‘I’m sorry,’ Jessica said. Her voice was nervous; she felt ashamed of herself.
‘It isn’t you, Jessica.’
‘Let’s have a drink on our own, shall we?’
Neither of them wishing to return immediately to their house, they went to the Red Rover and sat outside. She guessed his thoughts, as earlier he had seen hers in her face. When people wondered where all of it had gone, all that love and all those flowers, he would have liked to have shown them their darkened upstairs room. The jolly sixties and those trips to wonderland were there, he’d once cried out, with half-made aeroplanes gathering a dust. Their son had a name, which was used when they addressed him; but when they thought of him he was nameless in their minds. Years ago they’d discovered that that was the same for both of them.
‘Maybe,’ she said, referring to the future, trying to cheer him up.
He made a gesture, half a nod: the speculation was impossible. And the consolation that families had always had children who were locked away and looked after wasn’t a consolation in the least. They didn’t have to live with a monstrous fact of nature, but with a form of accidental suicide, and that was worse.
They sat a little longer in the sunshine, both of them thinking about the house they’d left an hour or so ago. It would be as silent as if they’d never had a child, and then little noises would begin, like the noises of a ghost. The quiet descent of the stairs, the shuffling through the hall. He would be there in the kitchen, patiently sitting, when they returned. He would smile at them and during lunch a kind of conversation might develop, or it might not. A week ago he’d said, quite suddenly, that soon he intended to work in a garden somewhere, or a park. Occasionally he said things like that.
They didn’t mention him as they sat there; they never did now. And it was easier for both of them to keep away from Memory Lane when they were together and alone. Instead of all that there was the gossip of Marcus Stire: Susanna Maidstone in the Trat-West, the girl from the office arriving in the Morrishes’ house, the quarrel between the smiling woman and her suede-clad husband, Anthea Chalmers, lone Mr Fulmer, the Livingstons endeavouring to make a go of it. Easily, Malcolm imagined Marcus Stire’s drawling tones and the sharpness of his eye, like a splinter of glass. He knew now how Jessica had been upset: a pair of shadows Marcus Stire would have called them, clinging to the periphery of life because that was where they felt safe, both of them a little destroyed.
They went on discussing the people they’d just left, wondering if some fresh drama had broken out, another explosion in the landscape of marriage that Marcus Stire had likened to a minefield. Finishing their drinks, they agreed that he’d certainly tell them if it had. They talked about him for a moment, and then the subject of the party drifted away from them and they talked of other things. Malcolm told her what was happening in Edwin Drood, because it was a book she would never read. His voice continued while they left the Red Rover and walked across the common, back to their house. It was odd, she reflected as she listened to it, that companionship had developed in their middle age, when luckier people made of their marriages such tales of woe.
The Paradise Lounge
On her high stool by the bar the old woman was as still as a statue. Perhaps her face is expressionless, Beatrice thought, because in repose it does not betray the extent of her years. The face itself was lavishly made up, eyes and mouth, rouge softening the wrinkles, a dusting of perfumed powder. The chin was held more than a little high, at an angle that tightened the loops of flesh beneath it. Grey hair was short beneath a black cloche hat that suggested a fashion of the past, as did the tight black skirt and black velvet coat. Eighty she’d be, Beatrice deduced, or eighty-two or -three.
‘We can surely enjoy ourselves,’ Beatrice’s friend said, interrupting her scrutiny of the old woman. ‘Surely we can, Bea?’
She turned her head. The closeness of his brick-coloured flesh and of the smile in his eyes caused her lips to tremble. She appeared to smile also, but what might have been taken for pleasure was a checking of her tears.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course.’
They were married, though not to one another. Beatrice’s friend, casually dressed for a summer weekend, was in early middle age, no longer slim yet far from bulky. Beatrice was thirty-two, petite and black-haired in a blue denim dress. Sunglasses disguised her deep-rust eyes, which was how - a long time ago now – her father had described them. She had wanted to be an actress then.
‘It’s best,’ her friend said, repeating the brief statement for what might have been the hundredth time since they had settled into his car earlier that afternoon. The affair was over, the threat to their families averted. They had come away to say goodbye.
‘Yes, I know it’s best,’ she said, a repetition also.
At the bar the old woman slowly raised a hand to her hat and touched it delicately with her fingers. Slowly the hand descended, and then lifted her cocktail glass. Her scarlet mouth was not quite misshapen, but age had harshly scored what once had been a perfect outline, lips pressed together like a rosebud on its side. Failure, Beatrice thought as casually she observed all this: in the end the affair was a failure. She didn’t even love him any more, and long ago he’d ceased to love her. It was euphemism to call it saying goodbye: they were having a dirty weekend, there was nothing left to lift it higher than that.
‘I’m sorry we couldn’t manage longer,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry about Glen-garriff.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Even so.’
She ceased to watch the old woman at the bar. She smiled at him, again disguising tears but also wanting him to know that there were no hard feelings, for why on earth should there be?
‘After all, we’ve been to Glengarriff,’ she said, a joke because on the one occasion they’d visited the place they had nearly been discovered in their deceptions. She’d used her sister as an excuse for her absences from home: for a long time now her sister had been genuinely unwell in a farmhouse in Go. Meath, a house that fortunately for Beatrice’s purpose didn’t have a telephone.
‘I’ll never forget you,’ he said, his large tanned hand suddenly on one of hers, the vein throbbing in his forehead. A line of freckles ran down beside the vein, five smudges on the redbrick skin. In winter you hardly noticed them.
‘Nor I you.’
‘Darling old Bea,’ he said, as if they were back at the beginning.
The bar was a dim, square lounge with a scattering of small tables, one of which they occupied. Ashtrays advertised Guinness, beer-mats Heineken. Sunlight touched the darkened glass in one of two windows, drawing from it a glow that was not unlike the amber gleam of whiskey. Behind the bar itself the rows of bottles, spirits upside down above their global measures, glittered pleasantly as a centrepiece, their reflections gaudy in a cluttered mirror. The floor had a patterned carpet, further patterned with cigarette burns and a diversity of stains. The Paradise Lounge the bar had been titled in a moment of hyperbole by the grandfather of the present proprietor, a sign still proclaiming as much on the door that opened from the hotel’s mahogany hall. Beatrice’s friend had hesitated, for the place seemed hardly promising: Keegan’s Railway Hotel in a town neither of them knew. They might have driven on, but he was tired and the sun had been in his eyes. ‘It’s all right,’ she had reassured him.
He took their glasses to the bar and had to ring a bell because the man in charge had disappeared ten minutes ago. ‘Nice evening,’ he said to the old woman on the bar-stool, and she managed to indicate agreement without moving a muscle of her carefully held head. ‘We’ll have the same again,’ he said to the barman, who apologized for his absence, saying he’d been mending a tap.