Glyn arrives at the cottage door. He lifts a hand and knocks. Mary opens the studio window. “I’m in here,” she says.
He rallies. He takes in his surroundings; he sees a limestone cottage with mullioned windows, seventeenth-century, with brick chimney and slate roof of a later date. He heads up the garden path and knocks at the door. And a voice comes at him sideways. He looks round, and sees her. Oh, it is her all right, though he is surprised to see that she too has . . . well, moved on.
“Ah,” he says. “Mary.”
That would have been way on into the afternoon. After the initial niceties, the move into the cottage, the making of coffee. After his opening moves, Mary sitting there, saying nothing, that look in her eye. After he had made his pitch; after he had been careful, candid, persuasive.
Some while after that. After Mary had begun to talk, had been talking for what seemed a long time. Talking about Kath. You want to know about Kath? she had said. Right, then, I’ll tell you about Kath.
Actually, I’m not fooled, Glyn, she said. Stuff this memoir. There isn’t any memoir, is there? I don’t know what it is that’s bugging you—but, whatever it is, you’ve become obsessed with Kath, haven’t you? Obsessed in a way that you never were when she was alive, I suspect—at least not after you’d married her.
This is when the words begin to pile up, when he simply listens, despite himself, when he is conscious of kaleidoscopic emotions. A tide of resentment ebbs, and is replaced by something else that will surface fully much later on—tomorrow and tomorrow. Mary talks about a Kath whom Glyn seems not to have known. This is when she talks about the miscarriage. You never knew about that, did you? she says. Kath told me you didn’t. She wouldn’t have you know. You were away somewhere when it happened—in the States, I think she said. She was going to tell you about the pregnancy when you got back. It was a while ago—two or three years after you were married. She was working for some arts festival at the time.
You hadn’t realized she wanted a child. How much she did. Neither did I, until then. Afterwards, she said, Maybe just as well, Glyn wouldn’t have taken all that kindly to the idea. But it wasn’t just as well, it was just about as bad as anything could have been.
It was the second. The second miscarriage. The second non-baby. The first one wasn’t yours. Way back, that was. When she was in her twenties. She told me about it once in an offhand way—that way that always set alarm bells ringing. I asked her if she’d have stayed with the father, if things had turned out otherwise, if she hadn’t lost the baby—and she said, Oh yes, for that I would have. You bet. Anything, for that.
You want to know about Kath’s friends? Mary says. Well, that’s me, mainly. But you always knew about me. You want to know about Kath’s men friends, don’t you? Is that what’s bugging you? If so, you’re on a hiding to nothing, Glyn. There was no string of lovers. There’s nothing under the carpet.
So he tells her what is bugging him. At least he has a card to play.
Yes, I knew, she says. Afterwards, I knew. When she was busy hating herself. Hating herself even more than usual.
She told me. She said, I’ve been doing something so stupid. So bloody pointless. Nick. She said. Nick, of all people. I remember her sitting there, looking utterly bleak.
And, no, I don’t know why. The sort of thing that brings the analysts out of the woodwork, isn’t it? What I can tell you is that it didn’t go on for long, and when it was over it was over. Nick, of course, is . . . well, you know Nick as well as I do. Better, indeed. Nick blows with the wind, doesn’t he? A seize-the-day man, Nick. And there was a streak of that in Kath—more than a streak. But with her it was because it was the only way she could keep the demons at bay—whatever they were, whatever it was that boiled away there, every so often. She had to keep on the move—get out, go somewhere, do something.
So that’s what’s bugging you. I remember the picnic at the Roman Villa. She was staying here for a day or two and either Elaine or Nick rang up and suggested we all meet up. You were off somewhere, presumably. The photo call I do not remember.
Mary’s voice conjures up the photograph, which Glyn does not want to see, ever again. He sidesteps, he backtracks.
Hating herself . . . ?
You didn’t know about that? Well, she was good at smoke-screens. Maybe there was a touch of acting talent after all—perhaps she shouldn’t have quit drama school so precipitously. Most people would never have known. But you . . .
