‘Back about four, I expect?’
‘Something like that.’
Had he gone off, she wouldn’t still be in this house. She wouldn’t be sitting in this kitchen in her black-and-scarlet dressing-gown, eyeing him in his woolly brown one. She’d be living with one of the children or in a flat somewhere. Years ago the house would have been sold; she’d not have grown old with a companion. It was most unlikely there would ever have been another man; she doubted she’d have wanted one.
‘I dreamed we were on a ferry going to Denmark,’ he unexpectedly says. ‘There was a woman you got talking to, all in black.’
‘Prettily in black?’
‘Oh, yes. A pretty woman too. She used an odd expression. She said she was determined to have what she called a “corking child”.’
‘Ah.’
‘You sat me down in front of her and made me comment on her dress. You made me make suggestions.’
‘And did you, Charles?’
‘I did. I suggested shades of green. Deep greens; not olive like my trousers. And rounded collar-ends on her shirt, not pointed like mine. I made her look at mine. She was a nice woman except that she said something a little rude about my shoes.’
‘Scuffed?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Your shoes are never scuffed.’
‘No.’
‘Well, there you are.’
He nods. ‘Yes, there you are.’
Soon after that he rises and goes upstairs again. Why did that conversation about a dream take place? It’s true that just occasionally they tell one another their dreams; just occasionally, they have always done so. But significance appears to attach to the fact that he shared his with her this morning: that is a feeling she has.
‘Why did you bother with me if I didn’t matter?’ Long after he’d decided to stay with her she asked him that. Long afterwards she questioned everything; she tore at the love that had united them in the first place; it was her right that he should listen to her. Six years went by before their daughter was born.
‘Well, I’m off.’
Like a tall, thin child he looks, his eyes deep in their sockets, his dark, conventional suit well pressed, a Paisley tie in swirls of blue that matches the striped blue shirt. His brown shoes, the pair he keeps for special occasions, gleam as they did not in his eccentric dream.
‘If I’d known I’d have come with you.’ Zoë can’t help saying that; she doesn’t intend to, the words come out. But they don’t alarm him, as once they would have. Once, a shadow of terror would have passed through his features, apprehension spreading lest she rush upstairs to put her coat on.
‘We’ll go in together next time,’ he promises.
‘Yes, that’ll be nice.’
They kiss, as they always do when they part. The hall door bangs behind him. She’ll open a tin of salmon for lunch and have it with tomatoes and a packet of crisps. A whole tin will be too much, of course, but between them they’ll probably be able for whatever’s left this evening.
In the sitting-room she turns the television on. Celeste Holm, lavishly fur-coated, is in a car, cross about something. Zoë doesn’t want to watch and turns it off again. She imagines the old flame excited as the train approaches London. An hour ago the old flame made her face up, but now she does it all over again, difficult with the movement of the train. Audrey doesn’t know that love came back into the marriage, that skin grew over the wound. She doesn’t know, because no one told her, because he cannot bring himself to say that the brief occasion was an aberration. He honours – because he’s made like that – whatever it is the affair still means to the woman whose life it has disrupted. He doesn’t know that Audrey – in receipt of all that was on offer – would have recovered from the drama in a natural way if Grace – in receipt of nothing at all – hadn’t been an influence. He doesn’t wonder what will happen now, since death has altered the pattern of loose ends.
Opening the salmon tin, Zoë travels again to the Alp Horn rendezvous. She wonders if it has changed and considers it unlikely. The long horn still stretches over a single wall. The same Tyrolean landscape decorates two others. There are the blue-and-red tablecloths. He waits with a glass of sherry, and then she’s there.
‘My dear!’
She is the first to issue their familiar greeting, catching him unaware the way things sometimes do these days.
‘My dear!’ he says in turn.
Sherry is ordered for her, too, and when it comes the rims of their glasses touch for a moment, a toast to the past.
‘Grace,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it awful?’
‘I manage.’
The waiter briskly notes their order and enquires about the wine.
‘Oh, the good old house red.’
