Lynne Graham: The Mistress Wife

‘Please come out, Jock…’ Vivien begged the three-legged Scottie dog hiding under the sideboard.

Jock, rather optimistically named after a genial cartoon character, stayed put. He had been denied the chance to get his teeth into the leg of the washing-machine repairman and therefore cruelly prevented from fulfilling his duty to protect his mistress from a male interloper. Dogs were not supposed to sulk but Jock went off in a huff if he was denied the delights of chasing male individuals from the premises.

Marco gave a gurgle of delight and began crawling under the sideboard to join his favourite playmate. Vivien scooped her son up. Huge brown eyes fringed by silky black lashes as long as fly swats reproached her for her interference. Marco made a determined squirming motion in an effort to escape his mother’s restraining arms and when that failed loosed a noisy shout of annoyance.

Vivien steeled herself for a battle. ‘No…’ she told Marco quietly and steadily, all too painfully aware after a recent very public humiliation at the supermarket that it was time that she learned how to handle her son’s fits of temper.

No? In visible disbelief, Marco gazed back at the fair-haired woman with her big anxious green eyes. No? His nanny, Rosa, used that unpleasant word to him, and his father too. But he knew his mother adored him, and loved to please him. Indeed at the age of eighteen months he had all the controlling instincts of a tyrant, who had already discovered that he needed only the most basic of weapons to triumph over all opposition: when thwarted, he threw unmanageable tantrums until he got what he wanted. He began to draw in a deep, deep breath in preparation for screaming and raging his way to a crushing victory.

Barely five feet two inches tall and of slender build, Vivien laid her solid little son down inside the playpen. Marco was strong and when he flailed around in a temper, she found it very difficult to hold him. Once he had fallen off her lap and bumped his head. After that scare she had begun putting him down for his own safety.

‘He’s a spoilt brat!’ her sister, Bernice, had condemned with a shudder of distaste that had cut Vivien’s tender maternal heart to the quick.

‘Demanding little chap, isn’t he?’ Fabian Garsdale, her friend and colleague in the botany department, had remarked with an air of shocked disapproval when he’d witnessed such a display. ‘Have you thought of applying a spot of good old-fashioned discipline?’

‘You must try really hard to be firm with him,’ Rosa, Marco’s part-time nanny, had advised when pressed to explain why her charge rarely subjected her to the same temperamental episodes. ‘Marco can be very strong-willed.’

Vivien performed a handstand beside the playpen. If she was quick off the mark, simply distracting Marco worked a treat. Mid-wail, her son paused for breath and then chortled with delighted surprise at the sight of his mother upside down. He sat up to get a better view and his glorious smile shone forth.

Flipping back upright again, Vivien swept him into her arms, hugged him tight and blinked back the moisture in her eyes. All the fierce agonising love that she had once felt for Lucca had been transferred to their son. Without Marco, she was convinced that she would have gone out of her mind with grief over her broken marriage. It had been her baby’s needs that first forced her to confront unpleasant realities and carve out a new life for them both. But the devastating pain of Lucca’s betrayal was still locked up inside her and she had to live with it daily. She had always felt things too deeply and had learnt as a child to conceal the embarrassing intensity of her feelings behind a quiet façade. To do otherwise made people uncomfortable.

The noise of a car pulling rather too fast into the gravel driveway outside announced Bernice’s return. Jock emerged from below the sideboard, uttered a single bark, looked nervously at the sitting-room door and then went into retreat again. A moment later, the door bounced back in protest on its hinges to frame a tall, leggy brunette, who would have been quite stunningly lovely had it not been for the angry hardness of her blue eyes and the clenched set of dissatisfaction marring her mouth.

Indifferent to Bernice’s, entrance for his aunt never gave him attention unless it was to lament his vocal output or his infuriatingly immature behaviour, Marco gave vent to a large sleepy yawn and rested back heavily in his mother’s arms.

Bernice sent the curly-headed toddler a look of irritation. ‘Shouldn’t the kid be having his nap?’

‘I was just about to take him up.’ Wondering sympathetically if her sister had suffered yet another disappointment in the employment stakes, Vivien went upstairs and tried not to worry about her own increasingly strained finances.

After all, it would be downright cruel to preach economy yet again to Bernice, who was already utterly miserable struggling to survive without champagne breakfasts and the like. Vivien was also guiltily conscious that her own personal reluctance to take anything other than the barest minimum financial assistance from Lucca after their separation was ultimately responsible for her overdraft at the bank. She had put pride ahead of common sense and was now paying the literal price.

At least, the cottage was small and, now that all the repairs had been done, economical to run. Of course, Bernice said it was only fit for dolls. But in the dark days of late pregnancy when Vivien had been alone and struggling to bear a life that did not contain even occasional glimpses of Lucca, the little house had seemed like a sanctuary. Embellished by a mature tree in the front garden, the cottage lay in pretty countryside not too far from the Oxford college where Vivien currently worked three days a week as a tutor in the botany department.

Vivien squeezed between her own bed and Marco’s cot and tucked her son in for his morning nap. Possessed of two narrow bedrooms, her diminutive home was the perfect size for a single parent of one but stretched to capacity when required to house another adult. Even so, Vivien was overjoyed to have her sibling’s company and only wished she had foreseen the possibility that she might one day require roomier accommodation. Yet who could have guessed that her sister’s designer boutique in London would fail? Her poor sister had lost everything: her trendy Docklands apartment, her smart sports car, not to mention the majority of her fashionable but fickle friends.

‘Don’t even bother asking me how my interview went!’ her sister hissed furiously when Vivien joined her again. ‘The cheeky old hag virtually accused me of lying on my CV and I told her what she could do with her lousy hotel job!’

Vivien was taken aback ‘Surely the woman didn’t accuse you of lying—’

‘She didn’t have to…she started asking me questions in French and I hadn’t a clue what she was rattling on about!’ Bernice proclaimed in outrage. ‘I claimed a working knowledge of French on my CV…I didn’t say I was practically bilingual!’

Although it was news to Vivien that the sibling three years her senior had even a working knowledge of the French language, she hurried to soothe ruffled feathers with words of sympathy.

Unimpressed, Bernice pursed her lips. ‘It’s your fault that I was humiliated!’

‘My fault?’ Vivien stilled in dismay.

‘You’re still married to an incredibly rich man and yet we’re practically starving!’ Bernice condemned with ferocious bitterness. ‘You’re always moaning about how broke you are and making me feel guilty…I’m chasing rotten jobs way below my capabilities and you’re sitting home on your bum most of the week spoiling Marco like he’s a royal prince!’