Marrying the Mistress

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Marrying the Mistress Page 17

by Joanna Trollope


  ‘Simon doesn’t mind. Simon—’

  ‘You aren’t allowing Simon to mind,’ Wendy said. She looked at her watch. ‘I must go. You’re treating Simon just like you treated Guy. Just taking the bits you want.’

  ‘Oh!’ Laura cried, and covered her face with her hands.

  Wendy stood up.

  ‘Tell you what—’

  Laura waited, her hands over her face.

  ‘I think you could do with a little therapy.’

  Laura snatched her hands away.

  ‘Therapy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m not mad!’ Laura shrieked. ‘I’m not out of my mind!’ Wendy picked up her bag, and adjusted her spotted-framed sunglasses on their black bead necklace.

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘But therapy—‘

  ‘To reconcile yourself. What some therapy could do is help to reconcile you to what’s happened, to the future.’

  Laura glared at her. She stood up abruptly, knocking the table so that Wendy’s cold coffee slopped out of her mug. She seemed to be simmering with things she wanted to say and somehow couldn’t. Wendy slung her bag on to her shoulder.

  ‘Unless, of course,’ she said, ‘you really have no intention of ever being reconciled to anything.’

  The senior clerk looked at his watch. Then he looked at Alan. He said, ‘I’m expecting Miss Palmer back from court in about fifteen minutes, sir.’

  Alan said, ‘Can I wait?’

  ‘Certainly, sir. Do you have an appointment?’

  ‘No,’ Alan said, ‘I’m family.’ He paused. The senior clerk had gold-rimmed spectacles and the air of someone who expects to know, expects to be informed and, subsequently, to decide.

  ‘I’ll wait in her room,’ Alan said. This was all an impulse, finding himself walking through New Square after a prolonged and happy lunch with Charlie, and deciding just to drop in on Merrion, see her on her own territory, in her chosen setting. It might be the Chianti – they’d shared a bottle and had been hugely tempted by a second except Charlie had a four o’clock surgery – but Alan didn’t feel inclined to be intimidated by Gold Spectacles. He put a hand on the counter that separated the clerks from the outside world. ‘If you’ll just tell me where it is?’

  The senior clerk hesitated for a second. It was plain he was deciding whether to escort Alan to Merrion’s room, or merely to instruct him as to how to find it.

  ‘Your name, sir?’

  ‘Alan Stockdale. My father—’

  ‘Exactly, sir,’ the clerk said. He leaned across the counter and indicated to the right. ‘If you take the stairs to the right, sir, to the first floor, and follow the corridor round to the left, you’ll find Miss Palmer’s room on your right, at the end.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’ll tell her you’re here, Mr Stockdale.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Alan said again. He transferred his jacket from over his arm to over his shoulder. He was wearing a dark-green shirt and jeans. Gold Spectacles was in black and white. Alan gave him a grin and went across the reception to the staircase.

  Merrion’s room was oddly quiet with a sealed-in feeling. Her mackintosh hung behind the door, and her barrister’s wig hung on the knob of an upright chair back. Alan peered at it. Weird thing, bizarre, all those neat little horsehair rolls and rows. He sniffed it. It smelt dusty and faintly of something that might have been scent. Presumably, if it were hanging here, Merrion wasn’t actually appearing in court, whatever else she was doing there. Alan wondered what else she did do. Talk to people, clients and stuff? Get judges to agree to things outside the courtroom? He thought of her arguing very steadily with heated people who didn’t want her to be sensible, didn’t want to hear the reasonable, practical things she had to say. He picked the wig up and put it on his own head. It was a bit small. There was a little mirror hanging behind the door. He leaned forward to see himself, see the crisp grey-white wig perched on his own dark hair which even Charlie – who liked long hair – said needed a cut. He made a face at himself. The wig might be too small, but it was also strangely becoming, especially the straight line of it across his brow. It made him look slightly authoritative in a distinctly attractive way. He thought, briefly, delightedly, of wearing only the wig.

  The door opened.

  ‘You!’ Merrion said.

  Alan snatched the wig off.

  ‘Sorry—’

  ‘Feel free,’ she said. ‘It’s a peculiar bit of kit, isn’t it?’

