Marrying the Mistress (7 page)

The dogs, she could see, were watching her from the dining room, their paws up on the low windowsill.
They were eager for walks but considered gardening an incomprehensibly dull activity, best regarded as a spectator sport unless the sun was out. They were also anxious about her at the moment, anxious about Guy, about the atmosphere, about the suitcases on the landing ready for Guy to collect and take to his rented rooms in Stanborough, about the disruption of routine. Their anxiety took the form of following her about, even to the lavatory, lying down outside and breathing heavily at her under the door. When the telephone rang, they raised their heads and watched her. When she wept, they came and camped on her feet, leaning against her legs. When she gardened, habit kept them inside, but worry drove them from their baskets to watch her through the window, straining to be reassured that everything was all right, in order again, normal.

‘Get down!’ she shouted at them. ‘You’re worse than
children.’

They gazed at her, not moving. She could picture their tails, poised to wag but not daring to while she presented so distraught and disconcerting a picture. They would be relieved when the boys came, when Simon and Alan arrived, and they could release themselves into habit, dashing about the kitchen, bringing welcome presents of tea towels and stray shoes. Poor dogs. They should have been a comfort just now, she should be grateful for their loyal, loving agitation, but instead all she could feel was that she hadn’t a scrap of comfort to give them because she had less than a scrap to give herself.

She got up out of the muddy spring earth and banged at the clotted patches on the knees of her trousers. She would have to change: change her clothes and brush her hair and find her pearl earrings and put the kettle on and do her best, however poor that was, to present herself to her sons as someone who had not, overnight, turned from being their support into being their burden. She went across to the brick path and, with the side of her boot, pushed the glass splinters into a neat pile. Then she turned and went slowly into the house.

‘Do we need to go at this speed?’ Alan said.

Simon glanced in the driving mirror, moved the gear shift into fifth and pulled out into the outside lane to overtake an immense curtain-sided truck, with French number plates.

‘Yes.’

‘Mum isn’t expecting us till four.’

‘I need to get there,’ Simon said. He glanced in his driving mirror again. ‘And then I need to get away again.’

Alan looked out of the car window at the cold, empty-seeming landscape, not yet free of the deadness of winter. It made him feel slightly hopeless, looking at it, or at least compounded the hopelessness he’d felt last night when the prospective owner of the bar in Fulham that Alan had been going to redesign, redecorate, had rung to say that the whole project was off: he couldn’t get the financing. He sighed now, remembering, staring at the dead fields.

‘I might stay the night,’ he said. ‘I’ll see how she is.’

Simon said, ‘We know how she is.’

‘Yes, but I expect she varies. I mean there’s probably even a bit of
relief
, but being Mum, she’ll be managing to feel guilty about that, not thankful.’

‘Relief?’

Alan yawned.

‘It hasn’t exactly been wonderful, has it? This marriage—’

‘But she’s stuck to it,’ Simon said. ‘She’s made it her life, she’s shaped everything round it—’

Alan shrugged.

‘Her choice, boy.’

Simon beat lightly on the steering wheel with his free hand.

‘No, it isn’t. That’s the point. She hasn’t had a choice.’

‘We all have choices. That’s what Dad’s doing now, choosing.’

‘It drives me mad,’ Simon said, ‘to hear you saying things like that, as if you didn’t disapprove of Dad, as if it was perfectly OK just to duck out on four decades of a relationship because you’re bored—’

‘He’s not bored.’

‘Isn’t he? Well, if he isn’t bored, what the hell is he?’

Alan opened the glove pocket in front of him and began rummaging in the muddle inside.

‘He’s worn out with never knowing what she wants, what makes her happy, what he’s doing wrong. Have you got any mints?’

‘There’s nothing edible left in this car, ever. The kids are like a plague of locusts except locusts don’t leave litter.

Dad has done exactly what he wants always. He doesn’t know what Mum wants because he’s never asked her.’

‘D’you ask Carrie?’

‘She tells me,’ Simon said. ‘Mum isn’t like that. Mum’s never insisted upon anything for herself, ever.’

‘Then she’s colluded with being made a victim.’

‘Alan,’ Simon said furiously. ‘What’s got
into
you? Where’s your sense of justice? Where’s your loyalty to Mum?’

‘I just see both sides,’ Alan said. ‘I’m sorry for Mum but I’m sorry for Dad, too. I can see what’s happened. Well, a bit anyway.’

