‘Miss Martindale’s mother died,’ Ben divulged, breaking the monotony of a silence that had gathered. ‘A man interfered with her.’
‘My God!’ Francesca exclaimed, and Margy closed the magazine, finding little of interest in it.
‘Miss Martindale saw him,’ Jason said. ‘Miss Martindale was just arriving and she saw this figure. First she said a black man, then she said he could be any colour.’
‘You mean, Miss Martindale came to school today after something like that?’
‘Miss Martindale has a sense of duty,’ Jason said.
‘Actually she was extremely late,’ Ben said.
‘But how ghastly for the poor woman!’
Miss Martindale was a little thing with glasses, Francesca told her friend, not at all up to sustaining something like this. Ben said all the girls had cried, that Miss Martindale herself had cried, that her face was creased and funny because actually she’d been crying all night.
Margy watchedJason worrying in case his brother went too far. They could have said it was Miss Martindale who’d been murdered; they had probably intended to, but had changed it to her mother just in time. It wouldn’t have worked if they’d said Miss Martindale because sooner or later Miss Martindale would be there at a parents’ evening.
Neighbours now,’Jason said.
‘Started actually’ Ben pointed out.
Margy lit a cigarette when she was alone with Francesca, and suggested a drink. She poured gin and Cinzano Bianco for both of them, saying she didn’t believe there was much wrong with Miss Martindale’s mother, and Francesca, bewildered, looked up from the dishes she was washing. Then, without a word, she left the kitchen and Margy heard her noisily reprimanding her sons, declaring that it was cruel and unfeeling to say people were dead who weren’t. Abruptly, the sound of the television ceased and there were footsteps on the stairs. Margy opened a packet of Mignons Morceaux.
Francesca and Margy could remember being together in a garden when they were two, meeting there for the first time, they afterwards presumed, Francesca smiling, Margy scowling. Later, during their schooldays, they had equally disliked a sarcastic teacher with gummy false teeth, and had considered the visiting mathematics man handsome, though neither of them cared for his subject. Later still Francesca became the confidante of Margy’s many love affairs, herself confiding from the calmer territory of marriage. Margy brought mild adventure into Francesca’s life, and Francesca recognized that Margy would never suffer the loneliness she feared herself, the vacuum she was certain there would be if her children had not been born. They telephoned one another almost every day, to chat inconsequentially or to break some news, it didn’t matter which. Their common ground was the friendship itself: they shared some tastes and some opinions, but only some.
When Philip - father of Jason and Ben - arrived in the house an hour later Francesca and Margy had moved to the sitting-room, taking with them the gin, the Cinzano Bianco, what remained of the Mignons Morceaux, and their glasses.
‘Hi, Philip,’ Margy greeted him, and watched while he kissed Francesca. He nodded at Margy.
‘Margy’s going to make us her paella,’ Francesca said, and Margy knew that when Philip turned away it was to hide a sigh. He didn’t like her paella. He didn’t like the herb salad she put together to go with it. He had never said so, being too polite for that, but Margy knew.
‘Oh, good,’ Philip said.
He hadn’t liked the whiff of cigarettes that greeted him when he opened the hall-door, nor the sound of voices that had come from the sitting-room. He didn’t like the crumpled-up Mignons Morceaux packet, the gin bottle and the vermouth bottle on his bureau, Margy’s lipstained cigarette-ends, the way Margy was lolling on the floor with her shoes off. Margy didn’t have to look to see if this small cluster of aversions registered in Philip’s tight features. She knew it didn’t; he didn’t let things show.
‘They’ve been outrageous,’ Francesca said, and began about Miss Martindale’s mother.
Margy looked at him then. Nothing moved in his lean face; he didn’t blink before he turned away to stand by the open french windows. Golf and gardening he gave as his hobbies in Who’s Who.
‘Outrageous ?’ he repeated eventually, an inflection in his tone — unnoticed by Francesca - suggesting to Margy that he questioned the use of this word in whatever domestic sense it was being employed. He liked being in Who’s Who: it was a landmark in his life. One day he would be a High Court judge: everyone said that. One day he would be honoured with a title, and Francesca would be also because she was his wife.
‘I was really furious with them,’ Francesca said.
He didn’t know what all this was about, he couldn’t remember who Miss Martindale was because Francesca hadn’t said. Margy smiled at her friend’s husband, as if to indicate her understanding of his bewilderment, as if in sympathy It would be the weekend before he discovered that his golf-clubs had been set in concrete.
‘Be cross with them,’ Francesca begged, ‘when you go up. Tell them it was a horrid thing to say about anyone.’
He nodded, his back half turned on her, still gazing into the garden.
‘Have a drink, Philip,’ Margy suggested because it was better usually when he had one, though not by much.
‘Yes,’ Philip said, but instead of going to pour himself something he walked out into the garden.
‘I’ve depressed him,’ Francesca commented almost at once. ‘He’s not in the house more than a couple of seconds and I’m nagging him about the boys.’
She followed her husband into the garden, and a few minutes later, when Margy was gathering together the ingredients for her paella in the kitchen, she saw them strolling among the shrubs he so assiduously tended as a form of relaxation after his week in the courts. The boys would be asleep by the time he went up to say goodnight to them and if they weren’t they’d pretend; he wouldn’t have to reprimand them about something he didn’t understand. Of course all he had to do was to ask a few questions, but he wouldn’t because anything domestic was boring for him. It was true that when Mrs. Sleet’s headscarf disappeared from the back-door pegs he asked questions — precise and needling, as if still in one of his court-rooms. And he had reached a conclusion: that the foolish woman must have left her headscarf on the bus. He rejected out of hand Francesca’s belief that a passing thief had found the back door open and reached in for what immediately caught his eye. No one would want such an item of clothing, Philip had maintained, no thief in his senses. And of course he was right. Margy remembered the fingernails of the two boys en-grained with earth, and guessed that the headscarf had been used to wrap up Mabel, Ben’s guinea-pig, before confining her to the gerbil and guinea-pig graveyard beside the box hedge.
Smoking while she chopped her herb salad — which he would notice, and silently deplore, as he passed through the kitchen — Margy wondered why Philip’s presence grated on her so. He was handsome in his way and strictly speaking he wasn’t a bore, nor did he arrogantly impose his views. It was, she supposed, that he was simply a certain kind of man, inimical to those who were not of his ilk, unable to help himself even. Several times at gatherings in this house Margy had met Philip’s legal colleagues and was left in no doubt that he was held in high regard, that he commanded both loyalty and respect. Meticulous, fair, precise as a blade, he was feared by his court-room opponents, and professionally he did not have a silly side: in his anticipated heights of success, he would surely not become one of those infamous elderly judges who flapped about from court to court, doling out eccentric sentences, lost outside the boundaries of the real world. On the other hand, among a circle of wives and other women of his acquaintance, he was known as ‘Bad News’, a reference to the misfortune of being placed next to him at a dinner party. On such occasions, when he ran out of his stock of conversational questions he tried no more, and displayed little interest in the small-talk that was, increasingly desperately, levelled at him. He had a way of saying, flatly, ‘I see’ when a humorous anecdote, related purely for his entertainment, came to an end. And through all this he was not ill at ease; others laboured, never he.