The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life (9 page)

Such a sweet funny car Alan has. When you touch it after he comes home at the end of the day it’s still warm. Now that the evenings are getting longer he sits at his computer in his front room with the curtains open and the glow of the screen makes his face shine with a pale light. He has a beautiful face, but who is there to tell him so? Such a waste.

He doesn’t usually come home at lunchtime. Lucky that I happened to hear his car pull up in the road. Of course it’s quite possible that he came back in the hope that he might meet me, if only for the briefest of moments. There was something about him as he came up the path, a nervousness you could call it, as if he wanted something very much but felt he was wrong to want it. Then that quick intent look, and at once the look away. Oh, the poor boy. Not that he’s a boy, of course. He must be thirty at least. Younger than me, but you get men like that, they fall for older women. They want to be looked after.

Crossing the car park back to her car Marion recalls her words to Alan about David.
Not that he ever makes himself useful.
The remark, she now sees, has a double meaning. She blushes a deep hot red. He might have understood her to be criticizing David’s performance. At the very least he would have understood her to be implying dissatisfaction, and that, surely, is a kind of invitation. A sensitive young man like Alan could not fail to pick up the deeper meaning. And why deny the truth? David does lack the qualities a woman looks for in a man. Once he said to her, ‘All I am is your nurse, Marion.’ Well, there you have it in a nutshell. A woman doesn’t want a man as a nurse. She wants a provider, a protector, a lover.

But suppose Alan did construe her words as an invitation? What should she do? She realizes she must prepare with care and delicacy for their next encounter. To a sensitive young man the slightest nuance of word or look could be critical. It would be quite wrong to ask him to supper, for example. To do so would be to invite an open declaration of his feelings. And what would she say then?

What would she say?

For the first time Marion allows herself to imagine what it would be like if she did not resist. She would make him happy: of that she was sure. She believes she would be happy herself. But what about David? She owes him very little really. He was there when she went through that bad time, but that’s the best that can be said of him, that he was there. She came through it all on her own, and with the help of Dr Skilling, of course. If Alan needs me, why shouldn’t I make him happy? All we have in this short life is a chance of happiness. Such a chance may never come again.

Back in her own little kitchen she takes out of a drawer in the dresser a small brown button. She spotted this button on her neighbour’s path some time ago, and picked it up to give back to him. It must have come from one of his jackets. When you lose a button it’s often hard to find a match, so it’s worthwhile keeping the old ones.

She holds the button between her two palms, pressing them tight together. Yes, she thinks, it may be that it’s time I let change into my life. It may be that he loves me. It may be that I must learn to love him.

With this thought there comes a sensation of deep blessed calm, that she recognizes as the gift of a power greater than herself. She closes her eyes and lowers her head and gives silent thanks.

This will be a good week.

11

Laura crosses the west terrace at Edenfield Place and makes her way slowly down the lime avenue to the lake. There, fringed by rushes, stands the lake house, derelict, long abandoned, considered to be unsafe. A short railed bridge links it to the shore. A cord tied from side to side to indicate that access is not permitted hangs low as a skipping rope. Laura steps over it and passes between tall reeds to the main structure.

It stands on piles encircled by a broad grey deck, its single room timber-walled, hexagonal, many-windowed. The roof is shingled with larch. Some of the shingles have slipped. The doors facing the big house have gone. Inside a mass of dead leaves has been swept by the wind against one wall. Two iron chairs stand looking through blurred windows over the calm surface of the lake.

She steps carefully across the deck, which has rotted away in places to reveal the dark water below. She sits in one of the iron chairs, holds her handbag on her lap as if there’s a danger it might be stolen. In her bag is the letter, headed by an address and a phone number. In her bag is her phone.

The burden of memories. So long in storage, impossibly undamaged, as good as new.

A hesitant voice breaks over her reverie.

‘Hello? Laura?’

It’s Billy Holland on the land side of the bridge.

‘Don’t want to disturb you.’

‘It’s all right. I shouldn’t be here anyway. It’s supposed not to be safe.’

‘Oh, it’s safe enough.’ He crosses the bridge. ‘Not that I’ve been here in years.’

‘Watch where you step.’

But he comes to her without caring where his feet fall.

‘Do you have a moment?’

They sit on the iron chairs side by side and watch the patterns made by the wind on the water. She holds her letter, he holds his letters. A bundle of fifty-year-old papers no longer tied with string.

‘Was I wrong?’ she says. ‘Maybe I should have left them where I found them.’

‘Wrong? No, not at all.’

He’s breathing slowly, heavily. With one broad white hand he keeps smoothing the fabric of his trousers over his thigh.

‘Haven’t been here in years,’ he says. ‘Funny old world.’

She wonders what age he is. Sixty, perhaps.

‘My mother fell ill after I was born,’ he says. ‘She had to go away. A nursing home. So you see, my father was alone.’

