In her garden, while Mrs Lethwes still sleeps, the scent of night-stock fades with the cool of night. Dew forms on roses and geraniums, on the petals of the cosmos and the yellow spikes of broom. Slugs creep towards lettuce plants, avoiding a line of virulent bait; a silent cat, far outside its own domain, waits for the emergence of the rockery mice.
It is July. Dawn comes early, casting a pale twilight on the brick of the house, on the Virginia creeper that covers half a wall, setting off white-painted window-frames and decorative wrought-iron. This house and garden, in a tranquil wooded neighbourhood, constitute one part of the achievement of Mrs Lethwes’s husband, are a symbol of professional advancement conducted over twenty years, which happens also to be the length of this marriage.
Abruptly, Mrs Lethwes is fully awake and knows her night’s sleep is over. Hunched beneath the bedclothes in the other bed, her husband does not stir when she rises and crosses the room they share to the window. Drawing aside the edge of a curtain, she glances down into the early-morning garden and almost at once drops the curtain back into place. In bed again, she lies on her side, facing her husband because, being fond of him, she likes to watch him sleeping. She feels blurred and headachy, as she always does at this time, the worst moment of her day, Mrs Lethwes considers.
Is Elspeth awake too? She wonders that. Does Elspeth, in her city precinct, share the same pale shade of dawn? Is there, as well, the orange glow of a street lamp and now, beginning in the distance somewhere, the soft swish of a milk dray, a car door banging, a church bell chiming five? Mrs Lethwes doesn’t know where Elspeth lives precisely, or in any way what she looks like, but imagines short black hair and elfin features, a small, thin body, fragile fingers. An hour and three-quarters later – still conducting this morning ritual – she hears bath-water running; and later still there is music. Vivaldi, Mrs Lethwes thinks.
Her husband wakes. His eyes remember, becoming troubled, and then the trouble lifts from them when he notices, without surprise, that she’s not asleep. In another of her dreams during the night that has passed he carried her, and his voice spoke softly, soothing her. Or was it quite a dream, or only something like one? She tries to smile; she says she’s sorry, knowing now.
At ten, when the cleaning woman comes, Mrs Lethwes goes out to shop. She parks her small, white Peugeot in the Waitrose car park, and in a leisurely manner gathers vegetables and fruit, and tins and jars, pork chops for this evening, vermouth and Gordon’s gin, Edam, and Normandy butter because she has noticed the butter is getting low, Comfort and the cereal her husband favours, the one called Common Sense. Afterwards, with everything in the boot, she makes her way to the Trompe-L’Oeil for coffee. Her make-up is in place, her hair drawn up, the way she has taken to wearing it lately. She smiles at people she knows by sight, the waitress and other women who are having coffee, at the cashier when she pays her bill. There is some conversation, about the weather.
In her garden, later, the sound of the Hoover reaches her from the open windows of the house as the cleaning woman, Marietta, moves from room to room. The day is warm, Mrs Lethwes’s legs are bare, her blue dress light on her body, her Italian sandals comfortable yet elegant. Marietta claims to be Italian also, having had an Italian mother, but her voice and manner are Cockney and Mrs Lethwes doubts that she has ever been in Italy, even though she regularly gives the impression that she knows Venice well.
Mrs Lethwes likes to be occupied when Marietta comes. When it’s fine she finds something to do in the garden, and when the weather doesn’t permit that she lingers for longer in the Trompe-L’Oeil and there’s the pretence of letter-writing or tidying drawers. She likes to keep a closed door between herself and Marietta, to avoid as best she can the latest about Marietta’s daughter Ange, and Liam, whom Ange has been contemplating marriage with for almost five years, and the latest about the people in the house next door, who keep Alsatians.
In the garden Mrs Lethwes weeds a flowerbed, wishing that Marietta didn’t have to come to the house three times a week, but knowing that of course she must. She hopes the little heart-leafed things she’s clearing from among the delphiniums are not the germination of seeds that Mr Yatt has sown, a misfortune that occurred last year with his Welsh poppies. Unlike Marietta, Mr Yatt is dour and rarely speaks, but he has a way of slowly raising his head and staring, which Mrs Lethwes finds disconcerting. When he’s in the garden – Mondays only, all day – she keeps out of it herself.
Not Vivaldi now, perhaps a Telemann minuet, run Mrs Lethwes’s thoughts in her garden. Once, curious about the music a flautist plays, she read the information that accompanied half a dozen compact discs in a music shop. She didn’t buy the discs but, curious again, she borrowed some from the music section of the library and played them all one morning. Thirty-six, or just a little younger, she sees Elspeth as, unmarried of course and longing to bear the child of the man she loves: Mrs Lethwes is certain of that, since she has experienced this same longing herself. In the flat she imagines, there’s a smell of freshly made coffee. The fragile fingers cease their movement. The instrument is laid aside, the coffee poured.
It was in France, in the Hôtel 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 airmail 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.’