“Good evening, Major Hart,” Coral said.
“Yes,” he said. “Good evening, Miss Glynn. I wanted only to say to you—to tell you—that I am sorry for what I said to you this afternoon, and for the way I spoke.”
“You needn’t apologise,” said Coral. “I—”
“No, I must. Please allow me. You were being kind, and I was ungentlemanly. Do forgive me.”
“Of course I do,” said Coral.
“It is odd,” he said, “that you are more at ease with disfigurement than I. It has been difficult for me to accept how I am.”
“You are fine,” said Coral. “Truly, you are. You are alive.”
“And now I am ashamed,” said the Major. “For you are correct. I have not the slightest reason to feel sorry for myself, or to wish to be other than I am.”
“I only think of my brother—”
“Of course you do,” said the Major, “and how insensitive of me. Now you must forgive me for that as well.”
“I must return this tray to Mrs Prence,” said Coral. “I do not want to keep her waiting. And I must put your mother to bed.”
“Of course,” said the Major. “How is Mother?”
“She is fading, I think,” said Coral. “Would you like to sit with her awhile?”
The Major looked up the stairs, towards the room where his mother lay dying. “No,” he said. “We were through with one another a long time ago.”
Coral could think of no reply to this admission and so she shouldered open the door to the kitchen and descended with her tray. When she returned to the hallway the Major was gone and the door to the library was closed. She stood outside it for a moment, listening, but heard nothing.
* * *
Clement Hart was a solitary man, but he did have one friend, a friend of his youth, whom he loved. He had known Robin Lofting since they were boys; they had gone to grammar school together; their mothers had been friends and they often spent the summer holidays together in Tismouth, where the Loftings rented a seaside cottage. Robin still lived nearby and they met every Thursday evening for a drink or two at The Black Swan.
“How is your mother?” asked Robin.
“I don’t know,” said Clement. “The same, I suppose. How dreary it is to die like that. I’d much rather a bullet through my head.”
“That’s a cheery thought,” said Robin.
“Well, I just wish people would go when their time is nigh.”
“This is your mother we’re speaking of.”
“Yes, and you know better than anyone I’ve a right to feel as I do. I wish I had a jolly, happy mother like yours.”
“Oh, it wasn’t all lemonade and iced cakes with Rosalie.”
“Yes, but at least she liked children. Or other people, for that matter. I don’t think my mother ever met a person she liked. Including my father, of course. What a wretched woman. It’s all I can do to stop myself rushing upstairs and holding a pillow against her face.”
“Have you got a new nurse?”
“Yes,” said Clement.
“Ancient or nubile?”
“I rather like this one. She’s a nice girl.”
“Nubile?”
“You’re such an ass, Robin. As if you ever cared for nubility.”
“Nobility, perhaps. But we are men drinking in a pub, so one must say certain things, mustn’t one? For appearances’ sake, if nothing else.”
“Oh, God. I care nothing for appearances. I’d like to go away somewhere and live a hermit’s life.”
“People once had hermitages, I think. To be picturesque. They’d build false ruins and follies on their grounds. But I don’t think that happens much anymore. But you could be a hermit in the Sap Green Forest. Dolly could bring you casseroles.”
“How is Dolly?”
“Dolly never varies. That is part of her charm. Perhaps the entirety of her charm. She is a little like a dog in that way.”
“Robin, you oughtn’t compare your wife to a dog.”
“Oh, but I mean it in the nicest possible way. I love dogs. Except for Dolly’s, of course, which are thoroughly execrable creatures. They are constant in their characters, as she is in hers. I wish you would marry.”
“Why?”
“Because then we would be equal. We would both have wives. The story would be complete.”
“What story?”
“The story of us,” said Robin.
“It is complete,” said Clement. “It ended long ago.”
“But not in any formal sense,” said Robin. “The narrative stopped, but it did not really end. Did it?”
“I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about,” said Clement.
