“Do you want me to light the fire for you?”
“Well, you can if you want to, but isn’t it rather a waste if neither of us is going to be in there?”
“Aren’t you going to come and sit down this afternoon?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” said Louisa.
“What time do you usually light it?”
“About five o’clock, usually.” She said again. “You can light it if you want to,” but perversely, he didn’t, and took a sort of masochistic pleasure in settling himself down in a chair and self-consciously reading the leading article.
* * *
In the end, lunch was better than he had feared. Rich vegetable soup, crusty brown bread, farm butter, a little Stilton, a cup of coffee. He lit a small cigar, just to round it all off.
“How’s it going?” asked Louisa.
“How’s what going?”
“The report.”
“I’m about two-thirds of the way through.”
“What a clever old thing you are. Well, I’ll leave you in peace, and then you can get on with it without any interruptions.”
“Leave me? For whom do you leave me? Tell me the name of your lover.”
“I haven’t actually got a lover, but I do have to take Rufus for a walk, so we’re going to call on the butcher and pick up the spring lamb he promised me.”
“When are we going to eat spring lamb? Next Christmas?”
“No, tonight. But if you’re going to be sarcastic, I can easily put it in the deep freeze until such time as you feel better disposed.”
“Don’t you dare. What else are we having?”
“New potatoes and frozen peas. Don’t you ever think of anything except food?”
“I do sometimes think about drink.”
“You’re a glutton.”
“I’m a gourmet.” He kissed her. He thought about this. He said, “It’s funny kissing you at meals. I don’t often kiss you at table.”
“It’s having no children here,” said Louisa.
“Let’s do it more often. Get rid of them, I mean. If your sister Helen can’t have them, we’ll put them into kennels.”
* * *
The house that afternoon, without Louisa, without the dog, without children, guests, or any sort of activity, was totally dead. The silence was deafening, disconcerting as some continuous and unexplained sound. From where he sat working, James could hear only the muffled ticking on the clock in the hall. It occurred to him that this was how it was for Louisa most of the time, with himself in London and the children at school. No wonder she talked to the dog.
When she finally returned, the relief was so great that he had to restrain himself from going to greet her. Perhaps she sensed this, for a moment or two later she put her head around the door and said his name. He tried to look as though she had taken him unawares. “What is it?”
“If you want me, I’m out in the garden.”
James had hoped she was going to light the fire, and sit beside it, doing her tapestry and waiting for him to join her. He felt cheated. “What are you going out into the garden for?”
“I’m going to tidy the rose bed. It’s the first day I’ve had a chance to get at it. But if someone arrives in a van and rings the bell, could you answer it, or come and let me know?”
“Are you expecting company?”
“Mrs. Brick’s brother-in-law said he’d come this afternoon if he could.”
Mrs. Brick’s brother-in-law was an unknown quantity to James. “What do you intend doing with him?”
“Well, you see, he’s got this chain saw.” James gazed at her, totally confused, and Louisa became impatient. “Oh, James, I told you. One of the beech trees has come down in the wood, and the farmer said I could have the broken branches for firewood if I could get someone to cut them up. So Mrs. Brick said her brother-in-law would come. I did tell you. The trouble is, you never listen to anything I say, and if you do listen, you don’t hear.”
“You’re making noises like a wife,” James told her.
“Well, what do you expect? Anyway, keep an ear open for me. It would be maddening if he came and went away again, thinking I wasn’t here.”
James agreed that it would be maddening. Louisa duly shut the door and took herself away. A little later, she could be seen, rubber-booted, deep in the rose bed. Rufus sat by the wheelbarrow and gazed at her. Stupid dog, thought James. He could at least help.
* * *
The report claimed him once more. He could not remember anything having taken him so long to complete. But at last he had embarked on the final summing up, and was just struggling to achieve a particularly well-rounded phrase when his peace was shattered by the grinding approach of some ancient piece of machinery. It came up the drive from the road and stopped at the back of the house, where it continued to shudder while the driver—who obviously did not want to risk turning off the engine until he was sure he would be staying—rang the back door bell.
