The Likes of Us (52 page)

‘Of course. Why not?'

‘It'd be awfully expensive. And there's the new house.'

‘It won't bankrupt me,' Hare said. ‘And the house can be ready for you when you get back.'

‘Suppose I don't come back?'

‘That's up to you. Go by sea. The voyage will do you good.'

‘Perhaps it'll give us both a chance to sort ourselves out.'

‘Is there nobody else here who'll miss you?' Hare said.

‘What do you mean by that?'

But when he shrugged and said no more she did not press him to explain.

 

Fell was having a hard time coming to terms with Emily's death. His eyes would fill with tears when he spoke of her.

‘I still can't get over it, Gerald,' he said. ‘Every time I hear the door open I expect her to walk into the room. You're without your wife now, but just imagine to yourself, just close your eyes and imagine that she's gone for good, and you'll have an inkling of what I'm going through.'

‘It's no use my pretending that Cynthia and I are as close as you and Emily were,' Hare said. ‘You've seen and heard enough to know that.'

‘No,' Fell said, ‘and to think it was an act of good neighbourliness that brought it about. If only Emily hadn't made that offer. If only she hadn't rung your wife and agreed to go on that trip.' He turned away, choking.

Hare waited till Fell had himself under control.

‘“If only”, Tom. They're just about the saddest words we have.'

‘She was one in a million, Gerald. Nay, in ten million. I'll never replace her. I can't even begin to
think of putting anybody else in her place.'

‘Perhaps not. But you ought to have some kind of help with the girls, you know. There's them to think about as well as you. They've lost a mother, and that they can never replace.'

 

Laura's cottage was a sturdy five-roomed stone building whose fabric her father had had renewed. It stood beside and at an angle to a steep unsurfaced lane, a vehicle's width, down which women from the town took a shortcut to the yarn-spinning mill by the river. On the town side it was almost hidden by an overgrown bank; on the other it looked across the wide valley of river and canal to low wooded hills.

On venturing to visit her again, Hare was glad to find her in the garden. It allowed him to seem merely to be passing and saved him the embarrassment of facing her across her threshold.

‘Hullo, there,' he called to her stooping figure.

She straightened up and, momentarily dazzled, shielded her eyes with her hand so that she could see him standing against the sun.

‘Hullo.'

‘You know, you really have got a marvellous view here.'

‘I thought you'd bought the best view in the neighbourhood.'

‘You mean with the new house? Something ready-made like this would have saved me the bother.'

‘Oh, but your new house will be much more splendid than this.'

‘It's a folly,' Hare said. ‘A pure grandiose folly.'

‘Why did you go to the bother, then?'

‘It was my wife's idea. I thought I'd told you.'

‘But don't married people come to agreement on such important matters?'

‘Some might.'

She was keeping her distance, standing where he had found her. He lifted the gate latch and stepped inside, seeing her head go back an inch.

‘You know my wife's gone to visit her sister in Australia?'

‘No, I didn't.'

‘She thought the change would do her good.'

‘After that terrible accident...'

‘Oh, she's over that now. Quite recovered.'

She wiped a lock of hair off her forehead with the back of her wrist that showed between her gardening-glove and her sleeve. Then she looked down at herself, as if suddenly conscious of the old clothes she was wearing.

‘You keep it nice,' Hare said, waving his hand at the garden.

‘Father got it established. It was a wilderness when we came, and it would soon be so again.'

He saw that she was uneasy in his presence, but he motioned to the open door. ‘I wonder if I might... for a minute.' And when she still did not move or speak. ‘There's something I want to talk to you about.'

‘I thought we'd had all that out.'

‘Please,' Hare said. ‘It'll only take a few minutes.'

He followed her, waiting while she removed soil from her flat-heeled shoes on the iron scraper outside the door. When he reached to shut the door behind them, she said, ‘Please, I'd rather it were left open.' She didn't offer him a seat.

