Oh God, thought Frances, now what do I do?
The doorbell went. Marsha looked up expectantly. ‘There's someone ringing your bell.’
It was Philip. He looked beyond Frances into the hall and said, ‘Is Marsha here?’ He followed Frances into the sitting room where he stood with his hands thrust into his pockets. ‘I saw your note.’
‘Did you?’ Marsha stared back, sullen.
‘You'd better come home and leave Frances in peace.’
‘Frances and I were having a nice chat. Till now.’
‘I suppose you realize you left the cooker on.’
‘Oh, dear, oh dear, oh dear.’
Frances broke in. ‘Look, I'm going to bed myself in a minute anyway. Philip, do you want a glass of wine?’
‘No, thanks. Sorry about this, Frances…’ He shot her a look, a furtive pleading look that sat oddly on his gaunt face. ‘We'll push off. Come on, Marsha.’
‘Oh, for God's sake,’ said Marsha. ‘Leave me alone. I only wanted a change of scene for ten minutes.’ But she got up. ‘I'll look in again soon, Frances. His trouble is that he can't stand being alone in the house. One of his troubles.’ She walked past her husband and into the hall.
Philip hesitated for a moment. He shrugged; hopeless rather than dismissive. ‘We'd had a tiff. Sorry you got drawn in.’
Frances said nothing.
‘I'll be off. Goodnight.’
After she had let them out she looked out of the window and saw them going down the street, walking a little apart. That girl meant him to follow her round here, she thought. And then – she's not a girl, she's a woman, why does one call her that? What a sad pair.
She locked the back door, returned to the sitting room, sat down at Steven's desk. Those two unnerve me, she thought, I catch despondency from them like some kind of disease.
She laid her hands on the cool leather top of the desk and was filled with yearning. She gave in to it, capitulated, let it engulf her. Let me be anywhere but here, and now, she thought; let me be safely then again. In a different house. In the old house. In the Pulborough house, where it seems always to have been summer.
A summer afternoon, with sunshine falling on to the lawn through the branches of the apple tree to lie like gold pennies among the daisies. Idyllic, unreachable summer afternoon. Except that it is not idyllic because it is filled with black anger, anger invisibly fuming around the flowers and the bright grass and the butterflies sunning themselves on the terrace. Steven sits in a deck-chair at the far end of the lawn and she, Frances, on a rug at the other, and they have not spoken now for two and a half hours. Steven has his briefcase beside him and a stack of papers on his knee; Frances is reading, ostensibly, in fact allowing her eyes to travel from line to line and her hands occasionally to turn a page. The children come and go. Words glitter in her head, like pieces of broken glass: what she has said and what he said and what she did not say but thinks. And all of a sudden she cannot stand it any longer, that the glowing day should be thus infected, that time should be so wasted, that it should go on. She gets up and crosses, slowly, with resentment, the lawn, and when she is half way across Steven looks up from his papers and watches her. She says (sullenly), ‘I'm sorry’, and he says, ‘I'm sorry too’, and she says ‘I always say it first’, and Steven opens his mouth… and closes it quickly. And holds out his arms instead.
What is then said has been said before and will be said again. The quarrel, Frances's quarrel, is not with him but with all those people and events that take him away, that scuttle plans, that leave the children (she has histrionically declared) fatherless. The fatherless children gather round, scenting a brightening of the atmosphere that promises indulgences, attentions, and indeed yes the afternoon swivels suddenly into celebration. For Zoe arrives, unpredictable as ever, sweeping in with laughter and parcels and traveller's tales. The afternoon softens to evening, but it will never end, they will all be there for ever on the lavish grass in the sunshine. Tabitha darts to and fro, her six-year-old boot button eyes bright with excitement. ‘She's showing off,’ says Zoe. ‘It's a good thing we're all feeling so benign. And for Christ's sake get her to drop this auntie stuff.’
