Marrying the Mistress (3 page)

‘Look,’ he’d said, with some energy, ‘I can’t give up the Bar because it’s all I’m trained to do and I’m good at it, but I’ll do anything else you want, anything. Move house, move to the country, have another baby, anything.’

She put her arms around his neck.

‘I’d like to go to the country. I’d like to be somewhere where I’m visible. To myself as well as everyone else.’

‘But if you wanted to work again—?’

‘I won’t,’ she said.

But she had. Two years into the restoration of Hill Cottage, and she had. Guy changed gear to negotiate the curve of the road before his drive, and saw the familiar pattern of lit house lights; sitting room and hallway, landing and main bedroom, front door and – glow only visible – back door. It was twenty years ago – twenty years! – that he had begun to see that Laura was feeling, however much she battled against
it, that she had paid too high a personal price in marrying him.

And now. Now what was he about to do? He turned the car into the drive and felt the tyres crunch into the stones of the gravel.

‘I feel like a slapper now,’ the girl on the video link had said that day. ‘I’m not a virgin any more. I feel dirty. I feel naive and stupid.’

Guy let the car coast quietly to a halt in the gravelled yard outside the back door. Inside the house, the dogs began barking, rapturously welcoming however long or short his absence. He turned off the engine. That’s how I feel, he thought. Dirty. Naive and stupid and dirty. He opened the driver’s door and climbed out, a little stiffly, on to the gravel.

Merrion Palmer’s father had died when she was three. He was an engineer, working for a construction company in South Wales, and had come home one ordinary weekday evening complaining of a violent headache and a curiously stiff neck. Within six days he was dead, of meningitis. Merrion was never sure whether she could really remember him, or whether she had absorbed all the photographs of him, and all the things her mother told her about him until they had combined to make something so close to memory she could hardly tell the difference.

She looked like him, that was for sure. He’d been tall, square-shouldered and long-legged with thick dark hair and a face that relied upon personality rather than regularity for its charm. He was very straightforward, her mother said, you always knew where you were with him, and he had enough energy to fuel a rocket. And he was funny, she said, he’d had a keen sense of the ridiculous. By her bed, when she was a child, Merrion kept a photograph of herself and her
father. She was about two, dressed in a dress she could remember more clearly than the occasion, a red sundress spotted in white, and she was sitting on his knee, very solemn, looking at the camera. Her father was looking at the camera solemnly too, and he was wearing the tiny sunhat that matched Merrion’s dress. It looked like a coin balanced on a grapefruit.

After he died, Merrion’s mother married again, very quickly. She married her husband’s best friend, who left his wife for the purpose, and took Merrion and her mother to live in France. He was a property dealer, in a small way, and he planned to broker deals between French farmers wanting to sell off cottages and barns, and English people wanting to buy them as second homes. Merrion remembered moving a lot, a succession of flats and small hotels and rooms in farmhouses where, more often than not, she slept in a bed in the same room as her mother and stepfather. She remembered the smell of French bathrooms and churches, black cherry jam and old men in caps playing
boules
on a sandy triangle under some pine trees in one of the little towns they ended up in. She also remembered the muttering. Her mother and stepfather muttered at each other all the time, in the car, in bed, across tables at meals while Merrion made patterns and small mountain ranges out of crumbled bread. It grew louder, the muttering, as time went on, and then Merrion’s mother announced that it was time for Merrion to go to school, and took her back to South Wales.

She only saw her stepfather once, after that. He came to the little house her mother was renting in Cowbridge and gave her a monster bar of Toblerone chocolate. Her mother took the chocolate away and sent Merrion out into the garden. When, after what seemed an eternity, she came out to find Merrion, she looked dazed, as if she’d been smacked in the face. She picked Merrion up. Merrion was almost six and much disliked being picked up. She kicked vigorously, and wriggled.

‘I should never have done it,’ her mother said, and burst into tears.

It was quieter after that, but duller. Merrion’s mother became a secretary at a solicitor’s office in Cardiff, and Merrion’s grandmother sold her house in Llanelli to come and live with them and help look after Merrion. For a few years, Merrion’s mother talked non-stop about Merrion’s father, as if by so doing, she could somehow obliterate the episode in France, but then everything settled and Merrion allowed the memory of her stepfather – an eager, angular man – to be assimilated into the myth-memory of her father. Men were there, it seemed, and then they weren’t, and when they weren’t, you got on without them.

