Marrying the Mistress (34 page)

She had tried to keep herself busy. She had filled in at work with extra hours, while people went on holiday, and had permitted a serious boy who had just been taken on as junior clerk to give her rudimentary computer lessons. He was learning computer skills at day-release classes at the local technical college, and each week he attempted to pass on to Gwen everything he had learned.

‘Why’s it called a mouse?’ she’d say. ‘Why is that an icon?’

‘It’s its name,’ the boy would say. ‘That’s what it’s called.’

His name was Ivor. He read long, incomprehensible passages to her out of his computer manual and she typed away at the keyboard, marvelling at its lightness.

‘Isn’t it quick?’ she’d say. ‘Isn’t it clever?’

At home she washed all the curtains and starched the nets and planted her hanging baskets with petunias and trailing lobelia. She went up into the attic and sorted boxes and suitcases and found a whole lot of photographs, taken in France all those years ago, with Ray and Merrion. Merrion was scowling in
a lot of the pictures, scowling into the sun or into the camera lens.

How could I? Gwen thought, looking at Merrion’s scowl. How could I ever have put her through all that?

She brought the box down to the kitchen. Left to herself, she’d have thrown them away, lit a little bonfire of painful memories in the bottom of the old galvanized dustbin. But she felt she ought to show them to Merrion before she did that, show them, and suggest, by showing them, that she, Gwen, didn’t think she’d got life right, either. Not by miles. Not by a million miles. But of course, she couldn’t show anything to Merrion until she saw Merrion again; she couldn’t do more than make plans of what she’d do when the lines of communication were open again. When Merrion chose to open them.

She put the box on the kitchen table. Perhaps she would at least sort them, throw out all the views she had taken, all the hills and valleys and little town squares she had photographed as if they’d had significance. Perhaps they had, then: or perhaps she’d just hoped that, if she took their pictures, they’d acquire some. She took the lid off the box – an old shoebox, it was, brown Start-Rite sandals of Merrion’s, size eight with a daisy pattern, she remembered, stamped out of the toe – and tipped the photographs out on to the plastic tablecloth.

The telephone rang. Gwen jumped. She dropped the photograph box and hurried round the table to the telephone.

‘Hello?’

‘Mrs Palmer?’

‘Yes—’

‘Mrs Palmer,’ Guy said. ‘This is Guy Stockdale.’

‘Oh,’ Gwen said. It came out as a little gasp.

‘Am I interrupting you?’

‘No, no, I was just—’

‘Mrs Palmer,’ Guy said, ‘I wonder if I could come and see you?’

Gwen took a breath. She gripped the telephone receiver and stared at the wall, at the wallpaper she had chosen when she moved into the house, a washable kitchen wallpaper printed with grapevines growing through trellises, black grapes and greeny-yellow grapes with tightly curling tendrils, like springs.

‘Why?’ she said sharply.

‘There’s something I’d like to tell you—’

‘Tell me now,’ she said. ‘Tell me over the telephone.’

‘I’d rather see you. I’d rather see you face to face.’

‘Is it Merrion? Is Merrion ill?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘Merrion isn’t ill. Merrion is fine.’

‘Why isn’t
she
ringing me?’

‘Because I said I would. Because I asked her if I could.’

Gwen put her free hand out and traced a vine tendril.

‘Very well,’ she said. She’d heard that at the office.

‘Very well,’ her boss said, several times a day, on the telephone, ‘Very well.’ It sounded dignified, a slight put-down. It was far better, Gwen decided, than ‘All right’.

‘Thank you,’ Guy said.

Gwen looked round her kitchen. She tried to imagine Guy, in his suit, sitting at her plastic-covered table, staring out of her kitchen window at her bird feeders, at the bright, cheerful things she grew in her garden, the marigolds and nasturtiums and geraniums.

‘I’ll meet you in Cardiff,’ she said.

‘Of course—’

‘I’ll meet you on Friday. At the Angel Hotel.’

‘Thank you.’

She took the receiver away from her ear and looked at it. There didn’t seem to be a way of saying goodbye, of ending this conversation. After a moment or two, Gwen put the receiver quietly back into its cradle and went back towards the kitchen table. The photographs lay there where she had spilled them, the views and scenes of provincial France, Ray in the Hawaiian print shirts she’d so detested, Merrion in her sundresses and sandals with her hair in fat bunches and her scowl. Gwen bent over and began to scoop the photographs together, into a rough pile that she could put back into the shoebox. The sight of them suddenly made her want to cry.

