Marrying the Mistress

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Laura,’ he’d said tiredly. ‘Laura, don’t mistake a tyranny for an obligation.’

  She turned the tap off. The dogs shook themselves vigorously, springing about in a theatrical manner on the ends of their leads. She untied them, and they leaped away from her, chasing and tumbling over each other in their exaggerated relief that the ordeal was over. She watched them and felt like crying. They could, in their blithe doggy way, forget pain so easily, so cruelly easily.

  There was a car in the back drive, an estate car with a jumble of flower-arranging paraphernalia in the back. In the driver’s seat sat a middle-aged woman in spectacles writing absorbedly in a notebook. When she heard the sound of Laura’s feet on the gravel, she wound the car window down.

  ‘Thought that’s what you’d be doing, walking the dogs—’

  ‘Wendy,’ Laura said.

  ‘I was perfectly happy, sitting here. Gave me a chance to do the hospital-volunteer transport rota. How are you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Laura said.

  Wendy opened her car door, and got out.

  ‘Time to make me a cup of tea?’

  ‘Oh yes—’

  Wendy looked at the dogs. They were positioned by the back door, poised to dash inside.

  ‘It’s probably good for you, having to cope with them. Domestic routine has its uses.’

  Laura put a key into the back door and opened it. The dogs shot inside, leaving damp footprints along the passage floor, and vanished into the kitchen to find welcoming presents for Wendy.

  ‘It’s kind of you to come,’ Laura said.

  Wendy looked at her sharply through her spectacles. They had blue frames and gilt sidepieces.

  ‘My dear Laura,’ she said, ‘there, but for the grace of God, go any of us. Forty years of marriage. Forty. Do you think any of us went up that aisle forty years ago and thought about where we’d be forty years later? I didn’t, for one. I’d have died of fright.’

  Laura went ahead into the kitchen. The dogs had found a tea towel and an oven glove and were wagging round the table with these, as offerings for Wendy.

  ‘Bloody fools,’ she said.

  Laura ran water into the kettle.

  ‘I was very nervous about marrying Guy,’ she said. ‘But I thought that was normal. Everyone said it’s normal to be nervous when you marry.’

  ‘Roger fainted,’ Wendy said, ‘in the vestry when we were supposed to be signing the register. Not a wonderful omen, if you think about it. He’s never fainted since.’

  ‘And you still have him—’

  ‘I do,’ Wendy said, ‘but only after some pretty close shaves.’

  Laura put tea bags in a teapot.

  ‘Would you marry him again?’

  ‘Given half a chance,’ Wendy said, ‘I wouldn’t marry anybody. Except to have children.’ She glanced at Laura. ‘How are the children taking this?’

  Laura took mugs out of the cupboard and put them on the table.

  ‘As you would expect. Simon perfectly sweet and very sympathetic, and Alan making me feel that as this sort of thing happens all the time I shouldn’t make a fuss but just get on with the consequences.’

  ‘Oh Laura,’ Wendy said, taking her spectacles off and buffing the lenses up against her cardigan, ‘he doesn’t mean that. Alan’s a sweetie.’

  Laura put the teapot on the table and sat down.

  ‘He makes me feel he thinks Guy has a point.’

  ‘Laura dear, Guy is his father—‘

  ‘Who has been betraying me for the last seven years and has now walked out.’

  Wendy put her glasses back on.

  ‘I have, since I heard, rather wondered what I’d do if Roger walked out.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I think I’d go and live in Cornwall and run a b-and-b and grow prize fuchsias.’

  ‘You only think that because you don’t have to do it.’

  ‘Laura,’ Wendy said, ‘are you very, very sure you weren’t actually rather tired of being married to Guy?’

  Laura stopped pouring tea.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That it’s insulting and upsetting and frightening to be left like this, but that it just might be a chance to start again on your own terms?’

  ‘At sixty-one?’

  ‘At eighty-one, if needs be. No milk, thank you.’

