‘No,’ she said softly. She took up her hairbrush and gently brushed her bobbed hair. ‘Not in a million years,’ she said firmly.
She rose from the table and glanced around the room. In the evening sunlight the room glowed in rose and gold. The wallpaper matched the curtains, which echoed the colours of the carpet. The whole room, indeed the whole house, had that attractive English country look which appears so delightfully easy and yet is so hard to achieve, and time-consuming to maintain.
Stephanie went downstairs again. Jeff had poured himself a large brandy as if in celebration, and was still seated at the table.
‘You must do whatever you wish,’ she said.
‘I thought I’d stay with Elizabeth until you move out.’
She nodded. ‘You’ll want me to pack for you, then.’
‘I’ll pack,’ Jeff said awkwardly. It would be the first time in sixteen years that he had packed his own bag.
Stephanie nodded and let him go upstairs into their bedroom. She heard him opening and closing cupboard doors, looking for the suitcases. She wiped down the kitchen worktops and then laid the table for breakfast, with a white tablecloth and white napkins. She laid two places, she thought it looked more poignant. Then she went up the stairs and found Jeff thrusting ironed shirts into his suitcase.
‘I’ll do that,’ she offered.
Automatically, he stepped back, but then he hesitated. ‘You shouldn’t,’ he said, embarrassed.
‘Why ever not? You’ll only get them crumpled, and Elizabeth will have to iron them again.’
He forgot his tragic face and laughed. ‘I don’t think she’ll do that!’
‘How inconvenient for you. You’ll have to use the laundry service and I hear they’re dreadfully careless.’
He flung himself on to the little stool before her dressing table, and glanced at his handsome face in the mirror. ‘I can’t bear this,’ he said dramatically.
‘Poor Jeff,’ she said sympathetically, folding his shirts carefully and neatly. ‘I do hope you’re doing the right thing.’
There was a brief silence.
‘I thought you would be distraught,’ he said.
Only Stephanie could have heard the faint note of disappointment in his voice.
‘Of course I am,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t seem real. What shall we do about dinner with the Mitchells on Friday night?’
He hesitated, and then found the right tone. ‘I have lost it all,’ he said. ‘All! I know it. Our marriage, our friends, everything!’
She nodded. ‘If that’s what you want, darling.’ She was distracted by the sock drawer. ‘D’you want enough socks for a week, or do you want to take them all?’
‘Just enough … all of them …’ His outflung gesture implied his despair. ‘I can’t think about socks at a time like this!’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Everything does seem terribly wrong, doesn’t it? It doesn’t feel like a good idea at all.’
‘Oh, but it is,’ Jeff said hastily. ‘I love her, I can’t help myself. I’ve never …’
‘And all your winter suits?’ she interrupted. ‘They’ve all been dry cleaned, of course.’
‘You’ll miss the house,’ he said, trying to invoke her distress.
‘Oh, of course. But it’s such hard work. The garden alone is two days every week. Does Elizabeth garden?’
‘No,’ he said moodily.
‘You’ll have to get a gardener then,’ she said. ‘I’ll find a good one and leave Elizabeth a note. They’re dreadfully expensive. It’ll be about £80 a week. And a housekeeper on top of that.’
‘A housekeeper? What will we want a housekeeper for?’
She turned her guileless face to him. ‘Elizabeth isn’t going to want to do dusting and cleaning at the end of a day’s work, is she? All that exhausting sacking of people that she must do? And shopping and cooking dinner, and your breakfast, surely?’
‘Well, no … but …’
‘I’ll leave you the number of an agency. They’re about ten pounds an hour, you’ll need someone to come in for at least three hours a day …’ She started folding his jackets and laying them carefully on top of the suitcase. ‘Say six days a week … gracious! That’s £180 a week. And the gardener as well. That’s £260 a week, um, more than £1000 a month. Darling, this is going to be fearfully expensive. Are you sure you can afford it?’
Jeff looked anxious. He hated spending money.
‘But Elizabeth will help, I’m sure.’ She took a gamble. ‘Is she very well paid?’
‘Not yet,’ he admitted reluctantly. ‘She’s a freelance.’
