Marrying the Mistress (22 page)

‘I’ve decided to take a bit of a stand,’ Merrion said, to the window glass.

‘Oh?’

‘We’re going to get married in October. Sometime close to my birthday.’

‘October—’

‘Yes.’ There was a tiny pause and then Alan said, ‘Six months.’

‘Yes.’

‘Suppose the divorce isn’t through by then?’

‘It will be.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘I can’t. But I can be confident.’

‘Dad’s being advised by a friend of yours.’

‘Not a friend. Just a solicitor I know who I have confidence in. It’s an incredibly tricky situation because of Simon representing your mother. It wouldn’t stand up in court, a son representing his mother. We have to just hope it doesn’t come to that.’

‘You sound very crisp,’ Alan said.

Merrion turned from the window. She said, in quite a different voice, almost a whisper, ‘I want to rescue him—’

‘Dad?’

‘Yes,’ Merrion said. She put the back of one hand up briefly against her eyes. ‘I want him to see how it can be, how it’s supposed to be. I want him to see that he’s got it right, he’s had it right, all the time, by just being who he is, the person he is—’

She stopped. She sat down in her chair again abruptly and put her elbows on the desk in front of her. Alan leaned forward and put his tea mug down on a pile of pamphlets and then he stretched an arm out and touched her very lightly.

‘Good luck,’ he said.

Guy was late, arriving at the court building. He wasn’t very late – a mere ten minutes – but he disliked being anything other than early, always had. The morning train
from London was slightly delayed at Reading – some typical, predictable signalling problem – and it was raining which always meant a dearth of taxis at Stanborough Station. When he did find one, it dropped him at the main court building entrance, and not the side entrance which he and the other judges always used, and when he complained, the taxi driver pointed out with satisfaction that the entrance to the court building’s private car-park was blocked by an enormous truck, parked half on the pavement, and with no driver in the cab.

He went through the public lobby as rapidly as possible, and up the staircase to the courtroom floor. He was conscious of carrying an overnight bag in front of the court staff, as well as being in parts of the building they were not accustomed to seeing him in. Two security guards were standing by the public doors to Court Two, jingling their keys the way most men jingle their change.

‘I’ve got three down there this morning,’ one of them was saying. ‘Straight off Planet Lager and it isn’t even Friday. Morning, Judge.’

‘Morning,’ Guy said.

‘Martin’s looking for you,’ the guard said. ‘You might find him in your room.’

Guy pushed open the door to the judge’s corridor. It was quiet there, as it always was, and slightly stuffy; the air smelled of dusty carpet. Outside the door to Guy’s own chambers, Martin was standing. He was jacketless, as was his custom, and his shirt cuffs were rolled up above his wrists.

‘Martin,’ Guy said. ‘Have I kept you waiting?’

‘No,’ Martin said. He opened the door to Guy’s room and held it for Guy to pass through. ‘I didn’t have an appointment, did I?’

‘I’m always in by eight-forty-five—’

‘Except when the trains are late,’ Martin said.

Guy hesitated. He put his briefcase down on his desk and heard Martin close the door behind him.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I’m not prying, Judge—’

‘No,’ Guy said. ‘Of course you’re not.’ He turned round. ‘It’s rather difficult to get the timing right.’

Martin put a hand up and adjusted the knot of his tie.

‘That’s why I thought I’d come and see you.’

Guy made a gesture towards a chair.

‘Do sit down—’

Martin sat. He crossed his legs. He linked his fingers together in his lap.

Guy leaned against the edge of his desk. He said, with a shyness he didn’t seem able to control, ‘I imagine – you have a good idea—’

Martin waited.

‘My wife and I are separated,’ Guy said. He leaned his hands on the desk edge, either side of him, and stared at his shoes. ‘We are to be divorced. When we are divorced, I shall be marrying again.’

Martin said, ‘Miss Palmer?’

Guy nodded.

‘When I am in London, I am staying at Miss Palmer’s
flat. When I am in Stanborough, I have a flat out at Pinns Green. Usually, I confine my visits to London to the weekends. If you need those contact numbers as well as my mobile-telephone number, of course you shall have them.’

‘Thank you, Judge.’

Guy transferred his gaze from his own feet to Martin’s.

‘Is that what you needed to see me for?’

‘I just needed the facts,’ Martin said. ‘On account of the rumours.’

