Marrying the Mistress

by Joanna Trollope

  There was a movement outside Carrie’s bedroom door.

  ‘Rach?’ Carrie said.

  ‘Yeah—’

  ‘I’m coming in.’

  ‘Course,’ Rachel said.

  The door opened. Rachel held one foot up, shod in Emma’s mule.

  ‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, I’m going to put them back.’

  Carrie looked at her.

  ‘I like the dress and the sweater but why the jeans?’

  ‘It’s cool.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘It’s the layered look.’

  ‘But doesn’t it matter what the layers are?’

  ‘Jeans are OK, Mum.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  Carrie went past Rachel and opened her wardrobe door. She took off her suit jacket – rather tiredly, Rachel thought – and put it crookedly on a hanger. She lifted it to hang it inside the wardrobe, and it immediately fell off.

  ‘Damn.’

  Rachel bent and picked it up. It was still warm, from being on Carrie.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘Guess,’ Carrie said. She took the jacket and hung it up again, her face averted so that Rachel couldn’t really see it. Rachel hesitated, then she said, ‘I forgot he’d gone. He – he asked me to go with him.’

  Carrie stared at her.

  ‘To Granny’s?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t, could I? There’s school.’

  ‘It’s half term,’ Carrie said. She pushed the wardrobe door shut.

  ‘I forgot.’

  Carrie turned to look at her.

  ‘He’d have had company,’ she said. ‘On the journey.’

  Rachel squirmed faintly. She took one foot out of Emma’s mules and rubbed it up and down the back of her other leg.

  ‘I don’t like going there.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The ferret man,’ Rachel mumbled.

  ‘Rachel,’ Carrie said, ‘that was years ago. You were nine.’

  ‘Eight,’ Rachel said.

  She’d been sent to stay with Laura, just her and Emma. Emma had loved it, had loved the meals on time and the big bed with fat pillows and the ritual of picking vegetables and the dogs. She’d begged and begged Laura to let her take the dogs out alone and at last Laura had relented on condition that Rachel went, too. They were only to be twenty minutes, Laura said. She lent Rachel her watch, to be sure. After about seven minutes only, in the hilly field behind the cottage, they’d met a man with two lurchers. He had a flat cap on and a small wet mouth, and he was carrying a dead rabbit, swinging from one hand. Emma had screamed.

  Rachel said, almost in a whisper, ‘Did you shoot it?’

  He grinned at her. He jerked his head towards his dogs.

  ‘She got it.’

  The girls had stepped back clutching Laura’s dogs – quelled by the presence of the lurchers – by their leads.

  The man grinned again. Rachel saw his tongue shoot out and lick his lower lip.

  ‘It’ll do to feed the ferrets,’ he said.

  They’d run. They’d dragged Laura’s dogs down the field and run and run until they reached the garden. Rachel hadn’t wanted to tell Laura, but of course Emma did, sobbing and snuffling, wanting to be comforted and given a piece of chocolate. Laura thought Emma was crying because of the poor dead rabbit. Rachel let her think it. She didn’t really care what Laura thought. All she cared about was getting out of the hateful country and back to London, double quick.

  Carrie unzipped her work skirt and let it fall to the floor. She was wearing black tights underneath, and one leg had a narrow white ladder in it, running up Carrie’s thigh from the knee. She stepped out of her skirt and picked her jeans up from the muddle of clothes on the couch.

  ‘Poor Dad,’ Carrie said. She began to pull her jeans on, struggling unsteadily on one leg.

  Rachel watched her. Something about her new-found discovery of jealousy made her think Carrie looked sad, really sad, putting her jeans on, and not stupid or inept or typical-Mum-ish as she would have expected herself to think. She said awkwardly, turning up the long, baggy sleeves of Simon’s sweater, ‘Poor you.’

  Carrie stopped pulling her zip up and looked at Rachel. Her hair was falling everywhere. There was a comb on the carpet.

  ‘Is that why you didn’t go?’

