Marrying the Mistress

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Do you?’

  Carrie looked up. She said nothing.

  ‘Do you think he’s being pathetic?’ Alan said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said miserably, ‘I don’t. Not really. I just think he’s stuck. She’s got him cornered. She always has had him cornered. She was just biding her time.’

  ‘So you bawled him out—’

  Carrie’s gaze dropped.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Carrie—’

  ‘Don’t tell me I’m jealous,’ Carrie said, ‘I know I am. But he is mine, you know. Mine first.’

  ‘He knows that.’

  ‘But you can’t always have what you want if someone persuades you that you owe them first instead, can you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Alan said. ‘It’s never happened to me.’

  ‘But you can see, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Oh yes. I can see.’

  She leaned forward.

  ‘Can you help Simon?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Help him deal with her. Share it.’

  ‘I’m not a lawyer. She’ll say—’

  ‘Alan!’ Carrie almost shouted.

  ‘Sorry. Look, I want to help. I’ve tried to. But the two of them have been playing this game since before I was born.’

  Carrie’s shoulders slumped.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What are you afraid of?’

  She made a little face.

  ‘I suppose – that we’ll never be free of her. That whatever we do, she’ll be a consideration and, over time, the first consideration. That Simon will begin to put his obligation to her first. That – well, that he’ll never be able to see her for what she is.’

  ‘Could you say that?’

  ‘What?’ Carrie demanded. ‘To Laura?’

  ‘Yes—’

  Carrie brought her fist down on the table and a tongue of wine leaped out of her glass and splashed down the side.

  ‘Alan. Oh Alan, can’t you stop daydreaming about your bloody doctor for just one second and think. I don’t want to say all this stuff to Laura. It ought to be said, but if I say it, she can stop listening before I even start. Can’t you see? I want Simon to say it! I want Simon to open his eyes and see this whole situation for what it is and tell his mother that he is her loving and supportive son and that he is not a bloody substitute husband! That’s what I want!’

  Alan put out a hand and lightly touched her nearest one.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said.

  The whole office was quiet. The computers were shut down, Miriam had lowered the Venetian blinds – with their horizontal furrings of dust that no cleaning company ever seemed to tackle – and the office doors stood open revealing overflowing waste bins and swivel chairs left askew and a litter of takeaway coffee cups and plastic mineral-water bottles. Ted and Philip had gone off at six to play squash together, half an hour after Miriam, whose only conscientious bit of time-keeping was her departure time.

  Two days before, Miriam had left a yellow sticker note on Simon’s desk. It read, ‘Please ring your father.’ When he first saw it, he’d had a little burst of temper because the message was so peremptory, because after his interview with his mother he felt so jangled-up, so out-manoeuvred, that he was longing, just longing to find a scapegoat and for that, his father would do nicely. But, upon reflection, he remembered that Miriam, perpetually bored by all lives other than her own, was an inaccurate and minimal message-taker, and that a habitually courteous paragraph from his father could well have ended up, at Miriam’s hands, as, ‘Please ring your father.’ On further reflection, he’d probably been lucky to get the ‘please’.

  He had peeled the sticker off his desk and attached it to the side of his computer screen. Of course he should ring his father. He should have been in steady touch with his father ever since he learned of Merrion’s existence, even if he could hardly visualize what form that being-in-touch would have taken. It wasn’t helping the situation to have shied away from contact with Guy: it wasn’t helping his mother, it certainly wasn’t helping himself. And the proof of that was the position he now found himself in, because he had persuaded himself that he was standing on principle by refusing to speak to his father. Carrie had called it cowardice. She had also called it several other things that made the charge of cowardice seem quite mild. His attitude had, she said, played right into his mother’s manipulative hands.

  ‘Those weak little women!’ she’d shouted. ‘They’re always the ones you have to watch out for! They’re lethal!’

