The Story

by Victoria Hislop

  For a moment there’s silence, and then Marge says, “We could put in an offer tonight. I don’t think it’s too late. What do you think?”

  And now, suddenly it’s the next evening, and Ivy and I are flying back to Toronto. Here we are over the Rockies again, crossing them this time in darkness. Ivy sits with her head back, eyes closed, her shoulders so sharply her own; she’s not quite asleep, but not quite awake either.

  Our plane seems a fragile vessel, a piece of jewelry up here between the stars and the mountains. Flying through dark air like this makes me think that life itself is fragile. The miniature accidents of chromosomes can spread unstoppable circles of grief. A dozen words carelessly uttered can dismantle a marriage. A few gulps of oxygen are all that stand between us and death.

  I wonder if Ivy is thinking, as I am, of the three months ahead, of how tumultuous they’ll be. There are many things to think of when you move. For one, we’ll have to put our own house up for sale. The thought startles me, though I’ve no idea why.

  I try to imagine prospective buyers arriving for appointments, stepping through our front door with polite murmurs and a sharp eye for imperfections.

  They’ll work their way through the downstairs, the kitchen (renewed only four years ago), the living room (yes, a real fireplace, a good draft), the dining room (small, but you can seat ten in a pinch). Then they’ll make their way upstairs (carpet a little worn, but with lots of wear left). The main bedroom is fair size (with good reading lamps built in, also bookshelves).

  And then there’s Christopher’s bedroom.

  Will the vibrations announce that here lived a child with little muscular control, almost no sight or hearing and no real consciousness as that word is normally perceived? He had, though – and perhaps the vibrations will acknowledge the fact – his own kind of valor and perhaps his own way of seeing the world. At least Ivy and I always rewallpapered his room every three years or so out of a conviction that he took some pleasure in the sight of ducks swimming on a yellow sea. Later, it was sail boats; then tigers and monkeys dodging jungle growth, then a wild op-art checkerboard; and then, the final incarnation, a marvelous green cave of leafiness with amazing flowers and impossible birds sitting in branches.

  I can’t help wondering if these prospective buyers, these people looking for God only knows what, if they’ll enter this room and feel something of his fragile presence alive in a fragile world.

  Well, we shall see. We shall soon see.

  The Merry Widow

  Margaret Drabble

  Margaret Drabble (b. 1939) is an English novelist, biographer and critic. Awarded a CBE in 1980, Drabble was promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2008 Birthday Honours. In 2011, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for a lifetime’s distinguished service to literature.

  When Philip died, his friends and colleagues assumed that Elsa would cancel the holiday. Elsa knew that this would be their assumption. But she had no intention of cancelling. She was determined upon the holiday. During Philip’s unexpectedly sudden last hours, and in the succeeding weeks of funeral and condolence and letters from banks and solicitors, it began to take an increasingly powerful hold upon her imagination. If she were honest with herself, which she tried to be, she had not been looking forward to the holiday while Philip was alive: it would have been yet another dutifully endured, frustrating, saddening attempt at reviving past pleasures, overshadowed by Philip’s increasing ill health and ill temper. But without Philip, the prospect brightened. Elsa knew that she would have to conceal her growing anticipation, for it was surely not seemly for so recent a widow to look forward so eagerly to something as mundane as a summer holiday – although it was not, she reasoned with herself, as though she were contemplating an extravagant escapade. Their plans had been modest enough – no Swans tour of the Greek isles, no luxury hotel, not even a little family pension with check tablecloths and local wine in the Dordogne, but a fortnight in a rented cottage in Dorset. A quiet fortnight in late June. An unambitious arrangement, appropriate for such a couple as Philip and Elsa, Elsa and Philip.

  Perhaps, she thought, as she threw away old socks and parcelled suits for Oxfam and the Salvation Army, as she cancelled subscriptions to scholarly periodicals, perhaps she should try to imply to these well-meaning acquaintances that she felt a spiritual need to go to Dorset, a need for solitude, for privacy, a need to recover in tranquillity and new surroundings from the shock (however expected a shock) of Philip’s death? And indeed, such an implication would not be so far from the truth, except for the fact that the emotion she expected to experience in Dorset was not grief, but joy. She needed to be alone, to conceal from prying eyes her relief, her delight in her new freedom and, yes, her joy.

