He heard about a marriage that was unconsummated, about the shock there’d been for husband and wife in the Strand Hotel, about the state they had lived in since. Her voice was a toneless mutter, flattened and dead. Miss Embarrassment her friend had called her; but Mary Louise, who blushed so easily, was pale when she lay bare her confidences. Was it because he was an invalid that she told him? Robert wondered. Was it because he didn’t count, because he seemed to her to be beyond the realm of ordinary humanity, as impotent as her husband?
‘He has begun to drink,’ she said. ‘And I deceive him after only two years by coming here on Sundays.’
‘But I’m your cousin, Mary Louise. Doesn’t he know you come here?’
‘Nobody knows.’
He imagined her in the house, the spinster sisters resenting her presence, hating her even, Elmer Quarry trudging upstairs at mealtimes, drinking his shame away. She told him about the attics, about the toys the Quarry children had played with, all carefully kept in a cupboard. And then she said:
‘I used to think I was in love with you, Robert.’
‘With me?’
‘It might have been the time when you were fond of me. We might both have been in love with one another.’
He remembered again the pain of not being allowed to go to school, his anger with his mother, his refusal to understand. They would starve if things went on like this, his mother had said. No matter how early she rose in the mornings there weren’t enough hours of daylight, especially in wintertime. She hadn’t understood either; he couldn’t tell her.
‘When James came here with the butter every week I used to bring the conversation round to you. I often thought of giving a note to James.’
‘I think I’d turned my attentions to Mr Stewart by then.’
Laughter relieved a constriction. Then he said:
‘I’m in love with you still, to tell the truth. I wait for every Sunday with just the same feelings as I had then.’
In turn, for Robert, it didn’t matter either. Telling more of the truth didn’t matter because she would not come back in any case. After the intimacies she’d shared with him she would find it hard to cycle out next Sunday and the Sunday after, as if nothing different had occurred. She didn’t know this, but it would be so.
‘I couldn’t face the wedding party,’ he said.
‘I thought you weren’t up to it.’
‘No. We were going to go. We intended to. “I’ll wait in the car,” I said. But my mother wouldn’t have that.’
‘You couldn’t love me, Robert.’
‘It’s not a choice that people have.’
Did she mean, he wondered, that she couldn’t love him? Did she mean that even before her marriage there couldn’t have been love between them because he was only half a person? It was different for children was no doubt what she meant also: children didn’t always notice.
But Mary Louise contradicted these thoughts almost as they occurred. She wasn’t worth anyone’s love, she said. She had married a man for gain. She had married out of impatience and boredom, and had been handed both back with interest added. She had calculated; she had coldly examined the pros and cons.
Robert laughed. He took her hand again, and again she permitted him to do so. Anyone would do as she had, he said.
‘I wouldn’t have if there’d been our friendship, Robert.’
‘Then I’d have been insisting I was the guilty one.’
He felt the pressure of her fingers on his palm. Was this a sign, a statement she could not bring herself otherwise to make? Now and again, since the time they had been together in Miss Mullover’s schoolroom, he had glimpsed her in the town when by chance they visited it on the same day, not often. Every autumn his mother drove to the Dallons’ farmhouse with grapes and apples. He might have accompanied her but he’d never wished to, fearful of the renewal of emotions. The wedding had been impossible, entirely, to avoid.
‘I’m sorry I said all that, Robert.’
‘It means everything to me that you did.’
On his side, there were facts he might have added to what she’d said: his gloom and wretchedness while his mother chattered in the car, driving back after the wedding; the pain he experienced because he’d selfishly deprived her of an occasion she would have enjoyed; the greater pain of imagining the radiant happiness of the bride. While Mary Louise drank cherry brandy in McBirney’s she had still been in his thoughts, still in her wedding-dress, as last he’d seen her. He had tortured himself while Mary Louise, in the presence of her already unconscious husband, undressed and crept woozily into her marriage bed. While she slept, virginal and alone, he had descended to the bitterest depths of melancholy.
‘What an irony it is!’ was all he observed in this respect, speaking softly in the graveyard.
‘You are the only person in the world I could have told.’
He kissed her gently, their lips just touching. Then he pushed himself to his feet and held his hands out to her. They walked back towards the house, not saying anything else. Both were possessed by a warmth that delighted them, the warmth of secrets at last shared while still remaining secrets, the intimacy of a private truth.
Crossing the sloping field beyond which the house and garden lay, Robert said:
‘Look! There he is.’
They had not, that day, brought the binoculars. But Mary Louise could see, at the very place where they often watched the fish going by, the grey, angular form of the heron they had hoped for so long to catch a glimpse of. Neck extended, it dipped its long beak into the water, no doubt fishing for the trout, although the distance was too great to allow them to observe how successful these efforts were. It stuttered closer to the water on its ungainly legs, then turned, spread out its wings and flew away.
‘Clever creature,’ Robert said.
In the house he read to Mary Louise from a reference book. It was a common heron they’d seen, not a Great White or a Purple: Ardea cinerea. The common heron wasn’t rare, but even so was not often seen. Anglers had been known to persecute it.
He put the book away and hunted among some others. There were many stories by his favourite Russian novelist, he said, but he possessed only three. He spread these volumes out for her, each open at the title page, as if it was important for her to see them.
‘Why did you do that, Robert?’
‘In case you do not come back.’
‘Of course I’ll come back.’
‘No one can be certain.’
The three volumes were left as he had opened them, on one of the tables that contained stacks of other books. If not because of what had been confided, he thought, then because of what had occurred: she would not return.
‘You’ve been so good to me, Robert. I can’t tell you what it means to have been able to talk to you.’
‘May I kiss you in this room, Mary Louise? Just once?’
‘Yes, you may.’ She spoke quickly, without the slightest hesitation.
This time he put his arms around her and pressed her lips a little closer, then held her hand for a moment after they had parted. He said again that she was beautiful.
‘But I’m not in the least,’ she began, as she had before.
‘Actually you are,’ he repeated too.
They had tea in the kitchen, and when Mary Louise had gone Robert carried a cup out to his mother, who was picking raspberries. Was it enough, he wondered, that they had talked so? Would all they had shared make up for her not returning? As he helped to pick the fruit, it seemed to Robert that his cousin’s abrupt incursion into his life had from the very beginning been part of a pattern that their conversation today completed, with the telling of the truth. It seemed as if, outside their wills, their declaration of affection had been ordained. That his own love had persisted while hers had dwindled was just a circumstance; at least they’d honoured what there had been. But could he, he wondered, live off the moments of an afternoon?