Last Guests of the Season

by Sue Gee

  ‘I’ve had flu,’ said Frances.

  ‘Oh, dear, I’m sorry. Who looked after you?’

  ‘Mr Beecham.’ Frances put down her pen. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks. Do you want to come for tea in a bit?’

  ‘That would be nice.’

  Over in the refectory, they sat opposite each other beside the Gothic windows. The place was half empty, afternoon lectures over, those coming in for the evening not yet arrived. Across in Park Row, lights flicked on in the pub; people were getting up and wandering over. Claire said: ‘Perhaps we should be going for a drink – you look as though you could do with a brandy or something.’

  Frances shook her head. ‘I don’t really drink much, thanks.’

  ‘That’s a pity, I was going to ask you to our party. Last Saturday of term, if you can make it. Or would you find it unbearable?’

  ‘Probably,’ said Frances, ‘but it’s nice of you to ask me. What time?’

  ‘Oh, any time after nine,’ said Claire, and was pleased and surprised when Frances did indeed appear, looking rather good. Claire was wearing a voluminous smock, dyed coffee-colour, with lacy straps and floating Indian scarves; it wasn’t until years later that she realised how dreadful she and most of her friends must have looked at that time. Frances, even then, stood out, in a straight black dress and black tights, with little buttoned shoes from Anello & Davide. Claire went over and kissed her.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d come.’

  ‘No,’ said Frances, ‘neither did I.’ She held out a bottle of wine and looked about her, at the filling room lit by candles in bottles, at the Indian bedspreads hung on the walls and the joss sticks on the mantelpiece, dropping threads of ash.

  ‘Food and drink in the kitchen.’ Claire took the bottle. ‘Thanks for this – let me get you something.’

  ‘What kind of something?’ asked Frances. ‘There is a smell not disguised by your strawberry incense.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Claire. ‘I hope our landlady can’t smell it, or she’ll ring the police.’ But she led her over to a little group sitting on floor cushions in a corner near the speakers, where Pink Floyd throbbed. ‘Do you know any of these people?’

  ‘By sight,’ said Frances curtly.

  ‘This is Frances, everyone,’ said Claire, sitting down beside them, pulling Frances down to join her. Heads were raised, there were slow smiles. Claire made introductions, had a couple of puffs and passed the joint to Frances, leaving her to it as more people came. Surely they hadn’t asked so many.

  During the course of the evening she noticed that Frances seemed to know what was good for her: from time to time she caught sight of her smiling dreamily down in her corner and by about midnight she was lying full-length upon the rug by the fireplace, wrapped round someone called David Blunden, with whom she eventually left, going down the steep stairs in her gaberdine mac very slowly, laughing.

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ called Claire from the top, leaning up against the wall with her arms around someone she had long liked the look of. ‘See you next term.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Frances, and laughed again as David Blunden opened the front door, panelled with yellow and violet glass, and let in a gust of cold air. It closed behind them, and Claire turned back to her interesting companion.

  Frances reappeared the next term in the refectory queue for lunch.

  ‘David?’ asked Claire, after the pleasantries.

  ‘Nice,’ said Frances. ‘Briefly fulfilled a need.’

  ‘Why only briefly?’

  Frances shrugged, and took a bowl of minestrone from the counter. ‘Who can say? It doesn’t matter anyway.’ She put a roll on her plate and moved her tray along, blushing, Claire noticed. Ahead of them, steam rose diffusely and tin lids banged. ‘Are you free for supper one evening?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Claire. ‘Let’s make a date.’

  On a bright cold January night Frances cooked lamb chops with rosemary and garlic on her Belling ring and served them to Claire with mushrooms, broccoli and sauté potatoes. They sat at a varnished table with barley-sugar legs that doubled as desk in Frances’s high-ceilinged bedsit, and the gas fire popped beneath a mantelpiece which doubled as a bookshelf. Pinned to the wall above the books was a film poster: Bergmann’s Persona. On the table a wine-bottle lamp shone on to the tight buds of early daffodils which Claire had brought.

