Story: ‘Offences against the Person’

Hilary Mantel

Her name was Nicolette Bland, and she was my father’s mistress. I’m going back to the early 1970s. It’s a long time now since he was subject to urges of the flesh. She looked like a Nicolette: dainty, poised, hair short and artfully curling: dark, liquid, slightly slanting eyes. She was honey-coloured, as if she’d had a package holiday, and she looked rested, and seldom not-smiling. I put her at 26. I was 17, and filling in the summer before university as a junior clerk in my father’s chambers. Devilling, he called it. I never knew why.