The Travellers and Other Stories (14 page)

When she looked back out through the window, the black car was parked at the gate. The day was warm, a light October breeze blew soft patterns across the grass in front. They had the door open, and with Hazel still gaping at her sister's lean, eager, thieving profile, he'd walked right into the hall and put his dark head round the door into the front room. Hazel caught the taste of him riding in on the warm air, something fresh and sharp, a garden smell.

She has never forgotten it. The stink of plants on his clothes and in his skin.

She could hardly say afterwards exactly how things had happened. How one minute the two of them were with him at the door, both speaking at once in their fight to be the one to give him directions to the nursery. How the next minute he was standing with his black shoes on the patterned rug in the dining room saying the gammon smelled nice. And then she and Sylvia had said, in embarrassing, precise unison, ‘Do stay. Do stay and have something.' She'd felt her cheeks go hot, a scalding fury with Sylvia for making her look too eager by being so eager herself.

She was glad, at least, that everything looked so nice, that he had been brought to them on the day of the party.

A long trestle table stood against the far wall, opposite the bay window, covered in a white cloth lapping the patterned rug. Strawberries in a glass dish, pineapple chunks in mother's rose-coloured bowl. The warm gammon, sausages on sticks. Cheese and silver onions, a yellow jelly in a rabbit mould, shivering as if it were afraid.

Only Sylvia spoiled everything by hovering so close to the man when it was not her turn, smiling and arching her pencilled brows. Offering him tea in the little-girl voice she used for the men. The two sisters brought him over to the table together, like bodyguards, helped him to some warm gammon and a silver onion and urged him to try a mouthful of the yellow jelly.

He told them he was on a short holiday, staying at Bed & Breakfasts along the coast, buying the plants he was after wherever he could. He'd called ahead to the nursery here for the oleaster he wanted and they were keeping it for him, if only he could find the damn place. The three of them laughed together then, the sisters' voices clashing as they both began again with the directions.

He'd definitely been looking at her then though. Perhaps he'd sensed that she was more the gardener of the two of them. She saw herself leading him out into the back, into the garden that ran all the way down to the edge of the cliff. She saw herself describing how magnificent it would all be in the summer, with the bright flames of the kniphofia, the warm pleasing scent of the olearia. The soft clouds of blue and pink and white with the flax, tamarisk and daisy bush all in bloom. Sylvia could hardly even name them. She would be left standing, she'd have nothing to contribute, nothing with which to strike up a conversation.

Yes, he'd definitely been looking at her then. To this day, Hazel is sure of that. When he leaned forward to take up the frightened rabbit with his spoon, his dark hair almost touched her face and she'd caught again the sharp perfume in his clean dry cheeks. Briefly, then, she had the feeling that everything, after all, was as it should be. His mouth full, he'd smiled at her, gesturing with his spoon to show his appreciation of the food. Flecks of yellow rabbit clung to his teeth and he licked them away with his tongue. She pictured him, staying on for a night or two at the Bed & Breakfast down the road, the two of them sharing a few inches of Bristol Cream in the tooth mug there in the room. She tried a gentle, probing question, Would he be in the area for a while, after his visit to the nursery?

She remembers now that he hadn't seemed to hear her then, she remembers hating Sylvia for what she was doing. The rest of it has only become clear in the replaying of the scene, which visits her now like a nightmare.

The girls, Grace's friends, had begun to arrive, all in one big frilly clump, in their frothy pastel frocks and white ankle socks. He was leaning away from Hazel now, looking at all the girls who were jumping about watching Grace tear open her presents. That was when the fresh, green scent of his skin had got away from her, losing itself in the chatter of the noisy girls.

A thousand times she has asked herself if she could have prevented it. She has asked herself if the two of them had repelled him by their eagerness, by their both wanting him too much, falling over each other trying to get his attention, inviting him to more food, pressing him to stay.

She has asked herself if she could have prevented it by holding his interest herself, by being, perhaps, a little more beautiful.

