Marrying the Mistress (12 page)

‘I don’t understand you,’ Merrion said, kissing him. ‘We have sex, don’t we?’

He looked at his sponge bag.

‘But this is more intimate—’

She made space for him in the bathroom, space for him in her hanging cupboard. His shoes lay at the bottom, next to her shoes and boots. He would have liked to have put them somewhere else, somewhere out of her way, somewhere unobtrusive. He brought as little to London as possible, anxious not to burden her, not to make demands, not to – well, not to seem too
husbandly
.

On Fridays, he always bought flowers. He bought them at the station and put them in water when he got to the flat, throwing away the dead ones from the week before which she seemed never to have got round to. He turned some music on, checked the fridge for a bottle of wine, washed and changed out of his court suit, admired the Hyde Park trees from the window, scrupulously avoided looking at her letters, at the papers on her desk, at the number of messages on her answerphone. And then he waited. He didn’t mind how long he waited. She might be coming back from court in the Midlands, even the north-west, and while she did, he waited, his heart quietly lifting and lifting, until he heard the small crunch of her key in the door, and stood up to greet her.

On the train back to London from Croydon Crown Court, Merrion managed to find a seat in a different carriage from the defending counsel she’d been against in court that day. She’d won – not really to her satisfaction, not well – and he hadn’t liked it and had wanted his solicitor to complain to hers about inadequate instructions. Merrion’s solicitor had refused, and the defending counsel – a heavy, competitive man in his early forties – had said loudly that he’d have to have it out with Miss Palmer.

‘I’d hop it,’ Merrion’s solicitor said to her, ‘if I were you.’

She’d run, literally, to the railway station. As she hurried out of the court building, she’d seen her client – a thin-faced divorced woman in her forties with three wayward children – in a sulky huddle with her boyfriend and her mother. Merrion had won financial support, backdated for two years, from her ex-husband – who had briefly worked for an oil company in the Gulf and, while there, had made a half-hearted attempt to
take his children with him – but her client didn’t think it was enough. She’d wanted two hundred pounds a week. Her ex-husband was earning three hundred and ten pounds a week. She didn’t care, she said, she wanted what she wanted. What did it matter if the bugger starved? Merrion had won a payment of eighty pounds a week, and the backdate. Her client had glared. She wouldn’t speak to Merrion, after the judgement.

‘Bloody shower,’ she’d said, audibly, to her boyfriend.

A train for Central London was just pulling out as Merrion ran on to the platform. It didn’t matter. There were trains from Croydon every twenty minutes and in any case, the timing of her meeting with Guy’s daughter-in-law in a wine bar near Victoria Station had been left deliberately vague.

‘I don’t know why I feel we shouldn’t meet somewhere too obvious,’ Carrie said, ‘but I seem to. Do you mind?’

‘No,’ Merrion said. ‘It suits me.’ It had occurred to her to point out that, if the meeting took place somewhere anonymous, and turned out not to be a success, then they could somehow pretend it hadn’t happened, erase it from the story. But she refrained. Something in Carrie’s voice told her that she was thinking that anyway: that she didn’t need to be told.

Merrion bought a copy of the evening newspaper and retreated to the back of the railway platform, half-hidden by a chocolate-vending machine. She saw the defending counsel come on to the platform and look about him. He was a solid man, confident-looking, with a black velvet collar to his overcoat, and he stood
out, as lawyers she had often noticed seemed to, in ordinary crowds on public transport. If he were looking for Merrion, he wasn’t looking very hard. She held the newspaper up, opened out, in front of her face, and waited until he had passed her on his way to the station bar. She visualized him getting back to his family house in Clapham or Tooting or Stockwell and his wife – streaked hair, urbanely casual clothes – saying, ‘Marcus, the Fergusons can’t come this weekend after all, Sophie’s got nits – what do we pay that school? - and you stink of whisky.’ Merrion lowered the paper, and turned furtively to her horoscope for the next day - ‘If they worked,’ Guy said to her, ‘the word future would cease to exist’ – and read that she was to expect no surprises and should make no major decisions. She tried to remember what last night’s horoscope had said about today, and failed. If it had felt her meeting with Carrie had any significance, it plainly hadn’t shown it.

