Other People's Love Affairs: Stories

by D. Wystan Owen

  On the evening of their first trip to the Princess, he stowed his bike around the back of the shop. He had not told his parents it was Mrs. Trilby he’d be seeing, thinking they might object if they knew. “Is it a girl, Jerry?” his mother had asked, and he had blushed and said no, it was boys from his school.

  “It’s great you came, Gerald,” she said when he arrived. “We’re going to have a good time, you and me.”

  She drove them in her pale blue baby Austin, all the time describing films she’d seen as a girl. She’d been keen on the cinema then; her town had had a great big one, she said. Her favorite was Mandrake the Magician; she never missed that particular one. She glanced at him from time to time as she talked, swerving a bit on the road when she did.

  She was dressed as she had been for work, her makeup reapplied, a hint of perfume. She said he looked good in his suit. “You look very handsome,” she said.

  When the film was over, she didn’t want to go home. In the coming weeks, he would find this was always the case.

  “How about a walk?” she said. “Or ice cream. Would you want to have an ice cream tonight? I know about a place where we wouldn’t be known.”

  He looked at his watch. His sister, Janet, home from secretarial college, had sulked: “I never had the freedoms he does.” She had been the more troublesome teen, brooding, seeming always in search of something just out of reach. A year ago, late on the night before she left home, she had come into his room. “I’ll miss you,” she’d whispered from the foot of his bed. “But I’ve never been happy.”

  “Or we could pull off the road for a bit. There’s places to sit. We could chat for a while.”

  Each week the scene was repeated. In her dresses she would sometimes catch a chill after dark, and he would offer his coat to drape over her shoulders. She would gaze at the stars or up and down the Payne Road. When the picture was over she couldn’t sit still. She couldn’t keep from looking about.

  “I have to get home, I’m afraid. Another time we can have ice cream,” he said.

  “All right,” she said. “But hold my hand in the car. Would you do that? I’m feeling lonesome tonight.”

  With the windows down, the sea air was fresh, and their hands touched as they moved through the night. Vaguely, coming into the village, she said Mr. Trilby wasn’t at home.

  At the flower shop, his bike still leaned against the back door. Dropping him, she said, “It’s good of you, Gerald,” then drove off before he had made a reply.

  They saw seven films together that summer. One every Friday, till August was done.

  Now in Glass the lights along the roads had come on. The sky was like the inside of a shell. He passed the pub and thought he might stop for a drink. It had perhaps been a mistake, after all. Perhaps it wasn’t right keeping vigil at the Princess, with Elsie only just having died. In the early days of their courtship there had been nights of disclosure, a wine bottle dwindling as they told of past loves. Even then, he had said nothing of the woman from the flower shop; even then he had kept the memory for himself. There had been a heat on those nights as they confessed their virginity, a heat the first time she slept pressed against him. It had felt as if no space existed between them, when in fact, hardly noticing, he was maintaining one. Over time, that he had not told her became a part of what there was, the memory as much privately his as a dream in the moments just after waking.

  He stopped briefly outside the Green Man, then reconsidered and continued downtown. Hyde Pantry was the name of the diner. He did not get out of the car, only parked it and looked at the front of the building, the stucco unchanged, though the awning was new. He imagined, as he had more than fifty years prior, Loraine Trilby locking the door. He thought of his bike and of the flowers in the window. Now he could see a man sweeping the floor.

  With his mobile phone he rang Peter’s house. He was still in the driver’s seat of the wagon. The safety belt had not been unclasped.

  “Dad?” Peter said. “Hang on a minute.”

  Gerald heard him move to a quieter space. “I know it isn’t Sunday,” he said.

  “That’s all right. You can call any time, you know, Dad. You all right?”

  “Fine,” Gerald said.

  “Good. So what’s up?”

  “Only I was thinking of your mother a bit.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I wanted to say that.”

