Selected Stories

She finds the Pritt where Charles keeps it, in the middle drawer of the dresser, with his writing things and sealing-wax, Sellotape and scissors. She boils the water in the kettle again, for coffee. She hears his footstep above her, crossing the landing from their bedroom to the lavatory, crossing it again to the bathroom. Pipes rattle when he turns on the hot water because he has never learned not to turn the tap all the way in order to prevent it gushing so. All the years she has known him he has been impatient about things like that.

‘It’s time you saw Charles again,’ Zoë knows Grace used to say in that house, and guesses Audrey’s reply: that Charles has his own life now, that Charles has made his choice. Grace always pressed, gently, because she loved Charles, too, but had to keep it to herself. ‘My dear, I’m certain Charles would welcome a sign.’ Anything could have happened: they’d never know.

Thirty-nine years have passed since the first year of the great passion. Audrey and Grace were friends already, making their way in office life, both of them determined to use their secretarial posts as stepping-stones to something better. The day Charles appeared – the first time they laid eyes on him – he was being led around by the snooty, half-drunk Miss Maybury, both of them with glasses of vin rosé

, which was what La Maybury - her office title – drank every afternoon, sometimes in the mornings also. ‘Hullo,’ Charles said, a lanky young man with floppy fair hair. It wasn’t difficult for Zoë to imagine the shy smile he’d darted at Audrey and then at Grace. Afterwards he’d told her about La Maybury and the wine and the tour round the office.

‘Poor Charles’ he had become in after years. Poor Charles alone with his unloved, unloving wife. What was the point of any of it, now that his children were grown-up? In their seaside house they lived in hope – that one day he would sound less whispery on the telephone, passing on details of death by misadventure or disease. ‘Given six months, a merciful release.’ Or: ‘Just slipped. A wretched plastic bag. In the rain, near the dustbins.’

Zoë places two slices of bread in the toaster but does not press the lever down because it isn’t time to yet. Before the affair got going it had been a subject of fascination to him that two such apparently close friends should, in appearance at least, be so vastly different. ‘Oh, that’s often so,’ Zoë said, citing examples from her schooldays, but he had never shown much interest in her schooldays and he didn’t then. ‘Grace the lumpy one’s called,’ he said. ‘Back of a bus. Audrey’s the stunner.’ Old-fashioned names, she had thought, and imagined old-fashioned girls, frumpish in spite of Audrey’s looks. Later, he’d always included Grace in his references to Audrey, clouding the surface because of the depths beneath.

She measures coffee into a blue Denby pot, the last piece of a set. There was a photograph she found once: Audrey as handsome as he’d claimed, a goddess-like creature with a cigarette; Grace blurred, as if she’d moved. They were sprawled on a rug beside a tablecloth from which a picnic had been eaten. You could see part of the back wheel of a car, and it wasn’t difficult to sharpen into focus Grace’s frizzy hair, two pink-rimmed eyes behind her spectacles. Where on earth had that picnic been? What opportunity had been seized – a slack afternoon in the office?

Zoë props the letter against his cup, doing so with deliberation. It will vex him that she has arranged it so, the gesture attaching a comment of her own; but then she has been vexed herself. She tore that photograph into little pieces and watched them burn. He never mentioned its loss, as naturally he wouldn’t.

‘Ah, good,’ she greets him, and watches while he picks the letter up. She depresses the lever of the toaster. The milk saucepan rattles on the gas, a glass disc bouncing about in it to prevent the milk from boiling over. She pours their coffee. He returns the letter to its envelope. She halves each piece of toast diagonally, the way he likes it.

She hadn’t guessed. It was a frightening, numbing shock when he said: ‘Look, I have to tell you, Audrey and I have fallen in love.’ Just for a moment she couldn’t think who Audrey was. ‘Audrey and I,’ he repeated, thinking she hadn’t properly heard. ‘Audrey and I love one another.’ For what remained of that year and for several years following it, Zoë felt physically sick every time that statement echoed, coming back to her from its own Sunday morning: 10th September 1968, eleven o’clock. He had chosen the time because they’d have all day to go into things, yet apart from practicalities there was nothing to go into. They couldn’t much go into the fact that he wanted someone else more than he wanted her. After five years of marriage he was tired of her. He had spoken in order to be rid of her.