Selected Stories Page 4

  ‘Well, well, well,’ he murmured at La Trota, embracing Margy first and then Francesca. There were flecks of grey in his fair hair; his complexion was a little ruddier. But his lazy eyes were touched with the humour that both women remembered, and his big hands seemed gentle on the table.

  ‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ Sebastian said, choosing Francesca to say it to.

  ‘Oh heavens, I’ve said the wrong thing!’ a woman exclaimed in horror at a party, eyes briefly closed, a half-stifled breath drawn in.

  ‘No, not at all,’ Philip said.

  ‘It’s just that -’

  ‘We see Sebastian quite often, actually.’

  He wondered why he lied, and realized then that he was saving face. He had been smiling when the woman first mentioned Sebastian, when she’d asked how he was these days. Almost at once the woman had known she was saying the wrong thing, her expression adding more and more as she stumbled on, endeavouring to muddle with further words her original statement about trying unsuccessfully to catch Francesca’s and Sebastian’s attention in Wigmore Street.

  ‘So very nice,’ the woman floundered, hot-faced. ‘Sebastian.’

  A mass of odds and ends gathered in Philip’s mind. ‘The number of this taxi is 22003,’ he had said after he’d kissed Francesca in it. Their first embrace, and he had read out the number from the enamel disc on the back of the driver’s seat, and neither of them had since forgotten it. The first present Francesca gave him was a book about wine which to this day he wouldn’t lend to people.

  No one was as honest as Francesca, Philip reflected as the woman blundered on: it was impossible to accept that she had told lies, even through reticence. Yet now there were – as well – the odds and ends of the warm summer that had just passed, all suddenly transformed. Dates and the order of events glimmered in Philip’s brain; he was good at speedy calculation and accurately recalling. Excuses, and explanations, seemed elaborate in the bare light of the hindsight that was forced upon him. A note falling to the floor had been too hastily retrieved. There were headaches and cancellations and apologies. There’d been a difference in Francesca that hadn’t at the time seemed great but seemed great now.

  ‘Yes, Sebastian’s very nice,’ Philip said.

  ‘It’s over,’ Francesca said in their bedroom. ‘It’s been over for weeks, as a matter of fact.’

  Still dressed, sitting on the edge of their bed, Francesca was gazing at the earrings she’d just taken off, two drops of amber in the palm of her hand. Very slowly she made a pattern of them, moving them on her palm with the forefinger of her other hand. In their bedroom the light was dim, coming only from a bedside lamp. Francesca was in the shadows.

  ‘It doesn’t make much difference that it’s over,’ Philip said. ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’ve never told lies before.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I hated it.’

  Even while it was happening, she had sometimes thought it wasn’t. And for the last few lonely weeks it had felt like madness, as indeed it had been. Love was madness of a kind, Margy had said once, years ago, and Francesca at that time hadn’t understood: being fond of Sebastian in the past, and loving Philip, had never been touched by anything like that. Her recent inexplicable aberration felt as if she had taken time off from being herself, and now was back again where she belonged, not understanding, as bouts of madness are never understood.

  ‘That’s hardly an explanation,’ her husband said when she endeavoured to relate some of this.

  ‘No, I know it isn’t. I would have told you about it quite soon; I couldn’t not tell you.’

  ‘I didn’t even notice I wasn’t loved.’

  ‘You are loved, Philip. I ended it. And besides, it wasn’t much.’

  A silence grew between them. ‘I love you,’ Sebastian had said no longer ago than last June, and in July and in August and September also. And she had loved him too. More than she loved anyone else, more than she loved her children: that thought had been there. Yet now she could say it wasn’t much.

  As though he guessed some part of this, Philip said: ‘I’m dull compared to him. I’m grey and dull.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I mooch about the garden, I mooch about on golf courses. You’ve watched me becoming greyer in middle age. You don’t want to share our middle age.’

  ‘I never think things like that. Never, Philip.’

  ‘No one respects a cuckold.’

