After Rain (24 page)

    In the garden Mrs. Lethwes weeds a flowerbed, wishing that Marietta didn’t have to come to the house three times a week, but knowing that of course she must. She hopes the little heart-leafed things she’s clearing from among the delphiniums are not the germination of seeds that Mr. Yatt has sown, a misfortune that occurred last year with his Welsh poppies. Unlike Marietta, Mr. Yatt is dour and rarely speaks, but he has a way of slowly raising his head and staring, which Mrs. Lethwes finds disconcerting. When he’s in the garden - Mondays only, all day - she keeps out of it herself.

    Not Vivaldi now, perhaps a Telemann minuet, run Mrs. Lethwes’s thoughts in her garden. Once, curious about the music a flautist plays, she read the information that accompanied half a dozen compact discs in a music shop. She didn’t buy the discs but, curious again, she borrowed some from the music section of the library and played them all one morning. Thirty-six, or just a little younger, she sees Elspeth as, unmarried of course and longing to bear the child of the man she loves: Mrs. Lethwes is certain of that, since she has experienced this same longing herself. In the flat she imagines, there’s a smell of freshly made coffee. The fragile fingers cease their movement. The instrument is laid aside, the coffee poured.

    It was in France, in the Hotel St-Georges during their September holiday seven years ago, that Mrs. Lethwes found out about her husband’s other woman. There was a letter, round feminine handwriting on an air-mail envelope, an English stamp: she knew at once. The letter had been placed in someone else’s key-box by mistake, and was later handed to her with a palaver of apologies when her husband was swimming in the Mediterranean. ‘Ah,
merci,’
she thanked the smooth-haired girl receptionist and said the error didn’t matter in the very least. She knew at once: the instinct of a barren wife, she afterwards called it to herself. So this was why he made a point of being down before her every morning, why he had always done so during their September holiday in France; she’d never wondered about it before. On the terrace she examined the post-mark. It was indecipherable, but again the handwriting told a lot, and only a woman with whom a man had an association would write to him on holiday. From the letter itself, which she read and then destroyed, she learned all there was otherwise to know.

    There are too many of the heart-leafed plants, and when she looks in other areas of the border and in other beds she finds they’re not in evidence there. Clearly, it’s the tragedy of the Welsh poppies all over again. Mrs. Lethwes begins to put back what she has taken out, knowing as she does so that this isn’t going to work.

    ‘ “Silly girl,” I said, straight to her face. “Silly girl, Ange, no way you’re not.” ‘

    Marietta has established herself at the kitchen table, her shapeless bulk straining the seams of a pink overall, her feet temporarily removed from the carpet slippers she brings with her because they’re comfortable to work in.

    ‘No, not for me, thanks,’ Mrs. Lethwes says, which is what she always says when she is offered instant coffee at midday. Real coffee doesn’t agree with Marietta, never has. Toxic in Marietta’s view.

    ‘All she give’s a giggle. That’s Ange all over, that. Always has been.’

    This woman has watched Ange’s puppy-fat go, has seen her through childhood illnesses. And Bernardo, too. This woman could have had a dozen children, borne them and nursed them, loved them and been loved herself. ‘Well, I drew a halt at two, dear. Drew the line, know what I mean? He said have another go, but I couldn’t agree.’

    Five goes, Mrs. Lethwes has had herself: five failures, in bed for every day the third and fourth time, told she mustn’t try again, but she did. The same age she was then as she imagines her husband’s other woman to be: thirty-six when she finally accepted she was a childless wife.

    ‘Decent a bloke as ever walked a street is little Liam, but Ange don’t see it. One day she’ll look up and he’ll be gone and away. Talking to a wall you are.’

    ‘Is Ange in love, though?’

    ‘Call it how you like, dear. Mention it to Ange and all she give’s a giggle. Well, Liam’s small. A little fellow, but then where’s the harm in small?’

    Washing traces of soil from her hands at the sink, Mrs. Lethwes says there is no harm in a person being small. Hardly five foot, she has many times heard Liam is. But strong as a horse.

    ‘I said it to her straight, dear. Wait for some bruiser and you’ll build your life on regrets. No good to no one, regrets.’

    ‘No good at all.’