Zoe and Steven argue: she with verve and passion, he with relentless logic. Tabitha sits listening, or rather watching, her head swinging one way and then the other like a spectator at a tennis-match. She whispers to Frances, ‘Did Daddy win or did Auntie Zoe?’ ‘Not auntie,’ says Frances, ‘Just Zoe. Neither of them did. It's not a thing you win.’ ‘Oh yes it is,’ says Steven. ‘I did.’ ‘You damn well did not,’ snaps Zoe. And… ‘Ooo…’ says Tabitha piously, ‘Naughty words, you'll have to wash your mouth out with soap.’ Zoe glares: ‘What's with little Miss Prim here?’ ‘Education,’ says Steven. ‘You are hearing the voice of Miss someone at Pulborough Church of England primary school.’ ‘Miss Sanderson,’ cries Tabitha indignantly. And suddenly she loses interest and is gone, vanishing into the orchard in search of Harry, of apples, of heaven knows what. Zoe laughs: ‘I am going to have to mind my p's and q's, I can see.’ She looks at Frances: ‘Isn't she gorgeous, though?’
The children come rushing past; they are aeroplanes, or birds, or batmen. Frances nods. She says, softly, ‘It's amazing, but it works. We had no right, but it works.’ She feels convalescent, scoured by the anger that has gone, clean, happy; she looks across at Steven and sees that he feels the same. In the end, she thinks, it is always all right. What she feels and what she thinks are welded to the afternoon, to the lawn dabbed with sunlight, to these four people she loves above all.
Then and now. Then, which is gone but inescapable, and now, which has to be endured. She got up from the desk, drew the curtains, locked the doors, went to bed. Dry-eyed, she proudly noted.
‘Do you love that thing yet?’ asked Zoe, looking at the puppy.
‘No, not really.’
‘Bless him, though – Harry. The young bring tears to the eyes, don't they? Come here – guilt offering.’ She rolled the puppy on its back. ‘This thing is a he, Frances, he's got a prick an inch long already. You're in for trouble with the neighbouring ladies. Are you fraternizing locally, incidentally?’
‘Up to a point. There's an odd bleak couple called Landon down the road. He was at school with Steven, unfortunately.’
‘Unfortunately?’
‘Well – he's a bit creepy really.’
‘Any news of Harry?’
‘A couple of cards. You look tired. Are you all right?’
Zoe stood at the window, in a scarlet raincoat, looking into the wet street. ‘Oh, I'm all right. The weather's foul and I've got angst or some other kind of iron in the soul. And I'm getting old. And I'm not going to start complaining to you, of all people.’
She turned, and her hair was glittering with drops of rain, diamond drops that snapped in the light from the standard lamp. ‘You're staring at me as though I was an apparition, my love. Am I such a sight?’
‘You're a very welcome sight.’
Just as, once, in another red coat, she comes swimming into the clear patch rubbed in the condensation on a teashop window, that place in Gloucester Road: Zoe, darting between two taxis, the red coat hugged to her chin. It is snowing; feeble London snow that dies in black splodges on the pavement.
‘Bread and butter,’ she says. ‘No cakes. Above all, no cakes.’
The doorbell keeps pinging as people come in from the street. ‘I am in the most bloody awful fix,’ she says. ‘Oh, Frances, Frances, I need you, I really do. I want your nice warm shoulder to howl on.’
A woman in a green woolly hat sits at the next table, her backview eavesdropping.
‘Sick,’ says Zoe. ‘All the time. It's foul. I never realized.’
Numb at first; then a rush of feelings. Love for her; pity; and something else. Something creeping and hateful: envy. Oh, envy, envy.
‘Seven weeks,’ says Zoe, ‘or thereabouts. Oh, Christ, Frances, what lousy wretched luck…’
‘
Dan?’
But she shakes her head. Not Dan. ‘Don't ask. Nobody. Nobody who matters. A stupid damn mistake.’
Zoe's face. Zoe's funny monkey face all pinched and blotched with cold, her eyes pink-rimmed, her black fuzzy hair gleaming with rain-drops, glittery with drops, red and blue and yellow.
‘What will you…?’
‘Some beastly murdering illegal quack,’ says Zoe.
No. No, no, no.
‘It's no good,’ says Zoe. ‘Of course I've thought. Thought and thought. In between throwing up. I'd be hopeless. Poor little blighter. I couldn't cope. And I'm going to Paris. I haven't told you. I got the Reuter's job.’
Say it.
‘Oh, hell…’ says Zoe.
The glittery diamond drops; a smear of butter on her chin; her eyes watery. Zoe crying, who never does.
‘Let me have it. Please. Let us have it.’
Oh, please.
And now today a Zoe who is another but the same stripped off a different red coat and flung herself on the sofa. ‘What are you seeing, love, with that misty look?’
