‘She said it in the garden, in the matter-of-fact way of someone who cleans your house for you. She listened to my optimism: that all this was over for ever now. We spoke of love. She smiled a little, her gentle, lonely smile. She did not say, yet it was said, that in the rooms of a quiet house when she tried to love she could not love, and when she tried to hope she could not hope. We walked together, silent in the garden, and then she went away.’
* * *
* * *
In her bedroom, sitting by a window that overlooked the garden, Harriet wished she didn’t know. She wished that what she had dreaded had happened instead, ordinary and understandable.
The last of night clung on, a misty light not yet enough to bring back shape and colour. The pear trees’ blossom was elusive, tulips not their stately selves, aquilegia not there at all. Sunshine in its time would rescue ceanothus, and lilac in its corner, wallflowers and doronicum.
Shadows moved, not in the garden, three people, one a child. The rooms of a house were comfortable and unassuming, books in a bookcase, a telephone in the hall. Food was cooked and eaten, cleanness everywhere, and warmth. ‘What use is anger?’ Stephen had murmured as he closed his bedroom door, his professionalism at last affected by the distress that now was shared. Between the childhood and the death there was a life that hadn’t been worth living.
The scarlet tinge of early peonies came suddenly, broom’s yellow brightness, pink clematis, rosemary thriving. A chaffinch perched and waited. A blackbird looked about.
Harriet wept, and through the blur of her tears the beauty that had spread in her garden, and was spreading still, was lost in distortion. She watched it returning, becoming again resplendent, more even than it had been. But in a world that was all wrong it seemed this morning to be a mockery.
Making Conversation
‘Yes?’ Olivia says on the answering system when the doorbell rings in the middle of The Return of the Thin Man. The summons is an irritation on a Sunday afternoon, when it couldn’t possibly be the meter-man or the postman, and it’s most unlikely to be Courtney Haynes, the porter.
A woman’s voice crackles back at her but Olivia can’t hear what she says. More distinctly, the dialogue of the film reaches her from the sitting room. ‘Cocktail time,’ William Powell is saying, and there’s the barking of a dog. The man Olivia lives with laughs.
‘I’m sorry,’ Olivia says in the hall. ‘I can’t quite hear you.’
‘I’m not used to these answering gadgets.’ The woman’s voice is clearer now. There is a pause, and then: ‘Is my husband there?’
‘Your husband?’ Frowning, more irritated than she has been, Olivia suggests the wrong bell has been rung.
‘Oh, no,’ the voice insists. ‘Oh, no.’
‘I really do think so. This is number 19.’
Dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a crushed quality about her features that doesn’t detract from their beauty, Olivia at thirty-seven has been separated from her husband for years and feels the better for it. She has chosen not to marry the man she lives with; there is a feeling of independence about her life now, which she likes.
‘I’ve come up from Brighton,’ the woman two flights below states. ‘I’m Mrs Vinnicombe.’
* * *
* * *
Olivia met Vinnicombe on the street. She tripped as she was leaving a house in Hill Street – number 17 – where she had just been interviewed for a job she particularly wanted. She lost her balance, stumbled down two steps and fell on to the pavement, her handbag scattering its contents, her left knee grazed, tights badly torn. Vinnicombe was passing.
He helped her to her feet, collected her belongings together, noticed her grimace of pain when she began to hobble off after she’d thanked him. ‘No, no, you’re shaken,’ he said, and insisted that she sat for a while in the saloon bar at the end of the street. He bought her brandy, although she didn’t ask for it.
He was an overweight man in a dark suit that needed pressing, Olivia noticed when she had pulled herself together. He was probably forty-two or -three, his pigeon-coloured hair thinning at the temples, a tendency to pastiness in his complexion. Feeling foolish and embarrassed, hoping that the incident hadn’t been observed from the house where she’d been interviewed, Olivia insisted that she was perfectly all right now. ‘You’ll get the job,’ the man assured her when she told him why she was in Hill Street. He spoke with such certainty that she thought for a moment he was himself connected with the offices she had visited and had some influence there. But this turned out not to be so. The colour had come back into her cheeks, he said. No one would not give her a job, he said.
This confidence was well placed. A month later Olivia began work at number 17, and in time even told the people who had interviewed her how nervous she had been in case, glancing from a window, one of them had seen her sprawled all over the pavement. She laughed about it, and so did they. ‘I was rescued,’ she explained in the same light-hearted way, ‘by a gallant passer-by.’ Sometimes, when telling other people in the office about the incident, she jestingly called her rescuer a guardian angel. She remembered only that the man had been of unprepossessing appearance, that he had lightly held her elbow when she was on her feet again, and that his voice had warned her she’d been shaken. It was winter then, a January day when she stumbled down the steps, 14 February when she began to work for her new employers. In April, when the window-box daffodils were in bloom, a man smiled shyly at her in Hill Street, and for a moment, as she walked past, Olivia couldn’t remember where she had seen that podgy face before. ‘You got the job,’ a voice – hardly raised – called after her.
