Visitors (2 page)

After Henry had disengaged himself from her embrace it was the turn of Mrs May to be exclaimed over, patted, and led to a chair. Coming from a naturally austere background, she
had found this alarming, until, timidly at first, she allowed herself to relax, for there was nothing of which to be afraid. There was little conversation, but a wealth of largely mimed gratification. She sat in a chair next to Rose and allowed her hand to be stroked; she admired Rose’s clumsy embroidery until Henry returned from the kitchen and his settling of the household’s accounts. The tea was served, with the cakes of which Rose was so fond. Henry teased and indulged her like the child she still was, and although she did not quite understand that he had become a man and she therefore a woman, she laughed delightedly at his remarks, hearing the sound of his voice rather than the sense of his words.

Mrs May said little but was attentive, removing a slopped saucer, unobtrusively substituting a dry one, marvelling quietly at Rose’s dexterity with a cake fork when her remarks were so random and repetitive. But there was always the delighted laughter, until Henry looked at his watch and announced that it was time that they were on their way. Then there were tears, and the housekeeper had to intervene, to put an end to Rose’s prayerful embraces, and lead her to the window for the last goodbye. ‘Until next week, Rose,’ Henry would say, but she did not quite believe him. They waved exhaustively, until they saw her form retreat into the room behind her. Then Henry would shake off the burden of the visit, and they would walk back into town, glad of the activity. A different Sunday then impinged on their consciousness: tourists in T-shirts, tired children, decorous Asian shopkeepers and their families strolling in the park. All this, which could have been entertaining, became alien, as they silently compared it with the life, or half life, they had just left. Henry would sigh intermittently throughout the evening, though Mrs May was naturally equable. She was more than willing to
share Henry with his sister; for both of them Henry was of equal importance. Tired, therefore, but uncomplaining, she would set about preparing the evening meal, with scarcely a glance through the window at the garden.

And they were both dead, both Henry and Rose, within weeks of each other. Rose, supported by various cousins, had fainted at Henry’s funeral, although that had been as sparse and unemotional as Mrs May could contrive it. In that other garden, at Golders Green, Rose had finally understood the facts of death. An ambulance was called; in the ambulance she had a stroke, and in the hospital soon surrendered what consciousness she had left. Her bedside was thronged with those same relatives. Mrs May came and went silently. And then it was over. The relatives dispersed, and she was alone.

Alone except for the telephone calls, routinely made on a Sunday evening to ascertain that she was still alive. Henry’s married cousins, Kitty Levinson, Molly Goodman, his doctor and distant connection, Monty Goldmark, all paid her faithful though absent-minded attention. She felt herself to be a stranger in their midst, a truth on which agreement was more or less unanimous. Hospitality was invariably offered, but at the same time there was a tacit acceptance that she would continue her alien life at a distance. Both parties felt some relief at this convention; the cousins, guilty at even feeling relief, redoubled their expressions of goodwill. Again there was little conversation. Mrs May was in no doubt that the calls were motivated by love for the absent Henry rather than for herself. She did not take exception to this; she knew that Henry had been a superior character, that she was little more than his shadow, his relict. It was because they felt so sorry for any woman whom Henry had left alone that their ready emotions overflowed on Sunday evenings, as if even they acknowledged
the sadness of those hours, sadness that was perhaps little more than a pause for unwanted reflection, and the knowledge that time was slipping away.

The conversations seemed to follow an unseen rota, as if Kitty had previously agreed with Molly which one of them was to undertake the task. Mrs May took a small wager with herself as to who was shouldering the obligation on any particular week. If anything she dreaded the interruption of the silence in which she now lived, yet once the routine enquiries had been exchanged she surrendered almost pleasurably to Kitty’s or Molly’s invariable recital: their health, the health of their husbands, the dinner party of the week, the menu served at the dinner party, the projected visit to Kitty or to Molly, whoever was speaking or not speaking, reminiscences of Rose, whom these good women had been assiduous in visiting on days other than those sacrosanct Sundays, the fears they had entertained on Rose’s behalf after the death of her parents, the subsequent splendid behaviour of Henry, and ultimately of herself. This was what really spurred them to keep in touch, not her own health (monotonously good, they supposed, since she never complained), not the reminiscences, but their own unquestioning acceptance of Henry’s priorities. Even though she remained so puzzling a stranger, she was still Henry’s wife.

