Marrying the Mistress (25 page)

‘I’ve had a headache since yesterday.’

The school nurse was filling in forms. She hardly looked at Emma.

‘Why are you in school then?’

‘I thought it was better.’

The school nurse wrote something and underlined it.

‘Are you having your period?’

Emma looked at Sonia. She’d only had two. Sonia had started when she was eleven. She was really regular now.

‘No,’ Sonia said.

‘Have you had your eyes tested?’

‘Yes,’ Sonia said.

Emma wanted to giggle. She looked at the school nurse’s hair which was stuffed into an elasticated band, in a crooked lump.

‘Is your mother at home?’

Sonia nudged Emma.

‘Yes,’ Emma said.

The school nurse reached for a pad.

‘I’ll write a note for your form teacher,’ she said, scribbling rapidly. ‘Then you go home and tell your mother that if the headache isn’t gone by tomorrow you should see your doctor.’

She tore the form off a small pad and handed it to Sonia.

‘There you are.’ Sonia tried to walk Emma home.

‘I better. Your mum’s not there.’

‘I’ll be OK.’

‘C’mon, Emma,’ Sonia said. ‘Then I can bunk off second English.’

‘I don’t want you to,’ Emma said. ‘I don’t want to talk.’ She gave Sonia’s hand, still holding the sick note, a little slap. ‘You hand that in for me.’

‘OK,’ Sonia said. She always gave in, Emma had discovered; she’d put up a little fight and then she’d give in. It was one of the things about her that Emma liked, that and the way her dad spoiled her. Sonia’s dad had left Sonia’s mum for Sonia’s mum’s cousin, so he had to give Sonia things, to make up for it. Sometimes Sonia didn’t
want the things her dad had given her and gave them to Emma. That was how Emma had acquired the dark-blue mules. Sonia wouldn’t wear them because Sonia’s mum’s cousin – who was only twenty-seven – had some exactly the same.

‘See you,’ Emma said to Sonia.

‘See you later,’ Sonia said. She always said that, even if she wasn’t going to see Emma again for days.

Emma let herself into the house. It felt weird; not quite empty but more as if it were waiting. She put her house keys in the zipped pocket of her school bag and went into the kitchen. Breakfast was still partly on the table, as it always was if Carrie wasn’t the last to leave the house; smeary bowls and spoons and a cereal box with the inner packet still standing up so the air could get in and turn the contents soft. Emma hated soft cereal. She hated soft biscuits, too. She didn’t like anything old.

She went across to the fridge and opened it. She wasn’t exactly hungry but she felt she’d like to look and see what was in there all the same. She helped herself to a yoghurt and a cheese portion wrapped in plastic and two chocolates out of the box Merrion had brought Carrie when she came to lunch on Sunday. Emma rearranged the layers in the box a little so that it wasn’t so easy to see where the missing chocolates had been. Then she opened the cupboard beside the fridge and found a bag of smoky bacon-flavour crisps and a tub of salted almonds that Carrie had bought for Sunday and forgotten about. Emma put everything on
the table while she rummaged in the box under it for a can of Coca-Cola. She felt as she did when she and Rachel raided the fridge after Simon and Carrie had gone to bed, a slightly exciting mixture of being afraid of being caught, and all poised to be defiant.

‘It’s our home, isn’t it?’ Rachel would say. ‘It’s our fridge and food. Isn’t it?’

Emma bunched up the hem of her school skirt until she had made a loose sort of pocket, and put the food and the Coca-Cola can into it. She added a banana; not one of the brown speckled ones that Carrie said needed to be eaten first, but a smooth, yellow, new one. Carrie said the new ones tasted of nothing, but to Emma they tasted clean. She went slowly upstairs, holding her skirt pouch, and tipped the contents on to her bed.

She’d made her bed, that morning, headache or not. She always made her bed, not because Carrie told her to, but because it felt dirty to get into, at night, if she hadn’t made it. If you pulled the bottom sheet tight, Emma had discovered, it felt cleaner, newer. She kicked off her shoes and pulled her socks off. Her toenails had tiny pink stickers glued to them, shaped like flowers. She’d varnished over the top of them with clear varnish so the flowers looked as if they were under water. Emma hated her feet. They were too fat, even her toes were fat, like little sausages. It was a real affliction, Emma thought, to have fat feet.