Stephanie looked despondent. ‘She won’t do the secretarial work and the book-keeping then?’
He shook his head.
‘Can she type at least?’ Stephanie inquired brightly.
Again he shook his head. ‘Another £100,’ Stephanie said sadly. She thought for a moment. ‘That’s £360 a week, that’s £18,000 a year that it’s going to cost you when you don’t have me to work for free. And then you’ll have to buy a house for me, plus an allowance.’ She looked concerned. ‘Surely the business can’t stand these extra costs?’ She closed the suitcase and clicked the locks shut. ‘I think that’s all. Do you want me to cancel the Mitchells? What shall I tell them?’
He was reeling at her arithmetic. He had not thought her work was so valuable. ‘I’ll come,’ he said. ‘Let’s not rush into anything. Don’t tell anyone yet.’
She did not show any relief. ‘Whatever you like,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you at seven o’clock on Friday. Remind Elizabeth to top up the windscreen washer on your car.’
He looked uneasy. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘It’ll be good for me to do my own chores!’
She looked at him blankly. ‘Why should you? When you work so hard all day you need a comfortable supportive home. I’m sure Elizabeth feels that. After all she loves you, doesn’t she?’
‘Oh yes!’ he said quickly. ‘But she’s not the domestic type … she’s … she’s a modern girl. Liberated.’
Stephanie looked shocked. ‘Oh! You poor darling!’
She had to keep her nerve. She stood at the handsome front door and waved until the car was out of sight as she had always done. Her theory was that he would be bored of domestic chaos and hard work within the month.
On Friday Jeff came home to take her to the Mitchells’ dinner party. He looked tired, as a man will look who is deeply sexually gratified for the first time in his life. But he also looked shabby.
‘Your shoes!’ Stephanie exclaimed as he stepped into the hall.
If he had said then, ‘Oh, who cares about shoes?’, Stephanie would have known that she had lost him forever. But a quick look of irritation crossed his face. ‘She said she’d done them,’ he said. ‘She said she’d do them, if I changed the sheets.’
‘Slip them off,’ Stephanie said in a tone like honey. ‘She’s not even touched them. There’s a pitcher of chilled martini waiting for you in the sitting room. I’ll have to clean these before you can go anywhere.’
He looked at her black cocktail dress. ‘You can’t polish shoes in that,’ he said.
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Black doesn’t show the dirt, darling,’ she said easily. ‘You have a nice drink and relax.’
She saw his face as he turned towards the sitting room, the log fire, and the pitcher of iced martini with condensation clouding the wet sides of the jug, and the crystal goblets filled with ice and carefully serrated slices of lime. There were home-made cheese straws on a plate on the coffee table and a bowl of home-roasted almonds. He had the sneaky gleeful look of a man escaping from one house, to another where he secretly prefers to be.
It was the first time Stephanie had seen that expression on her husband’s face. She thought Elizabeth would have known it once, but Elizabeth would see it no more.
And she knew that her theories about men had been right.
Lady Emily’s Swim
Lady Emily swa
m the length of the pool with a slow weary breast stroke. Her face, tipped back to protect her makeup, floated like a dusty Venetian mask above the oily waters. Other bathers in their self-appointed routines paced her, overtook her, lapped her. Lady Emily’s steady froggy movements never faltered, she never swerved. When two foolish young men splashed exuberantly near her she shot them a blue look from under her heavy eyelids that was as powerful as a searchlight over a rolling swell. They apologised wetly and porpoised off to the shallow end to try to out-swim each other underwater. Lady Emily never broke her stroke, swam on.
Every morning she came to the little health club attached to the hotel. Every morning she swam her twenty lengths with the regularity of a turning waterwheel. Every morning she would mount the steps from the pool, pick up her towel, delicately pat her damp powdered face (leaving brown smears on the club’s towel) and saunter to the ladies’ changing room.
She never stopped to talk. ‘They call it a club, but it isn’t really. They just let in anyone. You never know who you might find there.’ She never used the other facilities – the sauna: ‘so hot!’, the steam room: ‘stifling!’, or the jacuzzi: ‘a quite disgusting invention!’
