Zoë knows when the day arrives. Glancing across their breakfast coffee at her, his eyes have a dull sparkle that’s caused by an attempt to rekindle an obsolete excitement: he was always one to make an effort. In a letter once Audrey referred to his ‘loose-limbed charm’, stating that she doubted she could live without it and be herself. He still has that lanky look, which perhaps was what she meant; what remains of his floppy fair hair, mainly at the back and sides of his head, is ash-coloured now; his hands – which Zoë can well imagine either Grace or Audrey designating his most elegant feature – have a shrivelled look, the bones more pronounced than once they were, splotches of freckles on skin like old paper. His face is beakier than it was, the teeth for the most part false, his eyes given to watering when a room is warm. Two spots of pink come and go high up on his narrow cheeks, where the structure of the cheekbones tautens the skin. Otherwise, his face is pale.
‘I have to go in today,’ he casually announces.
‘Not here for lunch?’
‘I’ll pick up a sandwich somewhere.’
She would like to be able to suggest he’d be wiser to go to a more expensive restaurant than the Alp Horn. Cheap food and house wine are a deadly combination at his time of life. A dreadful nuisance it is when his stomach goes wrong.
‘Bit of shopping to do,’ he says.
Once there was old so-and-so to meet but that doesn’t work any more because, with age, such figures can’t be counted upon not to give the game away. There was ‘the man at Lloyd’s’ to see, or Hanson and Phillips, who were arranging an annuity. All that has been tapped too often: what’s left is the feebleness of shopping. Before his retirement there was no need to mention anything at all.
‘Shopping,’ she says without an interrogative note. ‘Shopping.’
‘One or two things.’
Three Castles cigarettes are difficult to find. Audrey will smoke nothing else and it’s half a joke that he goes in search of them, a fragment of affection in the kaleidoscope of the love affair. Another such fragment is their shared delight in sweetbreads, a food Zoë finds repellent. They share unpunctuality also. Grace can’t understand how we ever manage to meet!
‘Should keep fine,’ he predicts.
‘Take your umbrella all the same.’
‘Yes, I’ll take my umbrella.’
He asks about a particular shirt, his blue striped one. He wonders if it has been ironed. She tells him where it is. Their three children – the boys, and Cecilia, born later, all married now – know nothing about Audrey. Sometimes it seems odd to Zoë that this should be so, that a person who has featured so profoundly in their father’s life should be unknown to them. If that person had had her way Cecilia would not have been born at all.
‘Anything you need?’ he offers. ‘Anything I can get you?’
She shakes her head. She wishes she could say: ‘I open her letters. I listen when there’s a phone conversation.’ She wishes he could tell her that Grace has died, that his friend is now alone.
‘Back about four, I expect?’
‘Something like that.’
Had he gone off, she wouldn’t still be in this house. She wouldn’t be sitting in this kitchen in her black-and-scarlet dressing-gown, eyeing him in his woolly brown one. She’d be living with one of the children or in a flat somewhere. Years ago the house would have been sold; she’d not have grown old with a companion. It was most unlikely there would ever have been another man; she doubted she’d have wanted one.
‘I dreamed we were on a ferry going to Denmark,’ he unexpectedly says. ‘There was a woman you got talking to, all in black.’
‘Prettily in black?’
‘Oh, yes. A pretty woman too. She used an odd expression. She said she was determined to have what she called a “corking child”.’
‘Ah.’
‘You sat me down in front of her and made me comment on her dress. You made me make suggestions.’
‘And did you, Charles?’
‘I did. I suggested shades of green. Deep greens; not olive like my trousers. And rounded collar-ends on her shirt, not pointed like mine. I made her look at mine. She was a nice woman except that she said something a little rude about my shoes.’
‘Scuffed?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Your shoes are never scuffed.’
‘No.’
‘Well, there you are.’
He nods. ‘Yes, there you are.’
Soon after that he rises and goes upstairs again. Why did that conversation about a dream take place? It’s true that just occasionally they tell one another their dreams; just occasionally, they have always done so. But significance appears to attach to the fact that he shared his with her this morning: that is a feeling she has.
‘Why did you bother with me if I didn’t matter?’ Long after he’d decided to stay with her she asked him that. Long afterwards she questioned everything; she tore at the love that had united them in the first place; it was her right that he should listen to her. Six years went by before their daughter was born.
‘Well, I’m off.’
Like a tall, thin child he looks, his eyes deep in their sockets, his dark, conventional suit well pressed, a Paisley tie in swirls of blue that matches the striped blue shirt. His brown shoes, the pair he keeps for special occasions, gleam as they did not in his eccentric dream.
‘If I’d known I’d have come with you.’ Zoë can’t help saying that; she doesn’t intend to, the words come out. But they don’t alarm him, as once they would have. Once, a shadow of terror would have passed through his features, apprehension spreading lest she rush upstairs to put her coat on.
