The Mistress of Alderley (16 page)

“Maybe,” she said skeptically. “But I didn't like it. It was like I was in a side compartment of his life—in fact, talk about someone's ‘bit on the side' always makes me feel uneasy, even now. He didn't mean to make me feel like that, maybe, but I did. And to add to that, my family never accepted him. They were very straitlaced, Methodist stock, and they regarded Bert Winterbottom—that's what Marius was called then—as their lovely and promising daughter's vile seducer, which he was in a way. Mind you, I was never promising in the way they thought I was. I was never going to get anywhere on my own. And in the end the affair just fizzled out. A long period when he got less and less interested, then the end. I was relieved, in a way.”

Charlie pondered the story.

“You say this was twenty-eight years ago when you two met. It must have gone on for a fair while, with your son now twenty-one.”

Betty Bagshaw looked embarrassed.

“Well, no. That was later. I feel such a fool. And I
was
a great big fool, and everyone who told me so was right.”

“What happened?”

“We met up again, several years after we'd split up. On Leeds station, it was. I'd been visiting my sister in Sheffield, he was off the London train. He'd branched out by then, started his first two supermarkets. We saw each other as we were going towards the ticket inspection barrier. Somehow everything clicked again. We both knew it. He marched me straight into the Queens Hotel, booked us into their best suite, and that was it for a couple of nights. Luxury like I'd never seen. He loved pampering and surprising people.”

“I think that stayed with him,” said Charlie.

“I suppose it would. I know that the very first time we—you know—he'd booked this lovely cottage in Northumberland. That wasn't luxury, it was loveliness: just mountains and moorlands and forests. He was so romantic, in a way.”

“But when the baby came?”

“Oh, he never acknowledged it was his. Said it could be anyone's. He knew I wasn't the Sunday school type—and hadn't been even when I was sixteen. Father could have been anyone, he said. Offered me a sum of one thousand pounds as a one-off gift. No acknowledgment of responsibility on his part.” She smiled as she sighed. “Like a fool I signed on the dotted line. I don't know that I'd have been any happier if I'd fought him in the courts, but even in 1980 a thousand didn't go far.”

“I don't suppose it did,” said Charlie. “These romantics can be surprisingly hardheaded, can't they?”

 

Thinking things over on Wednesday lunchtime, after the rector's devastating visit, Caroline could see no option but ringing Marius's solicitor and finding out her position from him. It was a Cardiff firm, dating back to the early days of the Fleetwood chain, and she had met the man for a moment when she had been down there for the weekend with Marius. To call him was embarrassing, but she told herself she had to get beyond and above embarrassment. As soon as she had finished a merely toyed-with lunch she rang him.

“Mr. Pritchard, I
am
very sorry to bother you, but it is rather difficult for me to make plans, not really knowing how I stand. I know the rent on Alderley has been paid up until the end of next month, but beyond that…”

“Yes, yes. I do understand the difficulties of your position, Mrs…. Mrs. Fawley. In fact, Mrs. Fleetwood has instructed me to answer all such questions.”

Caroline didn't quite like that “all such.”

“That's very kind of her,” she said.

“Yes, it is. Now, the codicil to the will instructs me to pay rent for a further two months after the period already covered, should that be your wish, and leaves you in addition the lump sum of ten thousand pounds, deductible from the estate.”

His voice faded into silence. That was it, then.

“I see. It's good of you to make things clear. Now I can begin to make plans,” said Caroline. Then her voice too faded into silence, and she put down the phone.

Oddly enough the thing that rankled most keenly was that “two months.” Why not three, or six? She had never thought of Marius as small-minded, but he certainly thought small when he made wills. Only a
petty
man could have specified two months. And she knew perfectly well how far ten thousand pounds went in this day and age. No distance at all. Perhaps this was some kind of standard settlement, something Mr. Pritchard always had ready—something Marius had up his sleeve for all his women.

Damn him! she thought.

Meanwhile she had another dilemma, a moral one, and one close to home. Since she had removed the note from the pocket of Marius's shirt, the whole affair it revealed seemed to have been burning a hole in her brain. She reached for her handbag and took it out again.

Christ! The eternal O! The human bike, more like. And Marius had…Marius had been on his way to…

She looked at her watch. Three o'clock. She could probably catch Oddie or Peace if she drove to Leeds now. She scrawled a note for Alexander and Stella, took out the keys to her newly restored-to-her car, and got on the road. Her rage did nothing for her driving, but it fueled her determination.

