The television screen remained opaque and grey.
‘Yes,’ Kay said to herself. ‘Yes.’
As she left the sewing room where they kept the television set her father came out of his study and instinctively Kay stepped back, acutely conscious of what had been said earlier.
‘Kay.’
She found herself reaching out, and then held by him, her face against his sleeve, pressed into the cloth, smelling his soap and the faint smell of his city day which brought her childhood back to envelop her and hold her as he held her himself.
Nothing else was said after the one word ‘Kay’ and in a second or two he disengaged himself gently and went down the passage towards the side door that led to the garden. Every night, until the last weeks of her mother’s life, he had gone there at the end of the evening to smoke a single small cigar. Kay went up to her bedroom and opened the window and after a moment the smell of the smoke came to her from the garden below.
She felt a rush of the most exhilarating happiness, as the anxiety and gloom of the past weeks fell away. The house had been sunk into the dreary aftermath of their mother’s death for so long that she had forgotten even the small, pleasant details of everyday life until now, when one of them had been given back. They were all weary, their flesh felt dead, their skins grey, their movements were slow; there had been no lightness in anything, the subdued atmosphere had become usual, their father’s isolated uncommunicated grief suffocating everything that might have been enjoyed or anticipated.
She leaned further out of the window, intent on catching as much as possible of the smell of his cigar smoke.
We have come through it, she thought. We have come through.
She was not rash enough to expect life to be everything that it had been. Their mother was dead. Nothing could alter that, nothing lessened the pain though the death had been ‘a blessing’.
But something had changed at last. They had all moved on and surely for good.
She waited at the open window until the last trace of smoke had faded from the air and the only smell was of night, and grass and the earth. Then she got into bed, and slept like something new born.
And indeed, slowly, gradually the mood in the house lightened. Their father spoke to them, went out, returned with the evening paper, opened letters, worked at his desk. There was no laughter yet, and no social life. Friends and neighbours were not invited. But they had all of them lost the habit of that and did not feel any particular need yet to re-acquire it.
‘In the summer,’ Nita said.
‘Perhaps we could have one of the old summer garden parties.’
‘I wonder – do you think Father has given any thought to a holiday?’
Such small exchanges lightened their days. There was no sense of urgency or anxiety, no need to push forward too fast. But when they spoke of their mother now it was with smiling reminiscence, only tinged at the edges with sorrow.
On a Wednesday evening, almost eight months after the death, they walked down the avenue together as usual, and into the house.
‘Hello?’
Sometimes they returned first, sometimes he did, and so one or other always called out.
‘Hello?’
It was late spring but exceptionally warm. The drawing-room door was open. Nita went through.
The French windows were also open. From the garden came voices speaking quietly together.
‘Kay.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘There is – there’s someone in the garden with Father.’
They looked at one another, recognising the next step taken, the next stage reached.
‘Good,’ Kay said. ‘Isn’t that good?’
Though they had to wait and absorb it, take in the feeling of strangeness. No one else had been in the house since the day of the funeral. Now someone was here, some old friend of his, some neighbour, and although if asked they would each have said that they welcomed it, nevertheless it felt like a violation of something that had grown to become sacred.
The clock ticked in the hall behind them.
‘Oh goodness,’ Kay said, half-laughing with impatience at their own hesitation, and walked boldly out through the open windows onto the terrace.
The scene, and the next moments that passed, took their place in the series of ineradicable pictures etched into their minds, joining their mother’s deathbed, the funeral, the sight of their father leaning over the grave.
Two garden chairs were drawn up on either side of the small table. Two cups and saucers, the teapot, milk jug and sugar bowl stood on the table. That fact alone they had difficulty in absorbing, and wondered wildly how the tea had come to be made and found its way out there.
Hearing them, their father turned, but did not get up.
Kay and Nita hesitated like children uncertain of what to say or do next, needing permission to come forward. They were on the outside of a charmed circle.
‘Here you are!’ he said.
After another moment, and as one, they began to cross the grass.
‘This is a friend of mine – Leila. Leila Crocker.’ He gestured expansively. ‘My daughters. Nita. Kay.’
They knew, Nita said afterwards. They knew absolutely and at once and their stomachs plunged like lifts down a deep shaft, leaving only nausea.
The garden froze, the colours were blanched out of everything, the leaves stiffened, the trees went dead. Unbelievably, instinctively, impossibly, they knew.
She stood. Said, ‘How very nice.’
Under their feet, deep below the grass and turf, the earth seemed to shift and heave treacherously, shaking their confidence, throwing them off balance. The sky tipped and ended up on its side, like a house after a bomb had fallen.
At the moment of death, it is said, a person’s past rushes towards them, but it was the whole of the future that they saw, in the instant between taking in the presence of the woman with their father, and her words; and in composing themselves to greet her, they saw what was to come in every aspect and detail, it seemed.
