Laura had made coffee but she declined it, and asked for a glass of water instead. She took two sips and then she left the glass on the kitchen table, and took out a huge tape measure on a black spool and began to make notes. She opened and shut the kitchen cupboards as if she were testing the hinges, and gave the kick boards at the bottom a little nudge with her foot. One of them fell off.
‘It’s the only one that does,’ Laura said.
‘Perhaps you would show me round,’ the valuer said. ‘And then I’d be most grateful to be left alone to measure up. Usually I have an assistant, but he has an exam today.’
Laura said, without intending to, ‘Would you like me to help?’
The valuer looked at her. She gave a very small smile.
‘No, thank you,’ she said.
Laura walked ahead of her through the house. She had put flowers in the sitting room and the hall and polished the front windows where the prevailing wind always blew dust up from the gravel outside. She had told Simon she wasn’t going to bother, she wasn’t going to go on making an effort, that it was both heartbreaking and pointless to show off something you’d given so much time and thought and energy to and that you were now forced to lose.
Simon said, ‘Just think of the money.’
‘I wish it was that simple.’
‘It is. It has to be.’
He had sounded exasperated, almost cross. Laura could easily imagine how little help Carrie was being to him, how unsympathetic she’d be about any part of Simon’s life that didn’t concern herself or their children.
When Simon had fallen in love with Carrie, Laura had said to Guy, ‘Don’t you think she’s hard?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘She’s just very candid.’
‘But does she see how sensitive he is?’
‘Yes,’ Guy said, ‘and she’s candid about that, too.’
‘You’ve always wanted to toughen him up—’
‘Not toughen. Teach to defend. Defend himself.’
‘Toughen,’ Laura had said again, very quietly.
After a few years, when Simon had actually married Carrie – his wedding day had been a hard day for Laura, hard in a way she saw nobody could perceive but herself – he used to say to her, when she called him in the office, ‘Mum. Why don’t you ring Carrie? Why don’t you just ring her?’
She’d always let a little silence fall. In that silence she let Simon know – she had to let him know – that it wasn’t Carrie she needed to speak to, it wasn’t Carrie who knew her history, understood her predicament, spoke her quiet, understated, meaningful language. After the silence had gone on for a little while, she’d say, ‘I will. Of course I will,’ and they’d both know she wouldn’t. Only once had Simon said, ‘Please, Mum, for my sake—’ and she had said in reply, wanting him to know he was breaking their private rules, ‘Simon. That isn’t fair.’
‘OK,’ he’d said. ‘OK. Forget it.’
He sounded tired, weary-tired. Next day, she rang to apologize.
‘It’s so difficult—’
‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t explain. You don’t have to.’
She’d smiled into the telephone.
‘No, I don’t, do I? I never have to, with you.’
Now, she pushed the sitting-room door wide. The sun was coming in through the south-east-facing windows and lying optimistically across the sofa and chairs whose covers she’d made herself, across the cushions she’d collected over the years – there were two still left from that first little house in Battersea – across the pale-green carpet and the rug with its Tree of Life pattern that Guy had bought at an auction along with a chicken coop – never used – and a pair of Versailles tubs she’d stripped of their flaking varnish and painted dark green and planted with bay trees.
‘Pleasant room, Mrs Stockdale,’ the valuer said. She advanced across the Tree of Life rug and surveyed the room with an assessing eye. ‘Good dimensions.’
‘It was three little rooms,’ Laura said, ‘when we came. One was full of potatoes, all sprouting. You can imagine the smell.’
The valuer looked at her properly for the first time.
‘How long have you been here, Mrs Stockdale?’
Laura moved to hold the back of the nearest armchair. She leaned on it. She wished, as she had said only yesterday to Wendy who had come on one of her attempts-at-bracing visits, that she could just stay plain angry all the time. Angry was fine. When she was angry she had purpose and energy, she could even sometimes glimpse a new self emerging from all this muddle and emotional squalor, a clean new self shorn of all the restrictions placed inevitably on a human being by the need to negotiate, day in, day out, with another human being at close quarters. It was the times when the anger died that she dreaded. Without anger, she fell prey to desolation, to a feeling of disorientation so deep she wondered if she actually had fallen right through the web of the life she had always – even in her darkest moments – taken for granted. Desolation meant grief; grief for the loss of so many huge and so many tiny things that it was quite beyond her to try and number them.