She unzipped her skirt and dropped it on the floor, and then her school cardigan. Her cardigan had been
Rachel’s, and the elbows were thin and shiny and the cuffs had frilled out and had ragged edges where Rachel had chewed them. Emma had fought very hard for a new school uniform, but had only won a skirt. Carrie was adamant about the rest, absolutely adamant. And it was no good going to Simon. Simon would be so bored by the topic of Emma having to wear Rachel’s cast-off school uniform that he wouldn’t even be able to hear her. He’d have looked at her as if she were both completely mad and also speaking an incomprehensible foreign language. He’d have made her feel a fool.

Emma got into bed in her knickers and her school shirt. She lay carefully down on her pillow, feeling all the items of food tumbling about on her duvet as she pushed her legs down the bed. Her headache, she decided, was still there, but it wasn’t worse. If she lay very still and ate very slowly, it might go away. If she ate with her eyes closed, it might go away even sooner. She reached down the duvet, patting it in search of one of her trophies. She found the yoghurt. You couldn’t, she thought, eat yoghurt out of the pot while lying down with your eyes closed. It would run into your ears. She put the yoghurt down and patted on. Her fingers found the small neat brick of cheese in its shiny plastic cover. She picked it up and put the corner of the cover between her teeth, to tear it open.

Below her, on the ground floor, the front door opened and shut with a slam. Emma froze. There was the thud of a bag being dropped and a clatter of keys. Then some
body went into the kitchen. Emma sat up. She put the cheese on her bedside table. Then she slid out of bed and went out on to the landing so that she could see down into the hall. It was Jack’s bag in the hall and his keys were on the floor beside it. Emma went back into her room and found the mauve-and-white-striped pedal-pushers that Sonia had lent her – ‘They’re only a lend, mind’ Sonia had said. ‘Just till Friday’ – and pulled them on under her school shirt. Then she went down the stairs in her bare, pink-stickered feet and crossed the hall to the kitchen.

Jack was standing by the kitchen table eating sliced white bread out of its packet.

‘What are you doing here?’ Emma said.

He gave a little start. He said, round the bread in his mouth, ‘You, too.’

‘I’ve got a headache,’ Emma said. ‘I’ve got a sick note.’

Jack grunted.

‘I didn’t think there’d be anybody here—’

‘Me either,’ Emma said. She looked at him. He looked awful, sort of greyish and lifeless. ‘Did you get sent home?’

‘No.’

She advanced towards the table and snatched the bread bag away. Carrie hated them eating things straight out of packets and cartons. She’d hate it that Emma hadn’t taken a spoon upstairs with her yoghurt.

‘What’re you doing here then?’

Jack lunged forward and whipped the bread bag back out of Emma’s hand.

‘Going somewhere—’

‘Don’t do that!’ Emma said. ‘Mum doesn’t like it! Mum doesn’t like you eating out of the packet!’ She leaned on the table. ‘Where’re you going, anyway?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘It does. You’ve got to tell Mum. Tell me and I’ll tell Mum.’

‘No,’ Jack said.

Emma sighed.

‘Why you going, anyway?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘It’s a school day,’ Emma said. ‘You can’t go anywhere on a school day.’

‘Look,’ Jack said. He finished the slice of bread he was eating. ‘Look. It’s none of your business where I go and what I do.’

‘It is,’ Emma said. ‘I’m your sister.’

‘So?’

‘So I need to know stuff.’

Jack went past her without replying. She heard him go across the hall and into the downstairs cloakroom, which she never used because it was dark and smelled of rubber boots and because Simon and Jack used it and left the lavatory seat up. She heard him pee, and then she heard the sound of water flushing. Jack came back across the hall.

‘You didn’t wash your hands!’ Emma called.

He picked up his keys. She heard the brief scrape as they were lifted from the tiled floor. Then he appeared in the kitchen doorway. He’d taken his school tie off,
but he was still in his school grey trousers and his school black blazer.

‘See you,’ he said.

She said, ‘Aren’t you going to change?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’

‘When will you be back?’ Emma said.

‘Dunno—’

She reached across the table and picked the bread up, holding it out to him in its plastic wrapper.

‘Want to take this?’

He shook his head again.

‘No.’

‘OK,’ Emma said. ‘What’ll I say to Mum?’

‘Tell her I’ll be back.’

‘When?’

