Marrying the Mistress (23 page)

‘Come to lunch,’ she’d said. ‘On Sunday. Just family. Just you and Guy and us.’

It was Guy who’d rung back to say they’d love to. He sounded pleased but tired.

‘It’s a lovely thought—’

‘It won’t be anything much. Just Sunday.’

When she told Simon, he had simply nodded.

‘OK.’

‘You’re not going to bite my head off?’

‘I haven’t the energy.’

‘Oh,
wonderful,’
Carrie said.

‘No need to be sarcastic—’

‘No need to be so self-pitying. Sometimes I—’ She stopped.

He looked at her.

‘Sometimes you think I am just like my mother?’

‘Yes,’ Carrie said.

He’d shrugged. She heard him go upstairs and then the sound of running water and then he’d come down again before going out to one of the free legal-advice clinics he ran with Ted.

‘Do you have to?’

He kissed her.

‘Yes,’ he’d said.

Now, looking at the under-sized piece of lamb, she thought she’d better wake him. She’d let him sleep in – heavens, she’d let them all sleep in – but Guy and Merrion were due in an hour and a half and, in any case, her feelings of self-sacrifice for the family were running dry. Lay table and cook lunch, fine. Tidy up sitting room, find wine, clear hall of school clutter, check downstairs lavatory, too, not fine at all. She ground salt and pepper over the lamb and opened the oven door. It ought to have garlic as well, but Emma had taken the last clove to school, for some domestic economy lesson, and of course had forgotten to say, or bothered to replace it. Carrie put the roasting tin into the oven and closed the door.

She climbed the stairs. Rachel’s bedroom door was shut and music was coming from Emma’s, although the
curtains were still pulled. She glanced up the second floor stairs towards Jack’s room. There was a black T-shirt lying on them, and a single high-top trainer and a crumpled magazine. Carrie sighed. She’d tackle Jack later. She went on towards her own bedroom and opened the door. Simon was asleep on her side of the bed, clutching the pillow against him as if it were a person.

She went across the room and pulled the curtains back. Then she went to the bed and sat down on the edge, next to Simon.

‘Si,’ she said.

He detached a hand from the pillow and held it out to her. She took it.

‘Getting up time.’

‘Mm,’ he said.

‘Getting up and helping-good-patient-wife time.’

He smiled faintly without opening his eyes.

‘You’re wonderful,’ he said.

‘I know. And about to be wonderfully cross.’

He yawned.

‘Where are the kids?’

‘Guess.’

He flung back the covers with sudden energy, and opened his eyes.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Sprint to bathroom before they do.’

From the floor above, Jack heard the groan and shudder of the water pipes as the shower was turned on. He’d been thinking about a shower, on and off, for some time. It was a funny thing, but if you slept in the T-shirt
you’d been wearing all day, you didn’t feel quite the same in the morning. It wasn’t so much that you felt dirtier, but rather more that you felt tireder. Jack rolled sideways and stared at the floor. His jeans were crumpled on it and one trainer lay a few feet away. His socks and his boxer shorts, he discovered, were still on him.

He’d been too tired, he remembered, to take them off. Then he’d been too tired to sleep, really. He hadn’t been tired in ages, quite the reverse, he’d been full of an enormous, brilliant energy, a feeling of wanting to run everywhere and vault gates and fences and take stairs and steps three at a time. And then yesterday, out of nowhere as far as he could see, Moll had said she was busy on Saturday night.

‘You mean I can’t see you?’ he said.

She smiled right at him.

‘Yes.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Something my mum wants me to do,’ Moll said.

‘Your mum—’

‘We always do a lot together,’ Moll said. She was still smiling. ‘I just haven’t lately. Because of you.’

‘Oh.’

She gave him a quick kiss on the side of his neck, a Moll special which involved a flick of her tongue.

‘One Saturday,’ she said.

‘But it’s a
Saturday—
‘

‘That’s why Mum wants to go out with me.’

Of course, he’d smiled. Of course, he’d said yes. She’d given him one of her long steady looks, right up
close, her face only an inch or two from his, and then she’d gone swinging off and he sat where she’d left him, watching her bottom and her hair and the way she carried her bag over her shoulder as if it weighed nothing at all. He was so used to seeing her every day, so used to the assumption of seeing her, that he felt quite displaced, as if his life had suddenly been swapped for somebody else’s. He beat his fists lightly on the seat of the bench he was sitting on.

