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FOUR

We do not know what we look like till someone tells us, Sally thought. If they tell us what they see — which they won’t, for fear of offending us, unless they want to offend, in which case what they say may be only half true — then so much the better, though even in friendship how can we know if it’s true? We still have to match it with what we see in the mirror, and with what we already know of ourselves, which is just as likely to be distorted. Then again, does it matter what we — or I, anyway — look like? unless it has some connection to the inner temperament, then of course it matters a lot.

Now what made me think funny things like that? Driving at night, she supposed, and an ominous clarity in the decreasing light, hedges and walls in sharp detail, as if someone she very much would not like to see lurked behind each.

She changed gear to get uphill, flicking mainbeams in case some idiot came shearing round the elbow bend. Stanley had been away a fortnight, and being on your own disorientated the senses, till you got used to it, which she almost had, but driving to the airport to meet him brought a little of the feeling back.

The funniest of all was the notion that she wouldn’t recognize him as he came out of the Customs, though they had been married eighteen years. She laughed, knowing she would spot the Antler luggage pulling at each arm, though the suit he would be wearing wouldn’t much differentiate him from other Identikit businessmen. At one time he had tried to dress as much as he could in the young fogey style because he thought it impressed the men overseas, but she put a stop to that. When it came to the finer harmonies of dressing he hadn’t much sense at all, so it was always she who packed his case and kitted him out for his trips, and even for their sojourns at the house in France, choosing ties and shirts and shoes and hoping he would remember which to wear with each. Her ‘action man’, she smiled, whenever he tried to object.

Yet what if she didn’t in fact recognize him, and picked up someone who wasn’t Stanley at all? A personable man so quick in understanding he would play up to it, and off they would blithely go to have fuck after fuck in an anonymous hotel room, so well matched as never to part. And Stanley would be greeted by the wife of the man she had gone with, so that their future would change as well.

She played the game for a while, working out even shadier permutations, certain areas so exciting she wobbled the steering and burred a hedge. Such luggage wasn’t so uncommon but neither was Stanley. Nor, come to that, was she. He made the trip twice a year to inspect the firm’s factories in the Far East, though thoughts like these hadn’t popped into her mind before. They had been married so long that maybe similar thoughts, as he stared up the long sardine box of the aeroplane, bothered him as well, and he wondered whether or not he would know her as he strolled out of the Customs.

Life was funny when it wasn’t boring. He had said: ‘Don’t meet me at the airport,’ and she answered: ‘All right, I won’t,’ knowing he expected her to be there nevertheless. ‘I can get a train,’ he said, ‘and then the bus,’ but the pathetic vision of him shifting two cases, raincoat and sundry bits from point to point burdened her heart, if only because he had met her when she flew back from Nice after her brother’s accident.

Anyway, he earned enough to be brought home in style, deserved it after his nonstop nerve-racking wining and dining which was even more exhausting, he said, than the technical discussions. She once teased him about the ‘bedding’ as well, but he put on his especially hurt look (no less genuine for that, she hoped) saying that even if he was inclined that way there was neither time nor energy to indulge.

Nor, in any case, was it offered, everyone was so scared of Aids, condoms or not, apart from which he supposed that the managerial element he mixed with, well accustomed to reading character, and taking hints in response to theirs, did not, he went on, push matters onto that particular stage, and this was proved by his extreme randiness the minute they got into the house, which induced her, always before leaving to meet him at the airport, to put the tube of K-Y Jelly on the shelf above the Aga so that it would not be so icy, because though the house was blessed with full central heating the odd tucked-away corner could nevertheless be bracing. Another vital item was a bottle of Moët et Chandon in the fridge. Absence made the heart grow fonder, but after a fortnight hers had to be cosseted back into life for the reunion.

Sleet came against the windscreen as if a bag of sago had burst somewhere above the car. Cleared, it rattled again, changed to grated coconut, then settled to a steady veil of wet and grainy white. Hell! There were twenty miles to the motorway, and then, she supposed, an open run. Would the car cope? Chains for the wheels were rusting in the garage, and in any case they clattered so bothersomely when the roads were unexpectedly free.

Snow played hide-and-seek, here one mile and gone the next, which made her nervous, a bad sign. Luckily, she had taken the green Volvo, instead of her dented Mini, from the driveway. Except for a bit of rust around the left headlamp the Mini was the best little runabout she’d ever had, but on a night like this the Volvo was more the job, though Stanley was always fidgety when she drove it, and might even use his god-given right to get at the wheel in the airport car park.

She recalled their first meeting at a Youth Hostel in the Lakes, campers in the common room going over the day’s walk with maps and Wainwright. Afterwards they played guessing each other’s sign of the zodiac, and she tried eleven times with Stanley, till it was obvious he was her own.

‘Brilliant,’ he called. ‘Sally’s rumbled me at last.’

She was uneasy. ‘What date, though?’

‘The twentieth.’ His face had caught the sun and the wind.

‘You’re joking.’ He had to be. Or it was uncanny. But the chances weren’t that remote, unless he had seen her card on the warden’s desk, and was lying, or teasing. Sometimes on rush evenings a pile was left to be seen to later. She remembered the warden’s sharp and weatherworn face, neither young nor old, and she couldn’t imagine him in any other job, evil demon on the one hand, wonderful wizard on the far side of the face, she would never know which.

Stanley’s dark hair was combed straight back, so could she trust him? She had been blonde. His sly smile suggested that she might fancy him. ‘It’s a lot of nonsense,’ he said, not entirely motiveless.

She had been reckless on the trek at times, going over the rocks and scree like a goat, so thought she must be careful in this. ‘What time of the day?’

‘A quarter to four. My mother swore she heard the tea bell as I popped out.’

Other hostellers listened as if to a tale of suspense, and she knew she turned pale, hands clasped, hoping she was too young for a heart attack.

‘Are you all right? Have I said something I shouldn’t?’

‘I’m tired,’ she said, ‘I suppose.’

‘Aren’t we all? What time were you born, then?’

Her father had noted in his diary, which he later showed with inane pride: ‘1545 hrs. Baby born. Seven and one half pounds. Call her Jane. No, Sally.’

‘Oh, I don’t really remember.’

From then on she tried to keep out of his way, but they were married in six months, drawn moth-like to the flame of zodiacal coincidence, which ever since had kept them in a firm matrimonial grip, or prevented them ever getting to know each other. Occasional quarrels were not enough, she thought, to justify his glib assertion that ‘We disagree so much that we get on like a house on fire.’ All the same, their meeting at the hostel seemed as fated as any arranged marriage, and they had either never been unhappy enough to separate, or at times too unhappy to separate, while the casualty rate among their friends had been so appalling that they knew no one who was married for the first time.