A Bit on the Side (10 page)

The woman for whom they were had often been noticed by Graillis about the town, coming out of a shop, getting into her car, not the kind of woman he would ever have known. Tall, and beautiful in her way, there was a difference about her, suggested by her composure and her clothes, and she seemed more different still when vaguely she wondered where Mr Haverty was, not knowing he had retired. She smiled when they talked then, and Graillis hadn’t seen her smile before. The next time they talked for longer, and after that more easily. When she asked him which novelists he recommended he introduced her to Proust and Malcolm Lowry, to Forster and Madox Ford, and Mrs Gaskell and Wilkie Collins. He got in another copy of
Dubliners
for her because the existing copy had been left out in the rain and rendered unintelligible. He drew her attention to
Brighton Rock
and
Tender is the Night.
She found Elizabeth Bowen for herself.

In her tidy drawing-room he poured the wine at lunchtime. Not feeling careless themselves, for they were not, they talked about the careless people of Scott Fitzgerald, about the Palace Flophouse, and Hangover Square and Dorlcote Mill. The struggles of Jude acquired new small dimensions, the goodness of Joe Gargery marked a day, as Mrs Proudie did and Daisy Miller. Ellen Wedgeworth died, Dermot Trellis slept. Maurice Bendrix embraced the wife of his friend.

They did not go in for telling one another the story of their lives. Their conversation was not like that, yet almost without their knowing it their lives were there, in a room made different by their friendship. They did not touch upon emotions, nor touch upon regret or anything that might have been; they did not lose control of words. They did not betray, she her finished past, he what still was there. She brought in coffee, he turned from gazing out at rain or cold spring sunshine, they spoke again of Wildfell Hall. Her front door wide behind her, she stood on the steps, and was there in his driving-mirror until the willow trees were there instead.

There was the beginning of gossip: his car seen on that road, people noticing that she came often to the library. It was not much but would become so; he knew that and so did she; they did not say it. When the days began to lengthen there had been three seasons. In summer they would sit outside, at the white table on the lawn, but summer did not come.

Graillis replaced on the shelves what had been returned earlier today,
The Garden of Allah
still read by someone, crime stories more popular, Georgette Heyer holding her own. Sunburnt spines enclosed a world that the smell of old paper made what it was. She had said she envied him this place.

He looked about him before he left. A poster hung from the counter by the door, advertising the Strawberry Festival in June. Above the door, in straw, there was St Brigid’s Cross. It was on the evening of the day the removal vans had clattered empty through the town and later lumbered away full of her possessions that she’d said she envied him. They’d had to wait until
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
was stamped for Mrs Garraher before they said goodbye, a Tuesday it had been.

He locked the door behind him and drove away.

*

Hearts were forming in the lettuces of his vegetable beds. He cut one, and chives and parsley. He walked about before he collected what he’d left on the path that ran beside his vegetables, adding a tomato that had ripened beneath a cloche. He had never become used to the emptiness of this return to his garden and his house, and he supposed he never would. In his kitchen he opened tins of soup and sardines. He washed the lettuce.

‘He phoned me afterwards,’ he imagined Clifferty saying now, standing in a kitchen doorway, going through his day, his solicitor’s caution estimating how much he could pass on. ‘I don’t know what that man’s trouble was,’ Clifferty said, and added that there hadn’t been much else today.

There was whiskey somewhere; Graillis looked for it and found it among the kitchen bottles. He poured a little, mixed oil and vinegar for his salad. On the radio there was agricultural news, the latest from the markets, and then a brash disc-jockey pumped out his chatter before a cacophony began. Silence was a pleasure after that.

Laying out a knife and fork on the kitchen table, Graillis wondered if either of his children would phone tonight. There was no reason why one of them should. There’d been nothing wrong, no cause for concern, when he’d heard from both of them not long ago. He poured more whiskey, not wanting to eat yet. He couldn’t remember any other time when he’d drunk alone in this house. He kept the whiskey for people who dropped in.

Taking his glass with him, he walked about his garden, among penstemons and roses and crocosmia not yet in bud. The row of artichokes he’d planted in February stood as high as empty sunflowers. Lavender scented the warm twilight.