  Francesca did not reply. She was asked if she wanted a divorce. She shook her head. Philip said:

  ‘One day in the summer you and Margy were talking about a key when I came in, and you stopped and said, “Have a drink, darling?” I remember now. Odd, how stuff’s dredged up. The key to Margy’s flat, I think?’

  Francesca stood up. She placed her amber earrings in the drawer of their bedside table and slowly began to undress. Philip, standing by the door, said he had always trusted her, which he had said already.

  ‘I’m sorry I hurt you, Philip.’ Tiredly, she dropped into a cliché, saying that Sebastian had been banished as a ghost may be, that at last she had got him out of her system. But what she said had little relevance, and mattered so slightly that it was hardly heard. What was there between them were the weekends Philip had been in charge of the children because Francesca needed a rest and had gone, with Margy, to some seaside place where Margy was looking after a house for people who were abroad. And the evenings she helped to paint Margy’s flat. And the mornings that were free after she gave up helping in the Little Acorn Nursery School. Yes, that key had been Margy’s, Francesca said. Left for her under a stone at the foot of a hydrangea bush in Pimlico, in a block of flats’ communal garden: she didn’t add that. Found there with a frisson of excitement: nor that, either.

  ‘I’m ashamed because I hurt you,’ she said instead. ‘I’m ashamed because I was selfish and a fool.’

  ‘You should have married him in the first place.’

  ‘It was you I wanted to marry, Philip.’

  Francesca put on her nightdress, folded her underclothes, and draped her tights over the back of a chair. She sat for a moment in front of her dressing-table looking-glass, rubbing cold cream into her face, stroking away the moisture of tears.

  ‘You have every right to turn me out,’ she said, calmly now.

  ‘You have every right to have the children to yourself.’

  ‘D’you want that?’

  ‘No.’

  He hated her, Francesca thought, but she sensed as well that this hatred was a visitation only, that time would take it away. And she guessed that Philip sensed this also, and resented it that something as ordinary as passing time could destroy the high emotions he was experiencing now. Yet it was the truth.

  ‘It happened by chance,’ Francesca said, and made it all sound worse. ‘I thought that Margy and Sebastian – oh well, it doesn’t matter.’

  They quarrelled then. The tranquillity that had prevailed was shattered in a moment, and their children woke and heard the raised voices. Underhand, hole-in-corner, shabby, untrustworthy, dishonourable, grubby: these words had never described Francesca in the past, but before the light of morning they were used. And to add a garnish to all that was said, there was Margy’s treachery too. She had smiled and connived even though there was nothing in it for her.

  Francesca countered when her spirit returned, after she’d wept beneath this lash of accusation, and the condemnation of her friend. Philip had long ago withdrawn himself from the family they were: it was an irony that her misbehaviour had pulled him back, that occasionally he had had to cook beans and make the bacon crispy for their children, and see that their rooms were tidied, their homework finished. At least her lies had done that.

  But there was no forgiveness when they dressed again. Nothing was over yet. Forgiveness came later.

  There was a pause after Francesca made her bleak statement in La Trota. Margy frowned, beginning to lean across the ta
ble because the hubbub was considerable that day. No longer working at Bygone Antiques, she had come across London specially.

  ‘Drop me?’ Margy said, and Francesca nodded: that was her husband’s request.

  The restaurant was full of people: youngish, well-to-do, men together, women together, older women with older men, older men with girls, five businessmen at a table. The two waitresses hurried with their orders, too busy to mutter their complaints about the overcrowding.

  ‘But why on earth?’ Margy said. ‘Why should you?’

  Expertly the Sicilian waitress opened the Gavi and splashed some into their glasses. ‘Buon appetito,’ she briskly wished them, returning in a moment with the sole. They hadn’t spoken since Margy had asked her questions.

  ‘He has a right to something, is that it?’ Margy squeezed her chunk of lemon over the fish and then on to her salad. ‘To punish?’

  ‘He thinks you betrayed him.’

  ‘I betrayed him? I?’