It seemed to surprise them that one not of their immediate kin could identify so closely with Henry’s life, and Mrs May could not tell them that Henry had been her subject, as if she had been studying him for a degree and was intent on knowing as much of him as it would be discreet of her to know, without impinging on his own sorely tested privacy. She was a novel reader, which helped, and the cousins were not. So she could not explain her deep appreciation of the differences
that existed between them. Henry was festive, emotional, easily moved, extravagant; when he brought her flowers his own cheeks would flush with pleasure. Her own response, though outwardly moderate, was deep. How to explain this to Molly or to Kitty, whose own husbands were usually described in terms of physical ailments? So that the telephone calls were usually a disappointment, at least on their side. After her meagre stock of news was exhausted, after she had made the usual response to accounts of the rheumatism or the recipe for lemon chicken, aware that she was letting them down, and sincerely sorry for the fact, she would ask after every extended family member—fortunately her memory was excellent—and thus repair her reputation.

‘I hope you’re looking after yourself, Thea,’ was usually the concluding remark. ‘What are you eating tonight?’

‘Gazpacho and baked cod,’ she would say, or, ‘Cold tongue with Madeira sauce.’

In fact she would eat a banana, as she usually did, and settle down with a book. Kitty or Molly would then think more kindly of her, guiltily reassured once again, although after the call they would telephone each other to deplore her coldness. This too she knew and did not resent.

For if they pitied her she did not pity herself. She had had Henry, so puzzlingly absent. His presence was somehow denied her, owing perhaps to that same rationality or coldness that the cousins deplored. For she could not tell of the loyalty, and gratitude, that had united her with Henry, and was therefore judged unfeeling. Because nothing had prepared her for this unlikely marriage she was profoundly surprised to be acknowledged as a wife. Not to be found a novice, to be made a companion, was her endowment from Henry. Yet there were no photographs of him in the flat, and she was not afraid
of the dark, nor did she commune sentimentally with his shade. Simply, he was gone, leaving her as alone now as when he had found her, neither more nor less. As a widow she cut a poor figure, she knew. If she wished for anything now it was to be left alone, to furnish her own silence. She knew that she was approaching the end of her life, and that silence was appropriate. She was unaware that she gave no sign of this, and was thus not understood. But to express her acceptance of these facts, of this situation, would be to invite the charge of morbidity, which she rejected with something of the same distaste as would be felt by Kitty or Molly if she so much as voiced her thoughts. Therefore her conversation consisted largely of enquiries as to the health and welfare of her interlocutor. These protected her and at the same time gave pleasure, easing her into another week with a consciousness of duties fulfilled and obligations discharged. Without this consciousness she would have felt undressed.

Since that remote day when she had tripped on an uneven paving stone and fallen, and had been rescued by a passer-by, who was Henry, her life had hardly been her own, and on occasion she had difficulty in recognising it. Therefore she felt a certain familiarity with these latter days; this was the solitude she had always known before and until her marriage. She had been rescued in more senses than one, though, strangely enough, on hot still evenings such as this, she could remember the involuntary surrender of the fall, before the strong hands had restored her balance. Now that they would never hold her again she sought no substitutes, was chary of affectionate gestures, a fact which estranged her even further from the cousins, as did her apparently unsupported status. She had no family, which to Kitty and Molly made her pitiable, even shameful. Yet she was still too loyal to her origins to describe
her relief at her escape from home, from the tall narrow house at the far end of the New Kings Road, in which she and her mother and father had passed their harmonious but largely silent days. Conversation was somehow a luxury, confined to Sundays. Thus she had learned nothing except to visit the Public Library: fiction taught her all she knew of life, taught her to interpret the lives of others. And she had not been found wanting: that was also Henry’s gift to her. Even the cousins, once introduced, could not fault her, little knowing that their immaculate carpets and voluptuous sofas provided such a contrast with the serviceable upright furniture and plain curtains of home. She had bought her present flat with the proceeds of the family house after the deaths of her father and her mother. They too had died within weeks of each other, as if their largely coded conversation could only be pursued beyond the grave.

