Selected Stories

Finishing with the marmalade, she moves it closer to him. His face, less expert at disguise than once it was, hides nothing. She watches him thinking about the woman who has been left on her own, his sympathy reaching into a seaside house that’s now too spacious for one. But Charles is not an imaginative man. He doesn’t penetrate far. He doesn’t see in the old flame’s fridge a chicken joint for one, and fish for one tomorrow. Winter’s a melancholy time to be bereaved, a mood reflected in the cold and wet, winds rattling and whining. Audrey’ll miss her friend particularly when it comes to watching television, no one beside her to share a comment with.

‘Oh yes, the Alp Horn’s still there,’ Zoë hears a little later that morning, having eased open a door he has carefully closed. ‘Twelve forty-five, should we say? If your train’s a little late, anything like that, please don’t worry. I’ll simply wait, my dear.’

He’d been saying something she hadn’t managed to hear before that, his voice unnaturally low, a hand cupped round the mouthpiece. Then there’d been the hint of a reprimand because the old flame hadn’t written sooner. Had he known he’d have gone to the funeral.

‘I’m sorry to have hurt you so,’ he said later that Sunday, but words by then made no sense whatsoever. Five years of a mistake, she thought, two children mistakenly born. Her tears dripped on to her clothes while he stood there crestfallen, his good looks distorted by distress. She did not blow her nose; she wanted to look as she felt. ‘You would like me dead,’ she sobbed, willing him to raise his fist in fury at her, to crash it down on her, obliterating in mercy all that remained of her. But he only stood there, seeming suddenly ill-fed. Had she not cooked properly for him? her thoughts half crazily ran on. Had she not given him what was nourishing? ‘I thought we were happy,’ she whispered. ‘I thought we didn’t need to question anything.’

‘Nice to see the old Alp Horn again,’ his murmur comes from the hall, and Zoë can tell that he’s endeavouring to be cheerful. ‘Tell you what, I’ll bring a packet of Three Castles.’

There is the click of the receiver, the brief sounding of the bell. He says something to himself, something like ‘Poor thing!’ Zoë softly closes the door. Grace and Audrey had probably been friends for fifty years, might even have been schoolfriends. Was Audrey the one whom other girls had pashes on? Was Grace a little bullied? Zoë imagines her hunched sulkily into a desk, and Audrey standing up for her. In letters and telephone conversations there have been references to friends, to holidays in Normandy and Brittany, to bridge, to Grace’s colonic irrigation, to Audrey’s wisdom teeth removed in hospital. Zoë knows – she doesn’t often call it guessing - that after Audrey’s return from every visit to the Alp Horn Grace was greedy for the morsels passed on to her. Not by the blink of an eye could Grace reveal her secret; the only expression of her passion was her constancy in urging another letter. We think of you with her in that coldness

. ‘Quite frail he looked,’ Audrey no doubt reported in recent years.

He did not stay with Zoë in 1967 because of love. He stayed because - quite suddenly, and unexpectedly – the emotions all around him seemed to have become too much: it was weariness that caused him to back off. Had he sensed, Zoë wondered years later, the shadow of Grace without entirely knowing that that was what it was? He stayed, he said, because Zoë and the two children who had then been born meant more than he had estimated. Beneath this statement there was the implication that for the sake of his own happiness it wasn’t fair to impose hardship on the innocent. That, though unspoken, had a bitter ring for Zoë. ‘Oh, go away!’ she cried. ‘Go to that unpleasant woman.’ But she did not insist; she did not say there was nothing left, that the damage had been done for ever. To the woman, he quoted his economic circumstances as the reason for thinking again. Supporting two households – which in those days was what the prospect looked like – was more than daunting. Grace says you wouldn’t have to leave them penniless. What she and I earn could easily make up for that. Grace would love to help us out. Had he gone, Grace would somehow have been there too.