Marrying the Mistress Read Free Page A

background and lost solidity, lost significance.
    Guy cleared the last of Stanborough’s raw, newish suburbs and turned down a minor road towards open country. The street lights petered out into darkness and the tyres of the car began to click stickily through mud. Five miles now. Five miles, and then, across a curve in the road and before he got to the village, he would see the lights glowing along the façade of his house and the twisted bare black outlines of the apple trees in the little orchard in front of it.
    They’d bought the house thirty years ago, when Simon was eight, and Alan was five. It had been three cottages, run-down and discouraging, sitting in a muddy welter of disused sheds and pig-sties. But there was the orchard, and a modest hill behind it, and a village with a church and a pub, and there were good rail connections to London from Stanborough, ten miles away. And, in any case, Laura wanted it. She had finally given up her job when she became pregnant with Simon, and presumably because Guy was now earning, she didn’t mention getting another one after he was born. She became a conscientious mother just as she had been a conscientious student. From the tiny terraced house in Battersea which they could scarcely afford, Laura took him out to Battersea Park every day, and played with him. She cut out letters and taught him to read when he was four. She fed him bread she had baked herself and rationed his hours of television – hesaw enough to enable him to fit in at school, but not enough to prevent him using his own imagination.
    When Alan came along, three years later, he joined in this earnest and busy enterprise.
    ‘Is this what you like?’ Guy said to Laura, intending to be supportive whatever her reply. ‘Is motherhood enough for you?’
    ‘For now,’ she said, not looking at him. She was pulling a soft tangle of coloured clothes out of the tumble-dryer. ‘There’s nothing else we can do for now.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘I mean, with you working so hard.’
    He crouched down on the little kitchen floor beside her. He was still in his dark suit from court, his black shoes, his sober tie.
    ‘Laura, I have to work hard. I’m self-employed. Barristers
are
. You know that. The harder I work, the better I’ll do.’
    She sat back on her heels, holding the plastic laundry basket of clothes on one hip.
    ‘Will it always be like this?’
    ‘Like what?’
    ‘You working all the hours there are, most weekends, lever-arch files even in bed—’
    ‘Not if I become a judge.’
    ‘A judge!’
    ‘I can’t even think about it for fifteen or twenty years.
    But if that’s what you’d like—’
    She got to her feet.
    ‘It’s not my choice.’
    ‘Laura, it is. It’s as much your choice as it’s mine.’
    She’d looked down at him, holding the laundry basket, biting slightly at her lower lip.
    ‘I didn’t quite visualize this.’
    He stood, too.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Well, when I was working and you were still a student, I didn’t think we’d – well, we’d get so
uneven.’
    ‘But we needn’t be. You could go back to work. Alan’s four, for heaven’s sake.’
    She rumpled some of the clothes in the basket with her free hand.
    ‘Could we move to the country?’ she said.
    ‘Would that help?’
    She gave him her clear, open look.
    ‘Yes,’ she said.
    Even then, even temporarily relieved by a seeming solution, he hadn’t been quite convinced. If she wanted to do it, if she was sure that a change of scene and society would, as it were, round her out once more, then they would do it. But he was haunted by feeling that it was possibly the worst thing they could do, that the hours he would have to travel would be added to the hours he would have to work, that a separateness would happen, that their priorities would cease to be united.
    ‘Are you sure?’ he said over and over.
    ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I want to be somewhere where I can make my own life. I’m – I’m confined