When the train came in, she allowed Marcus Hunt to board it ahead of her, and chose a carriage well away from his. Even if a single pub whisky had mellowed him, he would still unquestionably want to patronize her and in some ways being patronized was even more unpalatable than being quarrelled with: a quarrel presupposed, at least, some small equality. She found a seat next to a man engrossed in his laptop, opposite a girl in a leather jacket and red lipstick asleep with her mouth open. Merrion often fell asleep on trains and worried about her mouth dropping open. This girl looked as if she hardly cared.

‘I think,’ Guy said at the weekend, ‘that you will like Carrie. I certainly do.’

‘Does it matter?’

‘If you like her? I suppose – I suppose I’d rather you

did.’

‘It was nice of her to ring me,’ Merrion said. She was lying along her sofa, her head in Guy’s lap, and he was reading a Sunday newspaper above her, with his arms held high, to keep the newsprint off her face.

‘She’s slightly acerbic in manner, but don’t let that put you off.’

‘I can be acerbic too—’

‘I know.’

‘Three kids,’ Merrion said. ‘Think of it. How old is she?’

Guy rested the newspaper on Merrion’s stomach.

‘Forty-ish. Maybe less.’

‘Wow. Three kids.’

‘But not a promising career at the Bar.’

‘Why did you say that?’

‘To stop you making pointless comparisons.’

‘It doesn’t, however.’

‘Carrie’s father is a doctor. A GP in East Anglia. Her mother died quite a long time ago. That’s hard. Carrie loved her.’

‘Lucky her.’

Guy had bent over to look at her.

‘Why do you insist on regarding your mother in this way?’

‘Because it’s how it is.’

‘I think you’ve never grown out of thinking how glamorous it would be to be an orphan.’

‘Wrong.’

‘I would never have expected to be close to my mother,’ Guy said. ‘I didn’t regard our relationship as confidential and nor, I think, did she.’

Merrion reared up from the sofa and kissed him.

‘But that’s because things were different in your day—’

‘Long,
long
ago?’

‘Right,’ she said. She grinned.

He smiled back.

‘And now I can’t talk to my own children, either.’

Merrion swung her feet to the floor and felt about for her shoes.

‘Can you talk to Carrie?’

He put a hand out and took hold of a handful of her thick hair.

‘I’ve never tried. It hasn’t seemed, well—’

‘Proper?’

‘Perhaps. She’s Simon’s—’

‘But with a mind of her own?’

‘Oh yes,’ Guy said. ‘You’ll see that. At once.’

Merrion thought it must be Carrie, sitting at a corner table with a glass of red wine in front of her, scowling at the crossword in the newspaper. She was tapping her teeth with a pen. She had fair hair held up here and there with combs, and she wore a grey overcoat slung across her shoulders. Merrion made her way among the tables, holding her heavy briefcase up high out of
people’s way. She stopped in front of Carrie’s table and rested her briefcase on the edge of it.

Carrie looked up.

‘Merrion?’

‘Yes—’

‘You’re taller than I thought.’

‘Five eleven,’ Merrion said.

Carrie gave a faint smile.

‘Lucky you. All my children will be taller than me any minute and then the last possibility of discipline will vanish.’

Merrion pulled a chair out and sat down. She put her briefcase on the chair next to her and shrugged out of her coat.

‘Wine?’ Carrie said. ‘I’m afraid you have to go and get it.’

Merrion stood up again. Carrie watched her weave her way to the bar. She wore a black suit, the jacket quite fitted, the skirt narrow. She looked good in it, Carrie decided, good figure, good carriage, interesting hair. She imagined Guy looking at Merrion. Very exciting. Very gratifying. Very – well, unexpected, fresh, energetic. She thought of Simon looking at her, too, confronting the fact that she was distinctive, almost dramatic, but not vampish, not obvious, not in any way easily dismissable. Simon would be in a terrible confusion. So would she, for that matter, watching him watching Merrion. She took a big swallow of her red wine. Thirty-one! When she, Carrie, was thirty-one, she’d had three young children and no money and
no ambition much beyond getting to the end of each day without spinning off into a vortex. She glanced at Merrion’s briefcase. She certainly hadn’t had a career. The word didn’t exist in her vocabulary, not then. If it had, she’d have scorned it, anyway.

Merrion put a glass of white wine down beside her briefcase. Carrie looked at her hands. No ring.

‘No ring,’ Merrion said. She was smiling. ‘Guy wants one. I don’t. So, no ring.’

