Marrying the Mistress

by Joanna Trollope

  Jack said, without thinking, ‘Dad says—’ He stopped.

  ‘Your father says that that is what I’ve inflicted on Granny?’

  ‘I didn’t mean—’

  ‘I know you didn’t. But you’re right. Your father’s right. Jack—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why didn’t you go to your parents? Why didn’t you tell them?’

  Jack made a face.

  ‘Couldn’t.’

  ‘Because of the teasing, because of your sisters?’

  ‘No,’ Jack said, and then added uncertainly, ‘It doesn’t matter to them.’

  ‘Your happiness does.’

  ‘They didn’t think this was a big deal, they thought this was just – well, kids’ stuff. Anyway—’

  ‘Anyway what?’

  ‘You couldn’t talk to them now. You can’t tell them anything.’

  Guy was silent. He looked down at his hands lying in front of him on the desk. He seemed to be thinking. After a while he said, ‘We must tell them where you are.’

  ‘Emma will tell them I’ll be back—’

  ‘Does Emma know where you are?’

  ‘No,’ Jack said.

  ‘Then you must ring them.’

  ‘Are you sending me back—’

  ‘In the morning,’ Guy said. He stood up. ‘I must just make a call, and then you must ring home.’

  Jack stood, too. He said awkwardly, ‘Do you want me to go out?’

  ‘No,’ Guy said. ‘No. I won’t be long. You can stay.’

  Jack moved away from Guy’s desk and leaned against the shelves where the law books were. A green paperback had fallen forward. It was called The County Court Practice Supplement. Jack picked it up and riffled the pages. It seemed, well, polite not to do nothing, not to watch.

  Guy dialled a number on the telephone on his desk. He sat balanced against the edge of his desk, his back to Jack, his shoulders square against the light from the window.

  ‘Hello?’ he said. ‘Hello, my love, it’s me.’

  Jack fixed his eyes on a page and read a lot of words without seeing them.

  ‘Look,’ Guy said, ‘I won’t be coming up tonight. Yes, I know I did, but something’s happened. No, no, not Laura. It’s Jack. He’s had a bit of a crisis and turned up here an hour ago. Yes. Yes, I will, but in the morning. I’m going to give him some supper and take him back to the flat with me. He can get an early train in the morning.’ There was a pause. Jack glanced at Guy’s back. His head was bent, as if he were listening very hard. ‘Darling,’ Guy said, ‘I wouldn’t be upsetting our plans if it wasn’t important. It is important. The very fact that he has come to find me is important.’ There was another pause. Guy lifted his head and looked out of the window. Very quietly Jack closed the green paperback and slid it back on to the shelf among the other books. ‘I’ll ring you later,’ Guy said, ‘I’ll tell you more then. No, not now. Later. I’ll ring you from the flat,’ and then there was a tiny break and he said, ‘Goodbye, darling,’ and put the phone down. He sat there, quite still, his back to Jack.

  Jack cleared his throat.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be,’ Guy said. ‘You’ve done nothing to be sorry for.’ He turned to look at Jack, swivelling one thigh on the desktop.

  ‘You’re supposed to be in London—’

  ‘I can go tomorrow,’ Guy said. ‘And then I can go on Friday. I always go on Fridays anyway, for the weekend.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Jack said. Somewhere, obscurely, a small light was breaking, a tiny beacon of relief. He took a step away from the bookcase. ‘Thanks, Grando.’

  Guy looked at him. ‘There’s nothing to thank me for. Now. Ring your parents. With luck, you’ll get them before they even start to worry.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Miriam had, as usual, spilt Simon’s coffee. It had been one of their office’s footling New Year economies, to stop sending her out for coffee to the excellent tiny Italian coffee shop fifty yards away every morning, and to get her to make it instead. She seemed incapable of using even the simplest filter machine so had, after only two days of half-hearted trying, resorted to making mugs of instant coffee which she often put synthetic whitener into, having forgotten to buy milk. It irritated all of them, every morning, and they had frequent exasperatingly inconclusive conversations about it. The trouble was that reverting to the Italian coffee shop might mean much better coffee, but it would also entail Miriam inevitably extending her time out of the office while she fetched it, to do her own errands. The dreariness of the instant coffee was also compounded by the fact that Miriam carried all three mugs round the office to distribute them, in a single handful, with the result that she spilled coffee as she went along, and even more as she put the mug down on each desk. Ted said he was not only driven round the bend when it happened, but also by waiting for it to happen, regular as clockwork, every single morning.