‘I wondered how you were making out on your own,' Hare said. ‘How you were managing.' She looked at him, not understanding. ‘If there was anything you needed.'

‘Are you offering me money?' she said at last.

‘I didn't know how your father had left you,' Hare said.

‘And what would I be expected to do for it?' She coloured then as Hare looked away. ‘I'm sorry. I don't think you deserved that.'

‘It would be foolish to be in need when I could help. I shouldn't like the thought of you wanting for anything.'

‘It's kind of you. But quite impossible.'

‘I don't know why it should be.'

‘Oh, but it is. In any case, I might be leaving the district.'

‘Leaving?' Hare was startled by the violence with which his heart lurched.

‘I'm not destitute, but I must find a way of keeping myself. My mother had relatives in the south. I thought I might get work there.'

‘What kind of work?'

‘As a housekeeper. Looking after Father all those years has left me fitted for little else.'

‘I could probably find you something in the shop.'

‘No, please.' A little smile touched her lips.

Panic at the thought of losing her forever brought a thought to Hare.

‘Tom Fell needs a housekeeper and a nanny for his girls.'

‘Oh?'

‘His wife's death hit him badly. He just doesn't seem to be able to reconcile himself to it.' He saw that he had her interest. ‘Would you like me to speak to him about it?'

She looked round the room then crossed to the window.

‘You don't really want to uproot yourself and go away, do you?'

‘I do love this house,' she said eventually. ‘I hate the thought of leaving it.'

She stood with her back to him. He went and turned her to face him.

‘Stay,' he said. ‘Please don't go.'

They had never been so close. Even in the old days he had ventured no more than a steadying hand over a stile. Now he lifted her hot face and bent his towards it. Was he wrong or could she really not hide a hint of softness in her lips before they closed hard against his?

‘No.' She twisted free. ‘Please go now.'

She went and stood in the open doorway.

‘Will you let me speak to Tom?'

‘If you like. But I can't stay unless you promise never to come here again.'

A woman passed along the lane, twisting her head to give them a narrow-eyed appraisal as they stepped out of the house.

‘It takes only one person to start the tongues wagging,' Laura said.

 

The telegram arrived when Hare's wife had been away six months. ‘Cynthia seriously ill,' it read. ‘Letter following but think you should come at once.

Hare left the business in the hands of his partner and took a flight to Australia. He had nine days in a flying boat in which to wonder just what awaited him. As they flew across the eastern Mediterranean and put down at places he had become familiar with during his first operational posting, he thought, ‘When I was here before I didn't even know she existed.'

Cynthia had cancer at an advanced and inoperable stage. There were some new drugs which might arrest it for a time, but she must not be allowed to make that long journey home. Hare was surprised and moved by the courage with which she suffered and fought during the months left to her. She kept active for as long as possible.

‘I always used to say life was short, didn't I?' she said. ‘Well, now I know just how short, I want to make the most of what's left.'

It was a time of reconciliation, with bitterness gone, and, for Hare, a strangely ennobling experience. It left him needing time to think and come to terms with himself and his memories. After the funeral he booked a passage home by sea. It was during the long voyage, keeping himself to himself, that he would do his mourning, bury the past and brood on the possibilities of the future.

He came off the train at his local station to find himself on the edge of some farewell party spilling across from the other platform. He recognised one of Fell's daughters. She greeted him shyly.

‘Hullo, Elizabeth. What's all this about?'

Before she could reply, Fell himself came round the corner of the station-master's office. ‘Elizabeth, the train's due. Don't wander away.' He stopped at the sight of Hare.

‘Gerald! How well you look. Fancy you turning up just now!' Fell was dressed in a new suit, a carnation with fern in his buttonhole. ‘Come round here a minute.'

He took Hare by the arm and led him along the end of the building. Laura, in a slate-blue two-piece and a hat with its veil turned back, was standing in a group on the other side.

‘Laura, look who's here.' She turned her head as the train ran in beside her. ‘We got married this morning.' Fell laughed, thumping Hare's back. ‘You should have come home earlier and been my best man.'

