The following summer, to her great disappointment, and to Margaretta’s, Lauira did not visit Ireland. The reason for this was that her mother, suffering a bout of pneumonia in the early part of the year, did not recover quickly. She struggled back to her desk in the cubbyhole behind the Anstey Rye clothes shop, but an exhaustion that the illness had left her with would not lift, and when Laura’s summer holidays came Dr Farquhar advised that she should be responsible for all the housework and all the cooking, taking this burden at least from her mother. Had it not been for the postwar effort that was still required of everyone, he would have stipulated total rest for her mother, three months simply doing nothing. And he knew that ends had to be made to meet.
So Laura cooked her mother’s meals and her own, and Hoovered the rooms of their cottage. She made her mother rest on Sundays, bringing her trays in bed. She was conscientious about taking the wet battery of the wireless to be recharged once a week, she weeded the garden and transplanted the lettuce plants. All the time she cherished the hope that at the end of the summer, even for a week, she might be permitted to visit Margaretta. Her mother was clearly regaining her strength. She stopped spending Sundays in bed and instead sat in the garden. By mid-August she began to do the cooking again.
Letters from Margaretta asked if there was any chance, but in Anstey Rye Ireland was not mentioned. Instead, Laura’s mother spoke of their straitened circumstances this year: because of her pneumonia, she had not earned as much for those few months as she might have; ends had not yet begun to meet again. So Laura wrote to Margaretta, explaining.
Isn’t it strange, Margaretta herself wrote, long after that summer had passed and Laura’s mother had entirely recovered, that there should have been two invalids, your mother and Ralph de Courcy? Her handwriting was less wild than once it had been, her spelling much improved. My father says he’s only slowly mending. And in a daydream Laura allowed herself to pretend that it was he she had looked after, carrying trays up the curving staircase, carrying cushions to a chair in the garden. She wondered if she’d ever see that house again, and Sergeant Barry at the gate-lodge. Isn’t Linda Darnell beautiful? Margaretta wrote. I’d love to look like that. Have you seen Tortilla Flat?
In 1948 Laura went again to Ireland. Katie had married Wiry Bohan and had had a baby. There was a new maid with Eileen in the kitchen, Mattie Devlin’s daughter, Josie. The shopkeepers said Laura was getting prettier all the time, but Laura knew that it was Margaretta who was the beautiful one and always would be, her marvellous hair and her headstrong manner that Laura admired so. She’d been going to a boarding-school ever since Laura had last visited the Heaslips, the one in Bray where Mrs Heaslip and Laura’s mother had met. ‘You’re better looking than Linda Darnell,’ Laura said, meaning it.
They were too shy to cycle to the de Courcys’ house. They didn’t realize at first that such a shyness had developed in them, but when they talked about that warm day two summers ago they realized that they could not attempt to repeat it. Two children, with white socks and straw hats, had cycled up the avenue, chattering and giggling: it would be awkward now. But one evening, watching Thunder Rock at the De Luxe, they saw Ralph de Courcy two rows in front of them, with a blonde-haired girl. ‘You’re never Margaretta and Laura?’ he said when the film had come to an end and they met him face to face in the aisle.
‘Yes,’ Laura said, aware that she reddened as she spoke. When she glanced at Margaretta she saw that she had reddened also.
‘This is a sister of mine,’ he introduced. ‘Hazel.’
Margaretta said:
‘I think I met you, Hazel, years ago when we were kids.’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘This is my friend Laura.’
‘I’ve heard about the day you both came to see us, when we were all at Punchestown except Ralph.’
‘You never came again,’ he chided, through the smile that was always there. ‘You said you would, you know.’
‘Laura didn’t stay with us last year.’
‘You could have come on your own.’
Margaretta laughed, blushing again.
‘That was really an appalling film,’ he said. ‘A waste of money.’
‘Yes,’ Laura agreed, although she did not think so. ‘Yes, it was.’
The de Courcys had driven to town in a car powered by propane gas, a relic of the emergency. To Laura and Margaretta it looked like any other car except for an attachment at the back. Although the night was warm, Ralph put on a muffler and an overcoat before taking his place at the driver’s wheel. Unlike her mother, Laura thought, he was not totally well again.