“Oh, don’t make me sad,” said Robin. “You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“But it is pointless to talk about it. It is forgotten.”
“I don’t think it is. And the fact that we are talking about not talking about it proves this.”
“Shut up,” said Clement. “Go and get us another drink.”
Robin went up to the bar and got two more pints of ale. As he sidled back across the crowded room, he saw his friend sitting alone at their little table in the dim lamplight, staring down at his two hands, which were placed before him on the table-top. He appeared to be studying them for some obscure reason, as if he might be asked to identify them from a large assortment of severed hands at some later date. Robin stopped for a moment, struck by the beauty of Clement’s sad face, and felt his love for his friend as an almost unbearable pain.
He pretended he was a waiter and placed the two glasses on the table, one before Clement and one before his empty place. “Anything else I can get you, sir?”
Clement looked up at him, and saw the love in Robin’s eyes, and looked quickly away. “Sit down, you fool,” he said.
Robin sat.
Clement had moved his hands to his lap but regarded his glass of ale with the same preoccupying concentration. “Perhaps I shall marry,” said Clement. “Perhaps I shall marry Coral Glynn.”
“Coral Glynn? Who is Coral Glynn?”
“The nurse,” said Clement. “Mother’s nurse.”
“Your mother didn’t let you marry an industrialist’s daughter. She would never allow a nurse.”
“My mother will be dead,” said Clement. “And besides, I am no longer beholden to my mother.”
“You weren’t beholden then, either,” said Robin. “You were a man.”
“I agreed to wait until after the war. It made no sense to marry at that time. Many people felt that way.”
“If you loved Jean, it did,” said Robin. “She obviously thought it made plenty of sense to marry during the war. Even if she was engaged to you.”
“Well, it is all in the past,” said Clement.
“Everything is in the past,” said Robin. “Everything we know, that is.”
“Please don’t become philosophical. It doesn’t suit you.”
Robin leant down and sipped from his too-full glass of ale, and then picked it up and drank from it. He put it down. “Are you serious?” he asked. “About marrying the nurse?”
“Of course not,” said Clement. “It was only an idea.”
“Perhaps it is a good idea,” said Robin.
“She is a lovely girl,” said Clement. “I rather like her.”
“That seems like reason enough to marry her,” said Robin. “It is more reason than I had.”
“And it is surely my last chance,” said Clement. “I will never meet another girl again, if I become a hermit.”
“You may come across some Diana in the woods,” said Robin. “You never know.”
“Oh, yes I do,” said Clement. “If Mother dies—when Mother dies—and this girl goes away, I shall become a hermit, but not in the woods. I shall become the hermit of Hart House.”
“Nonsense. The two of us will go on meeting here, and I’ll drag you up to London on occasion. You may become quite a gay roué, in fact. And Dolly
and I will have you over, and Dolly will invite all her buck-toothed, pigeon-toed unmarried friends, and see to it that you marry one of them. She wants you to be married even more than I.”
“All the more reason to marry Coral.”
“How are her teeth? And her toes?”
“Perfectly normal, as far as I remember. But I have not made a study of them.”
“Perhaps you should. Or, better yet, perhaps I should. I must come and meet this nurse. I know better than anyone what kind of a girl will suit you. Or bring her to us, for dinner or something.”
“I can hardly do that,” said Clement. “She is here to nurse my dying mother, not socialise with me. And I have barely spoken to her, in any case.”
“Then how do you know you like her? I find that the way women talk, and what they talk about, matters quite a lot. Of course, Dolly only became insufferably loquacious after she said ‘I do.’ Two little words, tell-tale drips, before the deluge.”
“You are always so cruel about Dolly, yet I know you love her. I think you are cruel about her for my sake, and there is no need for that. I am happy that you love her.”
“Well, then, it is only to make you happy that I do love her. It is my way of loving you.”
This admission befuddled Clement. He said nothing.
