‘I’m sorry I hurt you, Philip.’ Tiredly, she dropped into a cliche, saying that Sebastian had been banished as a ghost may be, that at last she had got him out of her system. But what she said had little relevance, and mattered so slightly that it was hardly heard. What was there between them were the weekends Philip had been in charge of the children because Francesca needed a rest and had gone, with Margy, to some seaside place where Margy was looking after a house for people who were abroad. And the evenings she helped to paint Margy’s flat. And the mornings that were free after she gave up helping in the Little Acorn Nursery School. Yes, that key had been Margy’s, Francesca said. Left for her under a stone at the foot of a hydrangea bush in Pimlico, in a block of flats’ communal garden: she didn’t add that. Found there with a frisson of excitement: nor that, either.
‘I’m ashamed because I hurt you,’ she said instead. ‘I’m ashamed because I was selfish and a fool.’
‘You should have married him in the first place.’
‘It was you I wanted to marry, Philip.’
Francesca put on her nightdress, folded her underclothes, and draped her tights over the back of a chair. She sat for a moment in front of her dressing-table looking-glass, rubbing cold cream into her face, stroking away the moisture of tears.
‘You have every right to turn me out,’ she said, calmly now. ‘You have every right to have the children to yourself.’
‘D’you want that?’
‘No.’
He hated her, Francesca thought, but she sensed as well that this hatred was a visitation only, that time would take it away. And she guessed that Philip sensed this also, and resented it that something as ordinary as passing time could destroy the high emotions he was experiencing now. Yet it was the truth.
‘It happened by chance,’ Francesca said, and made it all sound worse. ‘I thought that Margy and Sebastian — oh well, it doesn’t matter.’
They quarrelled then. The tranquillity that had prevailed was shattered in a moment, and their children woke and heard the raised voices. Underhand, hole-in-corner, shabby, untrustworthy, dishonourable, grubby: these words had never described Francesca in the past, but before the light of morning they were used. And to add a garnish to all that was said, there was Margy’s treachery too. She had smiled and connived even though there was nothing in it for her.
Francesca countered when her spirit returned, after she’d wept beneath this lash of accusation, and the condemnation of her friend. Philip had long ago withdrawn himself from the family they were: it was an irony that her misbehaviour had pulled him back, that occasionally he had had to cook beans and make the bacon crispy for their children, and see that their rooms were tidied, their homework finished. At least her lies had done that.
But there was no forgiveness when they dressed again. Nothing was over yet. Forgiveness came later.
There was a pause after Francesca made her bleak statement in La Trota. Margy frowned, beginning to lean across the table because the hubbub was considerable that day. No longer working at Bygone Antiques, she had come across London specially.
‘Drop me?’ Margy said, and Francesca nodded: that was her husband’s request.
The restaurant was full of people: youngish, well-to-do, men together, women together, older women with older men, older men with girls, five businessmen at a table. The two waitresses hurried with their orders, too busy to mutter their complaints about the overcrowding.
‘But why on earth?’ Margy said. ‘Why should you ?’
Expertly the Sicilian waitress opened the Gavi and splashed some into their glasses. ’Buon appetito,’ she briskly wished them, returning in a moment with the sole. They hadn’t spoken since Margy had asked her questions.
‘He has a right to something, is that it?’ Margy squeezed her chunk of lemon over the fish and then on to her salad. ‘To punish?’
‘He thinks you betrayed him.’
‘I betrayed him ? I?’
‘It’s how Philip feels. No, not a punishment,’ Francesca said. ‘Philip’s not doing that.’
‘What then?’
Francesca didn’t reply, and Margy poked at the fish on her plate, not wanting to eat it now. Some vague insistence hovered in her consciousness: some truth, not known before and still not known, was foggily sensed.
‘I don’t understand this,’ Margy said. ‘Do you?’
A salvaging of pride was a wronged husband’s due: she could see that and could understand it, but there was more to this than pride.
‘It’s how Philip feels,’ Francesca said again. ‘It’s how all this has left him.’
She knew, Margy thought: whatever it was, it had been put to Francesca in Philip’s court-room manner, pride not even mentioned. Then, about to ask and before she could, she knew herself: the forgiving of a wife was as much as there could be. How could a wronged husband, so hurt and so aggrieved, forgive a treacherous friend as well ?
‘Love allows forgiveness,’ Francesca said, guessing what Margy’s thoughts were, which was occasionally possible after years of intimacy
But Margy’s thoughts were already moving on. Every time she played with his children he would remember the role she had played that summer: she could hear him saying it, and Francesca’s silence. Every present she brought to the house would seem to him to be a traitor’s bribe. The summer would always be there, embalmed in the friendship that had made the deception possible — the key to the flat, the seaside house, the secret kept and then discovered. What the marriage sought to forget the friendship never would because the summer had become another part of it. The friendship could only be destructive now, the subject of argument and quarrels, the cause of jealousy and pettiness and distress: this, Philip presented as his case, his logic perfect in all its parts. And again Margy could hear his voice.
‘It’s unfair, Francesca.’
‘It only seems so.’ Francesca paused, then said: ‘I love Philip, you know.’
‘Yes, I do know.’
In the crowded bistro their talk went round in muddled circles, the immediacy of the blow that had been struck at them lost from time to time in the web of detail that was their friendship, lost in days and moments and occasions not now recalled but still remembered, in confidences, and conversation rattling on, in being different in so many ways and that not mattering. Philip, without much meaning to, was offering his wife’s best friend a stature she had not possessed before in his estimation: she was being treated with respect. But that, of course, was neither here nor there.
‘What was her name,’ Margy asked, ‘that woman with the gummy teeth?’
‘Hyatt. Miss Hyatt.’
‘Yes, of course it was.’
There was a day when Margy was cross and said Francesca was not her friend and never would be, when they were six. There was the time the French girl smoked when they were made to take her for a walk on the hills behind their boarding-school. Margy fell in love with the boy who brought the papers round. Francesca’s father died and Margy read Tennyson to cheer her up. They ran out of money on their cycling tour and borrowed from a lorry driver who got the wrong idea. Years later Francesca was waiting afterwards when Margy had her abortion.
‘You like more cappuccinos ?’ the Sicilian waitress offered, placing fresh cups of coffee before them because they always had two each.
‘Thanks very much,’ Francesca said.