Marrying the Mistress

by Joanna Trollope

  The door of his room opened at the same time as somebody tapped lightly on it. Penny put her head round. She had taken to dragging her hair off her face with little metal clips so that she looked as if she were enduring some arcane kind of punishment.

  ‘Five minutes, Judge,’ she said. ‘Court One.’

  Laura was weeding. She was a meticulous weeder, on her knees hand-weeding with a small, light aluminium fork Guy had given her two Christmases ago. He nearly always gave her something for the garden. In the early days, he gave her books and jewellery, but the books were seldom to her taste and the jewellery was invariably too bold. There were boxes of it lying in the drawers of her dressing table, complete with the cards Guy had written to go with them. Laura had looked at some of those cards only the other night. ‘To my darling Laura,’ they said, year after year. ‘All my love, Guy.’ It was, now she came to think of it, seven or eight years since the jewellery stopped and the garden forks took over. About the length of time, in fact, that he had been having his affair with Merrion Palmer. Simon had told her he was sure it was just coincidence, that Guy had at last realized there was no point in giving gold gypsy hoops to a woman who only ever wore her twenty-first birthday pearls. Laura could not believe him. It was extra evidence to her that the garden forks never came with little cards expressing a completeness of love. They’d presumably had cards, of sorts, but Laura hadn’t kept them. She’d certainly have kept them, she told Simon, if they’d been worth keeping.

  A car was coming down the lane. The engine note was familiar. Laura sat back on her heels and looked across through the orchard to the hedge that divided Hill Cottage from the lane. A grey car was visible, coming down the lane. Guy had a grey car, an elderly grey Volvo he’d had for years, having bought it from a retiring judge when he was elected to the Bench himself.

  ‘It’s a bit silly,’ he’d said to Laura. ‘A bit of pseudo gravitas, really.’

  The grey car slowed as it approached the gates to the drive and turned in. Laura stayed where she was, sitting on her heels, holding her aluminium fork. The car was Guy’s, and Guy was driving. He went up the drive and stopped, just out of sight, where he had always stopped, by the back door. Laura heard the dogs barking and squealing. She heard Guy’s car door slam. She looked down at the patch she had weeded, at the moist, crumbly, dark earth, so finely forked it resembled chocolate-cake crumbs. She waited.

  ‘Laura!’ Guy shouted.

  ‘Here,’ she said, in a whisper.

  She heard his voice going shouting round the far side of the house, and then the dogs came racing round to find her and tell her the joyful news that Guy was home. They were extremely over-excited, and bounded around her, trampling across her lap, licking and wagging.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said, shielding her face. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘There you are,’ Guy said, following the dogs.

  Laura looked steadily at the earth. He came over the grass towards her and crouched down two feet away from her.

  ‘Laura,’ he said.

  She didn’t look at him.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I came to see you,’ he said. ‘I came to see Hill Cottage.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For some simple reasons and some rather more obscure ones.’

  ‘Typical,’ Laura said. She leaned forward and stuck her fork into the earth, under a flourishing clump of groundsel.

  ‘Laura,’ Guy said, ‘could we talk, do you think?’

  ‘You know what I said about that. I told you.’

  ‘Yes. You did. But it doesn’t work. It just makes things harder.’

  Laura shrugged. She shook the groundsel roots free of earth.

  ‘And it is extremely unfair to Simon,’ Guy said.

  ‘Please leave Simon out of it.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Guy said. ‘Like it or not, he is my son as well as yours. You can’t appropriate him like this and if you are going to instruct him as you have, then he is automatically involved.’

  Laura said nothing. Guy knelt on the grass to get closer to her. She could see the creases on the knees of his dark suit. She could smell, very faintly, the scent of his cologne, the scent that lurked so unkindly in the linen cupboard, in the little room off their bathroom where Guy had kept his clothes.

  ‘Look,’ Guy said, ‘I will let you have as much of everything as I can. I will just leave myself enough to manage on.’

  ‘Will that make you feel better?’

  ‘Simon said that to me,’ Guy said. ‘And my reply is the same to you as it was to him. I hope it will make you feel better.’

  ‘Things,’ Laura said bitterly.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Please go,’ Laura said.

  ‘I will, but I have to ask you first if you will please, please release Simon and let him find you a solicitor to represent you whom he recommends?’

  Laura took her fork out of the earth, and rubbed the tines clean on the grass beside her.

  ‘This isn’t the right kind of control,’ Guy said. ‘The control you need is the power to lead your own life, not manipulate other people’s.’

  ‘Why did you come?’ Laura said again.

  ‘I told you. I wanted to see Hill Cottage. I wanted to see you and ask you to reconsider this course of action. I wanted – I wanted to see if you were OK.’

  Laura put the fork into the pocket of her gardening apron. Then she stood up, awkwardly and stiffly. She’d been on her knees too long. Guy rose, too, and put a hand out to steady her. She ignored it.

  ‘Go away,’ she said.

  ‘Laura,’ he said. ‘Oh Laura, for your own sake if not for anyone else’s, please.’

  She looked at him, for the first time. Then she looked away.