‘Oh, goodness, I’m sorry!’ Olivia cried, ashamed and turning round. She almost exclaimed, ‘My guardian angel!’ It would have pleased him, she knew. You could guess it would, even on so slight an acquaintance.
‘You’re well?’ he asked. ‘You like it in there?’ He gestured at the offices she had just left, and Olivia said, yes, she did. He walked with her to the corner and they parted there.
Then, one lunchtime, less than a week later, he was in Zampoli’s in Shepherd Market and asked if he might share her table. He asked her name when he had ordered steak-and-kidney and she a chicken salad. His was Vinnicombe, he said. ‘Oh, I invent things,’ he answered when, making conversation, she enquired; and Olivia thought of Edison and Stephenson and Leonardo da Vinci, of the motor-car and the aeroplane and space travel.
But Vinnicombe’s inventions were not like that. His were domestic gadgets and accessories: fasteners for electric and gas ovens, for microwave ovens, for refrigerators and deep-freezes. He had invented a twin eggcup, a different kind of potato peeler, a carousel for drip-drying purposes, an electronic spike for opening and closing windows, a folding coat-hanger, a TV-dinner aid. Olivia tried to be interested.
* * *
* * *
‘He isn’t here,’ his wife says, agitated. In Olivia’s sitting room the television screen is blank and soundless now. The man she lives with, annoyed that it has to be so because of a visitor, is having a bath. A Sunday newspaper has been tidied up a bit, a chair pushed back.
‘Of course your husband isn’t here, Mrs Vinnicombe.’
She shouldn’t have let her in, Olivia is thinking. This woman has no possible right in the flat, no right to disturb their weekend peace. And yet when Mrs Vinnicombe said who she was, Olivia had found it hard to shout into the house telephone that she did not intend to allow her admittance.
‘I thought he might be here.’ Olivia’s visitor eyes the scarlet blooms of an amaryllis in a plain white container. She is a tall woman, big-boned, with henna-dyed hair, her bright fingernails the same shade as the lipstick that increases by a millimetre or so the natural outline of her lips.
‘I thought I’d better come.’ Specks of pink have appeared in Mrs Vinnicombe’s gaunt cheeks, confirming her agitation. It’s difficult
for her, Olivia tells herself, and does not attempt to make it easier. She sits down also, and is silent.
* * *
* * *
A week after their second encounter Vinnicombe telephoned Olivia, knowing now where she worked. He invited her to have a drink one evening, a proposition that caused her some embarrassment. This man had been kind to her on the street; it had seemed natural that he should ask to share her table in a crowded lunchtime restaurant; but telephoning the office, issuing a specific invitation, was different. ‘Oh, really, it’s very kind,’ she said, trying to leave it at that.
‘You asked me about kitchen extractors,’ he reminded her on the telephone and she remembered that, again making conversation, she had. ‘I’ve got a couple of brochures for you. I’d just like to pass them over.’
And so they met again, not in the saloon bar where he had taken her after the incident on the street but in one that was further away. It was he who suggested that, and afterwards Olivia wondered if he’d made the choice because people from her office didn’t frequent this bar, if he guessed that their tête-à-tête might possibly be a source of awkwardness for her. He had acquired three brochures for kitchen extractors. One of them he particularly recommended. Olivia was between love affairs then, temporarily on her own, which she believed this man had somehow sensed; she had certainly never said so.
‘I’d put it in for you,’ he offered. ‘No problem, that.’
‘Oh, heavens, no.’
‘You’d save a tidy bit.’
‘I couldn’t possibly let you.’
It wouldn’t take more than an hour or two, he said, one Saturday morning. He laughed, displaying small, evenly arranged teeth. ‘My stock in trade.’
‘Oh, no, no. Thanks all the same.’
His eyes were the feature you noticed: softly brown, they had a moist look, suggesting a residue of tears, and yet were not quite sad. It was more sentiment than sorrow that distinguished them, and what seemed like vulnerability. He could acquire any of the three extractors at trade terms, but the reduction for the recommended one was greater. Some cowboy could easily make a botched job of the installation, dozens of times he’d known it to happen.
‘I’ll think about it all,’ Olivia promised, and afterwards on the Underground she found herself wondering if he was lonely. He hadn’t mentioned anything about his private life except that he lived in Brighton and always had.
‘If you’re interested in that particular model,’ he said on the phone two days later, ‘there’s one that’s ordered and the lady’s seemingly changed her mind. In black, as you said you wanted. So there’d be a reduction on the price I gave you, not that there’s anything wrong with it, not even shop-soiled.’
Since Olivia did need an extractor in her small kitchen, it seemed silly to reject this bargain offer. She began to say again that she couldn’t possibly allow Vinnicombe to install it for her, but already he was insisting, reminding her of this further saving if he did. It seemed rude to go on refusing what he offered, especially as he had already gone to the trouble of finding out so much.
‘I’d really rather . . .’ she began, making one last effort, then giving in.
