‘It wasn’t . . .’ His voice was thick and he cleared his throat. ‘It wasn’t a situation I sought, or that I was happy with.’
‘I’d seen her before, did you know that? I don’t mean on stage. Years ago when we were holidaying on Ailmay. I had no idea who she was then, but hers isn’t a face one forgets.’
‘No.’
‘My only comfort is that she is so different. Different from me. At least I’ve retained my – what shall we say? – my individuality.’
He was suddenly exhausted by her cleverness, her precision, the way she was laying his life out before him like tarot cards.
‘Sian . . . please.’
‘One thing I would be interested to know. How does she feel? She doesn’t strike me as a woman likely to be satisfied with second best. Has she put you under pressure? If she meant so much to you, why didn’t you tell me?’
He considered the answer to this last question. ‘I don’t know. She’s extremely independent. And also . . .’ He fumbled for the words, which she in the end supplied.
‘You thought it best to hang on to what you’d got. It’s all right, Robert, there isn’t a single thing that’s new in any of this. Extraordinary how the old cliché comes up fresh when it’s we who are experiencing it, isn’t it?’ She turned her head and gazed out of the window for a moment. ‘But given all that . . . we must decide what’s best to do.’
He wanted, for his own sake more than hers, to tell her that it was over; that Stella had taken herself away from him. But keeping that to himself was his last shot at dignity, like a screen anti-hero concealing, honourably, a fatal wound.
‘We obviously need to be apart. At least for a while.’
‘No.’ She shook her head as it getting rid of a fly. ‘It should be one thing or the other.’
He had lived for so long with her calm detachment, it was shocking to realise what had been running beneath the surface like an underground stream.
‘Shall I go now?’
Gradually, with this brief exchange of words, the ball that had been thrown so high was returning to earth, bouncing lower and more swiftly, finding its eventual resting place.
‘I think—’ she closed her eyes momentarily, a slow blink ‘—I think that would be precipitate. I mean, you would need to pack. To think, and so on.’
He knew what she meant. To say goodbye.
They had supper, taking things from the fridge and the cupboards and assembling them with unconscious teamwork. Cheese on that plate, tomatoes in this, the small dish of black olives from last night, butter for him, low-fat spread for her, another glass, a can of beer, a bottle of water, a loaf of bread, apples . . . There was a sacramental air about the putting together of this, their last supper under the old dispensation. They were quiet, and Sian turned on the radio and allowed the harmonious conversation of chamber music to ease the silence.
Over supper they spoke of family matters – of Seppi and his wife Denise, and Natalie and the children, and about the house to which they had planned improvements. It was as if they had opened a long-closed box and were taking out the small objects that it contained one by one, gazing at them and turning them over in their hands to reacquaint themselves with the shape and texture before replacing them carefully. Robert thought, A shared life is so fragile and yet so durable, like human hair or spider’s web. It can withstand so much, and then the merest touch breaks it.
Towards the end of their meal the telephone rang and Sian went into the drawing room to answer it. He had scruples about leaving his plate, glass and cutlery in the dishwasher for another day, and so washed up their few things by hand, and put them away before making coffee. He reflected on Sian’s admission that she had seen Stella before, on Ailmay. That must have been the cold early spring that he had heard Stella sing in the pub and boldly said that. Yes, he was there. So the seeds of this day had been sown in all three lives at the same time, and now all three lives were separating again, one from another. It was impossible not to see it as a story, with a desolate completeness.
He took the coffee into the drawing room, where she was still on the phone. He poured each of them a cup, put hers down at her elbow and took his into the study. He had no paperwork to speak of, but the sudden fastidiousness that had prompted him to wash up meant that he did not wish to sit with the newspaper, waiting for her to finish her conversation.
The study was a big room at the side of the house, with a window overlooking the small front garden and the street. Sian’s area was perfectly tidy and ordered: his was chaotic. On her table her computer waited tranquilly, a dove floating and turning in slow motion on the dark, sleeping screen. On his lay an ugly slew of open and unanswered mail, papers, brochures, prospectuses, his laptop sullenly shut, a half-eaten bar of chocolate, a pottery mug full of chewed biros and felt-tips. It looked like not so much the desk of an untidy worker, as of a transient one – the detritus of a person disinclined to settle. Now, he thought, I should sort this out.
He began tidying, at speed – throwing away sheaves of paper, moving others aside for closer inspection. The curtains weren’t drawn and he caught sight of his reflection in the darkened window: a strange, frantic figure, a man in flight, at home nowhere. His longing to speak to Stella was so strong that he actually picked up the phone, only to hear the voice of Sian’s senior partner, and her crisp: ‘We shan’t be long’. Quaking with unhappiness he banged the receiver back and clasped his hands behind his head, his face clamped between his arms. The pain swelled and heaved around in him, his temples throbbed with it, his stomach contracted. It was like a birth.
‘So after the triumph,’ said George, ‘what now? Time off for good behaviour?’
‘Something like that.’
