Marrying the Mistress (19 page)

‘Merrion,’ Carrie said, ‘this is Emma.’

‘Hello, Emma,’ Merrion said.

‘When’s supper?’ Emma said to Carrie.

‘Say hello to Merrion,’ Carrie said.

Emma looked quickly at Merrion. Then she looked at the floor in front of Merrion’s feet.

‘Hi.’

‘It’s OK,’ Merrion said, ‘none of us knows what to do.’

‘We will, though,’ Carrie said. ‘We’ll get better. We’ll get used to it.’

Simon took off his jacket and hung it on the back of the nearest chair.

‘Come and sit down,’ he said to Merrion. He pulled another chair out slightly from the kitchen table and patted the back of it.

‘Thank you,’ she said. She moved towards the chair.

‘Bring your wine—’

‘Oh—’

‘I’ll get it,’ Emma said.

She put the wineglass down in front of Merrion, spilling a little. There was a phone number written on her hand.

‘Sorry—’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Get a cloth,’ Simon said.

‘Really, it doesn’t matter.’

Emma dabbed roughly at the spill with a disposable cloth.

‘Thank you.’

Simon went over to the fridge and took out a wine bottle. He waved it at Carrie.

‘Got some?’

She nodded.

‘Ems. Lay the table, would you?’

‘I can do that,’ Merrion said.

Simon put the bottle and a glass on the table opposite Merrion.

‘Next time.’

She looked at him. He wasn’t smiling, but he was looking back, straight at her.

‘Oh—’

He sat down and poured the wine. Then he raised his glass.

‘Cheers.’

Emma dumped a handful of knives and forks on the table.

‘Rach’s door is shut.’

‘Maybe,’ Carrie said, ‘she’s doing her biology.’

Emma snorted.

‘Where’s Jack?’

‘Out,’ Carrie said.

Emma snorted again.

‘Jack,’ Simon said to Merrion, ‘has a girlfriend.’

‘It’s pathetic,’ Emma said. ‘Pitiful.’

Merrion smiled at her.

‘You wait.’

Emma tossed her tuft of hair.

‘I won’t be pathetic, like Jack.’

‘Maybe,’ Simon said, ‘you won’t be able to help it.’

Merrion began to pick individual forks out of the pile of cutlery.

‘How many places?’

The telephone rang. Emma said immediately, ‘I’ll go.’

‘It rings all the time,’ Simon said. ‘All the time.’

‘And never for us,’ Carrie said.

‘Hello?’ Emma said, her back to the room. ‘Oh. Oh – hi, Granny.’ She swivelled around, gesturing. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘OK. No, no, he’s here, I’ll get him, I’ll – hang on, Granny—’

She put her free hand over the telephone mouthpiece. Simon was on his feet already.

‘It’s Gran, Dad—’

‘Yes—’

‘Quick, Dad, it’s awful, she’s crying.’

There was a tiny pause. Then Simon said to Carrie, ‘I’ll take it in the office.’

‘OK—’

‘Tell her I’m coming, Ems, tell her I’ve just gone to another phone.’

He ran from the room. Emma took her hand away from the mouthpiece. She exchanged a quick glance with her mother.

Then she said into the telephone, ‘It’s OK, Gran. Hold on. Dad’s coming. He’s just gone to another phone. He’s coming, OK?’

Simon was standing behind his desk when his father arrived. He’d been about to go round it and meet Guy in the doorway of his office, at least, but Guy was too quick for him. By mistake, Simon took a step backwards towards the wall, as Guy came in.

He shut Simon’s office door carefully behind him.

‘Hello,’ he said.

Simon swallowed.

‘Hello, Dad.’

Guy seemed to hesitate for a second, and then he came determinedly forward, around Simon’s desk, and took Simon in his arms.

Simon just stood there. He felt the bulk of his father, the size of him; he smelled the smell of the old-fashioned citrus-based men’s cologne he had always used, the smell that had pervaded the laundry basket at Hill Cottage, Guy’s wardrobe, his shirt drawers.

‘Relax,’ Guy said.

‘Please—’

‘What?’

‘Let go,’ Simon said.

