This letter is special, of course, because of Grace’s death. Others have been different. Grace and I wondered how you are getting along these days … Grace and I have finally taken retirement … I’m to give you this address Grace says. Just in case you ever want to write … A seaside house. Grace always wanted that … In 1985, in 1978 and ’73 and ’69, Grace always had a kind of say. A quick lunch some time? each letter – this one too – suggests before the As ever my love and the single cross that’s a reminder of their kissing. Somehow, Zoë has always believed, the quick-lunch suggestion came from Grace. Did she, she wonders, make it again on her deathbed?
The affair has developed in Zoë an extra sense. Without making an effort she can visualise a tall woman she has never met, now the lone occupant of a house she has never entered. She sees her smartly dressed in shades of maroon, iron-grey hair fashionably arranged, the clarity of her eyes a little clouded. Creases have multiplied on the skin of her face and are a map of wrinkles now. Zoë imagines her entering her kitchen and turning on the radio, to hear the same news she herself heard earlier: football fans on the rampage in a German city, shop windows smashed, a bus turned on its side. She imagines her standing with a cup of Nescafé in the bow-window of her sitting-room: seen through drizzle on a pane, the sea’s a pattern of undulations, greyish green, scuffed with white. The sky that meets it on the far horizon is too dull to contemplate. A single mackerel-trawler slips into view.
If it’s inconvenient or if you’d rather not well of course I understand.
The Alp Horn is where they lunch, have done so since 1951. Her inquisitiveness getting the better of her, Zoë went there once. She actually went inside, giving a name she had made up, of someone she was to meet there. A musical instrument, presumably an alp-horn, stretched the length of a wall; Tyrolean landscape decorated two others. There were checked tablecloths, blue and red; recorded music played; the place was modest. I’m awfully sorry,’ Zoë said to a waiter, half a lifetime ago it seems like because in fact it is. ‘Clearly there’s been a muddle.’
She finds the Pritt where Charles keeps it, in the middle drawer of the dresser, with his writing things and sealing-wax, Sellotape and scissors. She boils the water in the kettle again, for coffee. She hears his footstep above her, crossing the landing from their bedroom to the lavatory, crossing it again to the bathroom. Pipes rattle when he turns on the hot water because he has never learnt not to turn the tap all the way in order to prevent its gushing so. All the years she has known him he has been impatient about things like that.
‘It’s time you saw Charles again,’ Zoë knows Grace used to say in that house, and guesses Audrey’s reply: that Charles has his own life now, that Charles made his choice. Grace always pressed, gently, because she loved Charles, too, but had to keep it to herself. ‘My dear, I’m certain Charles would welcome a sign.’ Anything could have happened: they’d never know.
Forty years have passed since the year of the great passion: 1951. Charles and Audrey and Grace had met in that colourless time of disaffected lives and utility clothes when nobody was having much fun except the remaining spivs. Audrey and Grace had been in the ATS during the war, together all the time. When Charles arrived on the scene they were back in office life, both of them determined to use their secretarial posts as stepping-stones to something better. The day Charles appeared – the first time they laid eyes on him – he was being led around by the snooty, half-drunk Miss Maybury, both of them with glasses of vin rosé, which was what La Maybury – her office title – drank every afternoon, sometimes in the mornings also. ‘Hullo,’ Charles said, a lanky young man with floppy fair hair. It wasn’t difficult for Zoë to imagine the shy smile he’d darted at Audrey and then at Grace. Afterwards he’d told her about La Maybury and the wine and the tour round the office.
‘Poor Charles’ he had become in after years. Poor Charles alone with his unloved, unloving wife. What was the point of any of it, now that his children were grown up? In their seaside house they lived in hope – that one day he would sound less whispery on the telephone, passing on details of death by misadventure or disease. ‘Given six months, a merciful release.’ Or: ‘Just slipped. A wretched plastic bag. In the rain, near the dustbins.’
