Selected Stories

  Vividly, Mrs Lethwes sees this child, a tiny girl on a rug in the garden, a sunshade propped up, Mr Yatt bent among the dwarf sweetpeas. And Marietta saying in the kitchen, ‘My, my, there’s looks for you!’ The child is his, Mrs Lethwes reflects, pouring again; at least what has happened is halfway there to what might have been if the child was hers also. Beggars can’t be choosers.

  At fifteen minutes past five, fear sets in, the same fear there was on the terrace of the Hôtel St-Georges when the letter was still between her fingers. He will go from her; it is pity that keeps him with a barren woman; he will find the courage, and with it will come the hardness of heart that is not naturally his. Then he will go.

  Once, not long ago – or maybe it was a year or so ago, hard to be accurate now – she said on an impulse that she had been wrong to resist the adoption of an unwanted child, wrong to say a child for them must only be his and hers. In response he shook his head. Adoption would not be easy now, he said, in their middle age, and that was that. Some other day, on the television, there was a woman who took an infant from a pram, and she felt sympathy for that woman then, though no one else did. Whenever she saw a baby in a pram she thought of the woman taking it, and at other times she thought of that girl who walked away with the baby she was meant to be looking after, and the woman who took one from a hospital ward. When she told him she felt sympathy he put his arms around her and wiped away her tears. This afternoon, the fear lasts for half an hour; then, at a quarter to six, it is so much nonsense. Never in a thousand years would he develop that hardness of heart.

  ‘I have to go now,’ he says in his friend’s flat. They cease their observation of the passers-by below. Again they embrace and then he goes. The touch of her lips goes with him, her regretful smile, her fragile fingers where for so long that afternoon they rested in his hand. He drives through traffic, perfectly knowing the way, not having to think. And in the flat she plays her music, and finds in it a consolation. It is his due to have his other woman: on the hotel terrace she decided that. In the hour she sat there with the letter not yet destroyed everything fell into place. She knew she must never say she had discovered what she had. She knew she didn’t want him ever not to be there.

  Lovers quarrel. Love affairs end. What life is it for Elspeth, scraps from a marriage he won’t let go of? Why shouldn’t she tire of waiting? ‘No,’ he says when Elspeth cheats, allowing her pregnancy to occur in order to force his hand. Still he says he can’t, and all there is is a mess where once there was romance. He turns to his discarded wife and there between them is his confession. ‘She travels, you see. She has to travel, she won’t give up her music.’ How quickly should there be forgiveness? Should there be some pretence of anger? Should there be tears? His friend set a trap for him, his voice goes on, a tender trap, as in the song: that is where his weakness has landed him. His voice apologizes and asks for understanding and for mercy. His other woman has played her part although she never knew it; without his other woman there could not be a happy ending.

  She sets the table for their dinner, the tweed mats, the cutlery, the pepper-mill, the German mustard, glasses for wine because he deserves a little wine after his day, Châteauneuf-du-Pape. The bottle’s on the table, opened earlier because she knows to do that from experience: it’s difficult later on to open wine with all the rush of cooking. And the wine should breathe: years ago he taught her that.

  In the kitchen she begins to cut the fat off the pork chops she bought that morning, a long time ago it seems now. Marietta’s recipe she’s intending to do: pork chops in tomato sauce, onions and peppers. On the mottled working surface the blue toothbrush beaker is almost full again, reached out for often. The meat slides about although, in actual fact, it doesn’t move. It is necessary to be careful with the knife; her little finger is wrapped in a band-aid from a week ago. On the radio Humphrey Lyttelton asks his teams to announce the Late Arrivals at the Undertakers Ball.

  ‘Of course,’ Mrs Lethwes says aloud. ‘Of course, we’ll offer it a home.’