‘Are – there many?’

Martin said steadily, ‘You know how it is, Judge.’

‘Well, I don’t, you see,’ Guy said. ‘That’s half the trouble. There’s no rehearsal, is there, for something like this.’

Martin leaned forward. He put his elbows on his knees.

‘I was divorced eight years ago.’

‘I had no idea—’

‘You wouldn’t, Judge. It was before I took this job, I was working in London then.’ He glanced up at Guy.

‘It’s never easy.’

‘Thank you, Martin. Has – has there been much talk?’

Martin stood up.

‘Only when they haven’t got the football to think about.’

‘Do you have children?’

Martin moved towards the door.

‘Three, Judge. Thank you for your time and for your confidence.’

‘And do you see them?’ Guy said.

Martin opened the door. As he went out he said, ‘Like you, Judge, I spend my weekends in London,’ and then he closed the door behind him.

Guy stood up. He went round his desk to the window and stood looking down at the car park, at the familiar cars of all his colleagues with familiar things visible through the back windows, maps and rugs and plastic bottles of water, quiet evidence of lives lived a car journey away from this building and all its preoccupations. Poor Martin, poor man, probably living, as Guy lived now, in a strange, homeless no-man’s-land where the sense of belonging that characterized so much family life was torn away, leaving a feeling of acute disorientation behind it.

‘It’s so odd,’ Guy had said to Merrion not long ago, ‘but sometimes, when I’m not with you, when I’m not in court, I have a feeling that I’ve become invisible. That I’ve vanished.’

She had been puzzled. To her, his status, his professional achievement, was more than enough to give him an inescapable identity. He saw that she couldn’t understand – because she had never really known them – those subtler, quieter measures of singularity, or specificity, those marks of self conferred by being tied by blood to other people. There were, after all, almost no relations in Merrion’s life: she belonged to nobody beyond her mother and was in turn possessed by nobody beyond her mother. This state of affairs spelled liberty, certainly, but it also spelled a curious lack of human landscape, a
landscape that Guy now knew he had simply taken for granted as the natural backdrop to everything and anything he might accomplish. All those years, all those taken-for-granted mornings, he had, as poor Martin must have done, stepped out of that human backdrop to go to work and returned to settle confidently into it again at night. It was accepted, a given, so much part of him that he had not really given it a thought except in a hurried, practical, often exasperated way. And now it wasn’t there. It existed still, but not in the same relationship to him any more; the dynamics had changed. He thought of Hill Cottage; he thought of the steep field behind it and the well-known idiosyncrasies of both places – dark corners and sudden steps and uneven paths. It wasn’t, he thought, staring unseeingly down on the dusty car roofs below him, so much that he longed for the place, that he missed Hill Cottage, but that he felt – had felt for some weeks now – a painful space where his simple sense of domestic and family belonging had once been.

The door of his room opened at the same time as somebody tapped lightly on it. Penny put her head round. She had taken to dragging her hair off her face with little metal clips so that she looked as if she were enduring some arcane kind of punishment.

‘Five minutes, Judge,’ she said. ‘Court One.’

Laura was weeding. She was a meticulous weeder, on her knees hand-weeding with a small, light aluminium fork Guy had given her two Christmases ago. He nearly
always gave her something for the garden. In the early days, he gave her books and jewellery, but the books were seldom to her taste and the jewellery was invariably too bold. There were boxes of it lying in the drawers of her dressing table, complete with the cards Guy had written to go with them. Laura had looked at some of those cards only the other night. ‘To my darling Laura,’ they said, year after year. ‘All my love, Guy.’ It was, now she came to think of it, seven or eight years since the jewellery stopped and the garden forks took over. About the length of time, in fact, that he had been having his affair with Merrion Palmer. Simon had told her he was sure it was just coincidence, that Guy had at last realized there was no point in giving gold gypsy hoops to a woman who only ever wore her twenty-first birthday pearls. Laura could not believe him. It was extra evidence to her that the garden forks never came with little cards expressing a completeness of love. They’d presumably had cards, of sorts, but Laura hadn’t kept them. She’d certainly have kept them, she told Simon, if they’d been worth keeping.

A car was coming down the lane. The engine note was familiar. Laura sat back on her heels and looked across through the orchard to the hedge that divided Hill Cottage from the lane. A grey car was visible, coming down the lane. Guy had a grey car, an elderly grey Volvo he’d had for years, having bought it from a retiring judge when he was elected to the Bench himself.