The whiskey talk was private now, a whisper from his orderly remembering that no longer nurtured panic. In visiting the solicitor, in going to the house, he had touched what should not be touched except in memory, where everything was there for ever and nothing could be changed. Retirement from a branch library would not bring much and so there’d been a gesture. A stranger’s interpretation of that – what curiosity hatched or gossip spun – was neither here nor there. Again, instead, there was the fresh, bright face, the gentle shyness. Again, instead, the older woman lifted to her lips a tan-tipped cigarette touched with crimson. Again there was the happiness of marriage, again embraces were imagined.

There was no more, nor would there be. Not even an ornament, for that would cheat reality. Not even a piece of china, and he would write to say so. The winter flowers lay scattered in the shadow of a secret, deception honouring a silent love.

Solitude

I reach the lock by standing on the hall chair. I open the hall door and pull the chair back to the alcove. I comb my hair in the hallstand glass. I am seven years old, waiting for my father to come downstairs.

Our house is a narrow house with a blue hall door, in a square, in London. My father has been away and now he is back.
The first morning we’ll go to the café.
Ages ago my mother read what he had written for me on the postcard. ‘They’re called the Pyramids,’ she said when I pointed at the picture. And then: ‘Not long before he’s back.’ But it was fifty days.

I hear him whistling on the stairs, ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’, and then he hugs me, because he has come in the night when I was asleep. He doesn’t believe it, he says, how I have grown. ‘I missed you terribly,’ he says.

We walk together, across the square to where the traffic and the streets are. ‘Coffee,’ my father says in the café. ‘Coffee, please, and a slice of Russian cake for you-know-who.’

But all the time there is what happened and all the time I know I mustn’t say. A child to witness such a thing was best forgotten, Mrs Upsilla said, and Charles nodded his long black head. No blame, Charles said; any child would play her games behind a sofa; all they’d had to do was look. ‘No skin off my nose,’ Charles said. ‘No business of a poor black man’s.’ And not knowing I was still outside the kitchen door, Mrs Upsilla said it made her sick to her bones. Well, it was something, Charles reminded her, that my mother wouldn’t take her friend to the bedroom that was my father’s too. At least there was the delicacy of that. But Mrs Upsilla said what delicacy, and called my mother’s friend a low-down man.

‘You’re learning French now?’ my father says in the café. ‘Do you like French?’

‘Not as much as history.’

‘What have you learnt in history?’

‘That William the Conqueror’s son also got an arrow in his eye.’

‘Which eye? Did they say which eye?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

In the café the waitress is the one who always comes to us. My father says that is because we always sit at the same table. He says our waitress has Titian hair; he says that’s what that colour is. My father is always commenting on people, saying they have this or that, guessing about them, or asking questions. Often he falls into conversation with people who enquire the way on the street, and beggars, anyone who stops him, anyone in shops. ‘Rich as a candy king,’ I heard someone in the café say once, and my father laughed, shaking his head.

All the time in the café I want to tell him, because I tell him everything when he comes back from a journey. I want to tell him about the dream I had that same night, all of it happening again. ‘Oh, horrid nightmare,’ my mother comforted me, not knowing what it was about because I didn’t say, because I didn’t want to.

‘The picture gallery?’ my father suggests when we have had our coffee. ‘Or the dolls’ museum today? Look, I have this.’

He spreads out on the table a handkerchief he has bought, all faded colours, so flimsy you can see through it in places. Old, he says, Egyptian silk. There is a pattern and he draws his forefinger through it so that I can see it too. ‘For you,’ he says. ‘For you.’

In the bus, on the way to the dolls’ museum he talks about Egypt. So hot it could make your skin peel off, so hot you have to lie down in the afternoon. One day he’ll bring me with him; one day he’ll show me the Pyramids. He takes my hand when we walk the last bit.

I know the way, but when we get there the doll I like best isn’t on her shelf. Unwell, the man says, getting better in hospital. It’s his way of putting it, my father says. He asks the man: that doll, the Spanish doll, will be back next week. ‘Well, we can come again,’ my father promises. ‘Who’s going to stay up for the party?’ he says when we’re back in the house.

The party is tonight. In the kitchen the wine bottles are laid out, two long rows all the length of the table, and other bottles on trays, and glasses waiting to be filled. Charles comes specially early to help when there is a party. There always is when my father returns.