‘Come and play tennis one day,’ his sister invited. ‘Come in the morning and stay to lunch.’
‘Come on Friday,’ he said.
‘My husband is an eye specialist,’ Laura says in the cathedral.
‘Mine makes radio components.’
Margaretta had remained in the town, marrying Shulmann, who had set up his factory there in 1955. Shulmann was with her in Siena, resting now in their pensione. Their three children are grown up.
‘I guessed you would have married,’ Laura says.
‘And I you.’
What does the eye-specialist look like? Is Shulmann thin or fat? Laura remembers Margaretta’s hair on the pillow, spread out in the moonlight, and Margaretta saying that the smell in the De Luxe Picture House was of hot celluloid and cigarette-butts, and how they giggled because they’d considered Sergeant Barry comic. How different would their lives have been if the friendship had continued? Some instinct tells her as they stand there among the tourists that their friendship in its time went deeper than the marriages they have mentioned. She sees them on their bicycles, and the curiosity of Sergeant Barry passing from their sandals and their white socks to their beribboned straw hats. ‘Ludmilla’, Margaretta says on the pink-striped sofa. Is friendship more fragile, Laura wonders, the more precious it is? And Margaretta reflects that in the thirty-eight years that have passed the friendship might have made a difference in all sorts of ways. They are tourists like the others now, strangers among strangers.
They rode over early on the Friday of the tennis party, but as they arrived at the de Courcys’ house rain began to fall. Other people were there, friends of Hazel de Courcy who had also come to play tennis but who now stood about forlornly because the rain persisted. Then someone suggested whist and the occasion became a different one from the occasion the visitors had anticipated. The fire blazed in the drawing-room, there was tea and Marietta biscuits at eleven o’clock, and lunch at one; there was tea and cake, with bread and butter and scones, at four. Ralph de Courcy rested after lunch, but soon appeared again. He talked to Margaretta alone, questioning her about the boarding-school at Bray, about the buildings and the playing-fields and the food. He asked her if she was happy there.
‘Oh, it’s all right,’ Margaretta replied, and she described the big assembly hall that was known as the ballroom because that was what it had been before the house became a school. A draughty conservatory served as the senior lounge; cold, gaunt dormitories contained rows of beds, each with its narrow pine cupboard and wash-stand. The two headmistresses were sisters, in tweed skirts and jumpers on which necklaces bounced. The food was inedible.
‘Poor Margaretta,’ he murmured.
She was about to say it wasn’t as awful as it sounded but changed her mind because his sympathy was pleasant. He said he Would think of her at the school, eating the inedible food, being polite to the headmistresses. She felt a shiver of warmth, in her head or her body, she wasn’t sure which: a delicious sensation that made her want to close her eyes.
‘It’ll be lovely for me,’ Ralph de Courcy said, ‘being able to imagine you there, Margaretta.’
The rain ceased after tea but the tennis court was too sodden by now to permit play that day, and soon afterwards the party broke up. Hardly speaking at all – not once commenting as they might have on Hazel de Courcy’s friends – the
girls cycled back to the town, and when Dr Heaslip asked at supper how Ralph de Courcy had seemed neither at first replied. Then Margaretta said that he was quite recovered from his illness, even though he’d had his usual rest. Every day he was recovering a little more. Soon he would be just like anyone else, she said.
Laura cut her ham and salad into tiny shreds, not wanting to hear anything in the dining-room in case it impinged on what the day already meant to her. The sun had been warm during their ride back from the de Courcys’ house; the damp fields and hedges had acquired a beauty as if in celebration of what had happened. ‘Shall we write to one another?’ he had suggested in the moments when they’d been alone. He had asked her about England, about Anstey Rye and her mother. He smiled more than ever while he spoke, making her feel complimented, as if smiling was natural in her presence.
‘I didn’t know till now,’ Margaretta said a few days later, ‘that I fell in love with him the first time we rode out there.’
