Marrying the Mistress (17 page)

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 bath 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.

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.

Laura had made coffee but she declined it, and asked for a glass of water instead. She took two sips and then she left the glass on the kitchen table, and took out a huge tape measure on a black spool and began to make notes. She opened and shut the kitchen cupboards as if she were testing the hinges, and gave the kick boards at the bottom a little nudge with her foot. One of them fell off.

‘It’s the only one that does,’ Laura said.

‘Perhaps you would show me round,’ the valuer said. ‘And then I’d be most grateful to be left alone to measure up. Usually I have an assistant, but he has an exam today.’

Laura said, without intending to, ‘Would you like me to help?’

The valuer looked at her. She gave a very small smile.

‘No, thank you,’ she said.

Laura walked ahead of her through the house. She had put flowers in the sitting room and the hall and polished the front windows where the prevailing wind always blew dust up from the gravel outside. She had told Simon she wasn’t going to bother, she wasn’t going to go on making an effort, that it was both heartbreaking and pointless to show off something you’d given so much time and thought and energy to and that you were now forced to lose.

Simon said, ‘Just think of the money.’

‘I wish it was that simple.’

‘It is. It has to be.’

He had sounded exasperated, almost cross. Laura could easily imagine how little help Carrie was being to him, how unsympathetic she’d be about any part of Simon’s life that didn’t concern herself or their children.

When Simon had fallen in love with Carrie, Laura had said to Guy, ‘Don’t you think she’s hard?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘She’s just very candid.’

‘But does she see how sensitive he is?’

‘Yes,’ Guy said, ‘and she’s candid about that, too.’

‘You’ve always wanted to toughen him up—’

‘Not toughen. Teach to defend. Defend himself.’

‘Toughen,’ Laura had said again, very quietly.

After a few years, when Simon had actually married Carrie – his wedding day had been a hard day for Laura, hard in a way she saw nobody could perceive but herself – he used to say to her, when she called him in the office, ‘Mum. Why don’t you ring Carrie? Why don’t you just ring her?’

She’d always let a little silence fall. In that silence she let Simon know – she had to let him know – that it wasn’t Carrie she needed to speak to, it wasn’t Carrie who knew her history, understood her predicament, spoke her quiet, understated, meaningful language. After the silence had gone on for a little while, she’d say, ‘I will. Of course I will,’ and they’d both know she wouldn’t. Only once had Simon said, ‘Please, Mum, for my sake—’ and she had said in reply, wanting him to know he was breaking their private rules, ‘Simon. That isn’t fair.’

‘OK,’ he’d said. ‘OK. Forget it.’

He sounded tired, weary-tired. Next day, she rang to apologize.

‘It’s so difficult—’

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t explain. You don’t have to.’

She’d smiled into the telephone.

‘No, I don’t, do I? I never have to, with you.’

Now, she pushed the sitting-room door wide. The sun was coming in through the south-east-facing windows and lying optimistically across the sofa and chairs whose covers she’d made herself, across the cushions
she’d collected over the years – there were two still left from that first little house in Battersea – across the pale-green carpet and the rug with its Tree of Life pattern that Guy had bought at an auction along with a chicken coop – never used – and a pair of Versailles tubs she’d stripped of their flaking varnish and painted dark green and planted with bay trees.

‘Pleasant room, Mrs Stockdale,’ the valuer said. She advanced across the Tree of Life rug and surveyed the room with an assessing eye. ‘Good dimensions.’

‘It was three little rooms,’ Laura said, ‘when we came. One was full of potatoes, all sprouting. You can imagine the smell.’

The valuer looked at her properly for the first time.

‘How long have you been here, Mrs Stockdale?’

Laura moved to hold the back of the nearest armchair. She leaned on it. She wished, as she had said only yesterday to Wendy who had come on one of her attempts-at-bracing visits, that she could just stay plain angry all the time. Angry was fine. When she was angry she had purpose and energy, she could even sometimes glimpse a new self emerging from all this muddle and emotional squalor, a clean new self shorn of all the restrictions placed inevitably on a human being by the need to negotiate, day in, day out, with another human being at close quarters. It was the times when the anger died that she dreaded. Without anger, she fell prey to desolation, to a feeling of disorientation so deep she wondered if she actually had fallen right through the web of the life she had always – even in
her darkest moments – taken for granted. Desolation meant grief; grief for the loss of so many huge and so many tiny things that it was quite beyond her to try and number them.

‘Mrs Stockdale?’

Laura stared fixedly at the cushion in the chair below her, a tapestry cushion, embroidered with auriculae in a terracotta pot, which she had made one long, unremarkable, contented summer while watching Alan captain his school cricket team for the under-fifteens.

‘Are you all right, Mrs Stockdale?’

Laura nodded. She made an immense effort and looked up.

‘We came here thirty years ago. My boys were eight and five. Younger than my grandchildren are now.’

In a different tone of voice to the one she’d used earlier, the valuer said, ‘It’s a wrench, isn’t it—’

Laura put her hands over her face. From behind them she cried, ‘I don’t want this to happen! I don’t want to leave!’

‘I’m so sorry—’

Laura took her hands away from her face. She said, almost gasping, ‘Sometimes I think this is all I’ve done, all I’ve achieved. When I think of myself, Hill Cottage and the garden is how I think of myself. It’s – it’s my sort of landscape, my background. If I go—’

The valuer waited. She had put down her measure and her notebook and was simply standing there, almost as if she was braced to catch Laura should she fall.

‘I’ll vanish,’ Laura whispered. ‘Won’t I? I’ll just vanish. There – there won’t be any need for me, any more.

Will there?’

The valuer bent and picked up her measure again. She held it out to Laura.

‘I wonder, Mrs Stockdale, if you would be very kind and help me with this? After all?’

‘Sorry,’ Carrie said the next morning.

Simon, in shirt and tie and suit trousers, was balanced astride the sink trying to fix the kitchen blind that had unrolled itself quietly in the night and was now declining to roll itself up again, and stay rolled. He gave a little grunt.

‘About last night,’ she said.

‘I know.’

‘It isn’t very easy to explain—’

‘Nothing is,’ Simon said. ‘Nothing bloody is, right now. That’s why, in the midst of all these problems, twenty minutes of happy, uncomplicated sex would have been so great.’

‘I know,’ Carrie said. She poured cereal into two bowls. She said, rather hesitantly, ‘Your – your mother—’

‘What the hell has my mother got to do with our sex life?’

The blind, having hung limply above the sink, suddenly became galvanized with activity and rushed up into a tight roll, taking the tips of Simon’s fingers with it.

‘Shit,’
Simon said.

‘Are you hurt?’

‘No,’ he said. He put his fingers in his mouth. ‘At least, not physically.’

‘Don’t—’

Simon crouched down and jumped lightly to the floor. He shook his fingers.

‘My cheque-signing hand.’

She held her own hand out.

‘Let me look.’

He put his hand in hers. She bent and kissed his fingertips.

‘Oh Carrie—’

‘I’m jealous,’ she whispered into his hand. ‘I want you back.’

‘I haven’t gone anywhere—’

‘But you might.’

Simon took his hand back.

‘I
have
to help her.’

‘I know.’

‘There’s no-one else.’

‘But you can’t be held responsible for that. It isn’t your fault that she’s never made friends, that she hardly speaks to her sister, that she thinks Alan isn’t a fully operational adult.’