After Rain (5 page)

    But there was no forgiveness when they dressed again. Nothing was over yet. Forgiveness came later.

    There was a pause after Francesca made her bleak statement in La Trota. Margy frowned, beginning to lean across the table because the hubbub was considerable that day. No longer working at Bygone Antiques, she had come across London specially.

    ‘Drop me?’ Margy said, and Francesca nodded: that was her husband’s request.

    The restaurant was full of people: youngish, well-to-do, men together, women together, older women with older men, older men with girls, five businessmen at a table. The two waitresses hurried with their orders, too busy to mutter their complaints about the overcrowding.

    ‘But why on earth?’ Margy said. ‘Why should you ?’

    Expertly the Sicilian waitress opened the Gavi and splashed some into their glasses.
’Buon appetito,’
she briskly wished them, returning in a moment with the sole. They hadn’t spoken since Margy had asked her questions.

    ‘He has a right to something, is that it?’ Margy squeezed her chunk of lemon over the fish and then on to her salad. ‘To punish?’

    ‘He thinks you betrayed him.’

    
‘I
betrayed
him ? I?’

    ‘It’s how Philip feels. No, not a punishment,’ Francesca said. ‘Philip’s not doing that.’

    ‘What then?’

    Francesca didn’t reply, and Margy poked at the fish on her plate, not wanting to eat it now. Some vague insistence hovered in her consciousness: some truth, not known before and still not known, was foggily sensed.

    ‘I don’t understand this,’ Margy said. ‘Do you?’

    A salvaging of pride was a wronged husband’s due: she could see that and could understand it, but there was more to this than pride.

    ‘It’s how Philip feels,’ Francesca said again. ‘It’s how all this has left him.’

    She knew, Margy thought: whatever it was, it had been put to Francesca in Philip’s court-room manner, pride not even mentioned. Then, about to ask and before she could, she knew herself: the forgiving of a wife was as much as there could be. How could a wronged husband, so hurt and so aggrieved, forgive a treacherous friend as well ?

    ‘Love allows forgiveness,’ Francesca said, guessing what Margy’s thoughts were, which was occasionally possible after years of intimacy

    But Margy’s thoughts were already moving on. Every time she played with his children he would remember the role she had played that summer: she could hear him saying it, and Francesca’s silence. Every present she brought to the house would seem to him to be a traitor’s bribe. The summer would always be there, embalmed in the friendship that had made the deception possible — the key to the flat, the seaside house, the secret kept and then discovered. What the marriage sought to forget the friendship never would because the summer had become another part of it. The friendship could only be destructive now, the subject of argument and quarrels, the cause of jealousy and pettiness and distress: this, Philip presented as his case, his logic perfect in all its parts. And again Margy could hear his voice.

    ‘It’s unfair, Francesca.’

    ‘It only seems so.’ Francesca paused, then said: ‘I love Philip, you know.’

    ‘Yes, I do know.’

    In the crowded bistro their talk went round in muddled circles, the immediacy of the blow that had been struck at them lost from time to time in the web of detail that was their friendship, lost in days and moments and occasions not now recalled but still remembered, in confidences, and conversation rattling on, in being different in so many ways and that not mattering. Philip, without much meaning to, was offering his wife’s best friend a stature she had not possessed before in his estimation: she was being treated with respect. But that, of course, was neither here nor there.

    ‘What was her name,’ Margy asked, ‘that woman with the gummy teeth?’

    ‘Hyatt. Miss Hyatt.’

    ‘Yes, of course it was.’

    There was a day when Margy was cross and said Francesca was not her friend and never would be, when they were six. There was the time the French girl smoked when they were made to take her for a walk on the hills behind their boarding-school. Margy fell in love with the boy who brought the papers round. Francesca’s father died and Margy read Tennyson to cheer her up. They ran out of money on their cycling tour and borrowed from a lorry driver who got the wrong idea. Years later Francesca was waiting afterwards when Margy had her abortion.

    ‘You like more cappuccinos ?’ the Sicilian waitress offered, placing fresh cups of coffee before them because they always had two each.

    ‘Thanks very much,’ Francesca said.

