Other People's Love Affairs: Stories

by D. Wystan Owen

  The doorway remained open behind me, and with one step I could have slipped into the darkness. To be invisible, just for one blessed moment, would have been a monumental relief, but it would also have been too cruel to Marina, who had turned, miserably, to face Mrs. Hargreaves. It seemed that a great deal of time passed in silence, broken only by Sir Ian, who snorted into a handkerchief. At last, Marina, standing unsteadily now, moved with dignity to smooth the chiffon of her dress. It was easy, watching her then, to believe that here was a woman who had had many lovers but only one fleeting love in her life.

  “I was reminded,” she said, as though to no one at all. “There is no crime in being reminded.”

  Another interval passed, and she lifted her head. She looked to Barnaby, who had drawn himself nearer.

  “Mr.—” she said.

  “Barnaby, Madam.”

  “Would you be kind enough to take me to where I might lie down?”

  “Certainly, Madam,” Barnaby said, and he took her by the soft, hanging flesh of an arm. They walked gingerly, hunched over a little, like a couple together in the dusk of their life.

  Marina leaned closer, whispering something.

  Barnaby nodded, whispering back.

  Outside, darkness had fallen and I walked in the rain, only vaguely protected by my damaged umbrella. The orbs of warm light from the lamps appeared large, distorted, as the green olive had in her gin. At home, I paused before reaching my rooms to scrounge a cigarette from a neighbor. “Been out in this?” he said. “See you don’t catch your death.” I leaned against the frame of his door as if it were the only thing holding me up.

  “Thank you,” I said. The words caught in my throat. I left him without saying anything else.

  I lit the cigarette at the electrical stove. I’d left the wireless on, the volume low enough to have escaped my notice before; it carried on now with an orchestral piece. My thoughts wandered but never strayed very far. The cool touch of Marina’s lips and of her body remained, a presence, it seemed, as real as any other. I’d been confronted, as she said every Englishman must, with the physical form, not nude but shrouded in the most delicate fabrics. This, she’d suggested, had the power to make one whole. So why, then, did I feel so totally shattered?

  Another week passed; the rain dissipated a little. Exams were approaching, and I busied myself with my studies. I did not hear from Marina at all, though there were many things I would have liked to ask her: about solitude, about the things she regretted, about Proust on a rainy sidewalk in Paris.

  I spoke with my sister for a time on the phone. Chris Blake had taken her out. She was shy, but I heard the note of thrill in her voice. Cream teas along the boardwalk, a film; he’d loaned her his coat when it rained. “It’s what’s meant,” my father said on the subject. “I’ll manage, sure enough. Don’t fret about that.”

  I did not know whether or not I ought to expect another summons to Mrs. Hargreaves’s salon, nor whether I wished to receive one. But it came, just as ever it had, in the middle of the following week.

  “I didn’t know if you’d want me back,” I said.

  “Nonsense. You’ve become a fixture of our little luncheons. Madame Dupont will be back, as will Naismith, the poet.”

  “With the gambling debts,” I said rather vaguely. I was standing by the window, looking onto the street. It was midday and people bustled about.

  “I’ve paid those, I’m afraid,” Dolly said. “Oh, I oughtn’t have. He’ll only accrue more, but he’s still young and occasionally turns out a good verse. I couldn’t bear to see him beaten about the knees or thrown into the streets. It’s too awful for that sort of thing to happen to a poet.”

  “And Mrs. Valenska,” I said. “Will she be at the luncheon?”

  “Ah, my dear, no. You needn’t worry. How polite you are, waiting so long to ask. Marina left me at the end of last week. I believe she was off to Italy next.”

  I sat down in the small wooden chair from my desk, which I placed sometimes just next to the window. I experienced, when she said this, a strange sense of loss.

  “I rather thought she’d still be there,” I said.

  “Oh, no. She’s not one to linger. Not after she’s got what she came for.”

  “What she came for?”