When she'd come back into the room after fetching the cake from the kitchen, the cake with the thirteen candles on it, he was bending down and talking to Grace. She was showing him her presents. A box of Milk Tray. Some mittens and a packet of socks, a record in a white paper sleeve.

Grace smiled at the man. He was tall and dark and had a strange perfume like nothing she was used to inside the rooms of this house. It was like grass, mingled with something else too which was different from the cloying sweetness she was used to, the thickly scented skin of her mother and her aunt. It was like the nice smell of other girls' fathers.

To Hazel, it had seemed like more than a favour then, his offering to drive the girls home at the end of the party, saving them getting the car out of the garage. It had seemed like a promise, the next stage in their getting to know him, a kindness there would be some opportunity to repay. Each sister had felt a fierce certainty that she would be the one who would find that opportunity.

They'd watched him make room for the girls in the back, moving a box of plants, sea lavender and eryngium, into the boot, brushing off with his hand the grainy trail of sand and soil left behind on the leather. They watched him open the passenger door for Grace, who would show him the way. Each of the sisters was as full of hope at that moment as the other, in spite of the way he'd said, ‘Goodbye then, ladies.' Neither of them had liked that.
Ladies
. The way it made a pair of them.

He hadn't stopped when he dropped Grace back afterwards. Hazel heard her niece's step in the hall, and when she looked out through the bay window, his black car had already moved away.

Hazel dreams that he'll come back to them one day. She is fairly sure that if he ever comes, she will kill him.

She has sat, often, in the bay window looking down onto the road and imagined him strolling along it, walking back towards them from the direction of the nursery, his purchases made, a flat box of plants in his arms. She has seen herself going out into the white garage attached to the house, slowly backing out into the road in Sylvia's green Austin, picking up speed quickly as she motors towards him. She's seen the shallow box twirl lazily in the air, yellow grasses and silvery shrubs like handfuls of feathers breaking out of their pots and floating down with the man. Shining leaves and crumbs of earth settling themselves over his dead, dry face, his dark fanned-out hair.

Hazel has begun to knit a blanket, a blue one because she feels in her bones that it will be a boy. She will wrap the baby up in it when he is born and keep him warm. She has come to think of the blanket as something powerful that will help him after his awful start. He will be safe and they will look after him. He will grow up and he will forgive them for everything and so, perhaps, will Grace.

She and Sylvia talked once, briefly, once it began to be clear what had occurred, of going to the police, but Sylvia wouldn't have it and in the end Hazel came round to her way of thinking. It was better to be quiet about everything. Grace, after all, has never, ever talked about what happened to her. No word about it, about the man, has ever been spoken.

What matters now is Grace, what's important is to protect her in every way, to make her life easy and comfortable.

When spring comes, they leave the white house and take a small one further down the coast.

It's Hazel who arranges everything, who finds the new house to rent, who notifies the school that they are moving out of the area.

‘We've found the prettiest place,' she tells her niece. ‘You won't need to go to school when we move. You can do your work at home for a change, your mother and I will teach you between us.'

It turns out that Hazel takes care of all the teaching, Sylvia scarcely seems up to it. Sylvia seems to shrink from any of the necessary arrangements. She has taken it all very, very hard. She is quiet and brooding, spends her days reading in her chair in the corner of the front room.

Hazel asks Grace if she minds moving house, if she'll miss her old school. The girl shrugs, says she'll miss her friends.

Everything Hazel does now, she does with Grace in mind, so that everything will go smoothly after the terrible thing that has happened.

Mostly they stay indoors, Sylvia reading in her chair, crumpled and withdrawn from everything. Hazel's life is taken up with caring for Grace, with her lessons, with cooking the things she likes to eat, with choosing books for her from the library. Hazel goes out for all the shopping. In the street, she keeps her eyes down, the world seems to her these days to be full of men. She looks away from them, as if she's afraid of some fresh horror, some new ambush.

