Aphrodite's Hat

by Salley Vickers

  It was almost midnight when the phone rang. I had fallen asleep and was not immediately sure where I was or what time of day it was so I must have sounded strange. I felt sure, though, it was Bill.

  ‘Darling,’ I said, ‘where ever are you? What’s going on?’ and there was a long silence at the other end of the phone.

  Then someone said, ‘I am so sorry’ and put the phone down.

  When the police arrived the following day, I had just returned from work and had my shoes off and was watching the news. They told me Bill had been found dead somewhere in Dorset, a part of the country to which he had no known reason to travel. It appeared he had been alone, had somehow slipped and in the fall his neck had been broken. A colleague reported that Bill had said he had a luncheon date and had not returned. Although there was no evidence of any lunch appointment in his diary, the police said they were treating the death as accidental.

  What weighed on me most was that I could never know what past knot it was between those two men that had led to the death of one of them, for I knew at once and with every fibre of my being that this was no accident. I had lived with Bill for twenty-one years and yet – and this is the weirdest thing – of the two men I would say I knew Jean Martin better. For one thing he had told me of his own volition what Bill had never divulged. Which is how I came to see that it was no accident that we met him that day in Richmond Park. He must have been shadowing me, using whatever his past skills had taught him to watch over me. It was chance (or maybe fate?) that Bill turned out to be my husband. This is also why I know that it was Bill who must have instigated the violence against Jean and that Jean had killed Bill purely in selfdefence. Whatever shadow loomed from their shared past Jean would never have killed a man who was important to me.

  I never saw Jean Martin again but I have wondered whether I might have been wrong about his love. It might have been the kind that sticks. Which might have meant more than a life saved had my husband only learned how to sit still in a room.

  THE FALL OF A SPARROW

  ‘I think I may die,’ Rebecca said aloud one morning. She did not mean she intended to kill herself. Only that things seemed suddenly more than she felt she could bear. It was to a single sparrow out on her small, slightly dingy balcony, that, quite undramatically, she addressed these words.

  Years ago, Rebecca had fallen in love with Frank. Frank Butler was her university tutor, who taught the class on Romantic poetry which Rebecca had attended, as a mature student, when she first moved to London. The class had read Keats, on whom Rebecca had written an essay, commenting on the poet’s untimely death, which had found favour with her tutor.

  Frank was older than Rebecca, married with a young family. It was not he but Rebecca who had insisted that he mustn’t leave his wife until the children were old enough. He had been the one who had wanted to fly off with her. ‘You will feel guilty,’ she had told him. ‘And regret it. And then you will regret me, and that I would mind.’

  They had waited; but as anyone who has been in this situation discovers, children are never ‘old enough’ for their parents to split up safely. And, however irksome, the claims of marital responsibility tend to foreclose over time.

  After ten years, Rebecca asked, tactfully, whether or not Frank envisaged their ever moving in together. He had answered not exactly shiftily but it was impossible not to register the lack of the first fine careless protestations. During the early years of knowing Frank Rebecca had turned down other promising alliances. One in particular, Tim Robbins, who had emigrated to South Africa, she thought of at this point. She even went so far as to email him. Tim replied with news of his family, explaining that his wife, a former ballet dancer, was training to be a doctor. Rebecca deleted the pictures of the blue swimming pool and laughing children and did not repeat this experiment.

  By the time the Butler children were at university, Rebecca felt the moment had arrived for a straight talk with Frank. Samantha, Frank’s daughter, had recovered from the anorexia which had set her back during her first year, and Keir was well on his way to a doctorate in chemical engineering. ‘Are we ever going to live together?’ she asked one afternoon.

  They were in bed having made love. The lovemaking was more of a ritual by now. But perhaps it is sentimental to expect passions to retain their initial force. ‘I don’t know,’ Frank had said, with unusual candour.

  This was the first time any doubt on this matter had ever been voiced and Rebecca’s chest tightened. ‘Don’t you love me any more?’ she asked, and cursed herself. She knew better than to ask this question. But like it or not, it is not always our ‘better’ selves who speak for us.

  ‘Of course I do,’ Frank said, in something like his old tone.

  ‘Not enough to live with me though?’ She had got her voice back under control.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said again. ‘It’s not that I don’t love you.’

  ‘You love Evelyn more?’

  He frowned, and again she felt sorry for him. She rarely pushed, and she was aware that this was a crucial element in her appeal. ‘Not the way I love you. But where would she go if I left her?’

  Rebecca did not ask: ‘Where will I go if you and I part?’ She got out of bed and put on her dressing gown and went to wash up the lunch. When he came to say goodbye she was in the kitchen staring out of the window of her high mansion flat.

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘I was wishing I was a bird,’ she said, watching a solitary seagull which had strayed inland.

  ‘So you could fly away from me?’

  ‘So at least I could fly somewhere.’

  That autumn, the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, as he had once written to her on a postcard, Frank explained he was taking Evelyn to Venice for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Venice was where he and Rebecca had always planned to go, when they were free. Rebecca found the card which for all those years had been stuck in her volume of Keats to mark the famous ode – a drawing of a naked woman whose torso Frank had flatteringly compared to hers – drank most of a bottle of gin and wrote a letter. She carried it around in her bag for three days before finally dropping it into the post box.

