Both his companions on the train, as it happened, were divorced and remarried – and there were stories that Fitzpatrick’s second marriage was already showing signs of wear and tear. His marriage to Ann had been something special, not to be repeated, not to be followed, not to be betrayed – however she had betrayed it – by some flippant affair or remarriage with the first woman who appeared in his sights.
When they arrived at the station they picked up their cars and made their individual ways home. Lee had much the farthest to drive, and it was nine by the time he turned into his garage, and he was pleased to see there was a light in the house. His mouth a little dry, he went up to the front door, put in his key and went in. As he put his case down in the hall Letty came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands and half smiling at him.
‘You waited,’ he said.
‘Yes … You said you’d be back but they reported fog on the news. I was not sure.’
‘Thank you for waiting.’
He went across and kissed her. She accepted it as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and then went up the stairs ahead of him to pour him a drink and to listen to what he had to say.
VIII
She stayed the night, but not of course with him. She continued just as usual, cycling up from Concord two evenings a week, and in the light evenings cycling back again. Life continued on its course.
But it was not quite the same. He had never kissed Hannah, nor ever would. He often wondered why he had done it on this occasion. Had he intended it as a gesture of appreciation because she had waited for him to come back? It was not unpleasant. She was a pretty woman. He hadn’t kissed many women apart from Ann in the last thirty-odd years, except for the society kiss when you met someone at a party. To be truthful, it hadn’t been very much more he had given Letty, just that it seemed to have a greater significance. If he had kissed Hannah she would have thought he’d gone out of his mind. Letty certainly hadn’t seemed to think that. He almost got the impression that she had tried to return the kiss.
Talk between them became a little more personal after this. She explained that her own marriage had broken up when Carl Heinz’s firm had promoted him and moved him to Virginia. She hadn’t wanted to leave, so he had gone alone. It clearly hadn’t been much of a marriage by then. He was now living in Parkersbury and had set up house with another woman. It occurred to Lee that Carl probably wasn’t paying Letty enough for an allowance, but it was not his business to interfere.
Letty had not seen her son Leon for some time. Neither had his father. The boy was now almost eighteen and living off welfare. His mother assured Lee there was no real badness in the boy, he was just easily led and influenced. He’d always been affectionate towards her but he wanted to live with his friends, not his parents.
She herself, she told him, had been born in Brixton, England, where her father Christian Larsen had been employed in a wood-pulp and cellulose factory. When the factory closed the family went back to Norway, where her father worked as a railway clerk; and she had finished her schooling in Norway.
… Well, here he was, Lee Pemberton Burford, head of one of the most successful law practices in New England, recently deserted by his wife, and already feeling something – a little of something – only a little of something, but it was there – for a woman whom he still wasn’t quite sure he even liked. He, in his seventh decade, grey-haired, with a lined face and an overweight body, who had spent all his adult life among talk of depositions, interrogatories, subpoenas and federal indictments, having thoughts and feelings about a young married woman out of his class and with an unknown background, and with not the slightest interest in him or his affairs.
Did she anyway consider him impossibly old to have any feelings at all? Nearly twenty-five years – more than twenty anyway – was an enormous gap. If she was looking for somebody to replace Carl Heinz, she no doubt had no interest at all in anyone over fifty.
But of course to someone in Letty Heinz’s position he might be looked on as a social and financial catch. To hell with it. It was absurd, unimportant and unworthy of consideration.
A few weeks later another letter from Ann.
Darling, darling,
This may be the last letter for some time as we are going on a pretty prolonged trip: just three of us, Althea and I and a woman called Josie, who’s over sixty but as tough as old boots. Between us our ages add up to almost 150, and our boat, a 30-foot clinker-built yawl, is about forty years old, so we are a geriatric quartet! We plan to sail across the Tasman Sea and I am fantastically looking forward to it.
I have bought a small cottage, just two up and two down with a splendid view over the little harbour and bay, and one sees wonderful sunsets. You would be welcome to come.
Of course you will know what the legal position is – afraid I don’t – but as a deserting wife I do not feel entitled to any allowance from you at all. Nor do I want one, for it is cheap living here, and the little legacy my mother left me just covers things nicely.
I very much hope you are settling down by now. Your letter sounded sad, and I do not want you to be sad on my account. Nor hurt. Nor deprived. I am finding a new life which at present is a constant challenge in a way that living at Concord was not. Once again, I swear to you that I remember our marriage as a period of great happiness. Please be happy again – as I am.
Ann
P.S. Arum lilies grow here like weeds, and geraniums bloom all the year round.
IX
Ann’s personality was still strong in the house. Most of her clothes were in the wardrobe still, her shoes in drawers, on stands, under her bed. Cosmetics and perfumes dotted her dressing table. After another couple of months Lee asked Hannah if she would tidy them up: throw nothing away but put things in boxes and label them, move most of her clothes on hangers into one of the spare rooms. Hanna said could she invite Mrs Heinz to help. Lee said yes. He omitted to say what he should have said, which was, please do it all before I get home. As it was, he found them in the last stages, and was a little surprised to find them both in tears.