  Simon picked up his coffee mug and blotted the wet ring under it with a piece of junk mail that had come in that morning’s post. It was proving difficult to concentrate this morning, so difficult that he’d even found himself reading the junk mail in an idle, unseeing sort of way before he put it under his coffee mug. He hadn’t slept very well, of course. Nor had Carrie. They’d lain side by side in bed and had silent and separate mental tussles about why Jack, upset by Moll’s defection, should have gone to find his grandfather rather than one of them.

  Carrie, Simon knew, blamed him. After Jack had rung from Stanborough and said he was staying the night and would be back in the morning, Carrie had looked at Simon for a long time. She hadn’t said anything, she’d just looked.

  After several minutes, Simon said, ‘Will he be back in time for school?’

  ‘Yes,’ Carrie said. She was still staring at Simon. ‘Guy’s putting him on the seven-fifteen.’

  ‘Will you meet him?’

  Carrie said, ‘I rather thought you would.’

  He made a face. He said, ‘I’ve got an eight o’clock meeting—’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘He can surely get himself across London—’

  ‘It isn’t really about that,’ Carrie said. ‘Is it?’

  Simon made one hand into a fist and folded the other round it. He said, ‘I can’t quite see why this little episode is my fault, too.’

  ‘Can’t you?’

  ‘No,’ Simon said.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Jack gets upset because Moll starts dating someone else so he does a bunk. It isn’t dramatic enough just to go home, so he goes to Stanborough. Really original thinking.’

  ‘Doesn’t it strike you as significant that he might have chosen Stanborough because he thought he had a chance of a sympathetic reception there?’

  ‘Oh come on,’ Simon said. ‘When did Jack and my father ever have much to say to one another?’

  ‘Things have changed,’ Carrie said. Her expression, he observed, was one of unmistakable anger. ‘When something like this whole family crisis happens, everything changes, all the dynamics. It’s only you that won’t see that.’

  She went out of the room then. She was hurt, he could see, badly hurt that Jack, in pain, had chosen a confidant other than her. But what Simon couldn’t work out was why she was still angry with him, and not with his father. He would have understood, he thought, if Carrie had resented Guy for comforting Jack instead of her. But she didn’t seem to feel resentment, she only seemed to feel that Simon had somehow made home impossible as a refuge for Jack when he needed one. Twice, in the night, Simon had reached out a tentative hand to touch Carrie, to see if he could convey something sympathetic, apologetic even, by action rather than words. The first time, she ignored his hand; the second time, she pushed it away.

  After his eight o’clock meeting, Simon had rung Jack’s school to see if he had arrived. He had, and was about to go into a double period of business studies. Simon said, ‘Give him my—’ to the school secretary, and then stopped. What could he possi
bly send Jack in these circumstances, via Mrs Pritchard in the school office, whose son he was advising legally about a turbulent neighbour? ‘Tell him I’ll see him later,’ Simon said. ‘Tell him – I’m glad he’s OK.’

  He took a mouthful of coffee. It was lukewarm and thin-tasting and speckles of artificial whitener floated on the surface like tiny clots of sour milk. He put the mug back down on the damp junk-mail mat and pushed the whole thing away from him. A steady misery was settling on him, and with it a definite and rather tremulous desire to see Jack. He looked at the telephone. Perhaps he would ring Carrie: perhaps he would ring her before she went into her ten o’clock meeting and tell her he’d go round to the school in the afternoon and meet Jack coming out. He put a hand out towards the telephone and it immediately rang. He picked it up.

  ‘Simon Stockdale.’

  ‘Simon,’ Laura said.

  He shut his eyes.

  ‘Hello, Mum.’

  ‘Simon,’ Laura said. ‘What on earth do you mean by this?’

  He took a breath and opened his eyes.

  ‘What—’

  ‘This letter,’ she said. Her voice was high and strained. ‘This horrible, formal letter advising me to accept the offer on the house.’