‘Mrs Stockdale?’
Laura stared fixedly at the cushion in the chair below her, a tapestry cushion, embroidered with auriculae in a terracotta pot, which she had made one long, unremarkable, contented summer while watching Alan captain his school cricket team for the under-fifteens.
‘Are you all right, Mrs Stockdale?’
Laura nodded. She made an immense effort and looked up.
‘We came here thirty years ago. My boys were eight and five. Younger than my grandchildren are now.’
In a different tone of voice to the one she’d used earlier, the valuer said, ‘It’s a wrench, isn’t it—’
Laura put her hands over her face. From behind them she cried, ‘I don’t want this to happen! I don’t want to leave!’
‘I’m so sorry—’
Laura took her hands away from her face. She said, almost gasping, ‘Sometimes I think this is all I’ve done, all I’ve achieved. When I think of myself, Hill Cottage and the garden is how I think of myself. It’s – it’s my sort of landscape, my background. If I go—’
The valuer waited. She had put down her measure and her notebook and was simply standing there, almost as if she was braced to catch Laura should she fall.
‘I’ll vanish,’ Laura whispered. ‘Won’t I? I’ll just vanish. There – there won’t be any need for me, any more.
Will there?’
The valuer bent and picked up her measure again. She held it out to Laura.
‘I wonder, Mrs Stockdale, if you would be very kind and help me with this? After all?’
‘Sorry,’ Carrie said the next morning.
Simon, in shirt and tie and suit trousers, was balanced astride the sink trying to fix the kitchen blind that had unrolled itself quietly in the night and was now declining to roll itself up again, and stay rolled. He gave a little grunt.
‘About last night,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘It isn’t very easy to explain—’
‘Nothing is,’ Simon said. ‘Nothing bloody is, right now. That’s why, in the midst of all these problems, twenty minutes of happy, uncomplicated sex would have been so great.’
‘I know,’ Carrie said. She poured cereal into two bowls. She said, rather hesitantly, ‘Your – your mother—’
‘What the hell has my mother got to do with our sex life?’
The blind, having hung limply above the sink, suddenly became galvanized with activity and rushed up into a tight roll, taking the tips of Simon’s fingers with it.
‘Shit,’ Simon said.
‘Are you hurt?’
‘No,’ he said. He put his fingers in his mouth. ‘At least, not physically.’
‘Don’t—’
Simon crouched down and jumped lightly to the floor. He shook his fingers.
‘My cheque-signing hand.’
She held her own hand out.
‘Let m
e look.’
He put his hand in hers. She bent and kissed his fingertips.
‘Oh Carrie—’
‘I’m jealous,’ she whispered into his hand. ‘I want you back.’
‘I haven’t gone anywhere—’
‘But you might.’
Simon took his hand back.
‘I have to help her.’
‘I know.’
‘There’s no-one else.’
‘But you can’t be held responsible for that. It isn’t your fault that she’s never made friends, that she hardly speaks to her sister, that she thinks Alan isn’t a fully operational adult.’
Simon poured milk out of a quart plastic bottle on to one bowl of cereal and held it out to her.
He said, ‘What do you want to do?’
‘What do I want to do?’
‘Yes.’
She looked down at the cereal. She seemed to be struggling either to say something or not to say it.
‘It’s not me—’ she said finally.
Simon picked up the second cereal bowl, and a spoon.
‘Let’s not start on what Simon is doing wrong again. Please.’
Carrie took a breath. She put her cereal bowl down.
‘OK,’ she said.
He took a mouthful, and crunched it. Through it, he said, ‘OK what?’
‘I do want to do something.’
The kitchen door opened. Rachel, in her school uniform with the addition of a small blue glitter butterfly stuck to her cheek and a chalk-pink lipsticked mouth, came in, yawning cavernously.
