Marrying the Mistress (21 page)

‘Well, now,
that’s
something to rejoice over!’

‘I’d have to share it with Guy,’ Laura said primly.

‘You said Simon was making him give you the lion’s share—’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Then if you get more money for this,
you’ll
have more—’

Laura looked down the garden. The herbaceous border – such extraordinarily hard work, such equally extraordinary satisfaction – was full of bright clumps of new leaves, the first stirrings of lupins, aquilegia, delphiniums, foxgloves.

She said, ‘It isn’t about that.’

Wendy looked at her coffee mug. Then she looked at the almost-empty coffee pot. Then she looked at the tubs of huge blue pansies beside her and at the aubretia and the iberis spilling over a nearby low wall and then she looked at Laura.

‘You could do this garden again.’

‘What for?’

‘For exactly the same reason as you did this. Because you’re good at it. Because you like it.’

‘But there’d be no point to it—’

‘Don’t kid yourself.’

‘About what?’

‘That there was any point beyond your own pleasure in making
this
garden. Guy isn’t a garden man. Never has been.’

Laura said to her lap, ‘I wanted him to be.’

Wendy poured herself some cold coffee. She added milk and although she didn’t usually take it, a spoonful of brown sugar. She stirred the mixture. It looked muddy and unattractive. She pushed the mug away from her.

‘Laura—’

‘Yes.’

‘This business of Guy—’

Laura raised her head and looked at Wendy.

‘What about Guy?’

‘I just wonder—’ She stopped.

Laura waited.

‘Did you ever love Guy?’ Wendy said. ‘Or did you just want him to love you?’

Laura grasped the arms of her green plastic garden chair.

‘How dare you—’

‘You think about it,’ Wendy said.

Laura said, half crying, ‘Why would I want him to love me if I didn’t love him in the first place?’

Wendy leaned back. She shaded her eyes despite her sunglasses and looked up at the sky. Three ducks were going overhead in neat triangular formation, like stunt-flying aeroplanes.

‘You tell me.’

‘He’s been the centre of my life for forty years, he’s been the pivot, the heart—’

Wendy said nothing. She stopped looking at the sky and looked at her hands instead. On her left hand she wore her wedding ring and the eternity ring Roger had given her when they’d survived ten years and three children and an escapade of his with the captain of the Stanborough tennis club’s women’s team. She’d lost her engagement ring years ago. It had probably gone out with the rubbish or down the drain with the laundry or the children’s bath water. She didn’t miss it. It was an amethyst, a biggish amethyst surrounded by diamonds, and it had belonged to Roger’s aunt Lilian. It was a gloomy ring, Wendy always thought, just like Aunt Lilian. She twisted the eternity ring. It could do with a clean, poor thing, a freshen up. She’d have a go at it later, she thought, with some washing-up liquid and an old toothbrush. She looked at Laura.

‘You’ll have to stop this.’

‘Stop what?’

‘All this pretending. All this being sorry for yourself. It’s not fair on anyone, particularly not on your children.’

‘Simon doesn’t mind. Simon—’

‘You aren’t
allowing
Simon to mind,’ Wendy said. She looked at her watch. ‘I must go. You’re treating Simon just like you treated Guy. Just taking the bits you want.’

‘Oh!’ Laura cried, and covered her face with her hands.

Wendy stood up.

‘Tell you what—’

Laura waited, her hands over her face.

‘I think you could do with a little therapy.’

Laura snatched her hands away.

‘Therapy?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m not mad!’ Laura shrieked. ‘I’m not out of my mind!’ Wendy picked up her bag, and adjusted her spotted-framed sunglasses on their black bead necklace.

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘But
therapy—
‘

‘To reconcile yourself. What some therapy could do is help to reconcile you to what’s happened, to the future.’

Laura glared at her. She stood up abruptly, knocking the table so that Wendy’s cold coffee slopped out of her mug. She seemed to be simmering with things she wanted to say and somehow couldn’t. Wendy slung her bag on to her shoulder.

‘Unless, of course,’ she said, ‘you really have no intention of ever being reconciled to anything.’