It wasn’t until she was about twelve that she began to notice the men in her schoolfriends’ lives. There were fathers and stepfathers and brothers – the latter mostly discountable on grounds of age, lack of hygiene and gormlessness. They lent, Merrion noticed, a different flavour to home atmospheres; there was more energy and noise, more adventurousness, more food, more
danger. A house with men in it had a definite excitement to it. It was also more tiring. But Merrion liked it. She watched girls at school who had men at home, and wondered if anyone could tell, by just looking at them, that they had something she didn’t have. She put the sundress photograph away and found others of her father and herself, less goofy ones, and one taken of her father alone on his graduation day from college, with tidy hair and polished shoes. She spent a long time looking intently at this picture, as if something might emerge from it and influence her, affect her, change the feminine round of the way she and her mother and her grandmother lived.

When her mother went out on infrequent dates, she grew hopeful.

‘Did you like him? Are you going out with him again?’

‘Yes, but nothing’ll come of it. Don’t worry. I’ve learned my lesson.’

‘Will she get married again?’ Merrion asked her grandmother.

‘Unlikely,’ her grandmother said. She was doing the crossword. She’d done the crossword in the same newspaper for forty years, at roughly the same time in the morning, and grew restive if something prevented her.

‘Doesn’t she want to?’

‘No, I don’t think she does. The last episode wasn’t very encouraging.’

‘You mean with Ray in France?’

‘Yes.’

‘She could do better than Ray,’ Merrion said. ‘Ray was creepy.’

‘Creeps put you off, though,’ her grandmother said.

Merrion twiddled the ladybird clips that held her hair off her face.

‘I’m the only one in the class with a dead father.’

‘But not in the school.’

‘There are twelve hundred people in the school. I don’t know them. I know my class.’

Her grandmother concentrated for a moment and wrote something down in her newspaper.

‘You’ll feel better,’ she said unhelpfully, ‘when you’re married.’

By fourteen, Merrion’s father-preoccupation had become a marriage-preoccupation. She always looked at people’s left hands, particularly women’s, and if the gold band was absent would scan their faces to see if something else was missing, too, if singleness showed visibly, as she had once wondered if fatherlessness did. She looked at couples together – middle-aged couples, not boys and girls – and tried to see if anything emanated from them, if they looked, somehow, more
right
, more natural than people by themselves. Just after her fifteenth birthday, Merrion’s mother became engaged, to a local cabinet maker who had also lost his wife, and then disengaged herself almost immediately.

‘But
why?’
Merrion said.

‘I daren’t risk it—’

‘But you wouldn’t have been risking anything! He’s
OK.’

‘It wasn’t him that was the risk,’ Merrion’s mother said. ‘It was me.’

Merrion said, ‘But you’ve got to just dare things sometimes—’

‘Not,’ her mother said, ‘unless you really, really want to do it.’

When Merrion was sixteen, her grandmother died, very trimly in her sleep, of a heart attack. She had not been a big or troublesome personality in any way, but her death left a surprising gap and made Merrion and her mother feel suddenly a small and draughty unit. She had left them everything she possessed, including the modest proceeds from the sale of the house in Llanelli, ten years previously, and Merrion had the idea, quite suddenly, that they should move from Cowbridge into Cardiff and buy a flat.

‘But you’d have to change schools!’

‘I’d like to.’

‘In the middle of your A levels—’

‘I’ll catch up.’

‘And all your friends. And my friends—’

‘We’ll make new ones. You’ll be nearer work. I can go wild.’

‘Will you?’

‘Probably not. But I’d like to have the opportunity. Mum, I can’t just stay here always. I can’t. I’m like a hamster on a wheel.’

