by Jane Gardam
She sat down with Sophie at the far end of the table and the booming grew less, then less still and finally stopped. A blessed trickle into the tank could be heard.
He said, ‘Irish plumbing.’ Sophie eating biscuits sidled round to him and watched his fingers and Andy who had been having his bath, which for safety’s sake had been Sophie’s not-run-out, came down again and leaned against Heneker watching the emergence from the plasticine of a fat porcupine on elephant’s legs, armour plated on the stomach and with a rhino’s spike. Sophie coming closer gazed at it with love.
‘Could I have it?’ said Andy.
‘Someone can,’ said Heneker. He put it in the middle of the table with its nose in a bowl of fuchsias.
‘Thirsty,’ said Sophie. ‘Poor pig.’
‘It’s not a pig. It’s a—what is it, Heneker?’
‘It’s a swamp wanderer.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It wanders through swamps. It squelches through bogs. It thunders in roofs—’ They squealed with joy.
‘Now then,’ said Hetty, ‘bedtime.’
Heneker made a roaring and thundering noise. They clung to him. ‘Bedtime,’ Hetty said, hearing her Surrey voice. ‘Now that will do. You’re over-excited. Go to bed.’
‘Oh please—’
‘No. If Daddy were here—’
‘He’s not. Can’t we stay?’
‘Off,’ said Heneker. ‘Quick before the squelcher gets you.’
They fled, Sophie stopping on the bend in the stairs, minute, delectable in a flowery nightgown. ‘You won’t go away? You’ll come back tomorrow?’
‘Yes,’ said Heneker.
She brought coffee to the sitting room where he was sitting in one of the two comfortable, shabby armchairs and watching the crumbling peat fire. Four long windows lit the chintz sofa, the shelves of Lord Thing’s books about fishing and birds. Outside shone the Irish night, black and silver, with long bumpy spars of land running out towards America. Not a sound anywhere, never a light moving along the road. There was the sense that all about the holiday house lay miles of silence, darkness, the ancient mountains inland making a long barricade against the usual world.
Heneker’s face as he sat far back in his chair was in shadow. She put the coffee between them on a stool and leaned back in her chair, too. They did not speak for a long time.
‘It might have been like this,’ he said at last. She felt her heart begin to thump and hung on to the chair. (This is Heneker. Heneker I have thought of every day.)
‘No,’ she said.
He said, ‘Yes. Oh God!’
‘You never asked me,’ she said. ‘Not once.’
‘Well you know why.’
‘I don’t know why.’
‘Oh Hetty—’
‘I don’t know why. I never knew why. I couldn’t ask you. All that year. That room . . . The bed made out of ropes. The roof like a greenhouse and the curtain over the corner.’
‘Where our clothes were.’
‘No. Our clothes were in heaps. Well your clothes were in heaps.’
‘I loved your clothes.’ he said. ‘Always clean and neat. And small. All the buttons were real buttons with proper buttonholes.’
‘I used to gather up yours,’ she said. ‘Like gleaning. A sock here. A shirt there, a shoe on the light.’
‘On the light?’
‘Yes. To dim it down. Very dangerous.’
‘And smelly.’
She laughed.
‘Oh go on,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Laughing,’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten.’
‘And now you’re famous,’ she said, looking up at him. He had stood up, all the long length of him, resting his forehead against his arm on the high chimney piece and looking down at the grey fire. ‘Heneker Mann.’
‘“What a piece of work is Mann.” Have you—?’
‘Yes. I’ve been to all of them.’
‘Exhibitions,’ he said. ‘God knows what they amount to really. I was doing better stuff that year.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You are very much better now.’ (He still says things in order to be contradicted. He knows I will contradict. He knows that I know that he needs to be contradicted. Our thoughts move completely together. They always did. We sit here. We are like Darby and Joan . . . And it’s ten years. He’s wicked still of course. I suppose he’s married, I wonder—)
‘She’s a painter,’ he said to the fire.
Hetty said nothing.