Oddie and Charlie were both busy when she arrived at Millgarth, and it was nearly five o'clock before she found herself sitting in Oddie's office, with Charlie standing by the door and Oddie behind his desk. Her wait had tensed her up psychologically, and her mixture of emotions suddenly found an outlet.

“I feel disgusted with myself.”

Oddie looked at her compassionately.

“You haven't done anything disgusting yet.”

“No, but I'm going to.”

“Do you want us to be discreet about the source of any information you're about to give us?”

Caroline's chin went up.

“No. I definitely don't. If I'm behaving badly it's because they nauseate me with their—with their farmyard behavior!”

Oddie continued to look sympathetically at her. By the door, Charlie's expression was more cynical. Caroline rummaged in her bag.

“I was…going through my wardrobe, and found that I'd put one of Marius's shirts there by mistake. I found this in the pocket. It's been washed with the shirt, but it's still readable.”

Oddie read the note, then called Charlie over and handed it to him.

“It's an assignation note,” Oddie said finally.

“Yes.”

“For Saturday, probably.”

“I looked in the Leeds directory. There's a Crescent Hotel there, near the theater.”

“Oh, we know all about the Crescent. And the handwriting is your daughter's, I take it.”

“Yes. Without a doubt…. There is a long period in the opera when her character is offstage.”

“I know. Luckily I saw a performance. Before I did I'd assumed your daughter was out of the picture. In fact, she has nothing to do from around eight-thirty to around ten. A long time with nothing to do.”

“Oh, Olivia will always find something to do. She's well known in the profession. No one would think of going to her dressing room in the course of a performance. She says her voice needs it…. Oh God! I've not been a good woman, not by old-fashioned standards, not even by my own, but I can't think what I've done to account for my daughter being a nymphomaniac who thinks nothing of stealing her mother's man.”

“I have to say, so you don't feel too guilty at bringing this in to us, that I'd guessed about this assignation before you came,” said Oddie.

She looked at him, her forehead furrowed, her mind working.

“I think, you know, I'm not feeling guilty at landing my daughter in it. She landed herself in it. What I feel guilty about is producing such a rapacious
horror
of a woman!”

She leapt to her feet and ran to the door. Charlie ran after her to escort her from the building. With prompting from him she made it to the staircase, then down and through the outer office, where Charlie let her through the electronic doors into the public area.

Sitting there was a smart, intelligent-looking woman of maybe forty-something, regarding them both. Caroline didn't see her and was blundering through toward the main door. The woman got up, however, and went over to her.

“Hello. It's Caroline Fawley, isn't it? I'm Sheila Fleetwood.

“Are you all right?” Sheila Fleetwood asked.

“Yes. Yes—I'll be fine.” Caroline was doing the plucky little wife. It had been a frequent role for her, but her choice was ironic in the circumstances. “The drive home will do me good.”

“You should
not
drive in this state. It would be asking for another tragedy. Look, I was thinking of going back to my hotel for tea. Why don't you come along and share it with me? You don't have to talk if you don't want to, but I always find that tea and scones work wonders.”

Caroline nodded miserably. She had no particular desire to go with this woman, or to like her. But somehow it already felt as if she had known her for a long while.

Sheila had obviously registered the taxi rank just around the corner from the police headquarters, and she bundled Caroline into the back of the first waiting one. She was staying at the Queens, and when they got there she gave careful orders for their tea at the desk and took Caroline up in the lift without pestering her with talk or fussy attentions. Her suite on the third floor turned out to be rather grand.

“Marius always insisted on the best. Part of the image, part of selling himself. Actually, I think he used to bring totty to this place from time to time.”

The old-fashioned word seemed to unite them, but Caroline looked around uneasily, sensing a weight of adultery in the walls and furnishings of the suite.

“Oh dear,” she said. “Things
ought
to be so difficult between us. The wronged wife always seems to have moral right on her side, but being the wronged mistress doesn't pack much moral clout.”

“Oh, I don't know,” said Sheila. “It depends on what you were told.”

“Told?”

“By Marius. What kind of assumptions you lived under. It's many years since I had any illusions about my place in his life, so I ran out of indignation and grievance long since. You, I suppose, have only just learned the truth about him.”

“Well, yes, that's true. But that wasn't entirely what upset me, made me rush out of the police station like that.”

“What was it?”

“Olivia.”