  He leaned his head on the wheel. Perhaps the phone call had been another mistake. It was embarrassing, calling this way. There was a silence, and then Peter said, “I’m sorry, Dad. We should mention her more. I didn’t know whether you wanted to talk about it or not.”

  “I do.”

  “Okay, well we can. Les and I do, you know. So we can.”

  “The first time I saw her she was catching a bus. She was the only one waiting, and it almost didn’t stop. She stood on her toes and waved to be seen.”

  Peter made a sound that might have been interest, or grief.

  “Do you remember you got a splinter at the playground in Glass?”

  “I remember we went there. Ages ago.”

  “I took it out because your mother couldn’t bear to cause pain. That’s why I took the splinter out, Peter.”

  “You were good with that sort of thing. You used to hum a little tune while you did it.”

  “Of course, your mother was the musical one. Well, I only wanted to tell you.”

  When he’d rung off, he lifted his head from the wheel and found that the day had come to an end. His view inside the diner was clearer now in the dark, dinner guests sitting down, men and women together.

  On their last trip to the Princess, she had tried to be gay. She said sweetly how she wished he didn’t have to go back to school. At home, his father had commended him brusquely. The merchants in Glass had been pleased with his work. “Take the Morris tonight,” his father had said, not knowing that a car had been used all that summer, driven to a wayside theater by another man’s wife.

  “That’s a first,” she had said when he arrived at the shop. “A ride in a delivery van.”

  She was wearing her most beautiful dress, pale silk with a pattern of lavender flowers, cut to expose the rise of her breast. He had told her once that he thought it was pretty, a boldness in the first days of what had since attained an air of intimacy.

  As he guided them along the familiar route, she talked about what a fine summer they’d had.

  “You’ll visit? You’d say you will?”

  He agreed that he would.

  The picture was No Stranger to Crime, and all through it she held firm to his hand. He scarcely watched, only looked at her face in the dark. Her eyes caught reflected silver light from the screen, and he thought she might have wept, but he couldn’t be sure.

  When it was over, her high spirits were down. She said little as they walked to the van. It was there, as they headed back into Glass, that she said it. “My husband isn’t any good to me, Gerald.”

  He didn’t know what to say. She had spoken little of Mr. Trilby, except of his absence, and he was startled to find the man should be in her thoughts. On the road, the van’s headlamps cast a small orb of light: moving pavement, at its edges thin branches and leaves. On some evenings that summer her car and its lights had seemed to enclose the whole of the world.

  “He’s the reason I can’t ever be a mother,” she said. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window. “That’s a great disappointment in a woman’s life.”

  She spoke as though very distant from him, subdued as she had been that day in the shop when first she had spoken of her childlessness.

  “Perhaps that will change,” he said.

  She exhaled.

  “Perhaps there can be an adoption.”

  “How can there be? How would I manage? Sometimes I wish he weren’t kind to me, Gerald. I wish he would hit me or say something cruel.”

  She had the rigid self-possession of an ill-humored youth, which, he re
alized, she must lately have been. She was like his sister when a mood was upon her. Janet, who’d said she had never been happy, though there were times in his memory when he’d have sworn that she had been.

  From the shop, she directed him to her house. He had never been there and didn’t know where she lived. The street was dark but for a light on her porch. It was a small cottage with a rosebush in front.

  He stopped but she didn’t want to get out.

  “Who will bring me my ribbons and twine? Who will sit and be sweet through a dull afternoon?”

  He did not want her to go either. It seemed something precious was passing from his life, or perhaps that it already had. When he asked which was her favorite of the pictures they’d seen, she said she couldn’t remember a one.

  Through the front window, he saw that a lamp was switched on, pale and plaintive beside the brighter light from the porch. It caught his attention a moment, and as he regarded the house he noticed a wooden ramp beside the steps to the door. Behind the curtains, a vague figure sat in relief, a low shadow that might have been a chair or small table, except that it seemed to rock slowly in place.

  He looked at her, uncomprehending.

  “Does somebody live with you and your husband?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Mrs. Trilby, is your husband unwell?”

