The Mistress of Alderley (4 page)

Now would have been another good chance to mention Pete Bagshaw. But Caroline let it pass, again.

“She sounds like a woman after my own heart. Though as far as computers are concerned, I'm not
against
them. I don't despise them, I'm just ignorant, and I want to keep my ignorance.”

“Sheila feels everything is becoming automated and dumbed down. She shudders when she opens the arts pages of
The Times.
She's of a generation that can hardly think of films—or ‘Film,' as they call it—as an art form at all.”

“Nonsense, she's of my generation. And I do think that's going a bit far.”

“Well, pop music, then. She sits on cultural bodies and she's on all the cultural grapevines. She knows when anything significant is coming at the theater long before it actually opens. She's bound to have heard that Olivia is going to be a sensation in
Forza
. She'd probably come if it wasn't—”

“Yes, if it wasn't.
Are
the grapevines saying Olivia is going to be a sensation? It's news to me.”

“Oh yes. People have commented, wished her well through me. That's people who know about you and me, of course.”

“Well, that's wonderful news if it's true. I've always had a feeling in my bones about Olivia's voice, but of course I'm only an amateur as far as opera is concerned.”

The topic of Marius's wife did not come up again, but interval time at the West Yorkshire Playhouse did lead to more discussion of Olivia's approaching appearance as Leonora. There were various people from the acting trade in the audience—people appearing in or otherwise involved with plays in the West Yorkshire area. The ones who knew Caroline, and even one or two who didn't, came up and asked what she was doing (“Being a kept woman,” she said to one of them, “and very pleasant it is too”). Several had heard on the local arts network that rehearsals were going sensationally well for Olivia.

“They say it's a wonderfully rich voice,” said an elderly actor who had seen every operatic sensation since Callas's Covent Garden Norma, “and with the bloom still on. Lucky old us.”

“We hear a lot of it, but we still think it's pretty magnificent,” said Caroline. “If there's going to be a lot of advance hype, I hope it doesn't arouse too high expectations, though.”

“It's not hype, darling. It's informed report passed by word of mouth between people in the know.”

Going back into the auditorium Caroline got a warm glow of anticipation. She was soon going to be known as the mother of Olivia Fawley. She felt not the slightest twinge of jealousy, no sense of anticlimax. Her career had never aimed at the highest peaks, and her life, now her career was over, was both happier and—oddly—more fulfilled. Part of that fulfillment was the excellent relationship she had with her children.

That thought brought in its train other thoughts about parents and children. But with Marius's comforting presence beside her, she put those thoughts away. She
would
think about Marius and Pete, she would think through the implications of what Pete had let slip, but she would do so when Marius was not there to influence her conclusions. And she would not be so silly as to take the offhand and ambiguous remarks of a post-adolescent young man as gospel truth. Marius deserved better than that from her.

It was as they were leaving the theater with a sense of two hours pleasantly spent that Caroline saw Lauren Spender and Lauren saw her. Lauren was the current partner of Rick Radshaw, her first husband.

“Darling! How come I didn't spot you at interval?”

“I didn't spot you either, Lauren. Perhaps we weren't looking.”

“Darling, what are you doing at the moment?”

“Being a kept woman. You know how it is, Lauren.”

“Oh, catty! Actually, I'm opening in
Loot
next week. So I won't be able to come to
Forza
. But Rick will be there, to support his talented offspring. We're in a cottage in the Dales. Heaven! Bye, darling.”

“Don't ‘darling' me, you bitch,” muttered Caroline as she got into the car.

“Do I gather that is the dreadful Rick's wife, partner, or appendage?” asked Marius as they drove off.

“Partner.”

“Why the bitchiness?”

“I've always loathed her. Everything is false about her except her spleen.”

“Sounds like she and Rick are well matched.”

“Ideally. But what does that say about me, who married him and let him father my first child?”

“That you were hardly more than a child yourself at the time.”

“I've known toddlers who had more sense and better judgment. And now I'll have to be nice,
specially
nice, to him at the first night—as if he has had anything to do with Olivia's success.”

“Well, he is the parent with the singing voice, you said this morning.”

“Oh, I give him that. But that's exactly like saying a parent has given its child brown eyes or fair hair or flat feet. Not something you can accept credit or blame for.”

“Certainly not something you're going to give him any credit for,” commented Marius. Caroline laughed.

