Marrying the Mistress (14 page)

‘You all right, Judge?’ the court manager said, stopping halfway across the public foyer.

‘Yes, thank you, Martin, I’m fine—’

‘You look a bit pale—’

‘Not much air in Court Two. You know.’

‘Weird, isn’t it? People who can design security can’t design ventilation.’

The two advocates went past at a pace, robes swinging.

‘Night, Judge—’

‘Goodnight,’ Guy said.

‘Fearful hotel,’ one said to the other. ‘Fearful. Used to be a knocking shop.’

‘Still is.’

Martin grinned at Guy.

‘The Bell. They were staying at the Bell—’

‘A knocking shop?’

‘Not a very successful one, Judge. More the railway trade. Can I get you some water?’

‘Thank you, Martin, I’ll be fine. I’ll open the window in my room.’

He moved on towards the half-glazed door that led to the judges’ corridor. Martin watched him. The usher came out of the courtroom’s side door and watched him, too.

‘He looks his age today,’ the usher said. ‘He doesn’t usually.’

‘Something’s up,’ Martin said.

Guy opened the door, went through it and closed it carefully behind him. They could see his big shadow looming behind the frosted glass. His shadowy arm went up and removed his wig.

‘What kind of thing?’

‘I don’t think he’s going home at nights,’ Martin said.

‘Where’s he going, then?’

‘Out towards Pinns Green. And he’s off like a rabbit, Fridays. To the station.’

‘You been following him?’

‘No,’ Martin said, ‘but I’ve been noticing. He looks like a man with something on his mind. Doesn’t he? Does he look like a happy man to you?’

Gwen Palmer had brought her own sandwiches with her, to eat on the train. Merrion would have laughed at her, she knew, would have told her she was turning into an old thing on an awayday pensioner’s excursion ten years before she needed to. But for Gwen, the journey to London was quite enough by itself without worrying about train buffet cars and being ignored by the bartender in favour of big men buying spirits. After all, she was having to come up during an evening, in order to have any hope of catching Merrion on her own, and evenings spelled automatic alarm for Gwen anyway, never mind long-distance train journeys and the prospect of almost unknown London. She would take taxis. She had resolved upon that. She wouldn’t make things
harder for herself than she simply had to, so she had brought sandwiches, and would take taxis.

It had dawned upon Gwen, during the last telephone call with Merrion, that their lives were now so far apart in thought, word and deed, that it was sometimes difficult to believe that Merrion’s childhood and adolescence had actually happened the way they had. Of course Gwen was proud of Merrion. Who wouldn’t be proud of a daughter with such professional accomplishment as Merrion’s? And yet there lurked in Gwen’s mind an apprehension that Merrion had, for all the glory and shine of her life in London, taken some kind of wrong turning, set off down some path that seemed, almost inevitably, to lead away from all the things that Gwen believed – had believed all her life – contributed to womanly fulfilment. If she tried to intimate this to Merrion, Merrion told her she didn’t understand, even angrily once, that she didn’t know anything.

‘I do,’ Gwen said. She was angry, too, clutching a tea towel. ‘I do, so. I’ve been married twice and I’m a mother, which is more than you can say for yourself.’

‘I’m joining you,’ Merrion said, her voice suddenly quiet. ‘I’m getting married. I’m going to get married, too.’

Gwen had burst into tears. She hadn’t meant to, but they had rushed up her throat and out of her eyes before she could stop them.

‘Oh Merrion—’

‘Don’t,’ Merrion said.

‘It’s you that needs don’t!’ Gwen had shrieked. ‘It’s you that needs stopping, from throwing your life away!’

Merrion had said nothing. She had risen from where she had been sitting at the kitchen table, collected her coat and her bag and her briefcase, and had walked out of the house. She hadn’t even looked at Gwen; she certainly didn’t speak to her. She just opened the front door and stepped out of it and went down the street in the direction of the town centre and she didn’t look back. Not once.

