A Period of Adjustment (17 page)

A dandruffy young man in a blue chalk-stripe suite and pink shirt, ‘our Mr Wells', came from time to time to check that the fixtures and fittings were as agreed, admired the acres of beige Axminster, and said in what good condition everything seemed to be. Full marks to Helen there. The new owners, an American oil company, would entirely redo the house, of course, which is why they felt unable to match the asking price. None of this was in the least bit interesting to me, I just wanted out; and as crates and cartons trundled and banged past us I suggested that perhaps Mr Wells and I were in the way, and got on with stuffing black bin liners with old papers and litter from the shredder.

It really wasn't catastrophic. I would be delighted to tell Arthur when we got back. On the last day Helen arrived about noon with the kids. The house was practically stripped, a few boxes here and there, feet thudding about on bare boards somewhere, a tap trickling in the sink. A duff washer.

‘Feels quite odd, doesn't it? As if we had never been here. Odd. Anyway, I'm glad that I took all my little belongings down to Mummy ages ago. You know, clothes, processor, so on … and the only bits of furniture I kept for myself are just sentimental really. Sentimental stuff.'

‘That's really not like you, Helen dear.'

‘What? What's not like me?'

‘Being sentimental. The last thing I'd have expected.'

‘You are a shitty bastard. There is very little you would
ever know about sentiment, or even if I ever had it. I tell you one thing, there won't be any sentiment at all when it comes to the divorce. None at all, my friend. Not a whiff…'

‘Good. When do you want that to start up? Any urgency? I can get on to Hudson as soon as you like.'

Helen was leaning against the sink, looking through the window down into the drab little garden with its tiled patio, dried up pots, drooping may tree. She played idly with the chain which held the plug, clonking the metal of the basin. ‘Eric is the one to decide really. His divorce is not final yet.'

‘I see. I didn't know he was married. Sorry.'

‘Nothing to be sorry about. They're splitting just as we are. Incompatibility. No children.
Unlike
us. That's all. She's a cow as far as I can gather, met some Italian fellow in Monte Carlo. Very rich. They're working on it all.' She dropped the plug into the sink, wiped her hands on a piece of kitchen paper left behind.

‘Just let me know when.'

Annie came into the room behind a burly youth carrying a cardboard carton. ‘Oh! Mummy! It's awful really. Everything's packed up. Will you ever find anything again? I feel quite sad, don't you?' She was a pretty child, good skin, her mother's green eyes, like Giles, and her mother's hard mouth. She had as much sentiment too. She'd be splendid with horses, hell with her men.

‘You going to be a horsey lady?' I said.

She shot me a look of extreme irritation. ‘I'm going to
try.
I'm learning. Eventing, one day, perhaps. There's a stables and Miss Bliss-Montgomery says I'm very good. And Merlin, my pony, is lovely; you'd like him. I'm reading
Horse and Hound
to see if I can find a secondhand coat for him in the winter. Do you think I will?'

I said I really didn't know, and watched Helen prodding
through the half-filled carton. ‘What's in this? Oh, the food processor and the blades, scales and things. That's why it's so heavy. Is that the lot, young man?'

The burly youth looked at her blankly. ‘The lot. Apart from that old calendar on the wall.'

There was a hint of sarcasm in his voice which Helen chose not to hear. She took the calendar and smoothed it carefully, flipping through it. ‘I'll take it. It's only May, June now. Another seven months. Pity to leave it.' She stuck it into the carton. ‘Seal it up, then.
That's
the lot.'

Annie said suddenly, ‘Mummy said that one day I can come down to see you in your lovely house in France. I'd like that, but it would mean leaving Merlin so I couldn't stay long really. I'll come when Giles has a holiday from school. That would be all right, wouldn't it?'

I said it would be splendid and I would like it very much, and Giles, who had wandered in from the garden with a small china frog he'd just found, said the holidays were really long in France, and she'd have a lovely time except it was terribly hot all the time, and Annie sighed and said she really
hated
the heat. Giles said he knew that, and then asked me if he could put the frog in his pocket. It was an old one, he'd lost it years ago. So the stub-end of family life flickered on, guttering in the empty room of the echoing house.