They were walking together on a dull road, just beyond the town. Margaretta did not add that he’d asked her about her school, that he had been interested in all that ordinary detail so that he could picture her there that autumn. She refrained from this revelation because she knew that Laura was in love with him also. Laura had not said so but you could see, and it would hurt her horribly to know that he had asked – passionately almost – about the gaunt dormitories and the ballroom that had become an assembly hall.
‘Well, of course,’ Laura said, ‘he’s very nice.’
There was nothing else she could say. Bidding her goodbye, he had clasped her hand as though he never wanted to let it go. His deep, brown eyes had held hers in a way she knew she would never forget; she was certain he had almost kissed her. ‘Are you good at secrets?’ he had asked. ‘Are you, Laura?’ She had only nodded in reply, but she’d known that what he meant was that all this should be kept between themselves, and she intended to honour that.
‘I simply think he’s a marvellous person,’ Margaretta said, possessively.
‘Oh, yes, of course.’
Already it was September, and they did not speak of him again. Laura within a week returned to England and a few, days after that Margaretta began another term at the boarding-school in Bray.
I see you so very clearly, he wrote. I think of you and wonder about you. I’ll never forget our being in the garden that day, I sometimes imagine I can still taste the tinned soup we had for lunch. Whatever can you have thought of me, going away to rest like that? Was it rude? Please write and tell me it wasn’t rude and that you didn’t mind. I rested, actually, with your face beside me on the cushion.
He did not beg for love in vain, and in Bray and Buckinghamshire they exulted in their giving of it, though both felt saddened that in their own communications, one to another, they did not mention Ralph de Courcy or his letters. I was glad when it rained because, actually, I don’t play much tennis. Oh, heavens, how I should love to be walking with you beneath the beech trees! Did you think I was at death’s door that first day – the day when I said to myself you were an angel sent to me? When we met in the De Luxe it was marvellous. Was it for you? Please write. I love your letters.
In Bray and Buckinghamshire they loved his letters also. They snatched at them impatiently: from the letter table in the senior lounge, from the hallstand in Anstey Rye. They bore them away to read in private, to savour and learn by heart. They kept them hidden but close at hand, so that when the yearning came they could raise them to their lips. Shall I come and see you in the holidays? Margaretta wrote. Or could you drive over in your father’s gas contraption and maybe we’d go to the De Luxe? I can’t wait till the holidays, to tell the truth. December the 16th.
These suggestions provoked a swift response. Their friendship was a secret. If Margaretta came to the de Courcys’ house would they be able to disguise it beneath the eye of the family? Of all absurd things, the family might mention strain, and a visit to the picture house was out of the question. Dear Margaretta, we must wait a little while yet. Please wait. Please let’s just write our letters for the moment.
But Margaretta, on the 18th of that December, was unable to prevent herself from cycling out of the town in the direction of the de Courcys’ house. It was a cold morning, with frost heavy on the hedges and beautifully whitening the fields. All she wanted was a single glimpse of him.
I cannot tell you the confusion it caused, he wrote, weeks later, to Laura, and how great the unhappiness has been for me. It was so sad because she looked bulky and ridiculous in the trousers she had put on for cycling. They thought she was a thief at least. Why on earth did she come?
Sergeant Barry found her among the rhododendrons and led her, weeping, to the house. ‘Goodness, Margaretta!’ Hazel de Courcy exclaimed in the hall while Margaretta tried to pull herself together. She said she’d just been passing by.
She seemed a different person from the girl who’d first come here with you, but that was perhaps because you were with her then. No one knew what to say when she stood there in the hall. I turned away and went upstairs. What else could I do?
Margaretta rode miserably back to the house in the square. She wrote immediately, apologizing, trying to explain, but her letter elicited no reply. She was unable to eat properly all the holidays, unable in any way to comfort herself. No letter arrived at the boarding-school in Bray. No letter, ever again, arrived for Margaretta from Ralph de Courcy.
Oafish, my sister said, and although it’s hard I thought the same. Not beautiful in the least, her cheeks all red and ugly. I had never thought Margaretta was stupid before.