  ‘I don’t think,’ Laura said, bending over her mug, ‘that you understand at all.’

  ‘Ah,’ Wendy said.

  ‘I have never been able quite to live up to Guy, you see. I’ve never quite been able to be what he wanted me to be, what he made it very plain he wanted me to be. The things I’m good at are the things he can’t see the point of. I am a private person. He is a public person. He made me feel that the privacy of my life was a kind of selfishness.’

  ‘Ah,’ Wendy said again. She sipped her tea.

  ‘I feel cast aside,’ Laura said. ‘Thrown away. Not good enough. Rejected.’

  Wendy put her mug down.

  ‘I have to say, except for very superficially, that isn’t how it looks.’

  ‘Oh?’ Laura said sharply.

  ‘It looks,’ Wendy said, ‘as if you’d just grown miles and miles apart. Simple as that. Nothing left but the formalities.’

  ‘And if he’d never met this girl?’

  ‘He’d probably have met another one.’

  ‘Because of me?’

  Wendy made a face.

  ‘Because of your marriage. There were two of you in that.’

  Laura got up to refill the teapot.

  ‘Simon doesn’t think that. Simon thinks it’s all part of Guy’s need to be centre stage.’

  ‘Guy and Simon,’ Wendy said, ‘are very different people. How’s that nice wife of his?’

  ‘I haven’t heard from her,’ Laura said. ‘One brief word on the phone and that was it. Sympathy has never been Carrie’s forte.’

  ‘She probably doesn’t know what to say—’

  ‘Wendy,’ Laura said, ‘Carrie has never been lost for words in her life.’

  She held the teapot up. Wendy shook her head. She said, ‘Will you be all right for money?’

  ‘Simon will see to that.’

  ‘Will he? Should he?’

  ‘Who else is there?’ Laura said.

  ‘You and your lawyer.’

  ‘I hate all this. I hate all this exposure, this having to cope. I hate the loss of all I’ve known, the status of marriage—’

  Wendy stood up. She looked down at Laura’s smooth hair, at her face hidden in her two small, pale hands.

  ‘My dear girl,’ she said, ‘do wake up. There really isn’t much status left in marriage in this day and age.’

  Because it was a Friday, Guy came up from Stanborough on the five o’clock train, and let himself into Merrion’s flat. It was a relief to do that, not least because he felt it was one of the few things he could do openly, one of the few things he had, because of at last coming clean about Merrion, given himself proper permission to do. During the week, in Stanborough, he lived a life he knew was – in a quite different way to his previous life – duplicitous. He said nothing about his changed circumstances to anybody. If anyone knew, they hadn’t confronted him with the knowledge and hadn’t yet caught up with the fact that the town’s Resident Judge had left his wife and was living, during the week, in rented rooms, above a small shopping parade. The parade consisted of a chemist, a Chinese takeaway, a newsagent, a children’s clothes shop and an electrical shop. The owner of the electrical shop, who lived with his mother-in-law because he couldn’t afford the rent on the flat above the shop, was glad to have a tenant above him. He’d had to put metal grilles up across the shop window at night already and a tenant gave him a feeling of extra security. He told his wife Mr Stockdale was an accountant.

  ‘Must be. Or one of those financial managers. Goes off every morning in a business suit. Drives a Volvo.’

  Guy was grateful for his anonymity in the
flat above the electrical shop. They were unwelcoming rooms, bleakly decorated and furnished, but they fitted his sense of what was due to him just now, and he had no need, really, to tell anyone even his name. He had taken them for three months and moved into them just a minimum of clothes and books. Merrion – whom he refused to allow to see them – said they sounded like his hair shirt.

