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.
In silence, in the end, they watched the bistro emptying. The two waitresses took the tablecloths off and lifted the chairs on to the tables in order to mop over the coloured patterns of shellfish on the tiled floor. Quite suddenly a wave of loneliness caused Margy to shiver inwardly, as the chill news of death does.
‘Perhaps with a bit of time,’ she began, but even as she spoke she knew that time would make no difference. Time would simply pass, and while it did so Francesca’s guilt would still be there; she would always feel she owed this sacrifice. They would not cheat; Francesca would not do that a second time. She would say that friends meeting stealthily was ridiculous, a grimier deception than that of lovers.
‘It’s all my fault,’ Francesca said.
Hardly perceptibly, Margy shook her head, knowing it wasn’t. She had gone too far; she had been sillily angry because of a children’s prank. She hadn’t sought to knock a marriage about, only to give her friend a treat that seemed to be owing to her, only to rescue her for a few summer months from her exhausting children and her exhausting husband, from Mrs Sleet and the Little Acorn Nursery School, from her too-safe haven. But who was to blame, and what intentions there had been, didn’t matter in the least now.
‘In fairness,’ Francesca said, ‘Philip has a point of view. Please say you see it, Margy.’
‘Oh yes, I see it.’ She said it quickly, knowing she must do so before it became impossible to say, before all generosity was gone. She knew, too, that one day Francesca would pass on this admission to her husband because Francesca was Francesca, who told the truth and was no good at deception.
‘See you soon,’ the Sicilian waitress called out when eventually they stood up to go.
‘Yes,’ Margy agreed, lying for her friend as well. On the pavement outside La Trota they stood for a moment in a chill November wind, then moved away in their two different directions.
Timothy’s Birthday
They made the usual preparations. Charlotte bought a small leg of lamb, picked purple broccoli and sprigs of mint. All were Timothy’s favourites, purchased every year for April 23rd, which this year was a Thursday. Odo ensured that the gin had not gone too low: a gin and tonic, and then another one, was what Timothy liked. Odo did not object to that, did not in fact object to obtaining the gin specially, since it was not otherwise drunk in the house.
They were a couple in their sixties who had scarcely parted from each other in the forty-two years of their marriage. Odo was tall, thin as a straw, his bony features receding into a freckled dome on which little hair remained. Charlotte was small and still pretty, her grey hair drawn back and tidy, her eyes an arresting shade of blue. Timothy was their only child.
Deciding on a fire, Odo chopped up an old seed-box for kindling and filled a basket with logs and turf. The rooks were cawing and chattering in the high trees, their nests already in place – more of them this year, Odo noticed, than last. The cobbles of the yard were still damp from a shower. Grass, occasionally ragwort or a dock, greened them in patches. Later perhaps, when Timothy had gone, he’d go over them with weed-killer, as he did every year in April. The outhouses that bounded the yard required attention also, their wooden doors rotted away at the bottom, the whitewash of their stucco gone grey, brambles growing through their windows. Odo resolved that this year he would rectify matters, but knew, even as the thought occurred, that he would not.