  She went past him, sliding her bag off her shoulder, and an armful of papers on to her desk. She was in a black suit and her hair was in a trim, fat pigtail which started almost at the crown of her head and ended below her collar, tied neatly with a black ribbon. She glanced at him.

  ‘To what do I owe—’

  ‘Nothing,’ Alan said. ‘Just an idea, a spur of the moment idea. I was walking back from lunch.’

  Merrion said, smiling, ‘Don’t you work?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘In bursts.’

  ‘Would you like some tea?’

  ‘Is that—’

  ‘A nuisance? No.’ She gave him another quick glance.

  ‘I’m glad to see you.’

  He beamed.

  ‘Oh good.’

  ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘The kettle lives outside in a cupboard. The sort of thing a designer would call a coffee point. I won’t be a moment.’

  She went out of the room. Alan sat in a green leather chair, opposite her desk. This was presumably where Merrion’s clients sat, and looked at her across her desk top and thought: This is my lawyer who is going to save me, and who is going to cost me x pounds an hour at the same time. What did Merrion cost people? Eighty pounds an hour? A hundred and twenty pounds an hour? How were these things calculated anyway? He looked at Merrion’s bag. It was black leather, big enough to hold a book or a file of documents. Alan wondered what private stuff it had in it, too, lipsticks and tampons and photographs. Probably, in that businesslike-looking bag, there were photographs of Guy, photographs Alan had never seen, taken on occasions he had never known about and never would. Merrion had seen aspects of Guy that nobody else had ever seen, maybe aspects that nobody else had ever noticed. That was what happened when you fell in love, that was what Charlie had been talking about over lunch, the way that falling in love enabled you to go to places in yourself you’d never been to before, places you didn’t know about, places you wouldn’t have dared to go to without this particular person to go with you. Being in love with Charlie made Alan feel a kind of sympathetic intensity towards Merrion. He looked at her bag again and hoped that it was stuffed with mementoes of Guy, photographs and letters and tiny portable presents, key rings and pens and things. The kind of little, often-used thing that kept the giver in your mind a dozen times a day.

  Merrion came back into the room carrying a small tin tray with two mugs on it and a pint carton of milk.

  ‘Do you have sugar?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just as well.’

  He got up and took the tray from her. He said, ‘I know you had supper with Simon and Carrie.’

  She made a space on her desk for him to put the tray down.

  ‘I can’t get used to the way news travels round families. I don’t have a family really, just my mother, so I expect things I do to stay private and of course they don’t.’

  ‘I talk to Carrie a lot,’ Alan said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We have a kind of unspoken pact. I don’t know how it started.’

  ‘I imagine,’ Merrion said, pouring milk into their tea mugs, ‘that once she’s on your side, she stays there.’

  ‘Just about,’ Alan said. ‘Though she wouldn’t pull any punches.’

  Merrion pushed a mug towards Alan.

  ‘I like her.’

  He said, smiling and looking at his tea, ‘I expect she likes you.’

  Merrion sat down in the high-backed chair behind her desk.
<
br />   ‘Nobody can really come clean, though, can they?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean,’ Merrion said, ‘that we can’t, any of us, express our real, true opinions. We all have to behave beautifully, diplomatically. We have to edit what we say, all the time.’

  He leaned back in his chair.

  ‘What would you like to say?’

  She looked at him.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Ready.’

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Well, it seems to me that the person who is creating the most difficulties right now, the person who is setting people most successfully against one another, the person who is being supremely unreasonable – is your mother.’

  Alan looked down again into his tea.

  ‘Simon would say she is the most justified because she is the most injured.’

  ‘Simon isn’t here,’ Merrion said. ‘Anyway, from what I gather, she isn’t exactly fair to Simon either.’

  ‘Has Carrie said anything?’

  Merrion drank some tea.

  ‘She doesn’t need to. While I was there for supper your mother rang in hysterics about the house sale. Nobody said anything, of course. Because they didn’t need to.’

  Alan said thoughtfully, ‘My parents have been married longer than I’ve been alive.’

  ‘And me.’

  ‘Does longevity give a situation precedence?’