Stella was reluctant to tell her secret. Not that she wished to broadcast it widely at such an early stage, but having decided, for moral support’s sake, to let George into her confidence, she found it difficult to do so. The reason was that while she’d kept it to herself all things had seemed possible. She might tell Robert, he might find out, he might simply storm back into her life and demand to know what was going on. She was dismayed to have uncovered this streak of unreconstructed pre-feminism in herself: perhaps it was pregnancy and its associated hormone-rush that made her so long to be overtaken by events. Or maybe – and this was something she only allowed herself to regard fearfully, at dead of night, from the corner of her eye – maybe she wanted his unconditional, overwhelming love more than anything, ever, in her life before. She had thrown down the gauntlet of her decision in the hope that by some mysterious telepathic means he would know, and come forward to pick it up. Having distanced him so throughly, sheer stubborn pride prevented her from giving an inch.
She was spending the weekend with George and Brian. On Saturday Brian (having taken the golden bowler and a job in human resources) had a course in Cirencester and the older children were not due out from their respective boarding schools until Sunday, so the two sisters had a day to themselves with three-year-old Zoe. The family had moved a few months earlier to the converted stable block of a large, rundown country house. The stable block was nicely enough done by a smart local builder, but it was the house itself, with its faded and neglected English beauty, that spoke to Stella.
In the afternoon they went for a walk around the unsympathetic post-and-wire fence that marked its boundaries.
‘It’s had a chequered history, poor old thing,’ said George in answer to Stella’s question. ‘In the dim and distant it was owned by a family called Latimer, there’s scads of them memorialised in the local church. Then as I understand it it was a convalescent home in the first world war, some sort of lunatic fringe experimental school in the twenties and thirties, and requisitioned by the army in the second war. Since when it’s fallen on hard times rather, as you can see.’
‘So who lives there now?’
‘It’s actually owned by the council and they let it to the Prior Foundation. No, I’d never heard of
them either, but they run arts courses. All nice people, what we see of them, but I don’t know whether it’s a long-term arrangement or whether some beady-eyed moneybags that we wot not of is waiting in the wings ready to turn it into a country club or worse.’
They were standing about a hundred yards from the house at a point at the junction of the old driveway and the tarmacked Bells Yard development access road. Stella gazed at the brick, amber and grey in this light as a winter sunrise, the ample leaded windows and rugged chimneys. And for an instant she, the quintessential townie, the woman to whom the countryside was a fearsome wilderness, entertained a picture of living in such a place. Zoe was hanging on to the top wire of the fence, legs bent, bobbing and bouncing, and Stella thought: In three years’ time my child will be like that
‘Tubs! Come on, let’s show Stella the wild wood. Tubs—’ George went and retrieved her daughter from the fence and plonked her down between them.
‘Hold my hands!’
‘Only if you promise not to swing, it does my back in.’
‘I promise!’
They each took a hand. Zoe at once began to swing. ‘No’, said George, ‘walk properly, we’re not going far. Why don’t you go and hide behind a tree and see if you can jump out and give us a surprise?’
‘Okay!’ Zoe ran away, George pulled a ‘so-sue-me’ face. Stella thought: Remember this.
‘Our little ray of sunshine,’ said George drily. ‘Our adorable afterthought.’
‘She’s sweet.’
‘But you’re hellish glad she’s not yours.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You don’t have to. The further I travel along the great road of family life the less I seem to know.’
‘You do wonderfully well. Your lot are a credit to you.’
George paused for a moment, eyes wide. ‘Did I hear aright?’
Stella shrugged. ‘These things need saying from time to time.’
‘You’re going soft in your old age . . . Hang on, there she is, prepare to act startled.’
Zoe leapt out from behind a treetrunk and they obliged with an outrageous pantomime of mock terror which was well received and sent her scurrying off to repeat the exercise. They followed her into the wood, along a footpath marked by a post with a yellow arrow.
‘This is part of the grounds,’ explained George, ‘but the council have done the decent thing and preserved the footpath. You can walk all the way down into the village from here, but it’s a steep climb back and I don’t fancy piggy-backing Tubs up the hill.’
The path wound between the trees pleasingly, as if following the footsteps of people who had meandered that way over the years. They didn’t hurry. Zoe darted, and hid, and was distracted by an enormous fungus which demanded that they stop and pay their respects. It stuck out from the side of a treetrunk like a spongy discus embedded in the bark, its pallid upper surface spotted with mould, underside dark and leprous, edges delicately crenellated.
‘It’s humungous!’
‘The perfect word for it,’ agreed Stella.
‘Will it poison me?’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘Only if you take a bite out of it.’ George gave Stella a look. ‘Sorry, no room for discussion on that one.’
Remember this, thought Stella. They walked on.
‘Why Bells?’ she asked.
‘That’s rather nice. Apparently on a still Sunday if the calendar’s right you can hear the bells of seven churches. Though whether that still applies in the age of the group parish and dwindling congregations I couldn’t say. I must test the proposition some time.’
‘We could do it tomorrow.’
‘I suppose we could.’