* * *
* * *
At Olivia’s invitation Mrs Vinnicombe has settled herself uneasily on the pale cushions of the sofa but, as if she fears to do so, she does not come to the point. She mentions Brighton again, as conversationally as her husband did when he said he had always lived there. She describes the waves splashing against the pier and the concrete walls of the promenade. She was married in Brighton, she says; a mortgage was taken out locally on the house she has lived in since that time. Her two boys were born not five hundred yards from that house, the younger one – Kevin – the last infant to be delivered in the old maternity home, now the site of a petrol station. As a child herself, she built sandcastles when the sea was far enough out; her back and arms peeled one summer, not covered in time.
‘Of course, he told me about you,’ she eventually brings herself to say. ‘Well, naturally, you know that.’
‘Told you what, Mrs Vinnicombe?’
Mrs Vinnicombe slightly shakes her head, as if an exactitude here is not important, as if what she has said is enough.
‘Sixteen Kevin is now, Josh two years older. Well, of course, you know that too. I’m sorry.’
‘Why have you come here, Mrs Vinnicombe?’
The specks of pink have spread in the gaunt cheeks and are blotches now. A trace of lipstick has found its way on to one of Mrs Vinnicombe’s front teeth. She looks away, her gaze again settling on the exotic amaryllis.
‘You took my husband from me. I came to get him back.’
* * *
* * *
The installing of the extractor lasted longer than a couple of hours. They had lunch together at the kitchen table, soup and salad and the Milleens cheese Olivia had bought the day before. ‘Just a minute,’ Vinnicombe said at one point and went out, returning with Danish pastries. Later, when he finished just before six, Olivia offered him a drink. She opened a bottle of Beaune and they sat in the sitting room.
‘Thank you,’ he said when they had finished the wine, when eventually he stood up to go.
‘I’m awfully grateful,’ she said, realizing as she spoke that he had been going to say something else, that unintentionally she had interrupted him.
‘It’s been so nice,’ he said. ‘Today has been so nice.’
She smiled, not knowing how to respond. She felt nervous again, as she had the first time he telephoned the office. She wrote a cheque. He folded it into his wallet. He had been adamant about not charging for his labour.
‘What’ll you do, Olivia?’ he asked, for the first time using her Christian name. ‘How’ll you spend what’s left of today?’
And she said, wash her hair, because that was true, and watch something on television, and read in bed. She hardly ever went out on Saturday nights, she said.
‘I have to tell you something,’ he said. ‘That first day when we met: remember that day, Olivia?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I fell in love with you that day, Olivia.’
He was looking straight at her when he said that, his moist brown eyes steadily fixed on hers. Once or twice before, Olivia had met their stare and had been aware of something that reminded her of pleading, as from a child.
‘I had to tell you,’ he said.
She shook her head, smiling, endeavouring to register that she was flattered yet also that what was said must surely be an exaggeration. Olivia had quite often been told before that she was loved and had felt flattered on each occasion; but this was different because, somehow, it was all absurd.
‘I don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘we could meet again?’
‘No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.’
‘I had to tell you.’
He had brought a metal tool-container with him and he picked this up from beside the kitchen door. He offered to take away the carton and the packing the extractor had come in, but she said that wasn’t necessary, that she could easily dispose of them. He took them all the same, for the third time saying that he had had to tell her.
* * *
* * *
‘I was twenty when we married,’ Mrs Vinnicombe says. ‘I’m forty-one now. It’s quite a time, you know. The boys growing up; months there were with not a penny coming into the house. Oh, it’s better now. I’m not saying for an instant it isn’t better in that respect. Not well off, not even comfortable sometimes, but near enough to not having to worry. It’s been a partnership, you know: I’ve always done the invoicing and accounts, the tax returns, the VAT. Not that I’m trained: I worked in Hazlitt’s, the jeweller’s. That’s where he found me.’
‘Mrs Vinnicombe, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. By the sound of what you’re saying, you�
��re under a very considerable misapprehension.’
Mrs Vinnicombe shakes her head in her dismissive manner, a tiny movement, not one of impatience. Then, as if she has in some way been unfair or discourteous, she says that when her husband told her he held nothing back. Long before that, though, she knew that something was wrong.
‘Well, any woman would. And the boys – well, I’ve watched the boys becoming frightened. There’s no other word for it. I’ve watched him ceasing to be bothered with them.’
‘I didn’t take your husband from you, Mrs Vinnicombe. That is totally untrue. As you can see, I’m perfectly happily –’
‘He gave me the address, no argument at all when I asked him where you lived. Oh, ages ago that was. I don’t know why I asked him. I never thought I’d come here.’
‘Please listen to me, Mrs Vinnicombe.’
After the Saturday of the extractor installation, Vinnicombe became a nuisance. When he’d said he had to tell her, when he’d asked if they might meet again and she’d said no, he hadn’t passed out of her life, as she imagined he would. He telephoned on the Monday and before he could say anything she thanked him for his work in her kitchen. ‘Just one quick drink,’ he pleaded, and she repeated, even more firmly than she already had, that what he was suggesting was not a good idea. When he pressed her, she said she was sorry if she had ever given him reason to suppose that a relationship such as he was proposing was possible. He took no notice, he didn’t appear to hear. ‘No more than ten minutes,’ he said. ‘Ten minutes.’
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