You were married to her; you lived with her for ten years. This is unspoken, but rings out between them.
Again, don’t ask me why, says Mary. I don’t go in for amateur-shrink stuff. But that was how she was. Not always. Sometimes she could coast along fine. Then . . . wham! Oddly, she was often at her most beautiful when she was like that. Kind of glowing. Oh, you’d never have known. I only did because she told me. Once, just once. And after that I watched her.
I’ll tell you why she married you, Glyn. Out of all the men who went after her. She thought you loved her. Mary looks intently now at Glyn, and he finds he cannot meet her eye.
And at some point then, Glyn has had enough. He can’t manage any more of this, he wants out, he wants to get in the car and head away from Mary Packard, from what she has said. Except that nothing can now be unsaid, her voice will be there always. He must walk down her garden path with her words in his head, and take them home with him.
She wants that confidence restored. She wants to hear that the voices are misleading, that she has not heard what she thinks she may have heard, that everything is as it always was.
She just wants to talk for a while about Kath to someone who knew her well. That is all she wants. Isn’t it?
And so she steps briskly from the car, opens the gate, walks up the path between the two little hedges of Lavandula augustifolia “Munstead” and raises her hand to knock on the door of Mary Packard’s cottage, which is thickly clad with Clematis tangutica and Rosa “New Dawn.”
“Not at all,” says Mary Packard. “I thought you’d come.”
Which is not what she should be saying, and Elaine is disconcerted.
That was at the beginning.
At the end, when Elaine walks away between the lavender hedges, she has this odd feeling that much time has passed, instead of an hour or two, during which she has become someone else. In one sense she is herself, but in another she has been entirely altered. The past has been reconstructed, and, with that, her own old certainties. She sees differently; she feels differently.
The nonbabies are now loud and clear, who did not exist a couple of hours ago. Kath’s nonchildren. Because of them—because of these beings who never were—there is a new flavor to much that was said, much that was done. When Kath speaks now, Elaine hears a new note in her voice. Kath says the same things, but she says them in a new way.
Why didn’t you tell me? says Elaine.
She sees Kath with Polly, dancing with her—small Polly, grown-up Kath—she sees her plaiting Polly’s hair, she sees her coming into the kitchen with Polly and a brimming basket of windfall apples.
I always thought you didn’t particularly want children, says Elaine. She speaks to the wheel of her car, to the driving mirror, to the tailgate of the lorry ahead of her, to Kath.
The nonchildren eclipse much else. She hears the nonchildren louder than anything that has been said. It is the nonchildren above all who have skewed things. They keep coming back—faceless, formless, significant.
Mary Packard knew, and Elaine did not. Friend; sister. Mary is perhaps embarrassed by this: I hadn’t entirely realized . . . she says. I knew that Glyn . . . but I thought that probably you . . . I see. Well, Kath would have had her reasons, I suppose, says Mary.
Quite, thinks Elaine. And the principal reason was probably me. How I am. How I was with her.
There is more, though. There is a subversive flow that occupies her as she drives mindlessly in the direction of home. The thing is, says Mary Packard, Kath alwa
ys wanted to be someone else. She wanted to be you. She wanted to be me. She was stuck with the dictation of what she looked like, which pretty well determined her life, one realizes. If she hadn’t looked like that, quite different things might have happened. Different men. Different directions. She might have set to and learned a trade, like you and me. She once said—sitting out there, in my studio—she once said, There isn’t a single thing that I can do well, I’ve fiddled away at this and that ever since I can remember.
She wanted to be loved. Most people do, I suppose. But her more than most.
Your mother dying when she did. That accounts for much, says Mary. Didn’t you know? There is an edge to her voice; Elaine is uncomfortable.
The business with Nick . . . says Mary.
And Elaine, who would not have spoken of that, goes rigid. Oh, so Glyn has been here. I see, no wonder I was expected.
