Selected Stories, Volume 2 Read online

  ‘You did your homework before you turned on that television?’ Francesca asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Ben lied.

  ‘I bet you didn’t,’ Margy said, not looking up from the magazine she was flipping through. Busy with their food, Francesca didn’t hear that.

  Francesca was tall, with pale, uncurled hair that glistened in the sunlight. Margy was small and dark, brown-eyed, with thin, fragile fingers. They had known one another more or less all their lives.

  ‘Miss Martindale’s mother died,’ Ben divulged, breaking the monotony of a silence that had gathered. ‘A man interfered with her.’

  ‘My God!’ Francesca exclaimed, and Margy closed the magazine, finding little of interest in it.

  ‘Miss Martindale saw him,’ Jason said. ‘Miss Martindale was just arriving and she saw this figure. First she said a black man, then she said he could be any colour.’

  ‘You mean, Miss Martindale came to school today after something like that?’

  ‘Miss Martindale has a sense of duty,’ Jason said.

  ‘Actually she was extremely late,’ Ben said.

  ‘But how ghastly for the poor woman!’

  Miss Martindale was a little thing with glasses, Francesca told her friend, not at all up to sustaining something like this. Ben said all the girls had cried, that Miss Martindale herself had cried, that her face was creased and funny because actually she’d been crying all night.

  Margy watched Jason worrying in case his brother went too far. They could have said it was Miss Martindale who’d been murdered; they had probably intended to, but had changed it to her mother just in time. It wouldn’t have worked if they’d said Miss Martindale because sooner or later Miss Martindale would be there at a parents’ evening.

  ‘Neighbours now,’ Jason said.

  ‘Started actually,’ Ben pointed out.

  Margy lit a cigarette when she was alone with Francesca, and suggested a drink. She poured gin and Cinzano Bianco for both of them, saying she didn’t believe there was much wrong with Miss Martindale’s mother, and Francesca, bewildered, looked up from the dishes she was washing. Then, without a word, she left the kitchen and Margy heard her noisily reprimanding her sons, declaring that it was cruel and unfeeling to say people were dead who weren’t. Abruptly, the sound of the television ceased and there were footsteps on the stairs. Margy opened a packet of Mignons Morceaux.

  Francesca and Margy could remember being together in a garden when they were two, meeting there for the first time, they afterwards presumed, Francesca smiling, Margy scowling. Later, during their schooldays, they had equally disliked a sarcastic teacher with gummy false teeth, and had considered the visiting mathematics man handsome, though neither of them cared for his subject. Later still Francesca became the confidante of Margy’s many love affairs, herself confiding from the calmer territory of marriage. Margy brought mild adventure into Francesca’s life, and Francesca recognized that Margy would never suffer the loneliness she feared herself, the vacuum she was certain there would be if her children had not been born. They telephoned one another almost every day, to chat inconsequentially or to break some news, it didn’t matter which. Their common ground was the friendship itself: they shared some tastes and some opinions, but only some.

  When Philip – father of Jason and Ben – arrived in the house an hour later Francesca and Margy had moved to the sitting-room, taking with them the gin, the Cinzano Bianco, what remained of the Mignons Morceaux, and their glasses.

  ‘Hi, Philip,’ Margy greeted him, and watched while he kissed Francesca. He nodded at Margy.

  ‘Margy’s going to make us her paella,’ Francesca said, and Margy knew that when Philip turned away it was to hide a sigh. He didn’t like her paella. He didn’t like the herb salad she put together to go with it. He had never said so, being too polite for that, but Margy knew.

  ‘Oh, good,’ Philip said.

  He hadn’t liked the whiff of cigarettes that greeted him when he opened the hall-door, nor the sound of voices that had come from the sitting-room. He didn’t like the crumpled-up Mignons Morceaux packet, the gin bottle and the vermouth bottle on his bureau, Margy’s lipstained cigarette-ends, the way Margy was lolling on the floor with her shoes off. Margy didn’t have to look to see if this small cluster of aversions registered in Philip’s tight features. She knew it didn’t; he didn’t let things show.

  ‘They’ve been outrageous,’ Francesca said, and began about Miss Martindale’s mother.

