The Mistress of Alderley

by Robert Barnard

  Pete swung the pack round to sit squarely on his shoulders.

  “That’s all right. I don’t have to answer.”

  “No, of course not. You handled it well. I won’t compound my daughter’s rudeness, but it would be nice if you could pay us a visit one weekend when Marius is here.”

  The boy turned at the front door and looked at her.

  “Better not, don’t you think?” he said, then lifted the latch and was gone. Caroline stood for a moment, absorbing what he had said, then went back to the dining room.

  “Well, I’m not the only one who’s adept at scaring men away,” she said.

  “Oh Mum, I didn’t scare him. He just didn’t want to talk about Marius,” said Stella.

  “Marius? Why should he talk about Marius?” asked Alexander.

  Mother and daughter looked at each other.

  “You really didn’t notice?” asked Stella.

  “Notice? Notice what? We were looking at the screen most of the time.”

  “I bet. Well, for your information, Pete was the spitting image of Marius.”

  “Not the spitting image,” amended Caroline. “But like.”

  Alexander shrugged.

  “Didn’t notice. So what? He’s probably some relation.”

  “Could be,” admitted Stella. “Much more interesting if he’s a long-lost son.”

  “Why on earth should you think that? Marius was hardly mentioned.”

  “Well, actually,” said Caroline hesitantly, “while we were in the hall I suggested he might come back again when Marius was here, and he said, ‘Better not, don’t you think?’”

  “Oooh!” said Stella, now thoroughly interested. “Well, well: that more or less proves it, doesn’t it? I wonder what Marius will say when we tell him.”

  “Stella,” said Caroline, at her most impressive. “Stop smirking. You will say nothing to Marius about this, nothing about the boy’s visit at all. Do I make myself clear? Anything said about it will come from me, and I’m not sure it wouldn’t be best for me to keep mum as well. You two will keep well out of it. Understood?”

  “OK, Mum,” said Stella.

  Alexander shrugged. “I’m not interested.”

  That, Caroline suspected, was not true. She was confirmed in this opinion by her son’s next words. “I can’t think why he bothered to come at all. He did nothing beyond see you—see us. And how did he know about you, and where you lived?”

  “Yes,” said Caroline. “That was one of the things I’d like to have asked him.”

  Chapter 3

  Sweet and Sour

  The next day was Friday, and Marius arrived at Alderley earlier than usual. Luckily, Alex and Stella had already gone out—Marius had waved to them at the bus stop, in fact. He arrived at his usual top speed, and held her in a long, long embrace in the hall. He did not immediately start undressing her and leading her upstairs, and Caroline was glad that he didn’t. At their age it would have been ridiculous, and long years of playing comedy had honed her sense of that danger. In fact, she immediately put dinner on, got him his favorite dry Amontillado, and by candlelight (just on the right side of the ridiculous, in Caroline’s view) they ate the veal escalopes and sorbets she had prepared, with the New Zealand Chardonnay that was Marius’s preferred wine for other than special occasions. Then they went up to bed, and to the long, loving, tender sex that made Caroline so happy.

  “Dress, or not to dress?” Marius asked later.

  “Dressing gown will do, surely. My children aren’t nursery school kids. Alexander was going to the cinema anyway, and won’t be back till eleven or so. Stella hadn’t decided. By the way, Stella is becoming decidedly interested in boys.” Then would have been the time to tell him about Pete, but she only added, lamely: “I wouldn’t want it any other way,” and Marius started talking about his wife, Sheila.

  “If only she enjoyed it as you enjoy it,” he said.

  “I’m not at all sure I’d be happy about that,” said Caroline. “In fact, I much prefer it the the way it is.”

  The two children arrived back just as Caroline and Marius reached the landing on their way to bed. Caroline called out “Good night,” and the children called “Good night” back, and then went on with their argument about the film, which apparently they’d both been to see. They came up to bed twenty minutes later, and Marius’s hand paused as he waited for their doors to shut, and then began again its wonderfully exciting attentions.