‘I was looking at the calendar a moment ago, the one that hung by the sink,' said Helen carefully, ‘and I suddenly saw that someone I know, not two miles from where we stand, is about to have a birthday. Right?' She looked at me hard, then Giles.

Giles stuck the frog into his pocket. ‘I am. It's my birthday. On the second of July.'

Helen ruffled his hair, the loving mother. ‘Did you
really
think I'd forget? I never have, have I? Mummy never forgot your birthday. Did she?'

Annie, uneasy that all the attention was now on her brother, asserted her rights: ‘You never forget
mine
either. Mummy always remembers mine. It's April. And next year, when I'm thirteen, we shall have fourteen candles on my cake because thirteen is unlucky, you see?'

Giles was looking at me uncomfortably.

I said, ‘We're having a small supper party at the little hotel in our village … just local friends. It would be terrific if you could make it? He's ten, you know?'

‘I
know
he's ten.' Helen's voice was sharp with irritation. ‘But I don't think I can be there then. The second. I've got to be in Cannes on the 26th of June for the Festival, but I really don't know if we can stay on for your birthday. I'll see. We might have to go up to Milan, in Italy. It's not far from Milan, by air, is it?' She turned to me, a face devoid of any expression.

‘Not far at all,' I said. ‘Couple of hours about.'

Helen turned to leave the empty kitchen, the tailboards and doors were slamming on the vans, a couple of men came blustering into the hall with questions and papers to sign. Giles stood quite still, leaning against the empty refrigerator, the door slightly open. He was smiling, eyes bright. Annie had left with her mother. I closed the fridge door, turned the tap in the sink to stop the dribbling, smiled back at him, raised my hand, two fingers crossed. He laughed quietly, nodded.

When the vans had driven away, papers had been signed, tips dispensed and bright farewells exchanged, Helen and I went up to my stripped office, to do the absolutely final check. The children were down in the garden. Our voices were muted for some strange reason, as if there had been a death, which, I suppose, was exactly what the empty house signified. Death of a marriage, a relationship. Finished now. And the stripped house a mute symbol of that ending.

In my office some scattered paper-clips, empty shelves, a
splash of ink arced across a wall where once, in some frantic moment of correcting, I had probably flicked my pen in haste. The big room, our bedroom, bore no signs of anything. No relics of tumbled love, troubled nights, spilled pig-tails, young anxious faces at opened doors. And the bathroom, the main one on that floor, which had been the scene of Giles's distress, had refound its lock, and we didn't speak there. I just twisted taps. And so on, down through the house which now stood silent, awaiting a new pattern of life to be imposed on it.

It looked fresh, clean, tidy. Bits of string, scraps of straw, packing-bubbles, those ugly little plastic balls that one can never be rid of, were scattered here and there, but Mrs Nicholls, and her friend, had promised to ‘come in and do a last tidy'.

Helen, at the top of the stairs leading down to the front door and the hall, stopped, hand on the banister rail, one foot poised to move down a step. ‘Well, that's it, then. All done.' She shook her head, pushed her hair briskly behind her ears with one hand, went on down. I followed.

‘Funny,' she said, ‘that fourteen years leave no marks, don't you think? Nothing. Marks in the carpets where wardrobes and things have been. That ink splash; but, really nothing. You'd never know.'

I said nothing and we went down to the hall, the pleasant brass Georgian lamp hanging motionless. Fixtures and fittings.

‘You brought up your family here. Very well indeed.'

She nodded with a mock bow, ‘Thank you, kind sir. We had some good times, when we were young, and in love. In love. What do they say in the movies at this sort of moment? “No hard feelings.” That it?'

‘Something like that. Yes. And there aren't, are there?'

‘Not really. It's all over now anyway. And you never actually hit me, did you?'

‘No. No I never did, did I? Perhaps you might say that I was lacking in passion. Right?'

‘Oh no! Your passion was my downfall. There was plenty of passion. But you were a well-mannered young man, striking women was not your forte. You were pretty too. Long legs. I remember very well.'

‘And you were pretty too. Fantastically pretty. Still are, frankly.'

