Last Guests of the Season

by Sue Gee

  ‘Jessica? Jess?’ Claire was calling her from the kitchen doorway; she opened her eyes. ‘Are you joining us for tea?’

  She nodded without speaking; she didn’t want to speak to anyone, she only wanted to think of him, and his voice, as he told her. Told her.

  ‘Oliver back?’ Claire asked, as she reached the bottom of the steps, and she nodded again.

  ‘Lost your voice?’ Robert asked breezily, but she didn’t bother to answer, it simply wasn’t worth bothering. What did it matter, what did anything matter? Nothing mattered at all except that he was safe, he was back, and they were all right again.

  All through tea she kept quiet, waiting for him to come down from the pool and join them, hugging all her feelings to herself, deep inside, where no one even knew they existed, waiting for his special smile, just to her; and then she heard his footsteps.

  ‘Hello there,’ said Robert, when Oliver stepped out on to the terrace at last, cool and changed. ‘How was it?’

  ‘Good,’ said Oliver. ‘Very long and very good.’ He didn’t particularly smile at her, but it didn’t matter; she knew he couldn’t really. She watched him go over to Frances and put his hand on her shoulder, a bit as he had done to her, but of course it wasn’t the same; she watched them smile at each other, and she watched him go over to Tom, and greet him, and saw Tom gaze at the air in that funny way, and Oliver give the flicker of a frown, and then he sank down into a chair and Claire passed him a big mug of tea and he drank and drank.

  ‘So,’ said Frances, ‘tell us all about it.’

  And he told them, describing it all, boring stuff about solar panels and agriculture, and then, casually: ‘I was telling Jessica – I had a bit of an adventure towards the end.’

  She listened to it all again, she could see they were all impressed with how brave he had been, not that he was boasting or anything, just describing it. It did feel a bit funny, having him tell everyone else, but still, he had made it clear to them: he had told her first, there was something special about her.

  And she held that close, all through the evening, through helping her mother get supper, though she wasn’t sure if he’d noticed her doing that, through eating all together, catching his eye, just once, and being given a beautiful tired smile. Twenty miles! He went to bed early, so of course there was no chance to suggest a game of chess so that they could be alone together, but tomorrow there might be. Tomorrow was Wednesday: three days left of the holiday. Seventy-two hours before they had to say goodbye. She looked at her watch. That was four thousand, three hundred and twenty-two minutes. Twenty-one. She would tell him, and then, at last, he’d tell her. She went off to bed without a murmur, hardly noticing when her mother came in to say goodnight and switch off the light. She just lay there, going over it all again, planning it all.

  ‘Dora,’ says Frances, ‘I wrote you a letter …’

  ‘Yes.’ Dora is standing at her desk, busying herself with a pile of transparencies in plastic envelopes. She turns away, holding them up to the light, one by one, scanning the sheets, searching for something. Frances, from her desk across the room, can see nothing of what she is looking at, only Dora’s back, straight and beautiful, as she stands at the window overlooking the street. She is wearing her navy jacket and a straight dark skirt; it feels as though thorns surround her.

  ‘Dora …’ says Frances again. There is no one else in the office, but from downstairs she can hear a door bang, and footsteps on the stairs. She must be quick. ‘Did you get it?’ she asks, trying to sound matter-of-fact, as though it were any letter, and this were any day.

  The telephone rings on Dora’s desk; she moves to answer it. ‘Please,’ says Frances, ‘leave it.’ But Dora does not leave it, and Frances waits, taking a cigarette out of the packet. She has lost her lighter, and uses a box of matches; she opens it the wrong way and all the matches fall to the floor. She gets down to pick them up, scrabbling frantically, as if it is very important, so that when the telephone is put down again, and Dora is free to be addressed, she is kneeling like a supplicant, trying to get to her feet again, but with feet and legs filled with lead, so that she cannot move.

  ‘Did you get it?’ she asks again, looking up. Dora has her back to the light now, so that Frances cannot properly see her face, cannot tell what expression is there.

