The Mistress of Alderley Page 6

  “Guy’s not so bad.”

  “He’s only got one topic of conversation.”

  Stella hardly bothered to suppress a smile. “He may be mad about money but I prefer him to Helena. Bossy little thing she is. At least she won’t be coming. At home tending her mother over those first few difficult weeks. Yuck!”

  “They’ve probably both had difficult childhoods, what with Marius’s affairs and all that.”

  “Just like us. We seem to be surrounded by multiple adulterers.” They looked at each other. “Marvelous that we’ve grown up so normal and nice, isn’t it?”

  They roared with laughter, but as Alexander saw the bus approaching and put out his arm for it, he said, “I just hope Mum knows what she’s doing, that’s all.”

  “When has she ever known that?” said Stella.

  Chapter 6

  Behind the Idyll

  The next weekend was a rare one away from home for Caroline. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first Fleetwood’s supermarket, in Cardiff, and Marius was obliged to be there and speak at the celebratory dinner. He wanted Caroline with him, or at least near him, and though she probably disliked such occasions as much as Sheila (who had flatly refused to go) she agreed to accompany him, to sit discreetly at one of the lower tables, and to take nominal occupancy of an adjacent suite in the hotel.

  “If it was any other sort of do we wouldn’t have to be so hole-in-the-corner,” said Marius. “But a Fleetwood company event with lots of flattering publicity calls for caution.”

  So Caroline undertook a horrendous journey on Virgin Trains which left her feeling dirty and angry, and the two children had the house to themselves. Caroline felt she knew them well enough to trust they would not throw an orgy, suddenly start in on sex and drugs. With Olivia, at the same age, she would have been more apprehensive.

  In fact, as Stella remarked to her brother, it was a hideously dull weekend. If Alexander had been old enough to drive his mother’s car, things might have been different, but he couldn’t even think of having lessons until he was seventeen. Stella had to take the bus to Doncaster and go to an afternoon showing of a film (last time, they had had a lift home arranged, but in spite of ringing around all their acquaintances, Stella had not found one going in that weekend, and would have risked being stranded there overnight). For Alexander the best thing offered in the way of entertainment was an afternoon walk to the village.

  As it turned out, Marsham did offer more than he had expected. First he went to Mr. Patel’s shop, where he didn’t buy more things than he needed or wanted because he was too hard up and too canny, but he did buy two packets of cigarettes, with which he intended to smoke himself silly over the weekend if he could do it without Stella guessing his new vice. One of Alexander’s pleasures was doing things without people knowing.

  As he left the shop with cheery farewells to its owner, he bumped into Gina Watters, the rector’s daughter. Gina was the sort of girl Alexander thought he might fancy, if he went in for older women. Neat, rounded where it mattered, but quite sharp and funny.

  “Hi, Gina. I thought you’d be back in Leeds.”

  Her face creased into a smile of anticipation.

  “Tuesday. I can’t wait. It seems like months since I went clubbing. Well—it is months. I’ve been working like a navvy to finance the good life once I get away from this dump. Here—wait a sec: I only want a box of tissues, then you can walk me home.”

  Alexander wondered where the idea of walking a girl home came from, and concluded it was from her antediluvian parents. When she came out clutching her box, he asked her, “And is the Metropolitan University convenient for the club scene in Leeds?”

  Gina stopped and looked at him.

  “You’re a little Sherlock, aren’t you?”

  “It’s no big deal, is it? I thought it was your parents, not you, who made a secret of it.”

  “It is. And do you know, we’ve never talked about it, them and me. I noticed when I got my place that they always just said ‘Leeds,’ and when I twigged what was going on I thought I ought to go along with it. It’s a fairly harmless piece of snobbery, isn’t it? And it’s not as though Leeds University proper is one of the world’s great universities.”

  “But it’s a pretty good one, isn’t it? Whereas the Metropolitan University…”

  “Now who’s being a snob? It suits me. It has the sort of course I can manage without too much sweat.”