Hannah said: ‘Ooh, sor, she was a good lady. I wish her well, but she should not have gone.’ Hannah went out of the room, leaving Lee staring awkwardly at Letty, who was by the window blowing her nose.
She looked up. ‘I knew her so short a time but she has been my best friend. I do not think she should have gone neither.’
Lee looked round the room. It smelt of Ann’s scent.
Letty said: ‘Do not suppose we have been doing not anything but snuffle and weep. We have been working hard. It is difficult sorting out what should go where. But just before you came in Hannah picked up her scent atomizer and sprayed it across the room, and that gave us a sentimental turn thinking we shall not perhaps see her again.’
He stared at her. ‘ She has chosen a more exciting life than I could give her. That may be a justification.’
She put away her handkerchief and picked up a couple of nightdresses.
‘I suppose it was her dream.’
After a moment he said: ‘Do you have dreams? Like that, I mean.’
‘Not like that, Mr Burford. I dislike being on the sea.’
He stared at a faded photograph on the wall. It was of Boston after the great fire of 1872. He felt more sympathetic towards Letty than he had ever done before, because of her obvious affection for his lost wife.
He said: ‘ Is your life dull?’
She sounded surprised. ‘Dull? Mine? Why do you ask?’
‘I don’t know what you do with it – in the daytime, that is.’
‘I work at one or two things. And for the Church.’
‘Are you religious?’
‘It is not very strong, Mr Burford. But perhaps more than most people these days.’
‘You never speak of your life in Norway. How long were you there?’
‘Ten years.’
‘Were there any other children?’
‘One brother, Magnus. He was fi
ve years older than me.’
‘Was?’
‘Yes. He died.’ After a pause she added: ‘ I was – very fond of Magnus. I – loved him. My son is like him. Not small like me, but tall and broad-shouldered and blond—’
‘A Norseman?’
She smiled. ‘Perhaps that is how you would say it.’
He hesitated again, aware of a rare, very unlegal impulse. Hesitated, fingered his ring, then went on.
‘Would it give you pleasure to come to Boston sometime and take lunch with me?’
They could hear Hannah banging about downstairs. She had got the vacuum out. ‘Hoeing’, as Della chose to call it.
‘I should greatly enjoy it, Mr Burford. But I do not think it would be quite correct, would it?’
‘Why not?’
‘I am paid by you for work I do for you. Gentlemen do not take their employees out to lunch.’
‘And if this gentleman chose to?’
‘I am – not sure. The talk would get around.’
He grunted, aggrieved at her reply; aware that she might have strict convention on her side but irritated by her small-town attitude.
‘It is very kind of you,’ she said.
‘No matter. No doubt you have better things to do.’
‘Far from it. I should like to – perhaps later in the year? If you will ask me again. We can talk about Ann.’
‘Of course,’ he said stiffly.
‘I must help Hannah.’ She moved to leave the bedroom, then stopped. ‘If you will permit it, I should like very much next week to visit my son. I have not seen him since February. I am not sure of his address, but I think I can find him. It may take a day or so.’
‘Of course. I shall probably eat at one of my clubs in Boston before coming home.’
‘Hannah perhaps could come more often next week.’
‘No. Keep the rota as it is. And tell Hannah not to bother with dinner. I shall be eating out tonight.’
She said: ‘At the Paul Revere?’
‘No. Not at the Paul Revere.’
Chapter Four
I
Ramadan had just begun, and although Agadir was a sophisticated modern port and holiday resort, the Muslims in the four-hundred-year-old Kasbah on the hill were preparing for their long fast. They listened also to soothsayers, for it was a tradition that tomorrow was the night of destiny on which the fates of men should be foretold and decided for the year ahead. Some of the soothsayers, particularly El Ufrani, foresaw a forbidding future. Ufrani, who was reputed to be a hundred years old, saw calamity before him, a judgement on the godless population for not adhering more closely to the laws of the Prophet. He disapproved of the development of the town as a seaside resort to which infidels flocked in their hundreds – soon to be thousands. He disagreed vehemently with M. Bouamrani, the Governor, who welcomed the mushroom growth and pronounced that Agadir should soon become another San Francisco. He disapproved of the Casino, where Moroccan women, their faces uncovered, gambled with the French, the English, the Germans. He disapproved of the naked flesh on the beaches. Most of all he disapproved of the frivolity and godlessness of his own flock who observed Ramadan reluctantly and, he suspected, sometimes only in part, but feasted noisily as soon as dark fell and stayed so feasting and drinking into the small hours.
He said ill things would come, and instanced as a warning a couple of earth tremors which had occurred earlier in the month. The rest of the population treated them as nothing important. The last really serious upset had happened more than two hundred years ago: these latest rumblings, like the rumblings of thunder, raised no more than a lifted eyebrow and a philosophical shrug.
II
Laura legrand woke at seven on this first morning of her holiday, and saw the sun shining through the slats of the venetian blind. She rolled over, looked at a pink pouting face beside her and remembered that she had taken Françoise into her bed last night.