The well-turned phrase was lost forever. James got to his feet and went to answer the summons. On the doorstep he came face to face with a tall and handsome man, white-haired and ruddy-faced, dressed in corduroys and a tweed jacket. Behind him, droning and shaking on the tarmac, and issuing clouds of noxious exhaust, stood a battered blue station wagon, liberally coated with mud and manure.
The man had exceptionally bright and unblinking blue eyes. “Mrs. Harner?”
“No, I am not Mrs. Harner. I am Mr. Harner.”
“It’s Mrs. Harner I’m wanting.”
“Are you Mrs. Brick’s brother-in-law?”
“That’s right. Redmay’s the name. Josh Redmay.”
James felt disconcerted. This did not look like any relation of Mrs. Brick. Rather, with his blue eyes and his quarter-deck manner, did he resemble some retired admiral, and moreover, not one accustomed to having to deal with lower-deck pen-pushers.
“Mrs. Harner’s round the front of the house, in the garden. If you…”
“I brought the chain saw.” Mr. Redmay had no time for pleasantries. “Where’s the tree?”
It would have been splendid to tell him “two points west of south-west.” But James could only say, “I’m not quite sure, but my wife will show you.”
Mr. Redmay gave James a long measuring look, which James, by squaring his shoulders and tilting his chin, managed to meet, eye to eye. Then Mr. Redmay turned on his heel, went back to his mud-spattered vehicle, reached up into the cab, and switched off the ignition. Silence fell and the station wagon stopped shaking, but the smell of exhaust remained, painfully evident. From the back he lifted the chain saw and a can of petrol. At the sight of the blade, a shark’s jaws filled with teeth, James was suddenly apprehensive, visited by nightmare visions of Louise without any fingers.
“Mr. Redmay…”
Mrs. Brick’s brother-in-law turned. James felt a fool, but didn’t care. “Don’t let my wife get too near that thing, will you?”
Mr. Redmay’s expression did not change. But he ducked his head in James’s direction, heaved the chain saw onto his shoulder, and disappeared around the corner of the house. At least, thought James, going back indoors, he didn’t actually spit at me.
* * *
By a quarter to five the report was finished. Read and reread, corrected, squared off, and stapled. With some satisfaction, James slid it into his briefcase and snapped the lock shut. Tomorrow morning his secretary would type it. By the afternoon a fair copy would be in the in-tray of every director in the firm.
He was tired. He stretched and yawned. From the other end of the garden the chain saw continued to whine. He got up and went into the sitting room, took that book of matches off the mantelpiece and lit the fire, and then he went into the kitchen and filled a kettle and put it on to boil. He saw the basket of laundry on the table, clothes waiting to be ironed. He saw the bowl of peeled potatoes, and on the stove a saucepan simmered; when he lifted the lid, he was assailed by the fragrance of asparagus soup. His f
avourite.
The kettle boiled. He made tea, and filled a vacuum flask, found mugs, a bottle of milk, a packet of lump sugar. He went through the cake tins and found a huge fruit loaf. He cut three substantial slices, then put everything into a basket, pulled on an old jacket, and let himself out of the house.
The late afternoon was still and blue, the damp air smelt cool and fresh, of earth and things growing. He went down across the lawn, through the paddock, and over the fence into the beech wood. The scream of the saw grew louder and he found Louisa and Mr. Redmay without difficulty. Mr. Redmay had knocked up a makeshift saw horse with a tree stump, and the two of them were working together, Mr. Redmay wielding the saw and Louise feeding him with branches, to be reduced, in a matter of seconds, to piles of logs. The air was filled with the scent of sawdust.
James thought they looked both businesslike and companionable, and was assailed by a small pang of jealousy. Perhaps when he retired from the rat race of the advertising world, he and Louisa would spend their twilight years together, cutting wood.
Louisa looked up and saw him coming. She spoke to Mr. Redmay, and after a little the saw was switched off, the scream of its blade dying to silence. Mr. Redmay straightened up and turned to observe James’s approach.
He came up with the basket, feeling like the farmer’s wife. He said, “I thought it was time we all had a cup of tea.”
