by Mary Wesley
‘Banged my knees. Saw you from the bus. Thanks.’ Antonia stood upright, a little shaken, holding two parcels while Henry held the rest.
Henry said, ‘Have you no umbrella?’ The rain darkened her hair, streamed down her face. ‘We are blocking the pavement,’ he said as people pushed past. ‘The bus was moving,’ he said crossly. ‘Whoops, I love seeing that happen,’ as ahead of them a freak wind snapped an umbrella inside out and back again. ‘You’ve torn your stockings,’ he said.
Antonia laughed.
Henry took her arm. ‘I’m staying near here. You can borrow a pair of Angela’s stockings. It’s just round the corner. Unless you want me to take you home? What about lunch?’
Antonia said: ‘No, no. Who is Angela?’
Henry said, ‘Friend I am staying with, she’s out. I have to make a phone call, come along.’
Antonia said, ‘Lunch would be lovely.’
Henry said, ‘Good,’ and led her round the corner to a block of flats.
In the lift Antonia said, ‘I hesitate to make free with a stranger’s stockings.’
Henry said, ‘She won’t mind,’ and opened a door with a latchkey. ‘You must not be squeamish,’ he said. ‘She’s a clean girl,’ he said, opening and shutting drawers in a bedroom. ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Put them on while I telephone.’
Antonia took the stockings and, finding the bathroom, removed her own torn ones. Borrowing a sponge, she dabbed gingerly at her knees. In the next room Henry was telephoning, something to do with sheep; his conversation was brief.
Outside the bathroom he said, ‘What lunatic impulse propelled you from that bus?’
Drying her knees with a tissue, bending with her skirt rucked up, Antonia answered through gritted teeth, ‘I had a lecture this morning from my mother; the subject matter was caution versus impulse. When I saw you from the bus strolling in the rain, in your London suit, I obeyed an impulse long suppressed to ask you to make love to me.’
After a minute pause Henry said, ‘Why not now, before lunch?’
Antonia pulled down her skirt.
Henry said, ‘There’s a nice bed.’
Antonia said, ‘Your friend Angela’s?’
Henry said, ‘If you are going to be scrupulous, we can do it on the floor; personally, I go for comfort.’
‘It was amazing,’ Antonia said some years later, ‘such a healing experience.’ She was moved, as she had been several times before, to apologize to Calypso for her drunken visit of years ago—quite a number of years, actually. Susie, visible in the distance helping Calypso’s son Hamish (who had left Oxford a year earlier), was twelve now and her sister Clio, nearly nine, was hindering, as was Hilaria, Barbara and James’s daughter. Hamish was coppicing hazels. Antonia had brought the little girls from Cotteshaw to picnic in the Grants’ wood; now she sat with Calypso on the terrace in front of the house. ‘They are all falling in love with Hamish,’ she had said and Calypso, lazing in a deck-chair, had answered, ‘As you girls were with Henry,’ deflecting Antonia’s apology, which she had guessed was impending. She had no wish to hear it since Hector was dead and could not enjoy it with her. Antonia answered unguardedly, for with Calypso one was apt to indulge in indiscretion, she being a notoriously safe depository of secrets, ‘And as some of us still are.’
Calypso tipped her hat against the sun.
‘Henry saved my marriage,’ Antonia persisted. ‘There’s no doubt about it.’
Calypso still said nothing.
‘I have never talked to anyone about him,’ Antonia pressed on.
So why talk now? Calypso asked herself and mischievously, since a reply was expected, murmured, ‘Your mother?’ Antonia’s mother, with her impeccable virtue, was a person she and Hector had always deplored.
‘It was my mother, long-suffering and moral, who was responsible for what happened,’ said Antonia and went on to relate her meeting with Henry and the lovemaking in the borrowed bed. ‘It was wonderful,’ she said, ‘an eye-opener. I had rather wanted to sleep with Henry when I first met him. Wondered what it would be like. He has the most wonderful four-poster at Cotteshaw. It was when Matthew and I were getting engaged. I wanted to marry Matthew, of course, I had decided I would. But I wondered about Henry in the way one does. Then, the night of the June dinner party, when Margaret went bananas and killed the cockatoo, I saw Henry in his bath and I knew I absolutely must try sometime.’