That had been three weeks ago. Gwen had done a great deal of thinking in those three weeks. She catalogued, in her mind, all the things that in her view Merrion was doing wrong, all the things that would ultimately lead to a feeling that her life – as a human being – had hardly been worth the candle. Everything that was wrong came back, of course, to this man, this dratted man with his voice and his education and his legal position and his wife and his children and his grandchildren. Gwen could sometimes hardly believe Merrion’s stubbornness about Guy Stockdale. Seven years! Seven years out of a young woman’s life already thrown away, and now she was blithely proposing to throw away the rest.
Marry
him! Sleeping with him had been hard enough for Gwen to contend with – but
marriage
. She had conducted long diatribes to Merrion on the walk to her – now parttime – job. She had found that, without Merrion there in the flesh, the words came very easily, flowing furiously out of her mind and into her mouth. On these walks, Gwen told Merrion, angrily and silently, about everything that had ever happened to her, about how she’d felt, how she’d coped and how all that gave her both a
right and a duty to try and prevent Merrion just wasting herself. Sometimes, so keenly did she feel what she was mutely describing, she dissolved into tears, just like that, walking the pavements on her way to work. It was impossible to believe that Merrion couldn’t see how much she
minded
.

But then she began to notice that Merrion had stopped ringing. She hadn’t rung since she had walked out. There weren’t many people who rang Gwen anyway, heaven knows, but Merrion’s calls were significant. Whatever Gwen felt about her life in London, there was no doubt that, when she rang, Gwen caught a breath of another air, the note of a different tune. It occurred to her that, if she refused to acknowledge Merrion’s private life, if she resolutely pretended that what was happening wasn’t happening, then Merrion would simply withdraw. Rather than tell Gwen things and be criticized, she would cease to tell her anything. The rare visits would stop. So would the phone calls. And with them would go Gwen’s passport to Merrion, to – as far as she saw it – her future. If Gwen lost touch with Merrion, she would be left staring at a wall.

She considered telephoning. She liked answering the telephone but had always dreaded initiating calls. She thought of Merrion’s answering machine; she thought of the chance of Guy answering the telephone. She was suddenly struck, instead, by a bold plan. She would just go to London. She would choose a day when she wasn’t working the day after, and she would catch a late-afternoon train from Cardiff and go and see
Merrion. In her flat. Just like that. She would simply
do
it. If Merrion was out, she would write a note and put it through Merrion’s door. That would be almost as effective as actually seeing her. Whatever, Gwen told herself, it was a journey worth making.

She found a taxi at Paddington with no trouble. It was dusk and a light rain was falling, blurring the air and the car headlights and the lights in houses and shops. Gwen took her umbrella out of her bag. If Merrion wasn’t in she might have a long, damp wait. She could wait two hours, she had calculated, there’d be two hours before she had to find another taxi and go back to Paddington for the train.

The taxi stopped in a wide street of huge white terraced houses, flat-fronted except for pillared porches over broad flights of steps. There seemed to be, as far as Gwen could see in the dimness, a froth of trees at the end of the street. She got out on to the pavement with her bag and her holdall and her umbrella and gave the taxi driver too much money out of nervousness that she might give him too little.

‘Silly,’ she said to herself. ‘Silly.’

She went up the steps. There was a panel of entryphone buttons beside the door, each with a dimly illuminated name beside it.

‘Palmer, M.’, the top one said. ‘Flat 6’.

Gwen took a deep breath and shut her eyes. Then she opened them again and pressed the bell. There was a crackle and a hum and then a further crackle and a man’s voice said, ‘Darling? Did you forget your keys?’

Gwen froze. She gazed in horror at the entryphone panel.

‘Merrion?’ the man’s voice said. ‘Merrion?’

Gwen took a step back.

‘Who’s there?’ the man said. ‘Who is it?’

Gwen said nothing. She retreated to the edge of the porch and stood gazing at the entryphone. Something like a small sigh came from it, and then there was a decided click, as if a telephone receiver had been put down, and then silence. Gwen leaned against one of the huge pillars that held up the porch. It had ‘43’ painted on it in decided black numbers, just above her head. She looked across, again, at the entryphone. It had been
him
.

She felt, suddenly, rather peculiar, almost faint, as if she’d had a shock. She took some deep breaths, the kind they’d told her to take all those years ago when Merrion was being born. She took several, obediently, leaning against the pillar, her eyes closed. Then she opened her eyes again.

‘He’s up there,’ she said to herself. ‘He’s up there, in her flat, and she isn’t home yet. Gwen, you wouldn’t
dare
. Would you?’

