Marrying the Mistress (26 page)

Jack nodded. He kept his eyes down. He heard Guy’s feet move quietly on the carpet and then Guy’s arm went firmly round his shoulder.

‘Are you in trouble?’

Jack shook his head. He felt he shouldn’t be leaning against Grando but he couldn’t help it.

Guy said, ‘Something has happened, though.’

‘I wanted to go somewhere—’

‘Yes.’

‘Sorry,’ Jack said.

‘A row?’ Guy said. ‘Something at school? Something with your parents?’

‘No.’

‘I see Penny brought you some tea.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t—’

‘No. It doesn’t matter. Are you thirsty? Would you like something else?’

‘No,’ Jack whispered.

‘Look,’ Guy said, ‘I think you’d better sit down.’

He pulled Jack gently sideways.

‘Sit here.’

‘It’s your chair—’

‘It doesn’t matter. Sit here.’

Jack sat. He couldn’t look up. He felt worse than ever. He’d thought, when he got here, when he got to Grando, something would happen, something would get easier. But it hadn’t. Nothing had changed. He’d just left the house and crossed London and got on a train and asked a woman with a baby in a buggy where the court was and got here and that was it.

He said, to his knees, ‘I don’t know why I came. I don’t – I’m sorry.’

Guy had pulled another chair up, opposite to him, the other side of the desk. He said, ‘I’m pleased you did. Though I’m sorry you needed to.’

‘It was after Sunday—’

‘What was?’

‘When I saw you, when you came, when—’

‘Jack,’ Guy said, leaning forward towards him across the desk. ‘Jack, is it your girlfriend?’

Jack said nothing. He stared at his knees.

‘Has she left you?’

Jack shrugged.

‘Is that it, Jack? Did she tell you she didn’t want to see you any more?’

Jack raised his head a fraction.

‘She didn’t
tell
me—’

‘Oh,’ Guy said, ‘I see. She just did it.’

Jack stared at the desktop.

‘She said she was going out with her mother on Saturday. But she didn’t. She went out with Marco. She said she’d ring.’

‘But she didn’t.’

‘She didn’t even come to school this week—’

‘And left you to find out?’

‘Yes,’ Jack said.

Guy sighed. Jack glanced at him. He looked really sad, really unhappy.

‘Poor boy,’ he said. ‘My poor boy. I could tell you the first time is always the worst, but it wouldn’t be
true. It’s dreadful, every time. There’s no pain like betrayal.’

Jack said, without thinking, ‘Dad says—’ He stopped.

‘Your father says that that is what I’ve inflicted on Granny?’

‘I didn’t mean—’

‘I know you didn’t. But you’re right. Your father’s right. Jack—’

‘Yes?’

‘Why didn’t you go to your parents? Why didn’t you tell them?’

Jack made a face.

‘Couldn’t.’

‘Because of the teasing, because of your sisters?’

‘No,’ Jack said, and then added uncertainly, ‘It doesn’t matter to them.’

‘Your happiness does.’

‘They didn’t think this was a big deal, they thought this was just – well, kids’ stuff. Anyway—’

‘Anyway what?’

‘You couldn’t talk to them now. You can’t tell them anything.’

Guy was silent. He looked down at his hands lying in front of him on the desk. He seemed to be thinking. After a while he said, ‘We must tell them where you are.’

‘Emma will tell them I’ll be back—’

‘Does Emma know where you are?’

‘No,’ Jack said.

‘Then you must ring them.’

‘Are you sending me back—’

‘In the morning,’ Guy said. He stood up. ‘I must just make a call, and then you must ring home.’

Jack stood, too. He said awkwardly, ‘Do you want me to go out?’

‘No,’ Guy said. ‘No. I won’t be long. You can stay.’

Jack moved away from Guy’s desk and leaned against the shelves where the law books were. A green paperback had fallen forward. It was called
The County Court Practice Supplement
. Jack picked it up and riffled the pages. It seemed, well, polite not to do nothing, not to watch.

Guy dialled a number on the telephone on his desk. He sat balanced against the edge of his desk, his back to Jack, his shoulders square against the light from the window.

‘Hello?’ he said. ‘Hello, my love, it’s me.’

Jack fixed his eyes on a page and read a lot of words without seeing them.