‘It’s a bit silly,’ he’d said to Laura. ‘A bit of pseudo gravitas, really.’

The grey car slowed as it approached the gates to the drive and turned in. Laura stayed where she was, sitting on her heels, holding her aluminium fork. The car was Guy’s, and Guy was driving. He went up the drive and stopped, just out of sight, where he had always stopped, by the back door. Laura heard the dogs barking and squealing. She heard Guy’s car door slam. She looked down at the patch she had weeded, at the moist, crumbly, dark earth, so finely forked it resembled chocolate-cake crumbs. She waited.

‘Laura!’ Guy shouted.

‘Here,’ she said, in a whisper.

She heard his voice going shouting round the far side of the house, and then the dogs came racing round to find her and tell her the joyful news that Guy was home. They were extremely over-excited, and bounded around her, trampling across her lap, licking and wagging.

‘Don’t,’ she said, shielding her face. ‘Don’t.’

‘There you are,’ Guy said, following the dogs.

Laura looked steadily at the earth. He came over the grass towards her and crouched down two feet away from her.

‘Laura,’ he said.

She didn’t look at him.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I came to see you,’ he said. ‘I came to see Hill Cottage.’

‘Why?’

‘For some simple reasons and some rather more obscure ones.’

‘Typical,’ Laura said. She leaned forward and stuck her fork into the earth, under a flourishing clump of groundsel.

‘Laura,’ Guy said, ‘could we talk, do you think?’

‘You know what I said about that. I
told
you.’

‘Yes. You did. But it doesn’t work. It just makes things harder.’

Laura shrugged. She shook the groundsel roots free of earth.

‘And it is extremely unfair to Simon,’ Guy said.

‘Please leave Simon out of it.’

‘I can’t,’ Guy said. ‘Like it or not, he is my son as well as yours. You can’t appropriate him like this and if you are going to instruct him as you have, then he is automatically involved.’

Laura said nothing. Guy knelt on the grass to get closer to her. She could see the creases on the knees of his dark suit. She could smell, very faintly, the scent of his cologne, the scent that lurked so unkindly in the linen cupboard, in the little room off their bathroom where Guy had kept his clothes.

‘Look,’ Guy said, ‘I will let you have as much of everything as I can. I will just leave myself enough to manage on.’

‘Will that make you feel better?’

‘Simon said that to me,’ Guy said. ‘And my reply is the same to you as it was to him. I hope it will make
you
feel better.’

‘Things,’
Laura said bitterly.

‘Perhaps.’

‘Please go,’ Laura said.

‘I will, but I have to ask you first if you will please,
please
release Simon and let him find you a solicitor to represent you whom he recommends?’

Laura took her fork out of the earth, and rubbed the tines clean on the grass beside her.

‘This isn’t the right kind of control,’ Guy said. ‘The control you need is the power to lead your own life, not manipulate other people’s.’

‘Why did you come?’ Laura said again.

‘I told you. I wanted to see Hill Cottage. I wanted to see you and ask you to reconsider this course of action. I wanted – I wanted to see if you were OK.’

Laura put the fork into the pocket of her gardening apron. Then she stood up, awkwardly and stiffly. She’d been on her knees too long. Guy rose, too, and put a hand out to steady her. She ignored it.

‘Go away,’ she said.

‘Laura,’ he said. ‘Oh Laura, for your own sake if not for anyone else’s,
please.’

She looked at him, for the first time. Then she looked away.

‘If you’re homesick,’ she said, ‘then you’ll just have to bear it, like I shall have to. And don’t mention Simon to me again. I’m not making Simon do anything he doesn’t want to do, is
glad
to do. If you’re lonely, then you know who you have to blame.’

And then she turned and began to step deliberately across the grass, slightly stooped, towards the house and away from him.

Carrie looked at the piece of lamb in the roasting tin. It didn’t look big enough. It looked big enough for five people, perhaps, but not for seven, which is what they were going to be at lunchtime since she had invited Guy and Merrion. She’d done it on impulse, she hadn’t even told Simon she was going to. Something about her funny little broken conversation with Rachel had made her feel more confident, less helpless. She had felt that she wasn’t powerless, that she could strike some small blow for herself. So she had rung Merrion and left a message on her answerphone.