Marrying the Mistress (5 page)

‘I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,’ her mother said. ‘Like I always have.’

‘Turn that
down!’
Carrie Stockdale screamed up the stairs.

For several seconds nothing happened, and then a door opened on to the landing, releasing a yet more deafening blast of music, and a girl of about fourteen peered down.

‘What?’ she said sweetly.

‘Turn that music
down!’

Rachel shook her head. She smiled at her mother. She mouthed, ‘Can’t hear you.’

Carrie started up the stairs. Rachel straightened up and removed the smile.

‘OK, OK—’

‘I have told you and
told
you. No music until you have finished your homework and no music
ever
that is antisocial in either type or volume for the rest of us to live with.’

Rachel leaned back against the landing banisters. She said plaintively, ‘Jack doesn’t mind. And Emma
likes
it.’

Carrie pushed past her daughter into her bedroom. It was quite dark apart from the greenish glow from the CD player and a single small spotlight lamp on Rachel’s desk. Her books were open, neatly arranged and looked entirely unattended to. Her bed was rumpled.

‘Mum,’ Rachel said, suddenly loud, ‘don’t you touch anything. You touch
one thing—’

Carrie stooped behind the CD player and pulled the electric plug out of the socket in the wall.

‘How
dare
you,’ Rachel hissed.

Carrie stood up. The silence seemed almost as loud as the music had been.

‘Very easily,’ she said.

Rachel wailed, ‘I can’t work if it’s quiet!’

‘You’ll have to learn.’

‘You don’t make Emma—’

‘I would if she had her music up this loud.’

‘I’ll get headphones,’ Rachel said. ‘Jack has headphones. Then I can have it as loud as I like.’

‘Rachel,’ Carrie said, going over to her desk and peering at the open books, ‘try not to be so infantile. Is this your maths?’

‘I hate it—’

‘I’m sure you do. I used to hate it, too. You won’t have to do it after the exams except if you fail. And you’ll fail if you don’t work hard enough and then you’ll have to retake it until you
do
pass.’

‘Sadist,’ Rachel said. She kicked a cushion lying on the floor. ‘You’re really enjoying this.’

‘What?’

‘Giving me a hard time.’

‘Oh I’m loving it,’ Carrie said. She looked at the open drawers out of which T-shirt arms and tights legs drooped dispiritedly, and fought back the urge to tuck them in and close the drawers. ‘I’d no idea what fun being the mother of three adolescents was going to be. I’d no conception of how I was going to enjoy myself living with three perfectly intelligent people who choose to behave as if they were entirely subhuman. I’m having a
ball.’

‘OK, OK,’ Rachel said again. She sidled past her mother and sat down in front of her maths books. ‘Keep your hair on.’

Downstairs, the front door slammed and someone threw a rattling bunch of keys on to a hard surface.

‘There’s Dad,’ Rachel said. She sounded relieved. ‘You can go and take a pop at him now, can’t you?’

Simon Stockdale, still in his crumpled mackintosh over a dark business suit, was standing at the kitchen table, riffling irritably through his mail.

‘Hi,’ Carrie said.

She went across the room and kissed his cheek. He made a simultaneous kissing sound, but didn’t turn towards her.

She said, ‘I was upstairs, yelling at Rachel.’

‘Music?’

‘If you can call it that.’

‘Oh God,’ Simon said, throwing down a white envelope printed in scarlet. ‘Telephone. Final demand.’

‘I
paid
it.’

‘You can’t have—’

‘I did. I paid it last week. If you remember, I took a half-day off work to pay all the bills and generally get household stuff up to date.’

‘Then why this?’

‘It’s their computer,’ Carrie said. ‘It’s always computers. It’s programmed to send out a series of demands but not programmed to realize that a demand has been met.’

Simon took off his raincoat and dropped it over a chairback.

‘When the kids were little,’ he said, ‘they’d come rushing downstairs to meet me when I came home. Remember?’

Carrie pulled a chair out from the table and sat down.

‘That wouldn’t be cool, now.’

He looked at her for the first time.

‘Did we have them too early?’

She yawned.

‘Yes.’

‘You got pregnant though.’

‘Hardly by myself. Are you suggesting we wouldn’t be married if I hadn’t been pregnant with Jack?’

‘No,’ Simon said. He rubbed his hands over his face. ‘I was just thinking, here we are, not yet forty, and all we’ve done is work and have the kids.’

‘That’s life, babe.’

‘Is it?’

