A New England Affair

by Steven Carroll

  And it is only then, as they are cruising along through the night, looking for a good place to pull over and take a breath, that he takes out the bundle of papers he’s stuffed into his shirt and starts looking at them. At first eagerly, then impatiently. Letters, letters, letters. Useless old letters, with the kind of stamps on them that nobody uses any more.

  Grace is concentrating on the road ahead, only half mindful of what Ted is doing. The wind fans his face. One after another, and with increasing impatience, he pulls the letters from their envelopes, ripping an envelope here and a letter there.

  ‘Letters!’ he yells out to her. ‘Fucking letters!’

  He holds one up, switches on the internal light, and tries to read it.

  ‘I have always loved you …’ He grabs another and holds that up too, shaking his head as he reads. ‘I love you … Emily, Emily, I lurrve you …’ he yells, mimicking a popular recording in a sing-song voice, cackling and breaking into laughter.

  Suddenly, taking her eyes off the dark road and glancing at Ted and the bundle of letters on his lap, Grace understands. ‘They’re Miss Hale’s letters! Put them back!’

  But Ted is cackling and laughing. ‘Ooh, Miss Hale’s letters!’

  He holds another one up to her. ‘Useless fucking love letters. All of them. The old bag’s love letters. Fucking useless, the lot.’

  ‘Put them back in the envelopes! Leave them!’ Grace yells, no longer watching the road, the car beginning to weave from one side to the other.

  ‘Whoa, watch out!’

  ‘Leave them!’

  But Ted doesn’t hear. Or doesn’t want to. Still stoned, or just mad. She straightens the car, then looks back at Ted, the wind fanning his face, and is about to speak again. But before she can do anything, before she has the chance to cut through his manic laughter, before she can get through to him, whoever he is, Ted lifts the letters, half of them removed from their envelopes, half not, and throws them all out the window. He cackles as the flock of white pages and envelopes takes flight. Open-mouthed, Grace watches.

  She swings round from the wheel, ignoring the road. ‘What have you done? My God, look!’

  He is laughing harder. Her outrage is hilarious.

  Her foot hits the brake and they come to a loud, screeching stop. A lone car on a deserted country road. She turns, he turns. And they both watch as a white cloud of letters is lifted by the wind and carried swiftly across a farmer’s field. They rise, they fall, they scatter. Helpless. The wind has them. Letters, ripped from their envelopes; envelopes bearing the stamp images of dead kings — all float helplessly on the wind, and, within seconds, are blown from view, one by one gradually disappearing into the darkness. As if they never existed.

  She glares at him. ‘You idiot! You fucking idiot!’

  His laughter is dying down.

  ‘She knew someone. Miss Hale had a thing with someone famous.’

  ‘Ooh!’ He erupts into laughter again. ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she cries, her head falling back on the seat. ‘Somebody really famous. I don’t know, some … some sort of Shakespeare.’

  He is unmoved. ‘So?’

  She is bolt upright again. ‘So? Would you throw Shakespeare’s letters out the window?’

  He grins, lets out a cackle, and she nods to herself. Yes, yes, you would, wouldn’t you. And straight away, she knows that her Ted days are done, her Ted phase finished. Fun for a time, but the fun just ran out.

  She points at his stomach, where something is still concealed under his shirt. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Junk!’

  ‘Give it to me!’

  ‘Have it!’ And he flings a small book, a diary, Grace notes, or a journal, across the seat. It slaps into her lap. He lets out a snort.

  She scans the dark, bare field. Miss Hale’s letters are nowhere to be seen. Somebody famous. And all she can picture is the golfer, the famous golfer, in tweed shorts, socks and a cap, sometime long ago. Shakespeare in plus-fours. The letters, apart from the photograph, possibly all she had left. How in heaven’s name did she ever get herself into this? Miss Hale may not miss the money, but she will miss the letters. Yes, it was one thing to steal her money and tell yourself she wouldn’t miss it. But this is different. And she’d dearly love to scoop the last few hours up, along with the money and letters, and put them back in Miss Hale’s drawer. As if nothing had happened. But it has. She looks at Ted with utter contempt. ‘You idiot.’ And she knows, as she says this, shaking her head in disbelief, that she’s talking about herself as much as Ted. ‘You fucking idiot!’