Her first efforts at furnishing had been awkward; it had taken some time for her to settle on the blue-grey carpet and curtains that had so soothed Henry. And of course there was the outlook onto the garden, to which she paid so much attention these days. She had never really known whether Henry had loved the flat as much as she did. On those visits to the cousins, which could not be avoided, he seemed to reveal an affinity with the amiable husbands who put aside their newspapers to wave a cheerful greeting, leaving the formalities to their wives. Something wistful and pleasure-loving then emanated from him. The coffee, the cake, which appeared as though by magic, were just as magically consumed, as though they were a birthright, as natural as mother’s milk.

Their life alone together was courteous, deeply considerate. This enabled Mrs May to endure her sparse attractions, which the cousins, so abundant, so fecund, openly deplored. Had she
been guilty of weaning Henry away from his family? Perhaps she had; perhaps he had it in him to be just such an amiable husband, comfortably ensconced in just such a soft armchair, served coffee and cake by the sort of mother figure that Mrs May could never be. Yet alone with her he became more of a man; not merely the provider, through a family trust, of an extended network of cousins and nephews, but thoughtful, dignified, mature. He had been the director of a small charity for refugees, from which he took no salary, being satisfactorily financed through investments. There had been factories in Germany when the name was Meyer: as Henry May a native charm, together with his own resources, made him a respected figure in his own world and in hers. She had thought herself his debtor; only now, in old age, and in solitude, did she ever think of herself without reference to Henry.

This puzzled her. Although lonely she was not unhappy. A day like today, spent watching her neighbours’ children playing in the garden, hardly moving for the duration of the long Sunday afternoon, had not been unduly burdensome. If she saw herself, even in her memory, she did not see the brightness that had been hers as a wife; she saw the lined and ageing woman she had become, as if these lineaments had been waiting to emerge since her features had first been formed. For Henry’s sake she kept up appearances, had her hair done, applied discreet colours to her face, yet when she looked in the mirror, lipstick in hand, she saw a drained countenance, its expression wary, as if at any minute it might undergo disintegration, as if there were no longer any cells to separate the skin from the bone. This was a bad moment every morning. Once she was packaged for the day, in one of her navy-and-white print dresses, she thought no more of this sly transformation. Housework occupied a bare half hour; she was not untidy.
Once a fortnight a cleaning firm turned out the flat, during which time she sat politely in the garden. She had got rid of her daily, Olive Gage, who was so devoted to Henry, because she could no longer endure her tearful reminiscences. The cleaners sent by the firm were Vietnamese and silent. This suited her much better. She was aware of herself as a selfish old woman, but she knew that her character, like her appearance, was unlikely to improve, might even deteriorate to the extent of asking other people to be quiet, in a voice now almost rusty from misuse. The only voices she really welcomed were those she heard on the radio, since no response was called for. Yet these days she listened only to the news, and a little music in the evening. She had grown used to her own company, paid it little attention. At the same time she was aware that the world made demands even on one as undemanding as herself.

In these days of her solitude her own history reclaimed her, her life before Henry and her life since. She saw an intimate connection between the two, as if Henry had been an improbable interlude for which nothing had prepared her. On the contrary: his company, his presence had been a source of surprise as well as pleasure. It was in fact when she saw him buttressed by Rose, by Rose’s housekeeper, who always greeted her kindly, by Kitty and Molly and their husbands, that the breathtaking realisation struck her: these people are my relations. For her youth had been a long apprenticeship, her parents too busy, too abstracted, too conscious of each other, to satisfy any longings she might have had for gossip, for fantasy, such as she was to encounter in Kitty’s and Molly’s drawing rooms. Her youth had been an affair of studious long walks, trying to appreciate the wonders of nature in the dusty shrubs of her dull suburb; as soon as she was old enough she
took the bus to Kensington Gardens and walked round Hyde Park. This excursion usually occurred on a Sunday afternoon, when her parents settled down for their customary nap; her absence was tolerated unquestioningly, and on her return there would be a proper tea, with cake, as if the day had some significance after all. Now, her days once more unaccompanied, she remembered those timid celebrations (for that was what they were) with a sense of recognition that surprised her. Between the Public Library and her long walks she had preserved her youth in innocence, unaware of either happiness or unhappiness, unmarked by anguish or rebellion.