  ‘If you’re homesick,’ she said, ‘then you’ll just have to bear it, like I shall have to. And don’t mention Simon to me again. I’m not making Simon do anything he doesn’t want to do, is glad to do. If you’re lonely, then you know who you have to blame.’

  And then she turned and began to step deliberately across the grass, slightly stooped, towards the house and away from him.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Carrie looked at the piece of lamb in the roasting tin. It didn’t look big enough. It looked big enough for five people, perhaps, but not for seven, which is what they were going to be at lunchtime since she had invited Guy and Merrion. She’d done it on impulse, she hadn’t even told Simon she was going to. Something about her funny little broken conversation with Rachel had made her feel more confident, less helpless. She had felt that she wasn’t powerless, that she could strike some small blow for herself. So she had rung Merrion and left a message on her answerphone.

  ‘Come to lunch,’ she’d said. ‘On Sunday. Just family. Just you and Guy and us.’

  It was Guy who’d rung back to say they’d love to. He sounded pleased but tired.

  ‘It’s a lovely thought—’

  ‘It won’t be anything much. Just Sunday.’

  When she told Simon, he had simply nodded.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You’re not going to bite my head off?’

  ‘I haven’t the energy.’

  ‘Oh, wonderful,’ Carrie said.

  ‘No need to be sarcastic—’

  ‘No need to be so self-pitying. Sometimes I—’ She stopped.

  He looked at her.

  ‘Sometimes you think I am just like my mother?’

  ‘Yes,’ Carrie said.

  He’d shrugged. She heard him go upstairs and then the sound of running water and then he’d come down again before going out to one of the free legal-advice clinics he ran with Ted.

  ‘Do you have to?’

  He kissed her.

  ‘Yes,’ he’d said.

  Now, looking at the under-sized piece of lamb, she thought she’d better wake him. She’d let him sleep in – heavens, she’d let them all sleep in – but Guy and Merrion were due in an hour and a half and, in any case, her fee
lings of self-sacrifice for the family were running dry. Lay table and cook lunch, fine. Tidy up sitting room, find wine, clear hall of school clutter, check downstairs lavatory, too, not fine at all. She ground salt and pepper over the lamb and opened the oven door. It ought to have garlic as well, but Emma had taken the last clove to school, for some domestic economy lesson, and of course had forgotten to say, or bothered to replace it. Carrie put the roasting tin into the oven and closed the door.

  She climbed the stairs. Rachel’s bedroom door was shut and music was coming from Emma’s, although the curtains were still pulled. She glanced up the second floor stairs towards Jack’s room. There was a black T-shirt lying on them, and a single high-top trainer and a crumpled magazine. Carrie sighed. She’d tackle Jack later. She went on towards her own bedroom and opened the door. Simon was asleep on her side of the bed, clutching the pillow against him as if it were a person.

  She went across the room and pulled the curtains back. Then she went to the bed and sat down on the edge, next to Simon.

  ‘Si,’ she said.

  He detached a hand from the pillow and held it out to her. She took it.

  ‘Getting up time.’

  ‘Mm,’ he said.

  ‘Getting up and helping-good-patient-wife time.’

  He smiled faintly without opening his eyes.

  ‘You’re wonderful,’ he said.

  ‘I know. And about to be wonderfully cross.’

  He yawned.

  ‘Where are the kids?’

  ‘Guess.’

  He flung back the covers with sudden energy, and opened his eyes.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Sprint to bathroom before they do.’

  From the floor above, Jack heard the groan and shudder of the water pipes as the shower was turned on. He’d been thinking about a shower, on and off, for some time. It was a funny thing, but if you slept in the T-shirt you’d been wearing all day, you didn’t feel quite the same in the morning. It wasn’t so much that you felt dirtier, but rather more that you felt tireder. Jack rolled sideways and stared at the floor. His jeans were crumpled on it and one trainer lay a few feet away. His socks and his boxer shorts, he discovered, were still on him.

  He’d been too tired, he remembered, to take them off. Then he’d been too tired to sleep, really. He hadn’t been tired in ages, quite the reverse, he’d been full of an enormous, brilliant energy, a feeling of wanting to run everywhere and vault gates and fences and take stairs and steps three at a time. And then yesterday, out of nowhere as far as he could see, Moll had said she was busy on Saturday night.

  ‘You mean I can’t see you?’ he said.

  She smiled right at him.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Something my mum wants me to do,’ Moll said.

  ‘Your mum—’

  ‘We always do a lot together,’ Moll said. She was still smiling. ‘I just haven’t lately. Because of you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She gave him a quick kiss on the side of his neck, a Moll special which involved a flick of her tongue.

  ‘One Saturday,’ she said.

  ‘But it’s a Saturday—‘

  ‘That’s why Mum wants to go out with me.’

  Of course, he’d smiled. Of course, he’d said yes. She’d given him one of her long steady looks, right up close, her face only an inch or two from his, and then she’d gone swinging off and he sat where she’d left him, watching her bottom and her hair and the way she carried her bag over her shoulder as if it weighed nothing at all. He was so used to seeing her every day, so used to the assumption of seeing her, that he felt quite displaced, as if his life had suddenly been swapped for somebody else’s. He beat his fists lightly on the seat of the bench he was sitting on.