    Of course was what she’d thought on the terrace of the Hotel St-Georges: a childless marriage was a disappointment for any man. She’d failed him, although naturally it had never been said; he wasn’t in the least like that. But she had failed and had compounded her failure by turning away from talk of adoption. She had no feeling for the idea; she wasn’t the kind to take on other people’s kids. Their own particular children were the children she wanted, an expression of their love, an expression of their marriage: more and more, she’d got that into her head. When the letter arrived at the Hotel St-Georges she’d been reconciled for years to her barren state; they lived with it, or so she thought. The letter changed everything. The letter frightened her; she should have known.

    ‘We need the window-cleaners one of them days,’ Marietta says, dipping a biscuit into her coffee. ‘Shocking, the upstairs panes is.’

    ‘I’ll ring them.’

    ‘Didn’t mind me mentioning it, dear? Only with the build-up it works out twice the price. No saving really.’

    ‘Actually, I forget. I wasn’t trying to — ‘

    ‘Best done regular I always say.’

    ‘I’ll ring them this afternoon.’

    Mrs. Lethwes said nothing in the Hotel St-Georges and she hasn’t since. He doesn’t know she knows; she hopes that nothing ever shows. She sat for an hour on the terrace of the hotel, working it out. Say something, she thought, and as soon as she does it’ll be in the open. The next thing is he’ll be putting it gently to her that nothing is as it should be. Gently because he always has been gentle, especially about her barren state; sorry for her, dutiful in their plight, tied to her. He’d have had an Eastern child, any little slit-eyed thing, but when she hadn’t been able to see it he’d been good about that too.

    ‘Sets the place off when the windows is done, I always say.’

    ‘Yes, of course.’

    He came back from his swim; and the letter from a woman who played an instrument in an orchestra was already torn into little pieces and in a waste-bin in the car park, the most distant one she could find. ‘Awfully good, this,’ she said when he came and sat beside her.
Some Do Not
was the book she laid aside. He said he had read it at school.

    ‘I’ll do the window-sills when they’ve been. Shocking with flies, July is. Filthy really.’

    ‘I’ll see if I can get them next week.’

    There hadn’t been an address, just a date: September 4th. No need for an address because of course he knew it, and from the letter’s tone he had for ages. She wondered what that meant and couldn’t think of a time when a change had begun in his manner towards her. There hadn’t been one; and in other ways, too, he was as he always had been: unhurried in his movements and his speech, his square healthy features the same terracotta shade, the grey in his hair in no way diminishing his physical attractiveness. It was hardly surprising that someone else found him attractive too. Driving up through France, and back again in England, she became used to pretending in his company that the person called Elspeth did not exist, while endlessly conjecturing when she was alone.

    ‘I’ll do the stairs down,’ Marietta says, ‘and then I’ll scoot, dear.’

    ‘Yes, you run along whenever you’re ready.’

    ‘I’ll put in the extra Friday, dear. Three-quarters of an hour I owe all told.’

    ‘Oh, please don’t worry -’

    ‘Fair’s fair, dear. Only I’d like to catch the twenty-past today, with Bernardo anxious for his dinner.’

    ‘Yes, of course you must.’

    The house is silent when Marietta has left, and Mrs. Lethwes feels free again. The day is hers now, until the evening. She can go from room to room in stockinged feet, and let the telephone ring unanswered. She can watch, if the mood takes her, some old black-and-white film on the television, an English one, for she likes those best, pretty girls’ voices from the 1940s, Michael Wilding young again, Ann Todd.

    She doesn’t have much lunch. She never does during the week: a bit of cheese on the Ritz biscuits she has a weakness for, gin and dry Martini twice. In her spacious sitting-room Mrs. Lethwes slips her shoes off and stretches out on one of the room’s two sofas. Then the first sharp tang of the Martini causes her, for a moment, to close her eyes with pleasure.

    Silver-framed, a reminder of her wedding day stands on a round inlaid surface among other photographs near by August 26th 1974: the date floats through her midday thoughts. ‘I know this’ll work out,’ her mother - given to speaking openly - had remarked the evening before, when she met for the first time the parents of her daughter’s fiancé. The remark had caused a silence, then someone laughed.

    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.

    At fifteen minutes past five, fear sets in, the same fear there was on the terrace of the Hotel St-Georges when the letter was still between her fingers. He will go from her; it is pity that keeps him with a barren woman; he will find the courage, and with it will come the hardness of heart that is not naturally his. Then he will go.