  To Guy, they felt more like his limbo, his no-man’s-land. When he left them in the mornings, they left no mark on his mind all day beyond giving him, when in his colleagues’ company, a weird sense of rooflessness. At lunch, in the judges’ dining room, he would listen to the usual banter, over gooseberry crumble served with custard, and find himself furtively wondering about everyone else’s home lives, about the situations the others were going home to and how many of them, for various reasons, would try and spin out their days beyond the closure of the courts at four-thirty, delaying the moment of climbing into their cars and heading back to resume whatever it was. Sometimes, Guy felt, a time warp had happened, and he was back in those early days at the Bar, staying in peculiar hotels on circuit, conscious that, however dismal his surroundings or his dinner, there was also a certain beguiling freedom. He’d even come to Stanborough once, back then. He’d stayed at the accepted Bar hotel, the Bell; the district judges kept a cellar in the Bell, in those days. The chief administrator of the whole circuit was still known as the Wine Treasurer.

  What haunted him, these days, by contrast, was that his colleagues assumed something about him that was no longer the case. They assumed he’d be going home to Laura. Only a few of them had ever met Laura, and might not have retained any very strong impression of her, but she would be there, in the vague mental sketch they carried of Guy in their heads, along with the fact that he lived in the country, that he had sons, not daughters, that he wasn’t much of a fishing man but had been a good cricketer in his day. It would have electrified them to have that sketch come sharply into focus and reveal the presence of Merrion in it, too, and not only in it, but right in the foreground. Some of them might remember Merrion, too, remember her brief and effective performance at Stanborough, remember her because she was a woman. Most of them liked women, but couldn’t get used to having them about as colleagues, as equals. When a previous Lord Chancellor had promised he would find judges who could be relied upon not to make dubious comments in front of female counsel, there had been much muttering over the gooseberry crumble.

  ‘Hah! An attempt to appease the feminists, I see!’

  Guy could not quite visualize the moment when he could reveal how his life was now, what had happened, how he had broken with the custom of forty years and taken a radical step into emotional territory he was very, very certain he had never even glimpsed before; and how he lived now, in a quiet and suspended state during the week – bringing home meals to microwave, taking his shirts to the laundry, changing the sheets punctiliously on his bed – and then on Fridays, taking the train towards truth and enrichment.

  He left court promptly on Fridays, going straight to the station and carefully avoiding carriages occupied by visiting advocates going back to London. At Paddington, he took a taxi to Bayswater, and used his own key, the key Merrion had had cut for him, to let himself into the tall, white-painted house that had been converted into flats in the seventies. There was a lift and a staircase in the hallway, the staircase carpeted in dark red, patterned with lighter red fleur-de-lis. Guy always took the staircase, counting the steps.

  Merrion lived at the very top. The flat was small, but very light, with views between the buildings opposite, to the tops of trees in Hyde Park. Her taste was spare, a reaction to the flower-printed fabrics and profuse cushions of her childhood. The floors were wooden, there were blinds rather than curtains and her make-up lived in a black wire-mesh basket in the bathroom. Guy had been shy about putting his shaving things next to it.

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ Merrion said, kissing him. ‘We have sex, don’t we?’

  He looked at his sponge bag.

  ‘But this is more intimate—’

  She made space for him in the bathroom, space for him in her hanging cupboard. His shoes lay at the bottom, next to her shoes and boots. He would have liked to have put them somewhere else, somewhere out of her way, somewhere unobtrusive. He brought as little to London as possible, anxious not to burden her, not to make demands, not to – well, not to seem too husbandly.

  On Fridays, he always bought flowers. He bought them at the station and put them in water when he got to the flat, throwing away the dead ones from the week before which she seemed never to have got round to. He turned some music on, checked the fridge for a bottle of wine, washed and changed out of his court suit, admired the Hyde Park trees from the window, scrupulously avoided looking at her letters, at the papers on her desk, at the number of messages on her answerphone. And then he waited. He didn’t mind how long he waited. She might be coming back from court in the Midlands, even the north-west, and while she did, he waited, his heart quietly lifting and lifting, until he heard the small crunch of her key in the door, and stood up to greet her.