There was often competition among the ‘girls’ for the other woman’s loving attentions, and while Laura generally preferred Vicky it was necessary to spread her favours. Vicky was the youngest of the three, and she was more or less responsible for this holiday, having had a stroke of luck with one of her clients. A rich property owner had stayed long enough to be confidential and Vicky had learned of a new development that was planned near the Quai de Varennes in Bordeaux. She had consulted her old friend Laura who only two years ago had come from Paris, in despair at being hounded by the police, and opened a maison de passe, quite near where Vicky operated. Unlike Vicky, Laura was a businesswoman, and she at once consulted a lawyer, and found a small épicerie for sale in the centre of the proposed development area. Having ascertained that it was a propriété foncière libre de toute obligation, she had then approached Françoise, another refugee, and together they had persuaded Vicky to buy the shop; the three of them had pooled their limited resources to pay for it. It didn’t matter, Laura argued, if they must temporarily carry a large mortgage. She could put her cousin in to run the épicerie,and they would hardly lose in the long term even if the development didn’t come off.
But the development did come off, and the powerful property company found itself thwarted by a solitary shop whose freehold it could not buy and which held up the project. Having carried the mortgage and the responsibility for nearly a year, the three ladies were in no mood to be hustled, or even intimidated, and negotiations had gone on for a further six months before a bargain was struck. As a result, and even after paying off the cousin and the bank and all the legal fees, they were richer than they had ever been in their lives, better off probably than they had ever dared to hope, and were now determined to celebrate and to spend money while the sun shone.
The sun was certainly shining this morning; a shaft of it fell directly on Françoise’s snub nose, but it did not wake her. Laura regarded her friend dispassionately. She was the least attractive and the least successful of the three; she had a thick Burgundian accent, which she had never tried to amend, and broadening hips which her clients did not seem to mind. She was a good-natured young woman and not choosy about whom she took in. But she had never run a house, like Laura, nor had private clients, like Vicky. For a while, when she first worked in Paris, she had been a battery tart, getting through as many as a hundred clients daily.
Like Laura, she had been driven out of Paris by the over-zealous attentions of the police. Laura had known with a sense of foreboding, when votes were given to women, that they would exert pressure on their menfolk to close the high-class maisons de passe, where you could put on a show of elegance and it was not just bang, bang, bang all day long. Girls were expected to talk to their men in such superior places, if the men so wished. Great elegance and the strictest cleanliness prevailed. No girls ever went outside touting for custom. And when he left, a man must agree that he had been satisfied before he was expected to pay.
Both the younger women had worked at Laura’s house in the early days, when times were still good. Françoise, having had a child, which died, had been down on her luck, and Laura had taken pity on her, invited her to come for a trial period to see if she could adjust to their more cultured ways. In those days Françoise had a rural charm and prettiness, looked like a Dutch milkmaid, Laura always said; and there were men who fancied that type – even liked her to dress up in clogs and the rest, though minus some normally essential garments. So Françoise had adapted her style, though without ever quite losing the bad habits learned in the Rue de Courcey. But when she had another child, which lived this time, she had said she wanted to return and work in Dijon, and Laura had not tried to stop her.
Vicky was a different sort altogether. Though brought up by a drunken mother and a succession of noisy extrovert stepfathers, she had wanted to be the lady right from the start. She had a splendid figure: wasp waist, long slim legs, perfect bust, could have been the Number One in the Maison Laura. But her choosiness had just been too much; she sometimes quarrelled with clients for not agre
eing to their sexual whims; and often there was contention because she would not let her customers kiss her. ‘Kissing is too intimate,’ she would protest as she opened her legs. There had never been any doubt in her mind as to the profession she wanted to follow, but her schoolgirl reading had always been about the great kept ladies of the world, and it was her ambition to go private as soon as she could.
So Laura was not surprised when she had said she was going to marry a doctor from Bordeaux and had left the house. (Not that she ever did marry him in the end, but she stayed in Bordeaux and worked up a small clientele of her own.)
They had kept in touch over the last few years, chiefly by telephone on a Sunday morning since neither of them was really a letter writer; but their amiable friendship had been maintained. Both the younger women fancied themselves a bit in love with Laura, and their little amorous pranks made a refreshing change from normal professional work.
Françoise stirred and coughed but did not wake up. What a podge she was getting, Laura thought; she needed to go on a diet, a strict regime. Little chance there was on a holiday: she’d be into the ice cream and the chocolate cakes as soon as she stirred. Nor would she take advice. She must have put on three kilos this last year. If she became a great porker she’d lose her livelihood.
Not that any of them was exactly a Vénus de Milo these days, Laura thought. Even Vicky was thickening and losing her complexion. Not so surprising with herself: fifty-five next birthday, and it had been a hard life after being turned out of Paris, but these two should still be in their prime. The total profit from the sale of the shop was still not completely assessed, but with luck they might not have to work again, or at least could take it more easily. Laura wanted to go back to Paris with her share. One did not need to go crashing back into the big time, with all the hazards and hassles of police raids and paying protection; there were a few lucrative little sidelines she thought she could build up. It would be a relief not to be on the go all hours God sent.