  Rachel shrugged.

  Carrie said, a little unsteadily, ‘I don’t want you to have to take sides.’

  Rachel muttered, her head bent, ‘I’ll decide that.’

  ‘It isn’t that I don’t understand,’ Carrie said. ‘It isn’t that I don’t see how difficult it is for him.’ She finished pulling up her zip and reached for a red sweatshirt. ‘I wouldn’t like you to think—’

  ‘I don’t,’ Rachel said. She took both feet out of Emma’s mules and bent to pick them up.

  ‘I know, really,’ Carrie said. She pulled the sweatshirt over her head. ‘Do you know where Jack is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You mean you wouldn’t tell me, even if you did.’

  Rachel said, holding Emma’s mules out, ‘I’d better put these back—’

  ‘Yes,’ Carrie said. She ran a hand through her hair and took out the remaining comb. Then she came quickly over to Rachel and gave her a light kiss on her cheek. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  Rachel couldn’t look at her. There was a sudden lump of misery in her throat, hard and tight, like a hazelnut.

  ‘That’s OK,’ she said, and went out.

  Merrion’s room in chambers looked down on to a narrow walk that led into New Square. People went up and down the walk all day, lawyers and ordinary pedestrians, visible and weirdly inaudible because of the double glazing across the windows. Sometimes on the telephone to a solicitor or another barrister, Merrion let her gaze drift down through the window to watch these gesticulating, walking, talking people and wondered if they really felt as animated, as purposeful, as they looked.

  Nobody in her personal life had ever seen her room; not even Guy, certainly not Gwen. Gwen would have thought it very impersonal, cold even, with its white-painted shelves of law books, its Hogarth-framed prints of the Law Courts, of Lincoln’s Inn, its complete absence of photographs or flowers or even a carrier bag to indicate a little lunchtime shopping. It was how Merrion liked it, however: it was where she could think. It was the place where this person, Miss Palmer of Counsel, had a life where the rules were both known and adhered to, where whatever turbulence she had to deal with was manageable because it was at a slight distance and her relationship to it was, however sympathetic, defined by her paid professionalism.

  ‘It’s making you cold,’ Gwen had said to Merrion on the telephone. ‘The law is hardening your heart.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘What isn’t the point?’

  ‘What you are saying is not the point of this phone call.’

  There’d been a small, sulky silence at Gwen’s end of the telephone line.

  ‘You had no business to attack Guy like you did,’ Merrion said. ‘Me, well, OK if you simply have to, though I could probably write your speech for you. But it wasn’t fair to go for him and you had absolutely no right to. You took advantage of his good manners. He should have thrown you out.’

  Gwen said, with a small note of triumph, ‘He didn’t think it was none of my business. He said—’

  ‘I don’t want to know what he said. It’s happened, it’s caused great misery and complication, but it’s over. I’m just ringing to tell you it won’t happen again. Ever. You will mind your own business in future.’

  ‘I won’t be patronized,’ Gwen said. ‘I won’t be told.’

  Merrion gripped the receiver. ‘Too right,’ she said. ‘You won’t be told anything.’

  Gwen had written to her, after that. She had written a letter ostentatiously addressed to Merrion in chambers. She had written ‘Strictly private and personal’ on
the envelope and one of the junior clerks had handed it to Merrion with a wink. Sometimes, barristers got fan mail. Very occasionally, the fan mail was quite frisky. One young man, whose mother Merrion had successfully defended, had taken to coming to chambers with thin bouquets of mixed flowers – chrysanthemums and carnations on spindly stalks – and asking to be allowed to see Merrion to present them. He had caused a lot of mirth in the clerks’ room, particularly because he was so awkward, and wore an anorak with a drawstring waist.

  ‘This is from my mother,’ Merrion said to the junior clerk, with emphasis.