Guy stepped back a short pace. He held Simon still by his upper arms. Simon could feel the warmth of Guy’s hands through the cotton of his shirt sleeves.

‘Don’t take it out on me,’ Guy said.

‘What—’

‘The fact that you have been put in an impossible position.’

Simon said loudly, ‘She’s afraid. She can’t face anything she doesn’t know. She’s terrified.’

Guy gave Simon’s arms a little squeeze and dropped his hands. He went back around Simon’s desk and pulled up a chair.

‘It won’t help her, then, only communicating through you; it won’t help her see that she might manage, that there is a future—’

Simon said shortly. ‘I can only do what she wants. What she’s able to want.’

‘But surely a lawyer you know, someone you introduced her to—’

‘No.’

‘Have you tried?’

‘That’s none of your business,’ Simon said politely. He sat down opposite Guy.

‘I haven’t seen you for so long,’ Guy said.

‘No.’

‘Nearly three months.’

‘Dad—’

‘I’m not blaming you,’ Guy said. ‘I’m not blaming anybody. Except myself, probably. I could have come
to find you any time. I could have told you any time. But I didn’t. I didn’t tell anyone. I told myself, instead, that a way would be made plain to me.’

‘And it was.’

A look of intense and happy privacy passed briefly across Guy’s face.

‘It was.’

Simon leaned forward. He picked up a yellow ballpoint pen and flicked his thumbnail with it.

‘Have
you
got a lawyer?’

‘Yes,’ Guy said.

‘A friend of – Merrion’s?’

‘Yes.’

‘So I will be negotiating with a friend of Merrion’s. To whom you will make full financial disclosure.’

‘Yes.’

‘Dad—’

Guy leaned forward, too. He said, ‘Shall we make a pact?’

‘What?’

‘Nothing but the facts? Only the facts? No opinions—’

‘If we can stick to it,’ Simon said. ‘But there are things I have to tell you.’

‘Like?’

‘Mum is completely shattered about the house going. I mean devastated. Unhinged.’

‘If I could afford to let her stay there,’ Guy said, ‘I would.’

‘Make you feel better?’

Guy looked at him.

He said shortly, ‘Make
her
feel better?’

Simon uncapped the ballpoint and began to scribble on the margin of a printed paper in front of him.

‘It’s worth three hundred and twenty-five thousand.’

Guy let out a breath.

‘I paid six for it. Six thousand one hundred. Thirty years ago.’

‘Half Mum’s life.’

‘Half mine, too.’

‘But you’re going on to something,’ Simon said. ‘You’re moving on.’

Guy said quietly, ‘Maybe I’d have done that anyway.’

‘And she never would?’

‘I did not say that—’

‘But you meant it.’

‘Yes,’ Guy said, ‘I meant it.’ He looked at Simon again.

‘Can you cope?’

‘Of course.’

‘You look tired—’

‘I always look tired. I’ve looked tired since I was twenty for the simple reason that I am.’

‘And angry,’ Guy said.

Simon said nothing.

‘Simon,’ Guy said, ‘you’re my son as well as your mother’s. You’re my child, too.’

Simon said, his head bent, ‘So what do you feel entitled to, then?’

‘It’s not that. It’s just that because I’m your father I can’t be indifferent to you, to your opinions, your actions, your attitudes.’

Between gritted teeth Simon said, ‘Works both ways—’

‘I’m glad to hear it—’

‘Glad?’

‘Glad that you do have a heart.’

Simon pulled a blank piece of paper towards him.

He said, ‘What is the name of your solicitor?’

‘Susan Dewar.’

‘I know Susan Dewar.’

‘Good.’

‘To whom you and I will both reveal statements of assets we both know already and then argue about them.’

‘I won’t argue,’ Guy said.

Simon flung the ballpoint across the office, hitting a month-by-month calendar from a local garage, hanging slightly crookedly on the opposite wall.

‘This is all such a bloody
farce
!’

‘Yes.’

Simon glared at his father.

‘Susan Dewar is tough.’

‘No more than I’ll let her be. I’m not
fighting
your mother, Simon.’

Simon said, without thinking, ‘She’s fighting
you.’

Guy stood up.

‘It doesn’t follow that you have to fight me.’