‘And if he marries this girl and she has a baby and he alters his will in her favour, cutting us out, you’ll feel just as calm and objective and bloody superior?’

‘I expect so,’ Alan said.

Simon changed gear at the wrong speed and the gears grated loudly.

‘Hell,’ he said. ‘You and your moral high ground. You and your bloody smug refusal to be judgmental, as you put it. You and your fucking Buddhist elevation above all human dilemma. It must,’ Simon said savagely, ‘be such a comfort to know better than the rest of us. It must be such a
solace
to be gay.’

There was a small silence. Alan looked out of the window. He said, his head averted from his brother, ‘Actually, it’s the precise opposite,’ then he took a breath and added, shrugging his chin down into the upturned collar of his leather jacket, ‘but at least it stops you expecting the impossible from anyone else.’

Simon swallowed. ‘Sorry.’

‘That’s OK.’

‘I shouldn’t have—’

‘That’s
OK
. I
said.’

‘I’m just a bit apprehensive—’

‘I know. That she’ll want you to take Dad’s place. Well, you don’t have to collude with that either.’

A huge blue-and-white junction sign loomed at the edge of the motorway. Simon flicked his eyes briefly up at it.

‘There we go. Stanborough.’

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ Alan said, ‘if I never saw Stanborough again.’

Laura was waiting for them at the back door. She looked as she always did, composed inside conventional, controllable clothes – a shirt collar sitting neatly at the neck of a good sweater above well-tailored trousers and brushed suede loafers. She had brushed her hair, too, and found her earrings. She smelled of L’Air du Temps, which she had been wearing since she was eighteen. She said, kissing them both in turn as if the meeting were profoundly unexceptional, ‘There’s no etiquette for this, is there? I really don’t know what to say to either of you.’

They followed her inside. The dogs raced madly about the kitchen, collecting tributes, towels and cushions and a wooden bootjack Alan had made in a long-ago school woodwork class. He bent to retrieve it.

‘I’d forgotten that. Woodwork Job Two. Job One was a key-rack shaped like a key. With hooks in.’

Laura said, ‘I’ve still got it. It’s by the garden door. I don’t think you ever progressed to Job Three.’

Alan crouched so that the dogs could wag and lick ecstatically all over his shoulders and face.

Laura said apologetically, ‘I’m afraid they’re hysterical with worry—’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘And you, Mum?’ Simon said. ‘Are you hysterical with worry?’

‘On and off,’ she said. She began collecting a teapot and mugs and a bottle of milk.

‘Could I have coffee?’ Alan said.

His mother held up a jar of instant-coffee granules. She said, ‘I so don’t want to be a burden, a problem—’

Simon put his hands in his pockets and rattled his keys and his change. Carrie was always asking him not to. She said it encouraged Jack, that it was the male equivalent of the girls’ endless fiddling with and tossing of their hair, and equally exasperating. Simon had a sudden longing for Carrie, to have her there in this well-ordered kitchen where nobody was behaving like themselves except the dogs. Carrie would help them to be practical, not emotional. Carrie would remind Simon, by her very presence, that his first obligation was to her and the children, and not to his mother. She would take away his guilt.

Wouldn’t she?

‘Just because you can see someone’s problem,’ she
often said to Simon, ‘it doesn’t follow that it’s up to you to fix it.’

Simon said, ‘Mum, you need help, though. Your future needs sorting.’

Laura turned her back on them to unplug the kettle. Her back was eloquent of someone who doesn’t believe they have a future. She said, ‘I’ll manage.’

Alan rose to his feet. ‘Shhh,’ he mouthed at Simon.

Simon said, ‘We have to do nuts and bolts, Mum. Money, housing, that sort of stuff.’

‘Oh, I know.’ She turned and poured water into the teapot and into Alan’s coffee mug. ‘But do we have to do that today?’

‘Why not?’ Alan said gently.

She bent over the teapot. She was biting her lip. Simon was afraid she was about to cry.

‘Isn’t it a bit soon?’

‘Soon—’

‘Should we not talk about what’s happened? How I feel? How – how I’m to cope?’

Simon moved across the kitchen and put an arm around her shoulders.

‘Oh Mum—’

She turned and put her face into the shoulder of his jacket. He put his arms around her. Her own shoulders were shaking.