‘But that cannot have been so,’ Nita said, years later. Yet it had. They knew that absolutely.
But all they saw was a woman, of perhaps forty-five, perhaps a few years less or a few years more, who wore a cherry-red suit and had hair formed in an extraordinary bolster above her brow, and who was called Leila Crocker.
‘Leila,’ she said quickly; ‘please call me that.’
They would not. At once they retreated into themselves like snails touched on the tenderest tips of their horns. They could not possibly call her Leila, and so they called her nothing at all.
‘I’m afraid the tea will have gone cold.’ And she touched the china pot with the blue ribbon pattern. Nita and Kay flinched, though giving no outward sign. The last woman to have touched the blue ribbon teapot had been their mother.
‘Not that we’ve left much of it I’m afraid.’
Their father’s voice sounded quite different to them. Lighter, younger, the tone oddly jovial. Everything about him was lighter and younger. He sat back smiling, leaning back in the garden chair, looking at the blue ribbon teapot, and at the woman.
‘No please.’ Nita made a strange little gesture, like a half-bow. ‘Don’t worry. We always make tea freshly.’
No one moved then. No one else spoke.
We make a tableau, Kay thought, or one of those old pictures. ‘Tea in the Garden’ – no, ‘A Visitor to Tea’.
Their father might have spoken then, might have told them to take their freshly made tea into the garden to join them. The woman might have said, observing their evening routine, that she must go. But he did not, she did not; they sat, as if waiting to resume an interrupted conversation, so that in the end it was Nita who broke the tableau, by turning and going quickly back across the lawn and through the open French window into the house. Kay gave a half-smile, as if in some kind of hopeless explanation or apology – though meaning neither – before following her sister. Just at th
e window, she glanced quickly back, expecting them to be watching, feeling their eyes on her. But her father and the woman were turned towards one another, both leaning forwards slightly, their eager conversation eagerly resumed.
We might not have been here, Kay thought.
In the kitchen, Nita dropped the lid of the kettle and the sound went on reverberating on the tiled floor, even after she had bent impatiently to pick it up.
Rain poured off the roofs of the houses they walked past and the early blossom lay in sad, sodden little heaps in the gutter. Spring had retreated behind banked, swollen clouds and a cold wind.
‘Perhaps it is time for us to leave home,’ Kay said into the umbrella with which she was trying to shield her head and face. Nita stopped dead and lifted her own umbrella to stare at her sister and the rain flowed off it down her neck.
‘Even without… well, there will surely be changes. Perhaps we should institute our own.’
‘Why must there be changes?’
‘Aren’t we rather too old to be living at home still?’
Kay was thirty-five, Nita about thirty-seven. They looked older. Felt older.
‘But wherever would we go to? Where would you want to go?’
‘A flat?’
‘Do you like flats?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘We are perfectly happy and comfortable as we are.’
‘Yes.’
They turned the corner. Each had had a private inner glimpse into the rooms of a small flat, and looked quickly away.
‘Besides.’
The rest was unspoken, and perfectly understood. Besides, Nita would have continued, now that she has come to the house there is all the more reason than ever for us to stay.
Every afternoon since that first day when they had stepped into the garden and seen their father sitting with Leila Crocker over the blue ribbon teapot, they had dreaded coming home and finding her there again. Twice already they had done so. Once, the two of them had been seated in exactly the same place in the garden, the table and the tea things between them so that they might never have moved at all.
The next time, Leila Crocker had been coming along the passage from the downstairs cloakroom as they opened the front door. None of them had known what to say.
Now, Kay turned her key in the lock, pushed the door slowly and waited. They both waited, listening. But the house was empty, they could feel at once. It felt and sounded and smelled empty. The clock ticked. Nita took both umbrellas out to the scullery.
At the end of the television news, when Kay had switched off the set, their father had not come home.
‘He has never said anything.’
‘Perhaps he has nothing to say.’
‘He has told us nothing about her. Wouldn’t it be usual – to tell something?’
‘What is “usual”? I don’t think I know.’
‘No.’
It was not that he had behaved secretively, or evasively, or avoided them. Things had gone on exactly as before. Except that in some vital, deep-rooted way, they had not. Because always, no matter how he behaved, the woman was between the three of them.
The taxi came for him each morning. He went out, returned, sometimes very late, opened his letters, read the newspaper, worked at his desk, smoked his single late cigar. When they were all together, he ate with them. When he was not at home, they had no idea of where he was and could not ask.
The house seemed suddenly imbued with meaning, redolent of their past and precious to them. Every door handle and window-pane and cupboard. Every book and curtain and step on the stairs. The mirror in the hall and the clock and the blue ribbon teapot, all seemed to hold the life of their family within every atom, to be infinitely more than household objects made of wood and glass and metal and china and paint. Every touch and footstep, the echo of every word spoken, was part of the fabric and substance of the house. At night they lay and wrapped it round themselves and held it to them.