Zoë places two slices of bread in the toaster but does not press the lever down because it isn’t time to yet. Before the affair got going it had been a subject of fascination to him that two such apparently close friends should, in appearance at least, be so vastly different. ‘Oh, that’s often so,’ Zoe said, citing examples from her schooldays, but he had never shown much interest in her schooldays and he didn’t then. ‘Grace, the lumpy one’s called,’ he said. ‘Back of a bus. Audrey’s the stunner.’ Old-fashioned names, she had thought, and imagined old-fashioned girls, frumpish in spite of Audrey’s looks. Later, he’d always included Grace in his references to Audrey, clouding the surface because of the depths beneath.
She measures coffee into a blue Denby pot, the last piece of a set. There was a photograph she found once, Audrey as handsome as he’d claimed, a goddess-like creature with a cigarette, Grace blurred, as if she’d moved. They were sprawled on a rug beside a tablecloth from which a picnic had been eaten. You could see part of the back wheel of a car and it wasn’t difficult to sharpen into focus Grace’s frizzy hair, two pink-rimmed eyes behind her spectacles. Where on earth had that picnic been? What opportunity had been seized – a slack afternoon in the office?
Zoë props the letter against his cup, doing so with deliberation. It will vex him that she has arranged it so, the gesture attaching a comment of her own; but then she has been vexed herself. She tore that photograph into little pieces and watched them burn. He never mentioned its loss, as naturally he wouldn’t.
‘Ah, good,’ she greets him, and watches while he picks the letter up. She depresses the lever of the toaster. The milk saucepan rattles on the gas, a glass disc bouncing about in it to prevent the milk from boiling over. She pours their coffee. He returns the letter to its envelope. She halves each piece of toast diagonally, the way he likes it.
She hadn’t guessed. It was a frightening, numbing shock when he said: “Look, I have to tell you. Audrey and I have fallen in love.’ Just for a moment she couldn’t think who Audrey was. ‘Audrey and I,’ he repeated, thinking she hadn’t properly heard. ‘Audrey and I love one another.’ For what remained of that year and for several years following it, Zoë felt physically sick every time that statement echoed, coming back to her from its own Sunday morning: September 9th, 1951, eleven o’clock. He had chosen the time because they’d have all day to go into things, yet apart from practicalities there was nothing to go into. You couldn’t much go into the fact that he wanted someone else more than he wanted her. After five years of marriage he was tired of her. He had spoken in order to be rid of her.
Finishing with the marmalade, she moves it closer to him. His face, less expert at disguise than once it was, hides nothing. She watches him thinking about the woman who has been left on her own, his sympathy reaching into a seaside house that’s now too spacious for one. But Charles is not an imaginative man. He doesn’t penetrate far. He doesn’t see in the old flame’s fridge a chicken joint for one, and fish for one tomorrow. Winter’s a melancholy time to be bereaved, a mood reflected in the cold and wet, winds rattling and whining. Audrey’ll miss her friend particularly when it comes to watching television, no one beside her to share a comment with.
‘Oh yes, the Alp Horn’s still there,’ Zoë hears a little later that morning, having eased open a door he has carefully closed. ‘Twelve forty-five, should we say? If your train’s a little late, anything like that, please don’t worry. I’ll simply wait, my dear.’
He’d been saying something she hadn’t managed to hear before that, his voice unnaturally low, a hand cupped round the mouthpiece. Then there’d been the hint of a reprimand because the old flame hadn’t written sooner. Had he known he’d have gone to the funeral.
‘I’m sorr
y to have hurt you so,’ he said later that Sunday, but words by then made no sense whatsoever. Five years of a mistake, she thought, two children mistakenly born. Her tears dripped on to her clothes while he stood there crestfallen, his good looks distorted by distress. She did not blow her nose; she wanted to look as she felt. ‘You would like me dead,’ she sobbed, willing him to raise his fist in fury at her, to crash it down on her, obliterating in mercy all that remained of her. But he only stood there, seeming suddenly ill-fed. Had she not cooked properly for him? Her thoughts half-crazily ran on. Had she not given him what was nourishing? ‘I thought we were happy,’ she whispered. ‘I thought we didn’t need to question anything.’