  It was close to midnight, and the pair of them were still awake, though drowsy, when they heard a car draw up outside. Caroline slipped out of bed.

  “It’ll be Olivia,” said Marius softly.

  “I like to know,” said Caroline. She drew the curtains aside a fraction.

  Down below, getting out of a mid-priced car, was her daughter. She came round to the driver’s door, which was opening. Caroline got a look at a large young man, but couldn’t see his face as, standing, he enveloped her daughter in a passionate hug, bending her over the car to kiss her. She let the curtain drop, feeling she was intruding, but seconds later she heard the front door opening, then the car driving away.

  “Olivia, driven home by her latest,” she said, then amended it: “Or one of the current ones.” Olivia was not usually monogamous, even in her short-term relationships.

  Caroline got back into bed, laid her head on Marius’s shoulder, and was soon fast asleep.

  Morning began with mugs of tea from the Teasmaid. Caroline always said that was the best cup of tea of the day, because any preparation for it had been done so long ago that it was genuinely like maid service. That Saturday morning their enjoyment was accompanied by Olivia’s singing exercises from somewhere in the distance.

  “I’d say that was a gorgeous sound,” said Marius, “if you didn’t know me to be an absolute cloth-ears where music is concerned, whose opinion is of no use or interest whatsoever.”

  “Well, your cloth-ears happen for once to be right: she has a wonderful voice.”

  “She gets her looks from you—pale shadow though they are. Where does the voice come from?”

  Caroline grimaced. It was an instinct she had, when her first husband was mentioned.

  “Rick Radshaw was gunning for parts in musicals about the time we were married. Still does them whenever he can get them. The dizzy summit of his career was Freddy in the first touring production of My Fair Lady. We had ‘On the Street Where You Live’ nonstop around the flat for months.”

  “I think I’ve heard that one,” said Marius. Caroline looked at him with amused affection. How wonderfully unself-conscious he was!

  “Anyway, one thing I can assure you: La Forza del Destino stands up to oft-repeated hearings a great deal better than Lerner and Loewe do.”

  “When’s the first night?”

  “Today three weeks. You’ll be down that weekend, won’t you?”

  “How many weekends do I miss, darling? I keep them free with the ferocity of a cat keeping a mouse to herself. I suppose you’ll insist on buying me a ticket?”

  “It was bought long ago. First nights are always at a premium, and one on a Saturday is a bit unusual.”

  “So long as Olivia won’t be hurt if I don’t sit through the whole thing.”

  “She’ll expect you to duck out after about half an hour, as you have for everything of hers you’ve been to. And then maybe come back for curtain calls.”

  “That’s the nice thing about opera: they tell you in the foyer when it’s due to end. People assume I’ve been involved in some frightfully high-powered business dealings during the intervening hours.”

  “Whereas in fact you’ve been propping up a bar.”

  “Sometimes. I’ve been known to go and see a film if the damned opera is long enough.”

  Later, at breakfast, Olivia paid them a visit, popping her head round the door to see that Marius was still eating, not yet smoking. She sat down with them, took a piece of toast from the rack, spread it with the strawberry jam
that Marius preferred at breakfast time, then poured herself a strong cup of tea.

  “Your voice sounded lovely,” commented Caroline.

  “Mmmm,” said Olivia complacently. “It’s going to grow, get richer, acquire the sort of weight the role needs, the solidity, till this time Saturday three weeks—bingo!” Then, as if she seemed to think she was pushing her luck, “If all goes well.”

  Caroline looked at her daughter with motherly pride. Her looks, as Marius had implied, were not the equal of hers: in themselves they would not have got her parts on the dramatic stage, though they were a cause for comment in the world of opera. Caroline regarded her daughter’s voice—rich, powerful, capable of bringing tears to the eyes, shivers down the spine—as more than adequate compensation for her rather ordinary good looks. And she envied, without always approving, her voracious hunger for life, experience, fame. Time enough, in ten years, to slow down and accept the more everyday as her lot. If, of course, the life of an international star turned out to be beyond her grasp.

