But she said some of this to Mrs Barber as they strolled, and perhaps saying it broke the spell of it – or perhaps the weather made the difference; perhaps it was something about being here with Mrs Barber herself, the parasol glowing at her shoulder – anyhow, whatever the cause, the park had a charm today that she couldn’t recall it ever having had before. Its very neatness seemed appealing, everything in such perfect trim, the lawns clipped, the beds of gaudy flowers like icing piped on a cake. It was a little after four, and the passers-by were a daytime crowd of idlers, invalids, children just out of school, women with toddling infants, elderly gents with dogs on leashes – the sort of people, she thought wryly, who’d be the first to get admitted to a lifeboat. How Christina and Stevie would smile at all this! Christina and Stevie, however, seemed far away. She and Mrs Barber took paths scattered with fallen blossom. They walked the length of a terrace made dappled by hanging wisteria. When they looked for a spot on which to settle, she wished they had brought a blanket to spread out on the grass.
Instead, they found a bench, and unpacked their bags. And at once, it became apparent that they had had rather different ideas about what should constitute the picnic. Mrs Barber had made finger-rolls, pin-wheel sandwiches, miniature jam tarts: the sort of fiddly dainties written about in the women’s magazines that Frances now and then read over shoulders on the bus. She herself had brought hard-boiled eggs, radishes from the garden, salt in a twist of paper, half a round of seed cake and a bottle of sugarless tea, swaddled in a dish-cloth to keep it hot. But once they had set out the food on a chequered cloth, the meal looked surprisingly complete. ‘A perfect feast,’ they agreed, as they touched their cups together.
The jam tarts rather fell to pieces when one picked them up, and the pin-wheel sandwiches uncurled, letting out their cheesy innards. It didn’t matter. The rolls were good, the radishes were crisp, the eggs gave up their shells as if shrugging off cumbersome coats; the parasol, propped up, lent everything its winey colour. And Mrs Barber made the bench appear as comfortable as a sofa, letting herself settle sideways, resting a cheek on her fist. Once she laughed her natural laugh again, leaning forward with her wrist at her mouth; a man seated alone on a nearby bench turned his head at the sound. Frances had feared that the day might be awkward. The two of them, after all, barely knew each other. But they seemed to pick up the thread of their intimacy exactly where they had left it in the shadowy kitchen on Saturday afternoon, like retrieving a dropped stitch across a few rows of knitting.
That man, however, kept looking. She met his gaze in a frosty way; that only made him smirk. When the food was finished, she gathered the egg-shells, shook the crumbs from the cloth. ‘Shall we stroll again? See the rest of the sights?’
Mrs Barber smiled. ‘I’d like to.’
There was little enough to look at, really. The small formal garden had some pretty snapdragons in it. On the pond there were ducklings, and comical dirty-yellow goslings. At the tennis courts, two young women were in the middle of a match, playing well, their pleated skirts flying as they raced after the ball. Did Mrs Barber play tennis? No! She was far too lazy. Len played at the sports club at the Pearl; he’d won cups. How about Miss Wray?
‘Oh,’ said Frances, ‘I played at school. That, and lacrosse – a beastly game. I was never much good at those team things. I did better on a bicycle. Or roller-skates. We had a skating rink right here in Camberwell for a while.’
Mrs Barber said, ‘I know. I sometimes went there with my sisters.’
‘You did? I used to go with my brothers – until my father decided it was vulgar, and put a stop to it. We might have been there at the same time.’
‘Isn’t that a funny thought?’
The idea of it seemed to impress them both. They moved on at a livelier pace – making now for the band-stand, a quaint octagonal pavilion with a red tiled roof. They crossed the gravel, climbed the steps, and the wooden floor must have made Mrs Barber think of dancing: she went across it in the slow twirls of a graceful, unpartnered waltz.
She came to a stop at the balustrade, and stood looking down at the rail. Frances, joining her there, was dismayed to discover that the glossy green paint, which had looked neat from a distance, was in fact scored with naughty drawings – a bare-breasted woman, a cat’s behind – and carved with names: Bill goes with Alice, Albert & May, Olive loves Cecil – though the Cecil had been scratched through, perhaps with a hat-pin, and Jim carved instead.
