He looked at them in perplexity. They must be a dismal sight; water was already making pools on the porch floor. His house, to judge by the porch, was probably immaculately clean and tidy: coats were hung by their loops on a rail, the tongue-and-groove walls were ornamented with painted horseshoes and dried flower pictures, there was potpourri in a miniature basket tied with ribbon.
— My wife’s not here, he said. She’s away for a few days. How long have you been out in this?
— Oh, not that long. It’s just that kind of rain, it soaks you through.
Clare tried to explain where they’d left the car and the way they’d come.
— It took about twenty-five minutes, Coco said. I checked.
— Rose ran out in front of a car, said Lily.
— I saved her life, added Coco casually.
Clare wished she’d arranged with the children in advance not to give her away; she prayed they wouldn’t tell how she’d sworn at them and cried and sat in the road. She needed the man to have faith that she was adult and competent.
— All I have to do is to phone the AA, she said brightly and optimistically. I’ll give you the money for the phone. Then maybe we could just wait in your porch till they come.
— Perhaps if you take off your shoes and hang up your coat, he said. The phone’s in the hall. He looked at the children and sighed. I suppose you’d all better take off your things. It’s going to take time before the AA get here. You’d better come in and get dry.
* * *
THE CHILDREN sat in a row at the pine breakfast bar in the kitchen drinking tea with sugar, looking like the bedraggled survivors of the wreck of some ship from exotic lands: their eyes were huge and dark-ringed; their hair was plastered to their heads or drying in wild curls; they seemed to be wearing particularly gaudy and unsuitable clothes. Rose at some point before they left home must have exchanged her sensible top for a pink sleeveless sequined T-shirt: around her neck was the filthy last scrap of her Superman cape.
The AA were going to take an hour at least.
— It did say bed-and-breakfast on the gate, said Clare. I’ve got my checkbook and card. There isn’t any way that we can stay, officially? I mean, otherwise I feel too embarrassed about this.
— My wife does the bed-and-breakfasts, said the man gloomily. Actually, there’s a NO VACANCIES sign. I don’t know. I wouldn’t be able to do you a cooked breakfast. Or make up the beds.
— We don’t even like cooked breakfast! Clare exclaimed. And I can make the beds. But we’ll pay you the full price. You don’t have to do anything. I’ll clear up after us. If you showed us the bedroom we could just keep out of your way.
— Won’t they want to eat? he asked.
— Oh, no, we’ve eaten, Clare lied. She thought of the chocolate and sweets they could share once they had their room, and willed the children not to protest or ask for anything. They seemed intuitively to know how to perform the submissive and needy children role required for her act as responsible adult: Rose’s head was even drooping pathetically forward onto the table in sleep.
He capitulated, not terribly graciously, to the inevitable. Well, there is a family room you could have, I suppose, although I’ve no idea what state it’s in, I don’t go in there. Probably it’s all right. She keeps everything very clean.
Unmistakably he was a man adrift in a woman’s house: he picked things up warily, opened the cupboards and used the kettle and found the milk with a frown of irritated unusedness, surprised at finding himself going through these motions of service. If he had grandchildren — he was the sort of age where you expect grandchildren — he had certainly never looked after them: he poured scalding-hot tea the same for everyone, in china cups. Clare had surreptitiously to top them off under the cold tap.
The house was old and rambling but done up, overdone: a thick tide of fitted carpet and knickknacks had overflowed into every nook and corner. Going upstairs they had to pick their way past nests of tables, lamps with pleated fringed shades, displays of horse brasses, baby-sized wicker chairs, a collection of miniature silhouettes, a cabinet of china thimbles, vases of silk flowers. Lily was smitten with a display of collectable teddies in an alcove. Up under the roof was a big low-beamed pink room with a double bed, two single beds, a television, and a scatter of those wornout ornaments people put in a room they never use themselves. The man brought Clare a pile of flowery sheets, irritably flustered as to whether they were singles or doubles. She fiddled with unfolding them, pretending she could tell.
— Is your wife away somewhere nice? she asked. The woman’s presence in her house was as overwhelming as if she’d stood large and loud among the ornaments in the corner of each landing. Staying with friends?
— Friends of hers. What are you going to do about your things?
— The kids will be delighted with a night off from tooth-brushing. And we’ll just sleep in our underclothes. She suddenly blushed. I mean they can. I’ll get my bag when I go with the AA man.
He came back in a few minutes with something else for her: a nightdress to match the house, layered and florid with a huge tulip pattern in pink and blue and a blue satin ribbon threaded through broderie anglaise at the neck.
— You could get inside that twice over, he said. But I suppose it’ll be better than nothing, so to speak.
He was very deadpan; Clare didn’t know quite how much she was supposed to acknowledge the risqué joke, if it was a joke.
* * *
SHE SAT WITH HIM in the sitting room while she was waiting for the AA, and she decided he might be quite drunk, quietly drunk. She and her disaster had intruded on a solitary pleasure ritual, with his whisky and his jazz; perhaps he did this every night while his wife was away.
— Actually, she’s left me, he told her. Again.
— Again?
— She goes every six months or so. It makes for a funny kind of marriage. She’s not my first wife. Or my second, for that matter. I’ve no objection to her going off. But there is a down side to the arrangement.
— Well, I should think so. It must be very emotionally draining.
— Which is that she comes back.
— Oh, I see.
Clare could see he might have been a charmer, to have several wives. He had the crinkled-up eyes of someone habitually socially humorous and one of those dark quick faces that might have been as appealing as an alert little bird; she thought of a sort of charm formed in an era when men murmured dangerous sharp things into the ears of women with bare shoulders and dangling earrings whose role it was to be shocked and excited. He had no illusions that it would work with her, nor any interest in her beyond the most perfunctory. He didn’t even offer her a whisky.
The sitting room was done in gold, with gold and pink upholstery and pink velvet curtains; a contemporary landscape in oils hung above the teak fireplace, lit from above by a brass strip light as if it were in an exhibition. Clare worried that her wet jeans might leave a stain on the cushions of the sofa. She was curious about how the man accommodated himself inside the shell of his absent wife’s taste. He was submissive to her arrangements, using her coasters for his glass, fetching the dustpan for some ash that fell from the end of his slim panatella: obedient but perhaps resentful. The music (not Glenn Miller but Duke Ellington; Clare read the CD cover) coiled out of the stereo system like a snake of dissent, a last word unanswerable because spoken in an unknown language. His privacy merely used the convenience of the place so lovingly-smotheringly put together.
— Do you like jazz? he asked her.
— I don’t know much about it. I like John Coltrane, and Miles Davis.