‘She’s a painter, Lady Top-Brass, just a painter.’
‘Well I suppose so. She would have had to be.’
‘No. You know that. All that year you knew.’
‘I didn’t. Anyway, I was a painter.’
‘No. You picked up my clothes. Took the shoe off the light.’
‘Good painters are often tidy. Usually in fact. You must have been reading novels about painters, Heneker.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not tidy like you. The tidiness was growing. It was getting dangerous. It got in the way.’
‘Not often,’ she said. ‘As time went on you weren’t there to see. I tidied round nothing and nobody. You were always out. Later and later. More and more.’
‘You should have painted instead. If you’d painted then, instead of minding and tidying—’ he flung away and looked out of a window at the gigantic sea. ‘God, I missed you.’
One of the children called out upstairs and in a second she was out of her chair and the room and gone. Sophie lay like a seraph, her face lifted to the moonlight but Andy was flinging about in a heap, one arm flailing the air. ‘A spike,’ he cried. ‘Kill it.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Hush. Wake up a minute.’
‘Beast,’ he cried. ‘Thump it.’
‘It’s just a dream,’ she said. ‘You’re asleep. You’re sleeping—remembering the water tank.’
‘Huh!’ he said and, turning into a hump, was asleep again. She stood looking at herself in the glass at the top of the stairs, put back a strand of hair. ‘Thirty-one,’ she thought. ‘Honestly, you wouldn’t think so.’ She felt gloriously happy, drifted back to the sitting room. But Heneker was gone.
‘After all, it was you left me,’ he said.
‘No.’ She folded clothes. The children splashed, called, ‘Heneker! Come and look. Crabs, Heneker!’
‘Soon,’ he said. He sat on a rock with a towel round his neck. She sat a little below him on the sand, his bare brown leg from knee to ankle beside her shoulder as she pushed Andy’s socks into sandals. It was next day, still boiling, still un-Irishly hot.
‘Your parting,’ he said, ‘is very beautiful.’
‘“Was”, I suppose.’
‘No. Is. Your parting now, I mean. In your hair. All the hairs are bending back and shining down each side.’
‘Oh, Heneker.’ (Why is it that when he decides not to touch you it’s as good as other men touching you? Better.) ‘I thought you never liked my hair.’
‘I never said that. Just thought it was—too symmetrical in those days. Over-nice. Better now.’
‘I wasn’t over-nice in the end.’
‘Indeed no,’ said Heneker. ‘It was you left me, as I remarked.’
He slid down off the rock and sat beside her. ‘And got married,’ he said, leaning the back of his head against the rock he had been sitting on, ‘about ten minutes later. God knows all about it I suppose. I didn’t. The boy next door. Number three in The Times. Wedding in Scautland among all the dowdy dowagers. To which I was not invited.’
‘Hardly.’
‘Incidentally, is dowager a derivative? Of dowdy? One should look it up. Will you be a dowager? I’ll marry you.’
‘You’re being cruel.’ She began to get up.
‘STOP!’
The long brown hand, ten years older but as familiar as her own, at last fastened over hers. ‘Stop. Don’t go.’
‘Why the hell shouldn’t I?’
‘Don’t go. With your white, white skin.’
‘If I’m dowdy—’
‘Oh, Het. Shut up.’
They sat on the almost empty strand. Some Dubliners far across were assembling a boat. There were one or two other people. Two fishermen trudged up from the day’s work carrying a plastic bag with heavy fish in it staining the bag with blood. They were dressed in ageless clothes. They had very ancient faces. But for the plastic bag they might have been ghosts. They walked up past Sophie and Andy who were digging a fortress, Sophie patting the top of a Norman keep with a little pink spade. Her forearms were gold.
‘’Tis a beautiful day,’ said the older fisherman as they passed by. ‘You have beautiful children.’ The younger fisherman looked at Hetty. They went on up the beach.
‘I love you so,’ said Heneker.
She pulled hard against his tightening hand.