  “I didn’t think he’d be up.”

  “He isn’t well, then?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He remembered holding her hand in the dark, kisses accepted on the forehead or cheek. He had imagined telling his disbelieving friends back at school but now felt he wouldn’t wish them to know. It put a different color to things, the husband having been ill at home all the time.

  “It was only a bit of fun, Gerald,” she said. “He wanted me to have that. He was glad.”

  She opened the passenger door.

  “It doesn’t feel right, Mrs. Trilby,” he said.

  “It was right. It was a kindness you did.”

  When she moved, her necklace caught a flicker of light.

  All the way home that night he thought about them: what infirmity might have fractured their lives, and by what means they had agreed to press on. The image of Mr. Trilby loomed over it all, and for the time being he could see no way past it. An illness, maybe, or a wound from the war; it was shameful, this thing they had done. He parked the van outside his own house, amid his father’s cast-aside pallets and crates, a welcome sight, the whole unlovely mess of them. Soon he would be grown and would leave. This would be the last summer of the kind he had known. On the grass that grew beside the door to the kitchen, he lay down on his back, looking up at the stars.

  At some length, he became aware of a presence and turned his head to find that Janet was there. She sat beside him, cross-legged in the darkness. She lit a cigarette, something she’d started at school, and handed it to him for a drag. They were silent a while. He was glad she was there.

  “These will be the nights you remember,” she said.

  Beneath his illness from the sweets, his fatigue, and his sadness, he felt also vague stirrings of hunger. It crossed his mind to have a meal in the diner, but he didn’t have the heart to go in.

  Through the years of his marriage the flower shop had been with him. Sometimes scarcely thought of for years, even then it had nevertheless been a presence. He wondered if Peter and Leslie had sensed it, and he thought that, in the wordless way of children, they had. It would have been there whenever they visited Glass, in the silence as they passed the derelict picture house, the diner that had at one time been a florist’s. That would have been the reason they seemed withdrawn: he had never been entirely theirs. All along they’d have known that, just as they knew without having to ask that their mother’s piano had fallen from tune, or that his thoughts drifted back to dwell in a past to which none of them had ever laid claim.

  Elsie would have been aware of it, too, a wife’s intuition as strong as a child’s. She’d have seen it every time he came in with flowers, elaborate bouquets he’d assembled himself, garnished with lily grasses and ferns. Had she watched him from the window as he moved through the garden? Had she seen how he paused to smell the rind of a lemon, to finger the white petals of magnolia blossoms? Yes, he thought. Yes, she probably had.

  He backed the car away from the diner and pulled forward onto the road. In the mirror he watched as the building receded, the same way he had done on his bicycle, evenings, the touch of her hand like a wound on his brow.

  That touch remained, as all the rest of it did, though time was beginning to soften its texture. They had been young, he and Loraine, hardly more than children at play, their game one not of seduction but of innocence: a bit of fun in a burdensome life, a lost adolescence briefly restored. A bit of fun need not diminish all that came after, nor need it diminish what had brought it to be. Love had flourished in the dark at the Princess, granted by still a worthier kind. There was beauty in the gift Mr. Trilby had made, though surely its price had been terribly dear.

  The years with Elsie had likewise been a gift. The presence of her, the weight in the night. She had known when she said “So you won’t float away.” It was what she had meant, sensing him truant. She had not remonstrated, being better than he, had only stayed near that he not lose his mooring, that he not find himself as he did now: adrift, a mere ribbon of smoke come apart on the wind.

  Housekeeper

  Autumn and winter were passed by the fire, Louise cross-legged on the soft carpet, reading, Mr. Harris folded into the crook of his armchair, watching television programs with the sound turned off. His hearing wasn’t good anymore, and the noises only frustrated him. Louise liked the way he held the TV remote in the palm of his left hand and used the forefinger of his right to press the buttons. She would glance up sometimes from her book to regard him, so much like a child in his old age. In such moments—unspeaking and near—she felt extremely tender toward him.