Zoë’s fingers, gripping and slicing a tomato, are arthritic, painful sometimes though not at present. In bed at night he’s gentle when he reaches out for one hand or the other, cautious with affection, not tightening his grasp as once he did. Her fingers are ugly; she sometimes thinks she looks quite like a monkey now. She arranges the fish and the tomato on a plate and sprinkles pepper over both. Neither of them ever has salt.
‘And you, Charles?’
‘I’m all right.’
‘I worry about you sometimes.’
‘No, I’m all right.’
It was accordion music that was playing in the Alp Horn the day Zoë’s inquisitiveness drove her into it. Young office people occupied the tables. Business was quite brisk.
‘I do appreciate this,’ Audrey says. ‘When something’s over, all these years – I do appreciate it, Charles.’
He passes across the table the packet of Three Castles cigarettes, and she smiles, placing it beside her because it’s too soon yet to open it.
‘You’re fun, Charles.’
‘I think La Maybury married, you know. I think someone told me that.’
‘Grace could never stand her.’
‘No.’
Is this the end? Zoë wonders. Is this the final fling, the final call on his integrity and honour? Can his guilt slip back into whatever recesses there are, safe at last from Grace’s second-hand desire? No one told him that keeping faith could be as cruel as confessing faithlessness; only Grace might have appropriately done that, falsely playing a best friend’s role. But it wasn’t in Grace’s interest to do so.
‘Perhaps I’ll sell the house.’
‘I rather think you should.’
‘Grace did suggest it once.’
Leaving them to it, Zoé eats her salmon and tomato. She watches the end of the old black-and-white film: years ago they saw it together, long before Grace and Audrey. They’ve seen it together since; as a boy he’d been in love with Bette Davis. Picking at the food she has prepared, Zoë is again amused by what has amused her before. But only part of her attention is absorbed. Conversations take place; she does not hear; what she sees are fingers undistorted by arthritis loosening the cellophane on the cigarette packet and twisting it into a butterfly. He orders coffee. The scent that came back on his clothes was lemony with a trace of lilac. In a letter there was a mention of the cellophane twisted into a butterfly.
‘Well, there we are,’ he says. ‘It’s been lovely to see you, Audrey.’
‘Lovely for me too.’
When he has paid the bill they sit for just a moment longer. Then, in the ladies’, she powders away the shine that heat and wine have induced, and tidies her tidy grey hair. The lemony scent refreshes, for a moment, the stale air of the cloakroom.
‘Well, there we are, my dear,’ he says again on the street. Has there ever, Zoë wonders, been snappishness between them? Is she the kind not to lose her temper, long-suffering and patient as well as being a favourite girl at school? After all, she never quarrelled with her friend.
‘Yes, there we are, Charles.’ She takes his arm. ‘All this means the world to me, you know.’
They walk to the corner, looking for a taxi. Marriage is full of quarrels, Zoë reflects.
‘Being upright never helps. You just lie there. Drink lots of water, Charles.’
The jug of water, filled before she’d slipped in beside him last night, is on his bedside table, one glass poured out. Once, though quite a while ago now, he not only insisted on getting up when he had a stomach upset but actually worked in the garden. All day she’d watched him, filling his incinerator with leaves and weeding the rockery. Several times she’d rapped on the kitchen window, but he’d taken no notice. As a result he was laid up for a fortnight.
‘I’m sorry to be a nuisance,’ he says.
She smoothes the bedclothes on her side of the bed, giving the bed up to him, making it pleasant for him in the hope that he’ll remain in it. The newspaper is there for him when he feels like it. So is Little Dorrit, which he always reads when he’s unwell.
‘Perhaps consommé later on,’ she says. ‘And a cream cracker.’
‘You’re very good to me.’
‘Oh, now.’
