Selected Stories

She hardly knew the man she’d slept with. He’d danced with her at a party she’d gone to alone, and then he’d danced with her again, holding her closer, asking her her name and giving his. Phair didn’t accompany her to parties these days and she didn’t go often herself. But she’d known what she intended, going to this one.

The few tables were all taken. She found a stool at the bar that ran along one of the walls. Teenagers’ Curfew! a headline in someone else’s evening paper protested, a note of indignation implied, and for a few moments she wondered what all that was about and then lost interest.

Phair would be quietly at his desk, in shirtsleeves, the blue-flecked shirt she’d ironed the day before yesterday, his crinkly, gingerish hair as it had been that morning when he left the house, his agreeable smile welcoming anyone who approached him. In spite of what had happened nine years ago, Phair had not been made redundant, that useful euphemism for being sacked. That he’d been kept on was a tribute to his success in the past, and of course it wasn’t done to destroy a man when he was down. ‘We should go away,’ she’d said, and remembered saying it now, but he hadn’t wanted to, because running away was something that wasn’t done either. He would have called it running away, in fact he had.

This evening he would tell her about his day, and she would say about hers and would have to lie. And in turn they’d listen while she brought various dishes to the dining-table, and he would pour her wine. None for himself because he didn’t drink any more, unless someone pressed him and then only in order not to seem ungracious. ‘My marriage is breaking up,’ the man who’d made love to her in his temporary accommodation had confided when, as strangers, they had danced together. ‘And yours?’ he’d asked, and she’d hesitated and then said no, not breaking up. There’d never been talk of that. And when they danced the second time, after they’d had a drink together and then a few more, he asked her if she had children and she said she hadn’t. That she was not able to had been known before the marriage and then become part of it – as her employment at the Charter-house Institute had been until six weeks ago, when the Institute had decided to close itself down.

‘Idleness is upsetting,’ she had said while they danced, and had asked the man who held her closer now if he had ever heard of Sharon Ritchie. People often thought they hadn’t and then remembered. He shook his head and the name was still unfamiliar to him when she told him why it might not have been. ‘Sharon Ritchie was murdered,’ she’d said, and wouldn’t have without the few drinks. ‘My husband was accused.’

She blew on the surface of her coffee but it was still too hot. She tipped sugar out of its paper spill into her teaspoon and watched the sugar darkening when the coffee soaked it. She loved the taste of that, as much a pleasure as anything there’d been this afternoon. ‘Oh, suffocated,’ she’d said, when she’d been asked how the person called Sharon Ritchie had died. ‘She was suffocated with a cushion.’ Sharon Ritchie had had a squalid life, living grandly at a good address, visited by many men.

Katherine sat a while longer, staring at the crumbs of her florentine, her coffee drunk. ‘We live with it,’ she had said when they left the party together, he to return to the wife he didn’t get on with, she to the husband whose deceiving of her had ended with a death. Fascinated by what was lived with, an hour ago in the room that was his temporary accommodation her afternoon lover had wanted to know everything.

On the Tube she kept seeing the room: the picture of the elephant, the suitcases, the trailing flexes, the clothes on the back of the door. Their voices echoed, his curiosity, her evasions and then telling a little more because, after all, she owed him something. ‘He paid her with a cheque once, oh ages ago. That was how they brought him into things. And when they talked to the old woman in the flat across the landing from Sharon Ritchie’s she recognised him in the photograph she was shown. Oh yes, we live with it.’

Her ticket wouldn’t operate the turnstile when she tried to leave the Tube station and she remembered that she had guessed how much the fare should be and must have got it wrong. The Indian who was there to deal with such errors was inclined to be severe. Her journey had been different earlier, she tried to explain; she’d got things muddled. ‘Well, these things happen,’ the Indian said, and she realized his severity had not been meant. When she smiled he didn’t notice. That is his way too, she thought.