In the busy salon, above the noise of the dryers, she enquired about Jackie’s young man, Neville, and about Neville’s difficult mother, with whom they lived. ‘What will you do when the baby arrives?’ she asked. ‘Will you go on working?’ She was told that Neville’s mother would give up her job at the dry cleaners to look after the baby. ‘Early retirement,’ explained Jackie. Mrs May thought that Neville’s mother might be barely forty. ‘Won’t she miss the company?’ she asked. ‘I’m sure I should.’ Jackie gave her a swift glance in the mirror: all right for some, said her expression. ‘You out tonight?’ she asked.
‘I have a guest for dinner this evening,’ she replied. ‘And I shall be out all day tomorrow. So it was kind of you to fit me in.’
‘No problem. You’ll need a trim next time. Monday week?’
‘No. I may be in next Tuesday. I’m going to a wedding.’
In Marylebone High Street she bought a carton of minestrone, an onion tart, some salad leaves, a wedge of Dolcelatte, and six fine peaches. I should do this more often, she thought, and knew that she would not, for where was the pleasure in shopping for oneself? It was the need to set one’s bounty before another that was so fundamental. Struggling with her bags she managed to find a taxi just as it was starting to rain. She got home just after two, almost too late for lunch: a scrambled egg would do. But she noticed that there was only one egg left, and consequently none for Steve’s breakfast. Although it was now raining quite heavily she went out to the shop on the corner and bought, in addition to eggs, a packet of bacon, though she disliked the smell. He is giving up a whole day for me, she thought; it is the least I can do. And he should have a decent breakfast if he is to do all the driving. On further thought she went back to the shop and bought tomatoes and mushrooms.
Back in the flat she was surprised how dim and cold it felt, as if it were now truly autumn. The 15th tomorrow: Mother’s birthday. Yet no answering images came. Hardly surprising; she was now at the age at which her mother had died, although it felt quite different, of a different order of magnitude, now that there would be no-one to grieve for her. For she had grieved for her mother, that quiet modest woman, but so discreetly that no-one had noticed. The same had been true of her grief for Henry, but there the shock was greater; after his death, in the flat, her one wish had been to expunge every trace of his lingering illness, his relics, the sickroom odour. Relatives had inevitably arrived, and wept copiously, while she received them with no noticeable alteration in her normally self-contained demeanour. She thought that her impassivity, in those crucial days, was the main cause of the faint disaffection that had sprung up between herself and the Levinson-Goodman clan, though there had probably been cause for comment on many previous occasions. She had not noticed at the time; only now was she aware of incompatibility, and she assumed that it was too late to remedy this. Besides, she had come to tolerate it, as if it were a genuine family characteristic, the stuff of well-worn discussions. Except that the discussions went on without her, as she no doubt deserved. After all, she had never truly belonged.
She laid the table in her rarely used dining room, and had only just put the finishing touches to her appearance when the front door opened and closed.
‘All right if I have a bath, Dorothea?’
‘Don’t be long,’ she warned.
Already the flat was filled with his noise, although initially he had been as silent as a cat. It was the radio, she supposed, as she heard it travelling along the corridor with him to the bathroom, the door of which was never quite closed. Yet when he reappeared, wearing a shirt and tie and Henry’s jacket, all she said was ‘You look very smart.’
‘Yeah, it fits, doesn’t it?’
‘You’d better keep it. Nobody else will wear it.’
‘Thanks. Your husband been dead long?’
‘Fifteen years. He was older than I was.’
‘And you’ve been alone since then?’
‘Yes.’
He whistled. ‘Tough. Still, you seem to be making a go of it. This flat is a veritable pocket of refinement.’
