The Partridge and the Pelican

by Rachel Crowther

  She remembered, too, delivering Eve home at the end of that summer. The last time she’d seen her, before this year. Eve and her mother on the doorstep, watching her drive away. Olivia followed the thought for a moment, then pushed it away, discomfited by the unexpected dart of pity it induced. Eve had been in the ascendant back then, she reminded herself. Think how unkind she’d been to Sarah. She smiled across the table and took another piece of pitta bread.

  Chapter 31

  The restaurant had been quiet this lunchtime and was empty now. When the waiter came to collect their plates, Olivia ordered Lebanese coffee and a plate of baklava, more to spin out the time than because she wanted anything else to eat, and Sarah followed suit. Olivia had a strange sense of lethargy; she felt again how pleasant it would be to hide away from life for a while. Sitting here in the middle of this familiar city, she had the sudden feeling that she and Sarah were alone, pitted against the world: that unsuspected dangers might lurk along the sober pavements and behind the low hedges shivering in the December breeze.

  She tasted her coffee, thick and grainy and flavoured with cardamom.

  “How’s things on the wedding front?” she asked.

  “The wedding’s fine.” Sarah cut a small piece of baklava into two smaller halves which disintegrated into a heap of pastry flakes and crumbled almonds. “The plaster should be off by Christmas. It’s all fine, really.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Olivia that Sarah might have had a particular reason to propose lunch today, but studying her expression now she realised there was something on Sarah’s mind. She’d monopolised the conversation, she thought, and Sarah had been too polite to claim her portion.

  “But …?” she offered.

  Sarah sighed; a long, slow sigh. “Oh, it just seems such a – such a change. A lot to get used to.” She picked up another piece of baklava, contemplated it for a moment as though she wasn’t sure what to do with it, then slipped it into her mouth. “I know it’s my fault for leaving it so long.”

  Olivia tried to remember how she’d felt before her wedding. “I’ve never lived on my own,” she said. “You’ve got a whole life set up. I can’t imagine what that feels like.”

  “It’s not as though I’ve turned into some eccentric spinster with peculiar habits.” Sarah sighed again, more gently. “Robert’s away a lot, isn’t he?”

  Was he? Olivia digested this statement. Robert’s away a lot. She didn’t like the way it sounded like a fixed pattern. She wasn’t sure how it fitted into the conversation, either.

  “Is this,” she said, “a general worry, or …”

  “I don’t know.” Sarah looked calm; not about to cry, Olivia thought with relief. “There’s nothing about Guy – he’s not one of those inflexible men. Oh, it’s silly. I shouldn’t bother you with it.”

  “I bothered you with Eve,” said Olivia, and Sarah smiled gratefully.

  Neither of them said anything for a moment. It was her move, Olivia thought. Sarah was waiting for her to speak.

  “Have you talked to Guy?” she asked. “Said any of this to him?”

  Sarah shook her head. “It’s hard to explain,” she said. “We get along very well, but we don’t seem to have a way to say things. Some things. As if we’ve learned each other’s language but we’ve missed out a whole chunk of grammar or vocabulary or something. We can’t do à la maison. Does that make any sense?”

  Olivia thought of Robert; of the dwindling of their conversations. Had they had a common language and let it slip away?

  “Maybe it’s something you need to practise,” she said.

  She was conscious of sounding like an agony aunt now, her voice unnatural, unconvincing. She hadn’t had much call for this sort of talk recently.

  The waiter hovered, out of Sarah’s field of view. Keen to move them on, Olivia thought.

  “You know what?” Sarah said. “All the time I was single and everyone else was getting married, having babies, I used to think, ‘I’m fine like this. There are plenty of compensations.’ But I never completely believed it. Now I wonder whether I was too hasty. Whether I fell in with Guy’s proposal without thinking properly about it.”

  “Because you love him,” said Olivia. Too simplistic, she thought. Like a child’s view of an adult problem. She could see there was more to it than that; more than a simple balancing of plusses and minuses.

