It was in France, in the Hotel St-Georges during their September holiday seven years ago, that Mrs. Lethwes found out about her husband’s other woman. There was a letter, round feminine handwriting on an air-mail envelope, an English stamp: she knew at once. The letter had been placed in someone else’s key-box by mistake, and was later handed to her with a palaver of apologies when her husband was swimming in the Mediterranean. ‘Ah, merci,’ she thanked the smooth-haired girl receptionist and said the error didn’t matter in the very least. She knew at once: the instinct of a barren wife, she afterwards called it to herself. So this was why he made a point of being down before her every morning, why he had always done so during their September holiday in France; she’d never wondered about it before. On the terrace she examined the post-mark. It was indecipherable, but again the handwriting told a lot, and only a woman with whom a man had an association would write to him on holiday. From the letter itself, which she read and then destroyed, she learned all there was otherwise to know.
There are too many of the heart-leafed plants, and when she looks in other areas of the border and in other beds she finds they’re not in evidence there. Clearly, it’s the tragedy of the Welsh poppies all over again. Mrs. Lethwes begins to put back what she has taken out, knowing as she does so that this isn’t going to work.
‘ “Silly girl,” I said, straight to her face. “Silly girl, Ange, no way you’re not.” ‘
Marietta has established herself at the kitchen table, her shapeless bulk straining the seams of a pink overall, her feet temporarily removed from the carpet slippers she brings with her because they’re comfortable to work in.
‘No, not for me, thanks,’ Mrs. Lethwes says, which is what she always says when she is offered instant coffee at midday. Real coffee doesn’t agree with Marietta, never has. Toxic in Marietta’s view.
‘All she give’s a giggle. That’s Ange all over, that. Always has been.’
This woman has watched Ange’s puppy-fat go, has seen her through childhood illnesses. And Bernardo, too. This woman could have had a dozen children, borne them and nursed them, loved them and been loved herself. ‘Well, I drew a halt at two, dear. Drew the line, know what I mean? He said have another go, but I couldn’t agree.’
Five goes, Mrs. Lethwes has had herself: five failures, in bed for every day the third and fourth time, told she mustn’t try again, but she did. The same age she was then as she imagines her husband’s other woman to be: thirty-six when she finally accepted she was a childless wife.
‘Decent a bloke as ever walked a street is little Liam, but Ange don’t see it. One day she’ll look up and he’ll be gone and away. Talking to a wall you are.’
‘Is Ange in love, though?’
‘Call it how you like, dear. Mention it to Ange and all she give’s a giggle. Well, Liam’s small. A little fellow, but then where’s the harm in small?’
Washing traces of soil from her hands at the sink, Mrs. Lethwes says there is no harm in a person being small. Hardly five foot, she has many times heard Liam is. But strong as a horse.
‘I said it to her straight, dear. Wait for some bruiser and you’ll build your life on regrets. No good to no one, regrets.’
‘No good at all.’
Of course was what she’d thought on the terrace of the Hotel St-Georges: a childless marriage was a disappointment for any man. She’d failed him, although naturally it had never been said; he wasn’t in the least like that. But she had failed and had compounded her failure by turning away from talk of adoption. She had no feeling for the idea; she wasn’t the kind to take on other people’s kids. Their own particular children were the children she wanted, an expression of their love, an expression of their marriage: more and more, she’d got that into her head. When the letter arrived at the Hotel St-Georges she’d been reconciled for years to her barren state; they lived with it, or so she thought. The letter changed everything. The letter frightened her; she should have known.
‘We need the window-cleaners one of them days,’ Marietta says, dipping a biscuit into her coffee. ‘Shocking, the upstairs panes is.’
‘I’ll ring them.’
‘Didn’t mind me mentioning it, dear? Only with the build-up it works out twice the price. No saving really.’
‘Actually, I forget. I wasn’t trying to — ‘
‘Best done regular I always say.’
‘I’ll ring them this afternoon.’
Mrs. Lethwes said nothing in the Hotel St-Georges and she hasn’t since. He doesn’t know she knows; she hopes that nothing ever shows. She sat for an hour on the terrace of the hotel, working it out. Say something, she thought, and as soon as she does it’ll be in the open. The next thing is he’ll be putting it gently to her that nothing is as it should be. Gently because he always has been gentle, especially about her barren state; sorry for her, dutiful in their plight, tied to her. He’d have had an Eastern child, any little slit-eyed thing, but when she hadn’t been able to see it he’d been good about that too.
‘Sets the place off when the windows is done, I always say.’
‘Yes, of course.’
He came back from his swim; and the letter from a woman who played an instrument in an orchestra was already torn into little pieces and in a waste-bin in the car park, the most distant one she could find. ‘Awfully good, this,’ she said when he came and sat beside her. Some Do Not was the book she laid aside. He said he had read it at school.
‘I’ll do the window-sills when they’ve been. Shocking with flies, July is. Filthy really.’
‘I’ll see if I can get them next week.’
There hadn’t been an address, just a date: September 4th. No need for an address because of course he knew it, and from the letter’s tone he had for ages. She wondered what that meant and couldn’t think of a time when a change had begun in his manner towards her. There hadn’t been one; and in other ways, too, he was as he always had been: unhurried in his movements and his speech, his square healthy features the same terracotta shade, the grey in his hair in no way diminishing his physical attractiveness. It was hardly surprising that someone else found him attractive too. Driving up through France, and back again in England, she became used to pretending in his company that the person called Elspeth did not exist, while endlessly conjecturing when she was alone.
‘I’ll do the stairs down,’ Marietta says, ‘and then I’ll scoot, dear.’
‘Yes, you run along whenever you’re ready.’
‘I’ll put in the extra Friday, dear. Three-quarters of an hour I owe all told.’
‘Oh, please don’t worry -’
‘Fair’s fair, dear. Only I’d like to catch the twenty-past today, with Bernardo anxious for his dinner.’
‘Yes, of course you must.’
The house is silent when Marietta has left, and Mrs. Lethwes feels free again. The day is hers now, until the evening. She can go from room to room in stockinged feet, and let the telephone ring unanswered. She can watch, if the mood takes her, some old black-and-white film on the television, an English one, for she likes those best, pretty girls’ voices from the 1940s, Michael Wilding young again, Ann Todd.