Marrying the Mistress (27 page)

‘This afternoon, come this afternoon. Just for an hour.’

‘I can’t,’ Simon said.

‘Why can’t you? Surely someone else can cover for you?’

‘It isn’t work,’ Simon said. ‘It’s Jack.’

‘What’s happened to Jack?’

‘He’s been very upset by something.’

‘What thing?’

‘It doesn’t matter—’

‘It does,’ Laura said. Her voice was rising again.

‘What is it?
Drugs?’

‘No,’ Simon said, too loudly. ‘No, it’s nothing like that. But his first – well, he’s just been jilted. He’s very cut up.’

‘Jilted?’

‘Yes. His first girlfriend—’

‘Do you mean to tell me,’ Laura said, almost shouting, ‘that you won’t come and see me because Jack has had some – some little romantic
tiff?’

‘It isn’t like that. It’s more than that—’

‘Like what?’

‘I mean it’s more complicated than that, more emotional—’

‘More
important!’
Laura shrieked. Simon took a huge breath.

‘Yes,’ he said, and put the telephone down.

Merrion’s case had been cancelled. The clerks had failed to reach her before she left home for chambers, and she had forgotten to turn her mobile phone on, so she arrived to find a blank diary.

‘My apologies, Miss Palmer,’ the senior clerk said.

She looked at him with irritation. Why couldn’t he just say, ‘I’m sorry,’ like anybody else?

‘It doesn’t matter, Michael,’ she said, enunciating every word. ‘I have plenty to do, preparing for Monday.’

He said, ‘There is something that’s just come in, a threatened abduction matter, in Reading—’

‘Give it to someone else,’ Merrion said, and went past him through the double doors.

Her room was inevitably just as she had left it, the file for the cancelled case lying ready on her desk, her wig on its chair knob, yesterday’s newspaper thrown into the waste-paper bin. She dropped her briefcase and bag on the floor and went over to the window. It was a sunny day, a bright, heartless, all-seeing sunny day and the light was coming down clearly between her own building and the one opposite and showing up the thick pale layer of dust on the windowsill outside. Merrion sighed and drummed a little rhythm on the double glazing with her fingers. It would have suited her mood better if it had been raining.

She turned and went across to her desk. There were
no telephone messages. Guy had rung her that morning in the flat, as he always did, to say he would be on the usual train and that he would like to take her out to dinner to compensate for the night before. She had nearly said, ‘Don’t bother.’ Only in the nick of time had she checked herself and said, ‘Lovely.’ She hadn’t said it in quite the voice she would have wished, but at least she had said it.

‘Darling,’ Guy said. His voice was slightly teasing. ‘Darling, don’t have a sense-of-humour failure. It was only dinner.’

‘Yes,’ she said. She wanted to say, ‘No, it wasn’t only anything.’ Nothing, it seemed, was only anything now, everything had come to matter, to have significance and echoes and implications. She felt – and she had chastised herself over and over for feeling this – that she was suddenly having to fight for something that had, for seven years, been effortlessly and superbly hers. She found herself wanting to go
out
with Guy, to be
seen
with Guy, to be included in things with Guy. That was what last night’s dinner had been about, an expedition to a restaurant where not only did it not matter if they were seen together, but where she secretly hoped they
would
be seen, and the slow process of their real public acknowledgement as a couple could begin.

She sat down at her desk and pushed the file aside. She was ashamed of herself for feeling as she did, for behaving as she was, for being unable to feel genuine pity for poor, gawky, heartbroken Jack. She liked Jack. She found him appealing almost
because
he was so unfinished and
because he couldn’t help a certain softness in his nature showing through the cultivated nonchalance of his manner. But last night, she had been jealous of him. Plain, angry jealous. When Guy rang the second time – Jack was in the shower – she had wanted him to sound sorry, really remorseful, really disappointed at not seeing her, not having the chance to be with her in a public place. He’d sounded regretful, certainly, but only gently so. His main preoccupation had been with Jack and their evening together and the extraordinary and unexpected success their conversation had been. It was really easy, Guy said, talking to Jack, talking to a sixteen year old whose outlook must, by virtue alone of a forty-five-year age difference, be completely poles apart from his own. But it wasn’t. It had been a revelation.

‘Oh good,’ Merrion said.