Sylvia does come out sometimes, to walk with Hazel and Grace in the early morning when the beaches are empty. Only a few times they have been met by other people, who gape rudely at the two women with the schoolgirl. Frail legs in white socks, a fair pony-tail in a nylon band, damp and straggly in the salty wind, big and swollen like a sparrow. Hazel has watched their mouths fall open, blame spilling out onto the wet sand like fish, hanging around in heaps behind their backs after she's taken Grace by the hand and led her away, back into the little house behind the dunes.

Grace, mercifully, doesn't seem to notice people looking. Hazel is proud of her, of the girl's quiet strength. Hazel has read the postcards her niece sends to her old friends. They're full of ordinary things, about the new house, about the weather and ice-creams on the beach, about this or that book she has just finished.

Now that the birth is so close, Hazel has begun to feel more peaceful. Excited in a tentative, hopeful way. She has bought a set of cotton chemises for him, a supply of napkins, a little wool cap, and put everything in the bottom drawer of the chest in her own bedroom. He will be born here at home. She pictures Grace propped up against the pillows, her proud smile, her white finger gripped in his new fist. Everything behind them, the mess she and Sylvia have made. Each thing—the move to the new house, the buying one by one of his miniature garments—has felt like a small repair to their lives.

Only sometimes, there's a cold fluttering in Hazel's throat, a falling in her stomach as if she's descending too fast in the shaft of a lift. She's afraid that there's something in all of this that is not quite as it should be, that their situation, on the brink of the baby's arrival, should be in some way different.

Sometimes, in the evenings, when Grace is upstairs sleeping, and she and Sylvia are together in the front room—Sylvia reading in her chair under the lamp in the corner, while she knits by the window—Hazel feels the press of their silence in the little rented room, looks across it at her sister and asks herself if there isn't something in all her careful preparations that she has failed to take care of. It preys on her, the fear that she's missed something, that she's left something out.

She wonders if Sylvia looks at herself sometimes, as she has, in the mirror, and asks herself if she could have made things turn out differently by being, perhaps, just a little more beautiful.

‘Penny for them', she whispers softly to her sister one night near the end. But Sylvia doesn't even look up from her book, perhaps she doesn't hear, and the silence about it all that they've grown so used to glides over them again, still and heavy like water.

She watches Sylvia in the mornings when Grace comes down in her nightie for breakfast. She watches her sister's crumpled face searching for another spot in the little kitchen to rest her eyes, to save herself the agony of having to look at her daughter.

Hazel wonders how, exactly, the stranger's visit replays itself in her sister's mind, how exactly Sylvia feels about what has happened.

Sylvia looks these days, like a woman in mourning. Her mouth, unpainted, sags at the corners. She dresses in long cardigans and shapeless skirts, in thick stockings and flat-heeled shoes, but then, doesn't Hazel do more or less the same? Doesn't she have a horror of the way the two of them used to rig themselves out? The black slacks, the soft inviting sweaters? Don't the two of them look the same now, a pair of sad repentant twins? Two middle-aged women, a stoop beginning in their narrow cardiganed shoulders because of the weight they both carry, the weight of the guilt and the shame?

But Hazel can't say for sure what goes on in her sister's mind as she sits there in her chair on the other side of the silent room, because they've never talked about it to each other, never talked about any of it except that once when it became clear what the man had done. Like Grace's postcards, their talk is always of ordinary things, of anything but what's happened. It's about the quality of Sunday's pork shoulder, about the new shape of the dunes after last night's winds. Like Grace, they've stayed silent, mute, about the other thing, about the stranger and the baby who'll be with them soon.

Every evening now, before the light goes completely, Hazel knits by the window of the plain rented room. The blanket is nearly finished, there's just the border to do now. Knit one, slip one, a different rhythm from the rest.

Tonight Grace has come to sit with her aunt. Sylvia has gone to bed early. She said she felt tired. Hazel knits. From time to time she looks up so she can smile at Grace. Looking at her after looking at Sylvia is like a balm, her clear skin, her steady mouth. She looks peaceful, contented, very, very young. Hazel feels herself soften, relax, the fearful flutter in her throat subsides. However painful this has all been for them, whatever the horrible confusion is that torments Sylvia, Grace is here, Grace is safe.