She ran her fingers over the scorings. ‘Fickle Olive,’ she said.
Mrs Barber smiled, but made no reply. She seemed to have grown slightly wistful since her solitary waltz. For a minute she and Frances gazed out across the park, at the rather uninspiring view – the red-brick buildings of the local hospital. Then she turned and leaned back against the rail, catching hold of the cord of the parasol, absently running the red tassel back and forth over her lips. And since she seemed content to sit there, Frances turned and leaned beside her. It was a curious place to rest, rather a showy spot to sit in; but the parasol, raised behind them, gave an illusion of privacy.
Of course, the mood of the park would be different later, once dusk had begun to fall. Lovers would come here, clerks and shop-girls: Bill and Alice, Olive and Jim. Mrs Barber might return with her husband. Would she, though? It didn’t seem very likely to Frances. She recalled the dead little conversation she had overheard the week before; she remembered the encounter in the starlit garden that had preceded it. Looking sideways at Mrs Barber, watching her stroke the tassel in that idle way over her rounded chin and mouth, she said, ‘May I ask you something, Mrs Barber?’
Mrs Barber turned, intrigued. ‘Yes?’
‘How did you and your husband meet?’
Frances saw her expression fix slightly. ‘Me and Len? We met in the War, in my step-father’s shop. I used to work in there in those days – my sisters and I, we all did. Len was going by, on one of his leaves. He looked in, and saw me through the window.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Oh, well, then he came inside, making out that there was something he wanted to buy. We started talking, and – I didn’t think him specially handsome. He’s rather a weed really, isn’t he? But he had nice blue eyes. And he was fun. He made me laugh.’
She smiled as she spoke, but her gaze had turned inward, and the smile was a strange one, fond but faintly scornful. Aware of Frances waiting for more, she lifted a shoulder in a shrug. ‘There isn’t anything to tell about it, really. He took me to tea. We went dancing. He’s a good dancer when he wants to be. And then, when he went back to France, we began to write to each other. Other boys had taken me out, but Len – I don’t know. The War didn’t seem to touch him in the way it touched everybody else. He never got injured – only scratches. He told me he had a charmed life, that there was something uncanny about it, that fate had picked us out for each other, and —’ She let the tassel drop. ‘I was awfully young. It’s like you said the other day: the War made things seem more serious than they were. I don’t suppose he really meant to marry me. I don’t suppose I really meant to marry him.’
‘And yet, you did marry each other.’
She put out a foot, began to nudge at a knot in the wooden floor. ‘Yes.’
‘But why, if neither of you meant to?’
‘It was just one of those things, that’s all.’
‘One of those things?’ said Frances. ‘What a funny way to put it. You can’t marry someone by accident, surely?’
At that, Mrs Barber looked at her with a curious expression, a mixture of embarrassment and something else, something that might almost have been pity. But, ‘No, of course you can’t,’ she said, in an ordinary tone. She drew in her foot. ‘I’m just fooling. Poor Len! His ears must be on fire, mustn’t they? You oughtn’t to listen to me today. He and I – we had words last night.’
‘Oh,’ said Frances. ‘I’m sorr
y.’
‘It doesn’t matter. We’re always having words about something. I thought we wouldn’t, once we’d left Peckham. But it turns out we do.’
Frances found the simplicity of this statement, combined with the matter-of-fact tone in which Mrs Barber made it, rather terrible. For a few seconds she struggled to find an adequate reply. At last, in an effort to lighten the moment, she said, with a smile and an air of conclusion, ‘Well, my Yorkshire grandmother used to say that marriages are like pianos: they go in and out of tune. Perhaps yours and Mr Barber’s is like that.’
Mrs Barber smiled back at her; but the smile quickly faded. She lowered her gaze, and her eye was caught by something on the stretch of balustrade on which they were perched. She put her hand to it and, ‘This is marriage, Miss Wray,’ she murmured. ‘This is marriage, exactly.’