“I will come and meet Coral Glynn,” said Robin, “and decide if you should marry her. I was right about Jean, remember, but you did not listen to me then. You listened to your mother.”
“How can you meet her? She is always in with my mother. Or down in the kitchen with Mrs Prence, or up in her bedroom. I have to lurk about like mad to encounter her myself.”
“I am cleverer than you. I have a plan: I will come to see you, and I will trip over the hearth rug and twist my ankle or something like that, and we will have to call for her to come and attend to it, as the only medical professional available.”
“That plan is absurd. She will look at your ankle and see at once that you are faking. And I’m not sure I want her looking at your ankles in any case.”
“Do you think I have unusually attractive ankles? Are you worried that she will take one look at my comely ankle and fall in love with me? You rather enjoyed my feet, if I remember correctly.”
“Shut up,” said Clement.
“It shall be my appendix, then. Something she can’t look directly at. Or I shall feel dizzy. I will come over sick in some way that cannot be proved false or be found titillating. This is how I shall meet your Coral Glynn and decide if you are to marry her. What is she like? Describe her to me.”
“She is rather pretty, I think, in a plain way.”
“Well, anyone can be pretty in a pretty way. Is she dark or fair?”
“She is dark, at least her hair and eyes. And rather tall, and slender. She is very quiet and has a lovely smile.”
“And what about her figure?”
“I told you—she is slender.”
“Has she bosoms?”
“I was under the impression that all women had a bosom.”
“Yes, but they vary in size. What size are her bosoms?”
“What an extraordinary question. Why ever would you enquire about such a thing?”
“Because, as I have previously stated, we are two men talking in a pub. We must make an effort to follow protocol.”
“Then the best I can tell you is that her bosom—I do not like the word—is perfectly proportionate.”
“What word do you like?”
“I do not like any word. I do not like the subject.”
“Most men do. The marrying kind, at any rate. You shall have to make an effort.”
“I think she likes me,” said Clement. “I mean in her shy, quiet way. Not in any obvious way. But when we are together, I sense…”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps I only imagine it. There’s something, though—something strange. I mean unusual. A feeling, which I think is shared.”
“And what is that feeling?”
“I would not call it a happiness. A relief, perhaps. A feeling of something alive between us. A connection, I suppose.”
“Love, perhaps,” said Robin.
“I would not go that far,” said Clement.
“Yes, I know,” said Robin. “You have never gone that far.”
* * *
Saturday afternoons Coral had free. The first two weeks she stayed at the house, feeling it was too soon to take leave of it, even if it was her right. The third week she did not feel well: she was exhausted, for Mrs Hart had not been sleeping and kept crying out fearfully in the night, “More! More!” wanting the morphine, the sudden gorgeous prick of it in her worn flesh, so she spent the afternoon in bed. The fourth week she knew that a precedent must be set: she must leave the house, or she would be trapped. So she did the only thing she could think of to do, which was to go to the cinema in Harrington.
Hart House was situated as far from the bus line as it could possibly be, a mile down a road of its own. Mrs Prence claimed not to know the schedule of the bus, for she thought the town was beneath her, and avoided it.
It was a chilly day—it was always a chilly day; it was hard to believe other days would come—and damp, but the sun was shining and there was a hesitation to the chill, a feeling that if the sun just tried a little harder it might, just possibly, amount to something. She was wearing a scarf about her head, a gay silk scarf splashed with giant pink peonies, which had been a Christmas gift from the mother of the children she had cared for before coming to Hart House, three children with scarlet fever, and even though the scarf had been wrapped in lilac-coloured tissue paper, she was almost certain that it had not been purchased for her—that it had been pulled from the tangle of scarves she had seen in the woman’s dresser drawer, but because the woman had been kind and the children were sweet and the house had been well heated, she had not thought the gift of the second-hand scarf mean. It was its fragrance that gave it away; it still smelt faintly of the woman’s perfume, and the odour reminded Coral of that woman, that warm house in Guildford, those children, the Christmas tree they decorated in the nursery, the cat who unexpectedly released a litter of eight kittens. Of course, there was more to it than that, but there is no point in remembering misery.