    In silence, in the end, they watched the bistro emptying. The two waitresses took the tablecloths off and lifted the chairs on to the tables in order to mop over the coloured patterns of shellfish on the tiled floor. Quite suddenly a wave of loneliness caused Margy to shiver inwardly, as the chill news of death does.

    ‘Perhaps with a bit of time,’ she began, but even as she spoke she knew that time would make no difference. Time would simply pass, and while it did so Francesca’s guilt would still be there; she would always feel she owed this sacrifice. They would not cheat; Francesca would not do that a second time. She would say that friends meeting stealthily was ridiculous, a grimier deception than that of lovers.

    ‘It’s all my fault,’ Francesca said.

    Hardly perceptibly, Margy shook her head, knowing it wasn’t. She had gone too far; she had been sillily angry because of a children’s prank. She hadn’t sought to knock a marriage about, only to give her friend a treat that seemed to be owing to her, only to rescue her for a few summer months from her exhausting children and her exhausting husband, from Mrs. Sleet and the Little Acorn Nursery School, from her too-safe haven. But who was to blame, and what intentions there had been, didn’t matter in the least now.

    ‘In fairness,’ Francesca said, ‘Philip has a point of view.Please say you see it, Margy’

    ‘Oh yes, I see it.’ She said it quickly, knowing she must do so before it became impossible to say, before all generosity was gone. She knew, too, that one day Francesca would pass on this admission to her husband because Francesca was Francesca, who told the truth and was no good at deception.

    ‘See you soon,’ the Sicilian waitress called out when eventually they stood up to go.

    ‘Yes,’ Margy agreed, lying for her friend as well. On the pavement outside La Trota they stood for a moment in a chill November wind, then moved away in their two different directions.

Timothy's Birthday

    They made the usual preparations. Charlotte bought a small leg of lamb, picked purple broccoli and sprigs of mint. All were Timothy’s favourites, purchased every year for April 23rd, which this year was a Thursday Odo ensured that the gin had not gone too low: a gin and tonic, and then another one, was what Timothy liked. Odo did not object to that, did not in fact object to obtaining the gin specially, since it was not otherwise drunk in the house.

    They were a couple in their sixties who had scarcely parted from each other in the forty-two years of their marriage. Odo was tall, thin as a straw, his bony features receding into a freckled dome on which little hair remained. Charlotte was small and still pretty, her grey hair drawn back and tidy, her eyes an arresting shade of blue. Timothy was their only child.

    Deciding on a fire, Odo chopped up an old seed-box for kindling and filled a basket with logs and turf. The rooks were cawing and chattering in the high trees, their nests already in place — more of them this year, Odo noticed, than last. The cobbles of the yard were still damp from a shower. Grass, occasionally ragwort or a dock, greened them in patches. Later perhaps, when Timothy had gone, he’d go over them with weed-killer, as he did every year in April. The outhouses that bounded the yard required attention also, their wooden doors rotted away at the bottom, the whitewash of their stucco gone grey, brambles growing through their windows. Odo resolved that this year he would rectify matters, but knew, even as the thought occurred, that he would not.

    ‘Cold?’ Charlotte asked him as he passed through the kitchen, and he said yes, a little chilly outside. The kitchen was never cold because of the range. A long time ago they had been going to replace it with a secondhand Aga Charlotte had heard about, but when it came to the point Odo hadn’t wanted to and anyway there hadn’t been the funds.

    In the drawing-room Odo set the fire, crumpling up the pages of old account books because no newspaper was delivered to the house and one was rarely bought: they had the wireless and the television, which kept them up with things. The account books were of no use to anyone, belonging entirely to the past, to the time of Odo’s grandfather and generations earlier. Kept for the purpose in a wall-cupboard by the fireplace, their dry pages never failed to burn well.
Slating:
£2.15s., Odo read as he arranged the kindling over the slanted calligraphy He struck a match and stacked on logs and turf. Rain spattered against the long-paned windows; a sudden gust of wind tumbled something over in the garden.