  ‘Not legally—’

  ‘Morally?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Merrion said. ‘All I do know is that your father wouldn’t have fallen in love with me and stayed in love all this time if he and your mother had everything it takes to keep a marriage going.’

  ‘Why didn’t he leave her before?’

  She said calmly, ‘I didn’t ask him to.’

  ‘Did you now?’

  ‘Not really. It sort of coincided with his offering to. It got to a point.’

  ‘Between you?’ Alan said. ‘Or between him and my mother?’

  She drank more tea.

  ‘Both, I should think. But we’ll never know precisely—’

  ‘It just happened—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And now you’re kind of fighting her for my father.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘I think so,’ Alan said. ‘And Carrie is fighting her for Simon.’

  Merrion said nothing. She got up and leaned against the window. Two men were down on the paved walk below, both still wearing their court tabs, peering at the top sheet in a pile of papers one of them held. Merrion knew the one in spectacles. He’d asked her out for a drink once, years ago, when she was still a pupil, and then forgotten to turn up. When she saw him subsequently he either pretended not to remember he’d forgotten, or genuinely didn’t.

  ‘I’ve decided to take a bit of a stand,’ Merrion said, to the window glass.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘We’re going to get married in October. Sometime close to my birthday.’

  ‘October—’

  ‘Yes.’ There was a tiny pause and then Alan said, ‘Six months.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Suppose the divorce isn’t through by then?’

  ‘It will be.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘I can’t. But I can be confident.’

  ‘Dad’s being advised by a friend of yours.’

  ‘Not a friend. Just a solicitor I know who I have confidence in. It’s an incredibly tricky situation because of Simon representing your mother. It wouldn’t stand up in court, a son representing his mother. We have to just hope it doesn’t come to that.’

  ‘You sound very crisp,’ Alan said.

  Merrion turned from the window. She said, in quite a different voice, almost a whisper, ‘I want to rescue him—’

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Yes,’ Merrion said. She put the back of one hand up briefly against her eyes. ‘I want him to see how it can be, how it’s supposed to be. I want him to see that he’s got it right, he’s had it right, all the time, by just being who he is, the person he is—’

  She stopped. She sat down in her chair again abruptly and put her elbows on the desk in front of her. Alan leaned forward and put his tea mug down on a pile of pamphlets and then he stretched an arm out and touched her very lightly.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said.

  Guy was late, arriving at the court building. He wasn’t very late – a mere ten minutes – but he disliked being anything other than early, always had. The morning train from London was slightly delayed at Reading – some typical, predictable signalling problem – and it was raining which always meant a dearth of taxis at Stanborough Station. When he did find one, it dropped him at the main court building entrance, and not the side entrance which he and the other judges always used, and when he complained, the taxi driver pointed out with satisfaction that the entrance to the court building’s private car-park was blocked by an enormous truck, parked half on the pavement, and with no driver in the cab.

  He went through the public lobby as rapidly as possible, and up the staircase to the courtroom floor. He was conscious of carrying an overnight bag in front of the court staff, as well as being in parts of the building they were not accustomed to seeing him in. Two security guards were standing by the public doors to Court Two, jingling their keys the way most men jingle their change.

  ‘I’ve got three down there this morning,’ one of them was saying. ‘Straight off Planet Lager and it isn’t even Friday. Morning, Judge.’

  ‘Morning,’ Guy said.

  ‘Martin’s looking for you,’ the guard said. ‘You might find him in your room.’

  Guy pushed open the door to the judge’s corridor. It was quiet there, as it always was, and slightly stuffy; the air smelled of dusty carpet. Outside the door to Guy’s own chambers, Martin was standing. He was jacketless, as was his custom, and his shirt cuffs were rolled up above his wrists.

  ‘Martin,’ Guy said. ‘Have I kept you waiting?’

  ‘No,’ Martin said. He opened the door to Guy’s room and held it for Guy to pass through. ‘I didn’t have an appointment, did I?’

  ‘I’m always in by eight-forty-five—’

  ‘Except when the trains are late,’ Martin said.

  Guy hesitated. He put his briefcase down on his desk and heard Martin close the door behind him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not prying, Judge—’

  ‘No,’ Guy said. ‘Of course you’re not.’ He turned round. ‘It’s rather difficult to get the timing right.’