  At five to seven, acting instinctively as she does every evening at about this time, Mrs Lethwes washes the blue plastic beaker and replaces it in the bathroom. Twice, before she hears the car wheels on the tarmac, she raises the gin bottle directly to her lips, then pours herself, conventionally, a cocktail of Gordon’s and Martini. She knows it will happen tonight. She knows he will enter with a worry in his features and stand by the door, not coming forward for a moment, that then he’ll pour himself a drink, too, and sit down slowly and begin to tell her. ‘I’m sorry,’ is probably how he’ll put it, and she’ll stop him, telling him she can guess. And after he has spoken for twenty minutes, covering all the ground that has been lost, she’ll say, of course: ‘The child must come here.’

  The noisy up-and-over garage door falls into place. In a hurry Mrs Lethwes raises the green bottle to her lips because suddenly she feels the need of it. She does so again before there is the darkness that sometimes comes, arriving suddenly today just as she is whispering to herself that tomorrow, all day long, she’ll not take anything at all and thinking also that, for tonight, the open wine will be enough, and if it isn’t there’s always more that can be broached. For, after all, tonight is a time for celebration. A schoolgirl on a summer’s day, just like the one that has passed, occupies the upper room where only visitors sleep. She comes downstairs and chatters on, about her friends, her teachers, a worry she has, not understanding a poem, and together at the kitchen table they read it through. Oh, I do love you, Mrs Lethwes thinks, while there is imagery and words rhyme.

  On the mottled worktop in the kitchen the meat is where Mrs Lethwes left it, the fat partly cut away, the knife still separating it from one of the chops. The potatoes she scraped earlier in the day are in a saucepan of cold water, the peas she shelled in another. Often, in the evenings, it is like that in the kitchen when her husband returns to their house. He is gentle when he carries her, as he always is.

  Marrying Damian

  ‘I’m going to marry Damian,’ Joanna said.

  Claire wasn’t paying attention. She smiled and nodded, intent on unravelling a ball of garden twine that had become tangled. I said:

  ‘Well, that’s nice, of course. But Damian’s married already.’

  It didn’t matter, Joanna said, and repeated her resolve. Joanna was five at the time.

  Twenty-two years later Damian stood on the wild grass, among the corn-flowers and the echiums and the lavatera, under the cricket-bat willow that had been a two-foot shrub when Joanna made her announcement. He was wearing blue sunglasses and a powder-blue suit that looked new. In contrast, his tie – its maroon and gold stripes seeming to indicate membership of some club to which almost certainly Damian did not belong - was lank, and the collar of his shirt was frayed. We hadn’t been expecting him; we hadn’t heard from Damian for years. Since the spring of 1985, Claire later calculated, the year of his second divorce, from an American widow in upstate New York. After that there was an Englishwoman who lived in Venice, about whom we were never told very much. When Joanna had declared her childhood intention Damian had been still married to the only one of his three wives Claire and I actually knew: a slender, pretty girl, the daughter of the Bishop of Killaloe. We had known her since the wedding; I’d been Damian’s best man.

  I was actually asleep when Damian walked into our garden all those years later, and I think Claire was too. We were lolling in deck-chairs, Claire’s spaniels stretched out under hers, avoiding the afternoon sun.

  ‘Yes,’ Damian said. ‘It’s Damian.’

  We were surprised, but perhaps not much: turning up out of the blue had always been his habit. He never telephoned first or intimated his intention by letter or on a postcard. Over the years he had arrived in all seasons and at varying times of day, once rousing us at two o’clock in the morning. Invariably he brought with him details of a personal disaster which had left him with the need to borrow a little money. These loans were not paid
back; even as he accepted them he made no pretence that they would be.

  ‘Damian.’ Claire hugged him, laughing, playfully demanding to know what he was doing in that awful suit. I asked him where he’d been and he said oh, a lot of places – Vancouver, Oregon, Spain. Claire made him sit down, saying she was going to make some tea, inviting him to stay a while. He was the tonic we needed, Claire said, for she’s always afraid that we’ll slump into dullness unless we’re careful. A woman, somewhere, had given him the suit: we both guessed that.

  ‘I wasn’t all that well in Spain,’ Damian said. ‘Some kind of sunstroke.’