She stood upright for a moment. Then she put her umbrella away, adjusted her bag and holdall and transferred them to her left hand, stepped quickly across the porch and pressed the bell again. The crackle came once more, then the hum and then the man’s voice said, ‘Either tell me what you want, or go away.’

Gwen stood up straight. She put her mouth close to the entryphone grille.

‘It’s Mrs Palmer,’ she said.

There was a silence, a small, intense, complicated silence and then a buzzer sounded and the man said, ‘Push the door. Come in.’

Gwen pushed. The door swung open, still buzzing, and Gwen found herself in a long, high hallway with a staircase at the far end and a lot of mail scattered about, some on the ledge that ran the length of the hallway at chair-rail height, some just all anyhow, on the floor. Gwen went cautiously forward, avoiding the letters. It seemed wrong to tread on letters, even circulars. She reached the foot of the staircase and put her hand on the rail. Someone was coming down the stairs, fast, running. She got six steps up, almost to the first half-turn, and he appeared, almost leaping down.

‘Mrs Palmer—’

Gwen said nothing. She held the handrail, hard. He came down until he was on the same step as she was. He was in a dark suit, she noticed. His shoes were polished. He leaned to take her bags.

‘Let me take those. I’m so sorry, but the lift is broken. It’s a bit of a climb.’

Gwen opened her mouth to say it didn’t matter, and nothing happened. He was good-looking. Merrion hadn’t said he was good-looking, hadn’t said that, if you hadn’t known his age, you wouldn’t have guessed it. But then, she, Gwen, hadn’t let her say such things, had she? She hadn’t let her tell her anything about Guy Stockdale, in case knowing about him turned him into
a reality, instead of some kind of unpleasant, improbable notion that might never come to anything.

They began to climb the stairs together. He was half turned towards her as they climbed, her bags in his right hand and his left partly outstretched as if to steady her, help her. He wasn’t going to get out of breath, she could see that. She was. She hoped she wouldn’t have to stop before they got to the top; she didn’t want to be at any kind of disadvantage.

‘I expect,’ he said, ‘you were hoping to find Merrion. Not me.’

She nodded.

‘I don’t usually come up to London on Wednesdays, but I’d had rather a tough day, so I indulged myself.’

She nodded again, her eyes on the fleur-de-lis in the carpet ahead of her, step after red step.

‘She should be home any minute. She was in Peterborough today. She will be so pleased to see you.’

Gwen said, ‘I don’t think so.’ Her voice came out in little gasps. It was the first thing she’d said to him.

He took her elbow.

‘One more flight. Think of getting furniture up here.’

Or a baby, Gwen thought, without wanting to. She tried to remove her arm from his grasp, but he was holding her firmly. A skylight swung slowly into view above them, and then, at last, they were on a small landing with a weeping fig tree in a terracotta pot and a cream-painted front door. Merrion’s front door.

Guy put a key in the lock and turned it, then stood aside so that Gwen could go in ahead of him. She
stepped in, slowly, turning her head this way and that, taking it in, telling herself that this was how Merrion liked things, that this was how Merrion lived. It was very light, very pale. It looked, to Gwen, like something in a magazine, a flat where everything has been carefully chosen to make a whole, instead of just evolving because this was just the stuff she already had.

Guy put her bags down beside a long, cream-coloured sofa.

‘Can I make you a cup of tea? Or get you a glass of wine?’

‘Tea, please,’ Gwen said.

He indicated the sofa.

‘Do sit down.’ He hesitated, and then he said, ‘The bathroom is over there. Through the bedroom.’

The bedroom! Gwen swallowed. She sat on the edge of one end of the cream sofa. There was a low table in front of her, foreign-looking, with carved legs, covered with books and magazines and the newspaper Guy had probably been reading when she rang the doorbell. There was a vase of flowers on it, those Peruvian lily things that lasted so well, deep rusty red. On the floor – polished wood – there were rugs. They looked foreign, too, strips and blocks of rough weaving. No flowers. Gwen looked round the room. Except for the actual flowers on the low table, there wasn’t a flower in the room. Merrion never wore flowers either, never had. Gwen couldn’t remember when she’d seen Merrion in a flower-patterned anything, not even in summer.

Guy came out of what Gwen supposed was a little
kitchen and put a tray on the table in front of her. There was a small white teapot on it and a white cup and saucer and milk in a white jug and a square blue box of sugar cubes.