His voice had taken on the exaggerated fluting intonation that was perhaps his way of paying a compliment. Normally he was not loquacious, had signally failed to provide much-needed conversation. I probably strike him as impossibly affected, she thought, yet I was brought up to speak like that. Most people were in those days—not that he knows anything about that. He must have seen old films on television: Ronald Coleman, Leslie Howard. Even I might think them slightly silly nowadays. But it had been Henry’s smoothness, no doubt rooted in exactly the same models, that had won her over, as if she were being given access to another world, a semi-fictional world that contained something of the glamour of the films that she and her mother had once faithfully gone to see. Yes, that was it: Henry was glamorous, far more glamorous than she could ever be. And she suspected that he had seen a natural affinity between his restless temperament and her apparent repose, so that he need never be discomfited or challenged by her quieter behaviour, as he had been discomfited, perhaps permanently, by the first wife he never mentioned. Yet she had seen him becalmed by the illness that had killed him, had seen his look of astonishment, as if illness were her domain, the domain of the repressed, and extravagant grief his own prerogative. And the illness that had taken him away had left her intact, and if lonely, at least acquiescent, devoting her energies, or what remained of them, to trying to work out what she should do if she were to encounter grave illness herself before the end. For that reason it would be well to be prepared.
Yet every living fibre protested against such preparation, and the sight of the young face opposite hers reinforced her desire to appropriate a little more of her life while there was still time. Everything is provisional, she thought recklessly. Nothing matters very much. It hardly signifies that this person is here, since sooner or later he will be gone. By the same token I may soon be gone myself; my heart, contrary to Monty’s anodyne assurances—not very convincing, now that I come to think of it—is almost certainly in a state of disrepair. We could all go at any minute, even Kitty, whose calculations do not envisage any such eventuality. Curiously, this idea did not alarm her, alarmed her far less, in fact, than the prospect of more careful uninteresting days spent on unwelcome duties and observances. With the possibility of change before her she felt her spirits lift. There would no longer be any point in cautious husbandry, in the prudent expenditure of time and money. She saw the virtue—and it was a virtue—of living for the moment. She understood how adventurers could justify their actions. She sympathised with predators. Dizzy with this glimpse of freedom she smiled at Steve, for whom she felt a new affection. He had invited her out, as few men of her acquaintance had thought to do since Henry’s death. The prospect of her excursion, her interlude, brought a flush to her cheek. She drank her wine gratefully, resolving to do so more often: drinkers had more fun, were more approachable. Perhaps she would take a half of one of her pills tonight, so as to be rested for the following epochal day. All she had needed was a treat, she marvelled, and until now nobody had thought of it. She herself had hardly envisaged the possibility, so remote and impractical it had seemed.
The unlikely agent of her renewal laid down his knife and fork and smiled pleasantly at her, as if she and not he were the guest. He scrubbed his mouth with his napkin, a habit which normally irritated her. However, so indebted to him was she for her change of heart that she merely smiled warmly back.
‘Help yourself to bread,’ she said, and, following her former train of thought, added, ‘My husband and I were complete opposites in many ways. Yet we got on very well. Did you ring Kitty, by the way?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Neither did I,’ she reflected. ‘Will you pour me another glass of wine? Do you like it? And the tart? Yes? I’m so glad.’
He was probably bored by now, she reckoned, but she beamed beneficently at him anyway. For he would take her to the park, cancelling a dull Sunday, and
she would no longer be alone with her thoughts, and only the prospect of a routine telephone call to break the silence.
