Marrying the Mistress (30 page)

‘Thank you,’ Carrie said. She took her hand off the kettle. ‘I’ll go and get the papers then.’

She picked her handbag up and went out of the kitchen. Rachel heard the front door shut, not slam. She looked at the kettle. Still trying not to wake Dad, still trying not … Rachel went across the kitchen and took a mug out of the cupboard. She banged the door shut, loudly. If that didn’t wake Simon, she would, in two minutes.

She carried the mug of tea upstairs and along the landing. Emma’s door was still closed. Rachel paused by her parents’ bedroom door, transferred the mug from her right hand to her left, and turned the door handle. The room was half dark with the curtains still pulled across. Simon was just a long hump in the bed.

Rachel put the mug down on the chest of drawers and went across the room. She pulled all the curtains back with great energy.

‘I know, I know,’ Simon said from the pillows, his voice muffled.

‘It’s me,’ Rachel said.

She went back to the chest of drawers and picked up the tea mug. Simon lifted his head from the pillow and stared at her.

‘How very kind—’

‘Yes,’ Rachel said.

She went round the bed until she was facing the way he was lying, and held the mug out.

‘Here.’

Simon sat up slowly. He was wearing his pitiful dark-blue pyjamas and his hair was tousled. A lot of Rachel’s friends had fathers who were going bald. At least Simon wasn’t doing that. He held a hand out and she put the mug into it.

‘What have I done now?’ Simon said.

Rachel thought of sitting on the edge of the bed and decided against it. She pulled at the hem of her T-shirt so that it came well below the hem of Simon’s sweater.

She said, ‘You need a shave.’

Simon took a swallow of tea.

‘I need one every morning. And sometimes in the evening, too. Dark men do.’

‘Jack shaves sometimes. Round his spots.’

‘Rachel,’ Simon said, ‘can you say what you’ve come to say?’

Rachel inspected the cuticles of her right hand carefully.

‘It’s Mum.’

‘What’s Mum?’

‘She’s upset,’ Rachel said.

Simon took another mouthful of tea and leaned away from Rachel to put the mug down on the cluttered table beside the bed.

‘Of course she is. We all are. And Jack being so unhappy upsets everyone.’

‘It isn’t that,’ Rachel said. She peered at a hangnail and put her finger between her teeth.

‘What isn’t what?’

‘Mum isn’t upset about Jack,’ Rachel said, chewing at her hangnail. ‘I mean she is, but it isn’t the worst thing. It’s you.’

Simon flung himself across the bed, tossing the duvet aside, and put his feet on the floor.

‘Oh, I
know
it’s me—’

‘Not like that,’ Rachel said.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘She’s not upset because you’re such a pain. She’s upset because of Granny.’

Simon said steadily, ‘I have to help Granny.’

Rachel started on her other hand.

‘She was crying the other day.’

Simon turned to look at Rachel.

‘Crying?’

‘She said if Granny made her fight for you, she’d win.

Then she was crying.’

Simon stood up.

‘She said this to you?’

‘No,’ Rachel said. ‘She was on the phone. I was listening. She’s been upset for ages.’

‘Did she know you’d heard her?’

Rachel put both hands by her sides and held them there. If she chewed any more, she’d make herself bleed.

‘No.’

‘Why didn’t you say?’

‘There was no point,’ Rachel said. ‘I know what she thinks. I know what she’s feeling. It’s you that needs to know.’

Simon swallowed. He looked down and gave a hitch to his pyjama bottoms.

‘I see,’ he said.

‘You don’t,’ Rachel said rudely.

Simon looked at her. Rachel could suddenly, for a fleeting moment, see what he had once looked like, what he had looked like at Jack’s age. He said uncertainly, ‘What don’t I see?’

Rachel put her hands on her hips. She said, almost contemptuously, ‘That she likes you.’