  “That’s nice. Do you tell the people there about Mum having come to live in the village?”

  She stopped again to look at him.

  “What’s all this about?”

  “I’m just asking.”

  “Well, I may have. I mean, we haven’t got much in this little arsehole of a place, have we? There’s those from Manchester at Uni who boast about all the rock groups there, and how they’ve met this or that lead singer, slept with that one, maybe….”

  “Do you believe them?”

  “Some people will sleep with any one. Anyway, we haven’t got much here, and you can’t boast about a baronet in Leeds Metropolitan circles, so it has to be your mum.”

  “And Marius?”

  “Well, yes. The ‘mistress installed in state’ story needs the rich lover as the other part of the equation. Why?”

  “Do you know someone called Pete Bagshaw?”

  Gina creased her brow.

  “My best friend’s on-off boyfriend is called Pete, and then something common. It could be Bagshaw. I barely know him.”

  “But you could have told your best friend—”

  “About your mother? I’ve definitely told Trix. She’s my flatmate. We talk about everything.”

  “And she could have told her boyfriend?”

  “Yes. What is this?”

  They were now outside the rectory, and Alexander did not answer her, saying instead, “Mum’s getting the idea that she’s being accepted in the village.”

  “Well, she is, in a way.”

  “What way’s that?”

  “Well, you know”—Gina was very hot on “you know”s, which she could have caught from the prime minister—“everyone’s chuffed as hell at having an actress and a television star living here, and the fact of having a multimillionaire businessman whose picture appears in the financial pages of the broadsheets goes down pretty well too, with the broadsheet type of person. Your mother is accepted, as the mistress of a supermarket tycoon.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Well, it’s a bloody sight better than being ostracized for the same reason, isn’t it?” Gina was getting quite red, and seemed to Alexander much less attractive than he’d thought. “I mean, my parents call on her, and so does Sir Jack.”

  “You’re sounding as old-fashioned as them.”

  “Yes, well, here in Marsham I’m my parents’ child. I go along with their little snobberies and foibles. When I go to Leeds I do a climb-down act: there I don’t tell them Gina is short for Georgina, because it’s a stuffy sort of name. I couldn’t go to a concert, not a classical one, and not to a play unless there was some kind of scandal attached—gay scenes, nudity, explicit sex. I take E, and I do a modest bit of sleeping around. You have to fit in with your background, don’t you?”

  That seemed to Alexander a pretty craven sort of attitude but he just said, “I suppose so…. So your parents don’t really accept her and Marius.”

  Gina smiled in a way that was positively unpleasant.

  “They swallow hard whenever they have to meet her. Bye, Alex!”

  In bed that night in the best hotel in Cardiff, Caroline said to Marius, “Happy?”

  “Mmmm. I’m always happy when I’ve had you.”

  “I mean with the evening.”

  Marius’s bare shoulder sketched a shrug.

  “Duty done.”

  “Your speech went marvelously. Just what the occasion demanded.”

  Marius was used to flattery from his mistresses, and Caroline had sen
sed from the beginning that he expected it. It wasn’t something she had given to any of her other lovers, or her husbands. But it added to his little-boy appeal for her, her sense of being somehow responsible for him. His speech, in fact, had been adequate but a little labored, the jokes good but not particularly well told. Caroline felt that he could have done with a bit of coaching from her.

  “How were things at table seventeen?” he asked.

  “Oh fine. Everyone very pleased and interested. Lots of questions about television stars—Joanna Lumley, Jason Green, that sort of thing. Someone even remembered my episode of Morse.”

  “I don’t think I’ve seen that.”

  “It was one of the very early ones, and a good meaty part…. One of the wives more or less asked me why I was there.”

  Marius snarled at the far wall.

  “Which one?”

  “Never you mind. I don’t want anyone carpeted or sacked.”

  “They’d all been properly briefed, and told to brief their wives.”