* * *
It was very companionable, sitting in the darkening wood, drinking tea and munching fruit loaf and listening to the pigeons flying in. Louisa seemed tired, but she leaned against James’s shoulder and said with great satisfaction, “Just look at it all. Could you believe we’d have got so many logs off just a few branches?”
“How are we going to get them all up to the house?” James asked.
“I’ve fixed it with your missus,” said Mr. Redmay, puffing on his cigarette. “I’ll borrow a tractor and a trailer from the farmer and bring them up on that. Tomorrow maybe. It’s getting dark now. We’d better call it a day.”
So they packed up the tea-things and made their way home. When they reached the house, Louisa went up to have a bath, but James asked Mr. Redmay in for a drink, and Mr. Redmay instantly accepted, so they sat by the sitting-room fire and each downed a couple of whiskies, and by the time Mr. Redmay took himself home, they were the best of friends.
“Mind,” said Mr. Redmay, “that little wife of yours, she’s one in a million.” He clambered up into the cab of his station wagon and slammed the door. “Any time you want to get rid of her, you just let me know. I can always find a job for a hard worker.”
But James said that he didn’t want to get rid of her. Not just yet.
When Mr. Redmay had gone, he went into the house and upstairs, and Louisa was out of her bath, and had changed into her blue velvet housecoat with the sash tied tightly around her narrow waist. She was brushing her hair. She said, “I never asked about the report. Is it done?”
“Yes. Finished.” He sat on the edge of the bed and loosened his tie. Louise splashed on some scent and came to kiss the top of his head. “How hard you’ve worked,” she told him, and went out of the room and downstairs. He sat there for a little, then he finished undressing and had a bath. By the time he got downstairs, she had disposed of the basket of laundry, but he could smell, still, the fragrance of freshly ironed clothes. As he passed the dining room, he saw her through the open door, laying the table. He stopped to watch her. She looked up and saw him there and said, “What is it? Is something wrong?”
“You must be tired.”
“Not specially.”
He said, as he had every evening, “Do you want a drink?” and Louisa replied, as she did every evening, “I’d love a glass of sherry.” They were back in their usual routine.
* * *
Nothing had changed. The next morning James went to London, spent the day in the office, ate a pub lunch with one of the young copy writers, and returned—in the usual solid river of rush-hour traffic—to the country in the evening. But he did not go straight home. He stopped the car in Henborough, got out and went into the flower shop and bought Louisa an armful of fragile yellow jonquils, pale pink tulips, violet-blue iris. The girl wrapped them up in tissue paper, and James paid for them and took them home and presented them to Louisa.
“James…” She looked astonished, as well she might. He was not in the habit of bringing her home armfuls of flowers. “Oh, they’re beautiful.” She buried her face in them, drinking in the scent of the jonquils. Then she looked up. “But why…?”
Because you are my life. The mother of my children, the heart of my house. You are the fruit loaf in the tin, the clean shirts in the drawer, the logs in the basket, the roses in the garden. You are the flowers in the church and the smell of paint in the bathroom, and the apple of Mr. Redmay’s eye. And I love you.
He said, “No reason in particular.”
She reached up to kiss him. “What sort of day did you have?”
“All right,” said James. “How about you? What have you been doing?”
“Oh,” said Louisa. “Nothing much.”
Spanish Ladies
On a Wednesday at the beginning of July, old Admiral Colley died. He was buried the following Saturday, in the village church, and two weeks later his granddaughter Jane was married to Andrew Latham in the same little church. There were a few raised eyebrows in the village, and a few reproachful letters from distant and elderly relatives, but “That was what he would have wanted,” the family said to each other, and dried their tears and went on with the arrangements. “That was what he would have wanted.”
* * *
Because it was July and six-thirty in the morning, Laurie awoke to a bedroom filled with sunshine. It lay across her bed like a warm blanket. It conjured slivers of reflected light from the triple mirror on her dressing table, floodlit the faded pink carpet. Beyond the open window she could see the pale, cloudless sky, herald of a perfect day. A breeze blew in from the sea and stirred the daisy-patterned curtains. The curtains matched the wallpaper and the frills around the quilted bed, and had been chosen by Laurie’s mother when Laurie was thirteen and away at boarding school. She remembered coming home to the totally redecorated bedroom and having to hide her dismay, because in her heart of hearts she yearned for a room as neat and austere as a ship’s cabin, with whitewashed walls and space for all her books, and a bed like Grandfa’s, with drawers underneath and a little ladder to climb when you wanted to get into it.
