Yet they belong together, he and the girl, with their academic brightness and Hesselmann to talk about. The dog is no longer in the house. Ka-Ki has eaten a plastic bag, attracted by slivers of meat adhering to it, and has died. Henrietta blames herself. No matter how upset she’d felt it had been cruel to walk out and leave that dog.
‘I gave Roy up to you,’ she says, ‘since that was what you and he wanted.’
‘Roy is ill.’
‘He is ill, but at the same time he is well again. This house is yours and his now. You have changed things. You have let the place get dirty, the windows don’t seem ever to have been opened. I gave the house up to you also. I’m not asking you to give it back.’
‘Like I say, Henrietta, it was unfortunate about the dog. I’m sorry about that.’
‘I chose to leave the dog behind, with everything else.’
‘Look, Henrietta –’
‘Roy will be able to work again, just as before: we’ve been quite assured about that. He is to lose some weight, he is to take care of his diet. He is to exercise himself properly, something he never bothered with. It was you, not me, they gave those instructions to.’
‘They didn’t seem to get the picture, Henrietta. Like I say, we broke up, I wasn’t even living here. I’ve explained that to you, Henrietta. I haven’t been here for the past five months, I’m down in London now.’
‘Don’t you feel you should get Roy on his feet again, since you had last use of him, as it were?’
‘That way you’re talking is unpleasant, Henrietta. You’re getting at me, you’re getting at poor Roy. Like you’re jealous or something. There was love between us, there really was. Deep love. You know, Henrietta? You understand?’
‘Roy explained it to me about the love, that evening.’
‘But then it went. It just extinguished itself, like maybe there was something in the age-difference bit. I don’t know. Perhaps we’ll never know, Henrietta.’
‘Perhaps not indeed.’
‘We were happy for a long time, Roy and me. As happy as any two people could be.’
‘I’m sure you were.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. Look, Henrietta, I’m with someone else now. It’s different what I’ve got now. It’s going to work out.’
A damp coldness, like the fog that hangs about the garden, touches Henrietta’s flesh, insinuating itself beneath her clothes, icy on her stomach and her back. The girl had been at the hospital, called there because Roy had asked for her. She did not say then that she was with someone else.
‘May I just, you know, say goodbye to Roy? May I be with him for just five minutes, Henrietta?’
She does not reply. The coldness has spread to her arms and legs. It oozes over her breasts; it reaches for her feet. In blurred vision she sees the steep cool streets of the town, the laburnums and the blaze of clover in the landscape she ran away to.
‘I know it’s terrible for you, Henrietta.’
Sharon Tamm leaves the room to have her last five minutes. The blur in Henrietta’s vision is nothing now. She wonders if they have buried her dog somewhere.
‘Goodbye, Henrietta. He’s tons better, you know.’
She hears the hall door close as she heard it on the afternoon when the girl came to talk to her, and later when Roy left the house. It’s odd, she reflects, that because there has been a marriage and because she bears his name, she should be less free than the girl. Yet is not the life she discovered for herself much the same as finding someone else? Perhaps not.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, when she brings him a tray. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry about all this mess.’
He cries and is unable to cease. The tears fall on to the egg she has poached for him and into his cup of Bovril. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’
Cocktails at Doney’s
‘You’ve forgotten me,’ were the first words Mrs Faraday spoke to him in the Albergo San Lorenzo. She was a tall, black-haired woman, wearing a rust-red suede coat cut in an Italian style. She smiled. She had white, even teeth, and the shade of her lipstick appeared subtly to match the colour of her coat. Her accent was American, her voice soft, with a trace of huskiness. She was thirty-five, perhaps thirty-seven, certainly not older. ‘We met a long time ago,’ she said, smiling a little more. ‘I don’t know why I never forget a face.’
She was married to a man who managed a business in some town in America he’d never heard of. She was a beautiful woman, but he could remember neither her nor her husband. Her name meant nothing to him and when she prompted him with the information about her husband’s business he could not remember any better. Her eyes were brown, domiinating her classic features.
‘Of course,’ he lied politely.
She laughed, clearly guessing it was a lie. ‘Well, anyway,’ she said, ‘hullo to you.’
It was after dinner, almost ten o’clock. They had a drink in the bar since it seemed the natural thing to do. She had to do with fashion; she was in Florence for the Pitti Donna; she always came in February.
‘It’s nice to see you again. The people at these trade shows can be tacky.’
‘Don’t you go to the museums as well? The churches?’
‘Of course.’
When he asked if her husband accompanied her on her excursions to Florence she explained that the museums, the churches, and the Pitti Donna would tire her husband immensely. He was not a man for Europe, preferring local race-tracks.
‘And your wife? Is she here with you?’
‘I’m actually not married.’
He wished he had not met Mrs Faraday. He didn’t care for being approached in this manner, and her condemnation of the people at the trade exhibitions she spoke of seemed out of place since they were, after all, the people of her business world. And that she was married to a man who preferred race-tracks to culture was hardly of interest to a stranger. Before their conversation ended he was certain they had not ever met before.
‘I have to say good-night,’ he said, rising when she finished her drink. ‘I tend to get up early.’
‘Why, so do I!’
‘Good-night, Mrs Faraday.’
In his bedroom he sat on the edge of his bed, thinking about nothing in particular. Then he undressed and brushed his teeth. He examined his face in the slightly tarnished looking-glass above the wash-basin. He was fifty-seven, but according to this reflection older. His face would seem younger if he put on a bit of weight; chubbiness could be made to cover a multitude of sins. But he didn’t want that; he liked being thought of as beyond things.
He turned the looking-glass light out and got into bed. He read Our Mutual Friend and then lay for a moment in the darkness. He thought of Daphne and of Lucy – dark-haired, tiny Lucy who had said at first it didn’t matter, Daphne with her trusting eyes. He had blamed Daphne, not himself, and then had taken that back and asked to be forgiven; they were both of them to blame for the awful mistake of a marriage that should never have taken place, although later he had said that neither of them was, for how could they have guessed they were not suited in that way? It was with Lucy he had begun to know the truth; poor Lucy had suffered more.
He slept, and dreamed he was in Padua with a friend of another time, walking in the Botanical Gardens and explaining to his friend that the tourist guides he composed were short-lived in their usefulness because each reflected a city ephemerally caught. ‘You’re ashamed of your tourist guides,’ his friend of that time interrupted, Jeremy it was. ‘Why are the impotent so full of shame, my dear? Why is it?’ Then Rosie was in the dream and Jeremy was laughing, playfully, saying he’d been most amusingly led up the garden path. ‘He led me up it too, my God,’ Rosie cried out furiously. ‘All he could do was weep.’