Marrying the Mistress Read online

  ‘Carly, the court cannot hear you.’

  She took a breath and said tiredly but with a simultaneous small pride as if she was quoting something authoritative, ‘He was like a god to me.’

  A god. A forty-five-year-old man playing god to a besotted woman and her equally spellbound child. The terraced house, with its neat front garden and rather less neat back garden where the girls were allowed to keep pet rabbits in hutches, was, it seemed, less a family home than a cage for playing games in, improper, dangerous, degraded games, power games, cruel, harmful games. The jury had looked drained. Several of them looked as if, for all their worldly knowledge already gleaned from television and the press, they’d heard more than they’d bargained for, been faced with a raw reality they couldn’t just switch off when they’d had enough. And this was only the first day.

  But a god! That was what she had said, this fifteen-year-old child who had lived with her stepfather from the age of eight until a year ago, when she had finally told her mother what was happening. A god. You could, it seemed, go on about equality between the sexes until you were blue in the face, you could legislate, you could try to educate, but then along comes this child, this late-twentieth-century child, with her boldness and her unquestioned prospects, talking quite simply and unselfconsciously about a man being like a god to her.

  Guy wondered, detachedly, if he had ever seemed like a god to Laura, even in that first glory of love when the love object is truly something quite extraordinary. They had met at university, he reading law, she reading French and Spanish. They had both worked diligently – she because she was conscientious, he because he was ambitious – and had emerged with similar degrees. He had gone immediately to Bar School and she had applied to join the Foreign Office, failed, and taken a translating job with a firm of small manufacturers who were developing their business in Europe. It was a dull job. Guy urged Laura not to take it.

  ‘Try the BBC,’ he said. Try the World Service. Try publishing. Try teaching.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘If one of us doesn’t make some money, we can’t get married.’

  ‘We can. We don’t need money to get married. And if we do, I’ll borrow it. I don’t mind borrowing until I’m earning. But you can’t do something your heart’s not in.’

  ‘I can,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind.’

  But she did. He remembered, now, how much she did. She didn’t say anything because she had been brought up to endure in silence, but her attitude, her moods, even her walk indicated that she felt she was drudging, that she wasn’t allowing her brain to race ahead of her, as his was doing.

  ‘Are you resentful?’ he said, every so often.

  And she’d look at him, with that clear hazel gaze that appeared to display such transparency of mind and heart.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  He used to take her shoulders, give her a little shake.

  ‘Can I believe you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  So he did. Or, at least, he lived as if he did. He read as assiduously for the Bar as he had read for his law degree, and every so often, he asked Laura to change her job. She refused. Once, he went to their bank manager and secured a loan for six months, to enable Laura to leave her job and take time to find a more congenial one. A week later, she too went to the bank manager and cancelled the loan.

  ‘I hate it. I can’t do it. You know Mum and Dad were always in debt and how much I dread it.’

  ‘But we aren’t like your parents. We don’t have their problem with money. And I’m going to be earning. In two years’ time, all being well, I’m going to be earning reasonably and I’ll go on to earn well.’

  ‘I can’t believe anything,’ Laura said, ‘until it happens.’

  That was not, he thought now, the sort of thing you said to a god. Laura’s anxious practicality was not likely, ever, to find itself swept away by the presence of superhuman possibilities. Not as a young woman: certainly not now. Now! Well, how to think about that without a clutch of dread, of panic? Impossible. Laura was sixty-one. Not a particularly young or old sixty-one, but a nice-looking, well-kept, largely unassuming woman of sixty-one with the same clear hazel eyes but set, somehow, in a different context. Indeed, the way Laura’s still-young eyes looked out of her much older face was a metaphor for the way things had changed place, moved round in the last seven years: since meeting Merrion, the whole landscape in which Laura lived in relation to Guy seemed different. It was like walking very, very slowly away from something you knew very well, something you could visualize minutely when you were parted from it, and as you moved away, that something shrank against its background and lost solidity, lost significance.

  Guy cleared the last of Stanborough’s raw, newish suburbs and turned down a minor road towards open country. The street lights petered out into darkness and the tyres of the car began to click stickily through mud. Five miles now. Five miles, and then, across a curve in the road and before he got to the village, he would see the lights glowing along the façade of his house and the twisted bare black outlines of the apple trees in the little orchard in front of it.

  They’d bought the house thirty years ago, when Simon was eight, and Alan was five. It had been three cottages, run-down and discouraging, sitting in a muddy welter of disused sheds and pig-sties. But there was the orchard, and a modest hill behind it, and a village with a church and a pub, and there were good rail connections to London from Stanborough, ten miles away. And, in any case, Laura wanted it. She had finally given up her job when she became pregnant with Simon, and presumably because Guy was now earning, she didn’t mention getting another one after he was born. She became a conscientious mother just as she had been a conscientious student. From the tiny terraced house in Battersea which they could scarcely afford, Laura took him out to Battersea Park every day, and played with him. She cut out letters and taught him to read when he was four. She fed him bread she had baked herself and rationed his hours of television – he saw enough to enable him to fit in at school, but not enough to prevent him using his own imagination.