Once a week, on Wednesday, she took the train to London, first class, non-smoker, window seat, facing engine, to have her hair washed and set by Simon at Mayfair who was the only person who had the least idea how to do it. On Thursday it was the Women’s Institute market where Lady Emily would buy home-made scones and jars of other women’s marmalade and feed her vanity like a hungry butterfly on the flit from cake stall to jam stall: ‘Oh Lady Emily! Good morning!’ ‘Six cheese scones, Lady Emily? Of course!’
Tuesdays, Lady Emily spent at home. In the old days, before the war, when Lady Emily had been nothing more than a Hon. Miss Emily, and the youngest and the plainest of four, being At Home had meant something. Maids in their best caps with streamers served sandwiches and china tea on the lawn under the cedar tree, in the summer which went on and on. Now when Lady Emily was At Home she sat alone and listened to the radio. No-one came to see her. She might as well not have been At Home at all.
Friday was Lady Emily’s day for shopping and she had lunch at the Copper Kettle tea rooms where Tracey kept her the window table for twelve o’clock. Tracey was a funny girl, quite hopeless of course, with no more idea of waiting at table than flying to the moon; but she made much of Lady Emily, and, on showing her to her table would say loudly: ‘This way, your ladyship.’ And if there were tourists in the tea room she would say with special emphasis: ‘Here you are, YOUR LADYSHIP. YOUR LADYSHIP’s usual table’, and Lady Emily would take her seat and glance complacently around to see people staring with that ingratiating half-smile that the English use to show respect for their betters.
Saturday was gardening and perhaps church flower rota day. Sunday was church at eleven and lunch at one, and the Sunday Telegraph. ‘Don’t put the magazine in Lady Emily’s,’ the newsagent cautioned the boy with dreadful emphasis. ‘She doesn’t like it.’
Mondays were the worst.
There wasn’t really anything for Mondays. Sometimes she would write letters, but she was not a woman to whom words came easily, and she had no friends who wanted to know how she was. Sometimes she would change her library books on Monday. She always borrowed travel books or detective stories for those were the books chosen by her late husband, Sir William, dead so long ago that all that remained of him on this earth was the order for the Sunday Telegraph and his widow’s limited reading.
Lady Emily did not like reading. She could never remember the clues in order to identify the murderer in the mysteries, and she disliked travel books. One place is, after all, much the same as another, and the authors were so full of themselves as if they were brave or clever to go – as if they hadn’t chosen to go of their own free will in the first place!
But there is a limit to how long you can spend in a library and not look as if you are one of those pathetic old people with nothing to do, and no friends.
Sometimes on Mondays she telephoned Margaret, her daughter who lived in New York. Faintly in the background behind Margaret’s very English, slightly alarmed voice, she could hear the hum of foreign air conditioning – or was it the constant roar of traffic in the heart of that great city? Margaret would always ask, ‘Is everything all right?’, believing that a telephone call from her mother must herald disaster. And Lady Emily would say irritably: ‘Yes, yes. Quite all right. But how are you?’
She always placed the kitchen timer by the telephone and she would scrupulously set the time to two minutes and forty-five seconds so that she never exceeded a three-minute call. Margaret, miles away, years away, forgetful and bored of her mother, would hear the insistent tick, tick, ticking, behind Lady Emily’s account of the vicar, and slugs in the nasturtiums. Margaret would set her teeth on an impatient outburst and wonder, with dull frustration, why the old woman rang at all. And why always Mondays?
Lady Emily watched the pointer of the timer move upwards to the ‘0’ which signified the end of the call and felt her words syncopated by its clicks. She never spoke to Margaret of the empty house and the week of days, and then the weeks, and then the months which stretched interminably ahead. She had no language for the deep painful rhythms of someone speaking the truth. She had only little words to keep pace with the tick, tick, ticking, until the ‘ping’ when she said – as she always said – hurriedly: ‘There are the pips! I have to go!’ And hung up – as she always hung up – without saying goodbye.
Margaret had joined a health club in New York. When she heard, among her mother’s other mild complaints, that the George Hotel in town had opened a swimming pool of all things, in what used to be the car park, she sent a cheque for Lady Emily’s birthday and a card which said: ‘Your first year’s sub. for the new health club. Enjoy. Enjoy.’
