Marrying the Mistress

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Do you,’ Carrie said, sitting down by the cluttered table, still holding the narcissi, ‘feel disloyal?’

  ‘No,’ Alan said.

  ‘Strict truth, please.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alan said.

  ‘Because your mother couldn’t really hold a candle to this girl—’

  ‘Because,’ Alan said, taking a swallow of coffee, ‘my mother’s got nothing left to fight with. All these years, and that’s all she’s got. Just all these years.’

  ‘There’s you two—’

  ‘Not when we’re our age. It doesn’t count any more. You should see her, Carrie. She’s sitting in that house with every cushion plumped and the bath shining and the garden all perfect and you know she’s trying not to ask herself what it’s all for. For years she could kid herself it was for Dad, or Dad and her, but now that veil’s been torn away, too. She’s made something Dad’s told her he doesn’t want.’

  Carrie began to unwrap her flowers.

  ‘She didn’t do it for him. She did it to show him he hadn’t left any space for her, in his life.’

  ‘Come on—’

  ‘True,’ Carrie said. ‘Don’t confuse independence and defiance.’ She got up and began to search in a cupboard for a vase. ‘When did she last earn a penny piece?’

  ‘It’s different for that generation—’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Carrie said. ‘My mother worked, my aunts do. Your mother stopped. She chose to stop.’ She ran water into a narrow glass vase and put the narcissi in, unarranged. Alan held his hand out for the vase.

  ‘Oh, Carrie. Let me—’

  She passed it to him. The door to the hall opened and Simon came in.

  ‘I feel awful. I shouldn’t have slept. Hi, Al.’

  Alan said, concentrating on the narcissi, ‘I saw Dad.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘You knew I was going to. I told you.’

  ‘Do I want to know?’

  ‘I don’t know. Do you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Carrie said, ‘you do.’

  Simon sighed. He came forward a little and leaned on the back of the nearest chair.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘He’s fine,’ Alan said. ‘He looks well and happy.’

  Simon grunted.

  ‘And she—’

  Simon straightened.

  ‘She!’

  ‘She was there. Just briefly. And given briefly and first impressions and all of us jumpy, she’s great.’

  Simon closed his eyes.

  ‘Give me strength.’

  ‘It’s no good, Simon,’ Alan said. He put the broken-off pieces of narcissus stem into a neat pile. ‘You can’t write her off as a gold-digger or a marriage-wrecker or a legal groupie or a sex bomb. You can’t write Dad off, either, as a classic male menopause victim wanting to reassure himself he could still double the world’s population if he wanted to. She’s the real thing. She’s a proper person.’

  ‘I think,’ Simon said, taking his hands off the chair-back, ‘I’ve heard quite enough for the moment.’

  ‘One more thing,’ Carrie said.

  ‘What?’ Simon said. His voice was full of weary distaste.

  ‘I want to meet her,’ Carrie said.

  In her parents’ bedroom, Emma was experimenting with Carrie’s make-up. Emma had make-up of her own, but that was for using, not for playing with. Carrie didn’t have much make-up – not like Rachel’s friend Trudy’s mother, who had drawers and drawers of it, boxes of it in cupboards, baskets of it under beds – but she had enough to offer an intriguing alternative to the geography project (The Nature of Oceans) that she was supposed to be doing before Carrie would let her use the telephone. She sat on the old sofa, comfortably nested in random piles of her parents’ sweaters and shirts, and picked her way interestedly through the plastic box which had once held ice cream and now held a fairly battered collection of mascaras and eyeshadows and lipsticks. Carrie, Emma noticed, favoured sludge colours; Emma would have preferred lilac, something with a bit of sparkle in it, something a bit wicked.

  The telephone beside the bed rang. In a single swift movement, Emma was off the sofa and had the receiver in her hand. Even if the call was not for her, it was imperative for her to know who the caller was, and whom they wished to speak to. She crouched on the floor.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello, dear,’ Laura said. ‘Is that Rachel?’

  Emma made a face at the telephone.

  ‘No, it’s Emma.’

  ‘Emma dear, it’s Granny.’

  ‘I know,’ Emma said.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Bored,’ Emma said. She adjusted her crouch so that she was sitting on the floor. ‘How are the dogs?’

