Marrying the Mistress (18 page)

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.

‘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.

Merrion sat up, tightened the sash of Guy’s bathrobe and pushed her hair firmly off her face and behind her shoulders. Then she picked up the telephone, put it on her knees, and dialled her mother’s number.

‘It’s only pasta,’ Carrie said.

Merrion was leaning against the kitchen cupboards on the opposite side of the room. Carrie had poured her a glass of wine. She hadn’t drunk any yet but she was glad to have it to hold.

‘I like pasta.’

‘So do I. But sometimes I get tired of it being such a staple. We eat it all the time,
all
the time, because I don’t have to think about it and I know everybody will eat it.’

‘When I was doing my Bar finals,’ Merrion said, ‘I ate baked potatoes like that. Every day.’

Carrie put a pan of boiling water on the stove.

‘Can I help?’ Merrion said. ‘Can I chop something?’

‘It’s all done, really,’ Carrie said. ‘Rachel even made a sauce—’

‘Rachel—’

‘My fourteen year old.’

‘Does she cook?’

‘No. Never. But she made a carbonara sauce because you were coming.’

Merrion looked down.

‘I don’t know how to take that.’

‘I wouldn’t take it any way,’ Carrie said. ‘I’d just be prepared for it to taste a little strange.’

In the hall beyond the kitchen, the front door slammed and someone threw their keys on to a hard surface.

‘Simon,’ Carrie said.

Merrion put her wineglass down on the counter behind her. Carrie gave her a quick smile.

‘Deep breath.’

Merrion nodded.

‘Yes—’

A man appeared in the kitchen doorway. Merrion had the impression of quite a tall man, a dark man, a man in a rumpled business suit and a blue shirt.

‘Hi,’ the man said to Carrie, in Guy’s voice. He bent a little and kissed her. ‘OK?’

‘Simon,’ Carrie said, ‘this is Merrion.’

He turned towards her. The light from the window was behind him so she couldn’t see him very well, only enough to establish that the outline was Guy’s and the face was not.

‘Hello,’ he said.

She tried to smile.

‘Hello.’

He put a hand up to his collar, to loosen his tie. ‘Has Carrie given you a drink?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said and then, as steadily as she could, ‘I’m glad to be here.’

He nodded.

‘Good,’ he said.

‘It was brave of Carrie—’

‘No, it wasn’t,’ Carrie said.

‘To invite me.’

‘She is brave,’ Simon said. ‘Reckless sometimes.’

‘I like that,’ Merrion said.

He was looking at her. He was sliding his tie out from under his collar and undoing his collar button, and looking at her. She’d put on black jeans and a grey sweater with a slash neck. She could feel the soft straight line of the neck against her throat.

‘You’ve met my brother Alan—’

‘Yes.’

‘And then Carrie—’

‘Yes.’

‘And now me.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well done,’ Simon said.

Carrie looked across from the pasta pot.

‘Enough,’ she said.

He glanced at her. He was slightly smiling.

‘Just testing.’

‘Well, don’t. Don’t play games.’

‘Or only,’ Merrion said, ‘if I can play them, too.’

There was the sound of feet on the stairs, running feet, and then the thud of a jumped landing in the hall. A girl stood in the kitchen doorway, a big child girl in cargo pants and a tiny black top that showed a strip of pale, soft, very young midriff. Her hair was pulled up on one side in a tuft like the top of
a pineapple, secured by an elasticated band of fake leopard skin.