Selected Stories

She reaches for a Ritz. The soft brown hair that’s hardly visible beneath the bridal veil is blonded now and longer than it was, which is why she wears it gathered up, suitable in middle age. She was pretty then and is handsome now; still loose-limbed, she has put on only a little weight. Her teeth are still white and sound; only her light-blue eyes, once brilliantly clear, are blurred, like eyes caught out of focus. Afterwards her mother’s remark on the night before the wedding became a joke, because of course the marriage had worked out. A devoted couple; a perfect marriage, people said – and still say, perhaps – except for the pity of there being no children. It’s most unlikely, Mrs Lethwes believes, that anyone much knows about his other woman. He wouldn’t want that; he wouldn’t want his wife humiliated, that never was his style.

Mrs Lethwes, who smokes one cigarette a day, smokes it now as she lies on the sofa, not yet pouring her second drink. On later September holidays there had been no letters, of that she was certain. Some alarm had been raised by the one that didn’t find its intended destination: dreadful, he would have considered it, a liaison discovered by chance, and would have felt afraid. ‘Please understand. I’m awfully sorry,’ he would have said, and Elspeth would naturally have honoured his wishes, even though writing to him when he was away was precious.

‘No more. That’s all.’ On her feet again to pour her second drink, Mrs Lethwes firmly makes this resolution, speaking aloud since there is no one to be surprised by that. But a little later she finds herself rooting beneath underclothes in a bedroom drawer, and finding there another bottle of Gordon’s and pouring some and adding water from a bathroom tap. The bottle is returned, the fresh drink carried downstairs, the Ritz packet put away, the glass she drank her two cocktails from washed and dried and returned to where the glasses are kept. Opaque, blue to match the bathroom paint, the container she drinks from now is a toothbrush beaker, and holds more than the sedate cocktail glass, three times as much almost. The taste is different, the plastic beaker feels different in her grasp, not stemmed and cool as the glass was, warmer on her lips. The morning that has passed seems far away as the afternoon advances, as the afternoon connects with the afternoon of yesterday and of the day before, a repetition that must have a beginning somewhere but now is lost.

He is with her now. They are together in the flat she shares with no one, being an independent girl. At three o’clock, that is Mrs Lethwes’s thought. Excuses are not difficult; in his position in the office, he would not even have to make them. Lunch with the kind of business people he often refers to, lunch in the Milano or the Petit Escargot, and then a taxi to the flat that is a second home. ‘Surprise!’ he says on the doorstep intercom, and takes his jacket off while she makes tea. ‘I’ll not be back this afternoon,’ is all he has said on the phone to his bespectacled and devoted secretary.

They sit by the french windows that open on to a small balcony and are open now. It is a favourite place in summer, geraniums blooming in the balcony’s two ornamental containers, the passers-by on the street below viewed through the metal scrolls that decorate the balustrade, the drawn-back curtains undisturbed by breezes. The teacups are a shade of pink. The talk is about the orchestra, where it is going next, how long she’ll be away, the dates precisely given because that’s important. In winter the imagined scene is similar, except that they sit by the gas fire beneath the reproduction of Field of Poppies, the curtains drawn because it’s darkening outside even as early as this. In winter there’s Mahler on the CD player, instead of the passers-by to watch.

Why couldn’t it be? Mrs Lethwes wonders at ten past five when a film featuring George Formby comes to an end. Why couldn’t it be that he would come back this evening and confess there has been a miscalculation? ‘She is to have a child’: why shouldn’t it be that he might say simply that? And how could Elspeth, busy with her orchestra, travelling to Cleveland and Chicago and San Francisco, to Rome and Seville and Nice and Berlin, possibly be a mother? And yet, of course, Elspeth would want his child, women do when they’re in love.

Vividly, Mrs Lethwes sees this child, a tiny girl on a rug in the garden, a sunshade propped up, Mr Yatt bent among the dwarf sweetpeas. And Marietta saying in the kitchen, ‘My, my, there’s looks for you!’ The child is his, Mrs Lethwes reflects, pouring again; at least what has happened is halfway there to what might have been if the child was hers also. Beggars can’t be choosers.