‘So what did you do?’ she asked in the end.
He was leaning back still with eyes closed.
‘Got married I suppose.’
‘Suppose? You must know. To the one who—to the one you were—’
‘No,’ he said, sitting up. ‘Not her.’
‘Well, to a painter.’
‘Yes. To a bloody good painter if it is of any interest to you.’
Andy came up and flung down crabs. Sophie fell on a squishy thing and cried. Comfort. Handkerchieves. Clothes. Home for lunch and the children’s rest; Heneker back to the pub where he was staying.
‘Will you come up after and do plasticine beasts, Heneker?’
‘Yes, all right, Andy. Half past seven.’
‘I was supposed to be a bloody good painter too.’ She put down the coffee tray again between them, tried to brighten the fire, opened the curtains wider to the evening sea. ‘Until I met you.’
‘That’s what I mean.’
‘You destroyed it.’ She poured the coffee into mugs. ‘That’s all. Anyway you were no good to me. You’re no good to any woman.’
‘Any brown sugar?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘I’d have thought that Lord Thing kept brown sugar for his coffee, Lady Top-Brass. Lady Brass-Tops.’
‘The groceries aren’t in with the rent. They’re provided by me. Well, by Charles. You can’t get demerara in the village—’ she had to stop.
‘Darling,’ he said, coming over and taking her hands. ‘Darling, for God’s sake, don’t. Don’t cry. Whatever—’
‘You’re so bloody cruel. You always were so bloody cruel.’
‘But truthful,’ he said squeezing her hands so that they hurt. ‘Always that. And to no one else. Not truthful like this.’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘Oh, Het. Don’t be cruel back. God, you were always crueller. You know you were, too. You could get in where it hurt. Because you knew— Where’re you going?’
He caught up with her as she reached the hall, at the foot of the stairs beside the telephone which stood in the curl of the banisters—an old-fashioned telephone with a trumpet and a very old wire drooping out of it like a brown string chain. ‘Het,’ he said, grabbing her. The telephone tottered and he caught it and, ‘Marvellous!’ he said, looking at the telephone. ‘God, it’s nice. Like a black daffodil. Does it work?’
She flung off up the stairs leaving him with the telephone next to his heart. ‘I’ll go back to the pub then.’ She answered by closing her bedroom door and heard him walk slowly down the weedy drive between the giant rhubarb, the wilderness of fuchsias, to the great, crumbling gate-posts. Once, twice she heard him stop. Savagely, delightedly, she imagined him looking back at the house all in darkness, her bedroom window dark as all the rest.
‘Don’t move.’
She put an arm across her forehead and looked out under it. He was drawing. ‘Shut your eyes again. Put your arm down, Het.’
After a time she said, ‘Can I open them now? I want to see if the children— I fell asleep.’
‘They’re all right,’ he said. ‘I can see them. They’re shrimping in a pool. I’ve been drawing them, too.’
‘However long have you been here?’
‘About an hour. You were deep asleep. With the red ants walking all over you.’
‘I don’t believe that.’
‘The fishermen had a good look, too.’
‘I didn’t sleep much last night.’
‘You went to bed too soon, Hetty of the white, white skin. Here you are, you never were one to get sunburned.’ He threw the drawing across to her. ‘Hetty Sleeping.’
‘It’s—lovely.’
‘And here’s the children.’ Sophie’s round, firm cheek, a sweep of eye-lash, her wrist still with its foetal crease over the wrist top.
Andy’s long head, clear eyes; another drawing of his head from behind, the heart-breaking tail of hair (left from baby-hood) lying in the dent down the back of the neck.
‘Have you any children, Heneker?’
‘No.’
He got up and loped towards the sea and Sophie and Andy seeing him nearby sprang up to follow. She saw Andy show him something from a pool, Sophie lift her arms to be picked up. Heneker, examining in one hand the object from the pool, swung Sophie up with his other arm onto his shoulder and the three of them stood reflectively together, illuminated, at peace.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Heneker, eating her sandwiches at lunch-time—it was too beautiful a day to go back to the house, too good for the children to waste in resting—‘tomorrow we’ll go to the Clifden Show and see the ponies. We’ll go on the bus.’