  ‘It has to be formal, Mother. I am your lawyer—’

  She said nothing. He could feel the tension of her saying nothing like a hum down the line. He said, as forbearingly as he could, ‘Mother, you have asked me to act for you legally. I have to deal with your affairs in a proper, professional way because I am also dealing with another lawyer in this matter and there are certain rules of conduct to be observed.’

  ‘I accept that,’ Laura said, in a voice that belied her acceptance of any such thing, ‘but why must you write to me in such language?’

  ‘Because I have to demonstrate that I am acting for you properly—’

  ‘But you still don’t have to write to me as if you hardly know me! Simon, please don’t treat me like a fool. I’ve lived with lawyers all my life. I understand legal language, of course I do. But there is a difference between clear legal language and cold indifference.’

  Simon took the telephone away from his ear and laid it on his desk. Faint cheeps could be heard from it. He counted to ten and then he picked it up again.

  ‘Mother.’

  She was crying.

  ‘It just gets worse, every day gets worse, every day I think I’ve only got months left here, weeks maybe, it’s the last thing I’ve got, it’s all I am, it’s—’

  ‘Please,’ Simon said.

  There was a small, uneven silence at the other end of the telephone. Then Laura said, with difficulty, ‘I am so afraid.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I can’t imagine how I’ll live, how I’ll be.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I just feel I haven’t an identity any more.’

  ‘You do have,’ Simon said. ‘We all have. We have them just by being ourselves. We aren’t identified by where we live, how we live—’ He stopped.

  Laura said, ‘Then perhaps I’m different.’

  Simon wound a pencil into the coil of the telephone wire.

  ‘Mum, look. I’m sorry about the tone of the letter but I have to write to you like that. I have to demonstrate that I have given you the best legal advice I can. And the best advice I can give you, as your lawyer and as your son, is to accept this offer on the house. It’s an excellent offer.’

  There was a pause. Then Laura said, ‘I see,’ almost in a whisper.

  ‘It’ll mean you can buy another house. A nice house, with a garden.’

  ‘Simon—’ Laura said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can you come?’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Yes,’ Laura said.

  ‘Mum—’

  ‘Please,’ Laura said. ‘Please. I know I’ll be able to cope if you just come and talk to me about it. I’ll feel differently if you’re here. I know I will.’

  ‘Mum,’ Simon said, ‘it’s a working day, a weekday.’

  ‘This afternoon, come this afternoon. Just for an hour.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Simon said.

  ‘Why can’t you? Surely someone else can cover for you?’

  ‘It isn’t work,’ Simon said. ‘It’s Jack.’

  ‘What’s happened to Jack?’

  ‘He’s been very upset by something.’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter—’

  ‘It does,’ Laura said. Her voice was rising again.

  ‘What is it? Drugs?’

  ‘No,’ Simon said, too loudly. ‘No, it’s nothing like that. But his first – well, he’s just been jilted. He’s very cut up.’

  ‘Jilted?’

  ‘Yes. His first girlfriend—’

  ‘Do you mean to tell me,’ Laura said, almost shouting, ‘that you won’t come and see me because Jack has had some – some little romantic tiff?’

  ‘It isn’t like that. It’s more than that—’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I mean it’s more complicated than that, more emotional—’

  ‘More important!’ Laura shrieked. Simon took a huge breath.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and put the telephone down.

  Merrion’s case had been cancelled. The clerks had failed to reach her before she left home for chambers, and she had forgotten to turn her mobile phone on, so she arrived to find a blank diary.

  ‘My apologies, Miss Palmer,’ the senior clerk said.

  She looked at him with irritation. Why couldn’t he just say, ‘I’m sorry,’ like anybody else?

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Michael,’ she said, enunciating every word. ‘I have plenty to do, preparing for Monday.’

  He said, ‘There is something that’s just come in, a threatened abduction matter, in Reading—’

  ‘Give it to someone else,’ Merrion said, and went past him through the double doors.