  “Why, money, of course. The same as the poet. Same as all of them, darling. They come for money; isn’t that what she told you? Or did she say pity? Well I suppose that’s true, too; a widow must always accept people’s pity. We’re all parasites of one kind or another. What Marina needed, though, was money. She hasn’t a bean of her own. The dead husband, it turns out, was simply buried in debt, and the divorces, well, you can imagine: she was hardly in a position to ask anything of them. She got what she wanted, but I dare say she paid a fair price. I rather think you destroyed her, my dear.”

  On the street, a man was getting into a taxi. A woman was standing and watching him go.

  “She said she had once been Captain Hargreaves’s lover.”

  “Oh, that’s true. Doubtless it is. Marina is proud, and lecherous—sometimes I wonder if she isn’t a bit mad—but if she told you she was my husband’s lover, you may rely upon its being the truth. Why, if I’d had any doubts, I wouldn’t have given her a tuppence, I’m sure.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No,” Dolly said. “No, I should think not.”

  Certain things about those days would never become clear: the deepest mysteries of number theory and logic, what a butler might have whispered to a suffering guest.

  But the passage of time can render some things comprehensible. I did, for instance, come to understand what Marina had meant when she said that all love affairs end the same way. Like her, I came to know the pain of being reminded, the liquid beauty of Degas’s ballerinas, the ache that occurs in a scarred, aged heart at the tender depiction of an immodest nude. Such things do, as she promised they would, make us whole, but for one instant only, for we are all broken beings and far past repair.

  My sister married Christopher Blake and never seemed to outgrow her shyness about him. I suppose I never really outgrew mine, either. My father carried on for many years by himself, his heart proving not so weak after all. When he died, he did so alone, as the papers reported Marina had, too. I read the stories on the train back to Glass, where in two days’ time we would bury my father (and where I would find myself estranged by long absence, unrecognized in that place I had loved). Ruined actress, they said. Twice divorced and once widowed. A socialite fallen on difficult times. Nowhere did they mention a young refugee, a Polish boy, a gift of leather shoes or a watch. Nowhere either was mentioned the kiss she had shared with a student of maths or the impression of her lips that had lingered on his face to return sometimes for no reason at all as he lay, sleepless, through the years of his life. Unmentioned, lastly, was the salonnière who had shown her at once such generosity and malice, that woman whose eye had indeed been sufficient to recognize something fine when she saw it and who had had, thus, grudgingly to accept that the moment of joy, of wholeness, that her husband had once found in wanton embrace had been one worthy, at last, of her patronage.

  Other People’s Love Affairs

  For twenty years, Erma and Violet lived together in Glass, neither simply as friends nor precisely as lovers. If ever a question on the matter was raised, or if (more often) assumptions were made, they would share a glance, blushing, without a reply, not having a name for what they were to each other. Corpulence distinguished them both, indeed was something that had drawn them together, though Violet carried hers with superior ease. They shared a room in a half-timber cottage, two twin beds with a table between. They liked books, jigsaw puzzles and games, videos saved of Not Only . . . But Also. Each night, turning out the lamp before bed, Erma would say, not shyly, “I love you, Violet,” and then listen for a time to her friend’s moving lips as she proceeded through a whispered nightly devotion. Had she ever managed the words, what Erma might have
said of their union was that neither of them had ever truly been cared for, except in these last years by the other. There was nothing in them really worthy of love, the world had for so long seemed to say; it had stopped saying that on the day when they met. Now, listening in the darkness, Erma was often moved, overcome, knowing it was she who rated highest among Violet’s prayers.

  Sex had never come into things, at least not in a conventional sense. It wouldn’t have, in Erma’s case, being something she had long ago ceased to consider. (Aged eleven, she’d pined briefly after Phineas Cork, the only boy in school who hadn’t thought it was funny when she sat in the butter cruelly spread on her chair; later, she’d watched others court and be married, feeling only the mildest envy.) That she had wound up with another woman for a companion seemed perfectly natural and predictable to her, but she never considered it the like of other people’s love affairs.

  Mostly, they displayed only passing affection, notwithstanding Erma’s avowals. Only once had they breached that convention in earnest, when news had come that Violet’s mother was dead.