‘We’ll go in together next time,’ he promises.
‘Yes, that’ll be nice.’
They kiss, as they always do when they part. The hall door bangs behind him. She’ll open a tin of salmon for lunch and have it with tomatoes and a packet of crisps. A whole tin will be too much, of course, but between them they’ll probably be able for whatever’s left this evening.
In the sitting-room she turns the television on. Celeste Holm, lavishly fur-coated, is in a car, cross about something. Zoë doesn’t want to watch and turns it off again. She imagines the old flame excited as the train approaches London. An hour ago the old flame made her face up, but now she does it all over again, difficult with the movement of the train. Audrey doesn’t know that love came back into the marriage, that skin grew over the wound. She doesn’t know, because no one told her, because he cannot bring himself to say that the brief occasion was an aberration. He honours – because he’s made like that – whatever it is the affair still means to the woman whose life it has disrupted. He doesn’t know that Audrey – in receipt of all that was on offer – would have recovered from the drama in a natural way if Grace – in receipt of nothing at all – hadn’t been an influence. He doesn’t wonder what will happen now, since death has altered the pattern of loose ends.
Opening the salmon tin, Zoë travels again to the Alp Horn rendezvous. She wonders if it has changed and considers it unlikely. The long horn still stretches over a single wall. The same Tyrolean landscape decorates two others. There are the blue-and-red tablecloths. He waits with a glass of sherry, and then she’s there.
‘My dear!’
She is the first to issue their familiar greeting, catching him unaware the way things sometimes do these days.
‘My dear!’ he says in turn.
Sherry is ordered for her, too, and when it comes the rims of their glasses touch for a moment, a toast to the past.
‘Grace,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it awful?’
‘I manage.’
The waiter briskly notes their order and enquires about the wine.
‘Oh, the good old house red.’
Zoë’s fingers, gripping and slicing a tomato, are arthritic, painful sometimes though not at present. In bed at night he’s gentle when he reaches out for one hand or the other, cautious with affection, not tightening his grasp as once he did. Her fingers are ugly; she sometimes thinks she looks quite like a monkey now. She arranges the fish and the tomato on a plate and sprinkles pepper over both. Neither of them ever has salt.
‘And you, Charles?’
‘I’m all right.’
‘I worry about you sometimes.’
‘No, I’m all right.’
It was accordion music that was playing in the Alp Horn the day Zoë’s inquisitiveness drove her into it. Young office people occupied the tables. Business was quite brisk.
‘I do appreciate this,’ Audrey says. ‘When something’s over, all these years – I do appreciate it, Charles.’
He passes across the table the packet of Three Castles cigarettes, and she smiles, placing it beside her because it’s too soon yet to open it.
‘You’re fun, Charles.’
‘I think La Maybury married, you know. I think someone told me that.’
‘Grace could never stand her.’
‘No.’
Is this the end? Zoë wonders. Is this the final fling, the final call on his integrity and honour? Can his guilt slip back into whatever recesses there are, safe at last from Grace’s second-hand desire? No one told him that keeping faith could be as cruel as confessing faithlessness; only Grace might have appropriately done that, falsely playing a best friend’s role. But it wasn’t in Grace’s interest to do so.
‘Perhaps I’ll sell the house.’
‘I rather think you should.’
‘Grace did suggest it once.’
Leaving them to it, Zoé eats her salmon and tomato. She watches the end of the old black-and-white film: years ago they saw it together, long before Grace and Audrey. They’ve seen it together since; as a boy he’d been in love with Bette Davis. Picking at the food she has prepared, Zoë is again amused by what has amused her before. But only part of her attention is absorbed. Conversations take place; she does not hear; what she sees are fingers undistorted by arthritis loosening the cellophane on the cigarette packet and twisting it into a butterfly. He orders coffee. The scent that came back on his clothes was lemony with a trace of lilac. In a letter there was a mention of the cellophane twisted into a butterfly.
‘Well, there we are,’ he says. ‘It’s been lovely to see you, Audrey.’
‘Lovely for me too.’
When he has paid the bill they sit for just a moment longer. Then, in the ladies’, she powders away the shine that heat and wine have induced, and tidies her tidy grey hair. The lemony scent refreshes, for a moment, the stale air of the cloakroom.
‘Well, there we are, my dear,’ he says again on the street. Has there ever, Zoë wonders, been snappishness between them? Is she the kind not to lose her temper, long-suffering and patient as well as being a favourite girl at school? After all, she never quarrelled with her friend.
‘Yes, there we are, Charles.’ She takes his arm. ‘All this means the world to me, you know.’
They walk to the corner, looking for a taxi. Marriage is full of quarrels, Zoë reflects.