‘Morning, darling,’ Carrie said.
Simon ignored his daughter. He said, his eyes on his cereal, ‘What? What do you want to do?’
‘I want to ask Merrion Palmer here. For supper. Or Sunday lunch.’
Rachel stopped yawning.
‘Wow,’ she said.
Simon looked up from his cereal and stared at Carrie.
‘Merrion Palmer?’
‘Yes,’ Carrie said. ‘Her.’
‘With or without my father?’
Rachel leaned across the table and drew Carrie’s cereal bowl towards her.
‘Without,’ she said.
Carrie glanced at her. Then she stood a little straighter and looked at Simon.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Rachel’s right. Without.’
Merrion lay on her sofa. She had taken off her work clothes and put on the dark-blue bathrobe she had bought for Guy. It was new but he had worn it enough to have left it faintly impregnated, besides the smell of newness, with the smell of him. She had made herself a mug of tea and a honey sandwich. Guy had always been charmed by her passion for honey. He said it was so unlike her. He bought her exotic honeys from specialist shops, lavender and acacia honeys, honeys from Greece and Provence and the Italian Alps.
She had the telephone balanced on her stomach. In five minutes, she would ring Guy. He would be back in his flat then, in this flat he wouldn’t talk about and wouldn’t let her see.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘It’s just a space, a passing practicality. I’m going to rub it out of memory when it’s gone.’
Because he wouldn’t tell her about it, she pictured it. She imagined it worse than it probably was. She saw a rickety shower and a dank little kitchen smelling of drains, and his suits hanging in a plywood wardrobe with fancy plastic handles and doors that wouldn’t shut. He told her he read in the evenings and she imagined him in a too-small armchair covered in cut moquette with a grease patch where countless other heads had rested previously. She couldn’t imagine him in bed. She’d tried, and the picture that had swum into her mind, the bleakness and the loneliness of those nights, had been too much to bear. It was worse – weirdly worse than all those months and years of knowing he was in bed at Hill Cottage with Laura. There’d been envy in that, but also a small thrill because of the private, certain – oh, so certain – knowledge of where he’d rather be, where he was thinking of being. But his nights in the nameless rented flat were different. There was no secrecy to them, no illicit, gorgeous longing. There was just desolation instead.
She put her mug down on the coffee table and sat up sufficiently to be able to see the dialling buttons. She pressed the relevant ones rapidly, and lay back on the sofa cushions, the receiver to her ear.
‘Hello, darling,’ Guy said.
She smiled into the telephone.
‘Good, bad or indifferent?’
‘Patchy,’ he said. ‘Word has got out that Hill Cottage is on the market. They seem to know Laura and I have parted. I don’t know if they know about you.’
‘Course they do.’
‘Really?’
‘You know what gossips people are.’
‘Well,’ Guy said, ‘everyone is treating me as if I was an invalid. Martin opened two doors for me today. He’ll be giving me his arm up steps next.’
Merrion shifted her position a little.
‘I’ve got something to tell you.’
‘Something I’ll like?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Carrie and Simon have asked me to supper. At least, Carrie has.’
‘Oh!’ he said. She could hear his voice warming, imagine him smiling. ‘Oh, I am glad. Oh my darling, I am so glad!’
‘I am, too, in a slightly alarmed way.’
‘Because of Simon—’
‘Yes.’
‘Merrion—’
‘It’s just very hard to be disapproved of for what you represent rather than what you are.’
There was a little pause and then Guy said, ‘I know.’
‘Guy. You’re not still thinking about my mother, are you?’
‘Dearest, it isn’t something I can pretend didn’t happen.’
She said earnestly, ‘But you don’t have to heed her.
What she says and thinks is for her life, her personality, her circumstances. It’s not for yours and it’s certainly not for mine.’
He said, slightly heartily, ‘You’re very good for me.’
‘Not good enough. I can hear the doubt in your voice.’
‘What I couldn’t bear,’ Guy said, ‘is to do anything to impede your progress, clip your wings—’
‘You don’t. I’ve told you. Over and over, I’ve told you.’