Probably Sheila could guess what was coming from that hint, but she thought it would be salutary for Caroline if she was forced to spell it out.

“The great singer in the making?” she asked.

“Great whore, more like,” said Caroline bitterly. “Oh, I feel so—so
soiled.
That they could do this to me.”

“She and Marius?”

“Yes.”

They were interrupted by the arrival of tea. Little sandwiches, bread and butter, toasted tea cakes, scones, fruitcake, and biscuits. Caroline hadn't known that afternoon tea still existed outside the tea shops in places like Harrogate or Cheltenham. She would have said she had no appetite at all, but when she began on the large tray she found quite soon that she was tucking in, and that the array of old-fashioned favorites was genuinely restorative. Sheila was tucking in with an equal heartiness.

“The question is,” Sheila said, when they were beginning to slacken, “was she just totty?”

“Olivia? Just totty as opposed to my successor?”

“Yes.”

Caroline thought.

“I should think that for her it was a matter of a night or two only. For him—I don't know. I realize now that I never knew him.
And I don't give a bugger!
”

Sheila was silent.

“OK, that's silly,” admitted Caroline. “Of course I give a bugger. Several buggers. But I hate them. Hate them for what they were doing, or going to do. Hate them for doing it to
me.
If you think I'm a raging egotist, so be it.”

“Oh, but I don't. I couldn't. Your reactions are pretty much the same as mine, when I first got to know about his activities. That was quite early on in my marriage.” She looked quickly at Caroline. “I suppose you think I should have left him.”

“I'm not the one to give marriage guidance. But yes—I think I do. The word ‘farmyard' keeps coming into my head.”

“Yes…. I suppose staying with him was a sort of seduction: I let myself come round to keeping the marriage together because I didn't want to give up the sex, the lifestyle, the security. And I thought the children needed a father, and at that point he seemed a good one. These may be excuses, but there's lots of truth in them. I do love my children, with all their…weaknesses.”

“Guy?”

“Yes, poor Guy. Currently in a custody cell. He's always felt overshadowed, kept down, undervalued. I shouldn't have said ‘their' weaknesses. Helena is fine.”

“Is Guy in serious trouble?”

“Yes. Dealing, not just use.”

“I think that's what my children suspected.”

“Typical of Guy that he never got beyond the
intention
of dealing. Thank God, of course. I intend to be around for him. The fact that he's weak, trying to make a splash without an ounce of commercial nous, doesn't make the slightest bit of difference.”

“No—why should it?”

“I intend to be around for him,” she repeated.

“For all I know Olivia may be in trouble too. I intend to do nothing at all for her.”

“She's a lot older. You expect some kind of moral sense to develop during their twenties, if it hasn't before.”

“Moral sense? She doesn't know what the term means. I feel such a failure. I can't even blame Rick, her father. He wasn't in the picture for more than her first two years. And I don't believe in bad blood or nonsense like that. It was how I brought her up—though God knows I never went in for conduct like
hers,
so it wasn't example that turned her this way.”

She seemed to be heading back toward her old mood of self-flagellation, and Sheila pushed the cake stand in her direction and said, “Have one of these. You'll feel better.” Caroline almost laughed at her faith in confectionery.

“This is the end for me,” she said. “No more men, no more affairs, not even stable ones. That's what I thought Marius's and mine was. I thought, ‘I'm lousy at marriage. This suits me better.' But the truth is, it has nothing to do with marriage. I'm just a lousy picker for any sort of relationship.”

“I expect you'll change your mind.”

“I will
not
! What about you? Will you marry the baby's father?”

Sheila looked at her for a second or two, then burst out laughing.

“Is that what he told you? That's a new one! Let me tell you the truth. I have had the odd fling during our marriage, two, to be precise. The last one was ten years ago.”

Caroline gaped.

“You mean Marius was—”

“Of course he was. My baby will be his posthumous child. He wanted another son. I resisted for ages, because I thought it was just disappointment with Guy. Not a good basis for bringing a late child into the world. In the end I gave way. Marius always got what he wanted…. Isay, I do hope it's a girl.”

“That will be a slap in the face for him. I think he really despised women, don't you? Like Mr. Dombey. I once played the first Mrs. Dombey in a television adaptation. I died in the first five minutes of the first episode. But Marius was different from Dombey. He despised us even as he made love to us.”

“I must say it never showed.”

“No. But I bet he never thought of a daughter—or of any other woman, come to that—as his successor. I should think you'd be good at running a big firm, though.”