She woke suddenly, thinking that she had heard Henry call out to her from his sickroom. Even though she knew that Henry was dead she was not quite convinced of the fact. Her heart beat heavily in the dark room while she sought to make sense of the noise that had woken her. Her inability to do so alarmed her, as did the torpor that kept her half sitting in the bed, although it would have made more sense to get up. Gradually she pieced together a few crucial facts. She had, in a spirit of reckless preparation for the day ahead, taken one of her pills, rather late, and this, on top of two unaccustomed glasses of wine, had proved a mistake. I have a hangover, she thought with horror, though her head was quite clear, and she was not ill. More facts emerged: it was Sunday. The room was dark because it was raining. The summer was apparently over. The sun had gone, and although it might return, might even return in a day or two, it had taken with it a measure of contentment, a child-like trust in a user-friendly universe, one in which the days were all alike, with no abrupt reversals, no surprises in reserve. Even, or perhaps especially, in this half-light, the chill was perceptible. Damp stole through the open windows, and on the terrace rain fell on her abandoned table and chair. She would be obliged to drink her tea indoors, as she had not done for several weeks. This change of habit would be unwelcome: in fact all changes were unwelcome. Her present disarray might even have been a warning to her, as if some sort of general disruption were under way. Such a shame, she thought determinedly; people will be so disappointed to have their Sunday spoiled by bad weather. Fortunately, in the car we shall hardly notice.
A noise again: that was what had roused her. This time she was able to identify it quite prosaically as a knock on the door.
‘Come in,’ she quavered, in an old woman’s voice, the one that was rarely used so early in the morning. Hearing it now, as if for the first time, she was shocked. ‘Is that you, Steve? Is anything wrong?’
She could almost see him standing outside her bedroom door. A justifiable recoil would prevent him from entering. She was grateful for this; she was reluctant to be seen before she had bathed and dressed. It must be frightfully late, she thought, and reached for her clock. It was half past seven, two hours past her normal waking time. ‘Are you all right?’ she called.
‘I’m off, Dorothea,’ said the voice.
‘Where are you going? You’re not leaving?’
‘I’m going to see my folks. Cheltenham. All right if I take the car? I may stay the night; there’s nothing doing here while Ann and David are away. See you tomorrow, then. Okay?’
In the dark room she blushed, as she had blushed when she was a very young girl. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Drive carefully.’ A constriction in her throat made further comments impossible. She heard a shifting of feet outside in the corridor.
‘Until tomorrow, then. Oh, by the way, thanks for the fry-up; it was great.’ There was a pause. ‘You all right?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘You get off. I’ll see you when I see you.’
At last the footsteps receded; the front door opened and closed. She sank back onto the pillows, mortified. That was her overriding reaction, one of intense embarrassment that she had so presumed on this young man’s indulgence, whereas in all truth he regarded her simply as one to whom he was momentarily obligated, so that a meaningless compliment from time to time might be in order. She had thought that they were getting on rather well, had been approaching a sort of intimacy. In fact, as this event proved, any illusion of friendliness had been simply that, an illusion. Or rather that she had committed her original sin of mistaking friendliness for friendship, as she had on more than one occasion in her early life. She had always had a too ardent desire for closeness, the closeness she had known with her mother, and on which she had relied, or hoped to rely, to see her through whatever difficulties might lie ahead. She had learned, painfully, that no friendship, however well aspected, can protect one in this way, and so had gradually withdrawn her natural desire for affection. She had found that an apparent detachment served her somewhat better than a show of eagerness. Even with Henry she had learned not to show too much zeal, so that concern and care had gradually taken the place of passion. Of passion she had a bad memory. She had taken note of the relief felt on a certain occasion, many years long since, and had resolved there and then never again to be led by her instincts. Even now she had only to visualise that dingy room in Down Street to feel shame, just as now, incredibly, she felt shame at having once more committed an act of misjudgment. She had made an error, and would have to repair it as best she could. Fortunately she was too well trained to voice any objections on her own account. He had simply forgotten, she told herself; it was just as well that she had not reminded him. This was no doubt what the journalists and commentators called a defining moment. She had been passed over, returned to her habitual solitude by someone whose attention she had no right to think focused on herself. In fact nothing had been taken away from her: the bad news was that nothing had been added. And there was a long day ahead, and no help for it. She would simply have to try harder. Yet what she could only experience as Steve’s infidelity lingered in her mind. No respect, she thought fretfully, and reproached herself for being old, a failing for which there was no remedy.
