Marrying the Mistress by Joanna Trollope Page A

mind like an Exocet. Mention emotion in front of Rachel and she’d say, clear as a bell, ‘You fancy Moll Saunders, don’t you?’
    He squared his shoulders against the science-block wall. He did fancy her, it was true. He was, in fact, spellbound by the way she looked and moved, by the way her hair fell. But there was more than that. He wanted to know her. He wanted to hear her say things to him. He wanted to do things for her. After his father’s remark, he’d gone and looked up ‘emotion’ in the dictionary and it had talked about states of feeling, about sympathy and personal involvements and sensitivity and love. His mother had said Grando was in love. This was at once impossible and perfectly possible to imagine. Jack knew enough to sense that the life of the feelings didn’t automatically stop at twenty, but it was very hard to visualize that anyone could feel as strongly as he did now, and be as confused and as uncertain as to what to do next, as he was now.
    He put his hands flat against the wall and pushed himself away from it. He didn’t want a cigarette and he didn’t want two periods of physics followed by one of current affairs and he didn’t want to go home after that and have Rachel watching him and knowing she knewwhat was the matter. He began to move slowly along the science block towards the asphalt path that connected the block to the main school building. He felt he could summon up no interest in anything because the one thing he was interested in wasn’t interested back.
    On the asphalt path, just out of sight of the back of the science block, a girl was waiting.
    ‘Hi,’ Moll Saunders said.
    Jack stared at her, speechless.
    ‘Did I scare you?’
    ‘No. No, but I—’
    ‘I’ve got a bit of a down on smoking,’ Moll Saunders said. ‘My aunt died of lung cancer.’
    ‘Oh God,’ Jack said. ‘I wasn’t smoking, in fact I—’ His head was spinning. He put his hand into his trouser pocket and tugged out his cigarettes. He held them out to her. ‘Here.’
    ‘You don’t have to do that—’
    ‘I do,’ Jack said.
    ‘We’ll put them in the bin.’
    ‘OK.’
    ‘Jack,’ Moll said, ‘I really like your painting.’
    He looked down at his feet. His ears felt the size of dinner plates.
    ‘Wow—’
    ‘I do,’ she said. ‘It’s cool.’
    When Laura brought the dogs back from their afternoon walk, their bellies and legs and paws were dark with mud. She tied them up to a ring set into the wallof the potting shed, and went to unravel the hose. They began to leap about and squeal. The hose was a horror worse than the vacuum cleaner. They hated the hose.
    Laura turned the outside tap on and put her finger partly over the hose nozzle to intensify the pressure. She held each dog’s collar in turn and hosed it down methodically, despite the yelps and squirming; she did this in winter, she reflected, twice a day usually, twice a day seven days a week. When Guy was there, he’d walked the dogs perhaps once or twice at a weekend, but he never washed them properly. He never seemed to see the need, nor the need to walk them so regularly. He said being so regular with them made them a nuisance, encouraged them to badger for walks or their dinner with maddening persistence. Dogs, he said, ought to accommodate to people’s lives: not the other way about. She’d talked about her obligation to the dogs, to the garden, to the house, to the servicing of their joint lives.
    ‘Laura,’ he’d said tiredly. ‘Laura, don’t mistake a tyranny for an obligation.’
    She turned the tap off. The dogs shook themselves vigorously, springing about in a theatrical manner on the ends of their leads. She untied them, and they leaped away from her, chasing and tumbling over each other in their exaggerated relief that the ordeal was over. She watched them and felt like crying. They could, in their blithe doggy way, forget pain so easily, so cruelly easily.
    There was a car in the back drive, an estate car