“You bring out the best in me. I can hardly forgive you for that. Let's forget about Rick.”

And for the rest of the trip back to Alderley they laughed, were catty about the night's supporting actors, and forgot all about Sheila, and Rick, and Pete. Marius, of course, probably never thought about Pete.

“I've found out how that Pete Whatisname found out about you and where we live,” announced Alexander at breakfast on Tuesday.

“Oh? How?”

“The rector's daughter is at Leeds Metropolitan University.”

“Oh really? I thought she was at the older one.”

“They leave it vague,” said Alexander, with his habitual pleasure in finding out things. “They say ‘Gina will be going back to Leeds next week'—that sort of thing. I don't think she makes any secret of it herself, but she's hardly been around all summer.”

“I can't see why anyone should make a secret of it,” said Caroline.

“Don't you? It doesn't have the prestige of Leeds University. Just a harmless little bit of snobbery on the rector's part. Added to which, these new universities that used to be polytechnics are where people go who want to do wacky things like sports studies or the social history of sanitary engineering.”

“I bow to your superior knowledge,” said Caroline. “I suppose it's possible. But have you any evidence that they know each other?”

“No. But it's obvious.”

“Hmmm. Well, a course in logic might be a good idea for you, whatever you do as your main subject.”

“It may not stick out a mile, Mum,” said Stella, “but you've got to admit it's fairly likely.”

After breakfast, washing up, and a rather perfunctory tidying of things, Caroline walked to the village shop, half a mile away.

She was not surprised to see Jack walking in the opposite direction from the Dower House. They quite often did meet up in the shop, because Jack had come to know her habits—though he was sensible enough not to contrive it too often so that it was obvious that their meetings were no longer accidental. They greeted each other, walked the remaining short distance, then bought far more than they wanted as a way of placating Mr. Patel (who had no intention of closing down, but put out the rumors periodically for commercial reasons). Then they repaired together to the White Hart for coffee and biscuits.

“Has the rector's wife been in touch?” Jack asked.

“Just a phone call. Said she wanted to talk to me about these new events and attractions she's planning. I felt like saying, ‘There's months to go!'”

“Oh, things have to be prepared, to mature slowly. But it's good they're involving you.”

“Say it how you mean it, Jack: it's good that I'm being accepted, that's what you're thinking.”

Jack let fly, and as usual took no notice of sound or smell.

“Well, something like that.”

“It's rather touching your caring so much—more than I do.”

“I see shifting the fete as a sort of symbol. And you'll be much better as the host than I or Meta ever were.”

Caroline smiled a worldly-wise smile.

“I suppose it comes from playing lady-of-the-manor roles in highly forgettable drawing-room comedies. Not that Alderley is a manor, quite. Still, it's a lovely old house and the largest one
I've
ever lived in!”

“You should have seen the real manor,” said Jack with a sigh. “People don't realize how much I miss it. You could get away from people there. Still, no point in regrets. If you can't keep it up, and no one has a use for it, then it has to go. Yes, Alderley's a nice house.”

“I always feel it should have alder trees in the garden. Maybe it once did.”

Jack shot her a glance.

“Oh no. It was always called Hallam's Croft until the nineteen hundreds, after the man who had built it forty or more years before. His children didn't want it, and it was bought by another man who'd made his fortune in cotton, and he named it after his three children.”

“His children?”

“Yes. Alice, Derek, and Leyton, the last named after a maternal uncle the family had expectations from. He put the names together. Nothing to do with trees.”

“Oh.”

Caroline felt distinctly deflated, as if her beloved house had been devalued. It was like people calling their semis Philmar or Valjon. She shook herself for being silly, but she felt the house deserved better.

“What happened to the three children?” she asked.

“Derek—it was rather an uncommon name then—was killed in the Battle of the Somme. Leyton was killed three weeks before Armistice Day, and he'd never got the legacy from his maternal uncle that everyone hoped for. If he had, Alice would have been quite well off. As it was, she and her husband struggled with the house for years and years, but finally had to sell it in the fifties. It had various owners—the last one was Alfred Beck, who was your predecessor. It was too big for him after his wife died. He rattled around in it. He's much happier in his bungalow in Hornsea. He made his money in Whitby, out of fishing, and he always missed the sea.”

Jack seemed about to say something more, then decided against it.

