Marrying the Mistress Read Free

was only the first day.
    But a god! That was what she had said, this fifteen-year-old child who had lived with her stepfather from the age of eight until a year ago, when she had finally told her mother what was happening. A god. You could, it seemed, go on about equality between the sexes until you were blue in the face, you could legislate, you could try to educate, but then along comes this child, this late-twentieth-century child, with her boldness and her unquestioned prospects, talking quite simply and unselfconsciously about a man being like a god to her.
    Guy wondered, detachedly, if he had ever seemed like a god to Laura, even in that first glory of love when the love object is truly something quite extraordinary. They had met at university, he reading law, she reading French and Spanish. They had both worked diligently – she because she was conscientious, he because he was ambitious – and had emerged with similar degrees. He had gone immediately to Bar School and she had applied tojoin the Foreign Office, failed, and taken a translating job with a firm of small manufacturers who were developing their business in Europe. It was a dull job. Guy urged Laura not to take it.
    ‘Try the BBC,’ he said. Try the World Service. Try publishing. Try teaching.’
    ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘If one of us doesn’t make some money, we can’t get married.’
    ‘We
can
. We don’t need money to get
married
. And if we do, I’ll borrow it. I don’t mind borrowing until I’m earning. But you can’t do something your heart’s not in.’
    ‘I can,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind.’
    But she did. He remembered, now, how much she did. She didn’t say anything because she had been brought up to endure in silence, but her attitude, her moods, even her walk indicated that she felt she was drudging, that she wasn’t allowing her brain to race ahead of her, as his was doing.
    ‘Are you resentful?’ he said, every so often.
    And she’d look at him, with that clear hazel gaze that appeared to display such transparency of mind and heart.
    ‘No,’ she said.
    He used to take her shoulders, give her a little shake.
    ‘Can I believe you?’
    ‘Yes,’ she said.
    So he did. Or, at least, he lived as if he did. He read as assiduously for the Bar as he had read for his law degree, and every so often, he asked Laura to change herjob. She refused. Once, he went to their bank manager and secured a loan for six months, to enable Laura to leave her job and take time to find a more congenial one. A week later, she too went to the bank manager and cancelled the loan.
    ‘I hate it. I can’t do it. You
know
Mum and Dad were always in debt and how much I dread it.’
    ‘But we aren’t like your parents. We don’t have their problem with money. And I’m going to be earning. In two years’ time, all being well, I’m going to be earning reasonably and I’ll go on to earn well.’
    ‘I can’t believe anything,’ Laura said, ‘until it happens.’
    That was not, he thought now, the sort of thing you said to a god. Laura’s anxious practicality was not likely, ever, to find itself swept away by the presence of superhuman possibilities. Not as a young woman: certainly not now. Now! Well, how to think about that without a clutch of dread, of panic? Impossible. Laura was sixty-one. Not a particularly young or old sixty-one, but a nice-looking, well-kept, largely unassuming woman of sixty-one with the same clear hazel eyes but set, somehow, in a different context. Indeed, the way Laura’s still-young eyes looked out of her much older face was a metaphor for the way things had changed place, moved round in the last seven years: since meeting Merrion, the whole landscape in which Laura lived in relation to Guy seemed different. It was like walking very, very slowly away from something you knew very well, something you could visualize minutely whenyou were parted from it, and as you moved away, that something shrank against its