  ‘Get a grip,’ he told himself. It was something Carrie often said. ‘Get a grip.’

  He went out for a beer, instead, on Saturday, with Adam and Rich. Marco had a date somewhere. The three of them went to two pubs and then tried to get into a club and were turned away for being too young by a doorman so stupendously bored with having to deal with anyone so juvenile that it rather put a damper on the evening. Adam suggested going round to a friend of his who always had something interesting going, but Jack found his heart wasn’t in it.

  ‘You go,’ he said.

  The others exchanged glances.

  ‘Come on, mate—’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I’m beat. I’m going home.’

  He’d left them there, on the pavement outside the club with the bored bouncer, and loped home. It was a twenty-five-minute walk and in the course of it there were moments when he felt both solitary and vulnerable. He’d forgotten in these recent, heady weeks of seeing Moll, what it was like being the outsider, being the one without a social purpose, a place, a meaning. When he got home, he went straight to the telephone in case she’d rung. She hadn’t promised, but she’d sort of indicated she might. There were three messages there, two for Simon and one from Emma’s friend Sonia about drama club. Jack trailed out of the kitchen and up the stairs. It was almost midnight. His parents’ bedroom door was shut and so were his sisters’. He sat on the bottom step of the staircase up to his floor and took off one shoe, leaving it where it fell. Then he took off his top T-shirt – the black one – and his copy of Loaded magazine fell out of his jeans pocket. He was almost too tired, he’d thought, to get as far as his bedroom.

  The shower was turned off. He heard the pipes grumble into silence. Then he heard his mother call, ‘No, now, Rachel, now.’ He waited. He didn’t want the day to begin, he didn’t want to start feeling tired again.

  ‘Jack!’ Carrie shouted.

  She was at the foot of his staircase. He could picture her, hand on the wall, face turned up towards the darkness of his floor.

  ‘Jack!’ she shouted again. She was louder this time. ‘Jack, will you please get up?’

  ‘What’ll we talk about?’ Simon said. He was pulling a cork out of a wine bottle. He’d put on a blue denim shirt and his hair was still damp from his shower. Carrie rather wanted to go over and lean against him, but she didn’t. She stayed on her side of the kitchen table and sliced apples into a pie dish.

  ‘We could start with the sale of Hill Cottage and the consequences of extra-marital affairs.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘Well, really,’ Carrie said, ‘what d’you think? We’ll get by. The kids will be there. Emma and Rachel have been in the bathroom for hours.’

  Simon pulled the cork out with a jerk.

  ‘Because of her?’

  ‘It didn’t escape Rachel’s notice,’ Carrie said, ‘that Merrion was wearing a sweater from agnès b. when she came to supper.’

  Simon ran a piece of kitchen paper round the inside of the wine bottle’s neck.

  ‘Who is agnès b.?’

  ‘Clothes,’ Carrie said. ‘Classic but cool.’

  Simon shook his head.

  ‘Just think if Mum finds out—’

  ‘She won’t. Unless you choose to tell her.’

  ‘I feel awful—’

  ‘Ill? Or disloyal?’

  Simon threw the screw of kitchen paper roughly in the direction of the waste bin.

  ‘Disloyal.’

  ‘Oh Simon—‘

  He said, ‘She’s so vulnerable—’

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘You haven’t seen her.’

  ‘I’ve tried to,’ Carrie said. ‘I’ve asked her here. I’ve asked your father here. The difference is that he said yes and she said no.’

  Simon went across the kitchen and picked up the screw of kitchen paper.

  ‘It isn’t at all comparable.’

  ‘No,’ Carrie said. ‘It isn’t.’ She was slicing the apples very fast. ‘The other difference is that your father has always been very nice to me and your mother never has.’

  ‘Carrie—’

  ‘I’m sick of it,’ Carrie said. She put the paring
knife down and held her hands over her face. ‘I’m sick of you leaping to attention every time she so much as raises an eyebrow. I’m sick of her polite but determined refusal to acknowledge that I’m your wife. I’m sick of you refusing to see what your priorities are. I am sick, sick, sick of coming second.’

  There was a small silence.

  ‘I think—’ Simon said, and stopped.

  She waited. She took her hands away from her face and picked up the paring knife again.

  ‘Aren’t you exaggerating a bit?’ Simon said.

  She said nothing. Simon put the paper in the waste bin. He said, his back to her, ‘Why be angry with me? Why aren’t you angry with my father?’

  ‘Increasingly,’ Carrie said through clenched teeth, ‘I have every sympathy with your father.’

  ‘In that case—’

  ‘Shut up!’ Carrie shrieked.

  He looked at her.

  ‘Carrie—’

  ‘I’ve had enough! I’ve had enough of your evasions and your cowardice and your self-absorption and your bloody, fucking mother!’

  Simon looked pained.

  ‘Please—‘

  She shook her head violently. Tears of fury and frustration were beginning to leak out of her eyes.

  ‘You’re so obtuse.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I expect I am. Along with all my other failings.’ He picked up the wine bottle. ‘It’s a wonder you stay.’