‘He doesn’t seem to disapprove of me, either,’ Guy said. ‘You can imagine the relief
that
is?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘He’s thought about more than you’d think. I suppose that’s boys, really. Girls seem to do their thinking while talking. Boys do one and then some of them do the other, later. He isn’t, oddly enough, very like Simon.’

‘Oh.’

‘I must get him out of that shower and into bed. The flat looks as if a bomb has hit it. How can one boy with no possessions but what he stands up in do that?’

Merrion looked down at her blotter. It was covered with doodles, the peculiar, asymmetric angular shapes she’d always idly drawn on scraps and in margins since
she was little. And there were the letters. She liked forming and illuminating letters. ‘M,’ she’d written, over and over, in different scripts and sizes. At the bottom of the blotter there was a row of letters in pairs, linked together by a scribbled chain: ‘MS, MS, MS. Merrion Stockdale.’ She looked at it. Guy was Stockdale. So was Jack. So were Alan and Simon and Carrie. And Laura. They were all Stockdale. And she had envied them, wanted to be part of this Stockdale thing, wanted to wear that badge that was Guy’s, that would make her his. But did she? Did she want, now, to give Guy every reason to make her part of – even lump her in with – this Stockdale family of his? Might it be surrendering, rather than joining? Might she lose, it suddenly occurred to her, the right to assume she took precedence with Guy, precedence before Jack, before Simon, before Laura even, if Laura were to fall ill? If she became Stockdale, what might happen to Merrion Palmer? Might she become just a lawyer, an earner, an expert in the abrupt procedures of abduction and its legal consequences, and might the woman who had been Guy’s lover for seven years, his cherished and particular lover, just blur and blend into Merrion Stockdale until she was as if she had never been? Merrion sat very still. She put her feet together under her desk and her hands in her lap. Think, she said to herself, think about it. Think it through.
Think
.

When Charlie had asked Alan if he could cook, Alan had thought he’d meant just that, ‘Can you cook?’

‘Course I can.’

‘Oh good,’ Charlie said, ‘because I can’t.’

He’d been grinning at Alan, as if he could see a joke Alan couldn’t see.

He said, ‘And operate a washing machine?’

‘Yes—’

‘And iron?’

‘So-so. What
is
this?’

‘I just wanted to be sure—’

‘Sure of what?’

‘Sure of your domestic skills before you move in with me.’

Alan had gaped.

‘Charlie—’

‘Will you? Will you move in with me?’

He remembered a little ecstasy. He’d known Charlie was in love with him, known he wanted to spend time with him, but there was something so carefree about Charlie, something so unpossessed, that he, Alan, had never quite dared to hope that Charlie would suggest what he was longing for him to suggest. He could only nod, he remembered, nod and nod like some daft mechanical toy.

And now here he was, early evening in Charlie’s kitchen, throwing out all the rubbish in Charlie’s cupboards, all the packets and tins and tubes and bottles long past their sell-by dates. It was hugely pleasurable. It felt, Alan thought, dumping a broken box of elderly poppadoms in the bin, as if he were throwing away Charlie’s past, all the people he’d loved before Alan, all the people he’d known before Alan even knew he
was on the same planet. He was getting rid of all the stuff that didn’t count any more, all the stuff that was over, in order to make way for something not just new, but lasting. It was this sense of its being lasting that filled Alan with a kind of awe; a sense that he had stumbled upon exactly what he had been looking for, for years, exactly the person who could give a point to everything. He’d said to Charlie, a bit drunkenly the other night, that he wondered if they’d been making their way towards each other for years, constantly being diverted or encountering difficulties, but keeping on because – because, well, it was sort of
meant
. And Charlie, so given to teasing, so given to making light of the most serious things, had simply said, ‘I know.’

Charlie had hoarded the most extraordinary food. There were jars of peculiar East European vegetables and tins of nursery puddings and crumbling packets of obscure pulses and spices. It looked as if he had bought them on impulse and immediately forgotten he’d done it, since Alan knew for a fact that, up to the moment that they met, Charlie had lived on a truly appalling diet of random takeaways and indifferent hamburgers.

‘I’ll eat vegetables,’ Charlie had said. ‘Of course I will. I
like
vegetables. It’s just that they don’t ever exactly
occur
to me.’