‘You sit down there and have your sandwich.’ Mrs Upsilla’s grey head is bent over what she’s cooking; she’s too busy to look up. Charles winks at me and I try to wink back but I can’t do it properly. He passes close to where I’m sitting and then the sandwich I don’t want isn’t there any more. ‘Oh, there’s a good girl,’ Mrs Upsilla says when she asks if I’ve eaten it and I say yes. And Charles smiles. And Davie giggles and Abigail does.

Abigail and Davie aren’t real, but most of the time they’re there. They were that day, when the door opened and my mother and her friend came into the drawing-room. ‘It’s all right,’ my mother said. ‘She’s not here.’ And Davie giggled and Abigail did too and I made them be quiet.

‘My, my,’ Charles says in the kitchen when Mrs Upsilla calls me a good girl. He says it so often it annoys Mrs Upsilla. ‘Why’s he saying that?’ she asks me every time. ‘What’s he on about?’ And Charles always laughs.

I thank Mrs Upsilla for the sandwich I haven’t eaten because she likes me to thank her for things. On the way upstairs I remember that when the person in the café said as rich as a candy king I heard my father repeating that to my mother afterwards; he said that maybe what the person meant was he was rich to have so beautiful a wife. Or you could take it differently, Mrs Upsilla said when I told her: the person in the café could have been referring to my mother’s inheritance.

Upstairs, my father is standing at the door of their bedroom, my mother is tidying the bed. He has brought her a handkerchief too, bigger than mine, and already she wears it as a scarf. ‘So beautiful you are!’ my father says and my mother laughs, a sound that’s like the tinkling of a necklace he gave her once. The bath taps are dribbling in the bathroom, turned low for my mother’s bath. ‘Who’s going to help me take the corks out?’ my father says, and my mother asks him to open the window at the top. Her lips are soft when she kisses my forehead, her scent makes me want to close my eyes and always be able to smell it. ‘Good darling,’ she whispers.

In the kitchen my father draws out the corks and I make a pile of them, and count them. The red bottles are really green, he says, but you can’t see that until they’re empty. He cuts away the shiny covering over each cork before he puts the corkscrew in. ‘Well, that’s all done,’ he says and asks how many and I say thirty-six. ‘You take me to the picture gallery next time?’ he says, and the dancing ladies come into my head, and the storm at the cricket match, and Saint Catherine, and the portrait of the artist. ‘That to look forward to,’ my father says before he goes upstairs again.

We play a game in my room, Abigail and Davie and I. We pretend we are in Egypt, climbing up a pyramid, and Abigail says we should be wearing our cotton sun hats because the sun can burn your head even through your hair. So we go down for them but then it’s cooler so we walk about the streets. We buy things in a market, presents to bring home, rings and brooches and jars of Egyptian peaches, and Egyptian chocolate and Egyptian rugs for the floor. Then I go back to the kitchen.

Charles has gone out for ice. ‘You going to keep me company?’ Mrs Upsilla says, still busy with her cooking. ‘You’ll trip on those laces,’ she says, allowing the electric mixer to operate on its own for a moment. A nasty accident there could be, and she ties my laces. Always double-tie a shoelace, she says, and I go away.

In the drawing-room the bowls of olives and tit-bits are laid out; the fire is blazing, the wire net of the fire-guard drawn down. I watch the raindrops sliding on the window-panes. I watch the people in the square, hurrying through the rain, a woman holding an umbrella over her dog, Charles returning with the ice. The cars go slowly, the street lights have come on.

I sit in the armchair by the fire, looking at the pictures in the books, the old woman who kept children in a cage, the giants, the dwarfs, the Queen’s reflection in the looking-glass. I look out into the square again: my mother’s friend is the first to come. He waits for a car to pass before he crosses the square, and then there is the doorbell and his footsteps on the stairs.

‘Have one of these,’ he says in the drawing-room: cheese straws that Mrs Upsilla has made. ‘Time for your dancing lesson,’ and he puts the music on. He shows me the same steps again because I never try, because I don’t want to try. ‘How are they?’ he asks and I know he means Davie and Abigail; ever since my mother mentioned them to him he asks about them. I might have told him they were there that afternoon, but instead I just say they’re all right. Then other people come and he talks to them. I hate him so much I wish he could be dead.