Simon said unhappily, ‘I don’t know—’

‘Don’t you?’ Guy said. His voice was sharper. ‘Don’t you even know your
own
mind?’

Simon got up and went slowly across his office to retrieve the ballpoint. He stooped to pick it up. From
his bent position he said, slightly muffled, ‘You’d better go.’

Guy moved towards the door. With his hand on the handle, he turned to look at Simon.

‘If we were Americans, we could tell each other we loved each other at this point.’

‘Would that help?’

‘I think it might – bridge a gap.’

‘Would we have to mean it?’

‘Oh Simon,’ Guy said. He turned the door handle. Simon was still facing the wall and the garage calendar, flicking his thumbnail again with the ballpoint pen.

‘Bye,’ Guy said briefly, and went out.

Rachel stood in front of the mirror on Carrie’s wardrobe door. She was trying on clothes. She’d put on her new baggy jeans – they sat on her hips most satisfactorily – and then over that a black lace mini dress she’d found in a second-hand shop for two pounds and over that a grey wool V-necked sweater of her father’s. Emma was out – drama club was rehearsing
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
and Emma, to Rachel’s disgust, had been cast as Potiphar’s wife – so Rachel had borrowed Emma’s new dark-blue wedge-soled rubber mules. The effect was good. Rachel turned and looked at herself sideways. Her bosom – it was going to be really small, like Carrie’s – hardly showed at all. Her tummy (her obsession) didn’t show either, but she could see it all the same, pushing obscenely, roundly, at the denim and the black lace and the grey
wool. She’d eaten nothing that day but two carrots, a bag of barbecue-flavour crisps and two handfuls of raspberry crunch cereal dry, straight out of the packet. She wouldn’t eat any supper. Or at least, she’d pick out the low-calorie bits of supper and leave the rest. Carrie wouldn’t notice just now. Carrie had been anorexic for three years after her mother died and she had an eye like a hawk for not-eaters. But Carrie was preoccupied at the moment and not as observant as usual. If she’d been observant, she’d have noticed that Emma had had her belly button pierced by a friend at school using a needle and a cork and some ice cubes, that Rachel was hardly eating and that Jack had enough condoms in his bedroom to kit out the British Army.

Jack had discovered sex. Rachel was half intrigued and half repelled. The word at school was that Moll Saunders knew what she was doing, and although not exactly promiscuous – she didn’t go in for one-night-stands or two-timing – she was pretty experienced. And whatever experience she had, she was plainly imparting it to Jack, session by absorbing session, to the point where it was plain to Rachel – and probably to half the school, too – that it was absolutely all he could think about. When you looked at him – Rachel did this frequently but covertly, because her own reaction to his state was so disconcerting – you could see he was just dazed, by Moll and sex, by sex and Moll. When Rachel had had a good illicit snoop around Jack’s bedroom, she had expected to find a lot of pornographic stuff about, magazines and videos, even some of those toys
and aids which Trudy said her father kept under his side of the marital bed in an old supermarket carrier bag. But, apart from the condoms, there was nothing, no sign of fantasy or solitary dreaming. Rachel had thought she felt disappointed; she expected, she knew, to find more: cruder evidence of Jack’s unavoidable adolescent-boy preoccupation. But when she got back to her bedroom and lay on the bed in the dark listening to Brandy, she realized that she wasn’t so much disappointed as jealous. She was jealous of Jack’s intensity of feeling. She was jealous of Moll for having someone
that
interested in her, that obsessed. Rachel and Trudy scoffed at boys, scoffed together about them. But faced with Jack and Moll, Rachel knew she’d sell her soul to have someone – someone attractive, that is – so keen on her that he couldn’t see straight. Lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling which still had the glow stars on it she’d stuck up there when she was seven, she made a slow mental review of the sixth-form boys at school. Nobody under sixteen would do, nobody shorter than her, nobody blond, nobody with such a big opinion of himself he’d laugh at her (that knocked out most of Jack’s friends), nobody who wouldn’t cause Trudy to sit up and take notice. Trudy’s opinion would be crucial in this. It would be important for Trudy to feel just an edge of the jealous yearning that Rachel felt then, lying on her bed and thinking about Moll.

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.’