‘Nice to see the old Alp Horn again,’ his murmur comes from the hall, and Zoë can tell that he’s endeavouring to be cheerful. ‘Tell you what, I’ll bring a packet of Three Castles.’
There is the click of the receiver, the brief sounding of the bell. He says something to himself, something like ‘Poor thing!’ Zoë softly closes the door. Grace and Audrey had probably been friends for fifty years, might even have been schoolfriends. Was Audrey the one whom other girls had pashes on? Was Grace a little bullied? Zoë imagines her hunched sulkily into a desk, and Audrey standing up for her. In letters and telephone conversations there have been references to friends, to holidays in Normandy and Brittany, to bridge, to Grace’s colonic irrigation, to Audrey’s wisdom teeth removed in hospital. Zoë knows – she doesn’t often call it guessing – that after Audrey’s return from every visit to the Alp Horn Grace was greedy for the morsels passed on to her. Not by the blink of an eye could Grace reveal her secret; the only expression of her passion was her constancy in urging another letter. We think of you with her in that coldness. ‘Quite frail he looked,’ Audrey no doubt reported in recent years.
He did not stay with Zoë in 1951 because of love. He stayed because – quite suddenly, and unexpectedly – the emotions all around him seemed to have become too much: it was weariness that caused him to back off. Had he sensed, Zoë wondered years later, the shadow of Grace without entirely knowing that that was what it was? He stayed, he said, because Zoë and the two children who had then been born meant more than he had estimated. Beneath this statement there was the implication that for the sake of his own happiness it wasn’t fair to impose hardship on the innocent. That, though unspoken, had a bitter ring for Zoë. ‘Oh, go away!’ she cried. ‘Go to that unpleasant woman.’ But she did not insist, she did not say there was nothing left, that the damage had been done for ever. To the woman, he quoted his economic circumstances as the reason for thinking again. Supporting two households – which in those days was what the prospect looked like – was more than daunting. Grace says you wouldn’t have to leave your children penniless. What she and I earn could easily make up for that. Grace would love to help us out. Had he gone, Grace would somehow have been there too.
Zoë knows when the day arrives. Glancing across their breakfast coffee at her, his eyes have a dull sparkle that’s caused by an attempt to rekindle an obsolete excitement: he was always one to make an effort. In a letter once Audrey referred to his ‘loose-limbed charm’, stating that she doubted she could live without it and be herself. He still has that lanky look, which perhaps was what she meant; what remains of his floppy fair hair, mainly at the back and sides of his head, is ash-coloured now; his hands – which Zoë can well imagine either Grace or Audrey designating his most elegant feature – have a shrivelled look, the bones more pronounced than once they were, splotches of freckles on skin like old paper. His face is beakier than it was, the teeth for the most part false, his eyes given to watering when a room is warm. Two spots of pink come and go high up on his narrow cheeks, where the structure of the cheekbones tautens the skin. Otherwise, his face is pale.
‘I have to go in today,’ he casually announces.
‘Not here for lunch?’
‘I’ll pick up a sandwich somewhere.’
She would like to be able to suggest he’d be wiser to go to a more expensive restaurant than the Alp Horn. Cheap food and house wine are a deadly combination at his time of life. A dreadful nuisance it is when his stomach goes wrong.
‘Bit of shopping to do,’ he says.
Once there was old so-and-so to meet but that doesn’t work any more because, with age, such figures can’t be counted upon not to give the game away. There was ‘the man at Lloyd’s’ to see, or Hanson and Phillips, who were arranging an annuity. All that has been tapped too often: what’s left is the feebleness of shopping. Before his retirement there was no need to mention anything at all.
‘Shopping,’ she says without an interrogative note. ‘Shopping.’
‘One or two things.’
Three Castles cigarettes are difficult to find. Audrey will smoke nothing else and it’s half a joke that he goes in search of them, a fragment of affection in the kaleidoscope of the love affair. Another such fragment is their shared delight in sweetbreads, a food Zoë finds repellent. They share unpunctuality also. Grace can’t understand how we ever manage to meet!
