‘He married again, of course. Happy as a sandboy.’
‘Well, that’s something.’
‘Not for me it isn’t, dear. Not for an erring lady. D’you. ever think of that, Thad? The error of our ways?’
Thaddeus smiles. He confesses that he often dwells on the error of his ways. He comments on the room they’re in, saying it’s charming.
‘It’s what I can afford, dear.’ She carries his eyes with hers around the room’s contents — the big refrigerator in a corner, the screen that half obscures a sink, the tattered curtains, the television on a shelf, her shopping thrown on to the bed. The evening sun shows up the dust on surfaces. ‘The lav’s a flight up. She charges for a bath, fifty p on the gas. Oh well, there you are! I soldier on.’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘You bring that Bertranda to your house, Thad?’
‘No, I never did.’
‘You can’t not bring a wife, though. You let her in, eh?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I’d dearly love to know what she’s like. A wife that’d pay good money to an erring lady is never usual, Thad.’
‘Look -’
‘I understand, dear. Silly to be curious.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘I’d never bother you, Thad. I’d never be a leech.’
She pours more gin and tries to fill his glass as well, but he puts his hand over the top of it. Her husband’s in Lytham St. Annes, she says, the brass buttons of his blazer still smart, although of course the blazer would be a different one these days, but she can see him in it and she often does, navy blue as ever it was, pen and propelling pencil in the inside pocket, the neat knot of his Paisley tie.
‘How well I knew him, Thad!’
‘Yes.’
‘Not for me the past’s been buried. Not long ago or any time, unfortunately.’
Tears run through the powder on her face, thin rivulets wreaking minor havoc. She promised herself she wouldn’t, she cries with shrill determination. She swore before he came that not a single tear would fall. ‘Bad Hat,’ she murmurs, trying for a smile, forcing out a laugh instead.
‘My own Bad Hat.’
‘I hope it’ll be a help.’ He nods towards the bamboo table, the notes still where he placed them.
‘I have my pride, dear.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘She’s a — what’s her name, Thad?’
‘Letitia.’
‘That’s lovely, dear. A younger wife, no more than a girl, is she? And kiddies too?’
‘I have a daughter.’
‘I’m truly glad for you. A Sagittarian, Letitia is?’
‘A what?’
‘I thought you said a Sagittarian. When’s Letitia’s birthday, dear?’
‘May.’
‘More like a Gemini, I’d say. And what’s the little daughter called, dear?’
‘Georgina.’
‘Five? Six?’
‘Georgina’ll be six months in a few weeks.’
‘Capricorn, I shouldn’t wonder. And you’re Aquarius yourself, as I remember.’
‘I must go, Dot.’
‘Remember, I’d say you were always going? A shadow flitting?’
‘Yes, I remember.’
He touches a cheek with his lips and feels it damp. A hand grasps one of his, her body presses, thighs and knees, mouth searching, and suddenly her tongue. The rim of the glass she still holds is sharp on his stomach, its contents spilling into his shirt.
‘Oh, darling, I’m sorry!’
She fusses with a handkerchief, dabbing him with it. He can’t go yet, she insists, and disappears behind the screen. She runs a tap and squirts out washing-up liquid. It doesn’t matter, Thaddeus protests, but she says it does, wiping him with a soapy cloth.
‘Whatever’ll she say? Whatever’ll she think you’ve been up to, dear?’
‘It’s all right. Please don’t worry.’
‘Be honest with me, Thad: she didn’t think harassment when she read the letter?’
‘Harassment?’
‘It’s what they call it these days. Privacy invaded when all there’s been is a few letters. You tell her no harm meant. You tell her that?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Forgive me for all this kerfuffle, dear.’
‘Of course I do.’
‘You won’t forget old Dot?’
‘Of course I won’t.’
He looks back from the door before he goes. The wet cloth is on the bed beside her, she has poured herself another drink. She hugs her teddybear, trying to smile again. She raises her glass to him.