‘In ten years—’
‘Stop it. Guy, stop it.’
‘Things are changing,’ Guy said. ‘You take a step forward and all the landscape round you changes, the perspective is different—’
Merrion sat up. She wound the coiled telephone cable round her fingers and pulled it tight.
‘Guy,’ she said, ‘I’m not having any more of this conversation over the telephone. We shouldn’t talk like this when we can’t get at each other.’
She heard him catch his breath, and then he said, in a stronger, more impersonal tone, ‘When are you having supper with Carrie and Simon?’
‘Tomorrow. I’m in chambers all day. Conferences and paperwork. So – well, that’s good.’
‘It is.’
‘I’ll ring you later. I’ll ring you at bedtime.’
‘Please.’
‘What’s on the menu tonight? Chicken Korma and Little Dorrit?’ He laughed.
‘Pretty nearly.’
She blew a kiss into the telephone.
‘Miss you,’ she said. ‘Miss you all the time.’
She untangled the cable from her fingers and set the telephone down on the coffee table. Her tea was cold and her sandwich looked as if it might be an effort and not a pleasure to eat. She rolled back on to the sofa and faced the cushions along the back of it, running her forefinger along the bumpy lines of weaving in the nearest one.
Guy had been very shaken by Gwen’s visit. In all their years together, Merrion had never seen him thrown to this degree, so disconcerted.
He said, trying to make light of it, ‘She made me feel my age.’
‘She does that to me, too,’ Merrion said.
He’d looked at her.
&
nbsp; ‘What am I depriving you of? What am I keeping you from?’
‘Nothing!’ she’d shouted. She’d got angry then, furiously angry, wanted to ring Gwen late at night in Cowbridge and tell her to mind her own bloody, narrow-minded business.
‘Don’t,’ Guy said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because she has a perfect right, as your mother—’
‘She does not!’ Merrion yelled. ‘You don’t know her!
You don’t know she never does anything unless it’s to stop adventure, stop progress, stop enterprise! She wants the world, and especially me, to live in her tiny life by her tiny rules and never even think of doing anything that might remotely upset her! She’s a bully, in her respectable little way. That’s what my mother is, a coward and a bully!’
‘I didn’t think that,’ Guy said. ‘I saw a perfectly decent woman my own sort of age explaining to me with some force what effect my marrying her daughter might have on that daughter’s life.’
Merrion cast herself across his knees and held him hard around the neck.
‘Nothing like the effect you’ll have if you don’t marry her.’
He put his arms around her.
‘Oh God. I can’t even contemplate that—’
‘Well, then.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, his face in her neck, ‘maybe it’s just such a long time since I’ve been ticked off, I’ve forgotten how to handle it—’
‘And my mother is an ace ticker-off. It’s one of her specialities.’
He raised his head and kissed her.
‘I love you,’ he said, ‘I love you.’
She smiled.
‘That’s all I need to know.’
She thought, that night, that the problem was over. She thought, because she had had thirty years of practice in dealing with Gwen, that Guy could shrug off the encounter with that enviable male capacity not to indulge in teasing and worrying at an emotional annoyance. But his face had been clouded the next day. So had his mood. He had made Merrion promise she wouldn’t ring her mother.
‘I must.’
‘No. You absolutely must not. Promise me. Promise.’
‘OK.’
She rolled over on the sofa now and looked at the telephone. It was perfectly plain that Guy was unable to shake the effect of Gwen’s visit off, unable to get various ingenious little phrases out of his mind. Merrion knew that feeling, could probably even, after assiduous years of teaching herself to come to terms with the uneasiness of the relationship between her mother and herself, recall in precise detail various little barbs of Gwen’s – and the extraordinary, enduring small stabs of pain that went with them. Protecting herself had, over time, become one thing: a thing she could, given enough space of her own and distance from Cowbridge, handle without confrontation. But protecting Guy was another matter altogether. Protecting Guy required something more proactive and if it meant a broken promise and a stand-up screaming match – so familiar still, from her late adolescence – then so be it.
Marrying the Mistress Page 14