  His grin fades, the cackles subside. She’s calling him an idiot. A fucking idiot. And he doesn’t like it. His smile slips easily into a sneer, his lip curls. And suddenly she’s staring at a stranger. She’s on the point of calling him a small-town nobody as well, but holds back.

  ‘I’m an idiot? Who’s parked in the middle of the road?’

  Her foot pounds heavily onto the accelerator and she swings the car round, stirring up the dust, and speeds back into town. The journal on her lap. Ted, the stranger with a sneer on his face, beside her. More than a touch of violence in his eyes that she should have seen coming, but, like a lot of things, didn’t. There are no cars about and the trip back to town is fast. And silent.

  She doesn’t even look at Ted, say goodbye or acknowledge him in any way when she pulls up at the diner in the main street. Just parks, switches the engine off, leaps out into the street, clutching the journal, and walks away without so much as the slightest of backward glances.

  ‘Bitch!’ she hears Ted call from the car. ‘You’ll be back, Miss Marilyn Monroe. You’ll be back!’

  His cries fade in the deserted street as she strides away. Eyebrows raised, she could almost laugh. Marilyn Monroe, indeed. Yesterday’s goddess. Yesterday’s insults. Typical Ted, yesterday’s man to the last.

  Her steps take her, without any great conscious thought, to Miss Hale’s cottage. At first Grace is unsure if it’s the right thing to be doing or not. Then she looks down at the journal she is clutching as fiercely as she was when she leapt out of the car, and she knows she must do this. The journal must be returned. At least this much can be put right.

  The light in Miss Hale’s lounge room is still on. It’s not that late, after all. And she debates with herself about whether to approach the cottage or not, in case she is seen by Miss Hale or anybody else. But there is no one else about. The church is shut up. This part of the town is deserted now, apart from the occasional passing car. It won’t take long. So, quietly, in the darkness, she walks across the lawn, and, seeing there is no letter box, approaches the house. Music from a gramophone rises to meet her. A song, a singer, a scratchy record. She lifts the mat at the front door and places the journal underneath. It will be safe there until morning, when Miss Hale emerges and sees it. She hasn’t opened the journal and she has no desire to. It is not hers. It is Miss Hale’s. And she hopes that the return of the diary or the journal, whatever it is, will in some way compensate for the loss of the letters, now strewn in the dark across a farmer’s field. Eventually to be rained on, turned to mush and ploughed back into the soil, along with leaves and twigs and whatever else lands on the field, borne in by the wind.

  As Grace stands at the door she steals a quick glance in the front window, and there, with her back to Grace, is the seated figure of Miss Hale. Smoke is rising from her fingers, there is a drink on the table beside her. A crackling record plays. A song. The clear voice of the singer coming through the crackle. Miss Hale is in a world of her own. There is no danger of being observed. Words, here and there, become clear: dreaming waves, and delight that is all alone. The record finishes. Miss Hale puts her cigarette down. She lifts the needle, and the song starts again. Smoke rises from her fingers. Miss Hale has not so much withdrawn to her room as from the world. Out of view, the man dressed like a golfer – this Shakespeare with whom Miss Hale had a thing – smiles, no doubt, back at her, as h
e will always do. And for the first time, Grace is seriously wondering what happened between them. What stopped them? What stood in their way? What could have been so powerful? Miss Hale’s past has never seemed so distant and unfathomable.

  Grace quietly leaves; the scene is as undisturbed as when she came upon it. Miss Hale is in a world of her own. A time of her own, for there is something untouchable about her at this moment. No ding, no dong of the church clock striking the hour; no car horn; no voice can disturb her. She is, Grace notes with a reassured sigh, safe. Miss Hale is in her world. And as Grace crosses the lawn towards the street for the short walk home, where her father will be concerned that she is not back (but not too concerned, for she is a big girl now), she carries with her the picture of Miss Hale in her chair, smoke rising from her fingers with the crackling music, and the inkling that she too, sooner or later, will sit in such a way, similarly removed from the world, because the world outside won’t be hers any more. But, she tells herself with a lighter heart, not just yet. Not for some time. For between now and then there is a whole life to be lived, and if Miss Hale has taught her anything, beyond correct breathing, diction and rhythm, it is just to live, so that when, at last, she sits in that chair, smoke rising from her fingers with the crackling of music, it will be the solace of the lived life that she will draw on as much as her cigarette.