‘I loved you all over again this afternoon, Thad.’
He smiles away this protestation, shaking his head. In the past she wasn’t a drunk. She held the aces, as she used to say; she could have had anyone. Brash and shiny, irresistible on a barstool, or suddenly in the kitchen when he delivered what the chef she still keeps up with had ordered, there was an extraordinary excitement about her until she threw him over for an insurance salesman. ‘Why can’t you love a girl?’ she demanded, accusation in her tone, and he was taken aback.
‘Goodbye, Dot.’
She waves a hand, then turns her face away, seeming overcome. He doesn’t know why, just for a moment, he wants to tell her he has been widowed, that the wife she is jealous of died because she was concerned about chickens in a wooden box, that no arrogance or self-regard was smacked down by so absurd a death, only gentle modesty. In that same moment there is an urge that almost has its way: to connect past and present, to confess he could not love a girl because that is how he is, to throw in that he loves his child, a circumstance that still bewilders him. But nothing more is said.
Within minutes she’ll be asleep, he guesses as he descends the narrow stairway. Thrown down on her bed, the smell of gin cloying on her breath, she’ll drift through inebriated slumber and wake when her bed-sitting room is shadowy with twilight. A friend is what she needs, a friend from the present, not the past, some man to interest her in his hobbies, old coins or mill-wheels or choral singing. A man because she is a man’s woman. A man to whom she might give what she has always wasted, her generous muddle of devotion and respect.
Beside Thaddeus in the car, Rosie’s eyes are closed, her jaw propped on the edge of the passenger seat. He reaches out and runs the back of his fingers through her soft mane. She’s company in a car, she likes being with him. ‘Look!’ Letitia exclaimed the day she brought her back, and he thought to himself this flea-infested, mangy animal will be a nuisance and an expense. Better to have left the creature to find her own way out of her misery, he wanted to say, but instead said nothing.
With only a line of pylons breaking his horizon, he drives as slowly as he always does. He bought his snub-nosed Saab for a few hundred pounds when the big end went in the grey van Mrs. Ferry remembers. ‘That jalopy’ll go on for ever,’ the man who sold it to him promised; eighty-seven thousand four hundred, the odometer registers now. Before the grey van there was his father’s Aston Martin, which dated back to 1931, which of all his father’s possessions his mother was most adamant they should not sell. ‘We keep your father always. We see him in his things. We go to your father’s church.’ And every Sunday they did, walking there even when it rained. Twice a year Father Rzadiewicz drove her to Mass and afterwards played cards with her in the conservatory or the drawing-room she’d allowed to become tawdry, the old priest wearing his black mittens even in summer. The Aston Martin gave up on the road one day and had to be towed away, the repair that was necessary too expensive even to contemplate.
He was not able to love the bursar’s daughter when he was still fifteen, although above all else he wanted to. He tried to say he did on all their walks, and in the trunk loft, his blazer flung down on dusty floorboards, sunlight from a roof window warming her expectant face, her brown hair soft in his fingers. ‘Why can’t you love a girl?’ So very crossly that was demanded in Room Twenty,
and elsewhere also. Disappointed in the end, would Letitia, too, have protested that passion wasn’t enough in return for so much more?
Held up behind a lorry loaded with steel girders, an impatient sports car flashes its headlights. The lorry driver takes no notice, neither hurrying nor drawing in, and the lights are flashed again. Thaddeus turns off the main road, into the lanes.
Approaching the gateless pillars at the entrance to his house, he glimpses for an instant a flash of something white and blue — a child, it seems like, hurrying on a little used right-of-way through the fields. Even in the distance there is a familiar look about the figure, but Thaddeus does not pause to wonder why that is.
The car arrives, and then he’s there. She didn’t know that he was out somewhere. All the time on her journey she imagined him in the sunshine in his garden, and she wonders now where he has been. It could not have been the grave, for she’d have seen the car parked as she passed. Has he gone from shelf to shelf in a supermarket, having to because he has no wife to do it for him now? The dog is with him in the garden, and when he walks back to the house the dog remains.
