Marrying the Mistress (36 page)

He wasn’t at all sure why he’d made this offer of gardening. He hadn’t really planned to, he had just found himself saying it, offering, and then, after he’d offered, being sort of glad he had. Maybe it was something to do with the way things felt around the house now, the way the girls didn’t have their bedroom doors shut all the time and Carrie didn’t bang meals down on the table as if she were so fed up with getting them that she didn’t really care if anyone ate them or not. She’d had her hair streaked, too. Not much, just a few highlights in front, but it made a big difference. They’d all noticed. Rachel wanted to know how much it had cost and when Carrie wouldn’t tell her said, ‘Well, too much then.’ But you could see Rachel thought she looked OK, and that she knew it. There were a few new clothes, too, nothing major but definitely some new tops and a pair of sandals he’d seen Emma trying out, along the landing. Emma and Rachel never wore their own clothes if they could wear someone else’s.

And then Simon had said that they were going on this holiday. They’d all been completely amazed, stunned.

‘A
holiday?’
Rachel said, as if she hardly understood the word.

‘Yes,’ Simon said. He was grinning. ‘I thought we’d go to Majorca.’

Jack wrenched off another branch of the lilac bush and threw it behind him on the lawn. They never had holidays. They never had had. They’d had school trips, sometimes, and once in a blue moon, Simon and Carrie went away for a night at a weekend, but Simon always said there wasn’t any money for holidays, that there was hardly enough money for ordinary days, let alone holidays, and then he dropped this bombshell. It was such a bombshell that Jack wasn’t even sure he wanted to go at first.

‘Course you bloody do,’ Adam said.

‘With my kid sisters? With my parents?’

‘Forget them,’ Adam said. ‘Think of the other things.’

‘Like?’

‘Sun,’ Adam said. ‘Booze.’

‘Girls,’ Rich said.

‘Girls!’

‘You can go out on the pull every night,’ Adam said.

Rich gave Jack a nudge.

‘You’ve got the knowledge now—’

‘You’ll score,’ Adam said. He closed his eyes. ‘Think of it. Sun and booze and scoring. All day, all night. What are you bloody waiting for?’

Jack stood back and looked at the lilac. There was much less of it, certainly, but rather unevenly less. It looked a bit naked and pathetic, like somebody caught half-dressed. Jack chucked the secateurs on to the grass and picked up the garden fork. He stuck it into the earth,
trod it in and lifted. The earth was hard, baked solid. His forkful came up too suddenly, spraying grit and small stones and a long, uneven red worm. Jack peered at the worm. He thought of Majorca, and what Adam had said. He didn’t want to score every night, indiscriminately, after a skinful. But he’d like to score once, maybe, with somebody nice, somebody he liked, somebody he’d remember as a person and not just as a body.

‘Jack,’ Guy said, from behind him.

Jack turned.

‘Hi, Grando.’

Guy came close and put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. He looked at the lilac bush.

‘Do you know what you’re doing?’

‘Not a clue,’ Jack said.

‘Would you like some help?’

Jack pushed the red worm out of sight with his toe.

‘Do you know about it?’

‘Maybe,’ Guy said. ‘A bit more than you do.’

‘OK.’

‘We could level that up a bit.’

‘OK,’ Jack said. He stooped for the secateurs and handed them to Guy. Guy gave him a quick glance.

‘How are you?’

Jack looked down.

‘All right—’

‘Better?’

‘Yup,’ Jack said. He picked up the fork again. ‘I did what you said.’

‘Did you?’

‘I told her.’

‘Good for you,’ Guy said. He stepped into the border and began to even up the lilac bush. Jack looked at his back. He was wearing one of his usual check shirts, with the sleeves rolled up. From the back, he looked just as usual, just as he always did, always had. It was from the front that he looked different. Jack couldn’t quite define why, but it was as if something behind his face had fallen in, leaving hollows and lines and shadows. Perhaps it was that he looked old, now. Jack wasn’t sure. He was old, of course he was, but Jack knew now that just because you were young – or old – you couldn’t make assumptions about age, about looks or feelings or anything. Look at Carrie. Some days, just now, Rachel looked older than Carrie.

‘Grando,’ Jack said.

Guy turned and came out of the border with an armful of branches.

‘Is that better?’

‘What’s happening?’ Jack said.

Guy dropped the branches on the grass.

‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that you were going to Majorca.’

‘Yes, we are.’

‘Simon asked me to come, too—’

‘Come,’ Jack said.

Guy looked at him. ‘It’s – it’s lovely of you. Lovely of him. But no, I think. Not this year. Another year maybe.’

‘There mayn’t
be
another year.’