  A telegram had arrived at the house: an odd, archaic thing, even then. In the kitchen, Violet slowly sat down. She handed the paper to Erma.

  It was strange: they’d lived together for years, and she hadn’t known Violet’s mother was living.

  That night, for the first time, they shared a bed.

  “My poor mum.” Violet trembled with grief. She lay on her side with her face to the wall.

  “Oh, dear one,” Erma said. “You dear thing.” The curtains, gossamer, blue, did not move. With her own body, she traced the curve of her friend’s.

  No prayers were said in their house on that night. Together, they breathed; one’s hand clasped the other’s. The sea could be heard where it battered the cliffs.

  About the small coastal village of Glass they were known, traveling together in their pale yellow Beetle. Violet drove; people waved as they passed; smiling back, she tooted the horn. The car had been hers originally, as the house they lived in had been as well, possessed jointly since shortly after they met at the library, where Violet was in charge of collections and where Erma had a habit of running up fines. You got to know people in that line of work, as you did in Erma’s, too, selling paper and cards. They were friendly with local shopkeepers and clubs: with Herville, the butcher; with the Women’s Institute ladies; with Trilby, the florist, until she shut down.

  Meals were their own form of intimacy, a shared time calling them back to the body. Together, they cooked elaborate dishes: meat pies and hearty soups every winter; grilled fish, potato salads in summer. They had large appetites and did not pretend otherwise, as Erma felt they both must have done in the past. In the kitchen, as elsewhere, Violet directed, and though Erma was the more experienced cook, she didn’t mind being told what to do or even a harsh word now and then. Sometimes when it grew hot in the kitchen Violet would strip right down to her bra. “Don’t mind, do you, love?” she’d casually say, and then ask for a spoon or a bowl that she needed. “Don’t find it’s too much distraction?” She might sing a song, do a shimmy. “Your Feet’s Too Big” or “Roll Out the Barrel.” When Erma laughed, she covered her mouth; when Violet did, she threw back her head and her whole body tumbled in a beautiful manner, like water suspended for an instant in space.

  And then, on the cusp of their twenty-first year, Violet’s heart failed her as she’d been warned it would do. Through the years, Erma had tried sometimes to institute diets, not wanting one herself, nor to spoil their pleasure, but frightened of being left alone in the end. Being younger by several years, she’d been burdened by the possibility of that.

  They’d gone for lunch to a café they liked by the sea. In the sun, overlooking the long, rugged coast, the vendors and Ferris wheel on the strand, they had eaten crab legs with buttered rolls and white wine while gulls circled and landed nearby.

  “I’d like anything you ate with a hammer,” Violet said. She laughed and pounded the table. “All I need is a robe and a wig.”

  Afterward, they walked a trail near the shore, and it was there, in the dappled shade of an oak, that Violet collapsed, slowly, first to one knee and then further, with a plaintive glance over her shoulder, until she was laid out, quietly prone.

  Erma rushed to her, nearly crippled with panic. The space around them was terribly still. She removed the cellular phone from her pocket, shaking as she pulled it open and dialed. Later, she would not recall what was said or how long she’d waited that way on the line. She would remember only how she held Violet’s hand, which was moist and scarcely able to grasp.

  “You dear thing,” she said. “Oh, heavens. Oh, lord.”

  Soon, people came and shouted for help. A small crowd gathered; she wished they would go. One man placed his hands between Violet’s ribs and pressed while his wife held Erma away. From their place on the ground they could see nothing of the ocean and only the barest patch of the sky. Paramedics arrived with a board and a gurney; they placed a mask over Violet’s face. At some point, the top of her blouse was pulled open, and Erma wailed, wanting to cover her friend, shy for her in this state of undress, which only she herself had been allowed before to see.

  When, passing through the Mercy Hospital doors, she was informed that Violet had died, Erma’s first thought was that the end of her own life might as well come, and that, when it finally did, she would never—not even once—have been kissed.