  ‘Well,’ Laura said, ‘they’re not very happy, of course.’

  ‘Did they see Grando?’ Emma said.

  ‘No. I thought it would upset them. I put them in the garden room.’

  ‘Did they bark?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid they—’

  ‘They wanted to see Grando,’ Emma said. ‘Poor them.’

  ‘Emma,’ Laura said, in a different voice, ‘is your father there?’

  ‘He’s asleep.’

  ‘Could you wake him for me?’

  Emma thought about the dogs.

  ‘No, I couldn’t,’ she said.

  ‘Please, dear.’

  ‘He’s downstairs,’ Emma said. ‘I’m upstairs.’

  ‘Could you go down,’ Laura said, ‘and tell him Granny’s on the phone?’

  Emma wished that there was someone else to give the telephone to.

  ‘I’ll tell him when he wakes up,’ she said.

  ‘Dear—’

  ‘He was really grumpy at lunch,’ Emma said. ‘He needed to sleep. I’ll tell him when he wakes up. Have the dogs had their walk yet?’

  ‘Of course. Emma—’

  ‘Do they still like those biscuits with fake marrowbone stuff in them?’

  ‘I don’t think I know which biscuits—’

  ‘Give them my love,’ Emma said. She held the receiver a little way from her ear. She remembered a phrase Carrie and her friends used to each other at the end of calls. ‘Bye, Granny,’ she said. ‘Take care,’ and then she put the receiver down.

  From down the landing, Rachel shouted, ‘Who was that?’

  ‘No-one,’ Emma called.

  ‘Was it—’

  ‘No,’ Emma said, ‘it was Granny.’

  Rachel said nothing. The volume of her music went up again. Emma got up from the floor and looked at Carrie’s make-up box. It was really very dull. When she had dogs, when she was older, she’d never shut them up against their wills and she’d never do things to worry them. The telephone began to ring again. Emma turned her back and walked out of the room, leaving it to it.

  Chapter Six

  Above the desk in Carrie’s office, a notice-board hung. It had a huge at-a-glance year-long calendar pinned to it, which recorded the hours worked by part-time staff, the doctors’ days off and everybody’s holidays. Round the edge, Carrie had pinned other things: photographs of Simon and the children, cartoons cut out from newspapers, notes to herself that she forgot about the moment she had put them up there and a postcard from her aunt Cath on which Cath had scribbled, ‘Try not to be perfect.’ Cath had come to stay a year ago and surveyed Carrie’s life and work and home and family with an astonished and slightly sardonic eye, and had sent the postcard as her thank-you letter. Carrie had liked the postcard, but had also reflected that her mother – two years Cath’s senior – would never have sent it. ‘You’re doing brilliantly,’ her mother would have written. ‘Just try not to do too much.’ That would have been comforting, to be sure. But it wouldn’t have been so bracing.

  Work, Carrie often thought, was the only area of her life where something even a quarter way to perfection seemed attainable. She had hours within which she worked, regulations and timetables that were comfortingly inflexible, and if the human element rem
ained arbitrary, it almost always had to come to heel in the end. Doctors could throw tantrums, she had discovered, about not having the weekends off that they wanted, but if there were no-one else available to be on duty, on duty they had to be.

  ‘Sorry,’ she’d say, staring straight at the doctor in question just as if he weren’t shouting at her. ‘It isn’t my fault and there isn’t any alternative.’

  ‘You enjoy this!’ the doctor would yell.

  ‘That’s exactly what my children say,’ Carrie would say and then she’d go back to her office and pencil the doctor’s name in the relevant weekend on her year planner and picture his wife saying, that evening, when she discovered they couldn’t have a weekend break after all for their eleventh wedding anniversary, ‘But you promised.’ She was sorry for the wife, of course, but detachedly sorry. That was work for you. That was why work was such a pleasure. You took it on and off, like an overcoat, and you only took it home with you on very rare occasions. Above all, it allowed you to concentrate. At work, Carrie could give it her full attention, her capable, impersonal, full attention. At home she usually felt as if someone had seized her attention, torn it into a hundred small pieces and tossed them into the air.

  ‘I never finish anything,’ she’d said to Simon, over and over. ‘I’m never allowed to.’