‘Look,’ Guy said, ‘I won’t be coming up tonight. Yes, I know I did, but something’s happened. No, no, not Laura. It’s Jack. He’s had a bit of a crisis and turned up here an hour ago. Yes. Yes, I will, but in the morning. I’m going to give him some supper and take him back to the flat with me. He can get an early train in the morning.’ There was a pause. Jack glanced at Guy’s back. His head was bent, as if he were listening very hard. ‘Darling,’ Guy said, ‘I wouldn’t be upsetting our plans if it
wasn’t
important. It
is
important. The very fact that he has come to find me is important.’ There was another pause. Guy lifted his head and looked out of the window. Very quietly Jack closed the green
paperback and slid it back on to the shelf among the other books. ‘I’ll ring you later,’ Guy said, ‘I’ll tell you more then. No, not now. Later. I’ll ring you from the flat,’ and then there was a tiny break and he said, ‘Goodbye, darling,’ and put the phone down. He sat there, quite still, his back to Jack.

Jack cleared his throat.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘Don’t be,’ Guy said. ‘You’ve done nothing to be sorry for.’ He turned to look at Jack, swivelling one thigh on the desktop.

‘You’re supposed to be in London—’

‘I can go tomorrow,’ Guy said. ‘And then I can go on Friday. I always go on Fridays anyway, for the weekend.’

‘Thanks,’ Jack said. Somewhere, obscurely, a small light was breaking, a tiny beacon of relief. He took a step away from the bookcase. ‘Thanks, Grando.’

Guy looked at him. ‘There’s nothing to thank me for. Now. Ring your parents. With luck, you’ll get them before they even start to worry.’

Miriam had, as usual, spilt Simon’s coffee. It had been one of their office’s footling New Year economies, to stop sending her out for coffee to the excellent tiny Italian coffee shop fifty yards away every morning, and to get her to make it instead. She seemed incapable of using even the simplest filter machine so had, after only two days of half-hearted trying, resorted to making mugs of instant coffee which she often put synthetic whitener into, having forgotten to buy milk. It irritated all of them, every morning, and they had frequent exasperatingly inconclusive conversations about it. The trouble was that reverting to the Italian coffee shop might mean much better coffee, but it would also entail Miriam inevitably extending her time out of the office while she fetched it, to do her own errands. The dreariness of the instant coffee was also compounded by the fact that Miriam carried all three mugs round the office to distribute them, in a single handful, with the result that she spilled coffee as she went along, and even more as she put the mug
down on each desk. Ted said he was not only driven round the bend when it happened, but also by waiting for it to happen, regular as clockwork, every single morning.

Simon picked up his coffee mug and blotted the wet ring under it with a piece of junk mail that had come in that morning’s post. It was proving difficult to concentrate this morning, so difficult that he’d even found himself reading the junk mail in an idle, unseeing sort of way before he put it under his coffee mug. He hadn’t slept very well, of course. Nor had Carrie. They’d lain side by side in bed and had silent and separate mental tussles about why Jack, upset by Moll’s defection, should have gone to find his grandfather rather than one of them.

Carrie, Simon knew, blamed him. After Jack had rung from Stanborough and said he was staying the night and would be back in the morning, Carrie had looked at Simon for a long time. She hadn’t said anything, she’d just looked.

After several minutes, Simon said, ‘Will he be back in time for school?’

‘Yes,’ Carrie said. She was still staring at Simon. ‘Guy’s putting him on the seven-fifteen.’

‘Will you meet him?’

Carrie said, ‘I rather thought you would.’

He made a face. He said, ‘I’ve got an eight o’clock meeting—’

‘I see.’

‘He can surely get himself across London—’

‘It isn’t really about that,’ Carrie said. ‘Is it?’

Simon made one hand into a fist and folded the other round it. He said, ‘I can’t quite see why this little episode is my fault, too.’

‘Can’t you?’

‘No,’ Simon said.

‘Ah.’

‘Jack gets upset because Moll starts dating someone else so he does a bunk. It isn’t dramatic enough just to go home, so he goes to Stanborough. Really original thinking.’

‘Doesn’t it strike you as significant that he might have chosen Stanborough because he thought he had a chance of a sympathetic reception there?’

‘Oh come on,’ Simon said. ‘When did Jack and my father ever have much to say to one another?’

‘Things have changed,’ Carrie said. Her expression, he observed, was one of unmistakable anger. ‘When something like this whole family crisis happens, everything changes, all the dynamics. It’s only you that won’t see that.’