  It was curious that he should enjoy the television so much without any sound. Sometimes he watched football, which was easy to follow, but at other times he watched news or comedy programs, and he seemed untroubled as to their content. Louise would have liked for him to read. She knew he had read a great deal in his youth, and his shelves were still full of old books: wrinkled spines, yellowing pages. In the early months of her employ he had spoken of them, had teased her good-naturedly about the detective novels and pulp romances she favored, but he had not done that now for some time. He’d shown little interest in such things of late, something that made Louise terribly sad. For hours they would sit in the flickering hearth light, she with her book and he with the remote control in his lap and his hands spread like spiders, or like the oversize feet of certain wild birds, across the upholstered arms of his chair. She watched him even as she read, so that she would often reach the end of a page or a chapter and have to turn back to read it again.

  “Do you wish it would snow?”

  Wood hissed and popped in the hearth. She had drawn the curtains an hour ago, as the light fell and heavy fog clung to the glass.

  He asked her to repeat what she’d said.

  “Do you wish it would snow?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Harris said. “I wish it would.”

  They both looked at the fire awhile.

  “I never saw snow until I was sixteen,” Louise said. “Real snow, I mean. I lived near to the seaside as well—with my nan—and it only ever dusted a bit. Then I was taken to live somewhere else, and there was snow all over the place. The first day, a girl pushed me down and I cried. I thought I would be wet and freezing all day. I never knew snow was dry before that.”

  Mr. Harris laughed.

  “I wish it would snow, too,” Louise said, turning back to her book. “I wish it would snow us in.”

  They had been, in this way, together since August. The arrangement suited her well. In the boardinghouse, she hadn’t been liked. “Looney Louise,” she’d he
ard Ann Archer say. “I’d lock my doors with her in the place.” Over breakfast one morning she’d circled the ad: housekeeper wanted for elderly man.

  She’d found the house at the north end of Glass, where the roads veered eastward, away from the sea. It stood in a long row of others just like it: short, whitewashed, cinderblock things, like a collection of military barracks. Outside, she gathered herself. Growing up, she’d been painfully shy and unpretty; better that way, Nan had insisted, though she’d often felt it estranged her from things. Even now, she felt that: at thirty years old, her very life hung about her like an ill-fitting garment.

  At length, she’d knocked at the wrought-iron screen and was greeted by a middle-aged woman. “Esther,” she said. “Mr. Harris’s daughter.”

  From the doorway he could be seen in his chair, bent silently over a large bowl of soup.

  “We need someone for a few hours, daily,” the woman explained as they entered the house. It appeared as if she had someplace to be. “He can feed himself, bathe himself, that. We only need you to wash up, do the shopping. Make sure he swallows his pills.”

  “His pills?”

  The woman lit a cigarette and exhaled. “The bottles are labeled. Just keep the place up.”

  And so she’d begun working days in the house, riding in on the predawn bus from the city. Through windows she watched the world be remade, the slow rising color of sky, earth, and sea. It was only weeks before she moved in, having entered one morning to the odor of gas, the oven having been left on, unlit, through the night. “It’s good of you,” Esther had said. “God, how it all slides to hell in a day.”

  The old man never seemed to question her presence, even when first she began in the house. He treated her as someone who had always been there, the way a person might treat a neighborhood cat.

  He had suffered two strokes already, though his faculties were not very bad. At first, the only clear signs of ill health were a weak lower lip, a vague slur in his speech. Unpleasant, that, Nan would have said, illness so plainly declaring itself. But Louise did not find it so in the least. He took blood thinners and other medicine, mornings, swallowing them deliberately. She would stand beside him as he went through the progression, holding a tea towel under his chin. After he had finished she would retire with the dampened rag, and each would behave as though nothing had happened. Eventually, she knew, age would make further claims, as it would have done, too, with Nan if she’d lived. Louise dreaded all that, and what it would mean, but dreaded still more that he should die.