  Today, however, this Monday morning with all its demands built up from crises not being dealt with at the weekend, felt not like the finishing of things but more like their beginning. Or at least, their developing. Alan had stayed for supper the night before and when he was leaving, had said in Carrie’s ear, ‘Do you want her number?’

  ‘Oops,’ Carrie said.

  ‘Do you? Do you want Merrion’s number?’

  She’d stepped a little away from him.

  ‘Are you plotting?’

  ‘The reverse. This girl exists. Dad loves her. Demonizing her helps no-one.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’ll ring you at work.’

  ‘I do want to meet her,’ Carrie said. ‘It’s just that there’s Simon—’

  Alan pulled up his jacket collar.

  ‘Does it really help Simon if you side with Simon?’

  Carrie made a face. Alan gave her nearest cheek a quick kiss.

  ‘I’ll ring you at work. You don’t have to do anything after that if you don’t want to.’

  She looked down at her desk now. Alan had left a message. Maureen, one of the district nurses, had taken it down while in Carrie’s office, looking, she said, for the list of babies born at the weekend and due for their first post-natal visit before Wednesday. Maureen liked taking messages.

  ‘Carrie,’ she’d written on a yellow sticker note, ‘Alan called 9.07 Monday. He said the number you want is as follows.’ She’d signed the note ‘Maureen’, with a smiley face after her name and a small fish symbol. Maureen was a born-again Christian.

  Carrie looked at the telephone number. It was Central London. If she rang it now, she would get an answering machine and would have to leave a composed message. If she rang this evening, not only would she have to do it in some secrecy, but also her father-in-law might answer. Carrie had never had any previous trouble in speaking to her father-in-law, but she had an aversion just now, for reasons she couldn’t explain, to telling him she wished to speak to his mistress in order to set up a meeting. She couldn’t, she decided, deal with his pleasure at hearing she had such a purpose. Nor could she deal with deceiving Simon at home about her telephone call, nor with fending off Rachel and Emma’s intense, instinctive curiosity while she made it. She looked at her watch. Ten-twenty. Ten minutes before the weekly administrative practice meeting, which she chaired with tremendous briskness, having no tolerance whatsoever for people who adored meetings and who would go to any lengths to prolong them.

  She put her hand on the telephone receiver and dialled rapidly. Then she shut her eyes. The telephone rang out four times and then a woman’s voice said, rather distantly, ‘If you wish to leave a message for Merrion Palmer, please do so, after the tone.’

  ‘Hello,’ Carrie said, and stopped. Merrion’s answering machine waited, in faintly humming silence.

  ‘Hello,’ Carrie said again. She opened her eyes. ‘This is Carrie Stockdale. I’m Guy’s daughter-in-law. Could you ring me at work sometime? Between nine and four-thirty? Thank you.’

  She put the phone down. She thought, suddenly and with unexpected guilt, of Simon.

  The door opened, and one of the receptionists put her head in. ‘Carrie,’ she said, ‘Dr Mason’s had to go off to an emergency anaesthetic at the hospital. And he has seventeen people on his list this morning. What are we supposed to do with them?’

  Jack Stockdale leaned against the blank wall at the back of the science block. It was the place he and Rich and Marco came for a smoke usually, but he didn’t somehow feel like a smoke today, and certainly not with Rich and Marco. Marco, blazing with unconcealed triumph, had taken Moll to the cinema on Friday night and had hinted at a night of clubbing together on Saturday. Rich appeared to think that this was fine, brilliant even, cool. Jack had never breathed a word of his secret and intense interest in Moll to either Rich or Marco, but discovered that he felt brutally let down and betrayed all the same. He couldn’t speak to either of them; he could hardly look at them. When Adam said to him, ‘What’ve you got the hump about, mate?’ he’d shrugged and muttered and gone off to mooch about by himself, hands in his pockets, kicking things.

  The trouble was, he might not have said anything, but Marco knew, all the same. Marco glowed with the knowledge that he had somehow succeeded where Jack had failed. Marco had his Italian father’s colouring and his Italian father’s physical assurance and beside him, Jack felt suddenly raw and hopeless, physically and emotionally, pitifully unfinished. He knew he was being pathetic, like a big, sad, clumsy puppy, but he couldn’t see, right now, how to feel any other way. His father had put his finger on the problem, quite by chance, the other night. They’d all been hanging about the kitchen, wanting supper hours before it was ready, and Simon was chopping carrots on the table, very slowly and carefully, and Jack was watching him and waiting for Carrie to notice how thickly he was chopping them and say she wanted them cut much thinner than that.

