Marrying the Mistress by Joanna Trollope

parents when he was adolescent; it gave him a sense, however illusory, of his own separate stature. Sometimes he looked at Jack and wondered if that was precisely what Jack was now doing himself – removing himself crudely and visibly fromthe intimacy of the family circle to reassure himself of a separate and distinct identity. Simon picked up Jack’s Coca-Cola can. Once, when Jack was three, he had taken him to the zoo. He had told him beforehand of the exciting and enormous beasts he would see, the lions and tigers, the elephants and giraffes and camels. Jack had gazed at him with eyes like lamps, and had then said, in a voice acute with anxiety, ‘Will Jack be safe?’
    Simon got up. What tea remained in his mug was cold, and his feet were, too. He went back into the kitchen and put his mug down in the sink and ran water into it. It occurred to him suddenly and with guilty force that one of the strongest elements in his anger at this new situation was apprehension that his mother alone now, abandoned, might want him back, might somehow feel she could retrieve that little boy in Battersea Park and ask him to give her – silently; Laura always requested things silently – the unconditional love he had been so eager, so willing, so
anxious
to give her then.
    He gazed down at the cloudy water in his tea mug. I couldn’t do it, he thought, I simply couldn’t. It had been such a relief to fall in love with Carrie, such a heady release to find he had made a choice with his own heart, a choice that had nothing to do with duty or pity and everything to do with enthusiasm and independence and change. It had taken Laura a long time to accept Carrie; she had always been kind and civil, but a spark was missing, the spark of true warmth and sympathy. Carrie had noticed, but hadn’t minded. At least, not much, not angrily.
    ‘Mothers-in-law are like that, aren’t they?’ she’d said. ‘Especially the mothers of sons.’
    Perhaps that was why Carrie and Alan got on so well, perhaps they shared the freedom – and exclusion – of not being Laura’s chosen one, the apple of her eye. Alan! Simon banged the flat of his hand against his forehead. He’d forgotten Alan, quite forgotten in the turmoil of his own feelings, to call Alan as he had promised his mother that he would. He glanced up at the kitchen clock. It read twenty-past four. He couldn’t ring Alan for three hours at least. He couldn’t ring anybody, he couldn’t do anything, except go back to bed and derive what comfort he could from Carrie’s presence, her body there, warm and still and not always wholly sympathetic, but real.
    He went slowly up the stairs, pausing on the landing to take off the Chicago Bulls sweatshirt and hang it over the banister. Then he opened the bedroom door and went quietly across the carpet and slid gratefully in under the duvet. Carrie stirred, but didn’t turn over.
    ‘Ow,’ she said. ‘You’re
cold.’

Chapter Four
    The garden at Hill Cottage was Laura’s creation. The house was, too, but Guy, who had an aptitude for seeing where walls should be taken out or put in, or furniture placed, had had a considerable part in the house. Also, significantly, he had paid the bills. He was earning well, as a barrister, those first twenty years at Hill Cottage, and he had paid – without demur, she always had to admit – the bills that gave the place a new roof, new heating, new bathrooms, a level gravelled drive, paved terraces, garages and garden storerooms made from old cow byres, old pig-sties. But the garden was Laura’s. She’d thought about it, planned it, worked on it. Out of a couple of acres of derelict farmyard and rundown paddock, she’d made a garden and an orchard.
    As the boys grew up, the garden sidled quietly into that part of her psyche and personality that had nurtured her young children. She told herself that it was entirely typical, that Englishwomen of her age and type did succumb to gardening, at a certain