‘We're being rather silly, you know. Talking as if we were dead. We're not! Second chance starting.' Her hand caressed the polished pine ball at the end of the banister. ‘I reckon we just might make it to our fifties looking good, don't you? Still got your hair and teeth, no beer gut. I've got a few stretch-marks, a little sag here and there. Not much.' She was smiling like the old Helen I had known before passion gave way to ‘permission', and that to ‘perhaps', and finally ‘period'. As in full stop. She caught herself swiftly, doused the flirting, mocking little smile, pulled the chain-strapped bag from her shoulder and fumbled about in a veritable minestrone of papers, lipsticks, coins, compacts and tweezers and found a scuffed cheque book. ‘You'd better take this now. Cancel our joint account. I can cope.' She finished with an embarrassed shrug, the book limp in her fingers. Eric the Provider. I refused it.

‘When we have settled all else, Helen. Not before. I am still responsible for Annie, and even for you, Burnham Beeches notwithstanding. Thank you for thinking of it, I'd forgotten. All right?'

She shrugged lightly, not looking at me.

Sunlight struck into the empty hall like a probing finger, dust motes rose and fell, drifted.

‘All right,' she said, and then the car I had ordered for Giles and myself slid up to the kerb. I saw it through the glass panes of the door.

‘The sun has come out, can you believe? And my car is
here. Would you be sweet? Go and call the children? I'll load the suitcase and stuff.'

For a split second we looked at each other with the suddenly clear, direct eyes of our youth, untarnished by time. Just a second. Like a spark struck from a flint. Nothing more, then she turned quickly away and I heard her calling the children as she went down the hall, and I opened the front door.

There had been no message from Florence on the answering-machine.

I had telephoned Dottie from the airport at Nice, and said we'd be passing in about a couple of hours' time. She came running down the driveway of her house as the Simca swung through the gates.

‘How lovely! On time!
What
a treat!' She was holding her straw hat with one hand, blowing kisses with the other.

Giles waved a brown plastic bag in the air. ‘Look! Your presents! Tongue! Four tins! And the sausage thing!' He got out of the car, there was a slamming of doors, a flurry of embraces.

Dottie had the plastic bag, swinging it about, her hat pushed back on her head by my kiss on her cheek. ‘Oh, you are good, Giles! So lovely! We waited for lunch. It's all ready, a little cold collation, some salad.'

I protested a bit. ‘We just stopped off for the tins and the Cumberland ring. Giles insisted. And this week's
Country Life.
'

‘You can't have eaten! It's too early surely.'

‘Breakfast,' said Giles. ‘We had a
sort
of breakfast.'

‘Well, come and have a sort of lunch.' She turned, one hand on his shoulder. ‘The car's all right there, under the trees behind the Mercedes.'

‘Mercedes? Has Arthur won at bridge?'

We were laughing, the light was bright, hot, the path up to the house and its green vine dappled with pennies of sun and shade. On the terrace, to my slight consternation, a small group of people.

‘Oh Lord, Dottie, you've got guests. We really ought to get on home.'

‘Nonsense.' And then she called up to the terrace. ‘Arthur! They've got here, on time, isn't that amazing! A big glass of chilled Frascati for William.'

At the terrace table were Arthur in a faded denim shirt, and a straw hat, and a boy of about Giles's age, a woman lying back in a planter's chair, with black glasses and a scarlet headscarf. Arthur was on his feet, bottle held high.

‘Will! Giles! Wonderful! You've been away an age.
Vous avez oublié tout votre français, Gilles. C'est vrai?'

When we had got up on to the terrace Dottie, with plastic bag held high, swung it towards us and made her introduction.

‘William and Giles Caldicott, and this' – she swung the bag towards the back of the terrace and the far side of the table – ‘this is Frederick de Terrehaute and his mama, Madame La Duchesse de Terrehaute, only no one uses the Duchess bit, do they, Lulu?'

The woman in the planter's chair slowly leant forward. ‘Well, no. No. Not since 1793 anyway. Isn't that sad? But it's only useful for maître d's and getting the best table, and I
always
get that anyway. I'm Louise de Terrehaute, Mr Caldicott, and I am really delighted to meet with you.' She reached for a glass at her side, raised it in a half-toast. ‘Bienvenu! A new face in town, and my, oh my, a
pretty
one at last! Doubly welcome, sir.'