Laura had bought two dozen new delphinium plants. They were excellent specimens, leafy and robust. She was going to make a new border along the wall where the old cowshed had been, a blue border edged with French lavender which could spill over on to the brick path she had laid herself seven years ago with the help of a boy from the village. He had been looking for a summer job, any job, because he was saving up to buy a motorbike. For three weeks, one August – Guy was at a legal conference in Kuala Lumpur, she remembered – the boy helped Laura carry and then lay the bricks on a membrane of black plastic to stop the weeds coming through. She couldn’t now remember his name, which was rather awful. Steve or Gareth or something. He was very thin and hardly spoke but he didn’t seem to mind being told what to do. When she looked at the path now – a careful, pretty herringbone pattern – she felt a surge of envy for the mood in which she must have laid it, the unworried, carefree absorption in something simple and creative. When
she had planted her blue border, she thought she might change the dining-room curtains to echo it, since the dining room windows faced across a small lawn to the old cowshed wall. In fact, she could go round the whole house and look out of every window as if it were a picture, and see how she could, as it were, frame it.

She placed the delphiniums carefully on the dug – and fed – border and stood back to see if they would be in the right relation to one another for size and colour. She was good at that. Everybody said so. Just as everybody said that she had a particular knack with pruning, so that her garden flowered longer and stronger than anyone else’s. Even Wendy conceded that, and Wendy had a distinct pride in her own garden and was, in any case, like many people with multiple competencies, not very good, in Laura’s opinion, at dishing out the praise. You had to confront her to get any; stand up for yourself, point out that, although you might not do things Wendy’s way, your own way was pretty good in its own right. It had happened the other day when Wendy had arrived with a bottle of wine and banged it down on the kitchen table.

‘We’re drinking
that
. I’m not having any more cups of tea and accompanying fiddle faddle.’

Laura had decided to be dignified. She put the bottle and two glasses on a tray with the corkscrew and a little dish of enamelled-looking Japanese rice crackers, and carried it into the sitting room. She said, with her back to Wendy, ‘I suppose you have come to tick me off again.’

‘Of course I have,’ Wendy said. She flung herself back into an armchair and took off her spectacles. ‘What on earth else do you expect? You get offered twenty thousand pounds over the asking price for this house and you turn it down!’

Laura put the corkscrew very precisely into the neck of the wine bottle.

‘How do you know?’

‘For God’s sake, Laura,
everybody
knows! Everybody thinks you are completely insane! It’s only me that knows you practically
invented
obstinacy.’

Laura poured neat half-glasses of wine. She arranged a tiny smile on her face and carried the glass over to Wendy’s armchair. There was a little polished table beside it bearing a coaster with a camellia printed on it. Laura put the wineglass down carefully on the centre of the camellia.

‘Suppose we don’t talk about that?’

Wendy was breathing heavily on her spectacle lenses before polishing them. She stopped, mid-breath.

‘What?’

‘Suppose,’ Laura said, putting the dish of Japanese crackers beside Wendy’s wineglass, ‘suppose we don’t start again, all over again, on all the things you think I’m not doing right.’

‘And?’ Wendy said.

‘Concentrate on the things you think I
am
doing right.’

‘Heavens,’ Wendy said. She took a gulp of wine.

Laura sat down in the opposite armchair. She put
her knees and feet together. She smiled at Wendy, more broadly.

‘What am I doing right?’

Wendy gestured wildly with her hand holding her spectacles.

‘Well, you haven’t gone to pieces—’

‘No.’

‘You look, well, neat as a pin as you always have, so does the garden and the house—’

‘Yes.’

‘And you haven’t slagged Guy off in public, I suppose.

You may have to me, in private, but in public—’

‘Yes,’ Laura said.

Wendy put her spectacles back on.

‘So, well done. Well done for that.’

‘Thank you,’ Laura said.

Wendy heaved herself forward in the armchair.

‘But that doesn’t mean you get good marks for everything.’

Laura stiffened.

‘Here we go again—’

‘Yes,’ Wendy said, ‘we do.’

‘I am not talking about this house any more,’ Laura said. ‘I’ve decided.’