  ‘It’s how Philip feels. No, not a punishment,’ Francesca said. ‘Philip’s not doing that.’

  ‘What then?’

  Francesca didn’t reply, and Margy poked at the fish on her plate, not wanting to eat it now. Some vague insistence hovered in her consciousness: some truth, not known before and still not known, was foggily sensed.

  ‘I don’t understand this,’ Margy said. ‘Do you?’

  A salvaging of pride was a wronged husband’s due: she could see that and could understand it, but there was more to this than pride.

  ‘It’s how Philip feels,’ Francesca said again. ‘It’s how all this has left him.’

  She knew, Margy thought: whatever it was, it had been put to Francesca in Philip’s court-room manner, pride not even mentioned. Then, about to ask and before she could, she knew herself: the forgiving of a wife was as much as there could be. How could a wronged husband, so hurt and so aggrieved, forgive a treacherous friend as well?

  ‘Love allows forgiveness,’ Francesca said, guessing what Margy’s thoughts were, which was occasionally possible after years of intimacy.

  But Margy’s thoughts were already moving on. Every time she played with his children he would remember the role she had played that summer: she could hear him saying it, and Francesca’s silence. Every present she brought to the house would seem to him to be a traitor’s bribe. The summer would always be there, embalmed in the friendship that had made the deception possible – the key to the flat, the seaside house, the secret kept and then discovered. What the marriage sought to forget the friendship never would because the summer had become another part of it. The friendship could only be destructive now, the subject of argument and quarrels, the cause of jealousy and pettiness and distress: this, Philip presented as his case, his logic perfect in all its parts. And again Margy could hear his voice.

  ‘It’s unfair, Francesca.’

  ‘It only seems so.’ Francesca paused, then said: ‘I love Philip, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I do know.’

  In the crowded bistro their talk went round in muddled circles, the immediacy of the blow that had been struck at them lost from time to time in the web of detail that was their friendship, lost in days and moments and occasions not now recalled but still remembered, in confidences, and conversation rattling on, in being different in so many ways and that not mattering. Philip, without much meaning to, was offering his wife’s best friend a stature she had not possessed before in his estimation: she was being treated with respect. But that, of course, was neither here nor there.

  ‘What was her name,’ Margy asked, ‘that woman with the gummy teeth?’

  ‘Hyatt. Miss Hyatt.’

  ‘Yes, of course it was.’

  There was a day when Margy was cross and said Francesca was not her friend and never would be, when they were six. There was the time the French girl smoked when they were made to take her for a walk on the hills behind their boarding-school. Margy fell in love with the boy who brought the papers round. Francesca’s father died and Margy read Tennyson to cheer her up. They ran out of money on their cycling tour and borrowed from a lorry driver who got the wrong idea. Years later Francesca was waiting afterwards when Margy had her abortion.

  ‘You like more cappuccinos?’ the Sicilian waitress offered, placing fresh cups of coffee before them because they always had two each.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ Francesca said.

  In silence, in the end, they watched the bistro emptying. The two waitresses took the tablecloths off and lifted the chairs on to the tables in order to mop over the coloured patterns of shellfish on the tiled floor. Quite suddenly a wave of loneliness caused Margy to shiver inwardly, as the chill news of death does.

  ‘Perhaps with a bit of time,’ she began, but even as she spoke she knew that time would make no difference. Time would simply pass, and while it did so Francesca’s guilt would still be there; she would always feel she owed this sacrifice. They would not cheat; Francesca would not do that a second time. She would say that friends meeting stealthily was ridiculous, a grimier deception than that of lovers.

  ‘It’s all my fault,’ Francesca said.

  Hardly perceptibly, Margy shook her head, knowing it wasn’t. She had gone too far; she had been sillily angry because of a children’s prank. She hadn’t sought to knock a marriage about, only to give her friend a treat that seemed to be owing to her, only to rescue her for a few summer months from her exhausting children and her exhausting husband, from Mrs Sleet and the Little Acorn Nursery School, from her too-safe haven. But who was to blame, and what intentions there had been, didn’t matter in the least now.