In spite of herself, Calypso murmured, ‘But when you did, there must have been something to set you off.’
‘There was,’ said Antonia, ‘a combination of frustrations. I had left Susie to spend the day with my mother—she loves to play the omnipotent granny—I had tried to get away but she got in her spiky oar, she always does, about my being selfish and not putting Matthew first, as she does Father. It came on top of Matthew boring on about wanting a son, which he did a lot of at that time. I was browned off and not wanting to get pregnant again—putting it off, feeling pretty bitchy. Then I saw Henry walking in the rain and jumped off the bus. Meeting Henry did me so much good,’ said Antonia earnestly. ‘I was taking life too seriously, you see, making a meal of it. Henry can be absolutely beastly, as we all know, but he can also be very kind; look at the way he treats Margaret and how good he is to Pilar. Then he has this streak of frivolity which is so engaging, such a tonic. Once,’ said Antonia laughing, ‘when I felt a guilty pang and suggested that what we were doing was immoral, he said, “And all the more fun for that.”’
Calypso said, ‘You had rather a racy great-aunt.’
‘Oh yes!’ said Antonia. ‘I think she would have approved of Henry, don’t you? Did you know her well?’
Calypso shook her head. ‘Before my day, pre-1914. I was born in 1920, after her heyday.’
Antonia blushed. ‘How idiotic of me, sorry.’ Then she said, ‘I have bottled this up for years.’
‘Couldn’t you go on bottling?’
Antonia said, ‘No, I can’t. It’s OK for Catholics like you; you can hiss through a grille in a confessional, get absolved and feel better. I have to tell someone or I shall start being nasty to Matthew. I’ve thought of converting, but Matthew would hit the roof. I can’t.’
Calypso laughed.
‘You don’t know how lucky you were, married to Hector,’ said Antonia. ‘Gosh, you were fortunate.’
‘I do know,’ said Calypso.
Antonia said, ‘I should not have said that. I just wondered whether you who have had lovely, lovely Hector can guess what it’s like to be married to Matthew.’
‘I am not totally devoid of imagination.’
‘No, of course not. Oh, Calypso, I can say it to you, it’s so disloyal but I can’t help it, Matthew can be—quite often is—boring. Not always, of course.’
‘He loves you a lot,’ said Calypso. ‘It’s noticeable.’
‘I know, I know, and I love him. I don’t want to be married to anyone else. I’ve never thought of leaving him, he is jolly good to me, he is a wonderful father, he hardly ever gets drunk—not since he woke in Margaret’s bed and got such a fright he practically signed the pledge. But I don’t suppose you knew about that.’
Calypso smiled. ‘The Jonathans—’
‘Oh, of course. Yes. I ended up on their doorstep after crashing in on yours. By the way, I never apologized, I—’
‘Oh, do shut up about it,’ said Calypso.
Antonia said, ‘I’m sorry. Of course I will. I had not realized I was being a bore.’
‘Time you did.’
‘Oh dear, how diminishing, how—’ Antonia was abashed.
‘Not to worry,’ said Calypso more kindly, as she watched Hamish. He was making a good job of the coppicing. It should have been done in the winter, would have been done in the winter if Hector had been alive, but it was not too late and Hamish was being patient with the little girls, more patient than she felt with Antonia, who was speaking again.
‘I decided that day, when I made love with Henry,’ Anto
nia carried on, ‘that I would hang on to Matthew for dear life, keep him on the hop so to speak. I mean, he would not know I was keeping him on the hop, yet it would be for his benefit as well as mine.’
‘Ah.’ Calypso thought of Antonia’s great-aunt and the lateral inheritance of genes.
‘So, as I said just now, Henry saved my marriage.’
In spite of herself, Calypso said, ‘Why did you not go with all this to your friend Barbara?’
‘Well,’ said Antonia, drawing out the word, ‘I know we tell each other everything, or did at that time certainly, but somehow I couldn’t. She had fallen tremendously in love with James; they’d been married some time. And I thought, in fact I knew, that all was not well. Then suddenly, bingo, it clicked, I have never known why. They had gone to Paris on the spur of the moment, had a super, super time and presently there she was, pregnant with Hilaria and bloody smug about it. That child over there is a true love child, in every sense.’
Calypso said, ‘Isn’t that nice.’