  Her room was inevitably just as she had left it, the file for the cancelled case lying ready on her desk, her wig on its chair knob, yesterday’s newspaper thrown into the waste-paper bin. She dropped her briefcase and bag on the floor and went over to the window. It was a sunny day, a bright, heartless, all-seeing sunny day and the light was coming down clearly between her own building and the one opposite and showing up the thick pale layer of dust on the windowsill outside. Merrion sighed and drummed a little rhythm on the double glazing with her fingers. It would have suited her mood better if it had been raining.

  She turned and went across to her desk. There were no telephone messages. Guy had rung her that morning in the flat, as he always did, to say he would be on the usual train and that he would like to take her out to dinner to compensate for the night before. She had nearly said, ‘Don’t bother.’ Only in the nick of time had she checked herself and said, ‘Lovely.’ She hadn’t said it in quite the voice she would have wished, but at least she had said it.

  ‘Darling,’ Guy said. His voice was slightly teasing. ‘Darling, don’t have a sense-of-humour failure. It was only dinner.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She wanted to say, ‘No, it wasn’t only anything.’ Nothing, it seemed, was only anything now, everything had come to matter, to have significance and echoes and implications. She felt – and she had chastised herself over and over for feeling this – that she was suddenly having to fight for something that had, for seven years, been effortlessly and superbly hers. She found herself wanting to go out with Guy, to be seen with Guy, to be included in things with Guy. That was what last night’s dinner had been about, an expedition to a restaurant where not only did it not matter if they were seen together, but where she secretly hoped they would be seen, and the slow process of their real public acknowledgement as a couple could begin.

  She sat down at her desk and pushed the file aside. She was ashamed of herself for feeling as she did, for behaving as she was, for being unable to feel genuine pity for poor, gawky, heartbroken Jack. She liked J
ack. She found him appealing almost because he was so unfinished and because he couldn’t help a certain softness in his nature showing through the cultivated nonchalance of his manner. But last night, she had been jealous of him. Plain, angry jealous. When Guy rang the second time – Jack was in the shower – she had wanted him to sound sorry, really remorseful, really disappointed at not seeing her, not having the chance to be with her in a public place. He’d sounded regretful, certainly, but only gently so. His main preoccupation had been with Jack and their evening together and the extraordinary and unexpected success their conversation had been. It was really easy, Guy said, talking to Jack, talking to a sixteen year old whose outlook must, by virtue alone of a forty-five-year age difference, be completely poles apart from his own. But it wasn’t. It had been a revelation.

  ‘Oh good,’ Merrion said.

  ‘He doesn’t seem to disapprove of me, either,’ Guy said. ‘You can imagine the relief that is?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘He’s thought about more than you’d think. I suppose that’s boys, really. Girls seem to do their thinking while talking. Boys do one and then some of them do the other, later. He isn’t, oddly enough, very like Simon.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I must get him out of that shower and into bed. The flat looks as if a bomb has hit it. How can one boy with no possessions but what he stands up in do that?’

  Merrion looked down at her blotter. It was covered with doodles, the peculiar, asymmetric angular shapes she’d always idly drawn on scraps and in margins since she was little. And there were the letters. She liked forming and illuminating letters. ‘M,’ she’d written, over and over, in different scripts and sizes. At the bottom of the blotter there was a row of letters in pairs, linked together by a scribbled chain: ‘MS, MS, MS. Merrion Stockdale.’ She looked at it. Guy was Stockdale. So was Jack. So were Alan and Simon and Carrie. And Laura. They were all Stockdale. And she had envied them, wanted to be part of this Stockdale thing, wanted to wear that badge that was Guy’s, that would make her his. But did she? Did she want, now, to give Guy every reason to make her part of – even lump her in with – this Stockdale family of his? Might it be surrendering, rather than joining? Might she lose, it suddenly occurred to her, the right to assume she took precedence with Guy, precedence before Jack, before Simon, before Laura even, if Laura were to fall ill? If she became Stockdale, what might happen to Merrion Palmer? Might she become just a lawyer, an earner, an expert in the abrupt procedures of abduction and its legal consequences, and might the woman who had been Guy’s lover for seven years, his cherished and particular lover, just blur and blend into Merrion Stockdale until she was as if she had never been? Merrion sat very still. She put her feet together under her desk and her hands in her lap. Think, she said to herself, think about it. Think it through. Think.