Marrying the Mistress (9 page)

‘That’s easy. That’s professional. This is personal.’

‘Too right,’ she said. She took her hand out of his. ‘OK. I’ll come. For five minutes.’

Alan leaned against the pub bar and ordered a mineral water. He rather wanted something stronger, but thought he would wait for that until his father came and they could use the ritual of deciding and ordering
and paying to get them over the first few minutes. It wasn’t, exactly, that Alan felt nervous about meeting his father, it was more that he felt anxious about conveying satisfactorily the important fact that he was going to stand by both his parents without getting heavy about any of it.

He didn’t know this pub. He didn’t actually know Bayswater at all, it wasn’t his bit of London, but his father had suggested it because it was close to Merrion’s flat and he was spending the weekend with Merrion. Guy had said they’d meet for a drink in the pub and then go round the corner to a good Italian, a plan which made Alan think his father intended to include Merrion in the pub part, but not the Italian. Alan felt, in advance, a little sorry for Merrion. It would be an ordeal for her, however they played it. When he thought of Merrion, he thought of himself saying – through tears – a year ago when Callum left, ‘I didn’t
ask
to fall in love with you.’ It had been a pretty stupid thing to say, no doubt, but it had been true. Carrie had agreed with him.

‘We can kind of make ourselves available to falling in love,’ she’d said, ‘but that’s all the control we do have.’

Alan took a mouthful of his mineral water. It was too salty and the bubbles were aggressively bubbly. He’d tried, during the long and distressing evening with his mother, to explain that neither Guy nor Merrion had planned the pain they were causing – to themselves as well as to anyone else – and that things happened in life, some good, more bad, and you had
to just accept them without screwing yourself up by apportioning blame and finding reasons. She’d got very angry with him, angry enough to ring Simon at home, twice, in order, Alan supposed, to get the kind of furiously sympathetic response she felt she was entitled to. Alan had tried to prevent her, but he couldn’t. She felt he was no substitute for Simon, never had been, and she blamed him for, as she put it, making Simon go home and not stay the night as she’d wanted him to. Simon had needed a bit of urging, admittedly, but Alan could see that both Simon and Laura would be in pieces if Simon stayed. He’d have convinced her she was utterly wronged and she’d have convinced him that only he could save her. So Alan had put Simon’s car keys into his hand and told him to go, almost pushed him out of the house. Then he’d poured Laura a gin and tonic and she said she never drank gin and tipped it down the sink.

Alan hadn’t minded. In his world, in his life, people got awkward when they got upset, it was part of the situation, part of the result of losing control. Alan had learned very early on, when he realized that there was something deep in him that made him an outsider to his upbringing, that there weren’t patterns. There were consequences, sure, often as random as the behaviour that caused them, but there wasn’t order, there wasn’t symmetry and tidy sequence. There hadn’t been much future in trying to explain this to his mother, who interpreted his efforts as a peculiarly unkind form of detachment from her suffering, and in the end he’d
had to give up and simply sit there, holding her hand, and hoping that his silence and his touch conveyed at least something of what she wanted from him.

The double doors from the pavement swung inwards and two men in leather jackets came in, then an older man in a flat cap, and then Alan’s father, holding one door open for a tall girl with a mane of hair, wearing a dark overcoat that came almost to the floor. Alan straightened up a little and turned towards them, but didn’t move. His father looked – well, how did he look? Familiar, Alan thought, handsome, friendly. And tense. Distinctly tense. He took a couple of steps forward and put his arms round his father.

‘Hi, Dad.’

‘Alan,’ Guy said. He held Alan hard for a second. ‘I don’t know whether to say thank you for coming.’ He gave a brief laugh and turned away, curving an arm out to include the girl in the long overcoat. ‘This is Merrion.’

‘I had to be,’ the girl said. ‘Didn’t I?’

She didn’t hold her hand out. Alan smiled at her.

‘Glass of wine?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘A short? Mineral water?’

‘No, thanks,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t swallow anything right now.’