They were possessive, passionate and jealous of it and everything it contained. The feeling they had for it was as strong and vital as their love for their father and the memory of their mother. They were shocked by the power of it.
They could not say that they liked Leila Crocker. They could not say that they disliked her.
‘Her hair is very tightly permed,’ Kay said.
‘But her shoes are good.’
At the department store during one lunch hour Kay had suddenly told the other fitter about it. Anne McKay’s hirsute face had lit up.
‘Oh, Kay, that is so very nice! Isn’t that nice for him? I think that’s lovely.’
What is ‘lovely’? Kay thought, panicking. I have told her that he brought a woman to tea. Her face betrayed her terror. Anne McKay reached out and touched her arm. They were seated in the old broken-down basket chairs in the dusty little staffroom.
‘I meant how lovely for him to have some companionship. I know you miss your mother, of course you do, but life has to move on.’
Does it? Why does it? Why can it not stay as it is? Kay took a bite from her sandwich but could not swallow it.
‘You won’t be at home for ever, will you? Either of you.’
Won’t we? Why not? Why should we ever leave? Who could make us?
Kay jumped up, and went to the cloakroom and there spat the piece of sandwich violently into the lavatory basin.
‘I suppose,’ Nita said, hearing about it later, ‘that companionship is important.’
‘He has us. He isn’t alone.’
‘We should try to be fair.’
‘What is “unfair”?’
‘We are – well, isn’t it quite different?’
‘From what?’
‘I mean, it is just a different kind of companionship – friendship. Of course it is, Kay.’
But what the nature of the friendship or companionship was they could not have said.
It had been raining for almost a week, but now, as they walked the last hundred yards down the avenue, the sun came out and shone in their faces and reflected watery gold on the wet pavement and the house roof.
‘We must try to be fair,’ Nita said again.
They quickened their steps.
But the house was empty, as it was empty every evening for the next week, and after that, it seemed, was never empty again. It was the speed of it all that horrified them, the speed which was, Kay said, unnecessary and unseemly.
‘And rather hurtful.’
But their father was now oblivious to everything except the woman he was to marry. For he would marry Leila Crocker, he said, telling them, with neither warning nor ceremony, the next time he spent an evening at home with them.
‘I should like you to know,’ he had said, laying down his soup spoon, ‘that I have asked Leila to be my wife.’
The room went deathly silent and, it seemed to Kay and Nita, deathly cold. A chill mist seemed to creep in under the door and the window frame, curling itself round them so that they actually shivered. They could not look at him or at one another. They could do nothing.
‘I have found a very dear companion, a very fine person with whom to share the rest of my life. Your mother – her illness and her death – were – very difficult. I had not imagined – of course you hardly know Leila, but you will come to know her, and to love and admire her, I am quite certain of it. Quite certain.’
He beamed innocently from one to the other.
‘This is going to be a very happy home once more.’
It was like their bereavement all over again but in a way worse, because death was the final certainty, and this was uncertain, this would go on and on. Their whole lives would change but they did not know how. Their future would be entirely different but they could not picture it.
That first night, after he had told them, the silence had been so terrible, his eager, beaming face so open and expectant, that Nita had prayed to die, then, there, rather than have to face any of it and Kay had wished her tongue cut
out, for any words she might feel able to utter would be wrong and false and surely choke her.
In the end, after what might have been a minute or a lifetime, their father said, ‘I hope very much that you are pleased.’
Kay swallowed.
‘Of course, your mother—’
Nita leaped up, pushing her chair back with such force that it toppled and crashed over behind her. ‘She – Mother has nothing to do with this – please do not talk about Mother.’
‘Perhaps—’ Kay heard her own voice, strangled and peculiar. ‘Perhaps you may be able to understand what a shock this is.’
‘But you are happy for me? You do share this happiness with me?’
His face was that of a child anxious for approval, and their feelings as they looked at him were impossible, confused, painful.
‘She has given me a new life.’
They fled.
The next morning Nita woke Kay up before seven o’clock.
‘I am going to the service. Will you come?’
Kay turned onto her back. They had not been to church since the Sunday after the funeral.
‘What will you pray for?’
‘Guidance.’
‘For him?’
‘For ourselves.’
‘For it to end – for this – this thing to be over.’
Nita sat down on her sister’s bed. ‘I think,’ she said carefully, ‘that it will not.’
‘No.’
‘And I find I cannot cope with – I have never felt like this in my life.’
‘What do you feel?’
‘I think it is hatred. And anger. Great anger.’
‘Betrayal.’
‘Is it?’
‘But not us – it is not us he is betraying.’
‘No.’
‘It is indecent. He is an old man.’
‘Perhaps if it had been in a few years’ time.’
‘That is the worst, isn’t it? Think of all those tears. All that – and how to think it was all lies and falseness.’
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories Page 69