  ‘Yes,’ says Dora, ‘I got it,’ and then the door swings open, and the room is full of people, people they both know, who have come to a party: Derek and Kate and Elaine, and Jocelyn with his wife, and various authors and sales reps, and Robert, who comes over to Frances.

  ‘What are you doing down there?’ he asks, and bends to pick up the fallen matches.

  ‘Nothing,’ says Frances. ‘Leave me alone.’

  Somehow she gets to her feet. She pushes through the crowd of people towards Dora, who does not look at her, who is looking at everyone but her.

  ‘Dora,’ says Frances, ‘Dora, please. I just want to talk to you – about us, about our friendship. Something happened between us …’

  Then Dora turns to look at her, and in her face is everything Frances has ever feared she might one day see there: embarrassment, unease, retreat. Unequivocal retreat.

  ‘Oh, no, Frances,’ she says carefully, and suddenly looks very tired. ‘Something happened to you.’

  ‘Well – yes,’ says Frances. ‘Yes, of course that’s true, you’re right, of course, I didn’t mean … But even so. But please. But Dora, please …’

  But Dora has turned away again; she will not meet her eyes. Frances goes slowly back to her desk; she sits there staring at her piles of paper, hearing people talking to each other with interest and animation. Every time she looks up she sees Dora in conversation with someone different: she is receptive, revealing; she is looking at each of them but somehow never at Frances; her eyes are everywhere, she can take in everyone, but somehow Frances has become invisible.

  The people thin out, the door of the office keeps opening to let them go; Frances sits watching them all, absolutely still, waiting for the moment when the last of them will have gone, and she can try again. But Dora goes out talking to another woman; she does not even flick a glance towards the corner, and Frances slowly picks up the pieces of paper on her desk, and rips them into shreds.

  She woke in the darkness, in tears. Beside her, Oliver was deeply asleep, turned away from her, next to the wall, long heavy limbs stretched out beneath the covers. The room was quiet, the house was quiet; a thin line of blueish light from the village street lamps came through the cracks in the shutters. I shall go back to sleep, thought Frances, as the church clock struck one, and find another dream. I shall go back to sleep and forget about this one, which is, after all, only a dream, and will never happen.

  She turned over, wiping her eyes, tugging her pillow down into her arms, and lay looking at the cracks of light coming through the shutters at the other, smaller window at the side of the room, overlooking the garden. She tried to find Dora, the Dora she knew – but who did not, of course, know Frances, or the truth about her and her feelings. I have deceived her, thought Frances; I have implicitly lied to her throughout our friendship, and if she were to react like that I should only be paying the price. But I certainly could not bear it.

  Her fingers dug into the pillow; she closed her eyes and tried to breathe deeply, steadily, to sink into sleep again, taking Dora with her. But an unapproachable Dora was waiting, and Frances, giving up, on the edge of tears again, softly pushed back the covers and crept from the room, closing the door behind her.

  The corridor was lit by the moon, shining through the window on the landing which overlooked the peach tree. Silver squares of light, patterned with the shadows of leaves, fell on to the faded green carpet, an echo of the brilliant sun which lay here in the afternoons, when they all climbed the stairs to rest. She walked on bare feet over the creaking floorboards towards those shining squares, and down the wooden stairs which lay beyond them. She went into the sitting-room, so large
, so open, and across to the desk in the corner, and she knelt down, quietly tugging open the bottom drawer, feeling inside for her writing case at the back. She drew it out, unzipped it, took out the letter; she zipped the case up again, replaced it, carefully closed the drawer. Then she slowly got to her feet, wondering what to do.

  She could tear the letter to pieces, but what should she do with the pieces? Even a scrap, discovered, might betray her.

  Then what? She could take it into the kitchen, which smelt of gas, and burn it at the little leaky cooker. Or she could do more than that. I shall come down at night, when everyone is asleep, and seal up every crack … That had been when Oliver was raging. He wasn’t raging now. Besides.