  ‘You know something?’ Simon said.

  Carrie was making a casserole. She had her back to them all, dipping a big spoon in and out of the pot while she added things out of bottles and jars.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘What?’

  ‘You can handle anything in life,’ Simon said. ‘You can get anything sorted, can’t you, as long as your emotions aren’t involved. That’s why work works and life mostly doesn’t.’

  Carrie turned round.

  ‘Weird,’ she said, ‘I was thinking almost exactly that earlier today. Could you cut those a bit thinner?’

  Jack had leaned across and picked up a piece of carrot. He’d rather wanted to ask his father more about what he’d said, more about this emotion stuff and how it made you suddenly want things you’d never wanted before. And, worse, how it seemed to take away the feeling that you were in any way in control any more. But he felt shy. Rachel was sitting at the table, too, supposedly slicing cabbage and learning a poem for English, but actually doing neither, and she had ears like a lynx and a mind like an Exocet. Mention emotion in front of Rachel and she’d say, clear as a bell, ‘You fancy Moll Saunders, don’t you?’

  He squared his shoulders against the science-block wall. He did fancy her, it was true. He was, in fact, spellbound by the way she looked and moved, by the way her hair fell. But there was more than that. He wanted to know her. He wanted to hear her say things to him. He wanted to do things for her. After his father’s remark, he’d gone and looked up ‘emotion’ in the dictionary and it had talked about states of feeling, about sympathy and personal involvements and sensitivity and love. His mother had said Grando was in love. This was at once impossible and perfectly possible to imagine. Jack knew enough to sen
se that the life of the feelings didn’t automatically stop at twenty, but it was very hard to visualize that anyone could feel as strongly as he did now, and be as confused and as uncertain as to what to do next, as he was now.

  He put his hands flat against the wall and pushed himself away from it. He didn’t want a cigarette and he didn’t want two periods of physics followed by one of current affairs and he didn’t want to go home after that and have Rachel watching him and knowing she knew what was the matter. He began to move slowly along the science block towards the asphalt path that connected the block to the main school building. He felt he could summon up no interest in anything because the one thing he was interested in wasn’t interested back.

  On the asphalt path, just out of sight of the back of the science block, a girl was waiting.

  ‘Hi,’ Moll Saunders said.

  Jack stared at her, speechless.

  ‘Did I scare you?’

  ‘No. No, but I—’

  ‘I’ve got a bit of a down on smoking,’ Moll Saunders said. ‘My aunt died of lung cancer.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Jack said. ‘I wasn’t smoking, in fact I—’ His head was spinning. He put his hand into his trouser pocket and tugged out his cigarettes. He held them out to her. ‘Here.’

  ‘You don’t have to do that—’

  ‘I do,’ Jack said.

  ‘We’ll put them in the bin.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Jack,’ Moll said, ‘I really like your painting.’

  He looked down at his feet. His ears felt the size of dinner plates.

  ‘Wow—’

  ‘I do,’ she said. ‘It’s cool.’

  When Laura brought the dogs back from their afternoon walk, their bellies and legs and paws were dark with mud. She tied them up to a ring set into the wall of the potting shed, and went to unravel the hose. They began to leap about and squeal. The hose was a horror worse than the vacuum cleaner. They hated the hose.

  Laura turned the outside tap on and put her finger partly over the hose nozzle to intensify the pressure. She held each dog’s collar in turn and hosed it down methodically, despite the yelps and squirming; she did this in winter, she reflected, twice a day usually, twice a day seven days a week. When Guy was there, he’d walked the dogs perhaps once or twice at a weekend, but he never washed them properly. He never seemed to see the need, nor the need to walk them so regularly. He said being so regular with them made them a nuisance, encouraged them to badger for walks or their dinner with maddening persistence. Dogs, he said, ought to accommodate to people’s lives: not the other way about. She’d talked about her obligation to the dogs, to the garden, to the house, to the servicing of their joint lives.