Marrying the Mistress (6 page)

Simon sat down in front of the computer. There was an empty Coca-Cola can beside it, a sure sign that the last occupant of the chair had been Jack, no doubt playing war games or cruising the Internet in search of sport and pornography. Simon had spent hours in this room, hours in front of this computer, setting up the free legal-advice clinics that he seemed to feel driven to do, working out strategies for people who couldn’t cope, couldn’t understand how they had gone wrong, how to get redress, how to survive an apparent injustice. He knew his father felt he had always spent too much time and energy this way, too much of his own resources in trying to help people whose cases – lives, often – seemed futile, incapable of advancement, of enlightenment.

‘I need to,’ Simon said, ‘I have to. You live in an articulate world, where people have to explain themselves. But I don’t. I can’t, not while there are people who don’t have a hope, ever, of explaining themselves to anybody.’

There had always been the assumption that Simon would follow Guy into the law. It wasn’t Simon’s assumption: it was Guy’s. Laura, Simon knew, had begged Guy not to assume anything, but the law was what Guy knew, what Guy understood, what Guy was good at, and when Guy produced a clever son, the future of that son seemed to him a given, obvious. And it wasn’t that
Simon was averse to the idea of the law, it was only that he wanted his own approach, his own version, his own perception of it.

There weren’t rows. You didn’t have rows with Guy. You had heated, forceful discussions but there was no shouting or slamming of doors. That’s what Simon grew to hate, the lack of release, the appearance of civilization, the words, the torrents and torrents of clever, articulate, educated words which seemed to him, in the end, a mere substitute for real feeling, real sympathies.

‘I don’t want to be a barrister,’ he’d said to his father when he was sixteen. ‘I don’t want to be all mentally ingenious and clever, leaving people tied up in knots. I don’t want to confuse people, I want to help them, I want them to know that I’m on their
side.’

Rather later, when Simon was twenty-eight and Guy became a judge, and explained to Simon, with what he believed to be both courage and honesty, that he thought Simon’s teenage accusations had had some truth in them, Simon wouldn’t listen.

‘Now he’s on the Bench,’ he said to Carrie, ‘he thinks all advocates are just there to prove their own points, score their own bull’s-eyes, and only he, up there in all his red and black, can save the day. I can’t
believe
it.’

Carrie was bent over Emma’s high chair. Emma was two, then, and had discovered, a year before, the delicious tyranny of either eating at her own pace – interminable – or not eating at all. She had picked all the peas out of her dish, pushed the remainder of
the food as far away from her as she could get it, and was eating a single pea in her fingers alternately with dropping every second pea on the floor.

‘Give him a break,’ Carrie said. ‘He can’t get anything right, ever, can he? He’s wrong for being a barrister, now he’s wrong for being a judge. Emma, I am going to leave you to starve.’

Emma closed her eyes.

‘He only wanted the Bench,’ Simon said, ‘for the status.’

Carrie picked up a cube of carrot and inserted it into Emma’s mouth. Emma held it there for a few seconds and then ejected it forcefully, like a cork out of a bottle.

‘He didn’t,’ Carrie said. She turned her back on Emma. ‘He did it because your mother wanted it.’

‘He has never done anything my mother wanted in his
life—’

‘Simon,’ Carrie said, ‘don’t be so bloody unfair. She’s endured him working all the hours there are, all these years, and now she wants a
normal
husband, with regular working hours and a pension and health insurance.’

‘Look at me!’ Emma shouted imperiously. Carrie took no notice. Simon stood up.

‘Why are you on his side?’

‘I’m not. I’m not on anyone’s side. Your father may not be an angel but he’s not the exclusively selfish monster you insist on making him out to be.’

‘You didn’t grow up with him,’ Simon said. ‘You didn’t see what he did to my mother—’

‘Look
at me!’ Emma yelled. She picked her dish up and flung it to the floor, scattering carrot and potato and slices of sausage.

‘Go away,’ Carrie said to Simon, ‘just go away. I’ve got enough children to deal with, as it is.’

She had always been good for him, Simon reflected now, always balancing, always refusing to let him get too worked up about things, too emotional. He appreciated that, he really did. But what she couldn’t see, what she would never be able to see because she hadn’t been there, was the pain his mother suffered, had always suffered, on account of her quiet, unhappy realization that she had taken a wrong turning, made a choice she couldn’t – or wouldn’t – escape from. Simon remembered watching her when he was little, watching and watching her, waiting to see the cloud lift from her face, from her spirit, seeing the apprehension that joined the cloud when his father came home. Carrie had asked, more than once, and with some impatience, why Laura didn’t go, just leave, if things were really that bad, and Simon said she couldn’t, she was of the wrong generation, the wrong temperament, the wrong upbringing, she was held by a sense of obligation – call it old-fashioned if you like – to lie on a bed she had chosen and then made.