  When Alan came along, three years later, he joined in this earnest and busy enterprise.

  ‘Is this what you like?’ Guy said to Laura, intending to be supportive whatever her reply. ‘Is motherhood enough for you?’

  ‘For now,’ she said, not looking at him. She was pulling a soft tangle of coloured clothes out of the tumble-dryer. ‘There’s nothing else we can do for now.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, with you working so hard.’

  He crouched down on the little kitchen floor beside her. He was still in his dark suit from court, his black shoes, his sober tie.

  ‘Laura, I have to work hard. I’m self-employed. Barristers are. You know that. The harder I work, the better I’ll do.’

  She sat back on her heels, holding the plastic laundry basket of clothes on one hip.

  ‘Will it always be like this?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘You working all the hours there are, most weekends, lever-arch files even in bed—’

  ‘Not if I become a judge.’

  ‘A judge!’

  ‘I can’t even think about it for fifteen or twenty years.

  But if that’s what you’d like—’

  She got to her feet.

  ‘It’s not my choice.’

  ‘Laura, it is. It’s as much your choice as it’s mine.’

  She’d looked down at him, holding the laundry basket, biting slightly at her lower lip.

  ‘I didn’t quite visualize this.’

  He stood, too.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, when I was working and you were still a student, I didn’t think we’d – well, we’d get so uneven.’

  ‘But we needn’t be. You could go back to work. Alan’s four, for heaven’s sake.’

  She rumpled some of the clothes in the basket with her free hand.

  ‘Could we move to the country?’
she said.

  ‘Would that help?’

  She gave him her clear, open look.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  Even then, even temporarily relieved by a seeming solution, he hadn’t been quite convinced. If she wanted to do it, if she was sure that a change of scene and society would, as it were, round her out once more, then they would do it. But he was haunted by feeling that it was possibly the worst thing they could do, that the hours he would have to travel would be added to the hours he would have to work, that a separateness would happen, that their priorities would cease to be united.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he said over and over.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I want to be somewhere where I can make my own life. I’m – I’m confined here. I want the boys to have a garden.’

  ‘You won’t be lonely?’

  She took a little breath, as if she was about to speak but she didn’t say anything. He had an uneasy feeling that she’d been about to say, ‘I’m lonely now,’ and in her self-disciplined way had decided against it. Sometimes he wished she had less discipline, less reticence, that that elusiveness which had so captivated him when they first met – coming as he did from a family of loudly outspoken, opinionated people – was less opaque. Mystery was one thing, so was understatement and obliqueness and self-containment – but quiet stubbornness was quite another.

  ‘Look,’ he’d said, with some energy, ‘I can’t give up the Bar because it’s all I’m trained to do and I’m good at it, but I’ll do anything else you want, anything. Move house, move to the country, have another baby, anything.’

  She put her arms around his neck.

  ‘I’d like to go to the country. I’d like to be somewhere where I’m visible. To myself as well as everyone else.’

  ‘But if you wanted to work again—?’

  ‘I won’t,’ she said.

  But she had. Two years into the restoration of Hill Cottage, and she had. Guy changed gear to negotiate the curve of the road before his drive, and saw the familiar pattern of lit house lights; sitting room and hallway, landing and main bedroom, front door and – glow only visible – back door. It was twenty years ago – twenty years! – that he had begun to see that Laura was feeling, however much she battled against it, that she had paid too high a personal price in marrying him.

  And now. Now what was he about to do? He turned the car into the drive and felt the tyres crunch into the stones of the gravel.

  ‘I feel like a slapper now,’ the girl on the video link had said that day. ‘I’m not a virgin any more. I feel dirty. I feel naive and stupid.’

  Guy let the car coast quietly to a halt in the gravelled yard outside the back door. Inside the house, the dogs began barking, rapturously welcoming however long or short his absence. He turned off the engine. That’s how I feel, he thought. Dirty. Naive and stupid and dirty. He opened the driver’s door and climbed out, a little stiffly, on to the gravel.

  Chapter Two

  Merrion Palmer’s father had died when she was three. He was an engineer, working for a construction company in South Wales, and had come home one ordinary weekday evening complaining of a violent headache and a curiously stiff neck. Within six days he was dead, of meningitis. Merrion was never sure whether she could really remember him, or whether she had absorbed all the photographs of him, and all the things her mother told her about him until they had combined to make something so close to memory she could hardly tell the difference.

  She looked like him, that was for sure. He’d been tall, square-shouldered and long-legged with thick dark hair and a face that relied upon personality rather than regularity for its charm. He was very straightforward, her mother said, you always knew where you were with him, and he had enough energy to fuel a rocket. And he was funny, she said, he’d had a keen sense of the ridiculous. By her bed, when she was a child, Merrion kept a photograph of herself and her father. She was about two, dressed in a dress she could remember more clearly than the occasion, a red sundress spotted in white, and she was sitting on his knee, very solemn, looking at the camera. Her father was looking at the camera solemnly too, and he was wearing the tiny sunhat that matched Merrion’s dress. It looked like a coin balanced on a grapefruit.