Coral knew that wearing the scarf out on this day, with the chill damp breeze flattening it against her head, would hasten the evanescence of the scent—that by the time she returned to the house the scarf would smell of the bus and the cinema and cigarettes and of herself. This made her feel a little sad, but like many sadnesses she knew were inevitable, she tried to hasten its occurrence, for it was unbearable for her to experience a pleasure she knew was fleeting.
As she neared the main road she saw the bus approach, and she ran and called out, but it took no notice of her and passed swiftly by. She had to wait thirty minutes for the next bus and came late into the cinema. Slowly her eyes adjusted; she could see the rapt luminous faces offered up to the glowing movie screen, and she found a seat next to a man who put his hand on her knee as soon as she sat down, as if he had been expecting her. He kept his eyes focused on the screen, as if the parts of his body were separate, his hand a small country at the outskirts of a large empire that enjoys, simply because of its distance from the capital, the sort of autonomy that is merely a result of negligence. There was something almost tender in his gesture, as if she were his wife returning from the ladies’, and in the disorienting darkness Coral was for a moment confused, and thought perhaps she was his wife and the mistake was hers, but she knew by the way his hand trembled that it was perverse, so she got up and moved further along that row and sat beside a woman who had a small wheezing dog in a carpet bag on her lap.
The film, An Odd Marriage, was about two twin sisters who were evidently married, unwittingly, to the same man, although how this had happened Coral could not tell. One of the sisters lived in the country and the other lived in the city and the man cleverly moved back and forth between
them. The country wife was domestic and rosy-cheeked and the city wife was jaded and soigné; the same actress played both sisters. When the city wife was dying in childbirth and needed a blood transfusion that only her long-lost twin sister could provide, the husband was forced to make a decision: either reveal his duplicity or allow his city wife to die. A weakling with a thin moustache and beautiful suits, he chose the latter, and brought his infant motherless daughter down to the country wife, claiming she was an orphan of the war, and the country wife raised the baby as if she were her own, but of course the husband couldn’t bear the sight of the child, reminder as she was of his loathsomeness, and so he pulled her out of bed one night and tried to throw her over the cliff into the spumy crashing surf below, but the mother, waking in the night and sensing something amiss, came running out at the last moment, and struggled to wrench the child away from the father, who cruelly revealed the true identity of the little girl before plummeting (accidentally and thrillingly) onto the jagged rocks below.
The movie upset Coral, even though there was a final scene in which the country wife was seen happily marrying the handsome widowed gentleman from a neighbouring farm who had always been so kind to both her and her daughter, while waves relentlessly crashed upon the decomposing body of the evil husband, and predatory seagulls hovered above. It was not clear why the body of the loathsome husband had been left to rot rather than given a proper Christian burial.
* * *
It was dark and raining when Coral left the cinema, and there was something further upsetting about the change in weather and light, for she did not like it when night came in this unobserved way, without transition. She walked up the High Street of the town towards where the bus had left her. Despite the rain, the street was full of people hurrying about, in that happy way people do on a Saturday evening when they think there is only pleasure ahead of them. She did not have an umbrella and the rain coursed off the fabric domes of the passing umbrellas and soaked her, and she felt outcast, defeated, so when she passed a florist’s shop that was still open and brightly lit, she opened the door and stepped inside.
There was an odour of moisture in the shop, but it was different from the cold bland wetness of the street: inside the air was softer, warmer, and perfumed with the scent of the flowers that hung their necks over the rims of the tubs all around the floor. She stood inside the door, which had steamed over, as had the windows, and although she could still hear the rain and noise of the street outside, it felt far away, as if a gap had opened between her and it.
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