Marrying the Mistress (28 page)

‘OK. Mum, I’ve got to—’

‘What?’

‘I’ve got to go,’ Alan said. He took the phone away from his ear. Charlie took it out of his hand and switched it off. He winked at Alan.

‘Unless she’d like to join in?’

When Jack saw Simon on the pavement outside the school gates, he had an immediate panic. Simon had never come to meet him from school, not since his nursery-school days, and the sight of him hanging about rather apprehensively on the edge of the pavement, his hands in the pockets of his inevitably crumpled suit, made Jack think immediately that there’d
been a disaster. He forgot Adam and Rich, dawdling along beside him as they seemed to at the moment, like a couple of spaniels, and sprinted forward.

‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing,’ Simon said. He was trying to smile.

‘Where’s Mum?’

‘At work,’ Simon said. He put a hand out to touch Jack and it hovered, uncertain where to land. ‘Where did you think she’d be?’

‘Is she OK?’

‘Yes, of course—’

‘And Rach and Ems?’

Simon’s hand brushed Jack’s shoulder and slid off.

‘Everyone’s OK, Jack. Everyone’s fine. I’m not here with bad news. Nothing’s happened, promise.’

Jack peered at his father.

‘Why’re you here then?’

Simon shrugged a little. He said with difficulty, ‘I felt bad. I felt – well, I felt I’d let you down—’

Jack glanced over his shoulder. Adam and Rich were standing eight feet away, pretending they weren’t anything to do with anything. Jack jerked his head in their direction.

‘See you,’ he said to them.

Adam glanced up.

‘Later?’ he said.

‘Nah,’ Jack said. ‘Tomorrow.’

He willed Adam not to say, ‘You OK?’

‘You OK?’ Adam said.

Jack nodded. Rich pulled at Adam’s sleeve.

‘See you,’ he said. Jack nodded again. They went wandering off, their school bags bashing into one another.

‘Your friends?’ Simon said.

‘Yes. Some of them—’

‘Looking after you?’

Jack shrugged.

‘Seems like it—’

‘Sorry,’ Simon said.

‘Sorry what?’

‘Sorry it wasn’t me. Or Mum.’

Jack said, ‘Could we get a move on?’

He stepped past Simon into the gutter and began to walk along the road. Simon ran to catch up with him.

‘I didn’t mean to embarrass you in front of your friends—’

‘You didn’t.’

‘I just wanted to see you, to tell you I was sorry.’

Jack put his head down. He began to walk faster.

‘You did. It’s OK. I
said.’

‘Can I ask you,’ Simon said, dodging other people on the road edge to keep up with Jack. ‘Can I ask you something?’

Jack nodded.

‘When – when it happened, when you found out—’

He stopped.

Jack stopped walking.

‘What?’

‘When you found out,’ Simon said, stopping, too, and facing him, ‘why didn’t you come and tell me or Mum?’

Jack sighed. He shifted his school bag from one shoulder to the other.

‘I couldn’t.’

‘Why not? We’d met Moll, we’d seen what she meant to you—’

‘Dad,’ Jack said, interrupting.

‘What.’

‘You weren’t listening,’ Jack said.

Simon said earnestly, ‘But you didn’t
try
us.’

‘I couldn’t.’

‘You couldn’t? Why couldn’t you?’

‘There wasn’t any point,’ Jack said, and began to walk again.

‘Can you tell me—’

‘There hasn’t been any point for ages. Ever since this Grando thing. You’re always too tired or too busy or out or something.’

Simon said, ‘And Mum?’

‘Same,’ Jack said briefly.

They stopped to cross the road by some traffic lights. Simon put a hand on Jack’s arm.

‘Probably,’ Jack said, ‘I cross twenty roads a day all by myself.’

‘I don’t,’ Simon said. He waited for Jack to shrug his hand off. Jack didn’t. The lights changed and they went across together, Simon’s hand under Jack’s arm.

‘So you went to Grando.’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you tell me why?’

Jack screwed his face up.

‘He’s OK.’

‘Could you try a bit harder?’

Jack stopped walking again. He said, staring past Simon rather than at him, ‘He talked to me.’

‘Just that?’

‘He listened,’ Jack said, ‘he made time for me.’ He looked quickly at Simon. He said, quite slowly, ‘He didn’t make me feel I was just a bloody messy teenage pest.’

Simon’s face twitched.

‘I see.’

‘He’s in this grotty flat,’ Jack said. ‘He’s only got his clothes and some books. But he never—’

‘He never what?’