  ‘This is delicious.’ She picked up a forkful of mushrooms.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Frances. ‘I enjoy cooking. Reading Elizabeth David has helped me to rise above Middlesex, where my mother makes food out of packets. How was your Christmas?’

  ‘It was lovely,’ said Claire, who had taken Marcus, the man from the party, home to Derbyshire and walked with him across snowy fields, returning to a lit-up house and tea by the fire with her family, who had liked him. At night, when they were all asleep, he had come to her room and slipped into bed with her. The moon had shone through the curtains of her childhood, and she had felt wonderful. She still did.

  Frances listened to an edited version of all this with apparent interest.

  ‘And your Christmas?’ Claire asked.

  ‘Different. The turkey did not, of course, come out of a packet, but the gravy did and the turkey might as well have done. My parents and my Aunt Myra, who is there every Christmas, watched the Queen’s speech and fell asleep. I read, and went for walks in streets which felt like an old people’s home, and vowed I would never return.’ She picked up Claire’s empty plate. ‘I also took up smoking, I can’t think why it’s taken me so long. Do you mind if I smoke now?’

  ‘Of course not. Do you mean smoking or smoking?’

  ‘Not dope,’ said Frances. ‘I can’t afford it. That’s just for special occasions.’

  Claire watched her cross the room with the plates and disappear into the kitchenette outside. She was wearing the black tights and little buttoned shoes again, and a long grey sweater; her fair hair shone. When she came back, Claire said: ‘What about Rowan? Your friend.’ Frances took a packet of cigarettes off one of the books on the mantelpiece; on the wall above her, Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson gazed across the room, pale and uncompromising. It all felt a very long way from Derbyshire.

  Frances shook out her match and came over with an ashtray. ‘Rowan’s Christmas was more like yours,’ she said. ‘She has met someone nice at York and went home with him.’

  ‘Oh.’ Claire watched her, smoking intently. She wanted to ask again why David Blunden had not similarly rescued Frances, but didn’t like to.

  ‘I went up to see her at New Year,’ Frances went on, ‘but it was only partly enjoyable. People change. Never mind. There is always work. Work, as I have told you, is my salvation.’

  And after that evening she dropped from view again. Claire saw her from time to time but only at a distance: smiling thinly across the lecture hall and disappearing afterwards, coming out of the library with a pile of books, hurrying in a dark duffle-coat down the cold hill to the bus stop. Spring came, and by Easter Claire rarely gave her a thought; she spent most of her time with Marcus, and in the summer they went to Greece. There she discovered that you could have too much of a good thing: back in Bristol they drifted apart, and since no one came to take his place, Claire settled down at last to do some work.

  Finals loomed. She became better acquainted with the library, and thus saw more of Frances, who seemed to live there, leaving now and then to have a coffee across the road in the Berkeley, or a cigarette on the square of grass. Claire watched her through a Gothic window-pane one warm June afternoon, sitting on a low wall, deep in thought. First-years drifted by, hand in hand, in shorts and platform shoes; Frances did not seem to notice any of them. Claire tapped on the glass and waved, but was not seen or heard; after a while, Frances stubbed out her cigarette and walked towards the doors again. On her way out Claire looked along the rows of bent heads and whispering pages, and found her, three seats in from the aisle, writing furiously.
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  ‘Frances?’ she said softly.

  Frances jumped, looked up, saw her, nodded briskly and returned to her writing. Claire went out, feeling obscurely rebuked.

  The examinations came and were sat in a series of blazing days which in later years became indistinguishable, encapsulated in memory only as a blur of heat and nerves and silence. Afterwards, packing up the flat, saying goodbye at end-of-it-all parties, Claire found herself every now and then looking out for Frances, but she did not see her until the departmental lunch party ten days before the end of term.

