Marrying the Mistress (8 page)

‘Oh my God,’ Simon said. ‘What the hell did you have to do that for?’

‘She has to hear it—’

‘Maybe, but not
now
. Not while she’s so stunned she can’t think straight. Not while all she can think of is that she’s been rejected because she didn’t make the grade.’

‘The sooner she stops blaming Dad for every bloody thing, the better for her, for her recovery—’

Simon started round the table.

‘I’d better go and find her.’

‘Leave her,’ Alan said.

‘Al—’

‘Simon,’ Alan said, ‘leave her. Just
leave
her. For your own sake as well as hers.’

Simon paused. He put his hands in his pockets and shook up his change. He looked at Alan. ‘I can’t,’ he said unhappily, and went out of the room.

Jack Stockdale lay on the floor of his top-floor London bedroom, with his ear pressed to the carpet. He had turned his music off, and switched off all the lamps, too, in order to be able to concentrate better. Immediately below Jack’s room was his parents’ room. On his parents’ bed, right now, lay his sister Rachel. She had made herself very comfortable. Jack could picture her lying among the piled-up pillows – pulled out of the bed for the purpose – with the telephone receiver tucked in against her cheek, leaving her hands free to pick off the purple glitter nail varnish she had applied the night before and was probably already bored with. On the other end of the telephone was Rachel’s best friend, Trudy, and they were discussing someone else, called Moll. Moll was the reason Jack was lying on the floor with his ear pressed to the carpet.

Moll was in the year below Jack at school, and therefore a year above Rachel and Trudy. Moll was very athletic, with a strong, supple dancer’s body and extremely straight brown hair which she wore either wound up on top of her head in a complicated knot or falling plumb down her back like a curtain. It was her hair that Jack had first noticed, walking by chance behind her down the main school corridor between physics and social studies, and seeing this long, calm, smooth sheet of brown hair. She didn’t fiddle with it. She must have been the only girl in the whole school who didn’t touch her hair except to brush it or pile it out of the way. She seemed to
take it for granted, like she took her body for granted, the body that was so effortlessly proficient at gym and dancing and track sports. She’d only been in the school a term and already there was a buzz about her capabilities. In Jack’s year, among Jack’s mates, there was also a buzz about her sex appeal.

Usually, Jack joined in. He liked sex talk. He liked the jovial buddy stuff of boys talking dirty together; it gave him a feeling that he didn’t have to go on this rather alarming journey alone, reassured him that there’d be an element of teamwork, that when – if – he ventured anything, there’d be somewhere to come back to. But he found he didn’t want to talk about Moll in the comfortably abusive language of
Loaded
magazine. And even beyond that, he didn’t want to hear Rich and Marco and Adam and Ed talking that way about her either. His disapproval had taken the admittedly pretty feeble form of merely not joining in so far, but they’d notice he wasn’t joshing along with them soon and he’d have to say then, somehow, that he didn’t want to. And then he’d really be in for it, he’d never, ever, hear the end of it and the news would spill out and eventually it would trickle round the school and reach Moll Saunders who’d hear in crude terms that Jack Stockdale had the hots for her whereupon she’d say – she’d be bound to say – in tones of utter contempt, ‘Jack Stockdale? Jack
Stockdale?
Puh –
lease
. Gimme a
break.’

But would she? That day, she’d caught him looking at her outside the school secretary’s office where the
noticeboards hung, and she’d said, ‘Hi.’ She hadn’t smiled, she’d looked straight at him and just said, ‘Hi.’ He’d nodded. He couldn’t think what else to do on the spur of the moment, but give her this cheesy nod. She hadn’t seemed to mind. She’d gone on looking at him for several seconds after he’d nodded, and then she’d turned, quite naturally, to look at the gym-club notice. She left him feeling stunned, breathless, thrilled. He couldn’t believe it, how thrilled he’d been. Like he wanted to turn cartwheels or do a backflip. And all for a ‘Hi’.

At home, later, when he and Rachel and Emma were tussling in front of the fridge for drinks and yoghurts and a saucer of cold sausages, Rachel had said, ‘You know Moll? In fifth year?’