  ‘In fairness,’ Francesca said, ‘Philip has a point of view. Please say you see it, Margy.’

  ‘Oh yes, I see it.’ She said it quickly, knowing she must do so before it became impossible to say, before all generosity was gone. She knew, too, that one day Francesca would pass on this admission to her husband because Francesca was Francesca, who told the truth and was no good at deception.

  ‘See you soon,’ the Sicilian waitress called out when eventually they stood up to go.

  ‘Yes,’ Margy agreed, lying for her friend as well. On the pavement outside La Trota they stood for a moment in a chill November wind, then moved away in their two different directions.

  Timothy’s Birthday

  They made the usual preparations. Charlotte bought a small leg of lamb, picked purple broccoli and sprigs of mint. All were Timothy’s favourites, purchased every year for April 23rd, which this year was a Thursday. Odo ensured that the gin had not gone too low: a gin and tonic, and then another one, was what Timothy liked. Odo did not object to that, did not in fact object to obtaining the gin specially, since it was not otherwise drunk in the house.

  They were a couple in their sixties who had scarcely parted from each other in the forty-two years of their marriage. Odo was tall, thin as a straw, his bony features receding into a freckled dome on which little hair remained. Charlotte was small and still pretty, her grey hair drawn back and tidy, her eyes an arresting shade of blue. Timothy was their only child.

  Deciding on a fire, Odo chopped up an old seed-box for kindling and filled a basket with logs and turf. The rooks were cawing and chattering in the high trees, their nests already in place – more of them this year, Odo noticed, than last. The cobbles of the yard were still damp from a shower. Grass, occasionally ragwort or a dock, greened them in patches. Later perhaps, when Timothy had gone, he’d go over them with weed-killer, as he did every year in April. The outhouses that bounded the yard required attention also, their wooden doors rotted away at the bottom, the whitewash of their stucco gone grey, brambles growing through their windows. Odo resolved that this year he would rectify matters, but knew, even as the thought occurred, that he would not.

  ‘Cold?’ Charlotte asked him as he passed through the kitchen, and he said yes, a little chilly outside. The kitchen was never cold because of the range. A long time ago they had been going to replac
e it with a second-hand Aga Charlotte had heard about, but when it came to the point Odo hadn’t wanted to and anyway there hadn’t been the funds.

  In the drawing-room Odo set the fire, crumpling up the pages of old account books because no newspaper was delivered to the house and one was rarely bought: they had the wireless and the television, which kept them up with things. The account books were of no use to anyone, belonging entirely to the past, to the time of Odo’s grandfather and generations earlier. Kept for the purpose in a wall-cupboard by the fireplace, their dry pages never failed to burn well. Slating: £2. 15s., Odo read as he arranged the kindling over the slanted calligraphy. He struck a match and stacked on logs and turf. Rain spattered against the long-paned windows; a sudden gust of wind tumbled something over in the garden.

  Charlotte pressed rosemary into the slits she’d incised in the lamb. She worked swiftly, from long experience knowing just what she was doing. She washed the grease from her fingertips under a running tap and set aside what remained of the rosemary, even though it was unlikely that she would have a use for it: she hated throwing things away.

  The oven was slow; although it was still early, the meat would have to go in within half an hour, and potatoes to roast – another Timothy favourite – at eleven. The trifle, gooey with custard and raspberry jam and jelly – a nursery pudding – Charlotte had made the night before. When Timothy came he chopped the mint for the mint sauce, one of the first of his childhood tasks. He’d been a plump little boy then.

  ‘I can’t go,’ Timothy said in the flat that had recently been left to him by Mr Kinnally.

  Eddie didn’t respond. He turned the pages of the Irish Times, wishing it were something livelier, the Star or the Express. With little interest he noticed that schools’ entrance tests were to be abolished and that there was to be a canine clean-up, whatever that was, in Limerick.