Once again the snow was falling, but this time it was not settling. The café was closing up, but the semiuniformed man was still sitting at the table with the two discarded cups in front of him. He must have picked up the newspaper, for it was now jutting out of the top of the shopping bag like a chimney pot that was about to topple over. Julius stood up and snapped on the lights, which made it challenging to see out, and she realized that the few hardy souls wandering the snowy streets could now look up and enjoy the theatre of their lives. As she pushed back the sleeves of her cardigan, her full attention returned to the window, where she found herself longing to see a flower or a tree. Gardens were the missing factor, and she thought of her childhood friend Hester Greenwell, whose family had a large spread of a garden behind their detached stone house, but her father was the local doctor, so such extravagance was to be expected. Her own father always seemed uncomfortable whenever she went around to play at Hester’s, making it clear that she couldn’t stay for tea because Hester’s mother insisted on calling it supper. “Invite her over to our place,” he said. “After all, we’ve got a garden too.” And so Hester started to visit Monica’s house, and more often than not she would stay for tea.
Monica sat down at the table and tried to busy herself so the men wouldn’t think she was eavesdropping. Thanks to Julius, there was now enough light to read the newspaper she had bought last weekend when she took the children to the park. If there was a match on, she would go to the top of the hill and look down into the distant football ground and try to convince Ben to remember the names of the players and take a general interest in the game. She knew it was the kind of thing that a dad should be doing, but there was no point bargaining on this from Julius. However, because there was no match, she had sat apart from everybody else by the playground and watched Ben enjoying himself on the slide, while she let Tommy hurdle over her knees and pass from one side of the bench to the other. Her attention was suddenly seized by the wind combing through the trees, and then she looked up to the heavens and watched an aeroplane drawing a desperately slow line against the sky. Almost imperceptibly, she could feel herself striking out on one of her puzzling journeys into make-believe, and she knew she had to get a grip on herself. As Ben left the playground and began to run towards her, she saw he was in danger of being swallowed up by a group of Japanese tourists who were chatting incessantly and taking photographs. They parted abruptly and opened up like a river flowing around a protruding rock, and once they had passed on their way they left behind her bemused son all fresh and clean and standing before her.
“Of course, I understand.” She listened to Julius trying gently to press his own case. Now that the island appeared to be moving closer to independence her husband wanted the promise of a government position, or a title of some description, but this was beginning to seem unlikely. As Monica stood and moved back to the window, a quick glance revealed that the men were now angled towards each other on the settee, but she once again gave them her back.
She heard Julius laugh unconvincingly. This was the second time that Lloyd Samuels had visited their flat, but unlike earlier in the week, when he had scarcely crossed the doorstep, this time it was clear that he intended to stay awhile, and Julius had asked Monica if she would make coffee for them both. She thought that the men might talk for an hour or two before moving on to the pub and then go on from there to their evening meeting, but she now found herself wondering if their meeting had been cancelled because of the weather. It was perfectly possible for her to make more coffee, but she concluded she should wait until asked, for these were men who didn’t like to be interrupted.
“If the two parties merge, and you take the deputy seat, will you be in a position to offer me a role?”
She could hear unease in Julius’s voice.
“My friend, these people are better funded, they have resources, and there is no need for the opposition to be split like this. We must seek and greet consensus.”
It was typical of Julius to be so caught up with himself that he was ignorant of what was going on. She already had a powerful intimation of her husband’s fate, for she felt sure that his vain, overweight friend was the type of man who would happily go to the grave in his own embrace. A third visit would be unlikely.
As Monica continued to stare down into the street, she thought again about the upsetting truth that Julius had never once offered to take her and the children across the road to the café as a treat. In fact, since she’d had the boys, he had never exercised himself to take her anywhere, and she suspected that it embarrassed him to be seen in public with her. The poor man had probably exaggerated his knowledge of women, and while she couldn’t claim to have a great deal of experience with men, she knew enough to be aware that his colleague Lloyd Samuels was once again stealing clumsy glances at her. Her legs were bare, and her slender feet encased in tight pumps that were neither slippers nor shoes, but she fancied they made her movements appear graceful. When she bent over to look down out of the window, her cardigan rode up and exposed a thin band of flesh that drew the man’s eyes in. She could feel the inelegant weight of his gaze, but as long as he respected the fact that she was not available to him, and never would be, there was really nothing for her to do except adjust her cardigan, which she did.
“After Notting Hill,” said Julius, “it’s just one problem after another.”
“And the police?”
“The police and the teddy boys are as bad as each other.”
Her husband was chased once, but he would never speak with her about what had happened. It exasperated her now that she could hear him talking about the incident to this man. She had held his head over the sink and dabbed at the cut on his cheek and stopped the blood, but he wouldn’t even make eye contact with her. That night a morose and wounded Julius had had the same abject look on his face as the poor man who had spent the greater part of the afternoon sitting alone in the café with only the shopping bag for company.
She turns, having decided that she should once again go and check on the children. As she steps towards the bedroom, she sees that their guest has begun now to use his hands as he speaks, but he has modified his voice, which suggests that they have moved on to some new issue that makes them both feel a little more at ease. However, this new sense of comfort with each other will be only temporary, for Julius has told her that this evening he will ask for more money to help with the children. He will tell Dr. Samuels that it is no longer possible for him to manage in the absence of a proper wage and without guarantees of some sort. She closes in the door to the bedroom behind her and can see that her two children are still sleeping peacefully. Then she turns off the lights and goes and stands by the bedroom window and looks down at the now shuttered facade of the café and waits for the snow to stop falling.
* * *
Shortly after the talks between the British government and the delegation from his country collapsed, Julius applied for a job as a lecturer at the institution that had awarded him his bachelor’s degree. There was no need for him to inform Dr. Lloyd Samuels, for relations between the two of them had finally broken down one wet Monday night in the lounge bar of London’s Grosvenor Hotel. That night, despite his obvious distress at Samuels’s duplicity, Julius remained in the hotel bar long after his former friend had cleared off and downed one drink after the other. He knew there was no way he could share the news of their falling-out with his wife and give her the satisfaction of being proved right. If it had just been he and Monica alone, he felt sure that they would have put an end to their misery a long time ago, but the presence of the sullen-looking boys seemed to elicit some unspoken guilt in them both, so they had lingered on across months and years in their cramped flat with little money, and without any coherent idea of where life was taking them. But that night, alone in the bar of the Grosvenor Hotel, Julius looked around, and it finally dawned on him that he had no real interest in giving anything to this country that had now been his home for over a dozen years. After all, what had he received in return from these people? A late-night beating from some hooligans, and the problem of an increasingly sloppy wife who insisted that the children call her Mam as opposed to Mommy, or even Mama, and who long ago seemed to have relinquished any appetite for improvement or accomplishment.