Marrying the Mistress (32 page)

Carrie stopped massaging. She stared at the piece of carpet immediately beyond her foot. It had a stain on it, a small greyish stain about the size of a fifty-pence piece. It could be anything, tea, coffee, mascara, ink, mud. If she were a proper housewife, a true home-maker, she would have dealt with it long ago, long before it had settled itself so firmly into the carpet that nothing would shift it.

‘I told her that she was on her own now,’ Simon said. ‘That I’d always be her son but I couldn’t be anything more than that. And that I’d had enough of being manipulated. I had quite a lot of things planned to say about the nature of love, too, about generosity in love, but there wasn’t a chance really. Rather a waste. I’d done a lot of rehearsing in the car.’

Carrie stared at the stain. There seemed to be two or three of them. The harder she stared, the more they seemed to multiply. She felt Simon come and sit down next to her. He was damp and warm. She could see his thigh and calf out of the corner of the eye nearest to him.

‘Carrie,’ Simon said.

She turned her head and put her face down on her knee, sideways on, so that she was looking away from him.

‘I’m sorry,’ Simon said, ‘I am so, so sorry.’

She felt his hand on her back through the cotton of her shirt. She imagined how her back would feel under his hand, bony and unhelpful.

‘Could you sit up?’ he said. His hand moved to her arm. He helped her to sit up. She felt she couldn’t do it, on her own.

‘I went to tell her that you come first,’ Simon said.

She looked at his chest. It was very familiar, the way the hair grew, the moles and the shallow grooves of flesh and bone. He put his arms round her. She laid her face against his shoulder. He lifted one hand and pressed her head into his shoulder.

‘I should have done it years ago,’ Simon said. ‘When I first met you.’

He kissed the back of her head. She lifted her hands and put them tentatively on his sides. Then she slid them round his back and held him.

‘I don’t know if I couldn’t see or I wouldn’t see,’ Simon said. ‘But the thing is, I do now.’

Carrie nodded. She thought: I’m going to cry. I don’t want to cry, I
hate
crying. Simon loosened his hold on her, disengaging her arms, and then put one arm under her thighs and one around her back and lifted her across his lap. He said, right into her face, ‘All yours now. All yours. If you’ll still have me.’

She shut her eyes. She felt him lick along under them, where the tears were. She nodded again. ‘OK,’ she said. Her voice sounded tiny, as if it came from far away.

‘OK.’

Penny had left the customary pile of folders in Guy’s chambers. He had asked her not to leave them without at least forewarning him of the court order of any day, but as she was incapable of ever doing exactly as she was asked, she left them stickered with yellow adhesive notes instead, covered with her small, sloping, unformed script. It was the handwriting of a twelve year old and it would probably never change. When Penny was a narrow old woman of eighty, she’d still be writing with the writing of somebody of twelve.

He sat down at his desk. He had risen at six that morning, in order to catch a train to Stanborough that would have him in his chambers by eight-thirty. Because he had woken, Merrion had woken, too, and they had showered and dressed around each other, silent with the faint oppression of another Monday morning, and with the knowledge that it was better to say nothing much than to court even the smallest danger of saying too much when there was neither time nor atmosphere to say it in. He had left the flat before her. She’d kissed him. Neither had said
anything significant, even then, just, ‘Speak later.’ He had gone down those long flights of red-carpeted stairs very slowly, a weight upon him, silent and muffling.

He shuffled the folders. Mr Weaverbrook was again among them. Guy did not feel like Mr Weaverbrook. He did not feel like anything that reminded him of the intractability and persistence of human things. He put his fingers into his waistcoat pocket and took out his father’s watch. Ten-past nine. It was unlikely, Guy thought, that his father had ever looked at that watch and confessed to himself that he did not feel like dealing with the working day ahead. He would have regarded such thinking as unprofessional and self-indulgent. ‘I don’t mind if you don’t want to do it,’ Guy’s father would say, only half-humorously, to his sons, ‘I only mind if you don’t do it.’

The telephone rang. It might be Merrion. She had a conference at nine-thirty. He picked the receiver up and waited, half smiling.

‘Dad?’

‘Simon!’

‘Hello,’ Simon said. He sounded shy.

‘Hello to you, too. This is a very nice surprise.’