‘Well, don’t let her exploit you,’ Carrie said. ‘It’s not
your
fault she’s in a twitch about your father.’

Sitting in front of the computer now, cradling his mug of tea, Simon thought about that. He
did
feel responsible for his mother somehow, always had, always had known
that he gave her a strength she didn’t seem able to find anywhere else, even from his brother Alan. He remembered playing cricket with her in Battersea Park when he was tiny, watched by Alan from his pushchair. She would bowl to him for hours, patiently and encouragingly. He remembered some red jeans she’d had, a red hairband, too, and watching her red-jeaned legs running away from him across the worn grass to retrieve the cricket ball, time after time.

‘Now watch it,’ she’d call to him, preparing to bowl again. ‘Watch it all the way your bat.’

He’d adored her. He could recall the feeling still of a room being incomplete if she wasn’t in it. He used to hurtle out of school to find her waiting for him at the end of the day and every day was a reunion, a thankful, relieved reunion. Carrie had once asked him if he had been jealous when Alan came, resentful of this new and needy person in their lives, but he hadn’t been, not for a moment. He’d always known he was safe, exclusive.

But it had been a relief to get away from his mother, later. He thought he’d probably been pretty unpleasant as a teenager, chilly and distanced, to punish her for having made her his whole universe when he was little. In any case, there was a certain perverse satisfaction in being tough with both parents when he was adolescent; it gave him a sense, however illusory, of his own separate stature. Sometimes he looked at Jack and wondered if that was precisely what Jack was now doing himself – removing himself crudely and visibly from
the intimacy of the family circle to reassure himself of a separate and distinct identity. Simon picked up Jack’s Coca-Cola can. Once, when Jack was three, he had taken him to the zoo. He had told him beforehand of the exciting and enormous beasts he would see, the lions and tigers, the elephants and giraffes and camels. Jack had gazed at him with eyes like lamps, and had then said, in a voice acute with anxiety, ‘Will Jack be safe?’

Simon got up. What tea remained in his mug was cold, and his feet were, too. He went back into the kitchen and put his mug down in the sink and ran water into it. It occurred to him suddenly and with guilty force that one of the strongest elements in his anger at this new situation was apprehension that his mother alone now, abandoned, might want him back, might somehow feel she could retrieve that little boy in Battersea Park and ask him to give her – silently; Laura always requested things silently – the unconditional love he had been so eager, so willing, so
anxious
to give her then.

He gazed down at the cloudy water in his tea mug. I couldn’t do it, he thought, I simply couldn’t. It had been such a relief to fall in love with Carrie, such a heady release to find he had made a choice with his own heart, a choice that had nothing to do with duty or pity and everything to do with enthusiasm and independence and change. It had taken Laura a long time to accept Carrie; she had always been kind and civil, but a spark was missing, the spark of true warmth and sympathy. Carrie had noticed, but hadn’t minded. At least, not much, not angrily.

‘Mothers-in-law are like that, aren’t they?’ she’d said. ‘Especially the mothers of sons.’

Perhaps that was why Carrie and Alan got on so well, perhaps they shared the freedom – and exclusion – of not being Laura’s chosen one, the apple of her eye. Alan! Simon banged the flat of his hand against his forehead. He’d forgotten Alan, quite forgotten in the turmoil of his own feelings, to call Alan as he had promised his mother that he would. He glanced up at the kitchen clock. It read twenty-past four. He couldn’t ring Alan for three hours at least. He couldn’t ring anybody, he couldn’t do anything, except go back to bed and derive what comfort he could from Carrie’s presence, her body there, warm and still and not always wholly sympathetic, but real.

He went slowly up the stairs, pausing on the landing to take off the Chicago Bulls sweatshirt and hang it over the banister. Then he opened the bedroom door and went quietly across the carpet and slid gratefully in under the duvet. Carrie stirred, but didn’t turn over.

‘Ow,’ she said. ‘You’re
cold.’