‘She nearly didn’t come,’ Guy said.

Alan said, ‘A drink would give you something to do.’

She shook her head.

Guy said, ‘She won’t ever do anything that makes life easier for herself. She was born in a hair shirt.’

‘What d’you want, Dad, beer, wine—?’

Guy moved towards the bar.

‘I’ll get it—’

‘No,’ Alan said. ‘You can give me lunch. I’m doing this.’ He looked at Merrion. ‘I’m going to order you a glass of wine. You can ignore it if you want to.’

She gave a fleeting smile.

‘I wouldn’t be that churlish.’

Alan turned back to the bar. Guy put out a hand and took Merrion’s nearest one and squeezed it. He wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to do anything, say anything, that she didn’t have to perform for him, prove to his son what a winner she was. He wanted to tell her that any way she wanted to be was fine by him.

She took her hand carefully out of his and opened her coat. She was wearing jeans underneath, and a pale-grey sweater with a polo collar. She ran a hand round the inside of the polo collar, as if to let some air in to cool her thoughts, calm her. Alan turned back from the bar and handed her a glass of white wine.

‘Thanks,’ she said.

He held out a half-pint beer tankard to his father. Then he picked up his mineral water.

‘No toast,’ he said. ‘We wouldn’t know what to drink to.’

‘I do,’ Merrion said. She lifted her glass.

‘You do?’

‘Peace of mind,’ she said. She lowered her glass and took a sip. ‘I’ve never not had it before.’

In the sitting room of the house in Tooting, Simon lay asleep in a drift of Sunday newspapers. Jack had extracted the sports sections earlier in the day, and Carrie had taken the arts and review supplements to read on the kitchen table, leaving Simon with news. He thought briefly, before he fell asleep, that these sorts of age and gender divisions about newsprint were probably happening along precisely these lines, all over the world. Women only wanted news if it concerned the humanity of human beings and men only wanted reviews of things they were going to see. Teenagers didn’t want either. Culture smacked of school, and news couldn’t hold a candle to the gloomy drama of their own lives. Jack was very gloomy just now. Carrie thought he was in love. Simon thought he’d been left out of the long-jump team and had also begun to realize, dimly, that public academic examinations of real consequence were only just over a year away. Whatever the reason, Jack was fighting his demons with silence and an expression like doom.

Carrie had wanted Simon to go to bed after lunch, properly to bed with outer clothes off and the curtains pulled across.

‘You look exhausted—’

He yawned.

‘I ate too much lunch—’

‘You know it wasn’t that,’ Carrie said. ‘You know what this week’s been like.’

She’d answered the telephone to Laura several times in the last few days and on a couple of occasions had
not only said Simon was out when he wasn’t, but had also not told Simon of the calls.

‘I want you to sleep
properly.’

‘Then I won’t sleep tonight and that I can’t stand. Nothing seems manageable at 3 a.m.’

They’d compromised in the end and Simon had settled down along the length of the sitting-room sofa. He declined a rug.

‘Newspaper’s perfectly warm—’

‘I don’t understand,’ Carrie said, ‘why men are so unbelievably ungracious about being thoughtfully looked after.’

He blew her a kiss, his eyes on a front-page photograph of the Foreign Secretary. She went out of the room, closing the door behind her with something perfectly adjusted between a slam and a click. When she had gone, he found he would rather have liked to have had her back again.

In the kitchen, Rachel and Emma had cleared up approximately, doing the simple stuff like putting plates in the dishwasher and leaving anything that required application and conscientiousness, such as scouring out the roasting tin that had held the chicken. Carrie thought of summoning them back to finish, decided against it on the grounds of avoiding friction and the consequent attrition of her own energies, and dug in the cupboard under the sink to find her rubber gloves. They were yellow, as yellow as sunflowers, and for some reason a source of infinite amusement to her children. If my mother were still alive, she told herself, I’d ring
her now and tell her how I was feeling. I’d tell her that I had this sensation of dragging a whole lot of boulders uphill – nice boulders, boulders that I can’t help loving despite their shortcomings – and that just as I get near a resting place, never mind the actual summit, one or two of the boulders roll out of my grasp and bump steadily back down to the bottom again.