  “I expect they had, but they forgot in the presence of someone they’d seen on the box. Anyway, I just told the truth: how we’d met in a London restaurant and then again at a Booker Prize giving, omitting all the concentrated bedding in between. Then I changed the subject.”

  “Good…” But it rankled that his word had not been law. “I bet it was that silly cow Ellie Thackley. Men who marry women as vapid as that should do the decent thing and divorce them.”

  “You’re not the right man to lecture others on their duty to divorce.”

  “Sheila is not silly. Or vapid.”

  “I didn’t say she was. I get quite another impression of Sheila, and quite a pleasant one.”

  “Good, because she is pleasant. I can say that because I married her, and I wouldn’t want you to think I’d made a daft choice.” Caroline was silent, so he added: “What are you thinking about?”

  “Wondering if all your mistresses have been as understanding as I am about your wife.”

  “Some of them. Anyway, it’s the wife who’s supposed to be understanding about the mistresses.”

  “Or not, as the case may be.”

  “You’re exceptional because you’re not only understanding about my wife but also about my mistresses.”

  “Moderately,” said Caroline, snuggling up to him. “I can contemplate the idea of a long string, provided it’s in the past. I don’t think I’d be at all happy with competition in the present.”

  “I don’t know how you can even think about it. As far as I’m concerned, two women are more than enough to handle.”

  But next morning, when they had driven out to Llandaff for Communion, and when Marius’s voice was ringing out for “Glorious things of thee are spoken,” as if to prove that though he was cloth-eared he definitely wasn’t tone deaf, he stopped singing at the line “Fading is the worldling’s pleasure” and muttered to Caroline in his rich, experienced-it-all voice, “Oh no, it isn’t, Mr. John Newton, whoever you are: worldlings’ pleasures are doing very nicely, thank you very much. Not much sign of them fading today, thanks be to God!”

  *

  Alexander turned away from the rectory and made tracks back through Marsham and toward home. His talk with Gina had made him thoughtful. He decided after a bit that it had taught him a lot about how his mother was regarded in the village. If the rector and his wife were representative, it made him like the village a lot less. But were they? He thought they might be a special breed of person. In view of their advances to his mother about holding next year’s fete at Alderley, he could only conclude that they were a pair of holy hypocrites.

  And, really, their daughter, in spite of her devotion to swinging Leeds, was hardly any better. She had practically said that Caroline should be grateful she wasn’t ostracized. You could hardly get more Dark Ages than that, in Alexander’s view. He had tolerated a lot of his mother’s men-friends, and he was of her opinion that she shouldn’t get married again. If not quite a one-woman disaster area, she was definitely accident-prone.

  Coincidentally, he had no sooner come to that conclusion than he heard the sound of some kind of crash behind him. Turning, he saw the impressive sight of Meta Mortyn-Crosse sprawled on the tarmac clutching a bottle aloft, her familiar bicycle a foot or so away, its pedals still turning. As he ran to help her, she struggled to her feet and began dusting down her tweed skirt with her free hand.

  “Bloody bike!” she swore. “You can’t get a good upright ladies’ bike anymore.”

  Meta was built like a forklift, swung her shoulders when she walked, and generally gave the impression she must have joined her country’s armed forces in the days when homosexuals went into the navy and lesbians into the army. In fact, she had never done anything much except live in Marsham Manor and later the Dower House. Local gossip suggested her sexual tastes were entirely mainstream, though she had had little chance of gratifying them as the men in her life had generally fled in the early days of the relationship. Now her unlovely face was very red, her cheeks and eyeballs popping out like footballs. She mounted her bike, still clutching her bottle. Alexander made a note of the label, which was that of a cheap kind of brandy.

  “Are you sure you should be riding?” he asked.

  “Course I’m sure. Don’t be so bloody rude.”

  “I wasn’t being rude. You must have had a nasty shock in that fall. Anyway, it’s difficult carrying anything with those low handlebars.”

  “That skinflint Pattel has run out of carriers.” It was part of Meta’s character to mispronounce in the English manner any foreign-sounding name. “I’d’ve been all right with a bag.”

