Marrying the Mistress Read Free Page B

here. I want the boys to have a garden.’
    ‘You won’t be lonely?’
    She took a little breath, as if she was about to speak but she didn’t say anything. He had an uneasy feeling that she’d been about to say, ‘I’m lonely now,’ and in her self-disciplined way had decided against it. Sometimes he wished she had less discipline, less reticence, that that elusiveness which had so captivated him when they first met – coming as he did from a family of loudly outspoken, opinionated people – was less opaque. Mystery was one thing, so was understatement and obliqueness and self-containment – but quiet stubbornness was quite another.
    ‘Look,’ he’d said, with some energy, ‘I can’t give up the Bar because it’s all I’m trained to do and I’m good at it, but I’ll do anything else you want, anything. Move house, move to the country, have another baby, anything.’
    She put her arms around his neck.
    ‘I’d like to go to the country. I’d like to be somewhere where I’m visible. To myself as well as everyone else.’
    ‘But if you wanted to work again—?’
    ‘I won’t,’ she said.
    But she had. Two years into the restoration of Hill Cottage, and she had. Guy changed gear to negotiate the curve of the road before his drive, and saw the familiar pattern of lit house lights; sitting room and hallway, landing and main bedroom, front door and – glow only visible – back door. It was twenty years ago – twenty years! – that he had begun to see that Laura was feeling, however much she battled againstit, that she had paid too high a personal price in marrying him.
    And now. Now what was he about to do? He turned the car into the drive and felt the tyres crunch into the stones of the gravel.
    ‘I feel like a slapper now,’ the girl on the video link had said that day. ‘I’m not a virgin any more. I feel dirty. I feel naive and stupid.’
    Guy let the car coast quietly to a halt in the gravelled yard outside the back door. Inside the house, the dogs began barking, rapturously welcoming however long or short his absence. He turned off the engine. That’s how I feel, he thought. Dirty. Naive and stupid and dirty. He opened the driver’s door and climbed out, a little stiffly, on to the gravel.

Chapter Two
    Merrion Palmer’s father had died when she was three. He was an engineer, working for a construction company in South Wales, and had come home one ordinary weekday evening complaining of a violent headache and a curiously stiff neck. Within six days he was dead, of meningitis. Merrion was never sure whether she could really remember him, or whether she had absorbed all the photographs of him, and all the things her mother told her about him until they had combined to make something so close to memory she could hardly tell the difference.
    She looked like him, that was for sure. He’d been tall, square-shouldered and long-legged with thick dark hair and a face that relied upon personality rather than regularity for its charm. He was very straightforward, her mother said, you always knew where you were with him, and he had enough energy to fuel a rocket. And he was funny, she said, he’d had a keen sense of the ridiculous. By her bed, when she was a child, Merrion kept a photograph of herself and herfather. She was about two, dressed in a dress she could remember more clearly than the occasion, a red sundress spotted in white, and she was sitting on his knee, very solemn, looking at the camera. Her father was looking at the camera solemnly too, and he was wearing the tiny sunhat that matched Merrion’s dress. It looked like a coin balanced on a grapefruit.
    After he died, Merrion’s mother married again, very quickly. She married her husband’s best friend, who left his wife for the purpose, and took Merrion and her mother to live in France. He was a property dealer, in a small way, and he planned to broker deals between French farmers wanting to sell off cottages and barns, and English