  It was a good letter, Merrion had to admit that. It was calm and dignified and made the point that Merrion’s welfare could not possibly be a matter of indifference to Gwen, unless Gwen were a monster, and that Gwen’s standards and opinions, even if very much less sophisticated than Merrion’s, did not on that account lack their own validity. It was not Guy as a person she objected to, but the consequences of his age in relation to Merrion’s and the strength of his emotional desires which, even if they coincided with Merrion’s, were nevertheless forcing a pace whose long-term outcome nobody seemed to be prepared to face squarely and openly.

  Merrion did not show the letter to Guy. She did not tell him, either, that she had telephoned Gwen because she had promised him not to, in the first place. She was aware that this was not like her, that her instinct and habit had always been to tell him everything, not least because he was so wonderfully able to restore her sense of proportion. But in the past, her feelings about him had not been particularly protective. He had never asked for her sympathy over his marriage, had never suggested that he believed himself due any kind of reparation, or compensation for the curious, chilly, diffuse nature of his and Laura’s form of communication – if communication was in any way the word for it. Merrion was aware from the beginning – rapturously aware – of Guy’s delight in being able to talk to her, being free, even encouraged, to talk to her, but she had never, until recently, felt the need to defend him, and, in the process of that defence, not only curb her own tongue but also refrain from asking too many questions. What had been so clear between them, what she had always felt she could easily, contentedly describe, had become less definable. A veil had appeared, a series of veils, which made the business of loving no less ardent, but much less simple.

  It came down in the end, Merrion thought, marshalling the papers on her desk into the series of rectangles she needed them to be in before she could think straight, to all these people. These people who had been names and images before, but no more, people who had a reality for Guy but who hadn’t needed, for years and years, to have much of a reality for her. For years Simon and Carrie and Alan and even Laura had been in Merrion’s consciousness, at one remove, the wife and the sons and the daughter-in-law. They weren’t enemies, they didn’t even need winning-over for the simple reason that they didn’t know, and for so long neither Guy nor Merrion needed or wanted them to know. They belonged in a mental in-tray marked ‘one day’. Merrion got very used to having that in-tray there, very used to thinking that the future was something like Christmas, undeniably there, not particularly threatening, which would quietly arrive in its own good time with an accompanying set of rituals and instructions.

  But it hadn’t been like that. It hadn’t been like that, at all. One day, the future was where it had always been, comfortably upon some fairly remote horizon, and the next day, it had arrived. It arrived without warning and without any helpful information and within hours Merrion had gone from an acceptance of how things were to a real, profound and painful longing for something more.

  ‘I can’t bear this,’ Guy had said. ‘I can’t bear living this part-life with you any more. I can’t bear the waste of it, the fact that it is so wrongly unacknowledged.’

  And almost before the words were out of his mouth, she had realized that she had been desperate for him to say them, that she had had enough of not minding – not minding Christmas, not minding weekends, not minding Laura’s birthday – and that (most extraordinary of all) what had for seven years seemed thrilling and potent and truly essential had become, in moments, to feel contrived and furtive and distasteful. In the space of a day, secrecy became something Merrion could hardly remember as alluring; its charms (upon which she had so relied) withered as she watched them. Her sheer pride in being Guy’s mistress turned into something, at a stroke, whose glamour she could scarcely remember.

  And then the people came in. The names were fleshed out, the personalities grew from little lists of adjectives into palpable beings, beings to be reckoned with, taken into account, negotiated with. Guy – no less loving, no less attentive – seemed all the same to retreat into the landscape of these people who had known him for three and four decades, and more. Whatever he did or didn’t do, these people reclaimed him, recalled him, reminded him of what they felt he owed them, what he was most definitely not free to do without them. And, as a result, a kind of helplessness had descended upon Guy and Merrion; she saw the two of them sometimes, in her mind’s eye, like figures in a German Romantic painting, clinging together on a plain or a clifftop while a huge, bruise-coloured storm rolled inexorably towards them in a whirl of wind.