  “Would you like me to carry the…bottle up to the Dower House? It’s not far.”

  She stood astride her bike and brushed aside his offer with a shake of the head. “Your mother’s away for the weekend, I hear.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Off with Marius for a dirty—no. Can’t really be a dirty weekend when they have one every week, can it?”

  “I don’t see why they can’t have a dirty weekend anywhere they want to. Actually it’s Cardiff.”

  “Not my idea of a place to have a sexy rendezvous, but what would I know? I’ve hardly left the village in the last twenty years.” A grievance seemed to take hold of her not very clear brain, and she brandished her bottle in his face. “Reduced to buying cheap plonk because the coffers are so low. Next thing will be, Jack will want me to go out cleaning.”

  “I’m sure that won’t happen.” Nobody would employ you, Alexander thought.

  “I wouldn’t bank on it. What we need is a nice steep interest-rate rise, so that our money makes something for us, what there is of it.”

  “I expect there’d be inflation too, so it wouldn’t help in the long run.”

  “Bloody economist too, are you?” She bent forward to look him in the face, her bulging eyes fearsomely red. “If you’re so bloody smart about money, you should give your mother some advice.”

  “I think she gets more advice than she can stomach.”

  “Jack, you mean? He has her interests at heart, at least. She gets advice given her because she needs it. Any woman who’s a mistress not a wife does need it. Tell her to get something on paper, that’s what Jack says.”

  “I’ll tell her but—”

  “Otherwise what will happen? Marius is a high-powered businessman. Life of tremendous stress, eh? So one day he drops down dead, and then where is she? Nowhere.”

  “I think Marius has—”

  “No good thinking. Tell him she wants to see it, that’s what your mother should do. Otherwise she’ll have no money, no roof over her head, and a career that’s dead in the water because she hasn’t done any acting for yonks. She’d be a beggar. I don’t give a damn, but Jack does. Tell her to get something definite in writing! Otherwise tea and sympathy is all she’ll have, and not a great deal of the latter.”

  She hitched herself on to the saddle and rode off,
turning at the next corner in the direction of the Dower House. Alexander walked on slowly, expecting to hear another crash, but Meta seemed to have negotiated the last part of her journey successfully. Over the rest of the mile-long walk home he pondered what Meta had said. He felt that, granted it had come from a drunken old harridan with a vicious streak to her, it had not been bad advice at all. Alexander did not hate Marius, but neither did he love him in the way Caroline had convinced herself both her children did. His mother was also sure she was something more than just one in a long line of Marius’s mistresses. Without a doubt, words had been uttered that had convinced her that he had done, or would do, something that would give her special status a financial basis. OK then, let it be something not so lavish as to seriously damage his wife’s or his children’s position, but something generous and concrete. Something on paper. With witnesses. Even better, cash or title deeds in advance.

  Stella, when he talked it over with her later that day, was in agreement, but she said the matter of talking to their mother about it would have to be his duty.

  “You’re the elder, and you’re the one who’s thought it through. Anyway, Mum is convinced you are the really serious one in the family.”

  “I suppose it’s just a matter of finding the right time,” said Alexander dubiously.

  After he had talked with Stella, or tried to, he was rather doubtful whether any time would have been right. When Caroline had settled back after her Cardiff trip he put Meta’s points to her, and she clearly found the suggestion distasteful.

  “Oh, darling, how sordid!” she said, wrinkling up her face. “Like those awful film stars and tycoons who arrange the terms of their divorce before they even get married. You’ve got to trust each other if you love each other.”

  “Marius is a tycoon, so probably he wouldn’t object. Meta says Jack is worried about this.”

  “Is that why he goes on and on about my acting, and how I should keep it up?”

  “Probably. Remember, you’re not even Marius’s partner, which would probably give you some rights. He’s living with his wife. It surely wouldn’t do any harm to be sure Marius has actually done for you in his will what he promised to do.”