Marrying the Mistress

by Joanna Trollope

  Dad has done exactly what he wants always. He doesn’t know what Mum wants because he’s never asked her.’

  ‘D’you ask Carrie?’

  ‘She tells me,’ Simon said. ‘Mum isn’t like that. Mum’s never insisted upon anything for herself, ever.’

  ‘Then she’s colluded with being made a victim.’

  ‘Alan,’ Simon said furiously. ‘What’s got into you? Where’s your sense of justice? Where’s your loyalty to Mum?’

  ‘I just see both sides,’ Alan said. ‘I’m sorry for Mum but I’m sorry for Dad, too. I can see what’s happened. Well, a bit anyway.’

  ‘And if he marries this girl and she has a baby and he alters his will in her favour, cutting us out, you’ll feel just as calm and objective and bloody superior?’

  ‘I expect so,’ Alan said.

  Simon changed gear at the wrong speed and the gears grated loudly.

  ‘Hell,’ he said. ‘You and your moral high ground. You and your bloody smug refusal to be judgmental, as you put it. You and your fucking Buddhist elevation above all human dilemma. It must,’ Simon said savagely, ‘be such a comfort to know better than the rest of us. It must be such a solace to be gay.’

  There was a small silence. Alan looked out of the window. He said, his head averted from his brother, ‘Actually, it’s the precise opposite,’ then he took a breath and added, shrugging his chin down into the upturned collar of his leather jacket, ‘but at least it stops you expecting the impossible from anyone else.’

  Simon swallowed. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have—’

  ‘That’s OK. I said.’

  ‘I’m just a bit apprehensive—’

  ‘I know. That she’ll want you to take Dad’s place. Well, you don’t have to collude with that either.’

  A huge blue-and-white junction sign loomed at the edge of the motorway. Simon flicked his eyes briefly up at it.

  ‘There we go. Stanborough.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ Alan said, ‘if I never saw Stanborough again.’

  Laura was waiting for them at the back door. She looked as she always did, composed inside conventional, controllable clothes – a shirt collar sitting neatly at the neck of a good sweater above well-tailored trousers and brushed suede loafers. She had brushed her hair, too, and found her earrings. She smelled of L’Air du Temps, which she had been wearing since she was eighteen. She said, kissing them both in turn as if the meeting were profoundly unexceptional, ‘There’s no etiquette for this, is there? I really don’t know what to say to either of you.’

  They followed her inside. The dogs raced madly about the kitchen, collecting tributes, towels and cushions and a wooden bootjack Alan had made in a long-ago school woodwork class. He bent to retrieve it.

  ‘I’d forgotten that. Woodwork Job Two. Job One was a key-rack shaped like a key. With hooks in.’

  Laura said, ‘I’ve still got it. It’s by the garden door. I don’t think you ever progressed to Job Three.’

  Alan crouched so that the dogs could wag and lick ecstatically all over his shoulders and face.

  Laura said apologetically, ‘I’m afraid they’re hysterical with worry—’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘And you, Mum?’ Simon said. ‘Are you hysterical with worry?’

  ‘On and off,’ she said. She began collecting a teapot and mugs and a bottle of milk.

  ‘Could I have coffee?’ Alan said.

  His mother held up a jar of instant-coffee granules. She said, ‘I so don’t want to be a burden, a problem—’

  Simon put his hands in his pockets and rattled his keys and his change. Carrie was always asking him not to. She said it encouraged Jack, that it was the male equivalent of the girls’ endless fiddling with and tossing of their hair, and equally exasperating. Simon had a sudden longing for Carrie, to have her there in this well-ordered kitchen where nobody was behaving like themselves except the dogs. Carrie would help them to be practical, not emotional. Carrie would remind Simon, by her very presence, that his first obligation was to her and the children, and not to his mother. She would take away his guilt.

  Wouldn’t she?

  ‘Just because you can see someone’s problem,’ she often said to Simon, ‘it doesn’t follow that it’s up to you to fix it.’

  Simon said, ‘Mum, you need help, though. Your future needs sorting.’

  Laura turned her back on them to unplug the kettle. Her back was eloquent of someone who doesn’t believe they have a future. She said, ‘I’ll manage.’