Happy the bride the sun shines on. She listened and from far beneath her, in the depth of the old house, she heard a door open and shut and one of the dogs start to bark. She knew that her mother was already up and about, probably making an early morning cup of tea and sitting at the kitchen table, composing what must surely be the last of her hundreds of lists of things to do.
Fetch Aunt Blanche from station.
Hairdresser. Will she need lunch?
Robert to florist for carnations.
Dogs’ dinner. DON’T FORGET.
Happy the bride the sun shines on. Across the upstairs landing, in the other little attic bedroom, Jane presumably slumbered. Jane had never been an early riser, and the fact that this was her wedding morning was unlikely to break the lifelong habit of twenty-five years. Laurie pictured her, blonde and rosy, her hair tangled and the old eyeless teddy bear jammed under her chin. The teddy bear was a source of mild annoyance to their mother, who did not think that he should accompany Jane on her honeymoon. Laurie agreed that he did not go with pristine negligées and romance, but Jane had a way of sweetly agreeing with whatever was demanded of her and then doing the very opposite, so Laurie was fairly sure that this evening the bear would be right there, in the bridal suite of some expensive hotel.
Her imagination wandered on down through the house. To the double guest room where her elder brother and his wife slept. To the old nurseries where their children were tucked into inherited cots. She thought of her father, perhaps b
eginning to stir; to open his eyes, to give thanks for the fine weather, and then to start worrying. About the car park arrangements, the quality of the champagne, the fact that his morning suit trousers had had to be let out. The bills.
“We can’t afford a big wedding,” he had stated firmly the moment the engagement was announced. And the others had chimed in in much the same vein, but perhaps for different reasons. “We don’t want a big wedding,” Jane had said. “Perhaps a registry office and a little lunch afterwards.”
“We don’t want a big wedding,” her mother had agreed weakly, “but the village will expect it. I suppose we could have something very simple…”
Which left Laurie and Grandfa to make their contributions to the discussion. Laurie made no contribution at all, being at Oxford at the time of the engagement, and totally involved with tutorials and lectures, but Grandfa came down solidly on the side of what he called a bit of a splash. “Only got two daughters,” he told Laurie’s parents. “What’s the point of some hole-in-the-corner ceremony? No need to have a marquee. Clear the furniture out of the drawing room, and if it’s a nice day, the guests can move out onto the lawn…”
* * *
She could hear him saying it. She turned over in bed and buried her face in the pillow and fought against the great surge of tearless grief that threatened to engulf her, because he had been, all her life, her favourite person, her wisest counsellor, her very best friend. Jane and Robert were close in age, but Laurie had come along six years later and had always been something of a loner, almost an only child. “What a funny little thing she is,” her mother’s friends would observe, thinking that Laurie was not listening. “So self-contained. Doesn’t she ever want another child to play with?” But Laurie did not need other children, because she had Grandfa.
Grandfa had been in the Navy all his life. After his retirement and the death of his wife, more than twenty years ago, he had bought a piece of land off his son, built himself a little house, and moved to Cornwall, leaving Portsmouth behind forever. It was a wooden house, a cedar house with a shingle roof and a wide verandah that jutted out over the old sea wall. At high tide the water lapped against the stones and reminded Grandfa of his days at sea. He had a telescope fixed to his verandah rail and this afforded him much pleasure. There were no boats to watch, because although there were a few ramshackle crabbers pulled up on the shingle below his house, nothing nowadays came in or out of the estuary except the sea, but he enjoyed watching the birds and counting the cars on the causeway that ran along the far side of the sands. In winter they were few and far between, but once the summer tourists started, they crowded bumper to bumper, the sun flashing on their windscreens and the endless drone of traffic steady as a distant hum of bees.