‘I was thinking of the day we decided about Tab.’
There was a silence. ‘Yes,’ said Zoe. ‘I've thought of that lately. Rather a lot. Because of her being so grown-up and complete now. And because of not having Steven any more to be sensible and decisive. Should we tell her?’
‘Eventually, yes. Steven always said eventually.’
‘Eventually,’ said Zoe, ‘was curiously imprecise for Steven. Perhaps it was the one thing even he wasn't quite sure how to deal with.’
‘And yet we have all dealt with it well, I think. Better than I ever thought possible.’
‘We've dealt with the easy part. With what could be dealt with.’
‘Yes,’ said Frances after a moment. ‘I suppose what we never really thought of, back then, was now.’
‘Now was unthinkable, then. Up to a point we did. In so far as we could. Steven and the lawyers. All the stuff you and I didn't think mattered. Everything down on paper, so there should be no mistakes.’
‘Will she hate us for it?’
‘No.’
‘For not having told before.’
Zoe sighed. ‘Then all we can say is that we thought it was for the best. That Steven thought that. That we all did.’
‘It will change everything. Inevitably. Whatever she feels about it.’
‘Not what has already happened. Her childhood.’
‘Even that,’ said Frances. ‘Particularly that. Believe me, Zoe. That is what I have learned, these months.’
‘Then we shall have to cope as best we can. Oh, Frances – I'm craven, I'm not in good enough nick to face it just now. Nor are you. Presently. Eventually.’
‘Why always are you wearing long skirts,’ asked the Swedish boy, ‘when the other girls are wearing jeans?’
‘I don't know,’ said Tabitha, ‘I just do. I suppose it's a bit silly, on a dig. They get filthy.’
‘It is nice,’ said the Swedish boy. ‘Very… womanly.’ He gazed surreptitiously at Tabitha, whom he found quite unnervingly agreeable, and Tabitha, for whom the Swedish boy barely existed, looked out into the morning, the blue and purple Scottish morning in which people stumped around getting breakfast and seabirds cruised the skies, and thought with joy that one more day had gone, that she was one day nearer to seeing him, one day nearer to that moment when he would be at the barrier at King's Cross. The Swedish boy decided that he would remember Tabitha all his life: her small pale pointed face and the dark hair straggling over her shoulders, forever falling across her face and being wiped aside with an impatient hand, her serious abstracted look and the frailty of her, a small thin girl in trailing skirts like some apparition of the past amid the heather. He said, ‘Always you are thinking about something. Always so solemn, thinking.’ And Tabitha, who had not realized that her condition was thus apparent, laughed awkwardly and said, ‘Well, I'm that kind of person, I suppose. I don't chatter.’
The Swedish boy who, despite his admiration, had other appetites, went to find some breakfast and Tabitha continued to wait here by the hut to which the person who had gone to the village to collect the post would return. There might be a letter. There probably would not. But there might be. And while waiting in that comfortable state of not knowing, of hope and expectation (because if there was none her heart would sink and the day would be clouded, the morning would be less bright, the hills less purple… While if there was, oh if there was…), while waiting she would allow herself the supreme pleasure, the indulgence of recollection. Of going back into particular moments.
There were those times when the world stood still: when he said this, when he did that. Hitched each of them to backgrounds now and for ever sanctified: Oxford Circus tube station, a wine bar in Covent Garden, a field in Cambridge-shire. Invested each of them with wonder: as though you walked for the first time in a country of whose existence you had always known but whose reality was beyond all imagining. I am so happy, she had said once, and had heard the amazement in her own voice.