  After he died, Merrion’s mother married again, very quickly. She married her husband’s best friend, who left his wife for the purpose, and took Merrion and her mother to live in France. He was a property dealer, in a small way, and he planned to broker deals between French farmers wanting to sell off cottages and barns, and English people wanting to buy them as second homes. Merrion remembered moving a lot, a succession of flats and small hotels and rooms in farmhouses where, more often than not, she slept in a bed in the same room as her mother and stepfather. She remembered the smell of French bathrooms and churches, black cherry jam and old men in caps playing boules on a sandy triangle under some pine trees in one of the little towns they ended up in. She also remembered the muttering. Her mother and stepfather muttered at each other all the time, in the car, in bed, across tables at meals while Merrion made patterns and small mountain ranges out of crumbled bread. It grew louder, the muttering, as time went on, and then Merrion’s mother announced that it was time for Merrion to go to school, and took her back to South Wales.

  She only saw her stepfather once, after that. He came to the little house her mother was renting in Cowbridge and gave her a monster bar of Toblerone chocolate. Her mother took the chocolate away and sent Merrion out into the garden. When, after what seemed an eternity, she came out to find Merrion, she looked dazed, as if she’d been smacked in the face. She picked Merrion up. Merrion was almost six and much disliked being picked up. She kicked vigorously, and wriggled.

  ‘I should never have done it,’ her mother said, and burst into tears.

  It was quieter after that, but duller. Merrion’s mother became a secretary at a solicitor’s office in Cardiff, and Merrion’s grandmother sold her house in Llanelli to come and live with them and help look after Merrion. For a few years, Merrion’s mother talked non-stop about Merrion’s father, as if by so doing, she could somehow obliterate the episode in France, but then everything settled and Merrion allowed the memory of her stepfather – an eager, angular man – to be assimilated into the myth-memory of her father. Men were there, it seemed, and then they weren’t, and when they weren’t, you got on without them.

  It wasn’t until she was about twelve that she began to notice the men in her schoolfriends’ lives. There were fathers and stepfathers and brothers – the latter mostly discountable on grounds of age, lack of hygiene and gormlessness. They lent, Merrion noticed, a different flavour to home atmospheres; there was more energy and noise, more adventurousness, more food, more danger. A house with men in it had a definite excitement to it. It was also more tiring. But Merrion liked it. She watched girls at school who had men at home, and wondered if anyone could tell, by just looking at them, that they had something she didn’t have. She put the sundress photograph away and found others of her father and herself, less goofy ones, and one taken of her father alone on his graduation day from college, with tidy hair and polished shoes. She spent a long time looking intently at this picture, as if something might emerge from it and influence her, affect her, change the feminine round of the way she and her mother and her grandmother lived.

  When her mother went out on infrequent dates, she grew hopeful.

  ‘Did you like him? Are you going out with him again?’

  ‘Yes, but nothing’ll come of it. Don’t worry. I’ve learned my lesson.’

  ‘Will she get married again?’ Merrion asked her grandmother.

  ‘Unlikely,’ her grandmother said. She was doing the crossword. She’d done the crossword in the same newspaper for forty years, at roughly the same time in the morning, and grew restive if something prevented her.

  ‘Doesn’t she want to?’

  ‘No, I don’t think she does. The last episode wasn’t very encouraging.’

  ‘You me
an with Ray in France?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She could do better than Ray,’ Merrion said. ‘Ray was creepy.’

  ‘Creeps put you off, though,’ her grandmother said.

  Merrion twiddled the ladybird clips that held her hair off her face.

  ‘I’m the only one in the class with a dead father.’

  ‘But not in the school.’

  ‘There are twelve hundred people in the school. I don’t know them. I know my class.’

  Her grandmother concentrated for a moment and wrote something down in her newspaper.

  ‘You’ll feel better,’ she said unhelpfully, ‘when you’re married.’

  By fourteen, Merrion’s father-preoccupation had become a marriage-preoccupation. She always looked at people’s left hands, particularly women’s, and if the gold band was absent would scan their faces to see if something else was missing, too, if singleness showed visibly, as she had once wondered if fatherlessness did. She looked at couples together – middle-aged couples, not boys and girls – and tried to see if anything emanated from them, if they looked, somehow, more right, more natural than people by themselves. Just after her fifteenth birthday, Merrion’s mother became engaged, to a local cabinet maker who had also lost his wife, and then disengaged herself almost immediately.

  ‘But why?’ Merrion said.

  ‘I daren’t risk it—’

  ‘But you wouldn’t have been risking anything! He’s OK.’

  ‘It wasn’t him that was the risk,’ Merrion’s mother said. ‘It was me.’

  Merrion said, ‘But you’ve got to just dare things sometimes—’

  ‘Not,’ her mother said, ‘unless you really, really want to do it.’

  When Merrion was sixteen, her grandmother died, very trimly in her sleep, of a heart attack. She had not been a big or troublesome personality in any way, but her death left a surprising gap and made Merrion and her mother feel suddenly a small and draughty unit. She had left them everything she possessed, including the modest proceeds from the sale of the house in Llanelli, ten years previously, and Merrion had the idea, quite suddenly, that they should move from Cowbridge into Cardiff and buy a flat.