  Chapter Seven

  On the train back to London from Croydon Crown Court, Merrion managed to find a seat in a different carriage from the defending counsel she’d been against in court that day. She’d won – not really to her satisfaction, not well – and he hadn’t liked it and had wanted his solicitor to complain to hers about inadequate instructions. Merrion’s solicitor had refused, and the defending counsel – a heavy, competitive man in his early forties – had said loudly that he’d have to have it out with Miss Palmer.

  ‘I’d hop it,’ Merrion’s solicitor said to her, ‘if I were you.’

  She’d run, literally, to the railway station. As she hurried out of the court building, she’d seen her client – a thin-faced divorced woman in her forties with three wayward children – in a sulky huddle with her boyfriend and her mother. Merrion had won financial support, backdated for two years, from her ex-husband – who had briefly worked for an oil company in the Gulf and, while there, had made a half-hearted attempt to take his children with him – but her client didn’t think it was enough. She’d wanted two hundred pounds a week. Her ex-husband was earning three hundred and ten pounds a week. She didn’t care, she said, she wanted what she wanted. What did it matter if the bugger starved? Merrion had won a payment of eighty pounds a week, and the backdate. Her client had glared. She wouldn’t speak to Merrion, after the judgement.

  ‘Bloody shower,’ she’d said, audibly, to her boyfriend.

  A train for Central London was just pulling out as Merrion ran on to the platform. It didn’t matter. There were trains from Croydon every twenty minutes and in any case, the timing of her meeting with Guy’s daughter-in-law in a wine bar near Victoria Station had been left deliberately vague.

  ‘I don’t know why I feel we shouldn’t meet somewhere too obvious,’ Carrie said, ‘but I seem to. Do you mind?’

  ‘No,’ Merrion said. ‘It suits me.’ It had occurred to her to point out that, if the meeting took place somewhere anonymous, and turned out not to be a success, then they could somehow pretend it hadn’t happened, erase it from the story. But she refrained. Something in Carrie’s voice told her that she was thinking that anyway: that she didn’t need to be told.

  Merrion bought a copy of the evening newspaper and retreated to the back of the railway platform, half-hidden by a chocolate-vending machine. She saw the defending counsel come on to the platform and look about him. He was a solid man, confident-looking, with a black velvet collar to his overcoat, and he stood out, as lawyers she had often noticed seemed to, in ordinary crowds on public transport. If he were looking for Merrion, he wasn’t looking very hard. She held the newspaper up, opened out, in front of her face, and waited until he had passed her on his way to the station bar. She visualized him getting back to his family house in Clapham or Tooting or Stockwell and his wife – streaked hair, urbanely casual clothes – saying,
‘Marcus, the Fergusons can’t come this weekend after all, Sophie’s got nits – what do we pay that school? - and you stink of whisky.’ Merrion lowered the paper, and turned furtively to her horoscope for the next day - ‘If they worked,’ Guy said to her, ‘the word future would cease to exist’ – and read that she was to expect no surprises and should make no major decisions. She tried to remember what last night’s horoscope had said about today, and failed. If it had felt her meeting with Carrie had any significance, it plainly hadn’t shown it.

  When the train came in, she allowed Marcus Hunt to board it ahead of her, and chose a carriage well away from his. Even if a single pub whisky had mellowed him, he would still unquestionably want to patronize her and in some ways being patronized was even more unpalatable than being quarrelled with: a quarrel presupposed, at least, some small equality. She found a seat next to a man engrossed in his laptop, opposite a girl in a leather jacket and red lipstick asleep with her mouth open. Merrion often fell asleep on trains and worried about her mouth dropping open. This girl looked as if she hardly cared.

  ‘I think,’ Guy said at the weekend, ‘that you will like Carrie. I certainly do.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘If you like her? I suppose – I suppose I’d rather you

  did.’

  ‘It was nice of her to ring me,’ Merrion said. She was lying along her sofa, her head in Guy’s lap, and he was reading a Sunday newspaper above her, with his arms held high, to keep the newsprint off her face.

  ‘She’s slightly acerbic in manner, but don’t let that put you off.’