That sodding photograph, says Mary. Yes, I remember that day. Who? Oh, him. Someone I’m not in touch with anymore.
Forget it, says Mary. That business. Nick. A crazy aberration. God knows why. Do we need to ask?
Halfway home, stationary at a crossroads behind a line of traffic, Elaine discovers that she does not need to ask. This news comes as a relief, a release from something oppressive, and adds to her sense of a change in perception. When the line of cars advances, and she gathers speed once more, it is as though she were moving into some new age, a time when things would be apparently the same but also rather different.
Oliver sits in his car, outside Mary Packard’s gate, and for two pins he would start the engine up again and be off. What is he doing here? This is daft. Embarrassing. Entirely unnecessary. Except that for a few hours, several days ago, it seemed an imperative.
He gets out, locks up, opens the garden gate.
He had forgotten quite what Mary Packard looked like, but she is immediately familiar. Of course—that shock of hair, that cool, calm manner. And as soon as he is sitting in her kitchen, with a mug of tea in his hand, it seems quite reasonable and straightforward to be there.
The thing is, he says, I can’t get all this out of my head. Ever since . . . Well, you see, there’s this bloody photograph that turned up.
I know about the photograph, says Mary Packard. And she tells him why she knows, but Oliver has an eerie feeling that this woman might know everything anyway, by some osmotic process, like the wise woman of folktales.
It’s all my fault, says Oliver. I mean, it isn’t, of course—but actually it is, because I took the photo and then like an idiot I gave it to Nick instead of just throwing it away and saying nothing. If it weren’t for me there wouldn’t be all this fuss. I’ve had Glyn on my back, then Nick. Elaine threw a complete wobbly, it seems, and gave Nick the push.
Yes, says Mary. People do seem to have been on the move.
Is it my fault? says Oliver.
Of course not, she tells him. And you know perfectly well it isn’t. You didn’t come here to ask me that, did you?
Oliver agrees that he did not. They have become oddly companionable, he and Mary Packard, as though they were old friends, though Oliver cannot recall that back then they ever exchanged more than stock civilities. There is now some shared, unstated vision.
It was a crying shame, says Oliver. He is no longer talking about the photograph, or Glyn, or Nick. Her, of all people, he says. The blessed of the gods, you’d have thought. But she wasn’t, was she? One of the damned, more like.
I keep thinking about her. I mean, one always did, but not quite so—compulsively. Was there anything to be done?
Probably not, says Mary.
The afternoon has turned to evening. The mugs of tea have been replaced by glasses of red wine. Oliver and Mary Packard talk about other times. About Kath, especially. They remember this and that; they bring Kath back to life, passing her to and fro between them—looking at her, listening to her. They are clear-eyed; they do not remember with sentimentality. Oliver hears of things he did not know, and the Kath of whom he talks is subtly changed even as he does so; what he saw and heard is infused with a different understanding. But he is somehow soothed. It is as though in this consideration of Kath they are also performing a kind of ritual, they are paying tribute. He has no idea if this is what he came here for, but he is glad that he did. The visit has served a purpose, if not perhaps the one that he sought—if indeed he knew what that was.
She had an effect, he says.
She still is having an effect, says Mary.
Conclusions
“Can you remember what date Mum and I got married?”
“Actually, I wasn’t there,” says Polly.
“It was July, I’m pretty sure. And it’s July now. But what date?”
“You don’t know?” cries Polly. “All this time, and you don’t know?”
Nick replies that he does know. Well, he sort of knows. He knows sort of whenabouts it is—just, the exact day he sometimes forgets.
“Well, then, let me tell you. It’s the nineteenth. This Friday. And, frankly, Dad, I’m astonished you don’t know. I think you should ask yourself how on earth it can be that you don’t know. And listen, Dad, I’m going to be away this weekend. I’m going to the country with . . . with a friend. Please remember to take your keys with you when you go out.”