‘Will you have a wedding ring?’ Carrie said.

Merrion slid into her chair.

‘Shouldn’t think so.’

Carrie looked at her own hands.

‘I wear mine to work because it makes me look more approachable. Married equals cosy. I work in a medical practice. I manage it, in so far as I manage anything much.’

Merrion took a sip of her wine. She said, ‘Did you just want to have a look at me?’

‘Yes,’ Carrie said. She took a comb out of her hair, and stuck it back in again, in exactly the same place. ‘I wanted to see the reality. When someone’s just a name in a situation like this, they can become a sort of bogy.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Merrion said, ‘I’ve never been in anything remotely like this in my life before.’

‘There’s a lot of drama—’

‘Plainly.’

‘And things get distorted. People get angry.’

Merrion looked down into her wineglass.

‘Like your husband.’

‘Like Simon.’

Merrion said hesitantly, ‘He has his mother to protect—’

‘We’ll talk about that,’ Carrie said, ‘when we’re further down the line. If we get that far.’

Merrion picked her wineglass up and put it down again.

‘Presumably you have an agenda.’

‘No,’ Carrie said, ‘I told you. I just wanted to see the reality. It’s odd when a crisis happens in your partner’s family – you are at once absolutely involved and not involved at all. You spend a lot of time grappling with emotions on someone else’s behalf. I just felt I could cope with what Simon’s coping with if I met you.’

Merrion gave her a quick glance.

‘Guy likes you.’

‘I like him,’ Carrie said. ‘People have awful times with their fathers-in-law, being pawed or ignored or bossed about. He hasn’t done any of that. He leaves me alone.’

‘He’d like to talk to – to your husband.’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know much about how men in families work together,’ Merrion said. ‘My father died when I was three. I haven’t any brothers or sisters.’

Carrie picked up her wineglass.

‘They’re different. They watch each other all the time. They interpret actions instead of talking.’

‘Are they competitive?’ Merrion said.

Carrie gave her a sharp look.

‘Yes.’

Merrion drank some wine.

‘I see.’ She flicked a glance at Carrie. ‘So you have your own position to defend?’

‘Don’t go so fast,’ Carrie said.

‘I’m learning,’ Merrion said. ‘I’m learning all the time.’

‘You’ve had seven
years—’

‘A secret love affair,’ Merrion said, ‘is a piece of cake compared to this.’

‘Preferable?’

‘In a way. But you can’t keep it that way, either.’

‘My aunt Cath,’ Carrie said, ‘says life is like trying to pack kittens in a basket. You get the last one in and the first one is already climbing out the other side.’

‘I’m not particularly possessive,’ Merrion said, rolling her glass between her hands, ‘but I’ve been taken aback by the degree to which people belong to other people. Or believe they do. Not feeling free to act is one thing entirely. But not feeling free to even decide is quite another.’

‘Perhaps you never gave much thought to Guy’s life outside yours before.’

‘Perhaps,’ Merrion said. She looked at Carrie. ‘And perhaps nobody in Guy’s life outside mine gave much thought to
Guy
, before.’

‘Whoops,’ Carrie said. She emptied her glass and began to put her arms into her coat. ‘I ought to go. I told a lie about where I’d gone so I’d better not make it a very long lie.’

‘Why did you lie?’

‘My daughters would be insatiably curious and Simon would be hurt.’

‘He’d think you disloyal?’

Carrie said nothing. She stood up and stuffed her newspaper into her handbag. Merrion stood, too. She moved the table a little so that Carrie could get out.

‘Can I ask you one more thing?’

Carrie paused, but she didn’t look at her.

‘What?’

‘Did I pass the test?’

‘What test?’

‘You know,’ Merrion said, ‘the real reason we’re here. Which am I? Friend or foe?’

Simon drove down to Stanborough alone. He had told Carrie he was going, but not Alan. Alan would have offered to come, too, and Carrie would have encouraged him to. Both of them, Simon knew, wanted to save him from Laura and, at the same time, neither of them understood the precise nature of his obligation to her. Carrie said, in fact, that the precise nature didn’t trouble her much: it was the
strength
she found so hard to contend with.

‘We’d never have married!’ she’d screamed long ago during one particular row (the children had been lined up along the landing, horrified and spellbound), ‘if I hadn’t been pregnant! Your mother would have seen to that!’