They bought a flat – most reluctantly on Merrion’s mother’s part – in a seventies block with a view of a
narrow public garden on one side and the back of an old industrial building on the other. It had two bedrooms, an L-shaped sitting room and a kitchen with a balcony big enough for a cat litter tray, so that Merrion could have a kitten. Merrion discovered clothes shops, bookshops, music shops, boys, clubs, libraries and ice-skating. Her mother crept to and from her office and wished herself hourly back in Cowbridge where the postman knew her by name and Saturday-night drunks didn’t careen under her window howling obscene rugger songs in Welsh. They began to bicker. Merrion did better and better academically, grew her hair and had a butterfly tattooed on her ankle. Her mother could only see the wild hair and the butterfly. When Merrion’s A-level results were published, and she was discovered to have gained three A grades, she went out to celebrate with schoolfriends and didn’t come home until six in the morning.

They had the first violent row of their lives. They stood in the narrow kitchen, while the half-grown cat watched interestedly from a forbidden perch beside the kettle, and screamed abuse at each other, about loyalty and disloyalty, about courage and cowardice, about love and possessiveness, about Merrion’s father and Ray and France, about lack of proper priorities. Merrion was exhausted from a night of revelling; her mother equally so from a night of anxiety. After an hour or so, Merrion flung herself out of the kitchen and into her chaotic bedroom, stuffed a few clothes into the purple nylon rucksack she used as a school bag, and slammed out of the flat.

She had ninety-seven pounds in a Post Office savings account. She bought a train ticket to Bristol, and from Templemeads Railway Station she called the brother of a schoolfriend who was at the university in Bristol, studying English and drama. He was unsurprised to hear her – unspecified young nomads seemed forever to be drifting through on some aimless journey that involved a lot of talking and rather less doing – and offered her the use of a sofa in the student flat he shared with four others. For five nights, she slept in a chaos of old newspapers, wadded pillows, unemptied ashtrays and smeared mugs and glasses, fighting off both the advances of two of the flat’s inmates and the impulse to call home.

On the sixth day, she walked into a hairdresser on a whim and had all her hair cut off, and then she returned to the flat, emptied the ashtrays, washed up the glasses and mugs, stacked the newspapers and left two bottles of Chilean chardonnay in the kitchen with a note reading, ‘Thanks a million. All the best. M.’ Then she went back to Templemeads Station and – not without a longing glance at the London rail timetable – bought a ticket to Cardiff. When her mother came in from work, Merrion was sitting at the table in the sitting room with the cat on her knee, filling in a university acceptance form.

‘I’m going to study law,’ she said. ‘I’ve got the right grades and they’ve said they’ll have me.’ She waited for her mother to start screaming again. It was a long wait, minutes at least, and then her mother went past
her into the kitchen, saying as she went, ‘You are just
exactly
like your father,’ and then, seconds later, ‘Pity about your hair.’

When Merrion went to university, her mother sold the Cardiff flat and went back to Cowbridge, buying a house in the street that ran parallel to the one Merrion had grown up in. From its garden, if you stood on a chair, you could see over the fences and hedges of the adjoining gardens to the one Merrion had tried to play in the day her stepfather brought her the Toblerone. It was like, Merrion thought, being in a picture you knew very well, which had been turned back to front. Her mother re-created the interior of the first house in Cowbridge as precisely as she could, and Merrion, standing in her bedroom doorway, saw that it was the room of someone who didn’t exist any more and that it was therefore no longer hers.

During her three years at university, a courteous gulf grew between the two of them. Her mother was proud of her academic prowess and resolute in her refusal to know anything of her wayward social life. Love affairs, bursts of intimacy with other girls, expeditions, adventures and experiments of one kind or another all had, Merrion discovered, to be compressed and edited into phrases incapable of causing anxiety or upset. Sometimes, after a telephone call in which she had given an untruthful catalogue of essays delivered on time, regular meals eaten and early nights taken (alone), she would try and remember those various
shadowy bedrooms in France, with their thin curtains and cold waxed floors and her mother – only in her early thirties then – in bed six feet away, muttering at Ray. Where had that woman gone, the woman prepared to defy the respectability of her upbringing and the outrage consequent upon taking another woman’s husband, and skip to France with her four-year-old child? Or had that woman taken a whole lifetime’s supply of daring and enterprise and left no energy behind her, nothing but a husk of apprehensiveness and profound conformity? Whatever it was, and however much sympathy – and exasperation – she might feel for it, Merrion knew that was not the way for her.