  Emily stands looking at the desk, then sinks into the chair. The desk can be cleaned up. That’s no great matter. But the drawer has been left open and she can plainly see that the contents have been taken. Odd, earlier in the day she was ready to throw the letters into the sea along with the journal, so that the world would never get its grubby hands on them. But in the end, she couldn’t. Now this. The world, indeed, has got its grubby hands on them, but not the grubby hands she imagined.

  Has Chance done what she could not bring herself to do? But when she thinks past the sense of intrusion — or is it a sense of violation? — she’s asking herself if it was chance, after all. When, for whatever reason, we choose one course of action over another, are we setting wheels within wheels in motion, a whole clockwork mechanism that assumes a life of its own and may look like chance, but which, all the same, can be traced back to its origin with all the logical inevitability of a tragedy? Or a good detective story?

  She rises from the chair and begins tidying the desk. She wipes the surface, if only to rid herself of that sense of intrusion, that sense of a complete stranger standing where she is now, deciding what to take and what to leave, before she even thinks about such things as fingerprints. She puts the photographs back in place (her mother, her aunt and uncle, friends, and one of the young Tom just before he left Boston and never came back), returns the ink bottle and the fountain pen to their usual places, sits up the Concise Oxford Dictionary and a weighty Companion to Theatre, then closes the bookends on them. She shuts the drawer, bare except for a few business cards and pencils. Soon, everything is as it was. Except the letters are gone, and the journal she’s held on to for — how long is it now? — twenty-five, twenty-six years?

  Too long. Her impulse to tip the lot into the sea was possibly right: right for Tom, so that nobody, no grubby journalist, ambitious young professor or snooping reporter would ever pry into the private world of Tom and Emily; right for Emily, a way of casting off what had to be cast off, the satchel and all it contained removed from her neck like some long-borne albatross, so that she could, at last, be free of it all.

  She’s walking around the cottage wondering how the thief got in when she comes to a lounge-room window that has been forced open. The lock is broken, the flyscreen pulled back. No other room has been touched: not the bedroom, lounge room or kitchen. The thief came in through this window and knew exactly where to go. Who would know? A workman? Not really. A travelling salesman? No, they never get in the door. One of her girls? And straight away she’s remembering Grace, right there, in that lounge-room chair that looks into the study, with that mark on her neck and saying, ‘He’s a bit of an animal.’ And she’d flinched as if having let a bit of animal into the house. And perhaps she had. For when she stands at a certain spot in the lounge room she sees straight away that a trick of the mirror that she’s never noticed before catches the desk and the drawer.

  Grace. But could she, really? No. For as much as the girl has a touch of the wild about her, Emily also trusts her. Then she remembers that boyfriend of hers, the animal, and she can readily conceive of him doing such a thing. Had Grace told him, after all? Probably. At the same time, the weight of the past — of waiting and watching for the beast to leap and the great event to announce itself — now fallen from her, she’s asking herself, what of it? Perhaps it is all for the best. Nothing but some spare change and letters have been taken. And was it chance or do these things have an irresistible, fated logic to them? The constituent parts of the day’s events were there all along: Emily, Tom, the letters and the journal (stuffed hastily into a drawer), Grace and the animal. That and so much more: one’s whole history, right down to the decision to go to the parish meeting tonight as apart from staying at home just this once. Is everything so finely interwoven that nothing takes place by chance? And did what we call ‘chance’ step in and do the very thing that she couldn’t bring herself to do?

  She doesn’t need the letters. She has her memories. And nobody can steal them or pry into them. Nobody can get their grubby hands on your memories and turn them into cheap reading, something to while away the time between trains. No, they’re safe now: Tom is safe, Emily too. The letters are gone. What of it? ‘Chance’ has done its work.