She sat at the roadside by the hut, her arms clasping her knees, waiting. On the other side of the rough dirt road there was an outcrop of rock, rosy pink rock encrusted with a greyish green lichen, the two colours so wonderful a combination that mere random uncaring nature seemed an impossibility. And Tabitha remembered suddenly Steven; she remembered standing with him in a wood, a wood that must have been a birch wood because she could see still the soaring silver trunks, silver patched with bronze, soaring up into a blue sky. The branches had been bare and on them had been the tiny swellings of the new leaves, and somewhere far above small jewelled birds had darted against the swaying trees and the endless sky. And Tabitha, perceiving all this, the structure and the colour and what was suggested by those small secret buds, had been greatly excited. She had been exhilarated and amazed and aware of some enormous problem – aware that all this could not simply exist and no more than that; that such complexity invited wonder and speculation. How old had she been? Nine? Ten? She had worn sandals through the gaps of which twigs tickled her feet. She had demanded of Steven an explanation. She had turned to Steven who in his wisdom and common sense always knew how things had come about and what should be done, and had required an answer. She had raised questions of God and Time and Death. Why? she had said, and How? And Steven had said he did not know. He had explained that nobody knew; he had said that people argued over these things, that the arguments themselves were as important as the things, that the fact that there were no answers was less important than the arguments. And Tabitha had felt cheated; she had asked for knowledge, for huge significant knowledge, and all she was offered were uncertainties. While above her the trees blandly waved their pregnant branches against the sky.
A long time ago… Ten years ago. And now Steven was gone, obliterated, surviving only in such recreations, while somewhere perhaps those same trees rose still in their bronze and silver glory. I don't understand, Tabitha thought, I don't understand any better than I did then.
Distantly, round the bend in the road, there came the car driven by the person who had gone to collect the post from the village. Tabitha's heart leapt; she got up; she waited.
When Marsha Landon returned, a few days later, Frances knew with absolute certainty that she could not have her in contact with Steven's papers. It would be an intrusion, an affront to his ordered and positive nature. In desperation, she steered her into the spare bedroom, where boxes of books were not yet unpacked. Here, Marsha laconically sorted titles into piles according to subject and author. She did so with the air of one conferring a favour, wandering every now and then to find Frances with some query, or simply to stand talking. She was, Frances realized, as incapable of structuring her days as a child, and she hated to be alone.
‘Philip was talking about your husband last night. At school. They had some sort of fight.’
‘Fight?’ said Frances vaguely. She sat back on her heels, amid a thro
ng of letters and documents, beset as usual with problems of retention and destruction.
‘Not hitting, I don't mean. A row of some kind. I don't know… Philip was a bit pissed last night. He's been depressed lately. He was going on about one thing and another. He has this complex about people doing him down. The BBC push-off has been the last straw.’
‘Mmn…’ I don't know how much of this I can stand, Frances thought. She consigned a heap of papers to the waste paper basket, distracted by Marsha's lingering presence. Her pallor and her slow way of moving gave the impression of someone from whom all relish of life had long been leaking. ‘Marsha, I've got to go out soon. It's nice of you to help but I mustn't take up too much of your time.’
‘Have you… sort of got over it yet?’ said Marsha suddenly. ‘I mean your husband dying.’
‘No,’ said Frances shortly. ‘I don't imagine people do. It's a question of getting yourself going again, not getting over.’
‘It must be worse being unhappy when you have been happy.’
Frances looked at her. The remark seemed to suggest unexpected perception of several kinds. ‘Possibly.’
‘I'll have to go, actually.’ Marsha spoke as if she had been impeded in some way. ‘I'm going down to Kent for a couple of days to see my sister. Philip's going to have to fend for himself. I'll look in again when I get back.’
It was the end of August. The year was tipping downwards again. Frances, with the intense awareness of time that she had had since Steven's death, saw the changing quality of the light, that softness of dying summer. Waking in the mornings, she noted the spicy coolness of the draught through the open window; later in the day, tidying up the small garden, she watched the afternoon sun hanging always a little lower above the line of the rooftops, felt its tentative warmth on her face and arms. This consciousness of the physical world had been with her all the last months; sometimes she had felt that she was nothing but a pair of eyes and ears. She had walked about as though she were invisible and mindless, acutely registering what she saw and heard; colours were brighter, sounds louder. And always there had been the tormenting contradiction: whether the permanence of place was a solace or a mockery. In Venice, she had seen that beauty is constant, heartless and quite detached from the beholder. She had sat in a café staring at the Doge's Palace in numb misery and the harmony of light and shade and shape had been exactly the same as twenty years before. And at other times she had seen suddenly the incandescence of clouds piled above a horizon, or the play of leaf shadows on the pavement outside the window, and had been strengthened. In the first days, the days of raw shock, she had thought only that she was stranded alone in an unfeeling and meaningless world; it did not seem possible that the days could march unstoppably on, as they did, that Steven could be gone and yet that she could still inhabit the same landscape, use the same objects, see with the same eyes.