‘So you see,’ Antonia went on, ‘with Barbara in such an exalted state, I couldn’t tell her I had tricked Matthew; there was the risk she might have thought I had erred. Actually, having Hilaria rather altered Barbara; she grew more towards James, less towards me. Nor could I tell her that from time to time Henry and I did it again.’
Calypso said, ‘No.’
‘Somebody once said Henry is flawed,’ said Antonia thoughtfully.
‘Hector.’
‘So it was Hector? He was right. Henry must be flawed. D’you know he says he feels safe, married to Margaret? That she represents his freedom?’
Calypso said, ‘It figures.’
‘Free, married to that incubus, that albatross!’
‘Well—’
‘He told Barbara that he uses call-girls—Oh gosh, I’ve just thought; d’you think that woman Angela, whose bed we used, was a call-girl?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Calypso. ‘Would it matter?’
Antonia did not answer this but said, ‘Poor Henry. What a disappointing life.’
Calypso said, ‘Disappointed people make poor company.’ She was growing tired of Antonia.
‘Oh,’ cried Antonia, flushing, ‘I see what you mean. That’s the last thing Henry is. You must think me very stupid.’
Calypso said, ‘A little.’
Antonia said, ‘Thanks. I’m getting better.’
‘In what way?’ (They come over here and I quite like it, but they always stay too long.)
‘I’m better with Matthew, for one thing. When he wants to—er—well, if you must know, bugger me, I know he is remembering my brother Richard. He was in love with him at school. I can understand.’
(High time she left.) ‘I have met him,’ said Calypso. ‘Fat man in the Board of Trade.’
‘He was thin once.’ Antonia laughed. ‘And he was a very pretty boy.’
Calypso laughed, too. Then, because she feared a further torrent of indiscretions, she said, ‘I think it’s time you took your brood home.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Antonia. ‘Yes. I hope we haven’t outstayed our—’
‘Here they come,’ said Calypso. Hamish had obviously had enough of adoring little girls, yet he looked amiable as he came towards them. ‘Why,’ said Calypso, getting to her feet, ‘did they call that poor child Hilaria?’
Antonia said, ‘James has a rich aunt. Easy.’
‘So Barbara kept one foot on the ground.’
‘Barbara thought Hilaria was the goddess of pleasure.’ Antonia chuckled. ‘She was not undeceived until after the christening.’
‘They are lovely children.’ Calypso mellowed at the prospect of her guests’ departure. ‘Henry seems very fond of them,’ she said.
‘We all think it’s good for him, with none of his own, to have a share in ours,’ said Antonia.
Calypso drew in her breath.
‘One wonders,’ said Antonia, ‘what Henry’s life would have been like if he had not got himself lumbered with Margaret.’
Irritated, Calypso snapped, ‘Should it not suffice that he has been a remarkably good friend and kindness itself to your children? Henry,’ she said, ‘knows how to behave.’
Snubbed, Antonia said, ‘Of course, he is wonderful to them, wonderful to the children.’
(The silly bitch has reservations.) ‘And you never made it to the four-poster?’ Calypso waved her goodbye.
Slipping her arm through her son’s, Calypso said, ‘Let’s go in. I need a drink. Antonia has been telling me about a healing experience.’
‘And was it interesting?’ Hamish asked.
‘Only in so far as I suspect she was trying to tell me something else.’
PART FOUR 1959
TWENTY-SIX
FROM VISITING MARGARET ONE winter afternoon, the Jonathans came down the stairs loose-limbed with laughter. In the hall they leaned against one another and gave way to an explosion of giggles more suitable to adolescents than the middle-aged. They had viewed Margaret’s new decor; it had been a shock.
Gone were the gold walls and carpet; in their place red-striped wallpaper, red ceiling, carpet and furnishings. Hell, they told each other, an inferno made acute by bounced reflections from the mirrors. And they were to blame, they told one another ruefully; had they not persuaded Margaret to leave her bed and trip up to London? It was they who had taken her to Apsley House, where she had been entranced by striped wallpaper, permissible for the victor of Waterloo but anathema in a house like Cotteshaw.