‘Simon,’ Carrie said, ‘what is the
matter?’

‘
Would you like a drink?’

‘Not really.’

‘Sure? I’ve got something to tell you.’

She sighed. She spread her hands out on the kitchen table and noticed that her nails and cuticles definitely needed attention.

‘OK then. You’re leaving me.’

Simon went over to a cupboard on the far side of the room and took out two wineglasses. Carrie looked at him. His shirt had come untucked from his trousers and a tail of blue cotton hung below his suit jacket. He had a good figure, like his father’s, and his mother’s dark hair.

‘Nope,’ Simon said, ‘but close.’

Carrie sat up.

‘Close!’

Simon put the glasses down on the table and retrieved a half-empty bottle of wine from the refrigerator.

‘Mum called me in the office,’ he said. He poured the wine. His hand, Carrie noticed, was not at all steady. ‘Dad’s leaving her.’

‘Oh my
God,’
Carrie said. She put her hands over her face. From behind them she said, ‘Say that again. Slowly.’

Simon pushed one glass of wine across the table towards her and sat down in a chair opposite. He said flatly, ‘My father is leaving my mother. He told her three days ago. He has been having an affair with someone for seven years and has decided he wants out.’

‘Simon,’ Carrie said from behind her hands, ‘this isn’t happening.’

‘It is.’

‘How did she sound—’

‘Wiped out,’ Simon said. ‘Just – just kind of flattened. Hopeless.’

‘Did she know? I mean, had she known about this woman?’

Simon took a swallow of wine and made a face.

‘She’d suspected. She’d always thought he would, one day—’

‘What,’ Carrie said, taking her hands away from her face, ‘leave her?’

‘No. Have an affair. She said she sort of dreaded it. All the time.’

‘This sounds more than an affair—’

‘Yes,’ Simon said. ‘He wants to marry her.’

Carrie picked up her wineglass and put it down again.

‘Wow.’

‘I know.’

‘Who is she?’

‘Some girl, some barrister—’

‘A girl!’

‘She’s thirty-one,’ Simon said. He bent his head suddenly, his tie flopping on to the table. ‘Oh, Carrie, oh God, help me, help—’

She got up and went round the table. She put an arm round his shoulders and held him awkwardly against her.

‘I can’t
stand
this,’ Simon said, ‘I want to
kill
him.’

Carrie stroked his hair with her free hand.

‘We’ll have to look after your mother.’

‘It’s not that,’ Simon said. He drummed his clenched fists on the table. ‘It’s him. It’s bloody
him
. It’s always been him.’

‘Hey,’ someone said from the doorway. ‘Hey, what’s going on?’

Carrie looked up. Jack, who was sixteen, stood easily there dressed in a T-shirt, sweatpants and thick white sports socks with his heavy, bobbed, centrally parted hair hanging over his face.

She said, ‘We’ve had a bit of a shock.’

Jack came into the room, lunged across the table and picked up Carrie’s wineglass. He took a swallow.

‘Someone died?’

‘No,’ Carrie said. ‘Nothing as simple as that.’

Jack took another swallow. He looked at his slumped father, his mother stooped protectively over him.

‘Is Dad ill?’

Simon raised his head.

‘No,’ he said crossly.

Jack flicked his hair back. He grinned.

‘That’s OK then.’

‘No,’ Simon said, ‘it isn’t OK. What has happened is extremely upsetting and will cause appalling complication as well as pain.’

Jack looked interested. He slid into the chair his mother had been occupying. He gestured at his father.

‘Shoot,’ he said.

‘Jack,’ Simon said, ‘there’s no point not telling you.
You have to know. The girls have to know. Your uncle Alan has to know. Shortly the whole bloody world will have to know. Your grandfather is proposing to leave your grandmother, to whom he has been married for forty years, and marry a woman with whom he has been having an affair for seven years.’

Jack was quite still. He stared at his father.

‘Grando?’ he said. ‘Grando wants out and to start again?’

‘Yes,’ Simon said.

‘This woman, how old’s she?’

‘Thirty-one,’ Simon said with emphasis.

Jack grinned.

‘Thirty-one! And Grando’s over sixty, isn’t he? Old, anyway.’

‘Too old,’ Simon said with venom, ‘for
this.’

Jack picked up Carrie’s wineglass again and threw the remainder of the contents down his throat. Then he gave the tabletop a kind of delighted slap, a gesture of approval, of abandon.

‘Hey!’ he said, ‘thirty-one! That’s cool.’