She edges the door in the wall open, distrustful of the dog, but it doesn’t come. An hour passes, and then the woman dressed in black appears. She picks something that grows close to the ground, a bunch of greenery she goes away with. Soon after that the dog comes to the door and Pettie pushes it closed. She opens it gingerly; the dog just looks at her, wagging its tail. She takes a chance, patting its head, and then it bounds off.
Yesterday, twice, she put the receiver down immediately when it was that woman who answered. But an hour or so later his voice said, ‘Hullo,’ and when she walked away from the phone box she could feel such happiness as she never knew before. On the street two women stared at her and she stared back and laughed, wanting to tell them, wanting to say his name to them.
Trees protect her from the windows, a leafy barrier through which, after another wait, she watches the gaunt man light up a cigarette, far away in the yard. She noticed the green door in the arch of the high brick wall when he allowed her and the other girls to walk in the garden while they were waiting for the interviews. The two who kept together didn’t speak, one and then the other going off when her moment came to ring the doorbell. She being the last, she waited longest and, passing the door in the wall for the second time, she opened it and saw leading from it the path through the fields.
The green paint has blistered and faded on the door. There is an iron casing within the archway that spreads two hinges in a pattern like the outline of a leaf on to the door itself. He has opened and closed this door. How many times? The metal latch is strong, moves easily, its tongue shaped for the thumb that operates it. How often has he touched it? How often does he still? She bends down to caress it with her lips. Her eyes are closed, a cheek pressed hard against the worn green paint.
Dusk comes, the last of the light pale in the sky. Reluctantly Pettie goes away, lingering to look back at the tall chimneys of the house, their brick arranged in decoration that can’t be distinguished now, darkly silhouetted against the sky. On either side of the way through the fields she picks flowers she doesn’t know the names of, and picks more from the verges of the lane. In the graveyard she finds a jam-pot on a neglected grave and fills it with water from a tap by the side of the church. Her flowers are colourful in the gloom, beside the withering blooms on the mound of fresh clay. She leaves them there for him to find, to comfort him in his grieving.
5
‘Well, good days, bad days,’ the nurse at St. Bee’s reports on the telephone, no tiredness in her tone, no hint of the tedium of having again to say what she has said so often before. There is a cheerfulness even, and Mrs. Iveson recalls the slapdash features of the woman’s face in which, as if to establish some kind of order, eyebrows are plucked and lips given a well-defined outline. She recalls the starched white uniform, the rinsed hair beneath the starched white cap, the watch pinned to a flattened bosom. When it was agreed that she should move to Quincunx House she rang St. Bee’s and explained to this same nurse about the change there was to be in her life and what had brought it about. ‘Oh, my God!’ the woman exclaimed then, her shock faltering into distress, sympathy offered when she recovered.
‘You’re settling in, Mrs. Iveson?’ she says now, three weeks after the arrangement was agreed, a fortnight after Thaddeus’s rendezvous with Mrs. Ferry.
Later today.’ A telephone number is given, repeated in St. Bee’s.
‘It’s marvellous ofyou, Mrs. Iveson. It’s simply marvellous.’
‘Not really.’
‘Indeed it is. Not that I don’t envy you, an infant that age. Day to day, there’s something new.’
‘I suppose there is.’
It isn’t true, but of course it doesn’t matter. Chat there has to be. Well, at least she has her grandchild, they would have commented at St. Bee’s when news of the death was earlier passed on. ‘And to think he doesn’t know!’ would have been said, as so often it must be in this home. Georgina was called after him, he being a George, but he doesn’t know that either.
‘A joy at that age, I always say, not that it takes an iota away from the gesture you’re making, Mrs. Iveson. We’re all full of admiration, we really are.’
She isn’t young, they would have said; it’s not as though she’s young. Moving right in like that, not faltering or going to pieces, turning her back on what she knows, not that change isn’t the best tonic when there’s been what there has been. And of course it’s natural, a daughter’s baby.