If they had not worked so hard to ease Margaret from her bed, this would never have happened, they wailed. Getting her out of bed had caused a U-turn. Now she had a taste for shopping, there would be no stopping her. It would be all right if Henry cut off the money, but Henry was a pig-headed fool who felt responsible for his wife; he should make her spend her own. ‘He feels responsible,’ the Jonathans complained. ‘What about us? It’s awful to laugh,’ they said. ‘Awful!’ And they went to find Pilar in the drawing room.
‘So you see it?’ she said.
‘Oh, Pilar!’
‘Ebro got discount for the wallpaper,’ she said.
‘But it’s terrible,’ they said. ‘Terrible.’
‘Is change,’ said Pilar robustly. ‘Is Republican Flag, is colour for bulls.’
‘Gruesome,’ they said.
‘And red dress, see the red dress?’ she asked. ‘Is all red now.’
‘No!’
‘Red with tight waist.’ Pilar pressed her hands to her middle. ‘Is contrast,’ she said, laughing and nodding towards the window, from which Barbara and Antonia were visible, pacing ponderous in advanced pregnancy, silhouetted against the winter sky.
‘Don’t tell us Margaret is jealous,’ the Jonathans exclaimed.
‘Of the attention. She mock their shape.’
‘They do indeed look comical,’ said the older man, ‘like huge bells. It’s hard to imagine what it must be like for girls.’
‘Some men is always so.’ Pilar glanced to where his waist had once been. ‘And not only for a few months,’ she said cruelly.
‘Come on,’ said John. ‘We must be on our way. Crumpets for tea.’
‘Perhaps I should go easy on the crumpets.’
‘Wait until Lent,’ said his lover.
‘There go the Jonathans,’ said Barbara, waving. ‘Aren’t they touching? Their union is so stable, it’s positively enviable.’
‘Not what one would expect from the children of Henry’s father’s randy and irresponsible friends, is it?’ said Antonia.
‘You have been listening to village gossip,’ said Barbara. ‘Mrs. Watson at the post.’
‘One of their mothers was French; the stabilizing gene must come from her,’ said Antonia, and added wistfully, ‘They never seem bored.’
‘Are you,’ Barbara glanced sharply at her friend, ‘bored?’
‘Since you ask, yes,’ said Antonia flatly.
‘Oh,’ Barbara paced slowly. �
�Oh.’
‘There are times when I can’t think what to talk about at meals,’ said Antonia.
‘Oh,’ said Barbara again. ‘Oh. What about Matthew? Doesn’t he talk?’
‘I don’t always listen,’ said Antonia. ‘But it’s all right, I can manage.’
‘Hidden resources?’ quizzed her friend.
‘You could say that.’
‘Oh?’
‘And it will be better when he gets into Parliament. He will be out most evenings.’
Barbara said, ‘Oh,’ yet again.
‘Oh, oh, oh.’ Antonia mocked her. ‘Do you never find James tedious?’
‘Never,’ said Barbara, ‘but then James and I are very much in love.’
It was Antonia’s turn to say, Oh, but she merely mouthed it. Barbara had not been the same since she had had a migraine and cured it by rushing off to Paris. ‘I have a theory,’ she said, fishing, ‘that you did not manage an orgasm until you had been married for some time.’
‘Is that what you think?’ asked Barbara sharply.
Antonia said, ‘Yes,’ standing firm. ‘It is.’
‘And what about you?’ asked Barbara. ‘I take it that if Matthew is so boring, he doesn’t provide orgasms to counter the tedium of his chat?’
‘Take it however you like,’ said Antonia good-naturedly, ‘but it doesn’t mean you have got it right.’ Bed is where there is no need for talk, she thought.
‘Before we married we used to tell each other everything,’ said Barbara plaintively.
‘We only thought we did,’ said her friend. ‘There are things one hardly knows oneself; time passes and we forget them.’
Barbara said, ‘Um,’ and considered her love for James. ‘I was not really in love with James when I married him,’ she said, ‘but now—’
‘I am glad for you,’ said Antonia. ‘And I shall love Matthew more when he is an MP.’
Barbara said, ‘That figures.’
‘Anyway,’ said Antonia, switching the subject, ‘it is going to be smashing for us having babies of the same age.’
The expectant mothers meandered on, each with her thoughts. Then, in an endeavour to recapture the intimacy they had once enjoyed, Barbara ventured, ‘Do you still suppose Matthew spent that night with Margaret?’