  Simon didn’t think Laura was lethal. He didn’t think she was weak, either, but he did think she was vulnerable. He also thought she was in some kind of shock, dazed by the revelatory blow of Guy’s secret past and overt future and that that was why she couldn’t face acting for herself, couldn’t face dealing with a man who had betrayed her trust so comprehensively. Simon knew it wasn’t at all fair of Laura to ask him to act for her. He knew that, he told Carrie. He’d even said it, to Laura. But all the same, he couldn’t get out of his mind and heart that he had to do something for Laura, something to heal or soothe or compensate, because, quite simply, he was the only person in her life who could. As he had always been. He had never confessed that, openly, to Carrie. He could, he thought, have written down her response right then and there. Word for sharp word.

  But now, somehow, sometime, he had to speak to his father. Alan had said, insufferably, that he should never have let the speaking lapse, never have got to the point in life where speaking to any parent – whatever your opinion of them – became such a huge and daunting deal.

  ‘He’s gentle,’ Alan said. ‘You’ll see. He’s happier than he’s ever been but he’s not at all defiant. He’s not trying to justify anything, he’s just trying to deal with what is.’

  ‘Your personal bloody mantra, in short—’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Alan said, ‘how Carrie puts up with you.’

  Simon sighed.

  ‘Nor do I. I often wonder how I put up with myself. But how do you get to be different from what you are? If you’re a worrier, you worry. If you aren’t, you don’t. I’m a worrier. I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t aware of something to worry about.’

  Alan looked at him.

  ‘Why?’

  Simon looked back.

  ‘Because I can’t stop feeling that I have to do something about those worries. That it’s up to me.’

  And now it really is, Simon thought. He peeled the yellow sticker off his computer and stuck it on the side of the half-empty mineral-water bottle he had bought at lunchtime. Now, because I’ve let Mum think I’m her knight in shining armour, I really am. I’m committed. And Dad … Well, Dad has become something that, whatever I felt about him, I never intended him to be. He’s become the enemy. I’ve got to fight him, for Mum. I’ve got to see him as a lawyer would, not as a son. And it is my own stupid, bloody fault. Mine. I’ll tell myself that over and over, before Carrie has a chance to.

  He unscrewed the plastic cap on the water bottle and took a long pull. Then he reached out for his desk telephone and dialled Stanborough Crown Court. A recorded message – a girl sounding as indifferent and mechanical as Miriam – told him that the court was closed for business until the following morning but that urgent matters might be dealt with at the following number. Simon then dialled the second Stanborough number Guy had left.

  ‘It’s some dismal flat,’ Laura had said. ‘Above a kebab house or something. Not that I care.’

  The telephone rang out and out. Nobody answered. There was no answerphone and Simon wondered briefly if his father was actually there, lying on a rented bed in a rented room above a hairdresser or a takeaway shop listening to the telephone and not doing anything about it, the toes of his black, polished shoes pointing at a stained ceiling. Then, stupid, he thought, stupid. Why ever wouldn’t he answer the phone? It might be Merrion.

  He looked at the third number Guy had left. It was a Central London number
. It was of course Merrion’s flat, the flat where his father spent weekends, where he had those times, that kind of life, that Simon had never had, could hardly visualize having, because he’d scarcely had a moment ever in which love life and parent life weren’t inextricably mixed. Guy and Merrion had nights, presumably, not pole-axed by fatigue, and evenings, Sunday mornings, bath times in which conversation could happen, general conversation and jokes and the sort of silence so hard to achieve in family life because it was always assumed to have a significance, usually dangerous. And, of course, times for sex. Sex for its own strong sake. Simon swallowed. It was not possible, he discovered, to think about his father and Merrion and sex.

  He dialled the London number slowly. It rang out twice and then a woman’s voice on an answerphone asked him in an impersonal tone to leave a message. He took a breath.

  ‘It’s Simon Stockdale,’ he said. ‘I was hoping to speak to my father.’