The garden at Hill Cottage was Laura’s creation. The house was, too, but Guy, who had an aptitude for seeing where walls should be taken out or put in, or furniture placed, had had a considerable part in the house. Also, significantly, he had paid the bills. He was earning well, as a barrister, those first twenty years at Hill Cottage, and he had paid – without demur, she always had to admit – the bills that gave the place a new roof, new heating, new bathrooms, a level gravelled drive, paved terraces, garages and garden storerooms made from old cow byres, old pig-sties. But the garden was Laura’s. She’d thought about it, planned it, worked on it. Out of a couple of acres of derelict farmyard and rundown paddock, she’d made a garden and an orchard.

As the boys grew up, the garden sidled quietly into that part of her psyche and personality that had nurtured her young children. She told herself that it was entirely typical, that Englishwomen of her age and type did succumb to gardening, at a certain stage,
and allowed it to dominate their lives as little children had once done, with an accompanying and irritating preoccupation with weather forecasts. When Guy offered to take her to law conferences in Europe, or even the Far East, her first reaction – even above that of a small, pleased excitement at the prospect of Paris or Tokyo – was whether the garden could manage without her for five or ten days. Suppose there was a late hard frost? Suppose the weather was unseasonably warm and dry and extra watering was required? Suppose she missed the apricots on the south wall being at just the perfect moment to pick? Once, Guy had insisted she come, to Stockholm, and there had been a freak hailstorm in their absence and all the early roses collapsed into sodden brown lumps of blighted petals. She’d been distraught.

‘But even if you’d
been
here,’ Guy said, in exasperation, ‘what could you possibly have done to save anything?’

Nothing, she knew. She pictured the hailstorm, whipping round the cottage, battering the rose heads with icy pellets. Of course she couldn’t have done anything. She’d have been out there, miserable and impotent in the storm, but at least she’d have been there. It seemed impossible to explain to Guy that she had a sense of having let the garden down, failed it by not being there when it needed her. She could visualize how he’d look at her. He’d look at her as he’d looked at her so often over the years, trying and trying to see if she meant what she was saying, and – even more difficult – to see if he could understand.

‘I don’t,’ he said, ‘quite
get
it, about the garden. I see it’s a pleasure, a satisfaction. But I can’t see the hold it has on you. Is it—’ He paused.

‘Is it what?’

‘Animate
, to you?’

She’d felt shy, suddenly. She felt she couldn’t admit to someone who spent his days up to his armpits in demanding, messy, human things, that the garden was alive to her in a way; that it did have, if not a personality, then at least a spirit. And that that spirit was fragile, but vital, and in her care, because she had made it, she had somehow summoned it out of the muddy broken-brick-littered dereliction that had been there when they came. She was afraid Guy would think – as she had always been afraid of him thinking – that she had abandoned reality and all its demands for something more insubstantial, more fantastical, which didn’t, in the end, have a comparable validity. Of course, it was ridiculous,
pitiful
, to say, ‘I can’t come to Tokyo because nobody waters the pots on the terrace quite like I do,’ but the awful thing was that that’s what she believed, what she felt, with great, instinctive strength. It was a matter of belonging, of feeling at home, at peace and necessary. Heavens, it was so important to feel necessary! She thought Simon understood that a little, always had. But Guy didn’t, Guy had never been in doubt about his own indispensability. And Alan – well, Alan didn’t think like that. Alan never arranged things, in his mind or his life, in relative order. He just took people, events, job opportunities as they came,
on their own merits. If his mother wanted to spend her life in the garden and got ecstatic when her camellia flowered, well, fine, that’s what turned her on.

The trouble – the acute trouble just now – was that it wasn’t turning her on. It was where she had fled when Guy had told her he wanted a divorce so that he could marry someone called Merrion Palmer, and instead of receiving and consoling her, the garden had lain around her quite inert, almost indifferent. She’d begun to dig – a vegetable bed, ready for her precise rows of carrot and parsnip and beetroot – in the hope that strenuous physical activity would not only distract her but restore to her a feeling that the world was still, after all, recognizable, and all she’d felt after half an hour was that it was utterly pointless, that the cold spring earth certainly didn’t care, and that there was something deliberately masochistic about planting food for someone who had neither desire nor intention of being there to eat it. She flung the spade away from her and it clattered across a brick path and skidded into a leaning pile of glass panes she used for cloches over early lettuce, sending out a shower of green-white splinters. She sank to her knees, where she was, in the vegetable bed, and let herself howl like a toddler having a tantrum in a supermarket, rubbing at her wet face every so often with her earthy hands. When it began to rain, she didn’t move: it was almost a comfort to have something, however slight, happening.