‘Suppose I can’t cope—’

‘Hey, you can. You’re shocked now. It
is
a shock, an awful one.’

Alan came round the table. He stood close to his
mother and brother. He said, ‘In a way, you’ve been coping for years. If you think about it.’

Laura felt in her trouser pocket for a handkerchief. It was white cotton, nicely laundered. The anachronism of laundered handkerchiefs was an abiding fascination for Simon’s children.

‘What’s she think tissues are for?’ Rachel had demanded.

‘Ignoring,’ Simon said.

Laura wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘Mum, you are
not
to say sorry. About anything.’

She blew her nose again. She said, not looking at either of them, ‘Have you seen your father?’

Simon snorted.

‘Not bloody likely.’

Alan said, ‘I’m seeing him on Sunday.’

‘With – with—’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. But she exists, Mum. She’s part of the pattern now.’

‘Of the
problem,’
Simon said.

Laura moved out of Simon’s arms and began to put the mugs and teapot on the tray.

Simon said, ‘Can’t we drink it in here?’

‘I lit the fire,’ she said. ‘In the sitting room.’

‘Better here,’ Alan said.

‘All right,’ she said. She sounded offended.

Alan put a hand on her back between her shoulder blades.

‘Sit down,’ he said.

She sat, head bent. Simon and Alan sat, too, Alan beside her, Simon opposite.

‘I always thought,’ Laura said to the tabletop, ‘that I’d turn out not to be good enough, not exciting enough. I always thought he’d have an affair with one of his pupils. There was one particularly, called Fenella, with red hair. I was always very suspicious. But he said he never did, not with Fenella, not with any of them. He said there’d never been anyone – until, well, this one.’

Alan picked up the teapot and poured tea into mugs for his mother and brother. He put one mug in front of Laura.

‘You don’t need to analyse, Mum. There’s no point. You don’t need to tell yourself you’re not this or not enough that—’

‘I
do,’
Laura said, raising her face. ‘Why else would he go?’

Simon said tensely, ‘Because he is who he is. And always has been.’

‘Si—’ Alan said warningly.

‘I’m not having Mum sitting here,’ Simon said, too loudly, ‘thinking it’s her fault.’

Laura turned to look at him. She gave him a faint smile.

‘What I can’t get used to,’ she said, ‘is finding that something I’ve been afraid of happening for forty years actually is happening.’

Alan poured milk into his coffee. He felt in his pocket for his cigarettes, remembered he was in his mother’s house, and took his hand out of his pocket again.

‘All I wanted,’ Laura said, ‘was to be what
he
wanted.’

Simon shut his eyes and wrapped his hands hard round his tea mug.

‘Oh Mum—’

‘He wanted me to be like him, to be sure of who I was and where I was going and what my aims were. He wanted me to
know
. And I couldn’t. I never have.’

Simon and Alan said nothing.

‘You don’t want to hear this,’ Laura said. ‘Do you?’

Alan made a face.

‘It’s not that—’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘Mum,’ Alan said. He put his forearms on the table and loosely clasped his hands together. ‘Mum, it’s not that we aren’t sympathetic. It’s not that we don’t feel this is very hard for you. But there’s no
point
, Mum, in talking like this.’

Laura said tensely, ‘What do you mean?’

Alan avoided Simon’s eye. He said, ‘What I mean is, Mum, that we have to deal with what
is
, not what might have been.’

‘And?’

‘And nothing. What
is
, is that you are going to be on your own because Dad wants to marry someone else.
That’s
what we have to deal with.’

Laura half rose, shoving her chair back with a clatter on the tiled floor. She said, her voice rising, ‘Are you taking your father’s side? Are you
condoning
what your father has done?’

‘No,’ Alan said. He didn’t look up and his voice was deliberately steady. ‘No. That’s not what I said. I said—’

‘If you can’t at least understand how I feel,’ Laura shrieked, ‘then I really, really don’t want to hear
what
you said!’

Simon stood up. Laura glared at him.

‘Are you going to tell me just to get on with the wreck of my life, too?’

‘Mum, he didn’t say that, he didn’t—’

‘He did!’ Laura screamed. Her face was flushed. ‘He did!’ And then she turned and fled from the room, slamming the door behind her. The dogs, back in their baskets for a temporary cessation of tension, looked as if they had been kicked.