Laura came to them. It was impossible to read any more in her smile than quiet pleasure. ‘Welcome home,' she said.

‘Thank you,' Hare said.

‘We'd best get on, Tom,' Laura said.

‘I hope you'll be very happy,' Hare said.

 

Now, on the morning after Laura's funeral, Hare was once more in that house through whose rooms he had wandered like a man demented. The weather had changed again.

‘It seems,' Fell was saying, ‘that we have one calm day for half a dozen blustery ones.' He put coal on the fire then reached for the decanter and topped up Hare's sherry glass and his own.

‘It dropped right yesterday, anyway,' Hare said.

‘Aye, aye. How does it feel to be back as a visitor in your old home?'

‘Strange. Like a memory that won't quite focus.'

‘It's been a good home for us. You know,' Fell went on, ‘we thought about it afterwards, but that day you ran into me and Laura on the station, you were, so to speak, coming home from your own wife's funeral, weren't you?'

‘In a manner of speaking, yes.'

‘And you never said a word.'

‘There was hardly time. And it wasn't a day to burden you with that kind of news.'

‘No. But then, you always kept your feelings to yourself more than I did.'

‘You knew that Cynthia and I hadn't hit it off for some time before she went to Australia. Though we were, in a way, reconciled during her illness.'

‘Yes. I remember how I was when Emily was killed. Just as if the world had caved in on me. I didn't know where to put myself.'

But not this time, seemingly, Hare thought.

‘And then,' Fell said, ‘you sold out, pulled up stakes and went off without a goodbye. Whatever made you do that? Too many uncomfortable memories?'

‘Something like that,' Hare said. ‘I never really settled down after the war. Then that spell in Australia, when Cynthia was dying... I felt like a fresh start, where nobody knew me.'

‘And you never got married again.'

‘No.'

Why shouldn't I tell him? Hare thought. What harm can there be in it now she's gone? It might even give him some satisfaction to know the truth. His mind framed the sentences as Fell looked into the fire, silent, his thoughts elsewhere.

‘I went away because I was in love with Laura. I should have made sure of her before the war, when it looked as if she was interested and we were both free. But she wouldn't entertain me while I was tied to Cynthia and she wouldn't hear of me getting a divorce. When Cynthia died I came home to claim her, but I was too late. So I left, rather than live in the same town, seeing her and being constantly reminded what a fool I'd been.'

That was what he thought of saying, but before he could start the other man turned from the fire and forestalled him.

‘You know,' Fell began, ‘we were real friends at one time...'

‘Still are,' Hare put in, his spoken words followed by the immediate thought:
But did I ever really like him?'

‘Yes.' Fell turned his head and gave him an appreciative little smile in which there was a lurking sadness. ‘I often think about those years just after the war. They were the golden years, Gerald. For me, at any rate. I know you had your troubles... Some men are lucky enough to have a time like that; and luckier still if they recognise it while they're living it. Well, that was my time, and it all fell to pieces when Emily was killed.'

‘But surely,' Hare said, ‘you've had compensations since.'

‘Oh, yes,' Fell conceded. ‘Oh, yes; and I'd be churlish not to admit my good fortune in marrying Laura. All the same... Well, we have known each other a long time, Gerald, and I can tell you what I wouldn't tell another living soul.'

‘But what's wrong with the man?' Hare thought, and felt irritation move in him.

‘She was a good wife,' Fell went on, ‘a good woman and a good mother to the girls. And I shall miss her. But somehow, you know, though we were comfortable and never differed in anything that mattered, I sometimes found myself with this feeling of – well, I can only call it disappointment. A feeling that something, somehow, was missing. It was never the same as it was with Emily, you know, and perhaps I was a fool for ever thinking it might be.'

Wind suddenly buffeted the windows and tossed the bare branches of the lime trees in the avenue. Hot coals fell in the fireplace. The two old friends sat silently looking into the flames.