‘Get a grip,’ he told himself. It was something Carrie often said. ‘Get a grip.’

He went out for a beer, instead, on Saturday, with Adam and Rich. Marco had a date somewhere. The three of them went to two pubs and then tried to get into a club and were turned away for being too young by a doorman so stupendously bored with having to deal with anyone so juvenile that it rather put a damper on the evening. Adam suggested going round to a friend of his who always had something interesting going, but Jack found his heart wasn’t in it.

‘You go,’ he said.

The others exchanged glances.

‘Come on, mate—’

He shook his head.

‘I’m beat. I’m going home.’

He’d left them there, on the pavement outside the club with the bored bouncer, and loped home. It was a twenty-five-minute walk and in the course of it there were moments when he felt both solitary and vulnerable. He’d forgotten in these recent, heady weeks of
seeing Moll, what it was like being the outsider, being the one without a social purpose, a place, a meaning. When he got home, he went straight to the telephone in case she’d rung. She hadn’t promised, but she’d sort of indicated she might. There were three messages there, two for Simon and one from Emma’s friend Sonia about drama club. Jack trailed out of the kitchen and up the stairs. It was almost midnight. His parents’ bedroom door was shut and so were his sisters’. He sat on the bottom step of the staircase up to his floor and took off one shoe, leaving it where it fell. Then he took off his top T-shirt – the black one – and his copy of
Loaded
magazine fell out of his jeans pocket. He was almost too tired, he’d thought, to get as far as his bedroom.

The shower was turned off. He heard the pipes grumble into silence. Then he heard his mother call, ‘No, now, Rachel, now.’ He waited. He didn’t want the day to begin, he didn’t want to start feeling tired again.

‘Jack!’ Carrie shouted.

She was at the foot of his staircase. He could picture her, hand on the wall, face turned up towards the darkness of his floor.

‘Jack!’ she shouted again. She was louder this time. ‘Jack, will you please get
up?’

‘What’ll we talk about?’ Simon said. He was pulling a cork out of a wine bottle. He’d put on a blue denim shirt and his hair was still damp from his shower. Carrie rather wanted to go over and lean against him,
but she didn’t. She stayed on her side of the kitchen table and sliced apples into a pie dish.

‘We could start with the sale of Hill Cottage and the consequences of extra-marital affairs.’

‘Very funny.’

‘Well, really,’ Carrie said, ‘what d’you think? We’ll get by. The kids will be there. Emma and Rachel have been in the bathroom for hours.’

Simon pulled the cork out with a jerk.

‘Because of
her?’

‘It didn’t escape Rachel’s notice,’ Carrie said, ‘that Merrion was wearing a sweater from agnès b. when she came to supper.’

Simon ran a piece of kitchen paper round the inside of the wine bottle’s neck.

‘Who is agnès b.?’

‘Clothes,’ Carrie said. ‘Classic but cool.’

Simon shook his head.

‘Just think if Mum finds out—’

‘She won’t. Unless you choose to tell her.’

‘I feel awful—’

‘Ill? Or disloyal?’

Simon threw the screw of kitchen paper roughly in the direction of the waste bin.

‘Disloyal.’

‘Oh
Simon—
‘

He said, ‘She’s so vulnerable—’

‘Is she?’

‘You haven’t seen her.’

‘I’ve tried to,’ Carrie said. ‘I’ve asked her here. I’ve
asked your father here. The difference is that he said yes and she said no.’

Simon went across the kitchen and picked up the screw of kitchen paper.

‘It isn’t at all comparable.’

‘No,’ Carrie said. ‘It isn’t.’ She was slicing the apples very fast. ‘The other difference is that your father has always been very nice to me and your mother never has.’

‘Carrie—’

‘I’m sick of it,’ Carrie said. She put the paring knife down and held her hands over her face. ‘I’m sick of you leaping to attention every time she so much as raises an eyebrow. I’m sick of her polite but determined refusal to acknowledge that I’m your wife. I’m sick of you refusing to see what your priorities are. I am sick, sick,
sick
of coming second.’

There was a small silence.

‘I think—’ Simon said, and stopped.

She waited. She took her hands away from her face and picked up the paring knife again.

‘Aren’t you exaggerating a bit?’ Simon said.