  It was held in a large sunny room on the first floor of the old buildings; Claire took a glass of wine from the table by the window, turned, and saw Frances coming in with Simon Blair, one of the senior tutors – the tutor, indeed, who had reputedly so admired her essay on the Metaphysicals. He was wearing a cotton jacket and narrow tie; she wore a straight grey dress and very good shoes; her hair was like silk. She nodded to Claire as if from a great distance, and laughed at something Simon said. And Claire thought: Well. Well, good for Frances. But again felt rebuked, rebuffed, cast aside, even.

  Before the end of the party, when she’d had too many glasses of white wine and too much chicken tikka, she detached herself from Marcus, who was growing sentimental and nostalgic, and went across the room to the little group which contained Frances, poised and remote. Claire touched her elbow.

  ‘I just came to say goodbye.’

  Frances smiled graciously at her. ‘Goodbye, Claire.’

  ‘Do you know how you’ve done? What you’re going to do?’

  Frances said lightly, ‘I think I did well enough to go on. I’m applying to do an MA. What about you?’

  ‘I think I did well enough,’ said Claire, ‘but not well enough to go on. I expect I shall end up teaching, like everyone else. Anyway – I hope it all goes well for you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Frances. ‘And you.’ And she turned away, as if there were no more to be said, which, Claire felt, indeed, there wasn’t.

  ‘I have been put in my place,’ she told Marcus, returning.

  ‘And where is that?’ he asked her, fingering her string of jet-black beads.

  Claire looked at him.

  ‘For old times’sake?’ he wondered, and she thought: Well, why not?

  And thus a chapter ended. In Derbyshire, in August, Claire learned that she had got the degree she both expected and felt she deserved, and later she read in the Times that Frances, as she had also expected, had done very well. And after that she really did, for years, completely forget about her. She went to live in London to do her teaching diploma, and then she began her career, in a comprehensive school near King’s Cross which looked like a prison.

  Little in Claire’s life so far, except for a term’s teaching practice, had prepared her for the baptism of sniggering and mockery she was given for three weeks, every day, in almost every class. She was unprepared for the adolescent boys who hung around on the stairs in rainy dinner hours and swore at her as she went past; for the fights which broke out in class when she turned to the blackboard; for the particular fight, out in the corridor, when a knife was drawn. She was unprepared for truancy, for fourteen-year-olds on drugs, for general apathy and specific misery, and in dealing with all this she changed. Where she thought she might go under, she found she had resources; where she thought she would leave teaching for ever, she found that she stayed on, at first for one or two particular children and then for herself. She changed jobs, moving to a mixed comprehensive in Kilburn where she eventually became head of department.

  And then, at a supper party in Kentish Town, she met Robert, who was kind and reliable, when she was recovering from a man who was neither: the only person who had ever really hurt her, and who had made the Christmas term, always a long haul, with illness and absence and bad weather, even more difficult than usual. Robert Murray had been described by her friend Ruth, who was giving the party and who was usually rather critical, as a dear man, and when Claire met him she saw why. He was a few years older than she, ordinary in appearance – medium height, a bit overweight, thinning brown hair – but warm in manner, and so easy to talk to that long before the end of the evening she had stopped wanting to talk to anyone else.

  He was an accountant, working for a housing association which provided sheltered accommodation for recently discharged psychiatric patients. He might have made heavy weather of it all, but he didn’t. He made Claire laugh by describing a meeting of local residents near a run-down property being converted into one of the sheltered homes. The middle classes, naturally, had no objection at all to having ex-mental patients living nearby, they were just rather worried by the state of the building, which seemed to be not quite safe; one member of the audience knew of a rather good site some miles away. The working-class residents, on the other hand, couldn’t care less about the state of the bloody building, they just weren’t having a whole lot of lunatics wandering about the streets, and Robert and his architect and his bloody community liaison officer could take their bloody hostel somewhere else and be quick about it.

  ‘And are you going to?’ Claire asked, recovering.

  ‘No,’ said Robert, ‘of course not.’

  He asked her about her own work, and she made him laugh, describing one or two of the more colourful moments in the Christmas play. By the time Ruth was making coffee she had told him, too, about her unhappy love affair, and he had told her about a woman he had wanted to marry who had wanted to marry someone else who was already married. They sipped at the brandy Ruth passed round, and agreed they were cheering each other up no end.