  Sarah stared back, her usual assurance disconcertingly absent. “I don’t know,” she said. “Is that what you need, to make a marriage work? Is it essential?”

  “Among other things,” said Olivia helplessly.

  The truth was that she’d got married so young, herself, that she’d never considered these complexities. Perhaps her emotional development had been halted at twenty-two, when she gave up an independence she’d never recognised for what it was.

  The waiter sidled closer and Sarah turned abruptly towards him. “Two more coffees,” she said.

  Olivia didn’t demur.

  “The thing is,” Sarah said, the words coming out in a rush now, “I didn’t mean to tell you this, to tell anyone, but I’ve had a – I think I’ve fallen for someone else.”

  “An affair?” Olivia was curious to find that she wasn’t surprised. Was this what she’d anticipated, all those weeks ago when she’d read Sarah’s letter? A wrinkle in the smooth passage of late love? But Sarah was hurrying to deny it.

  “No, no – more a crush, really. Someone I met by chance, at work, who isn’t my type at all, who I hardly know anything about.” She flushed. “It’s so unlikely I can’t help feeling I’ve – sort of invented it, to test myself. To test Guy maybe. Or to talk myself out of marriage. You can see why I can’t say anything to Guy: I don’t know whether I should marry you because I’ve got a wild crush on a complete stranger.”

  “Are you seeing him? The other man?”

  Sarah shook her head miserably. “The last time I saw him was at the running club the night I did this.” She gestured at the plaster cast. “He appeared out of the blue. I thought it was some cruel twist of Fate, but it turned out the cruel twist Fate had lined up was for my ankle.”

  Olivia laughed, then checked herself.

  “But you’re still thinking about him?”

  Sarah shrugged. “About it,” she said. “About what it means. Am I only marrying Guy because he seems so suitable, or has this ridiculous crush only happened because I’m committed to Guy now, and being illicit makes it more exciting?” She moved her leg again with a grimace. “I keep wondering what would have happened if I’d met him – Harry – six months earlier. I keep trying to work out which set of feelings is closest to love.” She picked up the last crumbs of baklava with the pad of one finger, then flicked them back onto the plate with her thumbnail.

  Olivia didn’t say anything. There was a quiver, just a quiver, of guilty recognition, as she acknowledged the fantasy that had lurked in the back of her mind since that first chance meeting with James on the bridge.

  “People fall in love in arranged marriages, don’t they?” Sarah said, her tone almost pleading now. “And other people love each other madly but don’t manage to live together for more than a few months?”

  Olivia thought about her own marriage; the routine, the babies, the history. How much really depended on who you chose, she wondered, and how much on what you made of it? Then she thought about Robert, who was coming home that night, and she felt her skin tingle.

  “Love is important,” she said. “But it isn’t straightforward. It’s not the only thing that matters, and it’s tangled up with the rest of life, the practicalities and eventualities, more and more as time goes on.” She glanced out of the window, where the light was already beginning to fade. The boys would be home before long, she thought. “But maybe – maybe it’s what makes all those empty spaces into lace. Makes it look as though there’s a pattern, some sense to life. At best, I think that’s what it does.”

  The coffee arrived, set down without a word.
/>   “I don’t need this,” Sarah said. But she picked up her cup and sipped the hot coffee without stirring it.

  “You’ll never know unless you try,” Olivia said, a little desperately. “That’s what I think. If it doesn’t work out, it’ll be awkward, but you can undo it. You’re both grown-ups. You have to take a chance, sometimes. You’re good at making things work.”

  But was that the coward’s way out, the predictable advice of the long-married woman who liked things to follow their appointed path? That odd sense of responsibility niggled at her again, the thought that seeing Sarah married would settle some ancient account between them.

  “I just don’t know if it’s for me,” Sarah said. “For a long time I didn’t think it could be.”

  “Because you hadn’t met the right person, or …”

  “Because I didn’t think I had the right.”