‘Is it?’

‘I was just looking at the day ahead and wondering–’ He stopped and said, slightly heartily, ‘Monday morning. You know.’

‘Yes—’

‘How is Jack?’

‘A bit better. I think. At least he ate something over the weekend.’

‘No sign of the girl?’

‘No,’ Simon said. ‘I rather think even Jack doesn’t want to see her.’

‘I wonder.’

‘Dad—’ Simon said.

Guy looked at the ceiling. There was a plume of discarded cobweb hanging from the light fitting. It swayed slightly in the faint draught. There were two, now he came to look at them.

‘Has Mum spoken to you?’ Simon said.

‘Silly question.’

‘It’s just – well, I went to see her at the end of last week.’

‘Yes,’ Guy said levelly.

‘No,’ Simon said. ‘Not like that.’

‘Like how, then?’

‘I went to tell her that I can’t act for her any more. Legally, I mean. It’s caused so much trouble, it’s—’ He stopped, and then he said, ‘I should never have agreed in the first place.’

Guy looked down at his blotter. With his free hand, he picked up a pen and wrote ‘Simon’ on his blotter. Then he drew a box round the name.

‘Good for you,’ he said.

‘I thought,’ Simon said, slightly hesitantly, ‘that you ought to know. I ought to tell you.’

‘Thank you. That was brave of you, telling your mother.’

‘She—’ Simon said, and stopped again.

‘I can guess. But you’ve survived.’

‘Yes!’ Simon said. His voice rose a little. ‘Yes, I have.
In fact, I – well, it seems to have sorted out quite a lot of things.’

‘I’m so glad. What will Mum do now, for a lawyer?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll suggest some names, of course—’

‘So it’s back to the drawing board.’

‘Dad, it couldn’t actually be any further back than it is at the moment, anyway.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘Look,’ Simon said, ‘are you busy at the weekend?’

‘I don’t know,’ Guy said. He was conscious that his voice sounded surprised. ‘I don’t know yet. Why—’

‘Would – well, would you like to come over? Sunday supper, or something?’

‘That’s very sweet of Carrie—’

‘It wasn’t Carrie,’ Simon said. ‘I mean, I know she’d like to see you, but it’s me asking. Me asking you.’

Guy suddenly felt rather unsteady. He held the receiver, hard, gripping it.

‘Thank you—’

‘Think about it—’

‘I will.’

‘And Merrion, too, of course.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Give me a call,’ Simon said. ‘A bit later in the week?’

Guy nodded.

‘I will. Thank you. Thank you for ringing. And telling me—’

‘That’s OK,’ Simon said. There was a small pause, and then he said awkwardly, ‘Take care, Dad,’ and put the telephone down.

Jack could see her, all the way down the main corridor. She was standing by the notice-board, with a group of other girls, reading the end-of-term arrangements. She had pulled the long side-pieces of her hair back tightly and secured them with a band at the back of her head. Jack had never seen her hair like that before. He didn’t like it. It made her look hard.

Adam thought Jack should just ignore her.

‘Make like you can’t see her. Like you’ve never heard of her.’

‘That won’t finish it,’ Jack said.

‘But it
is
finished,’ Adam said. ‘She’s even going to Italy this summer with Marco’s family—’

‘It isn’t finished for
me,’
Jack said. ‘I never said anything. I just got dumped.’

‘Well, you don’t want it to happen twice—’

‘It can’t happen twice. It’s happened.’

He looked now down the length of the corridor, considering. She had her back to him now. Her school-uniform skirt fitted sleekly over her bottom and her legs looked as he remembered them, smooth and pale brown. She shook her head a little every so often, and the curtain of her hair shivered with the movement. Jack took a breath. He shifted his bag to his right shoulder and set off down the corridor.

The girls round her saw him coming before she did. He saw their eyes widen. One of them, a heavy girl with thick black curls who had always hung round Moll, put a hand out and touched Moll’s arm. Jack saw her
say something, too. Moll turned and saw him coming. He wondered if she would just toss her hair and walk away. She had done that already, three times, when Marco was around. But Marco wasn’t here now, only the group of girls.

Jack stopped in front of her.

‘Hi,’ he said.

She gave the heavy girl a sideways glance, then Jack an even more fleeting one.