  This was unseemly, but it was so. She had been absolutely fed up to the back teeth with Philip, she said to herself, gritting those teeth tightly as she wrote to increase the standing order for oil delivery, as she rang the plumber to arrange to have a shower attachment fitted to the bathroom tap. Why on earth shouldn’t she have a shower attachment, at her age, with her pension and savings? Her jaw ached with retrospective anger. How mean he had become, how querulous, how determined to thwart every pleasure, to interfere with every friendship. Thanks to Philip, she had no friends left, and that was why she was looking forward with a voluptuous, sensuous, almost feverish longing to the delights of solitude. To get away, away from all these ruined relationships, these false smiles, these old tweed suits and pigeonholes full of papers – to be alone, not to have to pretend, to sleep and wake alone, unobserved.

  It had not been Philip’s fault, she told others, that he had become ‘difficult’. It had been the fault of the illness. It had been bad luck, to be struck down like that when not yet sixty, bad luck to have such constant nagging pain, bad luck to be denied one’s usual physical exercise and pleasures, one’s usual diet. But of course in her heart she thought it was Philip’s fault. Illness had merely accentuated his selfishness, his discreet malice, his fondness for putting other people in their place. Illness gave him excuses for behaving badly – but he had always behaved badly. He had seized upon illness as a gift, had embraced it as his natural state. When younger, he had made efforts to control his tongue, his witticisms at the expense of others, his desire to prove the rest of the world ignorant, foolish, ill-mannered. Illness had removed the controls, had given him licence. He had seemed to enjoy humiliating her in public, complaining about her behind her back, undermining her when they sat alone together watching television. It had reached the stage where she could not express the slightest interest in any television programme without his launching an attack on her taste, her interests, her habits of mind. If she watched the news, she was news-obsessed, media-obsessed, brain-washed into submission by the news-madness of the programme planners; if she watched tennis or athletics or show-jumping, he would lecture her on the evils of competitive sport; if she watched wildlife documentaries, he would mock her for taking an interest in badgers and butterflies when she ought to be attending to the problems of the inner cities; if she watched a comedy series, he would call her escapist, and the comedy would be attacked as cosy middle-class fantasy or as a glorification of working-class subculture. Whatever she watched was wrong, and if she watched nothing – why, she was a television snob, unable to share the simple pleasures of Everyman. Night after night, at an oblique angle, through the small screen, he had abused her. It was not television he hated, it was her.

  There was no television in Dorset. Apologetically, the owners of the little Mill House had explained that the valley was too deep for good reception, the picture quality too poor to make it worth providing a set. Good, Philip had said, but he had not meant it. If he had lived, if he had been alive to go on this Dorset holiday, he would undoubtedly have found some devious way to complain about its absence. Her lack of conversation, perhaps, would have been trundled out: better a mindless television programme, he would have declared, th
an your small talk, your silences.

  Dead he was, now, and there would be no complaints. No television, and no complaints. There would be silence.

  The evening before her departure, Elsa Palmer sat alone in the drawing-room with a tray of bread and cheese and pickle, and tomato salad, and milk chocolate digestive biscuits, and a pile of road maps, and her bird book, and her butterfly book, and her flower book, and her Pevsner. The television was on, but she was not watching it. She ate a bit of cheese, and wrote down road numbers in an orderly way. A10, A30, A354. There didn’t seem to be any very obvious way of getting to Dorset from Cambridge, but that made the exercise of plotting a route all the more entertaining. She would pass through towns she did not know, get stuck in high streets she had never seen, drive past hedgerows banked with unfamiliar flowers. Alone, with her car radio. If she took a wrong turning, nobody would reprimand her. If she chose to listen to Radio 2, nobody would know. She could stop for a cup of coffee, she could eat a sandwich from her knee and drop crumbs on her skirt. And, at the end of the journey, there would be the Mill House, where nothing would remind her of Philip. She would lose herself in the deep Dorset countryside, so different from these appalling, over-farmed, open East Anglian wastes. There would be a whole fortnight of walkings and wanderings, of scrambling up coastal paths and rambling through woods, of collecting specimens and identifying them from her books in the long, light, solitary evenings. Unobserved, uncriticized.