    Charlotte pressed rosemary into the slits she’d incised in the lamb. She worked swiftly, from long experience knowing just what she was doing. She washed the grease from her fingertips under a running tap and set aside what remained of the rosemary, even though it was unlikely that she would have a use for it: she hated throwing things away

    The oven was slow; although it was still early, the meat would have to go in within half an hour, and potatoes to roast - another Timothy favourite — at eleven. The trifle, gooey with custard and raspberry jam and jelly — a nursery puddmg — Charlotte had made the night before. When Timothy came he chopped the mint for the mint sauce, one of the first of his childhood tasks. He’d been a plump little boy then.

    ‘I can’t go,’ Timothy said in the flat that had recently been left to him by Mr. Kinnally.

    Eddie didn’t respond. He turned the pages of the Irish Times, wishing it were something livelier, the Star or the Express. With little interest he noticed that schools’ entrance tests were to be abolished and that there was to be a canine clean-up, whatever that was, in Limerick.

    ‘I’ll drive you down,’ he offered then. His own plans were being shattered by this change of heart on the part of Timothy, but he kept the annoyance out of his voice. He had intended to gather his belongings together and leave as soon as he had the house to himself: a bus out to the N4, the long hitch-hike, then start all over again. ‘No problem to drive you down,’ he said. ‘No problem.’

    The suggestion wasn’t worth a reply, Timothy considered. It wasn’t even worth acknowledgement. No longer plump at thirty-three, Timothy wore his smooth fair hair in a ponytail. When he smiled, a dimple appeared in his left cheek, a characteristic he cultivated. He was dressed, this morning, as he often was, in flannel trousers and a navy-blue blazer, with a plain blue tie in the buttoned-down collar of his plain blue shirt.

    ‘I’d get out before we got there,’ Eddie offered. ‘I’d go for a walk while you was inside.’

    ‘What I’m saying is I can’t face it.’

    There was another silence then, during which Eddie sighed without making a sound. He knew about the birthday tradition because as the day approached there had been a lot of talk about it. The house called Coolattin had been described to him: four miles from the village of Baltinglass, a short avenue from which the entrance gates had been removed, a faded green hall-door, the high grass in the garden, the abandoned conservatory. And Timothy’s people — as Timothy always called them - had been as graphically presented: Charlotte’s smile and Odo’s solemnity, their fondness for one another evident in how they spoke and acted, their fondness for Coolattin. Charlotte cut what remained of Odo’s hair, and Timothy said you could tell. And you could tell, even when they were not in their own surroundings, that they weren’t well-to-do: all they wore was old. Hearing it described, Eddie had visualized in the drawing-room the bagatelle table between the windows and Odo’s ancestor in oils over the fireplace, the buttoned green sofa, the rugs that someone had once brought back from India or Egypt. Such shreds of grace and vigour from a family’s past took similar form in the dining-room that was these days used only once a year, on April 23rd, and in the hall and on the staircase wall, where further portraits hung. Except for the one occupied by Odo and Charlotte, the bedrooms were musty, with patches of grey damp on the ceilings, and plaster fallen away. Timothy’s, in which he had not slept for fifteen years, was as he’d left it, but in one corner the wallpaper had billowed out and now was curling away from the surface. The kitchen, where the television and the wireless were, where Odo and Charlotte ate all their meals except for lunch on Timothy’s birthday, was easily large enough for this general purpose: a dresser crowded with crockery and a lifetime’s odds and ends, a long scrubbed table on the flagged floor, with upright kitchen chairs around it. As well, there were the two armchairs Odo had brought in from the drawing-room, a washing-machine Timothy had given his mother, wooden draining-boards on either side of the sink, ham hooks in the panelled ceiling, and a row of bells on springs above the door to the scullery. A cheerful place, that kitchen, Eddie estimated, but Timothy said it was part and parcel, whatever he meant by that.

    ‘Would you go, Eddie? Would you go down and explain, say I’m feeling unwell?’

    Eddie hesitated. Then he said:

    ‘Did Mr. Kinnally ever go down there?’

    ‘No, of course he didn’t. It’s not the same.’

    Eddie walked away when he heard that reply. Mr. Kinnally had been far too grand to act as a messenger in that way. Mr. Kinnally had given Timothy birthday presents: the chain he wore on his wrist, shoes and pullovers. ‘Now, I don’t want you spending your money on me,’ Timothy had said a day or two ago. Eddie, who hadn’t been intending to, didn’t even buy a card.