It was important to remember that nothing had been taken away; that was the thought to hold on to. In a few minutes she would get up and dress carefully and behave as though nothing untoward had happened, would resume her natural sobriety of demeanour, would make breakfast, and read the newspapers. But she knew that she would gaze unseeingly at the newsprint, would not switch on the radio, since the kindly voices would not be addressing her own predicament, a predicament which she would of course keep to herself. It was only an excursion to the park, she told herself, imagining the smell of the newly wet earth, but instead of an avenue of trees she saw an avenue of desks, the classroom of her secretarial school, and heard the scrape of chairs being pushed back when it was time to go home. It was an image of imprisonment, though she had not thought so at the time: she had been glad of the company of other girls, unwilling to endanger the safety she had known at school. And on Sundays she had walked in the park. That was what Sundays were for. In fact there was nothing to stop her calling a taxi and asking the driver to take her to Richmond. For a second or two she entertained the idea, then dismissed it. The burden of the past was too heavy; she knew from experience that her exposed situation would favour further reminiscences, that the day would be coloured by memory, and that the inner world, in any contest, would win against the outer. And she had not telephoned Kitty to thank her for dinner. Kitty would not take this omission lightly. She would get in touch this evening, would pretend exhaustion, distress, exactly as Kitty would have done, had she been so remiss as not to offer thanks on a similar occasion. She would do all this—after all, she was exhausted, and perhaps not very well—but she would make a poor job of it, and the offence would remain, would indeed grow, an occasion for comment in the best family tradition.
The thought of Kitty made her feel worse, especially since Henry no longer provided support. Curiously, she did not think of Henry himself, and for a reason which she had long tried to ignore. It was because with Henry perfect fusion had never been effected. They had been seen as a devoted couple, and it was true that they were devoted, devoted to the task of making up for each other’s disappointment. He was a man whose natural disposition had been towards frivolity, and he had been permanently cast down by the defection of his first wife, his childhood sweetheart, whom he had married amid much splendour, and with family approval. Was she not in fact a remote relation? Mrs May never enquired, careful of her own peace of mind. The symbolism of Henry’s raising her to her feet in a busy street was not entirely lost on her. It had salved his sore spirit to be seen in this act of chivalry. ‘But why did you come back to the office that evening?’ she had asked him
. ‘I couldn’t get your funny little face out of my mind,’ he had replied. ‘You looked so woebegone. I felt you needed looking after.’ For this perception—though it had been no more than a passing remark—she had unstintingly rewarded him. But she had always known that she was not a fit companion for one with his exuberant nature, his moments of fatalism. She was utterly ignorant of the tantrums and stratagems that women used to intrigue or irritate men, and of which he, presumably, entertained a nostalgic memory. She had sensed this disappointment in him, had hoped that it was merely the effect of his age, had hoped that he too would realise that he was no longer the ardent young man of cherished memory, was in fact tired, disheartened. He had seen steadiness, an even temper. To him this had spelled novelty, and, half speculatively, he had succumbed to it.
And she? She had seen her one chance. She had known in her heart of hearts that if she did not seize it she would go through life as an orphan. She possessed nothing but her liberty, was without kinship, attachments. She was not prepared to look beyond this fact: it was Susie Fuller who did that. Susie, with her many boyfriends, was quite simply aghast at the idea that Henry might be relinquished. At one point Mrs May had thought that Susie herself was interested, but was quick enough to see that Susie’s boldness put her out of the picture: in Henry’s opinion only men were bold, or should be. He was in many ways surprisingly old-fashioned, courtly. It may even have been Susie’s cheerfully expressed interest that had brought forth in the normally undemanding Dorothea a faint spirit of rebellion. Thus a friendship had evolved into marriage. And she had appreciated him, and his persistence, until at last they sat, a little dazed, in the living room of the flat that was her pride and joy, and which he found surprisingly to his taste—but always with the unseen proviso that they could move on. Or that he could. Therefore she had made every effort so that he would want to stay.
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