  We are the same age, Damian and I, not young any more; that day, as we sat together in the garden, we were sixty and a bit, Claire five years younger. She’s tall and slim, and I can’t believe she’ll ever be anything but elegant, but of course I know I may be wrong. When we married she came to live in the country town I’ve always known, acquiring an extra identity as the doctor’s wife and the receptionist at the practice, as the mother of a daughter and a son, the organizer of a playgroup, the woman who first taught the illiterate of the town to read.

  Damian, at the first opportunity, fled this neighbourhood. On his return to it the time before this one he had carried – clearly an affectation - a silver-topped cane, which was abandoned now, no doubt because it drew attention to its own necessity, and Damian inclines towards vanity. Although he sat down briskly in the chair Claire had vacated for him, the protest of a joint caused him, for a single instant, to wince. His light, fair hair is grey in places now, and I don’t suppose he cares for that either, or that his teeth have shrivelled and become discoloured, nor that the freckles on the backs of his hands form blobs where they have spread into one another, or that the skin of his forehead is as dry as old vellum. But that day there was nothing about his eyes to suggest a coming to terms with a future destined to be different from the past, no hint of a hesitation about what should or should not be undertaken: in that sense Damian remains young.

  Even as a boy his features were gaunt, giving the impression then of undernourishment. He was angular, but without any of the awkwardness sometimes associated with that quality. In spite of whatever trouble he was having with a joint, he could still, I noticed that day, tidy himself away with natural ease. As always at the beginning of a visit, he was good-humoured; moodiness – sometimes a snappish response to questions, or silence – was apt to set in later.

  If, in terms of having a profession, Damian is anything, he is a poet, although in all the time I’ve known him he has never shown me more than a verse or two. Years ago someone told us that he once had a coterie of admirers and was still, in certain quarters, considered to possess ‘a voice’ that should be more widely heard. A volume entitled Slow Death of a Pigeon – its contents sparse, Claire and I always assumed, for nothing about Damian suggests he is profligate with his talent – appears to represent all he has so far chosen for posterity. In time we would receive a copy of Slow Death of a Pigeon, he promised on one of his visits, but none arrived.

  ‘Well, yes, it was that. Something like it,’ he was saying, slightly laughing, when I returned with another deck-chair after Claire had brought out the tea things. He had repeated all he’d told me about his sunstroke and the lack of anything of interest in Vancouver. Yes, he was confessing now, a relationship with a woman had featured in his more recent travels, had somehow been the reason for them. There was no confirmation that the powder-blue suit had been a gift. Damian wouldn’t have considered that of interest.

  ‘I thought I’d maybe die,’ he said, returning to the subject of his sunstroke, but when I asked him what he’d taken for it, what treatment there had been, he was vague.

  ‘Bloody visions,’ he said instead. ‘Goya stuff.’ In any case, he confidently pronounced, Spain was overrated.

  Had the woman been Spanish? I wondered, and thought of dancers, white teeth and a rosebud that was red, black skirts swirling, red ribbons in black hair. I have doctor colleagues who farm a bit, who let the wind blow away the mixture of triviality and death that now and again makes our consulting rooms melancholy places. Others collect rare books, make cabinets, involve themselves in politics, allow gardening or some sport to become a way of life to skulk in. For me, Damian’s infrequent visits, and wondering about him in between, were such a diversion. Not as efficacious as afternoons on a tractor or searching out a Cuala Press edition of Yeats, but then by nature I’m lazy.

  ‘A chapter closed?’ Claire was saying.

  ‘Should never have been opened.’

  Later, in the kitchen, I decanted the wine and Claire said the lamb would be enough, with extra potatoes and courgettes. We heard Joanna’s car and then her voice exclaiming in surprise and Damian greeting her.

  I carried a tray of drinks to the garden. Damian’s small black suitcase, familiar to us for many years, was still on the grass beside his deck-chair. I can see it now.