Nick wanders from Electrical Appliances to China and Glass, through Haberdashery and Lingerie, into Furnishing Fabrics, up to Sports and Garden Furniture, down by way of Baby Wear and Gifts. He is a boat against the current, bumping up against hordes of purposeful people; everybody here knows what they are doing except for him. He is immeasurably dispirited; it seems possible that he will go mad here, pitched finally into the purgatory that has loomed since Elaine told him to go. The store has become a mocking metaphor for a world in which others head confidently for their chosen slots. They know that their destiny is with Lighting or with Hosiery, while he can only drift feckless among them, unable to identify either need or direction. It is all uncomfortably near the knuckle, a parody of some true experience, except that in its way this is indeed real—he is here, by choice, and does not know where to go or what to do.
There are signals from ordinary life. In Kitchenware he passes a kettle like the one at home. He finds himself staring at a chair identical to one in Polly’s flat. He brushes past a girl wearing big hoop earrings like Kath used to wear, but immediately slams Kath out of his mind—there is not time nor space for her, she must be put aside, for now and perhaps forever. Occasionally he comes up against himself, a mirrored glimpse of this distracted man—too bald, too old—and is further disoriented. This cannot be him, but apparently it is.
He comes to a halt at last by a desk. A woman sits at the desk: a calm, benign woman who smiles at him—the first human contact he has experienced in this place. The woman has a sign above her head: she is Customer Services.
There is a chair in front of the desk. Nick sits down. The woman continues to smile invitingly. Later, it seems to him that he bared his soul to her.
Elaine registers this—the date rather than the errant estimate. So? she tells herself. So it’s the wedding anniversary? Well, it would be, wouldn’t it? They come round, like bulb-planting or pruning time. So?
Later, when she has snatched an hour to work in the garden, the date lurks, prompting various reflections: that Nick seldom remembered it, and, if he did, invariably got the day wrong and proposed a celebratory dinner a week too early; that this always riled her; that the wedding occasion itself is now something of a blur. How can such a seminal event have dissolved into a few hazy impressions? Auntie Clare’s hat, the rock-hard cake icing that resisted the knife, Kath in a floaty green dress.
Elaine plants out some pulmonarias and tries to concentrate on current projects. She has plenty of work in hand, but since her visit to Mary Packard she has felt disoriented, unable to fix her attention where it is required. It is not so much that she has been dwelling on what she learned from Mary Packard; rather, it is
a question of coming to terms with a revised vision, with a new set of responses.
The day proceeds. Elaine spends time on a garden design, and even more time on the phone. Sonia comes in and out with queries, as do Pam and Jim. Elaine achieves a further spell in the garden and, eventually, after five, everyone has gone and she is alone.
Nick’s arrival is nicely judged. Elaine has had a bath and is through in the conservatory when she hears a car in the drive. She goes to the front door, and there he is, with a package in his hand.
Elaine is so taken aback by the sight of him that she just stands there. Possibly she says, “Oh—” Polly is right—he is thinner. Otherwise he is simply Nick, and moreover, Nick wearing the furtive expression that normally heralds a long process of exculpation.
He proffers the package.
“It’s a scarf,” he explains. “It’s got flowers on it. Actually, a nice woman in the shop helped me, I must admit. You know I’m not good at shops. I told her all about you, and she thought this one with the flowers. It’s Italian, apparently. Silk.”
Elaine continues to stand there, now holding the package. An entirely fresh image from that day thirty-two years ago has swum into her head: she sees Nick’s hand above hers as he puts on the ring. She remembers her startled recognition that she was now part of a unit of two, whatever that was going to mean.
Nick is on the doorstep, expectant.
“Well,” she says. “You’d better come in.” She knows as she speaks that he will not be leaving again, and that this will be all right, or as all right as it ever was.
“And there’s more. My dad’s gone back to my mum. Or rather my mum’s let my dad come home. I got in late on Friday night and there’s this message saying actually he’s at home now and he’ll come and pick his things up next week. Just like that. Sorted, apparently.”