  Martin put a hand up and adjusted the knot of his tie.

  ‘That’s why I thought I’d come and see you.’

  Guy made a gesture towards a chair.

  ‘Do sit down—’

  Martin sat. He crossed his legs. He linked his fingers together in his lap.

  Guy leaned against the edge of his desk. He said, with a shyness he didn’t seem able to control, ‘I imagine – you have a good idea—’

  Martin waited.

  ‘My wife and I are separated,’ Guy said. He leaned his hands on the desk edge, either side of him, and stared at his shoes. ‘We are to be divorced. When we are divorced, I shall be marrying again.’

  Martin said, ‘Miss Palmer?’

  Guy nodded.

  ‘When I am in London, I am staying at Miss Palmer’s flat. When I am in Stanborough, I have a flat out at Pinns Green. Usually, I confine my visits to London to the weekends. If you need those contact numbers as well as my mobile-telephone number, of course you shall have them.’

  ‘Thank you, Judge.’

  Guy transferred his gaze from his own feet to Martin’s.

  ‘Is that what you needed to see me for?’

  ‘I just needed the facts,’ Martin said. ‘On account of the rumours.’

  ‘Are – there many?’

  Martin said steadily, ‘You know how it is, Judge.’

  ‘Well, I don’t, you see,’ Guy said. ‘That’s half the
trouble. There’s no rehearsal, is there, for something like this.’

  Martin leaned forward. He put his elbows on his knees.

  ‘I was divorced eight years ago.’

  ‘I had no idea—’

  ‘You wouldn’t, Judge. It was before I took this job, I was working in London then.’ He glanced up at Guy.

  ‘It’s never easy.’

  ‘Thank you, Martin. Has – has there been much talk?’

  Martin stood up.

  ‘Only when they haven’t got the football to think about.’

  ‘Do you have children?’

  Martin moved towards the door.

  ‘Three, Judge. Thank you for your time and for your confidence.’

  ‘And do you see them?’ Guy said.

  Martin opened the door. As he went out he said, ‘Like you, Judge, I spend my weekends in London,’ and then he closed the door behind him.

  Guy stood up. He went round his desk to the window and stood looking down at the car park, at the familiar cars of all his colleagues with familiar things visible through the back windows, maps and rugs and plastic bottles of water, quiet evidence of lives lived a car journey away from this building and all its preoccupations. Poor Martin, poor man, probably living, as Guy lived now, in a strange, homeless no-man’s-land where the sense of belonging that characterized so much family life was torn away, leaving a feeling of acute disorientation behind it.

  ‘It’s so odd,’ Guy had said to Merrion not long ago, ‘but sometimes, when I’m not with you, when I’m not in court, I have a feeling that I’ve become invisible. That I’ve vanished.’

  She had been puzzled. To her, his status, his professional achievement, was more than enough to give him an inescapable identity. He saw that she couldn’t understand – because she had never really known them – those subtler, quieter measures of singularity, or specificity, those marks of self conferred by being tied by blood to other people. There were, after all, almost no relations in Merrion’s life: she belonged to nobody beyond her mother and was in turn possessed by nobody beyond her mother. This state of affairs spelled liberty, certainly, but it also spelled a curious lack of human landscape, a landscape that Guy now knew he had simply taken for granted as the natural backdrop to everything and anything he might accomplish. All those years, all those taken-for-granted mornings, he had, as poor Martin must have done, stepped out of that human backdrop to go to work and returned to settle confidently into it again at night. It was accepted, a given, so much part of him that he had not really given it a thought except in a hurried, practical, often exasperated way. And now it wasn’t there. It existed still, but not in the same relationship to him any more; the dynamics had changed. He thought of Hill Cottage; he thought of the steep field behind it and the well-known idiosyncrasies of both places – dark corners and sudden steps and uneven paths. It wasn’t, he thought, staring unseeingly down on the dusty car roofs below him, so much that he longed for the place, that he missed Hill Cottage, but that he felt – had felt for some weeks now – a painful space where his simple sense of domestic and family belonging had once been.

 

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