  “By ‘if all goes well’ I suppose you mean if your love life goes well,” she commented.

  “What else? It affects the voice. Of course it affects the voice.”

  Caroline thought this was probably superstition, or a convenient fable, but she didn’t say so.

  “And who was the man who brought you home last night?”

  Olivia shrugged.

  “Not the love of my life, anyway. He’s the Alvaro in Forza. Sort of Irish, sort of American. Studied and trained in America. Nice enough voice.”

  Caroline sighed.

  “You’re not going to do the Ingrid Bergman thing of always having an affair with your current leading man, are you? That always seemed a bit calculating to me.”

  “I am not having an affair with Colm…. Not by any usual definition of the word.”

  Caroline wondered vaguely who she was having an affair with (baritone? bass? conductor? director?) but decided she wouldn’t bother to ask since the name would mean little or nothing to her.

  Having gobbled her toast and jam and gulped down her tea, Olivia took herself off, and soon she was to be heard floating phrases from Leonora’s big arias, and eventually singing one of the arias complete. Her half sister had enough skill at the piano to provide a skeleton accompaniment, though she had to be bribed with money—nothing else would do—to give up her time.

  Later, walking arm in arm with Marius in the late-summer sun, Caroline asked, “How is Sheila?”

  Marius never let his face betray any sign of distaste or irritation when the subject of his wife came up. Today it showed only perfect blankness.

  “As ever. Perfectly friendly but a bit remote. I think she misses the children now they’re not around the house so much. It’s left a hole. She actually came with me to a film premiere on Wednesday.”

  “Oh? Not the sort of thing you go to often, is it?”

  “Fleetwood Enterprises has sunk a bit of money into it. Not a lot of money, because for every British film that makes a packet, there’s forty or fifty that are lucky if they’re let out on video. Putting the Boot In looks as if it’s going to be in the former category, I’m glad to say.”

  “Most of what you invest in is.”

  “Ten percent daring, ninety percent caution—that’s my motto.”

  “Did Sheila enjoy it?”

  “Not at all. Much too violent. It was one of those films designed to show that Britain leads the world in gangsterism, though I shouldn’t think we hold a candle to America or Italy or Russia. I think we’ll have to find one of those upper-class comedies with wet British actors to put our money into next.”

  “I suppose Sheila would like that better.”

  “Much better.” He shot a shy look in her direction. “You’ve been in plenty of upper-class comedies yourself.”

  “True enough. I wasn’t being sarcastic.”

  “Sheila’s a perfectly nice woman, you know. And intelligent too.”

  “You’ve always made that plain.”

  “I was moderately faithful to her, till she made it clear that that side of the marriage was over as far as she was concerned.”

  Caroline laughed, then squeezed his arm.

  “I love your idea of being moderately faithful. Put a sock in it, Marius. Have I ever pressured you to get a divorce?”

  “Never.”

  “I’ve done with marriage myself, though not with that side of it, as you call it.”

  “Decidedly not.”

  “I don’t want the sort of commitment that gets written down on a sheet of paper. But I am totally committed.”

  “Me too, darling. I just don’t want to hurt Sheila.”

  “And nor do I…What do you think she will do, when the children are really gone, and her husband is semidetached? How will she fill in her life?”

  “Who knows?” Marius shrugged. “Good causes? Jam making? A young boyfriend?”

  “That doesn’t seem likely, if she’s gone off sex.”

  “If. Perhaps she’s just gone off it with me. She wouldn’t tell me if so. She’s not in the hurting business. Anyway, it’s her affair. I would never talk to her about my relationship with you, though she certainly knows about it, and I wouldn’t want her to talk about any relationship she gets into. There’s a lot to be said for tact and keeping quiet about things. Reticence doesn’t get much of a press these days, but it’s been very useful over the centuries. Think what an awful mess the Restoration rakes made of their lives by being totally open and flagrant.”

  “Charles the Second seems to have managed pretty well,” said Caroline, who had once played the part of the Duchess of Cleveland in In Good King Charles’s Golden Days.

