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 Hôtel 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 Hôtel 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 Hôtel 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.
She doesn’t have much lunch. She never does during the week: a bit of cheese on the Ritz biscuits she has a weakness for, gin and dry Martini twice. In her spacious sitting-room Mrs Lethwes slips her shoes off and stretches out on one of the room’s two sofas. Then the first sharp tang of the Martini causes her, for a moment, to close her eyes with pleasure.
Silver-framed, a reminder of her wedding day stands on a round inlaid surface among other photographs near by. August 26th 1974: the date floats through her midday thoughts. ‘I know this’ll work out,’ her mother - given to speaking openly – had remarked the evening before, when she met for the first time the parents of her daughter’s fiancé. The remark had caused a silence, then someone laughed.
She reaches for a Ritz. The soft brown hair that’s hardly visible beneath the bridal veil is blonded now and longer than it was, which is why she wears it gathered up, suitable in middle age. She was pretty then and is handsome now; still loose-limbed, she has put on only a little weight. Her teeth are still white and sound; only her light-blue eyes, once brilliantly clear, are blurred, like eyes caught out of focus. Afterwards her mother’s remark on the night before the wedding became a joke, because of course the marriage had worked out. A devoted couple; a perfect marriage, people said – and still say, perhaps – except for the pity of there being no children. It’s most unlikely, Mrs Lethwes believes, that anyone much knows about his other woman. He wouldn’t want that; he wouldn’t want his wife humiliated, that never was his style.
Mrs Lethwes, who smokes one cigarette a day, smokes it now as she lies on the sofa, not yet pouring her second drink. On later September holidays there had been no letters, of that she was certain. Some alarm had been raised by the one that didn’t find its intended destination: dreadful, he would have considered it, a liaison discovered by chance, and would have felt afraid. ‘Please understand. I’m awfully sorry,’ he would have said, and Elspeth would naturally have honoured his wishes, even though writing to him when he was away was precious.
‘No more. That’s all.’ On her feet again to pour her second drink, Mrs Lethwes firmly makes this resolution, speaking aloud since there is no one to be surprised by that. But a little later she finds herself rooting beneath underclothes in a bedroom drawer, and finding there another bottle of Gordon’s and pouring some and adding water from a bathroom tap. The bottle is returned, the fresh drink carried downstairs, the Ritz packet put away, the glass she drank her two cocktails from washed and dried and returned to where the glasses are kept. Opaque, blue to match the bathroom paint, the container she drinks from now is a toothbrush beaker, and holds more than the sedate cocktail glass, three times as much almost. The taste is different, the plastic beaker feels different in her grasp, not stemmed and cool as the glass was, warmer on her lips. The morning that has passed seems far away as the afternoon advances, as the afternoon connects with the afternoon of yesterday and of the day before, a repetition that must have a beginning somewhere but now is lost.