  Margy looked at him then. Nothing moved in his lean face; he didn’t blink before he turned away to stand by the open french windows. Golf and gardening he gave as his hobbies in Who’s Who.

  ‘Outrageous?’ he repeated eventually, an inflection in his tone – unnoticed by Francesca – suggesting to Margy that he questioned the use of this word in whatever domestic sense it was being employed. He liked being in Who’s Who: it was a landmark in his life. One day he would be a High Court judge: everyone said that. One day he would be honoured with a title, and Francesca would be also because she was his wife.

  ‘I was really furious with them,’ Francesca said.

  He didn’t know what all this was about, he couldn’t remember who Miss Martindale was because Francesca hadn’t said. Margy smiled at her friend’s husband, as if to indicate her understanding of his bewilderment, as if in sympathy. It would be the weekend before he discovered that his golf-clubs had been set in concrete.

  ‘Be cross with them,’ Francesca begged, ‘when you go up. Tell them it was a horrid thing to say about anyone.’

  He nodded, his back half turned on her, still gazing into the garden.

  ‘Have a drink, Philip,’ Margy suggested because it was better usually when he had one, though not by much.

  ‘Yes,’ Philip said, but instead of going to pour himself something he walked out into the garden.

  ‘I’ve depressed him,’ Francesca commented almost at once. ‘He’s not in the house more than a couple of seconds and I’m nagging him about the boys.’

  She followed her husband into the garden, and a few minutes later, when Margy was gathering together the ingredients for her paella in the kitchen, she saw them strolling among the shrubs he so assiduously tended as a form of relaxation after his week in the courts. The boys would be asleep by the time he went up to say goodnight to them and if they weren’t they’d pretend; he wouldn’t have to reprimand them about something he didn’t understand. Of course all he had to do was to ask a few questions, but he wouldn’t because anything domestic was boring for him. It was true that when Mrs Sleet’s headscarf disappeared from the back-door pegs he asked questions – precise and needling, as if still in one of his court-rooms. And he had reached a conclusion: that the foolish woman must have left her headscarf on the bus. He rejected out of hand Francesca’s belief that a passing thief had found the back door open and reached in for what immediately caught his eye. No one would want such an item of clothing, Philip had maintained, no thief in his senses. And of course he was right. Margy remembered the fingernails of the two boys engrained with earth, and guessed that the headscarf had been used to wrap up Mabel, Ben’s guinea-pig, before confining her to the gerbil and guinea-pig graveyard beside the box hedge.

  Smoking while she chopped her herb salad – which he would notice, and silently deplore, as he passed through the kitchen – Margy wondered why Philip’s presence grated on her so. He was handsome in his way and strictly speaking he wasn’t a bore, nor did he arrogantly impose his views. It was, she supposed, that he was simply a certain kind of man, inimical to those who were not of his ilk, unable to help himself even. Several times at gatherings in this house Margy had met Philip’s legal colleagues and was left in no doubt that he was held in high regard, that he commanded both loyalty and respect. Meticulous, fair, precise as a blade, he was feared by his court-room opponents, and professionally he did not have a silly side: in his anticipated heights of success, he would surely not become one of those infamous elder
ly judges who flapped about from court to court, doling out eccentric sentences, lost outside the boundaries of the real world. On the other hand, among a circle of wives and other women of his acquaintance, he was known as ‘Bad News’, a reference to the misfortune of being placed next to him at a dinner party. On such occasions, when he ran out of his stock of conversational questions he tried no more, and displayed little interest in the small-talk that was, increasingly desperately, levelled at him. He had a way of saying, flatly, ‘I see’ when a humorous anecdote, related purely for his entertainment, came to an end. And through all this he was not ill at ease; others laboured, never he.

  As Margy dwelt on this catalogue of Philip’s favourable and less favourable characteristics, husband and wife passed by the kitchen window. Francesca smiled through the glass at her friend, a way of saying that all was well again after her small faux pas of nagging too soon after her husband’s return. Then Margy heard the french windows of the sitting-room being closed and Philip’s footsteps passed through the hall, on their way to the children’s bedroom.