“I've certainly never thought of myself as a business-woman,” said Sheila. “I quite like sitting on the boards of arts bodies: galleries, museums, orchestras, that sort of thing.”

“Oh God! How can you! All those ghastly people—control freaks on ego trips…Still, if you can bear the sheer awfulness of that kind of person you would probably do well as a High Street tycoon.”

Sheila shook her head.

“I've got this bulge in my belly to take care of, and for the next few years it will be a full-time job.”

“We both have burdens. You've got a baby—and I don't pretend to envy you. I've got to find somewhere to live, and start sucking up to people to revive my flagging—or currently nonexistent—career.”

“Did you make any friends around Alderley?” Sheila asked, genuinely interested in the social position of a mistress in the twenty-first century.

“Oh yes. Best of all, Jack—Sir John Mortyn-Crosse. He is a
really
good friend, and tried to warn me. Then there's the rector—well, I
thought
he was becoming a friend, but I begin to think he was just a time-server.”

“Is Sir John unmarried?”

“Widower. But no, there's no romantic involvement. He would be a financial drain on me rather than vice versa, and he farts the whole time.”

“I can't see that's an insuperable problem. In an age when organs and combinations of organs are transplanted wholesale, flatulence must be curable.”

“Perhaps none of the great medical minds have taken it up. Anyway, I've told you: I've done with men.”

“Then you'd better get your finances in order. What provision had Marius made?”

“Ten thousand pounds and two months' rent. That ‘two' hurt. I never thought Marius a cheapskate.”

“He was, though—always excepting where his own comfort and convenience were concerned. And, of course, he would never compromise his reputation as a rich and successful entrepreneur.”

“Oh, if only I had him here, to give him a piece of my mind!”

“To be fair to him he did take account of inflation. The last one got a payoff of ten thousand too, but the one before that got eight. That's on a par with the two months as a sign of…let's be kind to the dead and say ‘caution.' So you're going back to stage and TV work, are you?”

“If I can get any. What other career options are open?”

“I believe the Little Theatre in Doncaster is looking for a manager.”

“Manager? Be the big panjandrum? I don't know if I could do that. It would mean orchestrating all the giant egos into one harmonious whole—draining, I should imagine.”

“If you don't have faith in yourself, nobody else will. The point is, you'd be in charge so you could shun the giant egos—not give them engagements.”

“True. So no job for Rick.”

“Who's Rick?”

“My ghastly first husband. Exists on a diet of self-love. He was around last Saturday: he was at the performance, and he and his awful partner were at the party afterwards. I wonder if the police have been on to him.”

“Should they be?”

Caroline thought, clinging to the idea, but not wholly convinced.

“Perhaps he found out about her and Marius. Though if he bumped off everyone who deflowered—or should that be deadheaded?—his precious daughter he'd be a serial killer of Harold Shipman proportions.” But another thought had lodged in her mind. “You know, a small theater company in Doncaster doesn't sound such a bad idea. The children could keep at the same school. And South Yorkshire has quite nice houses within my price range.”

“Doubtless that was why Marius chose Alderley,” said Sheila dryly. “I'll put in a word in the right quarters. Can't promise anything. I'm only a London gadfly in the arts scene. They'd want an actor-manager, of course.”

“I'd prefer that myself…. Isn't it odd, us two getting on well like this?”

Sheila shook her head.

“Not odd for me. I got on well with all the mistresses of Marius that I met. I was going back and forth in the police station—seeing Guy, his lawyers, various policemen, and I saw you sitting in the waiting area. When you rushed out I was hanging around on the off chance of meeting up with you, after I'd had a not-very-satisfactory talk with Guy. I thought you might have been living with Marius under an illusion—all his women were—and I thought from your look that you might have learned the truth. Since it was unlikely that I'd see you at the funeral—”

Caroline erupted.

“Unlikely? Bloody impossible! Since I don't like making scenes, and since I couldn't sit silent when hypocrisies were being spouted, I shall stay well away. Actually, I can't understand why you don't do the same.”

“You forget, I loved him.”

“Once.”

“Still. Always. Why else would I be having his child at the age of forty-three? Why else would I have stayed with him through all his affairs and adventures? It wasn't really the stability and the sex and the perks of marriage. I loved him, and I think he loved me. Perhaps it was that, that always made me curious about his women…. Could you do something for me?”

“I'd like to. You've been very kind to me.”