Free Marrying the Mistress by Joanna Trollope

concentrate better. Immediately below Jack’s room was his parents’ room. On his parents’ bed, right now, lay his sister Rachel. She had made herself very comfortable. Jack could picture her lying among the piled-up pillows – pulled out of the bed for the purpose – with the telephone receiver tucked in against her cheek, leaving her hands free to pick off the purple glitter nail varnish she had applied the night before and was probably already bored with. On the other end of the telephone was Rachel’s best friend, Trudy, and they were discussing someone else, called Moll. Moll was the reason Jack was lying on the floor with his ear pressed to the carpet.
    Moll was in the year below Jack at school, and therefore a year above Rachel and Trudy. Moll was very athletic, with a strong, supple dancer’s body and extremely straight brown hair which she wore either wound up on top of her head in a complicated knot or falling plumb down her back like a curtain. It was her hair that Jack had first noticed, walking by chance behind her down the main school corridor between physics and social studies, and seeing this long, calm, smooth sheet of brown hair. She didn’t fiddle with it. She must have been the only girl in the whole school who didn’t touch her hair except to brush it or pile it out of the way. She seemed totake it for granted, like she took her body for granted, the body that was so effortlessly proficient at gym and dancing and track sports. She’d only been in the school a term and already there was a buzz about her capabilities. In Jack’s year, among Jack’s mates, there was also a buzz about her sex appeal.
    Usually, Jack joined in. He liked sex talk. He liked the jovial buddy stuff of boys talking dirty together; it gave him a feeling that he didn’t have to go on this rather alarming journey alone, reassured him that there’d be an element of teamwork, that when – if – he ventured anything, there’d be somewhere to come back to. But he found he didn’t want to talk about Moll in the comfortably abusive language of
Loaded
magazine. And even beyond that, he didn’t want to hear Rich and Marco and Adam and Ed talking that way about her either. His disapproval had taken the admittedly pretty feeble form of merely not joining in so far, but they’d notice he wasn’t joshing along with them soon and he’d have to say then, somehow, that he didn’t want to. And then he’d really be in for it, he’d never, ever, hear the end of it and the news would spill out and eventually it would trickle round the school and reach Moll Saunders who’d hear in crude terms that Jack Stockdale had the hots for her whereupon she’d say – she’d be bound to say – in tones of utter contempt, ‘Jack Stockdale? Jack
Stockdale?
Puh –
lease
. Gimme a
break.’
    But would she? That day, she’d caught him looking at her outside the school secretary’s office where thenoticeboards hung, and she’d said, ‘Hi.’ She hadn’t smiled, she’d looked straight at him and just said, ‘Hi.’ He’d nodded. He couldn’t think what else to do on the spur of the moment, but give her this cheesy nod. She hadn’t seemed to mind. She’d gone on looking at him for several seconds after he’d nodded, and then she’d turned, quite naturally, to look at the gym-club notice. She left him feeling stunned, breathless, thrilled. He couldn’t believe it, how thrilled he’d been. Like he wanted to turn cartwheels or do a backflip. And all for a ‘Hi’.
    At home, later, when he and Rachel and Emma were tussling in front of the fridge for drinks and yoghurts and a saucer of cold sausages, Rachel had said, ‘You know Moll? In fifth year?’
    ‘Uh-huh,’ Jack said. He put a sausage between his teeth and tore off the ring-pull on a can of Coca-Cola.
    ‘She liked your painting.’
    Jack ducked his head.
    ‘What painting?’ he said, round the sausage.
    ‘That black one. The head thing. The one Mr Finlay put up. Moll