  Francesca came in to help, and to open wine. Chatting about other matters, she laid out blue tweed mats on the Formica surface of the table, and forks and other cutlery and glasses. It wasn’t so much Philip, Margy thought; had he been married to someone else, she was sure she wouldn’t have minded him so. It was the marriage itself: her friend’s marriage astonished her.

  Every so often Margy and Francesca had lunch at a local bistro called La Trota. It was an elegant rendezvous, though inexpensive and limited in that it offered only fish and a few Italian cheeses. Small and bright and always bustling, its decorative tone was set by a prevalence of aluminium and glass, and matt white surfaces. Its walls were white also, its floor colourfully tiled – a crustacea pattern that was repeated on the surface of the bar. Two waitresses – one from Sicily, the other from Salerno – served at the tables. Usually, Francesca and Margy had Dover sole and salad, and a bottle of Gavi.

  La Trota was in Barnes, not far from Bygone Antiques, where Margy was currently employed. In the mornings Francesca helped in the nearby Little Acorn Nursery School, which both Jason and Ben had attended in the past. Margy worked in Bygone Antiques because she was, ‘for the time being’ as she put it, involved with its proprietor, who was, as she put it also, ‘wearily married’.

  On the Tuesday after Philip’s discovery of the concrete in his golf-bag they lunched outside, at one of La Trota’s three pavement tables, the June day being warm and sunny. Two months ago, when Margy had begun her stint at Bygone Antiques, Francesca was delighted because it meant they would be able to see more of one another: Margy lived some distance away, over the river, in Pimlico.

  ‘He was livid of course,’ Francesca reported. ‘I mean, they said it was a joke.’

  Margy laughed.

  ‘I mean, how could it be a joke? And how could it be a joke to say Miss Martindale’s mother was dead?’

  ‘Did Mrs Sleet’s headscarf ever turn up?’

  ‘You don’t think they stole Mrs Sleet’s headscarf?’

  ‘What I think is you’re lucky to have lively children. Imagine if they never left the straight and narrow.’

  ‘How lovely it would be!’

  Francesca told of the quarrel that had followed the discovery of the golf-bag, the worst quarrel of her marriage, she said. She had naturally been blamed because it was clear from what had occurred that the boys had been alone in the house when they shouldn’t have been. Philip wanted to know how this had happened, his court-room manner sharpening his questioning and his argument. How long had his children been latchkey children, and for what reason were they so?

  ‘I wish I’d had girls,’ Francesca complained pettishly. ‘I often think that now.’

  Their Dover soles arrived. ‘Isn’t no help,’ the Sicilian waitress muttered crossly as she placed the plates in front of them. ‘Every day we say too many tables. Twice times, maybe hundred times. Every day they promise. Next day the same.’

  ‘Ridiculous.’ Margy smiled sympathetically at the plump Sicilian girl. ‘Poor Francesca,’ she sympathized with her friend, taking a piece of lettuce in her fingers.

  But Francesca, still lost in the detail of the rumpus there had been, hardly heard. An hour at the very least, Philip was arguing all over again; possibly two hours they must have been on their own. It was absurd to spend all morning looking after children in a nursery school and all afternoon neglecting your own. That Jason and Ben had been sent back early that day, that she had been informed of this beforehand and had forgotten, that she would naturally have been there had she remembered: all this was mere verbiage apparently, not worth listening to, much less considering. Mrs Sleet left the house at one o’clock on the dot, and Francesca was almost always back by three, long before the boys returned. Jason and Ben were not latchkey children; she had made a mistake on a particular day; she had forgotten; she was sorry.

  ‘If you’re asked to do anything,’ had been the final shaft, ‘it’s to see to the children, Francesca. You have all the help in the house you ask for. I don’t believe you want for much.’ The matter of Andy Konig’s video had been brought up, and Jason’s brazen insistence at the time that it was for Social Studies. Andy Konig’s video wouldn’t have been discovered if it hadn’t become stuck in the video-player, repeating an endless sequence of a woman undressing in a doctor’s surgery. ‘You didn’t even look to see what was on it,’ had been the accusation, repeated now, which of course was true. It was over, all this was followed by; they would forget it; he’d drive to the Mortlake tip with the golf-bag, there’d be no television for thirty days, no sweets, cake or biscuits. ‘I would ask you to honour that, Francesca.’ As the rumpus subsided, she had sniffed back the last of her tears, not replying.