  Violet had made a formal accounting, though she didn’t own much beyond the house they had shared. The will was in a safe deposit box in the city, which had to be opened by a long-estranged cousin, a woman who did not resemble Violet at all and who grumbled about the task, perhaps guessing that she would be unmentioned in the document. Catharine her name was. She came to the house, meeting Erma with a curious eye.

  “I suppose I knew her quite well as a kid,” she said as they drove to the bank.

  They had turned up Douglass, heading out of the village. A thick fog was rolling in off the sea. Outside the butcher’s shop, Herville was sweeping; Erma wondered if he had been told.

  “Haven’t seen her for ages, though, really. I understand she let things go in the end.”

  Erma didn’t say anything. She hadn’t any idea what Catharine could mean, unless she was referring to weight. The thought that there might have been talk about Violet, even gossip, among the unknown figures of her past was upsetting. Erma had not concealed a world of family, old friends; she’d had none of those things when they met. That had been at a very low time, when she’d moved to Glass with what money was left from her parents, two people who had tried to be kind but who’d never managed to disguise their disappointment with life. They had died some two weeks apart, not because the one remaining (her father) could not bear to go on without the other but because, in widowerhood, he had been relieved of a burden and had no obligations left to the living. She felt her parents would have left their house and their money to somebody else if they could have but had settled for her as they’d settled for other things, too: because it had been their duty to do so.

  At the bank, Catharine entered the vault while Erma was left to wait in the lobby. The floors were polished to a high, mirrored gloss; she squinted, avoiding the glare from the lights. She ate a mint from her purse, blew her nose. She would have liked very much to be named next of kin. It had seemed only natural to her that she should be, but it turned out there were rules about that.

  In the days since it happened she had not managed sleep. It was terrible to be in the bedroom, the empty twin bed beside her, sloppily made, as she’d so often reproached Violet for doing. In the darkness there was only her own breathing, sometimes the sea, and she longed for the sound of her friend’s muted prayers. She could not even re-create them in her mind, unable somehow to recall ever having made out a word of invocation. What she did recall was the quietness of it and the stillness she had felt while she listened: Violet, the buoyant and riotous one, transformed in t
he final moments of day.

  The will, it turned out, contained a small curiosity.

  Everything had been left to Erma, without specification, excepting one item she’d all but forgotten. This was a damaged rolltop desk, a large and cumbersome walnut antique, that had been covered over with a dust cloth in the garage for as long as Erma had lived in the house. It was to be given to a man named John Killian, owner of the Green Man in Hart Street. Erma knew at once who he was, having been sometimes for a drink at the pub: a tall fellow, balding and painfully thin; he was friendly, an easy and good-natured man, but hardly someone they’d ever remarked on.

  He turned up at the funeral but drew no attention. He wore black, placed a small bouquet of narcissus on the card table that had been arranged for the purpose. She had settled on a casual service, not lengthy or strictly religious, recalling that Violet had been brought up Catholic, but never having known her to confess. (Her prayers, she reasoned, had been of a general sort.) Cremation had been Violet’s wish, a release from the body for which she’d been known. Afterward, people milled about for a while. They took Erma’s hand, expressed their condolence, but stopped short, it seemed, of treating her as a widow.

  She wrote to him one week after the service: a brief note detailing the gift, no query as to what its meaning could be.

  Days passed. Life was dreamlike and strange. Evenings, she felt odd attempting to cook; her hand gripped the knife where Violet’s had, too. In the wash, some of her things were still there, the last time that would ever be so. In town, Mr. Herville sliced too much bacon; Ault reached, by habit, for a bottle of Port, forgetting that only Violet had drunk it. She didn’t linger in those shops anymore. It had been Violet, she saw now, who’d established their friendships, Violet who’d been fun, flirtatious even, who’d pulled faces, winked, said clever things.

  After dinner, she often went out to the garage and stood awhile in the dim, fusty light. She regarded the desk, still covered at first, then with the dust cloth thrown to the floor. The finish was scarred, the wood chipped away; there wasn’t anything left in the drawers.