The senior clerk looked at his watch. Then he looked at Alan. He said, ‘I’m expecting Miss Palmer back from court in about fifteen minutes, sir.’

Alan said, ‘Can I wait?’

‘Certainly, sir. Do you have an appointment?’

‘No,’ Alan said, ‘I’m family.’ He paused. The senior clerk had gold-rimmed spectacles and the air of someone who expects to know, expects to be informed and, subsequently, to decide.

‘I’ll wait in her room,’ Alan said. This was all an impulse, finding himself walking through New Square after a prolonged and happy lunch with Charlie, and deciding just to drop in on Merrion, see her on her own territory, in her chosen setting. It might be the Chianti – they’d shared a bottle and had been hugely tempted by a second except Charlie had a four o’clock surgery – but Alan didn’t feel inclined to be intimidated by Gold Spectacles. He put a hand on the counter that separated the clerks from the outside world. ‘If you’ll just tell me where it is?’

The senior clerk hesitated for a second. It was plain he was deciding whether to escort Alan to Merrion’s room, or merely to instruct him as to how to find it.

‘Your name, sir?’

‘Alan Stockdale. My father—’

‘Exactly, sir,’ the clerk said. He leaned across the counter and indicated to the right. ‘If you take the stairs to the right, sir, to the first floor, and follow the corridor round to the left, you’ll find Miss Palmer’s room on your right, at the end.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I’ll tell her you’re here, Mr Stockdale.’

‘Thank you,’ Alan said again. He transferred his jacket from over his arm to over his shoulder. He was wearing a dark-green shirt and jeans. Gold Spectacles was in black and white. Alan gave him a grin and went across the reception to the staircase.

Merrion’s room was oddly quiet with a sealed-in feeling. Her mackintosh hung behind the door, and her barrister’s wig hung on the knob of an upright chair back. Alan peered at it. Weird thing, bizarre, all those neat little horsehair rolls and rows. He sniffed it. It smelt dusty and faintly of something that might have been scent. Presumably, if it were hanging here, Merrion wasn’t actually appearing in court, whatever else she was doing there. Alan wondered what else she did do. Talk to people, clients and stuff? Get judges to agree to things outside the courtroom? He thought of her arguing very steadily with heated people who didn’t want her to be sensible, didn’t want to hear the reasonable, practical things she had to say. He picked the wig up and put it on his own head. It was a bit small. There was a little mirror hanging behind the door. He leaned forward to see himself, see the crisp grey-white wig perched on his own dark hair which even Charlie – who liked long hair – said needed a cut. He made a face at himself. The wig might be too small, but it was also strangely becoming, especially the straight line of it across his brow. It made him look slightly authoritative in a distinctly attractive
way. He thought, briefly, delightedly, of wearing
only
the wig.

The door opened.

‘You!’ Merrion said.

Alan snatched the wig off.

‘Sorry—’

‘Feel free,’ she said. ‘It’s a peculiar bit of kit, isn’t it?’

She went past him, sliding her bag off her shoulder, and an armful of papers on to her desk. She was in a black suit and her hair was in a trim, fat pigtail which started almost at the crown of her head and ended below her collar, tied neatly with a black ribbon. She glanced at him.

‘To what do I owe—’

‘Nothing,’ Alan said. ‘Just an idea, a spur of the moment idea. I was walking back from lunch.’

Merrion said, smiling, ‘Don’t you work?’

He shrugged.

‘In bursts.’

‘Would you like some tea?’

‘Is that—’

‘A nuisance? No.’ She gave him another quick glance.

‘I’m glad to see you.’

He beamed.

‘Oh good.’

‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘The kettle lives outside in a cupboard. The sort of thing a designer would call a coffee point. I won’t be a moment.’