  He put the phone down. Damn. He’d meant to say ‘trying’ not ‘hoping’. He’d meant to leave a message without a shred of emotion. He took the yellow sticker off the water bottle and stuck it back on his computer. He stood up and stretched. Then he looked at his watch. Seven-fifteen. Carrie had said she was seeing someone and then she was picking Emma up from something so she wouldn’t be home until around nine. Rachel was out somewhere. And Jack – Carrie hadn’t mentioned Jack. The thought of an empty house was oddly soothing. He would go back and let himself in and not look at the post nor the wine bottle until he’d had an immense bath, with some music playing, and pretended to himself, for half an hour only, that nothing was required of him that he couldn’t handle with ease. Complete, untroubled ease.

  He let himself in quietly. Usually, it was necessary to announce his return home by banging the door and flinging his keys on to the chest in the hall so that they would all know. They mightn’t react, they certainly wouldn’t all come skidding down the stairs to meet him, but at least they’d all know, and the human chemistry in the house could shift a little, to accommodate him, to acknowledge that he, Simon, husband, father, chief breadwinner, was home in the house that he would finally actually own when he was sixty-three and a half years old and probably past caring.

  He put his keys softly on the hall chest beside a scatter of unopened mail. Everybody went through the mail in an anticipatory frenzy every day, even though there was seldom anything for anyone except Simon and Carrie, and left the discarded envelopes in disorder, like a carcass from which the best bits have been picked. Simon didn’t look at the mail. He went into the kitchen and dropped his raincoat – ‘The universe’s saddest garment,’ Rachel said – over the back of a kitchen chair. The kitchen looked strangely tidy and smelled of something slightly chemical, like bleach. By the cooker was a pile of vegetables, tomatoes and peppers and aubergines and onions heaped up like a still life, on a wooden board. There was also a supermarket pack of pathetic little pink chicken strips confined under plastic film and looking as if they had never had the smallest association with anything living and breathing. Carrie, in a fit of forward planning, was evidently going to make supper when she got back. Simon looked at the vegetables again. It would be pretty nearly two hours before there was any hope of them resting comfortably on a plate in front of him. He opened the refrigerator and took out a saucer holding the rind end of a piece of Brie, two radishes and a cold, leftover roast potato from a blue pottery bowl. He ate these, standing up by the kitchen table, and then he put the saucer in the sink. He ran his tongue round his teeth. He should have washed the radishes. He could feel faint traces of their residual grit.

  He went out of the kitchen, hanging his suit jacket on the newel post at the foot of the stairs, and climbed upwards, loosening his tie and unbuttoning his shirt as he went. He felt, in a way he couldn’t in the least account for, happier than he had felt for ages, oddly released, in the empty house with the late spring light fading outside and the street noises at a comfortable, companionable distance, and the prospect of a long bath with Ella Fitzgerald playing or maybe some Gershwin, something glamorous anyway, American, sophisticated. He went lightly along the landing, sliding his tie out from under his shirt collar, and opened his bedroom door.

  The curtains were half pulled across, so that the room was dim. There was a sudden and peculiar silence in it, the silence you get with tension, or a terrific social awkwardness. Simon looked around. Carrie was in the bed, humped up as she was when she got one of her migraines and lay cursing and enduring under her breath. Poor Carrie. And sweet Carrie, to get everything ready to make supper before she took the new migraine drugs she’d been given, which worked but which knocked her for six while they did it.

  He went softly towards the bed. He couldn’t see her hair, only something dark and unfamiliar on the pillow. He said, whispering in case she was fathoms deep in drug-induced slumber, ‘Carrie? You OK?’

  There was a slow movement in the bed. The hump of Carrie stirred and flattened out into two shapes. Looking down, his tie still in his hand and his shirt unbuttoned to the waist, Simon found himself regarding Jack and Moll, their faces side by side and close together, looking up.

  ‘Were you cross?’ Carrie said. She was sitting on the bathroom floor, wrapped in a towel, clipping her toenails.

  ‘No,’ Simon said. He gazed down the length of the bath at his feet, arranged neatly and braced, either side of the taps.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I didn’t feel it.’