‘Uh-huh,’ Jack said. He put a sausage between his teeth and tore off the ring-pull on a can of Coca-Cola.

‘She liked your painting.’

Jack ducked his head.

‘What painting?’ he said, round the sausage.

‘That black one. The head thing. The one Mr Finlay put up. Moll said it was cool.’

Jack said carelessly, removing the sausage, ‘What would she know?’

‘Nothing,’ Emma said, slurping strawberry yoghurt straight from the pot, ‘because it’s crap anyway.’

‘Trudy heard her,’ Rachel said. ‘Trudy was trying to get Mr Finlay to let her do extra art instead of home economics. Moll was in there.’

Emma put the plastic pot on the table. She had a smear of yoghurt across the bridge of her nose.

‘Mr Finlay’s crap too.’

‘Only because he told you you couldn’t paint until you’d learned to draw.’

‘I don’t want to paint,’ Emma said.

‘OK,’ Jack said, regarding his Coca-Cola can with great intensity. ‘So this girl I don’t know liked my painting?’

Rachel looked at him. She let a tiny pause fall.

‘You know her,’ she said. She bent into the fridge and retrieved the last sausage, a carton of apple juice and a mini Mars bar.

‘You’re not allowed chocolate till after supper,’ Emma said.

Rachel put her bounty into the crook of one arm and added a bag of crisps.

‘I’m going to talk to Trudy. Before Mum gets back. I’ll probably ask her to tell me what Moll really said about your painting.’

Jack shrugged.

‘Suit yourself.’

Emma darted a hand into the fridge and snatched a couple of Mars bars.

‘Nobody’s going to look at
you
, Jack,’ she said. ‘Not in a million years.’

The trouble was, Jack could now hear Rachel’s voice, but not what she was actually saying. There was a lot of laughing and every so often, Rachel said, ‘Wow!’ and, ‘Wow-ee!’ but he couldn’t tell if the subject of Moll and her admiration of Jack’s painting was ongoing or over. What, he wondered, had she actually
said
anyway?
‘Cool,’ or, ‘Great,’ or, ‘Who painted that?’ or, ‘Who painted that, I’d really like to meet them?’ Downstairs, the front door slammed. Carrie always slammed it in order to give her children fair warning to stop doing the forbidden things they were doing and revert to the things they were supposed to be doing. Jack sat up and banged with his fist on the floor to warn Rachel. He heard her scream, ‘Bye-eee!’ and then silence, and knew she’d be scrambling round the bed trying to get the crisp and chocolate crumbs out, and the pillows back in, before Carrie came upstairs.

He stood up. In view of the day’s developments, he decided he’d give Rachel a break. He opened his bedroom door and shouted, ‘Hi, Mum!’

From two floors below Carrie called, ‘Hi,’ and then, ‘Can you give me a hand with the shopping?’

Jack loped downstairs. The hall floor was covered with supermarket bags, bulging with depressing things like giant bottles of clothes-washing liquid and jumbo packs of dustbin liners.

‘This is what every girl should see,’ Carrie said, gesturing at the floor, ‘before she orders that white dress and books a beach in Bali. Can you put it all on the kitchen table?’

Jack looped his fingers through three bags for each hand.

‘You love it, Ma.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yeah. You love being in charge. What’ll you do when you’ve only got Dad to make life hell for?’

Carrie began unpacking a bag of vegetables.

‘Poor Dad.’

‘Why?’

‘He went to see Gran today. With Alan.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yes. Oh.’ She looked at the pack in her hand. ‘Why did I get more sprouts? I am sick of sprouts and they’re horrible at this time of year. All rank.’

‘Is Gran OK?’

‘No.’

Jack dumped four more bags on the table.

‘Are you pissed off with Grando?’

Carrie gave him a quick glance.

‘Not particularly.’

‘Dad is.’

‘It’s different for Dad.’

‘Why?’

‘He feels – well, he feels it’s tough on Gran.’

‘Yeah,’ Jack said, ‘tough all round.’

The telephone rang.

‘Oh,’ Carrie said, her arms full of vegetables, ‘you get it—’

Jack picked up the receiver.

