She sets the table for their dinner, the tweed mats, the cutlery, the pepper-mill, the German mustard, glasses for wine because he deserves a little wine after his day, Châteauneuf-du-Pape. The bottle’s on the table, opened earlier because she knows to do that from experience: it’s difficult later on to open wine with all the rush of cooking. And the wine should breathe: years ago he taught her that.
In the kitchen she begins to cut the fat off the pork chops she bought that morning, a long time ago it seems now. Marietta’s recipe she’s intending to do: pork chops in tomato sauce, onions and peppers. On the mottled working surface the blue toothbrush beaker is almost full again, reached out for often. The meat slides about although, in actual fact, it doesn’t move. It is necessary to be careful with the knife; her little finger is wrapped in a band-aid from a week ago. On the radio Humphrey Lyttelton asks his teams to announce the Late Arrivals at the Undertakers Ball.
‘Of course,’ Mrs. Lethwes says aloud. ‘Of course, we’ll offer it a home.’
At five to seven, acting instinctively as she does every evening at about this time, Mrs. Lethwes washes the blue plastic beaker and replaces it in the bathroom. Twice, before she hears the car wheels on the tarmac, she raises the gin bottle directly to her lips, then pours herself, conventionally, a cocktail of Gordon’s and Martini. She knows it will happen tonight. She knows he will enter with a worry in his features and stand by the door, not coming forward for a moment, that then he’ll pour himself a drink, too, and sit down slowly and begin to tell her. ‘I’m sorry,’ is probably how he’ll put it, and she’ll stop him, telling him she can guess. And after he has spoken for twenty minutes, covering all the ground that has been lost, she’ll say, of course: ‘The child must come here.’
The noisy up-and-over garage door falls into place. In a hurry Mrs. Lethwes raises the green bottle to her lips because suddenly she feels the need of it. She does so again before there is the darkness that sometimes comes, arriving suddenly today just as she is whispering to herself that tomorrow, all day long, she’ll not take anything at all and thinking also that, for tonight, the open wine will be enough, and if it isn’t there’s always more that can be broached. For, after all, tonight is a time for celebration. A schoolgirl on a summer’s day, just like the one that has passed, occupies the upper room where only visitors sleep. She comes downstairs and chatters on, about her friends, her teachers, a worry she has, not understanding a poem, and together at the kitchen table they read it through. Oh, I do love you, Mrs. Lethwes thinks, while there is imagery and words rhyme.
On the mottled worktop in the kitchen the meat is where Mrs. Lethwes left it, the fat partly cut away, the knife still separating it from one of the chops. The potatoes she scraped earlier in the day are in a saucepan of cold water, the peas she shelled in another. Often, in the evenings, it is like that in the kitchen when her husband returns to their house. He is gentle when he carries her, as he always is.
Marrying Damian
‘I’m going to marry Damian,’ Joanna said.
Claire wasn’t paying attention. She smiled and nodded, intent on unravelling a ball of garden twine that had become tangled. I said:
‘Well, that’s nice, of course. But Damian’s married already.’
It didn’t matter, Joanna said, and repeated her resolve. Joanna was five at the time.
Twenty-two years later Damian stood on the wild grass, among the cornflowers and the echiums and the lavatera, under the cricket-bat willow that had been a two-foot shrub when Joanna made her announcement. He was wearing blue sunglasses and a powder-blue suit that looked new. In contrast, his tie - its maroon and gold stripes seeming to indicate membership of some club to which almost certainly Damian did not belong - was lank, and the collar of his shirt was frayed. We hadn’t been expecting him; we hadn’t heard from Damian for years. Since the spring of 1985, Claire later calculated, the year of his second divorce, from an American widow in upstate New York. After that there was an Englishwoman who lived in Venice, about whom we were never told very much. When Joanna had declared her childhood intention Damian had been still married to the only one of his three wives Claire and I actually knew: a slender, pretty girl, the daughter of the Bishop of Killaloe. We had known her since the wedding; I’d been Damian’s best man.
I was actually asleep when Damian walked into our garden all those years later, and I think Claire was too. We were lolling in deck-chairs, Claire’s spaniels stretched out under hers, avoiding the afternoon sun.
‘Yes,’ Damian said. ‘It’s Damian.’
We were surprised, but perhaps not much: turning up out of the blue had always been his habit. He never telephoned first or intimated his intention by letter or on a postcard. Over the years he had arrived in all seasons and at varying times of day, once rousing us at two o’clock in the morning. Invariably he brought with him details of a personal disaster which had left him with the need to borrow a little money. These loans were not paid back; even as he accepted them he made no pretence that they would be.
‘Damian.’ Claire hugged him, laughing, playfully demanding to know what he was doing in that awful suit. I asked him where he’d been and he said oh, a lot of places - Vancouver, Oregon, Spain. Claire made him sit down, saying she was going to make some tea, inviting him to stay a while. He was the tonic we needed, Claire said, for she’s always afraid that we’ll slump into dullness unless we’re careful. A woman, somewhere, had given him the suit: we both guessed that.
‘I wasn’t all that well in Spain,’ Damian said. ‘Some kind of sunstroke.’
We are the same age, Damian and I, not young any more; that day, as we sat together in the garden, we were sixty and a bit, Claire five years younger. She’s tall and slim, and I can’t believe she’ll ever be anything but elegant, but of course I know I may be wrong. When we married she came to live in the country town I’ve always known, acquiring an extra identity as the doctor’s wife and the receptionist at the practice, as the mother of a daughter and a son, the organizer of a playgroup, the woman who first taught the illiterate of the town to read.
Damian, at the first opportunity, fled this neighbourhood. On his return to it the time before this one he had carried - clearly an affectation - a silver-topped cane, which was abandoned now, no doubt because it drew attention to its own necessity, and Damian inclines towards vanity. Although he sat down briskly in the chair Claire had vacated for him, the protest of a joint caused him, for a single instant, to wince. His light, fair hair is grey in places now, and I don’t suppose he cares for that either, or that his teeth have shrivelled and become discoloured, nor that the freckles on the backs of his hands form blobs where they have spread into one another, or that the skin of his forehead is as dry as old vellum. But that day there was nothing about his eyes to suggest a coming to terms with a future destined to be different from the past, no hint of a hesitation about what should or should not be undertaken: in that sense Damian remains young.