‘He never asked me to be sorry for him. He was just sorry for me.’

‘Yes.’

‘Because he knew,’ Jack said loudly. ‘He
knows.’

Simon said tentatively, ‘And I don’t?’

Jack’s gaze dropped. He kicked at the uneven edge of a pavement slab.

‘I don’t know what you know,’ he said. ‘How can I? You never say.’

Rachel had left her bedroom door slightly open. The landing light was on as usual so that Rachel could see across the stairwell and notice that Emma’s door was shut. Emma had gone to bed halfway through supper, saying she had a headache.

‘The same headache?’ Carrie said. Carrie looked as if she had a headache herself.

‘I don’t know,’ Emma said.

‘Is it in the same place?’

Emma had twiddled some spaghetti into a nest shape and then taken her fork out of the nest and laid the fork aside on her plate.

‘I can’t remember.’

Carrie had found a packet of paracetamol in a kitchen drawer and made Emma swallow one. Then she’d taken Emma upstairs and put her to bed as if she were six.

When she came down, she said to Rachel, ‘I wonder if it’s her eyesight—’

‘You’ll never get her to wear glasses. She’d freak.’

‘Why should she keep having headaches?’

Rachel was reading the weekly colour supplement of the evening newspaper. There was an article in it on how stress made some girls into sticks and some into balloons.

‘Stress,’ she said.

‘Why should Emma be stressed?’ Carrie said.

Rachel shrugged. If Carrie didn’t think the whole evening hadn’t been stressed, with Simon first playing super-dad all over Jack and then insisting on taking him out for a drink, then she wasn’t going to point it out. Jack looked as if he didn’t know what to do, as if he hadn’t a clue as to what was expected of him. He hadn’t eaten his spaghetti either, he’d just picked some bits of ham out of the sauce and left the rest in a tomato-y mess, like Emma had. Rachel had eaten hers. She wished she hadn’t, but she had. She tried not to think of how her tummy would look in the shower. She pushed the colour supplement away from her.

‘I’ll clear up,’ she said to Carrie.

Carrie was nursing a mug of herbal tea. Her hair was all over her shoulders. It needed a wash, Rachel thought, or a brush at least.

‘Will you?’

Rachel got up.

‘Yes.’

‘Actually,’ Carrie said, ‘don’t bother. It’s very kind of you, but I’ll do it. I need something mindless to do while I wait for Dad and Jack to get back.’

‘OK.’

‘Have you got homework—’

‘Don’t ask,’ Rachel said. ‘Just don’t
always
ask.’

‘Sorry. Reflex.’

Rachel looked at the table. It was appalling to realize that she could easily have eaten what Jack and Emma had left on their plates. She jerked her tummy muscles in, and held them.

‘See you later,’ Rachel said.

Carrie lifted her face.

‘Give me a kiss.’

‘You never want a kiss—’

‘I do now.’

Rachel bent and kissed Carrie’s cheek. It felt dry and a little rough. Trudy thought Carrie was pretty but didn’t make the best of herself.

‘What d’you mean, the best?’ Rachel said. ‘She doesn’t make
anything.’

Once upstairs, Rachel lay on her bed. She raised her legs into the air, first left, then right, then both together, and felt the satisfactory pull in her abdomen. You ought really, she knew, to do these exercises on the floor, but it was too much to do at night, too much to ask of somebody with all the preoccupations Rachel had. She turned on her side and looked out through her open door at Emma’s closed one. She thought of going in and sitting on Emma’s bed and trying on the butterfly hair clips Sonia had given her. But it would be a hassle. Emma wouldn’t want her to, out of sheer perversity, and she’d shriek if Rachel so much as put a hand on the butterfly clips and then Carrie would come up and there’d be a scene and Emma would say her headache was worse.

Downstairs, the telephone rang. Rachel became alert.

‘Hello?’ she heard Carrie say. ‘Hello?’ and then, in a different voice, ‘Oh, hello, Laura.’

Rachel rolled quietly off her bed and on to the floor. Then she crawled out on to the landing and lay against the banisters, peering down towards the hall and the open kitchen door.

‘No,’ Carrie said. ‘No, he isn’t.’

Rachel heard the scrape of furniture on the kitchen floor as if Carrie were pulling a stool over towards the counter where the telephone was.

‘He’s out, Laura,’ Carrie said. Her voice was quite loud, louder, Rachel thought, than it needed to be for an ordinary conversation. ‘He’s out with Jack. They have gone out together. No. No, I don’t know when they’ll be back, I didn’t ask, Laura. I did not ask.’