Laura was hurt by this description of her friend, and she wished she might have sent her a line of consolation. Poor Margaretta had ridden out that day with no companion to lend her courage, and to everyone in the de Courcys’ house it must have been obvious that she was a lovesick girl. But by the summer she would have recovered, and Laura could gently tell her then that she and Ralph loved one another, because secrets could not remain secrets for ever.
But the summer, when it came, was not like that. In the February of that year Laura had become upset because her letters from Ralph de Courcy had ceased. A month later she received a note from Margaretta. I thought I’d better tell you. Ralph de Courcy died.
That summer, Margaretta and Laura were sixteen; and Mr Hearne, who had survived his years as a black-marketeer, was once again an ordinary butcher. ‘Women and meat won’t take squeezing,’ he said, eyeing the girls with lasciviousness now. At the De Luxe Picture House they saw Blithe Spirit and Green for Danger. Laura asked about Ralph de Courcy’s grave.
‘God knows where it is,’ Margaretta replied. ‘He could be buried under a road for all I care.’
‘We liked him.’
‘He was cheap.’
‘He’s dead, Margaretta.’
‘I’m glad he’s dead.’
Still Margaretta had not told her about her cycle ride on that bitter morning. She offered no explanation for this violent change of heart, so Laura asked her.
‘Well, something happened if you must know.’
She related all of it, telling how she had begun to receive letters from Ralph de Courcy, how they had come, two and three a week sometimes, to the boarding-school at Bray.
‘I didn’t mean any harm, Laura. All I wanted was a glimpse of him. Of course I should have gone at night, but how could I? Nine miles there and nine miles back?’
Laura hardly heard. ‘Letters?’ she whispered in a silence that had gathered. ‘Love letters, you mean?’
The conversation took place in Margaretta’s bedroom. She unlocked a drawer in her dressing-table and produced the letters she spoke of, tied together with a piece of red string.
‘You can read them,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind.’
I rested, actually, with your face beside me on the cushion. In Laura’s own bedroom, among the love letters she had so sadly and so fondly brought with her to Ireland, were those words
also. I said to myself you were an angel sent to me.
‘What kind of love was it,’ Margaretta cried, ‘that could evaporate in a second? Just because I made a mistake?’
The letters were returned to the dressing-table drawer, the key turned in the lock, the key itself secreted beneath a frilled cloth. Laura, catching a reflection of herself in the dressing-table looking-glass, saw that she had turned as white as powder. She felt weak, and imagined that if she stood up she would faint.
‘I don’t know why I keep his old letters,’ Margaretta said. ‘I honestly don’t know.’
That it had been Margaretta and not she who had been foolish was no consolation for Laura. That it was she, not Margaretta, to whom he had written for longer, until the day before his death, was none either. His protestations of passion seemed like mockery now.
‘Except I suppose,’ said Margaretta, ‘that I went on loving him. I always will.’
And I, too, thought Laura. She would love him in spite of the ugly pain she felt, in spite of not understanding why he had behaved so. Had two girls’ longing simply been more fun than one’s? Had he been as cruel as that?
‘I have a headache,’ she said, ‘I think I’ll lie down for a little.’
The days that followed were as unbearable for Laura as the days that followed her foolishness had been for Margaretta. Dr Heaslip said twice that their guest was looking peaky; she did her best to smile, ‘It’s all right, really,’ Margaretta reassured her, assuming that Laura’s lowness was a kind of sympathy. ‘It’s over now. He’s dead and gone.’
He was buried in a country churchyard a mile or so from the de Courcys’ house: that much at least Laura had elicited from Margaretta. One early morning, as dawn was just beginning to glimmer, she let herself out of the tall wooden doors through which Matt Devlin every day drove Dr Heaslip’s car, arid cycled out into the countryside. Trees that were at first only shadows acquired foliage as dawn advanced, hedges and fields softened into colour, stone walls and gates offered again the detail that night had claimed. Around the churchyard, rooks were noisy, and on the grave of Ralph de Courcy there were fresh flowers that Laura knew were Margaretta’s, conveyed there secretly also. She picked honeysuckle and laid it on the earth above his head. She knelt and spoke his name; she repeated what so often she had written in her letters. She couldn’t help loving him in spite of still not understanding.
The Collected Stories Page 144