Free The Mistress of Alderley by Robert Barnard

have told her boyfriend?”
    â€œYes. What is this?”
    They were now outside the rectory, and Alexander did not answer her, saying instead, “Mum’s getting the idea that she’s being accepted in the village.”
    â€œWell, she is, in a way.”
    â€œWhat way’s that?”
    â€œWell, you know”—Gina was very hot on “you know”s, which she could have caught from the prime minister—“everyone’s chuffed as hell at having an actress and a television star living here, and the fact of having a multimillionaire businessman whose picture appears in the financial pages of the broadsheets goes down pretty well too, with the broadsheet type of person. Your mother is accepted, as the mistress of a supermarket tycoon.”
    â€œThat’s what I thought.”
    â€œWell, it’s a bloody sight better than being os tracized for the same reason, isn’t it?” Gina was getting quite red, and seemed to Alexander much less attractive than he’d thought. “I mean, my parents call on her, and so does Sir Jack.”
    â€œYou’re sounding as old-fashioned as them.”
    â€œYes, well, here in Marsham I’m my parents’ child. I go along with their little snobberies and foibles. When I go to Leeds I do a climb-down act: there I don’t tell them Gina is short for Georgina, because it’s a stuffy sort of name. I couldn’t go to a concert, not a classical one, and not to a play unless there was some kind of scandal attached—gay scenes, nudity, explicit sex. I take E, and I do a modest bit of sleeping around. You have to fit in with your background, don’t you?”
    That seemed to Alexander a pretty craven sort of attitude but he just said, “I suppose so…. So your parents don’t really accept her and Marius.”
    Gina smiled in a way that was positively unpleasant.
    â€œThey swallow hard whenever they have to meet her. Bye, Alex!”
    Â 
    In bed that night in the best hotel in Cardiff, Caroline said to Marius, “Happy?”
    â€œMmmm. I’m always happy when I’ve had you.”
    â€œI mean with the evening.”
    Marius’s bare shoulder sketched a shrug.
    â€œDuty done.”
    â€œYour speech went marvelously. Just what the occasion demanded.”
    Marius was used to flattery from his mistresses, and Caroline had sensed from the beginning that he expected it. It wasn’t something she had given to any of her other lovers, or her husbands. But it added to his little-boy appeal for her, her sense of being somehow responsible for him. His speech, in fact, had been adequate but a little labored, the jokes good but not particularly well told. Caroline felt that he could have done with a bit of coaching from her.
    â€œHow were things at table seventeen?” he asked.
    â€œOh fine. Everyone very pleased and interested. Lots of questions about television stars—Joanna Lumley, Jason Green, that sort of thing. Someone even remembered my episode of Morse. ”
    â€œI don’t think I’ve seen that.”
    â€œIt was one of the very early ones, and a good meaty part…. One of the wives more or less asked me why I was there.”
    Marius snarled at the far wall.
    â€œ Which one?”
    â€œNever you mind. I don’t want anyone carpeted or sacked.”
    â€œThey’d all been properly briefed, and told to brief their wives.”
    â€œI expect they had, but they forgot in the presence of someone they’d seen on the box. Anyway, I just told the truth: how we’d met in a London restaurant and then again at a Booker Prize giving, omitting all the concentrated bedding in between. Then I changed the subject.”
    â€œGood…” But it rankled that his word had not been law. “I bet it was that silly cow Ellie Thackley. Men who marry women as vapid as that should do the decent thing and divorce them.”
    â€œYou’re not