  Frank didn’t ring when he returned but then she had particularly asked that he shouldn’t. Nevertheless, very few of us really want even our most ardently phrased requests obeyed. After waiting by the phone all weekend, she woke on the Monday, looked out the card and then tore it into little bits and dropped it over the balcony outside her flat. She delivered her bleak pronouncement to a sparrow which had flown down and perched on the balcony rail beside her. ‘I think I may die,’ she had said.

  Keats had liked sparrows. If a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel, he had written. It was the same letter where he had asserted, I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections. Keats had brought her into this hopeless situation. But he died in pain believing he was unloved.

  On an impulse, Rebecca booked a holiday in Rome.

  It was raining when she arrived at the sequestered so-called Protestant Cemetery just outside a remainder of the old walls of ancient Rome. She wandered along the grassy paths in the rain-dark light till she found what she was looking for, Keats’s gravestone on which was carved his own forlorn epitaph: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. The words he wrote and requested be his final memorial just before he died far from home, and his beloved, in humble lodgings on the Spanish Steps.

  She stood there, astonished that there was nothing more to indicate the abiding genius of the twenty-seven-year-old poet who believed that his poems would be as ephemeral as his life.

  The rain had begun to fall more heavily when she heard a voice.

  ‘You will catch cold.’ A pale young man had apparently followed her to the graveside. ‘Come under the tree.’

  He gestured towards a tall pine and they stood together, he holding his coat over their heads. He was smaller than Rebec
ca and slighter, so that to cover her head he had to stretch. His coat was rather worn and of an old-fashioned cloth and cut.

  ‘Why have you come here?’ he asked. He looked as if he might have suffered a long illness.

  ‘I saw a sparrow,’ she said. ‘It made me think of Keats.’

  ‘You like Keats?’ His dark eyes in his thin face were brightly enquiring.

  ‘He liked sparrows. He wrote to a friend once, If a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.’

  ‘Yes,’ the pale young man agreed. ‘You are right. He did love birds.’

  ‘There aren’t many sparrows left in London these days. I thought how he might have minded.’

  ‘So you came here?’

  ‘I wanted to die,’ she said. ‘So I came here.’

  ‘Oh, you mustn’t die,’ he said. And he looked at her with such urgency in his eyes that she had to look away. ‘Believe me. No one is worth dying for.’

  Side by side they stood, so close that she felt the shadow of his breath on her cold cheek. As the rain eased, a sparrow fluttered down and perched delicately on the tombstone.

  ‘Look,’ she whispered to her companion. Turning to him, she found there was no one beside her but the pine tree and the only breath a faint stirring of wind.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  There are novelists and there are short story writers and there are those who try their hands at both. Although I am primarily a novelist, I take comfort from the fact that two of my very favourite short stories, ‘The Dead’ by James Joyce and ‘The Eternal Moment’ by E.M. Forster, were written by people who were pre-eminently novelists. In fact, I wrote my first short story, ‘The Dragon’s Bones’, which is included in this collection, as a thank you to a great novelist but also a great short story writer, Penelope Fitzgerald, whose generous comments about my first novel, Miss Garnet’s Angel, helped much towards the book’s success. I was particularly grateful not only because I was an unknown writer but also because she was, and remains, one of my own top favourite writers. I treasure the postcards which she wrote to me over Miss Garnet but most especially the card she wrote to thank me for ‘The Dragon’s Bones’: ‘How lucky that you can do these. I find them so hard.’

  That the past mistress of short stories should write this to me, an absolute beginner, was humbling. Very soon after writing this card Penelope Fitzgerald died and within a few months one of my other favourite authors, William Maxwell, had died too. It was one of those synchronicities that both wrote so convincingly of that, according to her daughters, Penelope Fitzgerald was reading Maxwell in the days before she died. Maxwell was a brilliant editor as well as a fine writer and in his role as literary editor of the New Yorker, he edited some of the stories which have influenced my own. These were by Sylvia Townsend Warner, who, like Maxwell, is not known nowadays as well as she should be. I have borrowed from her the notion that only lowly fairies fly.

  Finally, writers are very sensitive to the atmosphere in which they write. Over the past years, I have been enormously helped by the kindness of my friend and former colleague, Dr Anthony Stevens, who, over the years I have been writing, has allowed me to visit his lovely Corfu home and write there in peace. At least two of these stories, and large parts of many of my novels, were written in this generative environment. The book is dedicated to him and to Corfu.

  Also by Salley Vickers

  Miss Garnet’s Angel

  Instances of the Number 3

  Mr Golightly’s Holiday

  The Other Side of You

  Where Three Roads Meet

  Dancing Backwards

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by

  Fourth Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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  London W6 8JB

  www.4thestate.co.uk

  Visit our authors’ blog: www.fifthestate.co.uk

  Copyright © Salley Vickers 2010

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  The right of Salley Vickers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-0-00-737103-7

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  EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-41683-7

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