Behind her, the back door that led to the garden and to the path that ran along the side of the house from the road, opened.

‘Hello,’ Alan said.

Carrie turned, her yellow-gloved hands still deep in the sink.

‘How very nice.’

He came in and closed the door behind him. He was holding a slender tube of florist’s paper with a small bunch of creamy narcissus heads sticking out of the top. He laid them on the table among the scattered placemats and unused spoons and forks and came to give Carrie a kiss.

He said, almost conspiratorially, ‘I met her.’

Carrie looked at him intently.

‘And?’

‘Tall. Very striking. Nervous as a kitten—’

‘And?’

‘Nice,’ Alan said. ‘Very. Not—’ He paused.

‘Not what?’

‘Not after Dad for anything except Dad. As far as I could see.’ He looked round the kitchen. ‘Where’s Si?’

‘Passed out under the papers.’

‘I bought you some flowers.’

‘I saw. They’re very pretty. You are the only man I’ve ever known who gives me flowers.’

Alan picked the kettle up and leaned across Carrie to fill it from the cold tap.

‘What’s the score here?’

‘In a nutshell,’ Carrie said, ‘Simon is worn out with confusion and being pressured, Jack thinks it’s really cool to fall for someone half your age, Rachel thinks it’s weird and Emma is worrying about Gran’s dogs.’

‘And you?’

Carrie put the last saucepan upside down on the draining board, pulled the plug out of the sink and took her gloves off with a snap.

‘Alan—’

‘Yes?’

She looked straight at him.

‘I don’t blame him.’

Alan said thoughtfully, his hand on the kettle as if it needed steadying while it boiled, ‘You’ve never liked her much, have you?’

‘Let’s put it another way,’ Carrie said. ‘Let’s say that she’s never liked me much.’

‘Oh come—’

‘Alan,’ Carrie said, ‘I don’t even think it’s personal. I don’t think she’d have liked anyone who married Simon.’

‘Does it get between you and Si?’

‘Sometimes. Depends on how I’m feeling. He forgets sometimes, that I haven’t a mother myself to counter
her with. She forgets that, too. Don’t use that coffee – it was on offer, and no wonder. The stuff in the black jar is much better.’ She went over to the table and picked the narcissi up, inhaling their astonishingly strong scent. ‘These are lovely.’

‘Would you like coffee?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Dad is so happy,’ Alan said. ‘I do this laid-back stuff but I can’t always carry it off to myself. I liked seeing him like that, I liked him being, well, appreciated.’

‘Does she flirt with him?’

‘No. Not the type. She’s a professional woman, she’s got a kind of detachment. And a Welsh accent.’

‘Welsh!’

‘Not very. Just a lilt. It’s lovely.’

‘Do you,’ Carrie said, sitting down by the cluttered table, still holding the narcissi, ‘feel disloyal?’

‘No,’ Alan said.

‘Strict truth, please.’

‘Yes,’ Alan said.

‘Because your mother couldn’t really hold a candle to this girl—’

‘Because,’ Alan said, taking a swallow of coffee, ‘my mother’s got nothing left to fight with. All these years, and that’s all she’s got. Just all these years.’

‘There’s you two—’

‘Not when we’re our age. It doesn’t count any more. You should see her, Carrie. She’s sitting in that house with every cushion plumped and the bath shining and the garden all perfect and you know she’s trying
not to ask herself what it’s all for. For years she could kid herself it was for Dad, or Dad and her, but now that veil’s been torn away, too. She’s made something Dad’s told her he doesn’t want.’

Carrie began to unwrap her flowers.

‘She didn’t do it for him. She did it to show him he hadn’t left any space for her, in his life.’

‘Come on—’

‘True,’ Carrie said. ‘Don’t confuse independence and defiance.’ She got up and began to search in a cupboard for a vase. ‘When did she last earn a penny piece?’