  “Kings have advantages over lesser mortals. No, I prefer the example of the Victorian lechers who managed to keep their lives in separate compartments.”

  “Well, we certainly do that, and you won’t find me complaining.”

  For some reason the topic of Sheila Fleetwood was in the air that weekend, although most of the times they were together she barely got a mention. In the car that evening, on the way to Dangerous Corner at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, Caroline said, “I really wasn’t being sarcastic about Sheila preferring an upper-class comedy to gangsterism and thuggery. I’d certainly prefer it myself. The truth is that these days neither category is very satisfying, as far as I’m concerned: I’d never go to either type of film a second time.”

  “You’re a bit of a culture snob, aren’t you, Caroline?”

  “I don’t know about that,” she said, almost miffed. “I’ve spent much of my acting career in fairly ordinary pieces. It was a real lift to get Streetcar early on—Stella, not Blanche, of course—and then Candida, and Rebecca West in Glasgow. But they were high spots. I spent much of my career in drawing-room comedies and whodunits.”

  “Sheila’s a real culture-vulture, to tell you the truth. It upset her a lot when Guy decided to do that computer stuff at university. Beneath contempt, she thought.”

  Now would have been another good chance to mention Pete Bagshaw. But Caroline let it pass, again.

  “She sounds like a woman after my own heart. Though as far as computers are concerned, I’m not against them. I don’t despise them, I’m just ignorant, and I want to keep my ignorance.”

  “Sheila feels everything is becoming automated and dumbed down. She shudders when she opens the arts pages of The Times. She’s of a generation that can hardly think of films—or ‘Film,’ as they call it—as an art form at all.”

  “Nonsense, she’s of my generation. And I do think that’s going a bit far.”

  “Well, pop music, then. She sits on cultural bodies and she’s on all the cultural grapevines. She knows when anything significant is coming at the theater long before it actually opens. She’s bound to have heard that Olivia is going to be a sensation in Forza. She’d probably come if it wasn’t—”

  “Yes, if it wasn’t. Are the grapevines saying Olivi
a is going to be a sensation? It’s news to me.”

  “Oh yes. People have commented, wished her well through me. That’s people who know about you and me, of course.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful news if it’s true. I’ve always had a feeling in my bones about Olivia’s voice, but of course I’m only an amateur as far as opera is concerned.”

  The topic of Marius’s wife did not come up again, but interval time at the West Yorkshire Playhouse did lead to more discussion of Olivia’s approaching appearance as Leonora. There were various people from the acting trade in the audience—people appearing in or otherwise involved with plays in the West Yorkshire area. The ones who knew Caroline, and even one or two who didn’t, came up and asked what she was doing (“Being a kept woman,” she said to one of them, “and very pleasant it is too”). Several had heard on the local arts network that rehearsals were going sensationally well for Olivia.

  “They say it’s a wonderfully rich voice,” said an elderly actor who had seen every operatic sensation since Callas’s Covent Garden Norma, “and with the bloom still on. Lucky old us.”

  “We hear a lot of it, but we still think it’s pretty magnificent,” said Caroline. “If there’s going to be a lot of advance hype, I hope it doesn’t arouse too high expectations, though.”

  “It’s not hype, darling. It’s informed report passed by word of mouth between people in the know.”

  Going back into the auditorium Caroline got a warm glow of anticipation. She was soon going to be known as the mother of Olivia Fawley. She felt not the slightest twinge of jealousy, no sense of anticlimax. Her career had never aimed at the highest peaks, and her life, now her career was over, was both happier and—oddly—more fulfilled. Part of that fulfillment was the excellent relationship she had with her children.

  That thought brought in its train other thoughts about parents and children. But with Marius’s comforting presence beside her, she put those thoughts away. She would think about Marius and Pete, she would think through the implications of what Pete had let slip, but she would do so when Marius was not there to influence her conclusions. And she would not be so silly as to take the offhand and ambiguous remarks of a post-adolescent young man as gospel truth. Marius deserved better than that from her.