  Alan rose to his feet. ‘Shhh,’ he mouthed at Simon.

  Simon said, ‘We have to do nuts and bolts, Mum. Money, housing, that sort of stuff.’

  ‘Oh, I know.’ She turned and poured water into the teapot and into Alan’s coffee mug. ‘But do we have to do that today?’

  ‘Why not?’ Alan said gently.

  She bent over the teapot. She was biting her lip. Simon was afraid she was about to cry.

  ‘Isn’t it a bit soon?’

  ‘Soon—’

  ‘Should we not talk about what’s happened? How I feel? How – how I’m to cope?’

  Simon moved across the kitchen and put an arm around her shoulders.

  ‘Oh Mum—’

  She turned and put her face into the shoulder of his jacket. He put his arms around her. Her own shoulders were shaking.

  ‘Suppose I can’t cope—’

  ‘Hey, you can. You’re shocked now. It is a shock, an awful one.’

  Alan came round the table. He stood close to his mother and brother. He said, ‘In a way, you’ve been coping for years. If you think about it.’

  Laura felt in her trouser pocket for a handkerchief. It was white cotton, nicely laundered. The anachronism of laundered handkerchiefs was an abiding fascination for Simon’s children.

  ‘What’s she think tissues are for?’ Rachel had demanded.

  ‘Ignoring,’ Simon said.

  Laura wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Mum, you are not to say sorry. About anything.’

  She blew her nose again. She said, not looking at either of them, ‘Have you seen your father?’

  Simon snorted.

  ‘Not bloody likely.’

  Alan said, ‘I’m seeing him on Sunday.’

  ‘With – with—’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. But she exists, Mum. She’s part of the pattern now.’

  ‘Of the problem,’ Simon said.

  Laura moved out of Simon’s arms and began to put the mugs and teapot on the tray.

  Simon said, ‘Can’t we drink it in here?’

  ‘I lit the fire,’ she said. ‘In the sitting room.’

  ‘Better here,’ Alan said.

  ‘All right,’ she said. She sounded offended.

  Alan put a hand on her back between her shoulder blades.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said.

  She sat, head bent. Simon and Alan sat, too, Alan beside her, Simon opposite.

  ‘I always thought,’ Laura said to the tabletop, ‘that I’d turn out not to be good enough, not exciting enough. I always thought he’d have an affair with one of his pupils. There was one particularly, called Fenella, with red hair. I was always very suspicious. But he said he never did, not with Fenella, not with any of them. He said there’d never been anyone – until, well, this one.’

  Alan picked up the teapot and poured tea into mugs for his mother and brother. He put one mug in front of Laura.

  ‘You don’t need to analyse, Mum. There’s no point. You don’t need to tell yourself you’re not this or not enough that—’

  ‘I do,’ Laura said, raising her face. ‘Why else would he go?’

  Simon said tensely, ‘Because he is who he is. And always has been.’

  ‘Si—’ Alan said warningly.

  ‘I’m not having Mum sitting here,’ Simon said, too loudly, ‘thinki
ng it’s her fault.’

  Laura turned to look at him. She gave him a faint smile.

  ‘What I can’t get used to,’ she said, ‘is finding that something I’ve been afraid of happening for forty years actually is happening.’

  Alan poured milk into his coffee. He felt in his pocket for his cigarettes, remembered he was in his mother’s house, and took his hand out of his pocket again.

  ‘All I wanted,’ Laura said, ‘was to be what he wanted.’

  Simon shut his eyes and wrapped his hands hard round his tea mug.

  ‘Oh Mum—’

  ‘He wanted me to be like him, to be sure of who I was and where I was going and what my aims were. He wanted me to know. And I couldn’t. I never have.’

  Simon and Alan said nothing.

  ‘You don’t want to hear this,’ Laura said. ‘Do you?’

  Alan made a face.

  ‘It’s not that—’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Mum,’ Alan said. He put his forearms on the table and loosely clasped his hands together. ‘Mum, it’s not that we aren’t sympathetic. It’s not that we don’t feel this is very hard for you. But there’s no point, Mum, in talking like this.’

  Laura said tensely, ‘What do you mean?’