  ‘I knew you’d like him,’ said Ruth, out in the hall.

  ‘Why on earth didn’t you produce him before?’ Claire was pulling her coat on.

  Ruth shrugged. ‘I hardly see you, do I? You’ve been lying low.’

  ‘Not any more.’

  Robert rang her two days later, and took her out to dinner the following weekend. They met at a Malaysian restaurant in a narrow little passage off Wardour Street, and afterwards wandered hand in hand among the deserted stalls of Berwick Street market. By the end of the evening it seemed to Claire absurd that she might ever have wanted to stay with a man who had made her so miserable when Robert made her so happy; by Easter they were married, on a heavenly spring day in Derbyshire, where the wind shook the daffodils growing in joyous profusion against the grey stone walls of her parents’garden. And then she and Robert slipped into life together as easily as if they had known each other and already lived together for years and years.

  They bought a flat in Hornsey, and after a while had Jessica; Claire left her head-of-department job in Kilburn and took one less demanding nearby. By the time they had Jack, who took longer to arrive than they might have wished – when they were, indeed, beginning to panic, neither of them being only children, and unable to imagine not having more – Robert had been made financial director of a different housing association. It had a higher profile, and was run by a man with charisma, whose name was often in the papers. They bought a very nice house in a leafy road in Crouch End, and Claire gave up teaching for a while and found life with a new baby exhausting. As the children grew older, and the mortgage rate went up, she went back to work again, at first two days a week, then four. Gradually, life, which had had its moments of real stress when the children were small, began to reappear as something they could all enjoy, and the summer holidays in particular.

  And Portugal, where they had come last year, was the best place: nowhere had ever been so beautiful, no house so easy to be in, with its space and airy rooms and wooden corridors, with the river close by and the weather, apart from a few wet days, quite perfect. Well, it had rained quite a bit, but that hadn’t mattered. Last year was the first time they’d holidayed with other people, and it had worked: the other family friends from school, the children, on the whole, playing well together and the adults sharing domesticity quite equably. They would have come back with them this
year but Geoffrey had broken his leg, falling off a ladder at the top of the stairs while changing a lightbulb. This was after they had booked the house and paid the deposit. Refunding Geoffrey and Linda their half with sympathetic noises, they cast about for other people to go with, and could not decide who to ask. It was quite a thing, sharing your precious two weeks with another family. They asked Robert’s sister, Penny, but she, who had found life at home with small children intolerable, had just landed a wonderful job as production assistant with an independent television company and felt she couldn’t get away so soon. Claire and Robert cast about further, but drew a blank.

  And it was extraordinary, in the midst of all this indecision, that one Friday morning in the Crouch End supermarket, Claire, leafing through an article on school refusers, should look up to see how much longer she had in the queue and realise that the fair-haired woman two places ahead of her was Frances.

  She was wearing jeans and a faded blue-grey sweatshirt over a white T-shirt, visible at the neck. Her sleeves were pulled up and her hair was tied back; she was leaning on the bar of her trolley reading a Virago paperback. She looked older, naturally, but not much, and seeing her now Claire felt the last eighteen years or so slip away as easily as if they had never passed: she was back in the library in Bristol again, finding Frances bent over her books, shrouded in thought, set apart. She still had that air of detachment, and for a moment Claire thought: I’ll leave her to it. She remembered the patronising dismissal Frances had given her at the summer lunch party (remembered, too, the delicious afternoon she had spent with Marcus afterwards, something she had not thought about for years) and wondered if she really wanted to speak to her at all. But she found herself curious, despite all this, and said to the woman in front of her: ‘Excuse me, I just want to – there’s someone I know –’ and went up to Frances and touched her arm.

  Frances jumped. She looked up, frowning, and then, when Claire said wryly, ‘Remember me?’ she gave a smile of pure, unaffected pleasure.

  ‘Claire!’