The Mistress of Alderley by Robert Barnard Read Free Book Online

flat in Maida Vale.”
    â€œI don’t really know London,” said Jack. “Is Maida Vale so dreadful?”
    â€œNot at all. But if I’m to be the acknowledged mistress of someone, I do very much prefer being it at Alderley, rather than shut away in a thirties flat in a thirties suburb of London.”
    Jack looked at her.
    â€œMarriage is better, you know. Particularly for a woman.”
    â€œMarriage is worse for this woman! I should know, if anyone knows. I’ve learned by experience.”
    They smiled and went on to talk about village matters.
    Â 
    Marius usually phoned Caroline midweek. When she heard the ring early on Wednesday evening she knew it was him, and settled comfortably in an armchair before picking it up.
    â€œWhat have you been doing?” he asked, after the preliminaries.
    â€œCoffee with Jack, gardening, listening to Mrs. Hogbin on the evils of drugs, though she doesn’t know her cannabis from her crack, reading silly magazines, settling a quarrel between Stella and Alexander. All very much as usual.”
    â€œAre you getting bored?”
    â€œ Bored? You must be joking. I feel I’m acting a part in an idyll. I get intense pleasure just thinking what to give you for dinner on Friday.”
    â€œDon’t.”
    â€œ Don’t? You mean you won’t be down for the weekend?”
    â€œI love the sound of the disappointment in your voice. You sound absolutely crushed. I’ll be down—in fact, probably earlier than usual. We’ll go out to eat.”
    â€œBut we usually do something like that on Saturday.”
    â€œNot this weekend. I’ve something to tell you.”
    â€œWell, tell me now.”
    â€œIt’s not the sort of thing that should be told on the phone.”
    â€œAnything can be told on the phone, Marius. Come on! You’ve not got the idea you’re being bugged, have you?”
    â€œNo, of course I haven’t.”
    â€œThen tell me.”
    â€œNo. Book a table for Friday, at some place where we can be pretty sure of getting a bit of privacy—Sheffield, Leeds, Doncaster, York—anywhere.”
    â€œThat rules out several of our favorite places. La Grillade has several little poky areas, though. But tell me now. Is it nice news?”
    â€œNot particularly.”
    â€œThen why on earth go out to a nice meal to break it to me?”
    â€œIt’s really, when I think about it, not nice or nasty. But it’s unexpected and—well—interesting. So book that table.”
    And he rang off. Caroline, feeling dissatisfied and gripped by curiosity, got up, poured herself a drink, and began pacing the living room.
    Her first thought was to wonder whether Pete Bagshaw had made contact with his father. That might qualify as a happening that was neither nice nor nasty. There was an ambiguity about the boy that nagged in Caroline’s mind. She had been adept enough at suggesting a character’s ambiguity on stage (Stella Kowalski and Rebecca West sprang to mind), but she now found she didn’t feel easy in real life with a person whose characteristics seemed shifting, two-sided, ungraspable. The boy had seemed to like her yet resent her. Or had that latter emotion been supplied by herself, by her guilt? Here she was at Alderley, and there he was, growing up in Armley with a wage-slave mother, obsessed with rising out of his environment, getting a well-paid job.
    But the question of Pete Bagshaw raised pressingly the question: If he was Marius’s, why had his father done so little for him over the first twenty years of his life? It would surely be natural for Pete to feel some resentment.
    And yet, assuming he was Marius’s child, it could be seen from the father’s point of view too. Twenty-odd years ago, as far as she could guess, the chain of supermarkets owned by Marius in the south and west of the country were no more than a link of two or three, though his