“Marius was lucky to find Alderley, anyway,” said Caroline to fill in the silence. “Or rather,
I
was lucky he found it.”

“On the contrary, we are lucky you came to live among us,” said Jack, with his usual gallantry.

“I wonder if the situation would be acceptable in any village around the country,” mused Caroline, “or is Marsham exceptionally tolerant? It would be quite unacceptable in parts of Scotland, I would guess. And Wales too, don't you think? But in most parts attitudes have changed enormously. Think—not so very long ago I would have been discreetly housed in a flat in Maida Vale.”

“I don't really know London,” said Jack. “Is Maida Vale so dreadful?”

“Not 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.

“Marriage is better, you know. Particularly for a woman.”

“Marriage 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.

 

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.

“What have you been doing?” he asked, after the preliminaries.

“Coffee 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.”

“Are you getting bored?”

“
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.”

“Don't.”

“
Don't?
You mean you won't be down for the weekend?”

“I 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.”

“But we usually do something like that on Saturday.”

“Not this weekend. I've something to tell you.”

“Well, tell me now.”

“It's not the sort of thing that should be told on the phone.”

“Anything can be told on the phone, Marius. Come on! You've not got the idea you're being bugged, have you?”

“No, of course I haven't.”

“Then tell me.”

“No. 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.”

“That rules out several of our favorite places. La Grillade has several little poky areas, though. But tell me
now.
Is it nice news?”

“Not particularly.”

“Then why on earth go out to a nice meal to break it to me?”

“It'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 ambition for something much greater was certainly there. If Marius had had a child by someone of his own background and class, he would have been expected to pay maintenance appropriate to his then financial position. Why should his meteoric rise in fortunes lead to a massive increase in the sum to be paid “Mrs.” Bagshaw for maintenance? Would that even be kind to the mother and boy, granted that a sudden access of funds, which they would be unused to handling, could have disastrous consequences? A sudden thought struck Caroline: Pete looked only a year or two older than Guy. Perhaps conceived at about the time of Marius's marriage to Sheila. It was a disconcerting thought.

A car drew up in the gathering darkness outside. Going to the window, Caroline thought she recognized the shape of the man seen from her bedroom window the Saturday before. She put down her sherry glass. Of course mothers should wait until their children
decided
to introduce their boy-or girlfriends, but…if she waited for Olivia to do that, she would never meet the long and varied list of men she was interested in or involved with.

She went into the hall and opened the front door. Getting out of the car's driver's seat was a large young man with an Irish chin and a definite presence. There was no particular distinction to his face, but he seemed pleasant, thoughtful, and very taken with Olivia. Caroline liked men to be wholehearted, committed, but with Olivia that was likely to prove
dis
heartening. Poor chap, she thought, for the umpteenth time about one of her daughter's boyfriends.

“Mrs. Fawley?” the young man said, swerving from Olivia's door and coming over, hand outstretched. Caroline made a face.

“Call me Caroline.”

“I'm Colm Fitzgerald.”

“I thought you might be. Everyone's very excited about
Forza,
I hear. Are you coming to rehearse here?”

“No, I'm just bringing Olivia home. She wanted a bit of peace and quiet and luxury. We've finished rehearsing for the day, and we're not needed again till late tomorrow.”

“Thanks for the lift, love,” said Olivia coolly, bending her head back and accepting, rather than reciprocating, a kiss. Caroline had been intending to ask the young man in, but Olivia said, “See you tomorrow,” and started toward the front door.

Colm Fitzgerald, obediently but reluctantly, got back into his car. As she turned to wave, Olivia said, “You didn't have to do that ‘Call me Caroline' bit. I told you: he's not a boyfriend.”

“I see. Just a chauffeur,” said Caroline, with a touch of tartness. As she watched the young man drive off, she noted the drooping set of his shoulders, and wondered whether he had overheard Olivia's words.

“So to what do we owe this honor?” she asked.

“It's like Colm said: I just got fed to the back teeth with the rackety and bitchy world of opera. The rehearsal period is worst, of course. I just felt I had to get away from it all,
them
all, and be myself for a few hours in a peaceful atmosphere, with nobody shouting or emoting or calling attention to themselves.”

“I see.”

Being some kind of refuge was one degree better than being the laundress for a week's wash, which she had been when Olivia was at music college, but Caroline was not altogether happy with the new role. It felt like conniving at the brutality with which her daughter treated her boyfriends.