‘Oh, I think there will be,’ Guy said. ‘I think there will be. Now.’

Jack said again, ‘What’s happening?’

Guy reached out and took the fork from Jack’s hand.

‘I’m moving to the north.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s a judge up there, a Crown Court judge like me, who has cancer, poor fellow. So he has to retire early and I’m being transferred up there, to take over. Resident Judge. Just like Stanborough.’

He turned away and began to push the fork into the matted earth around the lilac tree. Jack watched him, watched the rhythmical treading, pausing, turning movements.

‘Don’t go,’ Jack said. He hadn’t meant to. He felt a fool the moment he had spoken.

Guy paused long enough to give him a quick look.

‘I have to, old boy.’

Jack sat down on the grass. He felt, suddenly, like a little kid, like a little lost kid.

‘Why d’you have to?’

Guy stopped digging. He turned round completely.

‘Because I’m divorcing Granny so I shouldn’t stay in Stanborough. Because I’m not marrying Merrion so I shouldn’t stay in London.’

Jack swallowed hard. He began to rip at tufts of grass round his bent knees.

‘I’ll recover,’ Guy said. ‘Like you have. It’ll take me a bit longer and I may never get over it completely, but I tell you one thing.’

‘What—’

‘I couldn’t have borne it not to have happened. I
couldn’t have borne not to know Merrion. I couldn’t have borne not to have loved her.’

Jack got up. He bent and picked up a hand fork.

‘Sorry.’

‘What are you saying sorry for?’

‘Being such a bloody
juvenile,’
Jack said.

‘There isn’t any ideal way to behave,’ Guy said. ‘We just do the best we can.’

Jack knelt on the lawn edge and began to plunge his fork into the border.

‘What’ll she do?’

‘Merrion?’

‘Yes—’

‘She’ll go on to be an extremely successful family law barrister and probably take silk in about ten years’ time, become a Queen’s Counsel. And I hope she will marry and have children, too.’

‘Do you?’

‘I’m training myself,’ Guy said. ‘Now look. Can I show you how to do that?’

Jack surrendered his fork. Guy knelt beside him.

‘Doors close in your life,’ Guy said, ‘doors open. They don’t always do it together and they don’t always do it when you want them to. But they keep doing it. Now watch. You have to sift the earth through the fork as you dig to break up the lumps and let the air get in.’

‘Air?’

‘Yes, you chump. Air.’

Jack stretched now and felt the unyielding bars of the deck chair behind his head and his thighs. They’d done
the whole border after that, foot after unyielding foot, and at the end, Guy had made him cut the grass at the edge of the border with the shears, to give it a finish. He’d done that with great care, really paid it attention, and then Simon had come out and admired what they’d done and taken Guy away to do something, Jack couldn’t remember what, and have a drink somewhere, before supper. After that, Carrie had come out, bringing Jack a glass of lemonade, and said the kind of things Jack didn’t associate with Carrie at all. He hadn’t quite known how to react. He’d looked at the new stripes in her hair and the way they made her hair look thicker, somehow, and shinier, and it occurred to him that maybe she’d actually brushed it, too, because it looked smooth and almost curtain-like, the way he now knew he liked girls’ hair to look. When she’d finished talking and he’d finished the lemonade, she took the empty glass back inside and Jack lay down in the old deckchair he’d found behind the girls’ bikes in the shed, and looked at his handiwork. He felt it was pretty sad to want to look at a border, a garden border, but there was no-one to see how sad it was, after all, no-one to spoil this bizarre and perverse pleasure.

He looked up at the sky. It was clear and pale blue and the sunlight was getting lower and more golden. He thought of Carrie in the kitchen, probably opening and shutting cupboards with her striped hair swinging. He thought of Majorca and the sea and a girl in the sea with hair like that, only wet, plastered to her shoulders. He thought of Simon and Guy in a pub somewhere, maybe sitting on a pavement on metal chairs next to a little
round metal table, with glasses of beer, sort of circling round each other like dogs who know they’re going to play together in a minute but have getting-to-know-you-stuff to do first. He thought of Adam and Rich and Marco and Moll, of Moll reduced to saying, ‘Fuck off,’ pathetically, because she couldn’t think what else to say, how to reply to him, how to concede that she hadn’t, as she thought she had, called the last shot. He thought of what Guy had said about doors; doors closing and opening in a ceaseless, irregular movement all down those corridors of life, those long corridors that were sometimes terrifying to think about. He leaned forward and eased himself slowly and stiffly out of the deck chair. He liked those doors. He liked the idea of looking through them, seeing what was there. He put his arms above his head and stretched as high as he could, and then, giving the border one last glance, he sauntered across the grass towards the house to see what, if anything, was going on.