Marrying the Mistress by Joanna Trollope

Emma’s intense, instinctive curiosity while she made it. She looked at her watch. Ten-twenty. Ten minutes before the weekly administrative practice meeting, which she chaired with tremendous briskness, having no tolerance whatsoever for people who adored meetings and who would go to any lengths to prolong them.
    She put her hand on the telephone receiver and dialled rapidly. Then she shut her eyes. The telephone rang out four times and then a woman’s voice said, rather distantly, ‘If you wish to leave a message for Merrion Palmer, please do so, after the tone.’
    ‘Hello,’ Carrie said, and stopped. Merrion’s answering machine waited, in faintly humming silence.
    ‘Hello,’ Carrie said again. She opened her eyes. ‘This is Carrie Stockdale. I’m Guy’s daughter-in-law. Could you ring me at work sometime? Between nine and four-thirty? Thank you.’
    She put the phone down. She thought, suddenly and with unexpected guilt, of Simon.
    The door opened, and one of the receptionists put her head in. ‘Carrie,’ she said, ‘Dr Mason’s had to go off to an emergency anaesthetic at the hospital. And he has seventeen people on his list this morning. What are we supposed to do with them?’
    Jack Stockdale leaned against the blank wall at the back of the science block. It was the place he and Rich and Marco came for a smoke usually, but he didn’t somehow feel like a smoke today, and certainly not with Rich and Marco. Marco, blazing with unconcealed triumph, had taken Moll to the cinema on Friday night and had hinted at a night of clubbing together on Saturday. Rich appeared to think that this was fine, brilliant even, cool. Jack had never breathed a word of his secret and intense interest in Moll to either Rich or Marco, but discovered that he felt brutally let down and betrayed all the same. He couldn’t speak to either of them; he could hardly look at them. When Adam said to him, ‘What’ve you got the hump about, mate?’ he’d shrugged and muttered and gone off to mooch about by himself, hands in his pockets, kicking things.
    The trouble was, he might not have said anything, but Marco knew, all the same. Marco glowed with theknowledge that he had somehow succeeded where Jack had failed. Marco had his Italian father’s colouring and his Italian father’s physical assurance and beside him, Jack felt suddenly raw and hopeless, physically and emotionally, pitifully unfinished. He knew he was being pathetic, like a big, sad, clumsy puppy, but he couldn’t see, right now, how to feel any other way. His father had put his finger on the problem, quite by chance, the other night. They’d all been hanging about the kitchen, wanting supper hours before it was ready, and Simon was chopping carrots on the table, very slowly and carefully, and Jack was watching him and waiting for Carrie to notice how thickly he was chopping them and say she wanted them cut much thinner than that.
    ‘You know something?’ Simon said.
    Carrie was making a casserole. She had her back to them all, dipping a big spoon in and out of the pot while she added things out of bottles and jars.
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘What?’
    ‘You can handle anything in life,’ Simon said. ‘You can get anything sorted, can’t you, as long as your emotions aren’t involved. That’s why work works and life mostly doesn’t.’
    Carrie turned round.
    ‘Weird,’ she said, ‘I was thinking almost exactly that earlier today. Could you cut those a bit thinner?’
    Jack had leaned across and picked up a piece of carrot. He’d rather wanted to ask his father more about what he’d said, more about this emotion stuff and how itmade you suddenly want things you’d never wanted before. And, worse, how it seemed to take away the feeling that you were in any way in control any more. But he felt shy. Rachel was sitting at the table, too, supposedly slicing cabbage and learning a poem for English, but actually doing neither, and she had ears like a lynx and a