‘Sometime,’ Jack said. He looked down, jingling his keys, and then he turned without another word and went back across the hall to the front door. Emma heard the door slam again. He’d looked, she thought, like someone who’d been really told off, like people did when the exam results were put up and they discovered, despite saying they didn’t care what their marks were, that they’d done really badly, not cool badly, but moronic badly. Emma went round the kitchen table and put the bread back in the big plastic bread box that got soft greenish crumbs in the bottom if Carrie forgot to clean it out. Her headache, she discovered, had quite gone.

‘All stand!’ the court usher said.

Guy rose from his seat on the small dais of Court
One, and went out. It had been a long, trivial afternoon, full of applications by bailiffs for this and that.

‘Your Honour, as you are aware, Mr Simmons has failed to oblige—’

‘I respectfully submit, Your Honour, that without an order this could run and run—’

‘The plaintiffs, Your Honour, have decided to withdraw for the moment. Their reasons, Your Honour will find, are not, in the circumstances, allowable.’

Mrs Weaverbrook had been back, more exhausted than ever with the effort of finding excuses for Mr Weaverbrook’s persistent non-attendance in court, and simultaneous steady acquisition of farm machinery whose provenance he could not account for.

‘My problem,’ Mrs Weaverbrook said desperately, gazing at Guy, ‘is the legal aid board.’

Guy had leaned towards her. He said gently, ‘I don’t think, Mrs Weaverbrook, that legal aid really has anything to do with it.’

Outside Court One, Martin was waiting.

‘Could I have a word, Judge?’

Guy paused.

‘Of course—’

Martin reached up a little so that his face was close to Guy’s.

‘Your grandson’s here,’ Martin said.

‘My grandson!’

‘Yes, Judge. I’ve put him in your chambers. Penny found him in the lobby about half an hour ago.’

‘Is he all right?’

‘I think so. Penny’s taken him some tea. He’s a bit subdued, I’d say. Sometimes playing truant takes them that way—’

‘Heavens,’ Guy said. ‘Heavens.’ He glanced at Martin. ‘Thank you. Thank you very much indeed.’

Jack sat at Guy’s desk and wondered whether he could turn on his computer. It was an old computer, an old Dell, the sort of ancient computer that would need someone very clever indeed to get anything much out of it. Jack wondered if Grando could do that. He’d never thought of Grando and computers before, he’d never thought of what his office would look like either, what his place of work would be like, what people in it would think of him.

‘Your grandad’s in court,’ the girl called Penny with the hairclips had said. ‘He’ll be in there till four-thirty. It’s booked solid this afternoon.’

She’d asked Jack if he wanted some tea. He’d said no thank you, but she’d brought it anyway, in a mug on a plastic tray with a cellophane packet beside it containing two shortbread biscuits. He’d eaten the biscuits and left the tea. Tea seemed to him an extraordinarily sad drink, like cocoa or Horlicks, a drink for people who were ill or old or both and could only swallow squashed-up baby stuff.

When he’d eaten the biscuits, he wandered round Guy’s room a bit. It was a dull room. It had beige walls and a brown carpet and grey plastic furniture. There were shelves of files and shelves of law books and a few photographs on top of a cabinet, photographs of Simon
and Carrie, and Alan, photographs of him and Rachel and Emma – all taken long ago, all pretty embarrassing – and a photograph of Granny with the dogs and one of Merrion taken with a lot of sky behind her and her hair blowing. Jack only gave the one of Merrion the briefest of glances. It made him miserable to look at, acutely miserable, for reasons that had nothing to do with Merrion herself. He sat in Guy’s swivel chair and swivelled a bit. He looked at Guy’s robe hanging on the back of the door. He peered at his wig, perched on a weird object like a big wooden lollipop. He poked it, gingerly. It felt stiff, almost hard, and you could see the stitches in it plainly. It felt a bit strange, looking at Grando’s wig, like looking at a bit of someone dead, a bit that didn’t work any more, or have any life in it. He straightened up. He felt, abruptly, rather nervous, a bit shaky. He went across the room and sat in the chair behind Guy’s desk, an armchair upholstered in grey tweed. There was a blotter on the desk, with scribbles on the blotting paper, and on one side, a stack of files in thin cardboard folders and on the other, the computer.

The door opened. Jack sat up.

‘Jack,’ Guy said. He was wearing a dark suit and a blue tie and carrying a big file under one arm. ‘Dear fellow—’

Jack felt suddenly shy. He got up and shuffled sideways, away from Guy’s desk.

‘You haven’t got your wig on—’

‘I didn’t need it this afternoon. It was just a string of little civil cases.’ He put the file down on the nearest grey plastic desk. ‘Are you all right?’