Laura had all the sitting-room windows open. She had opened them the minute Alan and Charlie had gone, to try and get rid of the smell of cigarette smoke. Alan had smoked quite openly, quite, well, comfortably, in front of her. Of course she’d always known he smoked, but she had made it very plain that knowing and condoning were two very different things.
When he came to Hill Cottage in the past, he had never smoked in her presence. She’d sometimes found butts ground into the gravel outside, after he’d gone, but she had felt indulgent about those, conscious of Alan’s thoughtfulness. Now, however, he didn’t seem to wish to be so thoughtful. He seemed to have a new confidence, almost an assertiveness. He came into the house with something like a swagger, laughing, a lit cigarette in his hand. With Charlie.

Laura had in no way been prepared for Charlie. Like the smoking, she knew, without admitting she knew, that there was a reason for Alan’s not being married, for Alan’s never having had a girlfriend. But she’d never been confronted with it before. She’d never had to have evidence of Alan’s sexual orientation standing in her kitchen before, perfectly at ease, swinging his car keys.

‘Hello,’ Charlie had said. He had his hand out. He was smiling. He seemed, like Alan, almost indecently at ease.

Laura had put her hand in his, hesitantly. His hands were huge, huge hands on this tall, gangling, red-haired man with jug ears and a wide smile. She wondered if he were laughing at her, teasing her hesitation.

‘I’m Charlie,’ he said. ‘I’m a doctor. I expect Alan told you.’

She looked at Alan. He was perched on the edge of the table.

‘Nope,’ he said cheerfully, ‘I haven’t told her anything.’

Laura tried to extract her hand. Charlie held it.

‘Plenty to say then,’ Charlie said.

He’d brought her a bottle of wine and a book. Not flowers, or chocolates, or something conventional, but a
book
.

‘It’s about a woman restoring a house in Tuscany,’ Charlie said. ‘An American woman. My mother loved it.’

‘Thank you,’ Laura said faintly.

They uncorked the wine and poured out huge glasses. Laura watched them. Alan didn’t take her pretty modest-sized cut-glass wineglasses out of the cupboard but the big, rough, green Spanish ones that Guy had bought once, on holiday. Then he almost filled them. When he had poured the wine, there were only a few inches left in the bottle.

‘I couldn’t drink all that,’ Laura said.

Charlie smiled at her again.

‘Yes, you could,’ he said. ‘Good for you. Trust me.’

They went out into the garden with their glasses. The dogs thought Charlie was wonderful and he threw sticks for them and rubbed them under their chins and they lay panting on his feet and slavered worshipfully. He told Laura about growing up in Devon, and how he missed the sea and sailing and walking on Exmoor. His father built boats, he said, and his mother ran art courses for people wanting to make pottery and jewellery.

‘You ought to go,’ Charlie said to Laura. His wineglass was almost empty already. ‘You ought to go and do one of her pottery courses. They’re very successful. People love them. They come back year after year.’

Alan held out his wrist. There was a thin black bangle on it, threaded with a single red bead.

‘She sent me that.’

Laura stared.

‘His – his mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you – have you met her?’

‘No,’ Alan said. ‘But when Charlie told her about me, she made me that.’

Charlie leaned forward.

‘Drink up,’ he said to Laura.

She felt slightly dizzy when she went into the kitchen to dish up lunch, dizzy and disorientated. She could hear them laughing, all the way from the terrace, laughing and sort of
shouting
. She looked at the chicken she had roasted. It looked small and tame. Charlie’s potter mother wouldn’t have roasted a chicken, she was sure: she’d have served up something far more bold and artistic, something colourful and Mexican full of chillies and garlic. Laura thought of Alan’s black bracelet. It was a present, an apparently approving present, from a person he had never met, a person who appeared to be welcoming him into a family he hadn’t met either. Except for Charlie. Laura drained the chicken fat out of the roasting tin. She had better put some wine in the gravy. Hadn’t she?

The men ate lunch with relish. Feeding Charlie was like feeding an enormous adolescent. He ate everything: two, three, four of everything. Alan watched him with pride. After lunch, they put Laura in a chair in the garden and brought her coffee, in a mug. It seemed
churlish to say she would have preferred her coffee in a cup, but she said it, all the same.

