‘Poor Charles’ he had become in after years. Poor Charles alone with his unloved, unloving wife. What was the point of any of it, now that his children were grown-up? In their seaside house they lived in hope – that one day he would sound less whispery on the telephone, passing on details of death by misadventure or disease. ‘Given six months, a merciful release.’ Or: ‘Just slipped. A wretched plastic bag. In the rain, near the dustbins.’
Zoë places two slices of bread in the toaster but does not press the lever down because it isn’t time to yet. Before the affair got going it had been a subject of fascination to him that two such apparently close friends should, in appearance at least, be so vastly different. ‘Oh, that’s often so,’ Zoë said, citing examples from her schooldays, but he had never shown much interest in her schooldays and he didn’t then. ‘Grace the lumpy one’s called,’ he said. ‘Back of a bus. Audrey’s the stunner.’ Old-fashioned names, she had thought, and imagined old-fashioned girls, frumpish in spite of Audrey’s looks. Later, he’d always included Grace in his references to Audrey, clouding the surface because of the depths beneath.
She measures coffee into a blue Denby pot, the last piece of a set. There was a photograph she found once: Audrey as handsome as he’d claimed, a goddess-like creature with a cigarette; Grace blurred, as if she’d moved. They were sprawled on a rug beside a tablecloth from which a picnic had been eaten. You could see part of the back wheel of a car, and it wasn’t difficult to sharpen into focus Grace’s frizzy hair, two pink-rimmed eyes behind her spectacles. Where on earth had that picnic been? What opportunity had been seized – a slack afternoon in the office?
Zoë props the letter against his cup, doing so with deliberation. It will vex him that she has arranged it so, the gesture attaching a comment of her own; but then she has been vexed herself. She tore that photograph into little pieces and watched them burn. He never mentioned its loss, as naturally he wouldn’t.
‘Ah, good,’ she greets him, and watches while he picks the letter up. She depresses the lever of the toaster. The milk saucepan rattles on the gas, a glass disc bouncing about in it to prevent the milk from boiling over. She pours their coffee. He returns the letter to its envelope. She halves each piece of toast diagonally, the way he likes it.
She hadn’t guessed. It was a frightening, numbing shock when he said: ‘Look, I have to tell you, Audrey and I have fallen in love.’ Just for a moment she couldn’t think who Audrey was. ‘Audrey and I,’ he repeated, thinking she hadn’t properly heard. ‘Audrey and I love one another.’ For what remained of that year and for several years following it, Zoë felt physically sick every time that statement echoed, coming back to her from its own Sunday morning: 10th September 1968, eleven o’clock. He had chosen the time because they’d have all day to go into things, yet apart from practicalities there was nothing to go into. They couldn’t much go into the fact that he wanted someone else more than he wanted her. After five years of marriage he was tired of her. He had spoken in order to be rid of her.
Finishing with the marmalade, she moves it closer to him. His face, less expert at disguise than once it was, hides nothing. She watches him thinking about the woman who has been left on her own, his sympathy reaching into a seaside house that’s now too spacious for one. But Charles is not an imaginative man. He doesn’t penetrate far. He doesn’t see in the old flame’s fridge a chicken joint for one, and fish for one tomorrow. Winter’s a melancholy time to be bereaved, a mood reflected in the cold and wet, winds rattling and whining. Audrey’ll miss her friend particularly when it comes to watching television, no one beside her to share a comment with.
‘Oh yes, the Alp Horn’s still there,’ Zoë hears a little later that morning, having eased open a door he has carefully closed. ‘Twelve forty-five, should we say? If your train’s a little late, anything like that, please don’t worry. I’ll simply wait, my dear.’
He’d been saying something she hadn’t managed to hear before that, his voice unnaturally low, a hand cupped round the mouthpiece. Then there’d been the hint of a reprimand because the old flame hadn’t written sooner. Had he known he’d have gone to the funeral.
‘I’m sorry to have hurt you so,’ he said later that Sunday, but words by then made no sense whatsoever. Five years of a mistake, she thought, two children mistakenly born. Her tears dripped on to her clothes while he stood there crestfallen, his good looks distorted by distress. She did not blow her nose; she wanted to look as she felt. ‘You would like me dead,’ she sobbed, willing him to raise his fist in fury at her, to crash it down on her, obliterating in mercy all that remained of her. But he only stood there, seeming suddenly ill-fed. Had she not cooked properly for him? her thoughts half crazily ran on. Had she not given him what was nourishing? ‘I thought we were happy,’ she whispered. ‘I thought we didn’t need to question anything.’
‘Nice to see the old Alp Horn again,’ his murmur comes from the hall, and Zoë can tell that he’s endeavouring to be cheerful. ‘Tell you what, I’ll bring a packet of Three Castles.’
There is the click of the receiver, the brief sounding of the bell. He says something to himself, something like ‘Poor thing!’ Zoë softly closes the door. Grace and Audrey had probably been friends for fifty years, might even have been schoolfriends. Was Audrey the one whom other girls had pashes on? Was Grace a little bullied? Zoë imagines her hunched sulkily into a desk, and Audrey standing up for her. In letters and telephone conversations there have been references to friends, to holidays in Normandy and Brittany, to bridge, to Grace’s colonic irrigation, to Audrey’s wisdom teeth removed in hospital. Zoë knows – she doesn’t often call it guessing - that after Audrey’s return from every visit to the Alp Horn Grace was greedy for the morsels passed on to her. Not by the blink of an eye could Grace reveal her secret; the only expression of her passion was her constancy in urging another letter. We think of you with her in that coldness. ‘Quite frail he looked,’ Audrey no doubt reported in recent years.
He did not stay with Zoë in 1967 because of love. He stayed because - quite suddenly, and unexpectedly – the emotions all around him seemed to have become too much: it was weariness that caused him to back off. Had he sensed, Zoë wondered years later, the shadow of Grace without entirely knowing that that was what it was? He stayed, he said, because Zoë and the two children who had then been born meant more than he had estimated. Beneath this statement there was the implication that for the sake of his own happiness it wasn’t fair to impose hardship on the innocent. That, though unspoken, had a bitter ring for Zoë. ‘Oh, go away!’ she cried. ‘Go to that unpleasant woman.’ But she did not insist; she did not say there was nothing left, that the damage had been done for ever. To the woman, he quoted his economic circumstances as the reason for thinking again. Supporting two households – which in those days was what the prospect looked like – was more than daunting. Grace says you wouldn’t have to leave them penniless. What she and I earn could easily make up for that. Grace would love to help us out. Had he gone, Grace would somehow have been there too.