Downstairs Zoë lights the gas-fire in the sitting-room and looks to see if there’s a morning film. Barefoot in the Park it is, about to begin. Quite suddenly then, without warning, she sees how the loose ends are. Everything is different, but nothing of course will ever be said. So good the little restaurant’s still there, the old flame writes. Just a line to thank you. So good it was to talk. So good to see him. So good of him to remember the Three Castles. Yet none of it is any good at all because Grace is not there to say, ‘Now tell me every single thing.’ Not there to say when there’s a nagging doubt, ‘My dear, what perfect nonsense!’ On her own in the seaside house she’ll not find an excuse again to suggest a quick lunch if he’d like to. He’ll not do so himself, since he never has. He’ll gladly feel his duty done at last.
The old flame bores him now, with her scent and her cigarettes and her cellophane butterflies. In her seaside house she knows her thank-you letter is the last, and the sea is grey and again it rains. One day, on her own, she’ll guess her friend was false. One day she’ll guess a sense of honour kept pretence alive.
Grace died. That’s all that happened, Zoë tells herself, so why should she forgive? ‘Why should I?’ she murmurs. ‘Why should I?’ Yet for a moment before she turns on Barefoot in the Park tears sting her eyelids. A trick of old age, she tells herself, and orders them away.
Faith
She was a difficult woman, had been a wilful child, a moody, recalcitrant girl given to flashes of temper; severity and suspicion came later. People didn’t always know what they were doing, Hester liked to point out, readily speaking her mind, which she did most often to her brother, Bartholomew. She was forty-two now, he three years younger. She hadn’t married, had never wanted to.
There was a history here: of Hester’s influence while the two grew up together in crowded accommodation above a breadshop in a respectable Dublin neighbourhood. Their father was a clerk in Yarruth’s timber yards, their mother took in sewing and crocheting. They were poor Protestants, modest behind trim net curtains in Maunder Street, pride taken in their religion, in being themselves. Her bounden duty, Hester called it, looking after Bartholomew.
When the time came, Bartholomew didn’t marry either. An intense, serious young man, newly ordained into the Church of Ireland, he loved Sally Carbery and was accepted when he proposed. Necessarily a lengthy one, the engagement weathered the delay, but on the eve of the wedding it fell apart, which was a disappointment Bartholomew did not recover from. Sally Carbery – spirited and humorous, a source of strength during their friendship, beautiful in her way – married a man in Jacob’s Biscuits.
Hester worked for the Gas Board, and gave that up to look after her father when he became a widower, suffering from Parkinson’s disease for the last nine years of his life. That was her way; it was her nature, people said, compensation for her brusque manner; her sacrifice was applauded. ‘We’ve always got on,’ Hester said on the evening of their father’s funeral. ‘You and I have, Bartholomew.’
He didn’t disagree, but knew that there was something missing in how his sister put this. They got on because, dutiful in turn, he saw to it that they did. Bartholomew’s delicate good looks – fair hair, blue eyes – made the most of a family likeness that was less pleasing in Hester, his lithe ranginess cumbersome in a woman. All in all, it seemed only right that there should be adjustment, that any efforts made in the question of getting on should be his, and without acknowledgement.
Bartholomew didn’t have a parish of his own. He assisted in one on the north side of the city, where Maunder Street was too: visiting the elderly, concerned with Youth Reach and Youth Action and the running of the Youth Centre, on Saturdays taking parties of children to ramble in the Dublin mountains or to swim in one of the northside’s swimming-pools. He and Hester shared the family possessions when it was clearly no longer practical to retain the rented accommodation above the breadshop; Bartholomew found a room in the parish where he worked; Hester looked about for one. She made enquiries at the Gas Board about returning to a position similar to the one she had filled in the past, but for the moment there was nothing. Then she discovered Oscarey.
It was a townland in the Wicklow mountains, remote and bleak, once distinguished by the thriving presence of Oscarey House, of which no trace now remained. But the church that late in the house’s existence had been built on the back avenue, for the convenience of the family and its followers, was still standing; and the estate’s scattering of dwellings – the houndsman’s and its yard and kennels, the gamekeeper’s, the estate agent’s pebble-dashed house – had undergone renovation and were all occupied. There was a Spar foodstore at Oscarey crossroads, an Esso petrol pump; letters could be posted a few miles away.