Simon lay looking at the familiar night-time blocks of shadow in the bedroom: window, table piled with books and clutter, door, wardrobe, mantelpiece over defunct fireplace, chair, chest of drawers, old sofa piled with clothes, long looking glass glimmering like water. He supposed Carrie was asleep. She was turned away from him, anyhow, her bony shoulder protruding from the duvet, and she was very still. Even if she wasn’t
asleep, there really wasn’t much more to say at the moment, no new version of the shock and amazement and – in his case anyway – anger that had preoccupied the evening and half the night already. There would be more to come, of course, more details, more reactions, more plans, but right now Simon felt he was staring at a wall. It was a wall that hadn’t been there the previous morning and which would now be there forever: a wall he couldn’t move and couldn’t scale. Its presence made him feel weak with impotent fury.

He turned his head. Carrie’s fair hair lay tousled on the pillow close to his face. He liked it loose, always had. She had to pin it up or tie it back for her job as manager of a local medical practice, but at home she wore it down or scooped up roughly with a clip if she was cooking or sitting at the computer. He remembered that long ago he used to brush it. He liked brushing it. He hadn’t brushed it in years. Mind you, he reflected, Carrie wasn’t a great one for brushing it herself.

He wanted her to be awake. He put a hand on her hip, as bony as her shoulder. She gave a small grunt, and didn’t move. He had wanted her to be as angry with his father as he was but she said she couldn’t be.

‘It’s this blood thing. If it was my dad I’d probably be incoherent with rage, but I feel more impersonal about yours. I mean, I like him and all that, but I don’t feel betrayed by him.’

‘I do,’ Simon said.

‘Yes,’ she said. She was putting supper plates in the dishwasher. ‘And you always have.’

He took his hand off her hip and moved himself gingerly to the edge of the bed, trying to stay flat so as not to let a draught of cold air in, down her back. Then he slid out on to the floor and padded out of the room.

A light still burned on the landing. Emma, at twelve, said she couldn’t sleep without the light on. She had her bedroom door shut but insisted that, if the line of light showing under it from the landing were extinguished, she’d have nightmares about drowning. There were all kinds of things scattered about the landing: a lone trainer, two CDs, a belt, a copy of the
Big Issue
, a sweatshirt of Jack’s with the Chicago Bulls’ name and logo printed on it. Simon bent and picked up the sweatshirt and pulled it on over his pyjamas. The children thought his pyjamas were too sad for words, but he felt he could no longer sleep naked with three teenagers in the house, nor could he wear a nightshirt because that was what his father wore. So he wore pyjamas and endured the gibes.

He went downstairs warily in his bare feet. Young parenthood had engrained in him the apprehension that all stairs were littered with lethal pieces of Lego, agony to bare adult feet stumbling down to dawn toddler breakfasts. There was, in fact, nothing on these stairs except a single black sock and an apple core. He picked the apple core up with distaste and carried it into the kitchen and dropped it in the rubbish bin.

He switched on the low lights that illuminated the countertops and plugged in the kettle. Above the kettle hung a small mirror, framed in pine, which Carrie
used for putting in her pierced earrings – ‘I can never remember where the holes are’ – and the girls, with much shrieking and shoving, for squeezing their spots. He peered into it now. He saw a tired man with bags under his eyes and sleep-rumpled hair and his pyjama collar caught up all anyhow under the neck of a red sweatshirt. Do I look thirty-eight, Simon thought, or forty-eight? Or seventy-eight? Anyway, what does thirty-eight look like? And does thirty-eight with three children and a mortgage inevitably look quite different from thirty-eight with no commitments and a Porsche? He put his tongue out at himself. It did not look pink and gleaming. He put it away again.

He made himself a mug of tea and carried it through to the little room they optimistically called the office. The house, like most of its identical Edwardian neighbours in this South London road, had an extension built out at the back, into the garden that was exactly the width of the house itself. Some people had made kitchens out of their extensions, or sitting rooms with doors to the garden. Others had just left them as the warren of sculleries and storerooms that they had originally been. Simon and Carrie had started out with the former intention and then, running out of money and enthusiasm, had allowed the extension to lapse into the latter category. The office, small and damp, with a window almost obscured by the winter jasmine growing against the wall outside, had the feel of an Edwardian back kitchen. It housed the computer, the household files – approximately kept by Carrie – Simon’s law books
and the overflowing, heavy-duty grey plastic bags of outgrown clothing, intended for donation to charity shops, which never seemed to move and only to expand.