  She looked at her watch. It was two o’clock. She had a conference at three for which she had not done sufficient preparation. It would, with luck, be over by four-thirty, and then she would telephone Guy.

  ‘Come up to London,’ she’d say.

  ‘What? How lovely. A not-Friday—’

  He never said no. She didn’t know what she would do, if he said no. He’d come up, on the five o’clock train, and be in the flat by six-thirty, where she’d already be, with supper bought and wine in the fridge and her black suit exchanged for trousers and a jersey, and her announcement. She would announce – and he would listen; he always did – that she was tired of taking what came, feeling her way, being paced and checked by other people. Whether he was divorced or not, whether Laura was dragging her heels or not, whether Simon and Susan Dewar were in agreement or not, she was going to announce a wedding day. Had he heard her? She wanted to decide a date to be married.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘Three offers!’ Wendy said. ‘That’s wonderful. Aren’t people odd, always fired up about living in the country when spring comes, just as if winter was never going to happen again.’

  Laura said, ‘One of them is quite a bit above the asking price—’

  Wendy gave the garden table in front of her a little slap.

  ‘Well, now, that’s something to rejoice over!’

  ‘I’d have to share it with Guy,’ Laura said primly.

  ‘You said Simon was making him give you the lion’s share—’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Then if you get more money for this, you’ll have more—’

  Laura looked down the garden. The herbaceous border – such extraordinarily hard work, such equally extraordinary satisfaction – was full of bright clumps of new leaves, the first stirrings of lupins, aquilegia, delphiniums, foxgloves.

  She said, ‘It isn’t about that.’

  Wendy looked at her coffee mug. Then she looked at the almost-empty coffee pot. Then she looked at the tubs of huge blue pansies beside her and at the aubretia and the iberis spilling over a nearby low wall and then she looked at Laura.

  ‘You could do this garden again.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For exactly the same reason as you did this. Because you’re good at it. Because you like it.’

  ‘But there’d be no point to it—’

  ‘Don’t kid yourself.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘That there was any point beyond your own pleasure in making this garden. Guy isn’t a garden man. Never has been.’

  Laura said to her lap, ‘I wanted him to be.’

  Wendy poured herself some cold coffee. She added milk and although she didn’t usually take it, a spoonful of brown sugar. She stirred the mixture. It looked mu
ddy and unattractive. She pushed the mug away from her.

  ‘Laura—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This business of Guy—’

  Laura raised her head and looked at Wendy.

  ‘What about Guy?’

  ‘I just wonder—’ She stopped.

  Laura waited.

  ‘Did you ever love Guy?’ Wendy said. ‘Or did you just want him to love you?’

  Laura grasped the arms of her green plastic garden chair.

  ‘How dare you—’

  ‘You think about it,’ Wendy said.

  Laura said, half crying, ‘Why would I want him to love me if I didn’t love him in the first place?’

  Wendy leaned back. She shaded her eyes despite her sunglasses and looked up at the sky. Three ducks were going overhead in neat triangular formation, like stunt-flying aeroplanes.

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘He’s been the centre of my life for forty years, he’s been the pivot, the heart—’

  Wendy said nothing. She stopped looking at the sky and looked at her hands instead. On her left hand she wore her wedding ring and the eternity ring Roger had given her when they’d survived ten years and three children and an escapade of his with the captain of the Stanborough tennis club’s women’s team. She’d lost her engagement ring years ago. It had probably gone out with the rubbish or down the drain with the laundry or the children’s bath water. She didn’t miss it. It was an amethyst, a biggish amethyst surrounded by diamonds, and it had belonged to Roger’s aunt Lilian. It was a gloomy ring, Wendy always thought, just like Aunt Lilian. She twisted the eternity ring. It could do with a clean, poor thing, a freshen up. She’d have a go at it later, she thought, with some washing-up liquid and an old toothbrush. She looked at Laura.

  ‘You’ll have to stop this.’

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘All this pretending. All this being sorry for yourself. It’s not fair on anyone, particularly not on your children.’