  The visit followed a familiar pattern. In the small suitcase there were shirts and underclothes and socks in need of laundering; and when they had been through the washing-machine most of them were seen to be in need of repair. Damian, besides, was penniless; and there was the request that if anyone telephoned him – which was, he said, unlikely since, strictly speaking, no one knew his whereabouts – his presence in our house should be denied.

  When we were children, Damian and I had played together at Doul, the grey, half-derelict house where his Aunt Una had brought him up. Doul is no longer there, having been sold to a builder for the lead of its roof, and later razed to the ground. Damian’s Aunt Una had drunk herself to death in a caravan. I was actually there when her head jerked suddenly to one side on the pillow, the visible indication of her demise. She’d been, in our childhood, a vague presence in that old house and its lost garden, tall and handsome yet somehow like a ghost of someone else: it was said that she was Damian’s mother. People who remembered her advent, with an infant, in the neighbourhood, said the house had been bought for her by the man who’d made her pregnant, buying her silence also.

  I learned all that later. When Damian and I were eight his Aunt Una was known to me as his aunt and there was never a reason, afterwards, to doubt that she was. He and I were sent away to different schools – the seducer from the past said to have obliged in this way, also, where Damian’s boarding fees were concerned – but our friendship none the less continued. Damian – like a scarecrow sometimes because it was never noticed by his Aunt Una that he grew out of his clothes – was easy company, hard to dislike, an antidote to the provincial respectability I grew up in. We wandered about the countryside; we hung about point-to-points; when we were older we went to Friday dance-halls if one of us had money; we dreamed of romance with Bettina Nowd, clerk in the Munster and Leinster Bank. Abruptly, our ways parted, and remained so for a long time: when Damian, at nineteen, left the neighbourhood he did not return for fourteen years, by which time his Aunt Una was dead and her house gone. It was said he hadn’t written to her, or communicated in any way during that time, which was surprising because he was always fond of her. But as I heard nothing from him either it’s perhaps less odd than it seems. For Damian, perhaps, the vacuum of people’s absence cannot be filled by any other means. During that fourteen years he and I met only once, at Killaloe at the first of his weddings.

  ‘You know, I’d like to see Doul again,’ he said the day after he’d appeared in his powder-blue suit. So we went there, where there was nothing to see, not even the caravan his Aunt Una died in. Beneath the brambles that grew everywhere, and the great swathes of nettles, there might have been remains of some kind, but if there were the naked eye could not discern them. When we walked on a bit there were the walls of the kitchen garden, ivy-clad in places, fallen away in others.

  ‘You couldn’t build Doul again,’ I pointed out when he said he’d like to. ‘Not without a fortune, Damian.’

  He muttered something, and for the first time sounded disagreeable. There
was some kind of complaint, a protest about his continuing lack of means, and then: ‘The avenue . . . the gates . . .’

  A fragment from a poem? I wondered. Sometimes in Damian’s conversation words stand isolated and out of context, as though they do not belong in conversation at all.

  ‘The house,’ I began.

  ‘Oh, not the house as it was.’

  Claire’s spaniels sniffed about for rabbits. As we stood there, the September sun felt hot. Damian believes in the impossible and when we were younger occasionally inspired me with his optimism: that nothing could be easier than poaching salmon, that a bookie or a publican would accept an IOU, that Bettina Nowd had the love-light in her eyes. It was an endearing quality then; I wasn’t so sure about its being one that had endearingly endured. I felt uneasy about this talk of coming back. During the companionship of our youth there had never been an attempt to borrow money, since there was none to lend; nor was advantage taken of small politenesses, since politeness was not then readily on offer. The threat of a neighbour with a fly-by-night’s presumptions was just a little alarming.

  ‘Who owns it now?’ he asked, and I told him: the son of the builder who had stripped the roof of its lead.

  The cawing of rooks and the occasional bark of the dogs were the only sounds. It had always been quiet at Doul; that tall, beautiful woman floating about from room to room or picking the last of the mulberries; bees in the honeysuckle.