  Philip, of late, had taken increasingly strongly against her passion for identifications. ‘What’s in a name?’ he would say, when she tried to remember a variety of sweet pea, or to spot a distant little brown bird at the end of the garden. As he always beat her down in argument by sheer persistence (and anyway, was it fair to argue with an ill man?) she had never been able to defend her own pleasure in looking things up in reference books. It had seemed a harmless pleasure, until Philip attacked it. Harmless, innocent, and proper for the wife of a university lecturer. An interest in flowers and butterflies. What could be wrong with that? By some sleight of reasoning he had made it seem sinister, joyless, life-denying. He had made her feel it to be a weakness, a symptom of a character defect. She would never work out quite how he had managed it.

  The Lulworth Skipper. A local little butterfly that haunts Lulworth Cove. She looked at its portrait and smiled approvingly. Yes, she would walk along the Dorset Coast Path, with the Ordnance Survey map in her pocket, and go to Lulworth, and search for the Lulworth Skipper. And if she did not find it, nobody would know she had been defeated. Her pleasure would be her own, her disappointment her own.

  Marriage has warped me, thought Elsa Palmer the next day, as she dawdled through Biggleswade. Marriage is unnatural, thought Elsa Palmer, as she stopped at the red light of some roadworks ini Aylesbury.

  Marriage and maternity. She thought of her children, her grandchildren. They had all attended the funeral, dutifully. She had found herself bored by them, irritated with them. After years and years of cravenly soliciting their favours, of begging them to telephone more often, of blackmailing them into coming for Christmas (or, lately, into inviting herself and Philip for Christmas), she now, suddenly, had found herself bored, had admitted herself to be bored. Stuart was a slob, Harriet was a pedantic chip off the old block (and always ill, my God, what stories of migraines and backaches, and she was only twenty-nine) and even young Ben had been incredibly tedious about his new car. And the grandchildren – whining, sniffing, poking their noses, kicking the furniture, squabbling, with their awful London accents and their incessant demands for sweets. Spoiled brats, the lot of them. Elsa smiled, comfortably, to herself, as she sailed through the landscape, divinely, enchantingly, rapturously alone. The weather responded to her mood; the sun shone, huge white clouds drifted high, vast shadows fell on the broad trees and the green-gold trees. An Indian summer, in June.

  She had cautioned herself against disappointment at her journey’s end; could the mill really be as charming as it appeared in its photographs? Was there some undisclosed flaw, some blot in the immediate landscape, some pylon or pig farm on its doorstep? Maybe, maybe: but some charm it must surely have, and the description of the little river flowing through the house and the garden, dividing the front garden from the little paddock at the back, could not be wholly fictitious. There were trout in the stream, she was assured. She pictured herself reclining in a deckchair, lying on a rug on the grass, reading a book, sipping a drink, looking up every now and then to gaze at the trout in the shallows, the waving weed. Inexpressibly soothing, she found this image of herself.

  And the mill, when finally she arrived in the late afternoon, was no disappointment. It was smaller than it looked in the photographs, but houses always are, and it was right on the road, but the road was a small road, a country road, a delightful road, and she liked the way the garden gate opened onto a flinty courtyard where she parked her car. Rustic, unpretentious. A little lawn, with a wooden table; creepers growing up the house; a nesting blackbird watching anxiously, boldly, curiously; and beyond the lawn, the little river, the River Cerne itself, which flowed right through what was to be, for a whole fortnight, her own little property. The border was paved, and next to the idle mill wheel was a low stone wall, warm from the day’s sun. She sat on it, and saw the promised trout flicker. It was all that she had hoped. There was a little bridge over the river, leading to the tree-shaded, thickly hedged paddock, part also of her property. You can sit there, the owners had assured her, quite out of sight of the road. If you don’t like to sit down on the lawn at the front, they had said, it’s quite private, through the back.