Alan was looking forward to correcting that, looking forward to making Charlie eat breakfast and vegetables and olive oil and organic bread. He picked up a jar of grey-green pickled cabbage and dropped it, with a satisfactory thud, into the bin.

From the sitting room, his mobile phone began its shrill squeal. He hurried through, smiling, his face and voice ready for Charlie, ready to be tough and teasing about Charlie saying his surgery had overrun again and he’d got two emergencies at the hospital.

‘Hell
o,’
he said, with the special emphasis he reserved for Charlie.

‘Alan,’ Laura said.

His face changed.

‘Hi, Mum—’

‘Are you busy?’

‘Not especially—’

‘Where are you?’

Alan looked at Charlie’s swaybacked sofa piled with newspapers and discarded sweatshirts. Laura did not know about Charlie.

‘At home.’

‘Oh,’ Laura said.

‘What’s the matter, Mum?’

Laura said tightly, ‘Simon put the telephone down on me.’

‘What—’

‘Earlier today. I rang to ask him why he had taken to writing to me with such hideous formality and he said he was too busy with some family crisis and put the telephone down.’

Alan moved across the sitting room and sat down on the sofa. He pulled one of Charlie’s sweatshirts across his knees and patted it, as if it were a cat.

‘What crisis?’

‘Oh,’ Laura said irritably, ‘some storm in a teacup between Jack and a girl.’

‘Moll?’ Alan said.

‘I don’t know. Why should I know? Jack is sixteen and will probably think he’s in love another dozen times before next Christmas.’

Alan smoothed a sleeve of the sweatshirt and folded it up neatly.

‘I think it was quite serious, Mum. For Jack at any rate. The first time he’d—’

‘But not comparable,’ Laura said.

‘Not—’

‘Not comparable in any way to what I am faced with!’ Alan said nothing. He retrieved the second sleeve and folded it on top of the first one.

‘Are you there?’ Laura said.

‘Yes—’

‘Simon wants me to accept this offer on the house. He has
instructed
me to accept the offer. He has sent me an absolutely dreadful formal letter virtually commanding me to do it.’

‘It’s a good price, Mum. And he is your lawyer.’

‘I know. Of course I know.’

‘You
asked
him to be your lawyer.’

‘Because I believed he understood. I couldn’t go to a lawyer who didn’t know our history, didn’t understand how things were between your father and me. I couldn’t just be a statistic, a set of figures, a typical example. I asked Simon because he knew. Because he
cared
. I needed a supporter, Alan, someone to turn to,
someone who would feel what I was feeling, someone to take my part. Can you really not see?’

Alan moved the sweatshirt to one side and lay down along the sofa so that he could pillow his cheek on it. He said into the phone, with his eyes shut, ‘You’ve asked for his advice, Mum. He gives you the best advice he can. Then you refuse to take it.’

‘Yes, I do,’ Laura said.

Alan opened his eyes.

‘What?’

‘I am not accepting this offer. I am not selling Hill Cottage.’

Alan sat up abruptly.

‘Mum, you
have
to.’

‘Why do I?’

‘Because it represents the largest chunk of equity you and Dad have, and it has to be divided.’

‘That,’ Laura said, ‘is your father’s problem.’

Alan said patiently, ‘It doesn’t work like that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that you can’t stop things, ultimately. You can delay them, but you can’t prevent them.’

There was a small scrape of a key in the lock. The front door opened and then slammed.

‘Home!’ Charlie shouted.

‘Who is that?’ Laura said.

Charlie appeared in the sitting-room doorway. His hair was tousled and his tie was at half mast. Alan’s heart rose like a bird.

‘A friend—’

‘I want you to do something,’ Laura said.

Charlie tiptoed over to the sofa and sat down beside Alan. He pointed to the phone, raising his eyebrows.

‘My mother,’ Alan mouthed.

Charlie grinned and picked up Alan’s free hand. He put his fingers in his mouth.

‘What?’ Alan said.

‘I want you to tell Simon that I’m refusing the offer on Hill Cottage. I am not going to be treated like this. By
any
of you.’

Charlie bit gently on Alan’s fingers.

‘OK—’

‘Are you listening?’

‘Yes,’ Alan said faintly, his eyes on Charlie’s face.

‘Then ring Simon,’ Laura said. ‘Ring him and then ring me back.’