— I was hopeless last night, she confessed to her mother later. I didn’t know what to do. I got the children out on the road in the dark, and in all that rain. Rose ran in front of a car, it was Coco who grabbed her.
— I’m sure you did the right thing, said Marian, surprised. You took them where they could be dry and warm, in a house where you could phone.
— But what if there hadn’t been a house? Or if the man had been dangerous or something?
— Well, there was a house. And the man seemed perfectly pleasant.
— What if Rose…?
— But she didn’t. Good for Jacob. I’ll have to give him a special lifesaving medal.
* * *
THEY FOUND the garage and picked up Clare’s bags and arranged for her to collect the car later in the week, then drove on to the cottage. Clare was making up beds and Marian was cooking supper when the phone rang. Clare thought it must be Bram. She’d left him her number; perhaps he’d found out somehow about the car. She began to run downstairs but Marian got there first. There was a low crooked window on the landing where she paused to see if the call was indeed for her; she had to drop onto her knees to see through the distorting old panes thick as bottles to where the children were playing in the garden on some parallel bars and a swing. Coco was walking along the top of the bars with his nose screwed up to hold his glasses and his arms outstretched either side for balance, like wings. He was pale because he wasn’t a natural, but he moved in a swift true line because he believed he could do it. Lily was mothering Rose, wrapping her arms around her to hold her safely on the swing; there was a protesting scowl on Rose’s blunt little face and she was pulling busily at Lily’s hands to dig herself out from under the embrace.
— Someone for you, called Marian, grimacing to communicate she didn’t recognize the voice. American? she added in an undertone.
Clare saw air bubbles in the greenish glass between her and the happy scene outside, as if the glass were suddenly more opaque; as if she were looking through it at something that had in those seconds already changed.
So Tony had phoned her.
Had bothered to phone her, in fact, twice: he must have tried her at home or at Marian’s first and got the cottage number from Bram or from Tamsin. He would be phoning to give her the name of that book. But she also knew, with a flash of that passional intuition nineteenth-century writers make so much of, that by the end of the conversation he would casually suggest that they should meet for a drink sometime. She would of course say yes. And that would be the beginning of something between them. This was a thrill, a bliss, flattering her, opening up infinite new possibilities, shoring her up. There was never any chance of her refusing it.
But in the split seconds before she stood up and ran down the stairs to talk to him — they were like those elastic seconds that are supposed to be given to the drowning, to review their lives — she was sorry. Was this all the freedom she had meant, pulling on her wet jeans that morning? Love, again? All those emotional entanglements poised ready to fall into place: the jubilations and the raptures, the tugs and rendings and abasements, all quite outside the jurisdiction of her suspicious separate self. It would be good to refuse, to choose instead, like George Sand retiring to Nohant-Vicq after all those lovers, the sounder happiness of gardening, cooking, children, books. It would be good to set out on the road like the old Tolstoy trying to leave the fraudulent fantasies of lust behind. Not going back to Bram, but not changing him for another man either.
But that would have to wait, she thought. After all, she was only twenty-nine.
Absurd, anyway, absurd. Probably he was only phoning to give her the name of the book.
She picked up the phone, spoke warily as if to the unknown.
— Yes?
GRAHAM MET his third wife, Linda, at a party.
He hadn’t even wanted to go to the party, he was too old for parties. It had been Naomi, his second wife, who wanted to go, and because he worried sometimes that his middle age must weigh inhibitingly on her youthful need for a social life (she was twenty years younger), he braced himself to accompany her uncomplainingly. Then, in the afternoon of the day of the party, Naomi started to get a sore throat and a headache. He could remember standing in their kitchen while she made herself a drink of lemon and honey and dithered, with genuine disappointment, over whether she felt well enough to go.
— The one time I manage to get a baby-sitter on a Saturday!
The kitchen door stood open onto the brick-paved herb garden, and from outside came something — at this distance in time he’d lost the specificity of what it was; it might have been a trill of birdsong, or a finger of breeze that slipped under his shirt, or a smell of green things — something that as he ran his eye down the Radio Times to see if there was anything to watch on television instead made him make up his mind, to his own surprise, to go to the party anyway, whether she was sick or not. Naomi was surprised at him too, and of course he registered (although he studiously pretended not to) the little hard gleam of anxious jealousy that kindled instantly in her stare.
— Of course I don’t mind. I just didn’t think you were that keen. You hardly know them …
But he was suddenly subject to an unexpected stir of that restless ennui he thought he had forgotten.
He took it for granted that he would be disappointed; that his ennui would be just as ennuyé out as it might have been at home. He had found himself at parties recently taking on the role of someone avuncular who stood back and watched and considered and approved (or, worse, disapproved). It went with his height and his curling gray beard and — most of all, he supposed — with his age, his fifty-plus years; but it had happened without his intending it or liking it. One said and did the same things as one always had, and they were taken differently; the stream had flowed past him and was leaving him behind. Of course some people usually knew he was “the potter” (he had always eschewed the phony professionalism of “ceramicist”—which probably also dated him). That helped out with the problematic dignity of the avuncular role. But these days he had to mount careful guard against a pleased vanity when he was recognized and shyly admired or loudly lionized. There had been a time he’d hated to talk about his work; now he was afraid he liked talking about it too much.
He didn’t, indeed, know many people at the party that night, and they were mostly much younger than he was. If Naomi had been with him these things might have been the source of a patiently controlled irritation; as it was, alone, he found himself rather enjoying his alcohol-fueled prowl around the rooms, the fragments of vivid irresponsible contact with strangers, the cat-pee thin trace of pot woven in and out of an air thick with spiced food and incense. His hosts were the couple who owned the shop Naomi worked in, businesslike ex-hippies who traveled in India and North Africa and the Far East buying goods to sell; she had hennaed hair cut to hang across her eyes, and he had skin so tanned it looked smoked, a dark stubble like ink dots, and finely incised laughter lines. When hippies made money they didn’t exactly change their look, but it acquired a deeper tone and a glossy finish. The inside of their stolid Victorian house was rich with curiosities, hangings and paintings and dishes and glassware, much better things than ever went into the shop. It was a fine night: the windows and doors of the house were thrown open as far as they would go, the party had spilled out into the garden, and clumps of guests drew close together talking as the dark came down, louder and more animated and warmly intimate as they lost the precision of one another’s faces. Their host lit big torches stuck into the earth of the flower beds; they burned smokily with colored flames, illuminating shocked-pale bushes of rose and clematis.