Bartholomew drove his sister to Oscarey when she asked him to. They went on a Monday, which was his free day, leaving early in the morning to avoid the Dublin traffic. He didn’t know the purpose of their journey, hadn’t yet been told, but Hester quite often didn’t reveal her intentions, and he knew that eventually she would. It didn’t occur to him to make the connection he might have.
‘There’s a man called Flewett,’ Hester said in the car, reading the name from her own handwriting on a scrap of paper. ‘He’ll tell us.’
‘What, though, Hester?’
She said then – a little, not much, not everything. The small church at Oscarey that had served a purpose in the past was being talked about again. A deprived Church of Ireland community, among it the descendants of indoor servants, gardeners and estate workers, was without a convenient means of worship. A consecrated building was mouldering through disuse.
They drove through Blessington, Bartholomew’s very old A-30 van – used mainly for his Saturday trips to the mountains – making a tinny sound he hadn’t noticed before. He didn’t mention it but went on, hoping it was nothing much.
‘It came to me,’ Hester said.
‘Who’s Flewett, though?’
‘One of the people around.’
She didn’t say how she had heard about this man or offer further information about him.
‘We’ll see what Mr Flewett has to say,’ she said.
Conversation with Hester was often like that; Bartholomew was used to it. Details withheld or frugally proffered made the most of what was imparted, as if to imbue communication with greater interest. Strangers sometimes assumed this to be so, only to realize a little later that Hester was not in the least concerned with such pandering: it was simply a quirk - without a purpose – that caused her to complicate conversation in this manner. She didn’t know where it came from and did not ever wonder.
‘What d’you think?’ Bartholomew asked the man at the garage where he stopped for petrol, and the man said the tinny noise could be anything.
‘Would you rev the engine for me?’ he suggested, opening the bonnet when he’d finished at the petrol pump. ‘Give her the full throttle
, sir,’ he instructed, and then, ‘D’you know what I’m going to tell you, sir? The old carburettor in this one’s a bit shook. Ease her down now, sir, till we’ll take a look.’
Bartholomew did so, then turned the engine off. As he understood it, the carburettor had loosened on its fixing. Adjusting a monkey wrench, the man said it would take two seconds to put right, and when it was done he wouldn’t charge for it, although Bartholomew pressed him to.
‘There was a line or two about Oscarey in the Gazette,’ Hester said as they drove off again, referring to the magazine that was a source of Church of Ireland news. ‘They’re managing with a recorded service.’
It was as it always had been, she was thinking, Bartholomew offering the man money when it hadn’t been asked for. The soft touch of the family, their father had called him, and used that same expression, laughing a bit, when Bartholomew first wanted to become a clergyman. But even so he hadn’t been displeased; nor had their mother, nor Hester herself. Bartholomew’s vocation suited him; it completed him, and protected him, as Hester tried to do in other ways.
‘Lucky I called in there,’ he was saying, and Hester sensed that he had guessed by now why they were driving to Oscarey. He had put it all together, which was why he referred again to the stop at the garage, for often he didn’t want to talk about what had to be talked about, hoping that whatever it was would go away of its own accord. But this was something that shouldn’t be allowed to go away, no matter how awkward and difficult it was.
‘Good of him to want to help,’ he said, and Hester watched a flight of rooks swirling out of a tree as they passed it.
‘It’s interesting, how things are,’ she said. ‘At Oscarey.’
It was still early when they arrived there, ten to eleven when Bartholomew drew up outside the Spar shop at the crossroads. ‘A Mr Flewett?’ he enquired at the single check-out, and was given directions.
He left the main road, drove slowly in a maze of lanes. Here and there there was a signpost. They found the church almost immediately after they turned into what had been the back avenue of Oscarey House, grown over now. There were graves but hardly what could be called a churchyard, no more than a narrow strip of land beside a path close to the church itself, running all the way round it. One of the graves, without a head-stone, was more recent than the others. The church was tiny, built of dark, almost black stone that gave it a forbidding air.
Selected Stories Page 73