  Besides, it has not come to that, not yet, thought Frances, pacing the room. That is for when Dora – if Dora – is ever to be as she has been in my dream tonight. But she will never be, for I shall destroy this letter, and shall never write another.

  On the table in the middle of the room where they left all their books and sunglasses, she had left her cigarettes and lighter. She picked up the lighter, and opened the terrace doors.

  It was cool, and the sky was full of stars. A breeze stirred the leaves of the fruit trees and rustled the vines on the far side of the garden. The moon had risen high above the mountains beyond, where Oliver had gone walking; where wolves, or almost wolves prowled through the pines.

  Frances shivered, holding her letter, holding the cigarette lighter tight. The moon climbed higher, and was taken by moving clouds. She stood in the darkness, afraid, and then suddenly a swooping streak of light shot through the starry sky beyond the mountains, and fell to earth. It happened so quickly, so silently, that she almost doubted she’d seen it at all, but she knew that she had: a shooting star, a moment’s blazing arc, a star outshining all the others, rare and beautiful, and then it was gone.

  Dora, said Frances, searching the sky for another, knowing it was unlikely that there would be another, I really did adore you, you know. I looked at you across that room, and everyone else disappeared.

  Then she flicked on the lighter, and by its steady flame began to burn her letter, starting at the corner of the envelope, watching the edges begin to curl. Soon it was burning quickly, and she had to drop it on to the tiles, where she watched the flame consume it all, until only dark papery ash remained, which the breeze soon carried away.

  The moon came out again from behind the clouds, and disappeared again, and Frances went on standing there. Unwillingly, she saw herself: a woman up in the night alone, out in the darkness unknown to anyone, destroying a letter she should never have written, estranged from her husband, thinking of death, and she thought: you are close to the edge.

  She saw herself as Dora, who knew only a reserved but competent and collected person, would see her now, and she knew that she would be shocked and shaken, that to reveal even a hint of the person she was tonight would be unthinkable; and knowing all this was as if she were standing on one side of a great and impassable divide, between what she had longed for and dreamed of and what was real.

  She saw herself returning to London, climbing the stairs to the office, smiling, greeting, lying; trapped between what she felt and what she must not show. She felt the kitchen, with its faint but pervasive smell of gas, await her like a friend, once more offering oblivion, and standing there on the empty terrace with these thoughts the whole of her life seemed to rear up behind her, to hit her in the back: this end was what had always been waiting for her, it had always been only a matter of time.

  Well, then. Do it, then.

  The moon came out again; the breeze rustled the vines on the far side of the garden. There was another sound, behind her, and Frances, realising that she was not alone at all, perhaps had been followed all the time, and watched all the time, turned round with goose-flesh rising all over her to see Tom, his eyes like blank and staring stones, making his way across the moonlit tiles towards her.

  ‘Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty.’ She never swore, but she swore now, half out of her skin with fright. Tom came nearer, walking slowly, somehow feeling his way; she crouched down so that she was at his height, and held out her arms. No, be careful, no, don’t wake him, keep it steady and calm, holding him close might wake him, like last time, and frighten him to death. She was frightened to death, even though she had seen it before; it was different in London, in the flat, with everything familiar around them, and Oliver to call on, and work in the morning. And Dora in the morning. No.

  He drew closer; carefully she put her hands on his shoulders to stop him, and he stopped.

  They stayed there, and it felt as though those moments went on for ever: she searching his broad pale face, he, behind those hard blank eyes, miles away, locked away.

  It was cold. Now it was really cold. Unbidden, scraps of a conversation held on a cold evening out here with the others came floating up now, like distant voices:

  ‘… but I do believe in sin … Screwing up people’s lives, I suppose … Do you love me … do I love you …’

  Dora, said Frances, feeling herself reach out for comfort, for human warmth, have I entered the territory of sin? Do you believe in such things?