‘Hi,’ he said. Then his expression changed. He made an embarrassed face at Carrie. ‘Hi, Gran,’ he said. He motioned to Carrie to come over, jabbing at the air urgently with his free hand. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, he’s not. Yeah, well – well, I’ll get Mum—’

Carrie stooped over the table and let all the vegetables she had just picked up roll out of her arms again.
She crossed the room and took the receiver from Jack who pantomimed exaggerated relief and slithered to the floor.

‘Laura?’

Jack, beside his mother’s booted feet on the floor, heard his grandmother’s voice faintly from three feet above his head.

‘Carrie? Oh Carrie, is Simon back?’

‘No, he isn’t. I thought he was with you—’

‘Not now. He left. Isn’t he home yet?’

‘No.’

‘He should be,’ Laura said. ‘He should be by now.’

‘I expect,’ Carrie said, shifting her weight a little, ‘he’s got caught up in rush-hour traffic.’

‘Will you ask him to ring me? As soon as he gets in?’

‘Laura, has something happened, something—’

‘No,’ Laura said. ‘No. But I need to speak to him. I need to speak to Simon.’

‘OK—’

‘Tell him,’ Laura said. ‘Tell him, won’t you? As soon as he gets in?’

‘I can’t come,’ Merrion said. ‘I simply can’t.’

She was sitting on the edge of the sofa in her flat, nursing a gone-cold mug of herbal tea.

‘He’s a gentle soul,’ Guy said. ‘Very tolerant, very – well, whatever the opposite of volatile is. He isn’t, perhaps, quite as clever as Simon but he’s much less difficult.’

Merrion looked into her mug. The herbal tea was pale brownish yellow and smelled faintly and disagreeably of compost. She had decided she was drinking too much coffee and was trying to drink herbal tea instead. It was, she thought, like telling yourself that a dry, unadorned diet crispbread was a perfectly satisfactory substitute for a thick cheese sandwich.

‘But he’s still your son—’

‘Who knows about you and what you mean to me and what you’re going to mean. He knows your name. He knows the
score
, my darling.’

Merrion put the mug down on the floor by her feet. She leaned forward until she was bent double and her chin was on her knees.

‘What I hate is that the prospect of meeting a son of yours makes me feel
guilty
. I don’t know why, but it does. I feel as if I’d have to say sorry for upsetting his mother—’

‘Not much logic in that. His mother is the same person as my wife, and you very properly haven’t been consumed by guilt there.’

‘She’s a different generation. Alan’s my generation—’

‘Merrion, what on earth has that got to do with anything?’

‘I can’t explain,’ Merrion said, ‘but it has.’

‘Look,’ Guy said. He came across the small sitting room and sat down beside her. ‘Look, come and say hello very quickly, maybe even have a drink with us, and then go.’

She sat up straight and pushed her hair behind her shoulders.

‘Would I be doing this,’ she said, ‘for you, or for me?’

‘For us both. Even for Alan probably. He’s going to love you.’

‘Don’t
say
this stuff—’

‘Loving his mother doesn’t preclude his loving other people that I love. Especially when they’re lovable.’

‘My mother doesn’t think I’m lovable—’

‘She does. She merely thinks your behaviour is unconventional and inconvenient. That’s different.’

Merrion looked at Guy.

‘Are you trying to show me off?’

‘Of course.’

‘And give us credibility?’

‘That, too.’

‘I tell you,’ Merrion said, ‘I do not like this stage at all.’

‘I seem to remember—’

‘Oh, I did,’ Merrion said, standing up, ‘I did want you to leave Laura and all that. I do want it. But you never know how the dynamics will change when you get what you want, do you?’

She stooped and picked up the mug from the floor. He caught her free hand.

‘Are you losing your nerve?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘But I just feel socially inadequate at the prospect of meeting your son.’

‘We’re all inadequate for that,’ Guy said. ‘None of us has ever done it before.’ He gave her hand a little shake. ‘Five minutes and it’ll be over and that’s another dragon slayed.’

She sighed.

‘Give me a wet Monday morning,’ she said, ‘in court with the most useless, truculent client to defend and a judge who can’t stand women advocates, rather than this.’