Free The Mistress of Alderley by Robert Barnard Page B

of the label, which was that of a cheap kind of brandy.
    â€œAre you sure you should be riding?” he asked.
    â€œCourse I’m sure. Don’t be so bloody rude.”
    â€œI wasn’t being rude. You must have had a nasty shock in that fall. Anyway, it’s difficult carrying anything with those low handlebars.”
    â€œThat skinflint Pattel has run out of carriers.” It was part of Meta’s character to mispronounce in the English manner any foreign-sounding name. “I’d’ve been all right with a bag.”
    â€œWould you like me to carry the…bottle up to the Dower House? It’s not far.”
    She stood astride her bike and brushed aside his offer with a shake of the head. “Your mother’s away for the weekend, I hear.”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œOff with Marius for a dirty—no. Can’t really be a dirty weekend when they have one every week, can it?”
    â€œI don’t see why they can’t have a dirty weekend anywhere they want to. Actually it’s Cardiff.”
    â€œNot my idea of a place to have a sexy rendezvous, but what would I know? I’ve hardly left the village in the last twenty years.” A grievance seemed to take hold of her not very clear brain, and she brandished her bottle in his face. “Reduced to buying cheap plonk because the coffers are so low. Next thing will be, Jack will want me to go out cleaning.”
    â€œI’m sure that won’t happen.” Nobody would employ you, Alexander thought.
    â€œI wouldn’t bank on it. What we need is a nice steep interest-rate rise, so that our money makes something for us, what there is of it.”
    â€œI expect there’d be inflation too, so it wouldn’t help in the long run.”
    â€œBloody economist too, are you?” She bent forward to look him in the face, her bulging eyes fearsomely red. “If you’re so bloody smart about money, you should give your mother some advice.”
    â€œI think she gets more advice than she can stomach.”
    â€œJack, you mean? He has her interests at heart, at least. She gets advice given her because she needs it. Any woman who’s a mistress not a wife does need it. Tell her to get something on paper, that’s what Jack says.”
    â€œI’ll tell her but—”
    â€œOtherwise what will happen? Marius is a high-powered businessman. Life of tremendous stress, eh? So one day he drops down dead, and then where is she? Nowhere.”
    â€œI think Marius has—”
    â€œNo good thinking. Tell him she wants to see it, that’s what your mother should do. Otherwise she’ll have no money, no roof over her head, and a career that’s dead in the water because she hasn’t done any acting for yonks. She’d be a beggar. I don’t give a damn, but Jack does. Tell her to get something definite in writing! Otherwise tea and sympathy is all she’ll have, and not a great deal of the latter.”
    She hitched herself on to the saddle and rode off, turning at the next corner in the direction of the Dower House. Alexander walked on slowly, expecting to hear another crash, but Meta seemed to have negotiated the last part of her journey successfully. Over the rest of the mile-long walk home he pondered what Meta had said. He felt that, granted it had come from a drunken old harridan with a vicious streak to her, it had not been bad advice at all. Alexander did not hate Marius, but neither did he love him in the way Caroline had convinced herself both her children did. His mother was also sure she was something more than just one in a long line of Marius’s mistresses. Without a doubt, words had been uttered that had convinced her that he had done, or would do, something that would give her special status a financial basis. OK then, let it be something not so lavish as to seriously damage his wife’s or his children’s position, but something