Selected Stories

And Robert knew that time in passing would settle how the summer had been left. Time would gather up the ends, and see to it that his daughter’s honouring of a memory was love that mattered also, and even mattered more.

Old Flame

Grace died.

As Zoë replaces the lid of the electric kettle – having steamed the envelope open – her eye is caught by that stark statement. As she unfolds the plain white writing-paper, another random remark registers before she begins to read from the beginning. We never quarrelled not once that I remember.

The spidery scrawl, that economy with punctuation, were once drooled over by her husband, and to this day are not received in any ordinary manner, as a newspaper bill is, or a rates demand. Because of the sexual passion there has been, the scrawl connects with Charles’s own neat script, two parts of a conjunction in which letters have played an emotional part. Being given to promptness in such matters, Charles will at once compose a reply, considerate of an old flame’s due. Zoë feared this correspondence once, and hated it. As ever my love, Audrey

: in all the years of the relationship the final words have been the same.

As always, she’ll have to reseal the envelope because the adhesive on the flap has lost its efficacy. Much easier all that is nowadays, with convenient sticks of Pritt or Uhu. Once, at the height of the affair, she’d got glue all over the letter itself.

Zoë, now seventy-four, is a small, slender woman, only a little bent. Her straight hair, once jet-black, is almost white. What she herself thinks of as a letterbox mouth caused her, earlier in her life, to be designated attractive rather than beautiful. ‘Wild’ she was called as a girl, and ‘unpredictable’, both terms relating to her temperament. No one has ever called her pretty, and no one would call her wild or unpredictable now.

Because it’s early in the day she is still in her dressinggown, a pattern of tulips in black-and-scarlet silk. It hugs her slight body, crossed over on itself in front, tied with a matching sash. When her husband appears he’ll still be in his dressing-gown also, comfortably woollen, teddybear brown stitched with braid. Dearest, dearest Charles

, the letter begins. Zoë reads all of it again.

This letter is special, of course, because of Grace’s death. Others have been different. Grace and I wondered how you are getting along these days . . . Grace and I have finally taken retirement ... I’m to give you this address Grace says. Just in case you ever want to write . . . A seaside house. Grace always wanted that . . . In 1985, in 1978 and ’73 and ’69, Grace always had a kind of say. A quick lunch some time? each letter – this one too – suggests before the As ever my love

and the single cross that’s a reminder of their kissing. Somehow, Zoë has always believed, the quick-lunch suggestion came from Grace. Did she, she wonders, make it again on her deathbed?

The affair has developed in Zoë an extra sense. Without making an effort she can visualize a tall woman she has never met, now the lone occupant of a house she has never entered. She sees her smartly dressed in shades of maroon, iron-grey hair fashionably arranged, the clarity of her eyes a little clouded. Creases have multiplied on the skin of her face and are a map of wrinkles now. Zoë imagines her entering her kitchen and turning on the radio, to hear the same news she herself heard earlier: football fans on the rampage in a German city, shop windows smashed, a bus turned on its side. She imagines her standing with a cup of Nescafé in the bow-window of her sitting-room: seen through drizzle on a pane, the sea is a pattern of undulations, greyish green, scuffed with white. The sky that meets it on the far horizon is too dull to contemplate. A single mackerel-trawler slips into view.

If it’s inconvenient or if you’d rather not well of course I understand.

The Alp Horn is where they lunch, have done so since first they loved one another. Her inquisitiveness getting the better of her, Zoë went there once. She actually went inside, giving a name she had made up, of someone she was to meet there. A musical instrument, presumably an alp horn, stretched the length of a wall; Tyrolean landscape decorated two others. There were checked tablecloths, blue and red; recorded music played; the place was modest. ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ Zoë said to a waiter, half a lifetime ago it seems like because in fact it is. ‘Clearly there’s been a muddle.’