She had found a spot on the rail where the paint was chipped, exposing several older colours, right down to the pale raw wood beneath. Running her fingers over the flaw, she said, ‘You don’t think about all these colours when everything’s going all right; you’d go mad if you did. You just think about the colour on the top. But those colours are there, all the same. All the quarrels, and the bits of unkindness. And every so often something happens to put a chip right through; and then you can’t not think of them.’ She looked up, and grew self-conscious; her tone became ordinary again. ‘No, don’t ever get married, Miss Wray. Ask any wife! It isn’t worth it. You don’t know how lucky you are, being single, able to come and go just as you please —’
She stopped. ‘Oh, I do beg your pardon. Oh, I oughtn’t to have said that, about luck. Oh, that was stupid of me.’
Frances said, ‘But what do you mean?’
‘I wasn’t thinking.’
‘Thinking about what?’
‘Well —’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, I had the impression – Maybe I misunderstood. But didn’t you say, on Saturday, when we were sitting in the kitchen, that you had once been engaged to be married, and —?’
Had Frances said that? No, of course she hadn’t. But she had said something, she recalled now – something careless and unguarded. Something about a proposal – was it? A disappointment? A loss?
The parasol was still raised, making that screen behind their shoulders. It was a moment for confidences, for putting things straight. But how, she thought, to explain? How to answer Mrs Barber’s kind, romantic speculations, that were in one way so wildly wide of the mark and in another so horribly near? So she didn’t answer at all – and, of course, her silence answered for her. It isn’t a lie, she said to herself. But she knew that it was a lie, really.
The moment put a slight distance between them. They sat without speaking, side by side, their hips and shoulders close and warm, but she felt that the pleasure of the afternoon had been punctured, was beginning to leak away.
And now, yes, as if summoned up to chase off the last of their intimacy, here came someone – a man, on his own – strolling up into the band-stand, tipping his straw hat to them, then lingering stubbornly a few yards off, pretending to be admiring the view. Frances kept her face turned away from him. Mrs Barber was sitting with her own head bowed. But every so often he looked their way – Frances could see him in the corner of her vision – his eye was roving over towards them with what he must have imagined to be a ‘twinkle’.
She began to feel the twinkle like the buzzing of a fly. After a minute of it she said quietly, ‘Shall we find somewhere else to sit?’
Mrs Barber spoke without raising her head. ‘Because of him? Oh, I don’t mind.’
Their murmurs made the man draw closer. He began studying them like an artist, like a master of composition. ‘Now, if only I had a camera!’ he said, stooping at the side of an imaginary tripod, squeezing a bulb. He laughed at Frances’s expression. ‘Don’t you want your picture taken? I thought all young ladies wanted that. Especially the handsome ones.’
‘Shall we go?’ she asked Mrs Barber again, in an ordinary tone this time.
The man protested. ‘What’s the hurry?’
Frances got to her feet. He saw that she meant it, and came closer, and spoke in a more insinuating way. ‘Did you enjoy your picnic?’
That made her look at him. ‘What?’
‘I should just about say you did. I should say the picnic enjoyed it, too.’ His eyes flicked to Mrs Barber, and he smirked. ‘I never thought it possible for a fellow to envy a boiled egg, until I saw your friend eating hers.’
He was the man who had been watching them earlier on. He must have seen them finish their tea and been following them ever since, from the bench to the flower-beds, from the flower-beds to the pond, from the pond to the tennis courts, from the tennis courts to here. Of course, the red parasol made them rather hard to miss. That wasn’t why Mrs Barber had brought it, surely? That wasn’t why she’d wanted to sit here, in this oddly public spot?
No, of course it wasn’t. She was doing her best to ignore the man, her head dipped, her face flaming. He ducked his own head, in an attempt to catch her eye. ‘Don’t want to play?’
‘Look, go away, will you?’ said Frances.