  When she’s closed the window as best she can for the time being, she returns to the lounge room and takes a portable record player from the sideboard, places it on a table next to one of the armchairs, takes the Scotch from the drinks cabinet and pulls a packet of cigarettes from the sideboard drawer. Tom always liked a Scotch, and in those years between the wars when they were visiting each other, both here and there, she’d pour him his Scotch in the afternoon. Just like a wife, greeting her husband at the end of a working day, the height of the Scotch in the glass an indication of how the day had gone. And as she pours the spirit into the glass now, the quantity is commensurate to the nature of the day. Then she takes an old record from the rack, puts it on the turntable, lowers the needle and sits back in the armchair.

  The room is filled with the sound of crackling, and then it begins. Smoke rises from her fingers, Scotch warms her veins. The sound is thin, but she likes that. She could easily have — what is it? — a Hi Fi, but she prefers this. For the thin, scratchy record gives her not only the experience of the music but of the times themselves when the music spoke of those emotions, that now extinct order of feeling, that they themselves couldn’t speak of. A voice, clear and pure beneath the crackling, sings of dreaming waves and lone delight, and that long-ago parlour comes back to her: that small room, the guests all friends or family, and Tom, eyes darker than anything she had ever seen, a Gioconda smile on his lips. She knew he was hers. That she had him, before she lost him. And they spent the years between the wars trying to regain a lost life that was already lost forever.

  The next morning, one of bright sunshine and early warmth, she sees the hump under the front door mat straight away. And with a mixture of deep relief and trepidation, like someone welcoming back the weight of a responsibility they thought they’d discarded, she retrieves the journal, which is looking a little soiled after spending all night under the door mat. She places it in a cardboard box for such things that she keeps in her bedroom (and where the letters and the journal would have been the previous evening had she not been hurried), and returns the box to the wardrobe.

  Grace has been and left it. Who else? Not such a bit of an animal, after all. But one of her girls — hers, as they have always been. Drawn back by loyalty. Emily crosses the lawn and turns into the main street. She stops at the diner, which is also a sort of bakery. The Concord Women’s Club meets this morni
ng and every month she brings cakes and doughnuts that she buys here. The doughnuts always go first. So she is concentrating on the range of cakes on display when she enters the diner and doesn’t notice a small group in the corner, gathered round the jukebox.

  But when she looks round from selecting the cakes, she notices them, and sees, sitting at the centre of the group, the young man she observed yesterday with Grace. The animal, she supposes. And who, Emily decides instantly, is beneath Grace. She can almost hear herself warning the girl. Never, dear Grace, never marry beneath yourself. I had a friend, a very dear friend, who made a most unfortunate marriage and was almost destroyed by it. Never marry beneath yourself. And observing the scene from the front counter, it is with a certain satisfaction that she notes that Grace is not with him. She watches him for a moment as he displays a guitar to this small group with all the enthusiasm of a child showing off a new toy. An electric guitar. And little that she knows of these things, it looks costly. Beyond this young man’s means. He looks up briefly and sees Emily. And with all the authority that comes of being Miss Hale, Emily stares directly back at him and nods. A look that says, I know exactly what happened; don’t imagine for a minute I don’t, young man. And Ted recoils, instantly looking away like someone blinded by sunlight on an icy puddle. It is an exchange that contains both accusation and guilty admission. And the satisfaction is all Emily’s. She has her victory. A bit of an animal, true. But a lesser species of animal: one easily stared down. Beneath her, beneath Grace. Beneath Tom. Beneath them all. One of the low who will always recoil from the scrutiny of their betters. It is enough. The point is made.

  From the moment she wiped the top of the desk clean the previous evening, she knew she would not be contacting the police. The thought of the police walking through her house, listing what was stolen — the letters, private letters — was almost like delivering them into the grubby hands of the world herself. No, just as the young man is beneath Grace, so too the police are beneath Emily. She could not drag Tom through it, nor could she ever bring suspicion on one of her girls. Or put her through whatever may follow. No, there is no point. She has had her satisfaction.