She went out of the room. Alan sat in a green leather chair, opposite her desk. This was presumably where
Merrion’s clients sat, and looked at her across her desk top and thought: This is my lawyer who is going to save me, and who is going to cost me x pounds an hour at the same time. What did Merrion cost people? Eighty pounds an hour? A hundred and twenty pounds an hour? How were these things calculated anyway? He looked at Merrion’s bag. It was black leather, big enough to hold a book or a file of documents. Alan wondered what private stuff it had in it, too, lipsticks and tampons and photographs. Probably, in that businesslike-looking bag, there were photographs of Guy, photographs Alan had never seen, taken on occasions he had never known about and never would. Merrion had seen aspects of Guy that nobody else had ever seen, maybe aspects that nobody else had ever noticed. That was what happened when you fell in love, that was what Charlie had been talking about over lunch, the way that falling in love enabled you to go to places in yourself you’d never been to before, places you didn’t know about, places you wouldn’t have dared to go to without this particular person to go with you. Being in love with Charlie made Alan feel a kind of sympathetic intensity towards Merrion. He looked at her bag again and hoped that it was stuffed with mementoes of Guy, photographs and letters and tiny portable presents, key rings and pens and things. The kind of little, often-used thing that kept the giver in your mind a dozen times a day.

Merrion came back into the room carrying a small tin tray with two mugs on it and a pint carton of milk.

‘Do you have sugar?’

‘No.’

‘Just as well.’

He got up and took the tray from her. He said, ‘I know you had supper with Simon and Carrie.’

She made a space on her desk for him to put the tray down.

‘I can’t get used to the way news travels round families. I don’t have a family really, just my mother, so I expect things I do to stay private and of course they don’t.’

‘I talk to Carrie a lot,’ Alan said.

‘Yes.’

‘We have a kind of unspoken pact. I don’t know how it started.’

‘I imagine,’ Merrion said, pouring milk into their tea mugs, ‘that once she’s on your side, she stays there.’

‘Just about,’ Alan said. ‘Though she wouldn’t pull any punches.’

Merrion pushed a mug towards Alan.

‘I like her.’

He said, smiling and looking at his tea, ‘I expect she likes you.’

Merrion sat down in the high-backed chair behind her desk.

‘Nobody can really come clean, though, can they?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ Merrion said, ‘that we can’t, any of us, express our real, true opinions. We all have to behave beautifully, diplomatically. We have to edit what we say, all the time.’

He leaned back in his chair.

‘What would you like to say?’

She looked at him.

‘Ready?’

‘Ready.’

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Well, it seems to me that the person who is creating the most difficulties right now, the person who is setting people most successfully against one another, the person who is being supremely unreasonable – is your mother.’

Alan looked down again into his tea.

‘Simon would say she is the most justified because she is the most injured.’

‘Simon isn’t here,’ Merrion said. ‘Anyway, from what I gather, she isn’t exactly fair to Simon either.’

‘Has Carrie said anything?’

Merrion drank some tea.

‘She doesn’t need to. While I was there for supper your mother rang in hysterics about the house sale. Nobody
said
anything, of course. Because they didn’t need to.’

Alan said thoughtfully, ‘My parents have been married longer than I’ve been alive.’

‘And me.’

‘Does longevity give a situation precedence?’

‘Not legally—’

‘Morally?’

‘I don’t know,’ Merrion said. ‘All I do know is that your father wouldn’t have fallen in love with me and stayed in love all this time if he and your mother had everything it takes to keep a marriage going.’

‘Why didn’t he leave her before?’

She said calmly, ‘I didn’t ask him to.’

‘Did you now?’

‘Not really. It sort of coincided with his offering to. It got to a point.’

‘Between you?’ Alan said. ‘Or between him and my mother?’

She drank more tea.

‘Both, I should think. But we’ll never know precisely—’

‘It just happened—’

‘Yes.’

‘And now you’re kind of fighting her for my father.’

‘Am I?’

‘I think so,’ Alan said. ‘And Carrie is fighting her for Simon.’

Merrion said nothing. She got up and leaned against the window. Two men were down on the paved walk below, both still wearing their court tabs, peering at the top sheet in a pile of papers one of them held. Merrion knew the one in spectacles. He’d asked her out for a drink once, years ago, when she was still a pupil, and then forgotten to turn up. When she saw him subsequently he either pretended not to remember he’d forgotten, or genuinely didn’t.