He looked at her with a gaze grown fishy, then spoke to Mrs Barber again, turning down the corners of his mouth. ‘Your chum doesn’t seem to like me much, I can’t think why. How about you?’
Frances said, ‘No, she doesn’t like you either. Do go away.’
He held his ground for another few moments. But it was Mrs Barber he was after, and she wouldn’t raise her eyes to his; at last there was nothing he could do but give up on them both. He drew in his shoulders, pretending to shudder against a chill, and, ‘Brrr!’ he said, still addressing Mrs Barber, but jerking his head in Frances’s direction. ‘Suffragette, is she?’
No one answered him. He retreated, got out a cigarette, produced a lighter, struck a flame – all in a leisurely sort of way, as if it were the only thing he’d climbed the steps for. But the twinkle had faded from his manner, and after a moment he drifted back to his previous spot at the balustrade. A moment after that, he left the band-stand.
Mrs Barber’s pose loosened. She looked embarrassed, admiring, appalled. But she laughed. ‘Oh, Miss Wray! What a Tartar you are!’
‘Well,’ said Frances, still furious, ‘why should our nice day be spoiled simply because some fool of a man fancies himself a lady-killer?’
‘I usually just ignore them. They always go away in the end.’
‘But why should you have to waste your time ignoring them? Did you know he was following us? There he goes, look.’ She was watching the man as he sauntered away across the park. ‘Off to try his charms on some other poor woman, no doubt. I hope she hits him. “Suffragette”. As if the word’s an insult! Honestly, if I were younger I might have hit him myself.’
Mrs Barber was still laughing. ‘I think you’d have beaten him, too.’
Frances said, ‘I might have, at that. I was once taken in charge, you know, for throwing my shoes at an MP.’
Mrs Barber’s laughter died. She said, ‘You weren’t. I don’t believe you.’
‘I was. And spent the night in a police cell with three other women. We’d caused a fuss at a political meeting. I marvel, now, at our pluck. The entire crowd was against us. I oughtn’t to have thrown things, though. We were supposed to be pacifists.’
‘But what happened to you?’
‘Oh, the charges were dropped. The MP got wind of the fact that we were all gentlemen’s daughters; he didn’t want it getting into the papers. But I had to go home the next morning and explain the whole thing to my parents – they thought the white slavers had nabbed me. Still’ – she got to her feet, her spirits rising at the memory – ‘it was worth turning up at the house in the police matron’s shoes for the sake of the look on my father’s face! The neighbours enjoyed it too. Shall we move on?’
She offered her arm, meaning the gesture playfully, but Mrs Barber caught hold of it and let hers
elf be pulled upright, laughing again as she found her balance; it seemed natural, after that, to remain with their arms linked. They went down the steps and into the sunlight, wondering where to make for next. The little encounter with the man had put the polish back on the day.
But they were conscious of the time. Somehow, an hour and a half had passed. They thought of returning to the tennis courts for a final look at the match – but at last, with reluctance, decided that they ought to head home. They climbed the slope of the park, paused again to admire the bluebells; then were back on the dusty pavement.
They stayed arm in arm all the way. Only in hurrying across the busy road did they separate. But on the opposite side, as they started up the hill, Mrs Barber paused, to move the parasol from one shoulder to another, and to step around to Frances’s left instead of her right. Frances was puzzled by the gesture – then realised what she was doing. She was ‘taking the wall’, putting Frances between herself and the traffic in just the same instinctive way that she might have done while walking with a man.
Two more minutes and they were back at the house. Frances unlatched the garden gate, led the way inside. They went up the stairs together, Mrs Barber yawning as they climbed.
‘All the sun has made me dozy. What have you to do now, Miss Wray?’
‘I’ve to start thinking about my mother’s dinner.’
‘And I’ve to start thinking about Len’s. Oh, if only dinners would cook themselves! If only floors and carpets and china – if it would all just see to itself. You’d think Mr Einstein might invent a machine to help with housework, wouldn’t you? Instead of saying things about time and all that, that no one can understand anyhow. I bet I know what Mrs Einstein thinks about it all.’