  “The right?” Olivia was astonished. “Why wouldn’t you? Heavens: isn’t it in the Declaration of Human Rights, even?”

  “I didn’t think I had the right to be happy, I mean. Even though I was quite happy, really, as I was. Oh, I’m sorry, I’m being a bore.”

  “You’re certainly not,” Olivia said. “Bemusing, but not boring.”

  To her relief Sarah smiled.

  “We’d better go,” she said. “I expect they want to shut.”

  Sarah reached across the table and squeezed Olivia’s hand, then she swivelled in her seat and caught the eye of the waiter, who was leaning against the counter as though he’d given up hope of them leaving.

  “The bill, please,” she said. “And could you call me a taxi?”

  They hugged goodbye on the pavement: the occasion seemed to demand it. Olivia held the door of the taxi while Sarah slid awkwardly into the back seat.

  “Marriage isn’t the be all and end all,” Olivia said. “I’m like one of those financial advisors who have to warn you that they only sell their own bank’s products. I can’t give you a balanced view; I have to believe what I did was the right thing.”

  Sarah nodded. “I could do with a sign,” she said, looking up at Olivia just before she slammed the door shut. “But life isn’t like that, I know.”

  The phone was ringing when Olivia opened her front door. She didn’t reach it in time, and instead of interrupting the answerphone she stood and waited for the machine to stop flashing, then pressed the play button.

  Robert, making her heart skip a little. Hello darling, it’s me. The plane’s landed, I should be back by five. Hope all’s well. Robert who had been away quite a lot lately; whom she could do with having home again, now.

  Chapter 32

  “This is a good idea,” Robert said. “You always have good ideas.”

  He lifted his glass to her and Olivia smiled. But now they were alone at last, she was no longer quite sure what she wanted to say to him. He looked at her across the table with that open, enquiring look of his and she felt the same nervousness she’d felt facing Eve, the same uncertainty.

  It had taken several days to manage this outing. Olivia was out of the habit of asking for attention, used to managing on subsistence rations. “You look weary,” Robert had said on his first evening back, and she’d shrugged it off, not because she was many things as well as weary, not because she hardly knew where to begin, but because she knew his mind was still elsewhere. And because there were plenty of other things to occupy him, now he was home.

  He’d spent the first evening investigating the fuse box and speculating about what could have blown so many circuits at once. (An unusual flow of energy, the electrician had suggested, or a rogue appliance, and Olivia had thought that either of those descriptions could apply to Eve, though it was probably one of her sons’ many electronic devices.) Then there had been the inevitable demands from the boys: the Physics project saved up for his return; the problem with Angus’s computer that his older brothers couldn’t or wouldn’t fix – and the backlog of sleep Robert always brought home from business trips. He never slept well in hotels, he claimed, without Olivia. She knew she should be flattered, but she wished he didn’t always come back so tired.

  But here they were now, in the elegant 1930s conservatory at Gee’s, a bottle of wine in a cooler between them and a candle alight beside it. Here they were, and Robert didn’t seem inclined to fill the silence by telling her about his trip, or by discussing the boys’ homework or his mother’s plans for Christmas. Robert was good at filling silences, but he was good at leaving them alone, sometimes, too. Olivia had forgotten that.

  “You’ve been away a lot recently,” she said.

  “I suppose I have. There’s been a lot going on. We’re lucky to be so busy: lots of firms not doing so well at the moment.”

  Olivia took a sip of wine, cold and delicious, and Robert watched her face.

  “It should be better after Christmas,” he said. “Less travelling, once the takeover in Germany’s sorted out.”

  “Good.”

  They were surrounded by couples very much like them. A little older, a little younger, grouped into fours or sixes perhaps: the women dressed with some care but not expensively; the men in shirtsleeves, relaxed, laughing. People confident of themselves, not so burdened by work or domestic responsibilities that they couldn’t leave them behind for the evening. This must be what she and Robert looked like, too, Olivia thought; indistinguishable from the crowd. Convincing examples of a type.

