Selected Stories

It was the second time that Prosper had been left. The first time there had been a marriage, but the separation that followed the less formal relationship was no less painful; and in the days that now crawled by, anguish became an agony. He dreaded each return to the empty flat, especially in the small hours of the morning. He dreaded the night school, the chatter of voices between classes, the brooding presence of Hesse, who was its newly appointed principal, the hot-drinks machine that gave you what it had, not what you wanted, the classroom faces staring back at him. ‘All right?’ Hesse enquired, each guttural syllable articulated slowly and with care, his great blubber face simulating concern. In Prosper’s dreams the contentment he had known for two and a half years held on and he reached out often to touch the companion who was not there. In the dark the truth came then, merciless, undeniable.

When that week ended he went to Winchelsea on the Sunday, a long slow journey by train and bus, made slower by weekend work on different stretches of the railway line.

‘Well, this is nice,’ her mother said, flustered when she opened the hall door.

She led him into the sitting-room he remembered from the only time he had been in this house before – the prints of country scenes on the walls, the ornaments, a bookcase packed with books that Chloë said had never been read. The fire was unlit because this morning the room was sunny. A black-and-white dog – reluctant when it was shooed out of the french windows – smelled as it had before, of damp or of itself. A Sunday that had been too.

‘Oh yes, we’ve been well,’ Chloë’s mother said when she was asked. ‘He has a new thing now.’

Metal-detecting this turned out to be, poking about with a gadget on Winchelsea beach, which was the best for this purpose for miles around. ‘You’ll have a cup of coffee? Or lunch? He’ll be back for lunch.’

Prosper had always known she didn’t like him, an older man and not a type she could take to: he could hear her saying it. And now he’d caught her with a curler in her wispy grey hair, forgotten, he supposed. He watched her realizing, a nervous gesture, fingers patting one side of her head. She left him on his own and came back saying she was sorry for deserting him. She offered sherry, the bottle almost empty.

‘He said he’d get some more.’ She poured out what there was, none for herself.

‘I don’t know where she is,’ Prosper said. ‘I thought she might be here.’

‘Oh, Chloë’s not here.’

‘I wondered -’

‘No, Chloë’s not here.’

‘I wondered if she said anything about where she is.’

‘Well, no.’

He wondered what had been said, how it had been put, presumably on the telephone. He wondered if they’d been told more than he had himself, if they’d been glad, or at least relieved, both of them, not just she.

‘He’ll be back soon. He wouldn’t like to miss you.’

Prosper believed that, seeing in his mind’s eye the lanky figure prodding at the shingle of the beach with his detector. Her father had made a pet of Chloë and probably considered she could do no wrong; but even so it was he whom Prosper had come to see. It hadn’t been the truth when he’d said he thought she might be here.

‘It’s difficult,’ her mother said. ‘In the light of everything, it’s difficult.’

When she finished speaking she shook her head repeatedly. Prosper said he understood.

‘He’d want to see you. He’d want me to invite you.’

‘You’re very kind.’

‘He’s never idle.’

‘I remember that.’

‘He made those ships in bottles all last winter. You see the ships, going through the hall?’

‘Yes, I noticed the ships.’

‘It’s lamb I’ve got for today. A little leg, but it’s enough.’

There was her husband’s key in the front door while she spoke, then his voice called out to her, saying he was back.

Chloë left the Kylemore Hotel that same Sunday morning and took a taxi to Maida Vale, where she laid her things out in the room she’d been lent while the girl who lived there was on holiday in Provence. It would be better than the hotel, and three weeks might just be long enough to find somewhere permanent.

She filled the drawers that had been allocated to her and hung what clothes there was room for in a hanging space behind a curtain. A stroke of luck she’d called it when the girl – an office colleague whom she didn’t otherwise know – had suggested this arrangement, quoting the rent and requesting that it should be paid in advance. Chloë had lived in a quite similar room before she’d moved into the flat at Clement Gardens.

He hadn’t pressed her to do that; at no stage had he done so, at no stage in their relationship had he ever pressed her about anything. As soon as she saw the flat she had wanted to be there, enraptured by its spaciousness, and the grandeur – so she called it – of Clement Gardens. The gardens themselves, where you could sit out in summer, were for the use of the tenants only, the rules that kept them peaceful strictly enforced.