She said nothing. Simon put the paper in the waste bin. He said, his back to her, ‘Why be angry with me? Why aren’t you angry with my father?’

‘Increasingly,’ Carrie said through clenched teeth, ‘I have every sympathy with your father.’

‘In that case—’

‘Shut up!’ Carrie shrieked.

He looked at her.

‘Carrie—’

‘I’ve had enough! I’ve had enough of your evasions and your cowardice and your self-absorption and your bloody, fucking
mother!’

Simon looked pained.

‘Please—
‘

She shook her head violently. Tears of fury and frustration were beginning to leak out of her eyes.

‘You’re so
obtuse.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I expect I am. Along with all my other failings.’ He picked up the wine bottle. ‘It’s a wonder you stay.’

She glared at him. She’d put her hair up quite carefully earlier and it was beginning to slip down. She could feel a lock or two sliding down her neck.

‘Think about it,’ she hissed.

‘About what?’

‘Think
why I stay.’

He looked at the floor. Carrie jabbed the point of the paring knife into her chopping board.

‘Think
about it, Simon. Think why I’m still here, why I put up with your work commitments, your mother commitments, running this house, everything. I’m not the sort of person, am I, who’d stay just for the children. If I was going, I’d take them with me. But I don’t. I stay. Why, stupid, stupid Simon Stockdale do you
think
I stay?’

He gave her a quick glance. Then he looked down at the wine bottle in his hand.

‘I suppose—’ he said, and stopped.

The doorbell rang. They looked at each other in horror. ‘Oh my God,’ Carrie said. ‘It’s them.’

During lunch, Jack watched his grandfather. His sisters, he noticed, were watching Merrion, albeit covertly. Her hair was all loose today – it had been in a kind of plait when she came to supper – and he could see Rachel looking at it and wondering how you got hair to do that. Rachel’s hair was like Carrie’s, slippery and straight, with a tendency to divide over her ears. Merrion’s hair curved behind her ears and looked quite content to do so. It was very thick. Jack had never really looked at girls’ hair before. Before Moll, that is.

When you first looked at Grando, Jack thought, he seemed fine; normal, ordinary. But after a while you could see he was a bit on edge, that he was holding himself in a deliberately relaxed way, rather than being truly relaxed. He was sitting next to Carrie and he was listening to her. When he wasn’t eating, his hands and wrists rested on the table and you could see that his hands were the same as Simon’s hands, the same shape, the same fingernails. Grando had a checked shirt on, open-necked, under a dark-green sweater. He smiled at Carrie a lot. She was telling him about her job. ‘You’re amazing,’ he said, several times. ‘I don’t know how you stand it.’ Sometimes, when he reached to pick up his water glass, he gave Merrion the quickest of glances across the table and Jack felt a little jerk when he did that, a little twist of recognition and pain. He’d expected to think Grando pathetic; he’d told himself he was probably just
a sad old bloke who’d made a fool of himself. But that wasn’t how he seemed, it wasn’t how he seemed at all. He might be tense, but he wasn’t apologetic, he wasn’t pitiful, he was instead indicating – quietly but unmistakably – that the reason he was so happy to be in this room was because Merrion was in it, too. It filled Jack with awe and misery. It also quite took away his appetite so that when he looked down at his plate and found that it was empty he was astonished.

His father, he noticed, was talking law to Merrion. He wasn’t looking at her, he was looking at the table just in front of her plate, at the dull patch where Jack had spilled some water while filling her glass and forgotten to blot it up. Jack thought his father looked rather sarcastic; there was a smile on his lips that didn’t manage to look very smiling. For her part, Merrion seemed able to look at Simon. She looked at him quite steadily. Jack wondered what a girl would think of his father, someone who saw him as a bloke and not as a father. He wondered what Merrion was thinking, whether it was odd to look at a son and see something of the father you were really in love with. In love. Jack swallowed. He picked up his knife and traced patterns with it in the gravy left on his plate. Moll had said she’d call. ‘Call you Sunday if I don’t Saturday night, OK?’ she’d said. The telephone had been quite silent, all morning, not even Trudy or Sonia or one of Dad’s clients who always rang on Sundays because they thought they’d have a better chance of catching him in then. He pushed his chair back.

‘Jack?’ Carrie said.

He didn’t look at her.