Margaretta wrote to say that the de Courcys had returned from Dublin, so she’d heard, but on her own she naturally hadn’t had the nerve to cycle over. The De Luxe had at last acquired Western Electric Sound and the difference was tremendous. Wiry Bohan had been to the house to see about marrying Katie, and when Mrs Heaslip suggested that they should wait a little longer he’d gone red in the face and said he thought waiting wasn’t a good idea. Mr Hearne was dealing in black-market sugar and tea, making more than he’d ever made out of meat. But soon, so people said, he’d be arrested.
The following summer, to her great disappointment, and to Margaretta’s, Lauira did not visit Ireland. The reason for this was that her mother, suffering a bout of pneumonia in the early part of the year, did not recover quickly. She struggled back to her desk in the cubbyhole behind the Anstey Rye clothes shop, but an exhaustion that the illness had left her with would not lift, and when Laura’s summer holidays came Dr Farquhar advised that she should be responsible for all the housework and all the cooking, taking this burden at least from her mother. Had it not been for the postwar effort that was still required of everyone, he would have stipulated total rest for her mother, three months simply doing nothing. And he knew that ends had to be made to meet.
So Laura cooked her mother’s meals and her own, and Hoovered the rooms of their cottage. She made her mother rest on Sundays, bringing her trays in bed. She was conscientious about taking the wet battery of the wireless to be recharged once a week, she weeded the garden and transplanted the lettuce plants. All the time she cherished the hope that at the end of the summer, even for a week, she might be permitted to visit Margaretta. Her mother was clearly regaining her strength. She stopped spending Sundays in bed and instead sat in the garden. By mid-August she began to do the cooking again.
Letters from Margaretta asked if there was any chance, but in Anstey Rye Ireland was not mentioned. Instead, Laura’s mother spoke of their straitened circumstances this year: because of her pneumonia, she had not earned as much for those few months as she might have; ends had not yet begun to meet again. So Laura wrote to Margaretta, explaining.
Isn’t it strange, Margaretta herself wrote, long after that summer had passed and Laura’s mother had entirely recovered, that there should have been two invalids, your mother and Ralph de Courcy? Her handwriting was less wild than once it had been, her spelling much improved. My father says he’s only slowly mending. And in a daydream Laura allowed herself to pretend that it was he she had looked after, carrying trays up the curving staircase, carrying cushions to a chair in the garden. She wondered if she’d ever see that house again, and Sergeant Barry at the gate-lodge. Isn’t Linda Darnell beautiful? Margaretta wrote. I’d love to look like that. Have you seen Tortilla Flat?
In 1948 Laura went again to Ireland. Katie had married Wiry Bohan and had had a baby. There was a new maid with Eileen in the kitchen, Mattie Devlin’s daughter, Josie. The shopkeepers said Laura was getting prettier all the time, but Laura knew that it was Margaretta who was the beautiful one and always would be, her marvellous hair and her headstrong manner that Laura admired so. She’d been going to a boarding-school ever since Laura had last visited the Heaslips, the one in Bray where Mrs Heaslip and Laura’s mother had met. ‘You’re better looking than Linda Darnell,’ Laura said, meaning it.
They were too shy to cycle to the de Courcys’ house. They didn’t realize at first that such a shyness had developed in them, but when they talked about that warm day two summers ago they realized that they could not attempt to repeat it. Two children, with white socks and straw hats, had cycled up the avenue, chattering and giggling: it would be awkward now. But one evening, watching Thunder Rock at the De Luxe, they saw Ralph de Courcy two rows in front of them, with a blonde-haired girl. ‘You’re never Margaretta and Laura?’ he said when the film had come to an end and they met him face to face in the aisle.
‘Yes,’ Laura said, aware that she reddened as she spoke. When she glanced at Margaretta she saw that she had reddened also.
‘This is a sister of mine,’ he introduced. ‘Hazel.’
Margaretta said:
‘I think I met you, Hazel, years ago when we were kids.’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘This is my friend Laura.’
‘I’ve heard about the day you both came to see us, when we were all at Punchestown except Ralph.’
‘You never came again,’ he chided, through the smile that was always there. ‘You said you would, you know.’
‘Laura didn’t stay with us last year.’
‘You could have come on your own.’
Margaretta laughed, blushing again.
‘That was really an appalling film,’ he said. ‘A waste of money.’
‘Yes,’ Laura agreed, although she did not think so. ‘Yes, it was.’
The de Courcys had driven to town in a car powered by propane gas, a relic of the emergency. To Laura and Margaretta it looked like any other car except for an attachment at the back. Although the night was warm, Ralph put on a muffler and an overcoat before taking his place at the driver’s wheel. Unlike her mother, Laura thought, he was not totally well again.
‘Come and play tennis one day,’ his sister invited. ‘Come in the morning and stay to lunch.’
‘Come on Friday,’ he said.
‘My husband is an eye specialist,’ Laura says in the cathedral.
‘Mine makes radio components.’
Margaretta had remained in the town, marrying Shulmann, who had set up his factory there in 1955. Shulmann was with her in Siena, resting now in their pensione. Their three children are grown up.
‘I guessed you would have married,’ Laura says.
‘And I you.’
What does the eye-specialist look like? Is Shulmann thin or fat? Laura remembers Margaretta’s hair on the pillow, spread out in the moonlight, and Margaretta saying that the smell in the De Luxe Picture House was of hot celluloid and cigarette-butts, and how they giggled because they’d considered Sergeant Barry comic. How different would their lives have been if the friendship had continued? Some instinct tells her as they stand there among the tourists that their friendship in its time went deeper than the marriages they have mentioned. She sees them on their bicycles, and the curiosity of Sergeant Barry passing from their sandals and their white socks to their beribboned straw hats. ‘Ludmilla’, Margaretta says on the pink-striped sofa. Is friendship more fragile, Laura wonders, the more precious it is? And Margaretta reflects that in the thirty-eight years that have passed the friendship might have made a difference in all sorts of ways. They are tourists like the others now, strangers among strangers.
They rode over early on the Friday of the tennis party, but as they arrived at the de Courcys’ house rain began to fall. Other people were there, friends of Hazel de Courcy who had also come to play tennis but who now stood about forlornly because the rain persisted. Then someone suggested whist and the occasion became a different one from the occasion the visitors had anticipated. The fire blazed in the drawing-room, there was tea and Marietta biscuits at eleven o’clock, and lunch at one; there was tea and cake, with bread and butter and scones, at four. Ralph de Courcy rested after lunch, but soon appeared again. He talked to Margaretta alone, questioning her about the boarding-school at Bray, about the buildings and the playing-fields and the food. He asked her if she was happy there.
‘Oh, it’s all right,’ Margaretta replied, and she described the big assembly hall that was known as the ballroom because that was what it had been before the house became a school. A draughty conservatory served as the senior lounge; cold, gaunt dormitories contained rows of beds, each with its narrow pine cupboard and wash-stand. The two headmistresses were sisters, in tweed skirts and jumpers on which necklaces bounced. The food was inedible.