  Alan avoided Simon’s eye. He said, ‘What I mean is, Mum, that we have to deal with what is, not what might have been.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing. What is, is that you are going to be on your own because Dad wants to marry someone else. That’s what we have to deal with.’

  Laura half rose, shoving her chair back with a clatter on the tiled floor. She said, her voice rising, ‘Are you taking your father’s side? Are you condoning what your father has done?’

  ‘No,’ Alan said. He didn’t look up and his voice was deliberately steady. ‘No. That’s not what I said. I said—’

  ‘If you can’t at least understand how I feel,’ Laura shrieked, ‘then I really, really don’t want to hear what you said!’

  Simon stood up. Laura glared at him.

  ‘Are you going to tell me just to get on with the wreck of my life, too?’

  ‘Mum, he didn’t say that, he didn’t—’

  ‘He did!’ Laura screamed. Her face was flushed. ‘He did!’ And then she turned and fled from the room, slamming the door behind her. The dogs, back in their baskets for a temporary cessation of tension, looked as if they had been kicked.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Simon said. ‘What the hell did you have to do that for?’

  ‘She has to hear it—’

  ‘Maybe, but not now. Not while she’s so stunned she can’t think straight. Not while all she can think of is that she’s been rejected because she didn’t make the grade.’

  ‘The sooner she stops blaming Dad for every bloody thing, the better for her, for her recovery—’

  Simon started round the table.

  ‘I’d better go and find her.’

  ‘Leave her,’ Alan said.

  ‘Al—’

  ‘Simon,’ Alan said, ‘leave her. Just leave her. For your own sake as well as hers.’

  Simon paused. He put his hands in his pockets and shook up his change. He looked at Alan. ‘I can’t,’ he said unhappily, and went out of the room.

  Jack Stockdale lay on the floor of his top-floor London bedroom, with his ear pressed to the carpet. He had turned his music off, and switched off all the lamps, too, in order to be able to concentrate better. Immediately below Jack’s room was his parents’ room. On his parents’ bed, right now, lay his sister Rachel. She had made herself very comfortable. Jack could picture her lying among the piled-up pillows – pulled out of the bed for the purpose – with the telephone receiver tucked in against her cheek, leaving her hands free to pick off the purple glitter nail varnish she had applied the night before and was probably already bored with. On the other end of the telephone was Rachel’s best friend, Trudy, and they were discussing someone else, called Moll. Moll was the reason Jack was lying on the floor with his ear pressed to the carpet.

  Moll was in the year below Jack at school, and therefore a year above Rachel and Trudy. Moll was very athletic, with a strong, supple dancer’s body and extremely straight brown hair which she wore either wound up on top of her head in a complicated knot or falling plumb down her back like a curtain. It was her hair that Jack had first noticed, walking by chance behind her down the main school corridor between physics and social studies, and seeing this long, calm, smooth sheet of brown hair. She didn’t fiddle with it. She must have been the only girl in the whole school who didn’t touch her hair except to brush it or pile it out of the way. She seemed to take it for granted, like she took her body for granted, the body that was so effortlessly proficient at gym and dancing and track sports. She’d only been in the school a term and already there was a buzz about her capabilities. In Jack’s year, among Jack’s mates, there was also a buzz about her sex appeal.

  Usually, Jack joined in. He liked sex talk. He liked the jovial buddy stuff of boys talking dirty together; it gave him a feeling that he didn’t have to go on this rather alarming journey alone, reassured him that there’d be an element of teamwork, that when – if – he ventured anything, there’d be somewhere to come back to. But he found he didn’t want to talk about Moll in the comfortably abusive language of Loaded magazine. And even beyond that, he didn’t want to hear Rich and Marco and Adam and Ed talking that way about her either. His disapproval had taken the admittedly pretty feeble form of merely not joining in so far, but they’d notice he wasn’t joshing along with them soon and he’d have to say then, somehow, that he didn’t want to. And then he’d really be in for it, he’d never, ever, hear the end of it and the news would spill out and eventually it would trickle round the school and reach Moll Saunders who’d hear in crude terms that Jack Stockdale had the hots for her whereupon she’d say – she’d be bound to say – in tones of utter contempt, ‘Jack Stockdale? Jack Stockdale? Puh – lease. Gimme a break.’

