Mrs Angusthorpe saw him murmuring to his wife. He led the way to their table, and Mrs Angusthorpe observed that his wife moved less eagerly than he.
‘How marvellous, sir,’ Jackson Major said, shaking his headmaster by the hand. Except for a neat moustache, he had changed hardly at all, Mrs Angusthorpe noticed; a little fatter in the face, perhaps, and the small pimples that had marked his chin as a schoolboy had now cleared up completely. He introduced his wife to the headmaster, and then he turned to Mrs Angusthorpe and asked her how she was. Forgetfully, he omitted to introduce his wife to her, but she, in spite of that, smiled and nodded at his wife.
‘I’m afraid it’s gone down awfully, Jackson,’ Mr Angusthorpe said. ‘The hotel’s changed hands, you know. We weren’t aware ourselves.’
‘It seems quite comfortable, sir,’ Jackson Major said, sitting down and indicating that his wife should do the same.
‘The food was nice before,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe. ‘It’s really awful now.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say awful, dear,’ Mr Angusthorpe corrected her. ‘One becomes used to a hotel,’ he explained to Jackson Major. ‘Any change is rather noticeable.’
‘We had a perfectly ghastly dinner,’ Daphne Jackson said.
‘Still,’ said Mr Angusthorpe, as though she had not spoken, ‘we’ll not return another year. My wife is going to scout around for a better place. You’ve brought your rod, Jackson?’
‘Well, yes, I did. I thought that maybe if Daphne felt tired I might once or twice try out your famous rivers, sir.’
Mrs Angusthorpe saw Mrs Jackson glance in surprise at her new husband, and she deduced that Mrs Jackson hadn’t been aware that a fishing-rod had comprised part of her husband’s luggage.
‘Capital,’ cried Mr Angusthorpe, while the waitress took the Jacksons’ order for breakfast. ‘You could scout round together,’ he said, addressing the two women at once, ‘while I show Jackson what’s what.’
‘It’s most kind of you, sir,’ Jackson Major said, ‘but I think, you know –’
‘Capital,’ cried Mr Angusthorpe again, his eyes swivelling from face to face, forbidding defiance. He laughed his humourless laugh and he poured himself more tea. ‘I told you, dear,’ he said to Mrs Angusthorpe. ‘There’s always a silver lining.’
In the hall of the Slieve Gashal Doyle took a metal stand from beneath the reception desk and busied himself arranging picture postcards on it. His wife had bought the stand in Galway, getting it at a reduced price because it was broken. He was at the moment offended with his wife because of her attitude when he had entered the hotel kitchen an hour ago with a number of ribs of beef. ‘Did you drop that meat?’ she had said in a hard voice, looking up from the table where she was making bread. ‘Is that dirt on the suet?’ He had replied that he’d been obliged to cross the village street hurriedly, to avoid a man on a bicycle. ‘You dropped the meat on the road,’ she accused. ‘D’you want to poison the bloody lot of them?’ Feeling hard done by, he had left the kitchen.
While he continued to work with the postcards, Mr Angusthorpe and Jackson Major passed before him with their fishing-rods. ‘We’ll be frying tonight,’ he observed jollily, wagging his head at their two rods. They did not reply: weren’t they the queer-looking eejits, he thought, with their sporty clothes and the two tweed hats covered with artificial flies. ‘I’ll bring it up, sir,’ Jackson Major was saying, ‘at the Old Boys’ Dinner in the autumn.’ It was ridiculous, Doyle reflected, going to that much trouble to catch a few fish when all you had to do was to go out at night and shine a torch into the water. ‘Would you be interested in postcards, gentlemen?’ he inquired, but so absorbed were Mr Angusthorpe and Jackson Major in their conversation that again neither of them made a reply.
Some time later, Daphne Jackson descended the stairs of the hotel. Doyle watched her, admiring her slender legs and the flowered dress she was wearing. A light-blue cardigan hung casually from her shoulders, its sleeves not occupied by her arms. Wouldn’t it be great, he thought, to be married to a young body like that? He imagined her in a bedroom, taking off her cardigan and then her dress. She stood in her underclothes; swiftly she lifted them from her body.
‘Would you be interested in postcards at all?’ inquired Doyle. ‘I have the local views here.’
Daphne smiled at him. Without much interest, she examined the cards on the stand, and then she moved towards the entrance door.
‘There’s a lovely dinner we have for you today,’ said Doyle. ‘Ribs of beef that I’m just after handing over to the wife. As tender as an infant.’
He held the door open for her, talking all the time, since he knew they liked to be talked to. He asked her if she was going for a walk and told her that a walk would give her a healthy appetite. The day would keep good, he promised; he had read it in the paper.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
She walked through a sunny morning that did little to raise her spirits. Outside the hotel there was a large expanse of green grass, bounded on one side by the short village street. She crossed an area of the grass and then passed the butcher’s shop in which earlier Doyle had purchased the ribs of beef. She glanced in and the butcher smiled and waved at her, as though he knew her well. She smiled shyly back. Outside a small public house a man was mending a bicycle, which was upturned on the pavement: a child pushing a pram spoke to the man and he spoke to her. Farther on, past a row of cottages, a woman pumped water into a bucket from a green pump at the road’s edge, and beyond it, coming towards her slowly, she recognized the figure of Mrs Angusthorpe.
‘So we are grass widows,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe when she had arrived at a point at which it was suitable to speak.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m afraid it’s our fault, for being here. My husband’s, I mean, and mine.’
‘My husband could have declined to go fishing.’
The words were sour. They were sour and icy, Mrs Angusthorpe thought, matching her own mood. On her brief walk she had that morning disliked her husband more than ever she had disliked him before, and there was venom in her now. Once upon a time he might at least have heard her desires with what could even have been taken for understanding. He would not have acted upon her desires, since it was not in his nature to do so, but he would not have been guilty, either, of announcing in so obviously false a way that they should enjoy what they could and not make a fuss. There had been a semblance of chivalry in the attitude from which, at the beginning of their marriage, he had briefly regarded her; but forty-seven years had efficiently disposed of that garnish of politeness. A week or so ago a boy at the school had been casual with her, but the headmaster, hearing her report of the matter, had denied that what she stated could ever have occurred: he had moulded the boy in question, he pointed out, he had taken a special interest in the boy because he recognized in him qualities that were admirable: she was touchy, the headmaster said, increasingly touchy these days. She remembered in the first year of their marriage a way he had of patiently leaning back in his chair, puffing at the pipe he affected in those days and listening to her, seeming actually to weigh her arguments against his own. It was a long time now since he had weighed an argument of hers, or even devoted a moment of passing consideration to it. It was a long time since he could possibly have been concerned as to whether or not she found the food in a hotel unpalatable. She was angry when she thought of it this morning, not because she was unused to these circumstances of her life but because, quite suddenly, she had seen her state of resignation as an insult to the woman she once, too long ago, had been.