The Mistress of Alderley Read Free

about “thought I ought to bring it up,” like a rector apologizing for mentioning God every time he paid a visit, and then he went out to his car. As he got into his aging Honda Civic Shuttle he emitted a loud report that sent a passing squirrel scuttling up a tree. Alexander, coming round from the back with—if his mother had only had a stronger sense of smell—a whiff of nicotine about him, looked after the departing car.
    â€œFart Fart the Bart was looking a bit hangdog,” he remarked.
    â€œHe brought up the business of marriage again.”
    â€œWhy can’t they let you alone to do what you want?”
    â€œAmen to that.”
    â€œYou’ve slaved away on stages and in studios long enough.”
    â€œYou know,” she said, looking around her, “I think it’s this place, Alderley, that makes people do it. If Marius had set me up in a suburban semi they wouldn’t think it half so important that he should make an honest woman of me.”
    â€œThere wouldn’t be any point in setting you up in a suburban semi: we had one already.”
    â€œTrue. Anyway, I think the appeal of Alderley is aesthetic to Marius.”
    â€œDon’t talk to me about aesthetics, Mum. You know that’s my blind spot. I suppose you just mean he likes a good lay in pleasant surroundings.”
    And Alexander drifted back indoors to continue his trawl through the fatuities and ego trips on the Internet.
    Caroline rather enjoyed his last remark. It was characteristic of Alexander—his instinct to ground everything, to deflate pretensions and pomposities, to prick bubbles. Not something she would have wanted in a lover, but something she found quite useful in a son. She was just turning to follow Alexander back into the house when she saw someone approaching from the direction of the village up the narrow country road outside the gate. So few walked it—it only led by the most roundabout route to the next village—that she stayed outside, wondering if it was a friend of one of her children.
    It was a boy, a young man—she soon saw that. He had a smallish rucksack on his back. The shorts and open shirt bespoke a hiker. The walk —there was something in the walk that reminded her…of who? Not one of her husbands, thank God. When he got to the gate without seeing her, he stopped and got out a map.
    As he stood there peering at it, Caroline got a good view of his face. Of course! What his walk and face reminded her of was Marius.
    As she watched him from the shadow of the tree she was convinced he had not seen her, though his face was turned in her direction. After a minute or two with his finger tracing a route on the map, the young man folded it carefully, then continued on his way along the road.

Chapter 2
The Wandering Boy
    On thinking it over, Caroline became convinced that she would see the boy again.
    If she had passed in the street a young man who conspicuously resembled Marius she would have been intrigued, but she would soon have put it out of her mind: there was not an infinite number of facial types or personal features. And if it was not mere coincidence, then the boy could very well be a relative—a nephew, or some kind of cousin. Caroline knew next to nothing about Marius’s family, apart from his children, and she cared not a whit about anyone more distant. She had “done” families in the course of her two marriages, and had discovered nobody she particularly liked, apart from the mother of her first husband, who was quite as bemused by the awfulness of the product of her womb as anyone less intimately related to him could have been. Caroline cared about Marius’s children, Guy and Helena, and was interested in his wife, but that was it.
    But the fact was that she had not seen the boy casually in the street: he had come to the gate of Alderley, brought there apparently by a map, and this must mean that he had at least an intention