  Quite private. She savoured the concept of privacy. She would save her exploration of it until she had collected the key and been shown round, until she had unpacked and made herself at home.

  The interior of the house, as displayed to her by Mrs Miller from the village, was perhaps a little too rustic-smart: she was introduced to a shining wooden kitchen table and benches with diamond-shaped holes carved in them, a lot of glossy bright brown woodwork, an open light wooden staircase up to an upper floor and a semi-galleried sitting-room, a brass horseshoe and a brass kettle, and a disconcerting fox’s mask grinning down from a wall. It was all newly decorated, spick and span. But the millstone was still there, and the ancient machinery of the mill could still be seen in the back rooms of the house, and through the heart of the house flowed the noisy, companionable sound of water. Elsa liked it all very much. She even liked the varnished wood and the fox’s mask. Philip would have hated them, would have been full of witticisms about them, but she liked them very much. They were not to her taste, but she felt instantly at home with them. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said, brightly, to Mrs Miller, hoping Mrs Miller would take herself off as soon as she had explained the intricacies of the electricity meter and revealed the contents of the kitchen cupboards. ‘Oh, I’m sure I’ll find everything I need,’ she said, noting that milk, bread and butter had been provided. She was touched by the thoughtfulness of her absent landlords.

  Mrs Miller vanished, promptly, tactfully. Elsa Palmer was alone. She wandered from room to room, examining the objects that make themselves at home in holiday cottages – an earthenware jug of dried flowers, a songbook open on the piano, a Visitors’ Book, an umbrella-stand, a children’s tricycle under the stairs, a stone hot-water bottle, a clock in a glass case, a print of a hunting scene. They made her feel amazingly irresponsible. She felt that for the first time for years she had no housekeeping cares in the world. She could live on Kit Kat or KiteKat and no one would comment. She could starve, and no one would care. Contemplating this freedom, she unpacked her clothes and laid them neatly in empty, paper-lined, mothballed, impersonal drawers, and made up the double bed in the low-ceilinged bedroom, and went downstairs. It was early evening. She could hear the sound of the mill stream. She unpacked her groceries: eggs, cheese, long-life milk, tins of tuna fish, onions, potatoes, a little fruit. A bottle of gin, a bottle of white win
e, a few bottles of tonic.

  With a sense of bravado, she poured herself a gin and tonic. Philip had always poured the drinks; in his lifetime she would no more have thought of pouring one for herself than she would have expected Philip to make an Irish stew. The thought of Philip struggling with an Irish stew struck her as irresistibly comic; she smliled to herself. Now Philip was dead, she could laugh at him at last. She adorned her gin and tonic with ice cubes and a slice of lemon. A merry widow.

  The evening sun was mellow. It was one of the longest days of the year. She wandered out into the flinty courtyard and over to the little lawn. She sat on the low stone wall and sipped her drink. She watched a flock of long-tailed finches fluttering in a small tree. Tomorrow, if they returned, she would sit here and identify them. She thought they would return.

  The weeds swayed and poured in the stream. Water crowfoot blossomed above the surface, its roots trailing. Trout rippled, stationary yet supple and subtle, motionless yet full of movement.

  She sat and gazed as water and time flowed by. Then she rose and wandered over the little hidden wooden bridge to inspect the unseen paddock on the far side. As she crossed the bridge, a startled moorhen dislodged itself with great noise and splashing and she saw some chicks scrambling clumsily upstream. And there was the paddock – a long, triangular plot of land, planted with fruit trees, bordered on one side by a fence, on another by the stream and on the third by a high, irregular, ancient row of mixed tree and hedge, at the bottom of which ran another little tributary. The paddock, she discovered, was a sort of island. The music of the water was soft and reassuring. The grass was deep, knee-high. The stream was fringed with all sorts of wild flowers, growing in rich profusion and disorder – forget-me-not, valerian, comfrey, buttercup and many other species that she could not at once distinguish. A wild garden, overgrown, secret, mysterious. Nobody could overlook her here.