Lady Emily was not at all sure what Margaret meant by ‘Enjoy. Enjoy’ but she recognised the unmistakable ring of class argot. The tone which said: ‘This is slang, but it is slang as it is spoken by the top people.’ Emboldened by the sanction of her daughter, and the code of elite speech, Lady Emily arrived at the hotel’s newly completed swimming pool and found that she could join without personal application to the club committee (which she had rather hoped would be required) and without citing Debrett’s.
Instead a languid youth in milk-white shorts took her cheque and pushed a towel across the counter to her. ‘Open from haight hay hem to haight pee em,’ he said. ‘Copy of the rules.’
It was not a proper club. Not a proper club at all. It admitted absolutely anybody who arrived at the door with the fee, and all the hotel guests could come pouring into the pool whenever they chose to use it. And many of them had children who squalled miserably in the shallow end.
Still, Lady Emily learned the name of Phil, the languid youth. She taught him to call her ‘yer ladyship’ rather than ‘missis’ and started a new routine, grafted readily enough on to the old, of twenty lengths on Monday, after which she went home and wrote letters, twenty lengths on Tuesday, after which she went to the WI market, twenty lengths on Wednesday, after which she took the train to London and Simon said: ‘But dahling! your hair’, twenty lengths on Thursday before she was At Home, twenty lengths before her big shop on Friday, twenty lengths on Saturday before getting down to the garden. Sunday the pool was closed; and anyway it would hardly have been The Thing to swim on a Sunday.
She never swam any stroke but breast stroke. She never tackled her lengths in any style other than her languid progression down the pool and turn, down the pool and turn. She never dipped her face near the green water. Her scalloped chin was held defiantly above the viscous waves, her powdered face as blank as a Noh mask, fringed with the waving fronds of plastic petals which covered her bathing hat. Lady Emily kept her mouth tight shut against the odd lapping wave, closed hermetically in a bow of cerise. Through her pinched nostrils she breathed, in and out, in and out, with the rhythm of her stroke. She ne
ver varied, she never hurried. She scissored her way up and down the pool, her white legs bowing wide like nutcrackers and closing again.
She paused once or twice and held on to the side of the pool and looked down at her legs. The underwater lights shone on her old body illuminating the dull black of her swimming costume and the luminous paleness of her legs and arms. Inflated with water her skin looked like that of a young girl. Lady Emily turned back into the water with her smooth rhythmic stroke.
She thought first of all that she was swimming down a deep limpid river, fringed on either side by huge nut-bearing fruit-bearing trees. She could hear the plop of the ripe fruits as they tumbled into the water, and the ‘clop’ noise of a fish rising to snap at the rosehip-red fruit as it bobbed on the tide. She swam along narrow deep channels, the current beneath bearing her strongly up.
She swam between fronds of ferns, recklessly, fearing nothing. Onward and onward she swam, her heavy-lidded eyes taking in the vivid colours around her: the bright flicker of a stream of butterflies across a flower, the jewelled greenness of a tree frog, as still as if frozen by an enchantment on an emerald leaf. She swam past the smiling sleepy jaws of alligators, who turned their crusty heads to watch her go by, and widened their ochre eyes to frighten her. Her breath came a little faster then, but still, steadily through her nose she breathed, steadily she swam, through the deep channels of a mighty tropical river across inland lagoons, along hidden, secretive waterways. Still she swam upstream, carried by the current, the tepid water lapping under her stretched chin.
Above her head, high above her, was the thick canopy of the tropical forest, the sunlight filtering through the dense green leaves. Birds screamed as they flew overhead and Lady Emily could see the brilliant underside of turquoise wings, the scarlet feathers of their bellies, as they scattered in a flock from one roost to another. In one tree, as she swam with her strong measured stroke under the sweeping branches, there was a white-furred dark-faced monkey, dangling from one long arm. Its bright black eyes saw Lady Emily as she floated by; it bounced on the branch and falling leaves spiralled down into the water around her. Lady Emily swam on.
Bread and Chocolate Page 5