‘Never hesitate to call us up, dear. Don’t ever think it’s a nuisance, ringing up. In circumstances like this, I always say it’s good to talk.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I have the details, dear. Thanks ever so.’
Both receivers are replaced in the same moment. Who says lightning doesn’t strike twice? would have been said in St. Bee’s over cups of tea, the subject kept alive to ease the monotony of the day. No more’n a vegetable in tweeds, and now all this, the kiddy needing a mother’s hand, fortunate the father’s in agreement, unusual that.
I can’t say I’m not nervous about this upheaval, Mrs. Iveson last night finished a letter to her longtime friend in Sussex, and perhaps this is not at all what Letitia would want. Well, if it doesn’t work it doesn’t. We can only try.
She has let her flat to people called Redinger from Oregon, who say they like a good address. She chose them because something about their manner suggested to her that they would be careful tenants. Their tenancy is for four months only, since that is the period of their stay in England; and when it finishes the agency will come up with other people, whom she can also personally vet if she wishes to continue to let the flat. She could less inconveniently have left it empty, visiting it herself from time to time to see that all was well. But the advice she has received is that empty property, these days, attracts burglary: the Redingers and any successors they may have would be caretakers as much as tenants. With that in mind, and against the wishes of the agency she employed, she has asked for only a modest rent.
Often during the days that passed while all this was so swiftly arranged, Mrs. Iveson has experienced the doubts she expressed in her letter to her friend, but on each occasion has successfully wrangled with her misgivings. Within the tenancy agreement there is also a clause, specifically at the Redingers’ request, that allows one month’s notice on either side, should there be a change of circumstances. This is a comfort.
It is particularly so when Mrs. Iveson looks through what remains in cupboards and drawers on the morning of her departure, as she unlocks and locks again the built-in wardrobe that contains the clothes she isn’t taking with her. Everything is in order in the kitchen, the refrigerator empty, the electric kettle unplugged. The News comes unobtrusively from her Roberts radio, the sound turned down. Earthquakes in Russia, riots in Hong Kong, a body on a river path in Wales, carnage in Croatia. And five hundred pounds
to be paid as compensation to a canary breeder who declares himself devastated after a single measure of seed swelled to ten times its bulk in his prize bird’s stomach, destroying all chance of success at the Culross and Kincardine Cage-birds Festival.
‘You’ve never known unhappiness, darling,’ her own voice echoes, sounding harsh although she did not intend it to. In marriage she had not known unhappiness herself, and simply feared for her daughter in uncharted territory. That on an April afternoon there should have been an encounter on a train was a chance as cruel as life uselessly passing in a twilight room. You can’t help loving someone, Letitia said, returning at her usual time from the music library less than two months later, not taking her coat off yet or putting down her handbag. And that was that.
Standing on a chair, Mrs. Iveson reads the electric meter. Kneeling down, she reads the gas one. She notes both figures and leaves the piece of paper on the kitchen table, asking the Redingers to check them. On the radio a programme about people who collect things begins, a woman in Pontefract with an assortment of dental plates, a man with light switches, another with beer-bottle tops. She turns the voices off, realizing that she should have done so before reading the meters but deciding that a minute of the radio won’t make much difference to the figure she has recorded.
She closes her kitchen door and sits down to wait by the window of her sitting-room. She gazes into the street below, where a smartly dressed tart is exercising her Pekinese. Not long ago she was taken for such a woman herself as she let herselfin at the downstairs door. A man with a moustache in a teddybear coat raised his hat. ‘Colette?’ he smiled. ‘I phoned.’ This trade, in daytime, is a new thing in the neighbourhood.
The woman and the dog pass round the corner and then Thaddeus’s car appears, his old blue car to which apparently he is attached. Letitia found that touching, as she did his attachment to his house and to his garden. A sentimental man, she said. The worst that could happen next was that unhappiness would come. Beyond imagination was what actually occurred.