  But would she? That day, she’d caught him looking at her outside the school secretary’s office where the noticeboards hung, and she’d said, ‘Hi.’ She hadn’t smiled, she’d looked straight at him and just said, ‘Hi.’ He’d nodded. He couldn’t think what else to do on the spur of the moment, but give her this cheesy nod. She hadn’t seemed to mind. She’d gone on looking at him for several seconds after he’d nodded, and then she’d turned, quite naturally, to look at the gym-club notice. She left him feeling stunned, breathless, thrilled. He couldn’t believe it, how thrilled he’d been. Like he wanted to turn cartwheels or do a backflip. And all for a ‘Hi’.

  At home, later, when he and Rachel and Emma were tussling in front of the fridge for drinks and yoghurts and a saucer of cold sausages, Rachel had said, ‘You know Moll? In fifth year?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Jack said. He put a sausage between his teeth and tore off the ring-pull on a can of Coca-Cola.

  ‘She liked your painting.’

  Jack ducked his head.

  ‘What painting?’ he said, round the sausage.

  ‘That black one. The head thing. The one Mr Finlay put up. Moll said it was cool.’

  Jack said carelessly, removing the sausage, ‘What would she know?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Emma said, slurping strawberry yoghurt straight from the pot, ‘because it’s crap anyway.’

  ‘Trudy heard her,’ Rachel said. ‘Trudy was trying to get Mr Finlay to let her do extra art instead of home economics. Moll was in there.’

  Emma put the plastic pot on the table. She had a smear of yoghurt across the bridge of her nose.

  ‘Mr Finlay’s crap too.’

  ‘Only because he told you you couldn’t paint until you’d learned to draw.’

  ‘I don’t want to paint,’ Emma said.

  ‘OK,’ Jack said, regarding his Coca-Cola can with great intensity. ‘So this girl I don’t know liked my painting?’

  Rachel looked at him. She let a tiny pause fall.


  ‘You know her,’ she said. She bent into the fridge and retrieved the last sausage, a carton of apple juice and a mini Mars bar.

  ‘You’re not allowed chocolate till after supper,’ Emma said.

  Rachel put her bounty into the crook of one arm and added a bag of crisps.

  ‘I’m going to talk to Trudy. Before Mum gets back. I’ll probably ask her to tell me what Moll really said about your painting.’

  Jack shrugged.

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  Emma darted a hand into the fridge and snatched a couple of Mars bars.

  ‘Nobody’s going to look at you, Jack,’ she said. ‘Not in a million years.’

  The trouble was, Jack could now hear Rachel’s voice, but not what she was actually saying. There was a lot of laughing and every so often, Rachel said, ‘Wow!’ and, ‘Wow-ee!’ but he couldn’t tell if the subject of Moll and her admiration of Jack’s painting was ongoing or over. What, he wondered, had she actually said anyway? ‘Cool,’ or, ‘Great,’ or, ‘Who painted that?’ or, ‘Who painted that, I’d really like to meet them?’ Downstairs, the front door slammed. Carrie always slammed it in order to give her children fair warning to stop doing the forbidden things they were doing and revert to the things they were supposed to be doing. Jack sat up and banged with his fist on the floor to warn Rachel. He heard her scream, ‘Bye-eee!’ and then silence, and knew she’d be scrambling round the bed trying to get the crisp and chocolate crumbs out, and the pillows back in, before Carrie came upstairs.

  He stood up. In view of the day’s developments, he decided he’d give Rachel a break. He opened his bedroom door and shouted, ‘Hi, Mum!’

  From two floors below Carrie called, ‘Hi,’ and then, ‘Can you give me a hand with the shopping?’

  Jack loped downstairs. The hall floor was covered with supermarket bags, bulging with depressing things like giant bottles of clothes-washing liquid and jumbo packs of dustbin liners.

  ‘This is what every girl should see,’ Carrie said, gesturing at the floor, ‘before she orders that white dress and books a beach in Bali. Can you put it all on the kitchen table?’

  Jack looped his fingers through three bags for each hand.

  ‘You love it, Ma.’