She went out of the room then. She was hurt, he could see, badly hurt that Jack, in pain, had chosen a confidant other than her. But what Simon couldn’t work out was why she was still angry with him, and not with his father. He would have understood, he thought, if Carrie had resented Guy for comforting Jack instead of her. But she didn’t seem to feel resentment, she only seemed to feel that Simon had somehow made home impossible as a refuge for Jack when he needed one.
Twice, in the night, Simon had reached out a tentative hand to touch Carrie, to see if he could convey something sympathetic, apologetic even, by action rather than words. The first time, she ignored his hand; the second time, she pushed it away.

After his eight o’clock meeting, Simon had rung Jack’s school to see if he had arrived. He had, and was about to go into a double period of business studies. Simon said, ‘Give him my—’ to the school secretary, and then stopped. What could he possibly send Jack in these circumstances, via Mrs Pritchard in the school office, whose son he was advising legally about a turbulent neighbour? ‘Tell him I’ll see him later,’ Simon said. ‘Tell him – I’m glad he’s OK.’

He took a mouthful of coffee. It was lukewarm and thin-tasting and speckles of artificial whitener floated on the surface like tiny clots of sour milk. He put the mug back down on the damp junk-mail mat and pushed the whole thing away from him. A steady misery was settling on him, and with it a definite and rather tremulous desire to see Jack. He looked at the telephone. Perhaps he would ring Carrie: perhaps he would ring her before she went into her ten o’clock meeting and tell her he’d go round to the school in the afternoon and meet Jack coming out. He put a hand out towards the telephone and it immediately rang. He picked it up.

‘Simon Stockdale.’

‘Simon,’ Laura said.

He shut his eyes.

‘Hello, Mum.’

‘Simon,’ Laura said. ‘What on earth do you mean by this?’

He took a breath and opened his eyes.

‘What—’

‘This letter,’ she said. Her voice was high and strained. ‘This horrible, formal letter advising me to accept the offer on the house.’

‘It has to be formal, Mother. I am your lawyer—’

She said nothing. He could feel the tension of her saying nothing like a hum down the line. He said, as forbearingly as he could, ‘Mother, you have asked me to act for you legally. I have to deal with your affairs in a proper, professional way because I am also dealing with another lawyer in this matter and there are certain rules of conduct to be observed.’

‘I accept that,’ Laura said, in a voice that belied her acceptance of any such thing, ‘but why must you write to me in such language?’

‘Because I have to demonstrate that I am acting for you properly—’

‘But you
still
don’t have to write to me as if you hardly
know
me! Simon, please don’t treat me like a fool. I’ve lived with lawyers all my life. I understand legal language, of course I do. But there is a difference between clear legal language and cold indifference.’

Simon took the telephone away from his ear and laid it on his desk. Faint cheeps could be heard from it. He counted to ten and then he picked it up again.

‘Mother.’

She was crying.

‘It just gets worse, every day gets worse, every day I think I’ve only got months left here, weeks maybe, it’s the last thing I’ve got, it’s all I am, it’s—’

‘Please,’
Simon said.

There was a small, uneven silence at the other end of the telephone. Then Laura said, with difficulty, ‘I am so
afraid.’

‘I know.’

‘I can’t imagine how I’ll live, how I’ll be.’

‘I know.’

‘I just feel I haven’t an identity any more.’

‘You
do
have,’ Simon said. ‘We all have. We have them just by being ourselves. We aren’t identified by where we live, how we live—’ He stopped.

Laura said, ‘Then perhaps I’m different.’

Simon wound a pencil into the coil of the telephone wire.

‘Mum, look. I’m sorry about the tone of the letter but I
have
to write to you like that. I have to demonstrate that I have given you the best legal advice I can. And the best advice I can give you, as your lawyer and as your son, is to accept this offer on the house. It’s an excellent offer.’

There was a pause. Then Laura said, ‘I see,’ almost in a whisper.

‘It’ll mean you can buy another house. A nice house, with a garden.’

‘Simon—’ Laura said.

‘What?’

‘Can you come?’

‘What, now?’

‘Yes,’ Laura said.

‘Mum—’

‘Please,’ Laura said. ‘Please. I know I’ll be able to cope if you just come and talk to me about it. I’ll feel differently if you’re here. I know I will.’

‘Mum,’ Simon said, ‘it’s a working day, a weekday.’