Stella chose not to notice her sister’s quizzical glance. After another ten minutes in the wood they emerged on the brow of the hill with the village below them to the left and the White Horse opposite.
Stella sat down on the short grass with her arms round her knees. ‘May we gaze?’
‘Good idea. Tubs will be happy, she can orbit the site.’
They sat side by side, facing the horse. It was true – once a halt had been called Zoe seemed to settle, as though their fixed position were a kind of anchor. She pottered about, examining insects and tweaking off flowerheads to make a bunch, talking to herself. Remember this.
George cocked her head on one side. ‘Are we sure it is a horse? I’m no expert but it doesn’t look like any horse I’ve seen. And from what I gather horses in those days would have been sort of squat, with bog-brush manes. Not elegantly prancing steeds.’
‘Mmm . . .’ Stella reflected. ‘It’s a horse of the mind. A fantasy horse.’
‘I shall hold that thought.’
‘This is a lovely place, George.’
‘We like it. But it’s a classic case of falling for the romantic, impractical option.’
‘Is it so impractical?’
‘Oh, you know . . .’George picked a plantain and attempted to fire the head off. ‘Damn, I used to be brilliant at that. No, it’s the position. The kids are approaching the age when I shall be running a non-stop taxi-service to farflung town centres.’
‘But they like it?’
‘She does.’ George nodded at Zoe. ‘The others don’t really think about it. But believe me they will when their social life bites.’
Zoe rejoined them and sat down next to Stella, pressed confidingly against her leg.
‘I’m getting a pony.’
‘Are you?’ Stella glanced at George for confirmation of this.
‘Maybe.’
‘You said!’
‘Probably. It depends.’
‘You always say that.’
‘Because it’s true. Everything depends.’
‘On what?’
‘Everything else.’
This philosophical assertion seemed to bring the exchange to an inevitable, if not a satisfactory, conclusion. She would remember. They sat a while longer, with Zoe affecting moodiness a little way off, and the shadows of high clouds making the horse look as it it lay beneath flowing water. The peacefulness of the moment, the ease between the three of them, the sense of being cradled in the landscape, created a kind of spell that stopped Stella from speaking.
No rush, she thought. No rush.
On Sunday morning, when Brian had gone to collect the children from school, taking Zoe with him, and George was preparing the fatted calf, Stella went to see her parents. George, in her downright way, had made it clear that while they would normally have been invited to lunch as well, this arrangement had the double advantage of pleasing the old while releasing the young from the embarrassment contingent upon dealing with their grandfather on one of their few days out from school.
Mary and Andrew were sitting in the conservatory that was their pride and joy, drinking coffee. The cafetière and milk jug were on a folding tray-table between them. This regular drinking of proper coffee, a commodity previously reserved for visitors and best, was one of several small recent changes instigated by Mary for reasons which Stella suspected had more to do with her own state of mind than her husband’s.
Another of these changes was Andrew’s appearance: George had mentioned it. Their father’s interest in his toilette had been at best sporadic and whimsical, but until relatively recently Mary had allowed him to get himself up and dressed no matter what that entailed in the way of odd socks, inappropriate t-shirts, undone flies and wrongly buttoned cardigans. She who was never less than elegantly turned out herself had exerted iron control in adjusting (with the greatest possible tact) only what was dictated by the need for decency and dignity. Only when the process of dressing in an ordered way became a trial for him did she intervene, and now a happy hour or more each morning was spent on this joint enterprise to the perfect satisfaction of both.
She had not, however, Stella noticed, attempted to impose her taste on her husband. So today where Mary was immaculate in Scotch House chic – a pale blue polo-neck
and grey straight skirt – her husband wore joggers, a white shirt and a maroon sleeveless jumper, all spotlessly washed and pressed.
Mary sprang up and embraced her. ‘Stella – lovely! Look, I even brought an extra cup just in case.’
‘What’s with the just in case? I said I was coming.’
‘Yes, but I never take anything for granted. Darling, it’s Stella.’
‘I can see that.’
‘Hallo, Dad.’ She stooped to kiss him, noticing with a pang that his hair had been cut too. Mary had always performed this task, but never been allowed to take much off. In this one area she had not been able to resist indulging herself. The shorter cut made him look younger.
‘How’s life?’ he asked.
‘Oh, fine.’ She took her coffee. ‘I’m down staying with George and Brian for the weekend.’
‘Good show.’
‘Speaking of which,’ said Mary, ‘the run’s ended?’
‘Yes.’
‘So will you get a bit of a break now?’
‘As long as I want, really, boredom and the bank manager permitting.’
‘Shall you take a proper holiday? Can you take off somewhere nice with friends?’ This was one of those questions which displayed a certain quixotic hopefulness in her mother’s attitude. The ‘with friends’ reference was a tactful, if wistful, assumption that there was no one special. Mary had never been a parent who weighed her children down with force of expectation, but occasionally Stella was aware that what she most wished for them was to be happy, in the straightforward way of her own experience. In the case of George this might seem, on the face of it, to have been achieved, but in Stella’s it was more complicated. And at this moment, more complicated than they could possibly imagine.
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