  ‘Oh Lord!’ she cried in frustration at La Trota. ‘Oh Lord, the guilt!’

  Cheering her friend up, Margy insisted that they change the subject. She recounted an episode that morning in the antique shop, a woman she knew quite well, titled actually, slipping a Crown Derby piece into a shopping bag. She touched upon her love affair with the shop’s proprietor, which was not going well. One of these days they should look up Sebastian, she idly suggested. ‘It’s time I settled down,’ she murmured over their cappuccinos.

  ‘I’m not sure that Sebastian . . .’ Francesca began, her concentration still lingering on the domestic upset.

  ‘I often wonder about Sebastian,’ Margy said.

  Afterwards, in the antique shop, it was cool among the polished furniture, the sofa-tables and revolving libraries, the carved pew ends and sewing cabinets. The collection of early Victorian wall clocks – the speciality of the wearily married proprietor – ticked gracefully; occupying most of the window space, the figure of Christ on a donkey cast shadows that were distorted by the surfaces they reached. A couple in summer clothes, whom Margy had earlier noticed in La Trota, whispered among these offerings. A man with someone else’s wife, a wife with someone else’s husband: Margy could tell at once. ‘Of course,’ she’d said when they asked if they might look around, knowing that they wouldn’t buy anything: people in such circumstances rarely did. ‘Oh, isn’t that pretty!’ the girl whispered now, taken with a framed pot-lid – an 1868 rifle contest in Wimbledon, colourfully depicted.

  ‘Forty-five pounds I think,’ Margy replied when she was asked the price, and went away to consult the price book. One day, she believed, Francesca would pay cruelly for her passing error of judgement in marrying the man she had. Hearing about the fuss over the golf-bag, she had felt that instinct justified: the marriage would go from bad to worse, from fusses and quarrels over two little boys’ obstreperousness to fusses and quarrels about everything else, a mound of pettiness accumulating, respect all gone and taking with it what once had seemed like love. Too often Margy had heard from married men the kind of bitter talk that was the evidence of this, and had known she would have heard still worse from the wives they spoke of. Yet just as o
ften, she fairly admitted, people made a go of it. They rarely said so because of course that wasn’t interesting, and sometimes what was making a go of it one day was later, in the divorce courts, called tedium.

  ‘Look in again,’ she invited the summery couple as they left without the pot-lid.

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ the man said, and the girl put her head on one side, a way of indicating, possibly, that she was grateful also.

  Margy had mentioned Sebastian at lunch, not because she wished to look him up on her own account but because it occurred to her that Sebastian was just the person to jolly Francesca out of her gloom. Sebastian was given to easy humour and exuded an agreeableness that was pleasant to be exposed to. Since he had once, years ago, wanted to marry Francesca, Margy often imagined what her friend’s household would have been like with Sebastian there instead.

  ‘Hullo,’ her employer said, entering the shop with a Regency commode and bringing with him the raw scent of the stuff he dabbed on his underarms, and a whiff of beer.

  ‘Handsome,’ Margy remarked, referring to the commode.

  It was Francesca who telephoned Sebastian. ‘A voice from the past,’ she said and he knew immediately, answering her by name. He was pleased she’d rung, he said, and all the old telephone inflections, so familiar once, registered again as their conversation progressed. ‘Margy?’ he repeated when Francesca suggested lunch for three. He sounded disappointed, but Francesca hardly noticed that, caught up with so much else, wondering how in fact it would affect everything if, somehow or other, Sebastian and Margy hit it off now, as she and Sebastian had in the past. She knew Sebastian hadn’t married. He had been at her wedding; she would have been at his, their relationship transformed on both sides then. Like Margy, Francesca imagined, Sebastian had free-wheeled through the time that had passed since. At her wedding she had guessed they would lose touch, and in turn he had probably guessed that that was, sensibly, what she wanted. Sebastian, who had never honoured much, honoured that. When marriage occurs, the past clams up, lines are drawn beneath a sub-total.