  “So,” Robert said. “You had a visit from your friend Eve, I gather?”

  “She upset me, rather,” Olivia said. Might as well get on with it, before one of the boys rang on the mobile, or some colleague of Robert’s. Before she lost her nerve.

  “Didn’t she always?”

  “Not for twenty-five years.” Robert had never met Eve; that didn’t make it any easier to explain. “We were friends, though, and now it seems we aren’t. She wanted me to feel I’d done something wrong. That I’d caused her harm.”

  “What kind of harm?”

  Olivia picked up her wine glass again. She’d spent a lot of time in restaurants recently, she thought. Was this what happened when you had nothing better to do with your life? “She thought her boyfriend liked me better than her.”

  Robert laughed. “What, twenty-five years ago?”

  “She was pregnant,” Olivia said. “It spoiled everything, in her eyes.”

  “Hardly your fault, though.”

  “Maybe I was partly to blame.” Olivia stopped, considering the words at her disposal as though selecting flowers for a daisy chain. Essential to pick the best ones, those with substantial heads and strong stalks. Essential to cut through them cleanly, near the ground: there was always the risk that they would split apart or slide dismayingly together, spoiling the careful work of half an hour, or half a life. “Maybe I should have guessed she was pregnant.”

  “How could you have done? She was the medical student, not you.”

  “We spent the whole summer together,” Olivia said.

  The waitress approached, prompting them for their order. Robert picked up the menu, laid it down again, smiled at Olivia.

  “You didn’t have any experience of pregnancy, back then,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’d miss the signs now. What do you think: should I go for fish or steak?”

  Suddenly Olivia knew she didn’t have the heart for this conversation, not at the moment.

  “Fish would be nice with the Sauvignon.” She looked up at the waitress and smiled; a convincing example of a type. “Is the skate good?”

  Mary Bennett rang the next afternoon when Olivia was teaching. Olivia didn’t usually answer the phone in the middle of a lesson, but when she heard Mary’s voice on the loudspeaker she slipped out of the room with a mumbled apology. No bad thing, she thought, to give her pupil a run at her Bach prelude, the way it was going.

  “Any news?” Mary said, when Olivia picked up.

  “About?”

  “About Georgie. Have you made any progress?” />
  “Oh.” Olivia leaned against the worktop behind the kitchen door. “No. I talked to Georgie and she said she didn’t want to know about her family. I took that – she was very clear about it.”

  There was a long silence at the other end. Olivia could hear silence from the music room too, Bach abandoned in her absence. She cupped her hand over the receiver and called through the door: “Bar twenty, Natasha. I’ll be back in a moment.”

  “Here’s the thing,” Mary said. “Of course respecting the client’s wishes is paramount. Especially for Georgie, whose wishes were trampled over for years. But sometimes it’s hard not to do something you’re sure is in their best interests. You had the same thought as me, that some sort of reconciliation …”

  “Maybe Georgie will come round to the idea, in time,” Olivia said. Natasha had stopped again after four bars, wretched girl.

  “There may not be much time left. Georgie’s much frailer since that bout of pneumonia. I’m bound by a code of conduct, you’re not. You could at least find out whether she has any relatives left to be reconciled with.”

  Olivia felt riled. Surely Mary could research Georgie’s family in her free time, if she had scruples about making it official business? But it was Olivia who’d raised the matter, gone to see Mary in the first place. Of course Mary would assume she was keen to help.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said. “I’m sorry, I’m teaching. I really have to go now. I’ll be in touch.”

  Natasha was staring out of the window, watching a squirrel digging in the bed nearest the house, its paws neat and dextrous as wizened old hands.

  “They bury conkers all over the garden, then forget where they are,” Olivia said. The squirrel looked up, its head cocked as though it had heard her. Sometimes, she thought, they looked like animated models, the kind you’d get in a film.