‘Hi.’

‘Got a minute?’ Jack said.

She put her chin up.

‘I’ve got nothing to say—’

‘I have,’ Jack said.

‘I don’t want to hear anything you’ve got to say.’

The girls giggled faintly.

‘I’ll tell everyone else then,’ Jack said. ‘I’m not fussy.’

Moll gave a small, private smile. She glanced down at herself and brushed an imaginary piece of lint off her skirt.

‘It wasn’t being dumped I minded,’ Jack said.

The girls stared at him. He hitched his bag a bit higher.

‘I mean,’ Jack said, ‘nobody wants to be dumped, but it happens. You go off people like you go on them. It happens.’

Moll shrugged. She looked at Jack’s feet.

‘What got me,’ Jack said, ‘was not being told. You couldn’t even
tell
me, could you? You just did it.’

‘Nothing to tell,’ Moll said. She looked for support at the heavy girl. The heavy girl was looking at Jack.

‘Oh really?’

She shook her head. Jack leaned forward a little.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘when you dump Marco, try and remember to tell him, will you? Try just to have enough guts for that, OK?’

‘Fuck off,’ Moll said.

Jack took a step back.

‘Oh, I’m going,’ he said. ‘I’ve said what I came to say.’

They watched him go. He went down the corridor, the way he had come, with long, loping strides.

‘He looks like Steve,’ one of the girls said. ‘Doesn’t he?’

‘Steve who?’

‘Steve from Boyzone,’ the girl said.
‘You
know.’

Moll turned back to the notice-board. She lifted her hair with both hands and dropped it smoothly down her back again.

‘Dream on,’ she said.

Alan had made a curry, a careful, hot, Bengali curry. He’d read an article in one of the Sunday papers which said that the British had become so used to eating Indian food in Indian restaurants that they didn’t bother to cook it at home any more. Alan had bought a copy of one of Madhur Jaifrey’s Indian cookery books, and decided to do it properly: shop at an Indian grocer, grind his own spices, everything. It looked wonderful when he’d done it, shining and exotic. It had taken all afternoon to make, what with trying to do everything absolutely authentically, but that was a good thing because it had taken his mind off Laura. She had left four messages on his mobile,
and now she had written. She had written a letter to his old address and he’d picked it up there and brought it to read in Charlie’s flat out of an instinct that it would be better to read it in supportive surroundings.

It lay where he had left it, on the couch in Charlie’s sitting room. Every so often, as he moved across the kitchen in the course of his chopping and pounding and grinding, he lifted his eyes from all the red and brown and yellow in the bowls and saw the white square of letter lying there, on the squashed cushions. In the letter, she said that Alan was the only ally she had left in the world. Alan didn’t want her to say things like that. He wouldn’t, if he were honest, even want Charlie to say things like that. In Alan’s book, human beings shouldn’t put that kind of pressure on one another, shouldn’t try and hand the burden of themselves to someone else to carry. It distorted things, ruined things. You couldn’t make progress with someone who tried to surrender themselves completely to you.

The letter had made Alan think a good deal about Simon. Splitting the stiff little grey-green pods of cardamom seed with a sharp knife, Alan had wondered if this was the kind of thing Simon had had, one way or another, all his life, with Laura. When he was little, maybe the surrender had naturally been his, and then there’d been a tricky time as he grew up and found Carrie and gradually tried to withdraw his submission, and then, bit by bit over the years, Laura had taken the dependency over, as if she were calling in the dues of the past, the dues of Simon’s childhood. Was that
how it worked? Was that how the pattern was? Alan could see how, in any relationship, each day brought negotiation of some kind, but could these unspoken bargains also be struck, insidiously, over the years? And could they be struck unilaterally, so that even if you didn’t think you’d agreed to anything, you found you were involved and compromised by what had been done to you? The thought made Alan shiver. He’d had moments over the years, admittedly, of feeling jealous of Simon and Laura, but jealousy was quite eclipsed, and in a flash, by the apprehension of an imposed obligation, a duty which resulted from something other than choice. And that apprehension was followed by a sudden and blinding sympathy for Simon, a pang of knowing, in his guts, of the emotional marsh Simon had waded through all his life, a marsh of obligations owed and demanded and expected, rather than of anything given out of the sheer desire to give.