There was a pause. Rachel pictured Carrie perched on a stool, her elbows on the counter, and her hair swinging forward over the hand that held the receiver.

‘I’m not sure,’ Carrie said, ‘that that is any of your business, is it, Laura? If Simon and his son choose to go out together, they aren’t really obliged, are they, to account to you for their reasons? Yes, Jack has been upset this week, but that’s a family matter, a family affair—’

She stopped. Rachel raised her head a little. Emma’s bedroom door opened a few inches and revealed Emma, in her pink trackpant pyjama bottoms and a white T-shirt with a
diamanté
heart on the front.

‘Granny?’ Emma mouthed.

Rachel nodded.

‘No!’ Carrie said with vehemence from the kitchen.

Emma opened her door a little wider and sat down in the doorway. She had the headphones from her personal stereo slung round her neck.

‘Is she—?’ Emma whispered.

‘Shhh!’ Rachel said.

‘Yes, you did hear me,’ Carrie said. ‘You heard me perfectly clearly. I said no. I said – or I meant – no, I will not get Simon to ring you when he comes in. I may not even tell him you rang.’

The stool scraped on the kitchen floor. Carrie must be gesturing.

‘Because he has had enough!’ Carrie shouted. ‘Because I have had enough! We have all had enough of your demands and your complaints and your absolute refusal to blame yourself for anything! You are making our life intolerable, you are putting so much pressure on Simon and then he takes it out on us and we
all
suffer!’

She stopped again, abruptly. Emma crept forward until she was leaning against the opposite banister to Rachel.

‘I don’t care!’ Carrie yelled. ‘I don’t bloody
care
any more! You can cry your eyes out but I’ve utterly run out of any sympathy I’ve ever had for you. And I’ll tell you something else. I’ll tell you something else, Laura, something I should have told you months ago, years probably. If you fight me for Simon, Laura, I’ll not only fight you back, tooth and nail, but I’ll win. Do you hear me? I’ll
win!’

Then the telephone was crashed down. Rachel and Emma sat up.

‘Wow,’ Emma whispered. Rachel didn’t answer. She crawled to the top of the staircase and crouched there, as if she were wondering whether to go down. They heard Carrie get off the stool and pad across the kitchen and then they heard the soft rip of paper being torn off the roll of kitchen towel that hung by the cooker on a wooden bracket. Then they heard something else, a small, jerky, piteous sound, like a little animal in pain.

‘Oh God,’ Emma whispered. ‘Rach, she’s crying.’

Guy was possessed by a huge restlessness. He’d tried to sleep; he’d even thought he would be able to sleep, but the illuminated green numbers on Merrion’s clock radio said it was ten-past two and then five to three and then a quarter to four. Guy got up, gingerly, and went out to the kitchen, not turning any lights on in case Merrion woke up and asked him if he was all right. ‘Absolutely fine,’ he’d say, and she’d say, ‘No you’re not,’ and it would all start again.

He slid the kitchen door shut and turned on the lamp that stood in the angle of the tiny kitchen counter and threw such interesting angles of light and shadow. Guy had never considered light as an aesthetic form in a house before: he’d only, at Hill Cottage, regarded light as being sufficiently dim to watch television properly or sufficiently bright to see to read or shave. But Merrion thought about light. Her blinds and lamps and spotlights let light fall in certain pools and patterns
and degrees so that moods and atmospheres were altered. Like so much about Merrion, her way of looking at things had made such a difference to him, such an intriguing, illuminating difference.

He filled the kettle and plugged it in. He wasn’t sure he really wanted anything to drink but he had a feeling that to go through the ritual of making a drink would be reassuring. His mother had been a habitual insomniac and had constructed a series of rituals around the problem, as if to assert that she was in no way defeated, re-making her bed a dozen times a night, opening and closing the curtains, walking briskly up and down the stairs. Guy pictured her still at it, in her eighties, dressed in his father’s old pyjamas, going up and down the stairs at Hill Cottage whenever she came to stay, counting as she went.

‘It has to be fifty. Fifty steps. Forty-nine doesn’t work and nor does fifty-one.’

She had been possessed, right to the end, with formidable energy, helping Laura barrow loads of manure for the vegetable garden only two months before her death. The garden was the one thing that united Laura and his mother, the one space of territory where Laura didn’t feel inadequate and Guy’s mother understood at least something of her daughter-in-law’s nature.