‘Too late,’ Charlie said cheerfully. He winked at her and went back inside to help Alan wash up, leaving her with the mug. She lay back in the chair and looked at the garden and tried not to notice that Alan had dropped two cigarette butts on the lawn.

She must have gone to sleep. When she was conscious again, the coffee was cold and the dogs had gone and there were no more sounds of washing up. She got up and went into the house. They’d washed up, certainly, and the kitchen table was strewn with the results: haphazard piles and clumps of plates and spoons and damp tea towels draped across chair-backs and worktops. Laura looked into the sink. The waste was blocked with carrot peel, and a dirty ashtray sat under a dripping tap. She looked about her, for her rubber gloves.

‘Good, but not good enough?’ Alan said from the doorway.

She turned from the sink.

‘I was just—’

‘We took the dogs out,’ Alan said. ‘Up the hill.’

Charlie appeared behind him, in the doorway.

‘Lovely place,’ he said. He had his hand on Alan’s shoulder, not just resting it there, but holding, holding on. ‘Lovely view of it, from above like that.’

They moved forward into the kitchen. Laura held her gloves.

‘So glad,’ Charlie said, ‘that you’ve had such a good offer for it.’

Laura opened her mouth. They were standing on the other side of the kitchen table, looking across at her, and smiling.

‘I —’

‘It’s awful to have to leave somewhere like this,’ Charlie said. ‘Somewhere you’ve made. But it must be amazingly satisfying to know what you’ve made it
worth
, over the years.’

Laura said, ‘I don’t think you quite understand—’

‘He does,’ Alan said. He glanced at Charlie. ‘He understands completely.’

Charlie leaned forward. He put his huge hands down on the kitchen table among the piles of cutlery and plates. He said comfortably, ‘We’re here to help you, you know.’

‘We?’

‘Oh yes,’ Charlie said. ‘We.’

Alan took his cigarette packet out of his pocket.

‘We’ll help you find something else, Mum,’ he said. ‘Help you move.’

‘I’m not sure—’

‘We are,’ Charlie said.

Laura looked at Alan. He was lighting a cigarette.

‘Alan—’

He took a breath of smoke and blew it out. Through the faint blue cloud he looked at her.

‘We’re quite sure, Mum,’ he said.

Guy reached the Angel Hotel twenty minutes before his appointed time for meeting Gwen. He chose a corner sofa in the lounge, a sofa with an armchair opposite
to it and a low table between them bearing a glass ashtray and a triangular cardboard menu for afternoon tea and cocktails. Guy positioned himself on the sofa so that he could see the doorway through which Gwen would come, and ordered tea for two, Indian tea, with a selection of something called finger sandwiches. What on earth else, he wondered, would sandwiches resemble? Feet?

He took out his new, and disliked, reading spectacles and a legal journal that he felt obliged to take each month and seldom read. He crossed his legs and balanced the journal on his knee. A boy in dark trousers and a white shirt and a maroon tie arrived with a huge metal tea tray and began to unload its burden of cups and plates and pots and jugs with immense laboriousness, tucking paper napkins around potentially hot handles, arranging knives and teaspoons at precise angles.

‘Will that be all, sir?’

‘Yes,’ Guy said. ‘Yes. Thank you, it will.’

He took his reading glasses off. The boy went back across the lounge, holding the metal tray in front of him like a shield. In the doorway he paused, then retreated a step and turned sideways with an elaborate movement to allow a woman to come in. Gwen entered very falteringly, and paused, looking about her. She was wearing a printed summer dress with a pale jacket over it and she was holding her handbag in both hands. Guy got up from his sofa and went across the lounge towards her.

‘Mrs Palmer—’

She looked up at him. She said in a small voice, ‘Oh yes.’

He gestured towards the corner where he had been sitting.

‘I ordered us some tea.’

‘Oh yes,’ Gwen said again.

He put a hand out, as if to take her arm, but felt that perhaps he shouldn’t touch her; so he guided her across the room with his arm out behind her, as a gesture.

‘Would you like the armchair?’

‘Thank you,’ she said.

He went round the low table burdened with tea things and sat down again on the sofa. Gwen put her handbag on the floor beside her chair. She didn’t lean back into it, but sat up straight, as if she were in a dining chair, looking towards him, but not at him. Guy reached out and poured tea into the nearest cup.