‘Whyever the bus?’ she said.
‘To see some people.’
‘Will you draw the people on the bus?’ asked Andy.
‘I might.’
But he didn’t.
They sat in a row on either side of the gangway, Hetty with Andy, Heneker with Sophie who soon got on his knee, and listened to the talk around them and watched the sea and the bog and the procession of the Connemara mountains, purple and graceful behind the orange gorse and the great scattering of white stones. At Clifden they walked the fair and touched the ponies and brought things and ate things and drank things and lived in the lovely crowd. Heneker in washed-out blue denim, brown-faced, lanky as a cowboy with the two small children trotting behind him, turned heads. Hetty carrying the picnic in a big, round basket she had found among the fishing tackle in the house, in sandals and a handkerchief over her head and a faded red dress bought years ago in Florence, walked easily along feeling she might be taken for a tinker. Happy and weary at five o’clock they caught the bus home, Sophie falling deep asleep in Heneker’s arms, Andy moving over beside him. Hetty set the basket on the seat left empty beside her, and, like a peasant, shielded her eyes from the levelling sun.
Back at Heneker’s pub where the bus stopped he lifted Sophie carefully down and put her in the back seat of Hetty’s car. Andy stumbled in beside her, then stuck out his head.
‘You coming back too, Heneker?’
‘No. It’s supper-time at the pub.’
‘Mummy could cook you some with us.’
‘No, they’d be cross at the pub if I didn’t turn up. It’ll be ready.’
‘Why would they? You could still pay. Why don’t you come and stay with us? There’s heaps of room. You could sleep next to Mummy.’
His clear voice carried across the pub yard and some people coming up from the beach looked amusedly at them, and a girl—the waitress or barmaid who had been leaning against the bar door—disappeared, slamming it behind her.
‘I can’t do that.’ Heneker flicked Andy’s nose. ‘But you must go. It’s been
a long day.’
Hetty started the car. He came round to her side of it and said, ‘I’ll walk over later.’
It was a question made to sound like a statement. Not looking at him but busily at the gears she said, ‘All right,’ and swung through the gate and up the hill.
When the children were fed and in bed, drugged and rosy with sun, she bathed and changed, trying on first one thing and then another, ending up with a long cotton dressing-gown. She put up her hair on top of her head where it immediately began to fall down. Rather successfully. She took off her shoes and wandered to the kitchen to find something for supper, but nothing seemed to make her feel hungry. She ate a tomato by the fridge, staring through the kitchen window at the high, neglected grass and the tall Evening Primroses that slapped the pane. She laid the coffee tray.
Then she walked to the sitting room and struggled halfheartedly with the faint fire. The sun, now setting in a blaze beyond the point, turned the room to glory, lighting up a filmy silvery peaty dust on the old furniture, making a great vase of flowers and leaves she had gathered yesterday glow rose red. ‘It’s like a dream,’ she thought. She walked all round the house and then into the garden, pacing its boundaries on her bare feet, discovering an overgrown fishpond, peering into long-empty stables with trees growing through the roofs, disturbing three lean sheep from under an old mounting-block. She walked the long way back to the front door and stood a while looking out to sea and determinedly not towards the road.
Then she went in and lit the kettle. Then she turned it off. She went up to look at the children and coming down again looked at last unashamedly down the long, empty drive. She went back to the sitting room and sat in the arm chair and looked at the black turf on the fire. The sun had quite gone and the room was cold. It was half past ten.
He was not coming.
As she fell asleep she saw a sudden image of Charles’s alert and prudent face. She thought, ‘Charles always saw me right home to the door.’
‘Hetty sleeping.’
She jumped with such a jerk she felt quite sick, and sat bolt upright. Heneker was opposite her in the other chair. He was laughing. ‘Hetty very deeply sleeping.’