  Slowly she rose, her knees trembling, and slowly she turned Tom round, and took his hand. She led him back across the terrace, and carefully over the step; hand in hand they crossed the huge open space of the sitting-room floor, past Jessica’s room and up the stairs to where the moon fell in brilliant silver squares on the landing. Hand in hand they moved over the rag runner along the creaking corridor and into the bedroom where Jack lay sleeping.

  She picked Tom up, so heavy and still – how was it possible that he had not woken through such a journey? – and laid him down on the bed, pulling up the covers, tucking them in very tight. And then, shaking, she sank to the floor by the bed, leaning against it, her head between her knees.

  After a while, she got up, terribly cold, colder than she had ever been in her life, and went all the way down again to close the terrace doors. She went to the kitchen and heated some milk on a flickering blue ring of gas, no longer thinking of death, or indeed of anything now except how to get warm. She climbed the stairs again with her milk, she climbed into bed beside Oliver and drank it, and then she lay down close to him, wrapped herself round him, her face pressing into his neck.

  ‘I’m cold,’ she whispered. ‘Hold me, hold me.’

  But Oliver had walked for twenty miles, and he did not hear her.

  The church clock struck four times at who knew what hour. Frances thought: I have laid it all to rest. Tomorrow I shall be different; everything will be different.

  Chapter Eight

  Jessica sat on the swing-seat, shelling peas. The pods lay on a sheet of newspaper beside her, some of them green and fresh, some wrinkled and yellow and tired-looking. Claire had said not to worry, it was almost the end of the season and they were the best she could find in the market yesterday, only throw out the really duff ones. She didn’t worry: why should she, what did a few peas matter? She had washed up breakfast and brushed her hair and she sat out here being helpful, feeling nervous and excited as she waited for him to come out and join her.

  The cicadas down in the garden went on and on, it was lovely and warm. She swung to and fro, and her finger and thumb pressed on the sides of one of the fresh young pods and popped it open; she stripped the peas into the white china bowl on her lap: they made a satisfying little ping as they landed and rolled around on the bottom. She picked up another pod: pop, strip, ping, ping, ping. It was nice.

  Clicking noises came up the steps; Tom stood watching her.

  ‘Can I do that?’

  ‘No. Sorry.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Oh God.

  ‘Why not?’ He came over, and stood beside her, breathing heavily, watching. ‘Please can I?’

  Oh, God. ‘Goon, then.’

  He picked up one of the older pods, and squeezed it; nothing happened. ‘What do you do
?’

  She sighed, and showed him; he tried again.

  ‘Where’s Jack?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, watching him mangle the pod between his fingers and crush the peas. ‘Why don’t you go and look for him?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Don’t you want to find him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why did you ask where he was, then?’

  He didn’t answer, and she stopped shelling the peas and looked at him. He had dark circles under his eyes, as if he never got enough sleep, and he was breathing as if he’d got a cold, and even trying to concentrate on the peas, trying to shell them properly, which he couldn’t, he was restless and twitchy and moving about.

  ‘Tom?’

  He didn’t answer; he had that funny, faraway look in his eyes, and suddenly he dropped the pod he was making such a mess of, and just stood there.

  ‘Hey,’ said Jessica. ‘You’ve dropped it, pick it up.’

  But Tom didn’t pick it up, he went on standing there with the funny grey look on his face, and then footsteps Game across the sitting-room floor. It was him, it was him! She jumped, and the peas in the china bowl fell from her lap and on to the tiles, all scattered everywhere, rolling about, squashed and flattened by Tom’s great flat sandalled feet, treading all over them as he came back to normal – where had he been? – and went wandering vaguely off again, back down the steps to the garden. So that Oliver, coming out through the tall white doors, instead of finding her all grown-up and sensibly occupied, not at all showing him how nervous and excited she was, found her flushed and cross and flustered, down on her knees trying to pick up all the peas, the white china bowl beside her, miraculously unbroken, rolling noisily round and round on the orange tiles like a spinning top. And though of course he was kind, bending down to help her, setting the bowl to rights, she couldn’t possibly tell him now.

  Frances woke to an empty room. The shutters were still closed,