‘Should keep fine,’ he predicts.
Take your umbrella all the same.’
‘Yes, I’ll take my umbrella.’
He asks about a particular shirt, his blue striped one. He wonders if it has been ironed. She tells him where it is. Their three children – the boys, and Cecilia, born later, all married now – know nothing about Audrey. Sometimes it seems odd to Zoë that this should be so, that a person who has featured so profoundly in their father’s life, should be unknown to them. If that person had had her way Cecilia would not have been born at all.
‘Anything you need?’ he offers. ‘Anything I can get you?’
She shakes her head. She wishes she could say: ‘I open her letters. I listen when there’s a phone conversation.’
She wishes he could tell her that Grace has died, that his friend is now alone.
‘Back about four, I expect?’
‘Something like that.’
Had he gone off, she wouldn’t still be in this house. She wouldn’t be sitting in this kitchen in her scarlet-dragon dressing-gown, eying him in his woolly brown one. She’d be living with one of the children or in a flat somewhere. Years ago the house would have been sold; she’d not have grown old with a companion. It was most unlikely there would ever have been another man; she doubted she’d have wanted one.
‘I dreamed we were on a ferry going to Denmark,’ he unexpectedly says. ‘There was a woman you got talking to, all in brown.’
‘Prettily in brown?’
‘Oh, yes. A pretty woman, too. She used an odd expression. She said she was determined to have what she called a “corking child”.’
‘Ah.’
You sat me down in front of her and made me comment on her dress. You made me make suggestions.’
‘And did you, Charles?’
‘I did. I suggested shades of green. Deep greens; not olive like my trousers. And rounded collar-ends on her shirt, not pointed like mine. I made her look at mine. She was a nice woman except that she said something a little rude about my shoes.’
‘Scuffed?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Your shoes are never scuffed.’
‘No.’
‘Well, there you are.’
He nods. Yes, there you are.’
Soon after that he rises and goes upstairs again. Why did that conversation about a dream take place? It’s true that just occasionally they tell one another their dreams; just occasionally, they have always done so. But significance appears to attach to the fact that he shared his with her this morning: that is a feeling she has.
‘Why did you bother with me if I didn’t matter?’ Long after he’d decided to stay with her she asked him that. Long afterwards she questioned everything; she tore at the love that had united them in the first place; it was her right that he should listen to her. Five years went by before their daughter was born.
‘Well,
I’m off.’
Like a tall, thin child he looks, his eyes deep in their sockets, his dark, conventional suit well-pressed, a paisley tie in swirls of blue that matches the striped blue shirt. His brown shoes, the pair he keeps for special occasions, gleam as they did not in his eccentric dream.
‘If I’d known I’d have come with you.’ Zoë can’t help saying that; she doesn’t intend to, the words come out. But they don’t alarm him, as once they would have. Once, a shadow of terror would have passed through his features, apprehension spreading lest she rush upstairs to put her coat on.
‘We’ll go in together next time,’ he promises.
Yes, that’ll be nice.’
They kiss, as they always do when they part. The hall door bangs behind him. She’ll open a tin of salmon for lunch and have it with tomatoes and a packet of crisps. A whole tin will be too much, of course, but between them they’ll probably be able to eat whatever’s left this evening.
In the sitting-room she turns the television on. Celeste Holm, lavishly fur-coated, is in a car, cross about something. Zoë doesn’t want to watch and turns it off again. She imagines the old flame excited as the train approaches London. An hour ago the old flame made her face up, but now she does it all over again, difficult with the movement of the train. Audrey doesn’t know that love came back into the marriage, that skin grew over the wound. She doesn’t know, because no one told her, because he cannot bring himself to say that the brief occasion was an aberration. He honours – because he’s made like that – whatever it is the affair still means to the woman whose life it has disrupted. He doesn’t know that Audrey – in receipt of all that was on offer — would have recovered from the drama in a natural way if Grace – in receipt of nothing at all – hadn’t been an influence. He doesn’t wonder what will happen now, since death has altered the pattern of loose ends.
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