  ‘I think Jack expected you to be furious. He kept shooting you glances, like someone waiting for the big firework to go off.’

  ‘It was very peculiar,’ Simon said, almost dreamily, ‘but I didn’t want to shout. I thought I probably would, but I didn’t. I kept waiting for myself to say, How dare you and in our bed, and stuff, but I never did. I felt …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Rather envious.’

  ‘Envious?’

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘Of Jack? Having Moll?’

  ‘No,’ Simon said crossly. He sat up and began to rub soap into a face flannel. ‘No. Of them. Of, well, their freedom.’

  There was a pause and then Carrie said, very shortly,

  ‘Yes.’

  Simon began soaping his face and neck and chest.

  ‘They weren’t really very embarrassed. Jack was a bit, I suppose.’

  ‘What’d he say?’

  Simon grinned.

  ‘He said, Hi, Dad. I almost expected him to say, Had a good day at the office?’

  Carrie said, ‘D’you think it was his first time?’

  ‘I haven’t the first idea.’

  ‘They got through supper, though, didn’t they—’

  ‘They cooked it, even.’

  ‘That’s what I thought they were doing. That’s what I left them doing.’

  Simon put a wet arm out of the bath and pulled at the back of Carrie’s towel.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘You’ll make me jerk and I’ll cut my toes not my toenails.’

  ‘I’ll suck them for you.’

  ‘Simon!’ Carrie said. ‘What has got into you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He leaned back and floated the soapy flannel in the water above a rising erection. ‘I just feel better. I don’t know why. I grasped a small nettle today. Maybe—’ He paused.

  ‘What nettle?’

  ‘I rang Dad.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I didn’t speak to him, but I left a message.’

  Carrie finished the last toenail and dropped her clippers into a plastic box of scissors and files and combs.

  ‘Very brave.’

  ‘Carrie.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come here.’

  She got up and came to half crouch by the bath. Simon looked at her. He was smiling. She had her hair held up in a tangle with one of Rachel’s silly pink plastic spring-clip things. He loved it like that. She looked about sixteen.

  He said, ‘Get in the b
ath with me.’

  She looked down at him. The flannel had floated free.

  ‘Simon—’

  ‘Get in.’

  He reached out and took her nearest hand.

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Si,’ Carrie said, ‘you may have had a good day and think the Jack and Moll episode is just a jolly jape, but I haven’t. And I don’t.’

  Simon twitched her towel off.

  ‘Forget all that. Just for twenty minutes.’

  She pulled her hand out of his grasp and bent for her towel. He saw her breasts swing briefly, little pale globes. ‘A mouthful,’ he used to say to her. ‘Just right.’

  She stepped back.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  He looked at her.

  ‘Even if I said please?’

  She shook her head.

  He said, ‘When did we last have sex?’

  She was struggling into her old cotton kimono.

  ‘Oh, sometime last century, I should think. And what happened to the phrase making love?’

  Simon grasped the edge of the bath. He leaned towards her.

  ‘Carrie,’ he said, ‘I really, really want to make love to you. Now. Please. Please.’

  She put her hand on the bathroom door knob.

  ‘It has to be for real.’

  ‘It is. My God, it is!’

  She opened the door. She had tied the kimono sash tightly round her waist. She looked as fragile as a porcelain doll.

  ‘Nothing’s real just now,’ she said, and went out.

  Chapter Ten

  The valuer from the estate agent’s in Stanborough turned out to be a woman. Laura had been expecting a man, one of those predictable estate-agent men in a dark suit and a white shirt and a slightly too loud tie with a silly motif all over it: cartoon pigs, or elephants, or camels under palm trees. Laura knew how to deal with those kind of men, knew how to answer their questions. The valuer woman looked rather different. She was almost Laura’s age, for one thing, and she had a quiet, firm manner that made Laura feel she was only interested in figures, and not in the least in Laura and Laura’s plight.