‘You can’t decide. You can’t take a unilateral decision. Half belongs to Guy. Legally. It belongs to him.’

Laura looked straight ahead. She held her chin up, higher than was normal, high enough for defiance.

‘I’ve made my position quite plain,’ Laura said. ‘And I’m not discussing it any further. They can all come to
me when they have everything sorted, but I’m not involving myself any more. I am going to get on with my new life instead.’

‘Your new life?’

‘Living here,’ Laura said. ‘Living here alone and making something of it.’ She took a minute sip of wine. ‘I may take in bed-and-breakfast guests. I read that you can charge guests up to twenty-five pounds a night each.

I
may
do. I haven’t decided.’

Wendy had left soon after that. She had left in a slightly clumsy, flurried way, not even finishing her wine, which was irritating because it was a waste, really, of having opened the bottle in the first place. Laura put the cork back in and stored the bottle in the refrigerator. Perhaps Simon would like it, when he next came.
When
he next came.

Now, regarding the delphiniums and wondering whether to grade the blues from dark to light, or to mix them, Laura reflected that her conversation with Wendy had been something of a small triumph. It was extraordinary how, when you could take charge of your life again after a profound shock, you found you had the power to choose again, to decide, to arrange things in a way both satisfactory and suitable to yourself. There had been that terrible time when she thought she would
have
to leave Hill Cottage, when she saw her whole identity being somehow melted out of her and poured away by people who simply could not see where the core, the mainspring, of her being lay. She had been terrified then, almost desperate. There had been moments
when, despite her fear of driving in London, she had almost got into her car and found Simon’s office in that awful part of South London where he insisted on working and just flung herself at him. She’d seen herself, in her mind’s eye, clinging to him, sobbing,
making
him see that he was literally the only person who could save her from being just rubbed out, obliterated. But then something amazing had happened, some weird new strength had come to her, and it had come to her most inexplicably after Simon had written her that dreadful letter which really ordered her to sell Hill Cottage. It was as if a voice had said inside her head, ‘Don’t.’ She had felt relief surge up in her, an unspeakable comfort after pain. ‘Don’t agree. Don’t give in. Don’t move.’

‘I needn’t,’ she said aloud to the dogs, almost in wonder. ‘I
needn’t!
I don’t have to move!’

After that, nothing seemed to hurt so much, nothing seemed to touch her with quite the exquisite painfulness that everything had touched her with previously. Simon’s exasperation, Alan’s offhandedness, even Guy’s betrayal seemed all much more bearable, much more possible to reconcile herself to. Instead of running pitifully behind them all, begging for sympathy and understanding, she had somehow gone to the head of the line and they were all having to run after her. And she would make them run. She would see that that is what they did, until she had got what she wanted.

From inside the house, the telephone began to ring. Seconds later, the dogs began barking, a maddening habit they had developed lately in order to tell her that
the telephone – which she could hear perfectly well anyway; she had even installed an extra-loud bell for the garden – was ringing. She pulled off her gardening gloves, dropped them beside the tools on the path, and ran in.

‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Hello?’

‘Mum,’ Simon said.

She smiled broadly into the receiver.

‘Darling!’

‘You sound out of breath.’

‘I was in the garden.’

‘Oh—’

‘Planting a new border.’

‘A new—’

‘It’ll be lovely. All blues and greys. By the old cowshed wall.’

There was a silence and then Simon said, ‘I was wondering. Could I come and see you?’

‘Of course!’ Laura said delightedly. She thought of the bottle of wine in the fridge. She wondered if he would like cold ham or something roast, lamb perhaps, a half-leg. ‘I’d love it. When?’

‘Tomorrow?’ he said.

‘Perfect. Lovely. For lunch?’

‘I really don’t need lunch,’ Simon said. ‘I just need to see you for half an hour—’

‘Lunch,’ Laura said firmly. ‘Twelve-thirty.’ She smiled into the receiver and put up a hand to touch her hair to smooth it back into place. ‘Drive carefully.’