‘Please, Billy,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to explain anything to me.’

‘There’s no one else.’

‘Did you know?’

‘Oh, no. No, no.’

‘So you don’t know who she was.’

‘A girl from the village, it seems. He calls her Doll. A private name, I suppose. It means nothing to me.’

He stares out over the lake like a man in shock. She says nothing, giving him time and space.

‘I never really knew my mother,’ he says at last. ‘I was so young. She was mostly away. Then she died. I was seven.’

‘I’m so sorry, Billy.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s not that.’

Again the silence, and the slow rising up to the surface of inadequate words.

‘What my father did. What he felt. I suppose it was wrong. But I had no idea that it was possible.’

‘People have always had affairs.’

‘Was it an affair? There’s nothing in the letters to say so. No doubt it was. The main thing is, she made him happy.’

He looks round at Laura and she catches the wistfulness in his eyes.

‘That’s all we want in the end, isn’t it? Someone who makes us happy.’

‘Yes,’ says Laura. ‘That’s all we want.’

‘Her handwriting. She’s not educated, you can tell. And my father, he was very correct. Very proud. But of course all that came afterwards. I only really knew him after it was all over.’

He clears his throat. Then he coughs, covering his mouth with one hand.

‘It’s possible,’ he says, ‘that she’s still alive. This Doll. I imagine she was quite young. She would be in her seventies or eighties.’

‘Yes, it’s possible.’

‘The thing is.’ He coughs again. ‘I would like to meet her. If she is still alive. But it’s not easy. Not easy.’

‘No. I suppose it isn’t.’

‘I was wondering if you. In the course of your researches. The name discovered, you see. Perhaps one could say the letters belong to this person. This Doll.’

Laura understands.

‘You want me to trace her.’

‘Ask around, perhaps. Better coming from you.’

‘I’ll try, certainly.’

‘Well, then.’ He stands. ‘Let me know what you come up with. Much appreciated.’

With that he nods vaguely in her direction and leaves.

Left alone in the lake house, scene of long-ago trysts, Laura finds herself in a strange mood.

That’s all we want in the end, isn’t it? Someone who makes us happy.

She thinks of Henry. As always when she conjures up a deliberate picture of him he’s on a walk, leaning into the wind, somewhere high on the Downs. He’s turning towards her, telling her something, his long arm sweeping over the valley below. Henry doesn’t just walk, he looks, he sees, he reads the landscape. And as always when she pictures him in this mode, striding along, eager words lost in the wind, she feels a clench of gratitude. He has given himself to her, there’s no other way to put it. That simple act of unwithholding is what makes her life possible. She will do nothing to hurt him, nothing to lose him.

But does he make me happy?

There are no gauges, no measures. How happy am I entitled to be? I have security, loyalty, kindness. Am I allowed excitement? Am I allowed ecstasy?

The words sound ridiculous to her even as she frames them in her mind, as if they belong to a time now gone by, her youth, her twenties. But why should this be so? Sometimes she finds several days have passed and she can’t recall how she spent them, other than in the unnoticed round of domestic life, the breakfasts and the school runs, the trips to the supermarket, the suppers and the waiting for Henry to come home. She is living in a world without markers. She is adrift in a coastal mist, all sense of direction lost and all sense of time. Not a condition deserving of sympathy. And yet—

There was a time when I would wait in all day for the phone to ring. I had a lover once whose voice on the phone made me tremble.

I will not burn what remains of the greatest happiness I have ever known.

She takes out Nick’s letter and passing the information from her eyes to her fingers without any conscious process of decision-making she taps out the numbers on her phone. Then she pauses, her finger on the send button.

If I press send, it will begin again.

What! Such vanity. Such melodrama. Nothing more than a phone call. The satisfying of curiosity. The chances are he won’t be there anyway.

‘Hello?’

She recognizes the voice of an old friend from university days.

‘Richard? It’s Laura.’

‘Laura! Oh my God! It’s been too long. How are you?’

‘Not so bad. And you?’

‘We were just talking about you. That is so weird. How long is it? Has to be five years. How old are your children?’

‘Jack’s eleven now. Carrie’s nine.’

‘I don’t believe it. Hey, you’ll never guess who’s showed up here.’

‘Who?’

Why am I pretending I don’t know?

‘Nick Crocker! Blown in from California. Hold on.’

She hears his voice speaking to someone else. ‘It’s Laura Kinross. Do you want to say hi?’ So Nick has been keeping secrets too.

‘Laura? Nick’s right here. He’d like a word.’

And there he is. The long-forgotten voice, entirely unchanged.

‘Laura? Is that you?’

‘Yes. It’s me.’

Her heart bumps even as she keeps her voice neutral.

‘When do I see you?’ he says.

No preliminaries as ever.

‘So what happened to you?’ she says.

She doesn’t see him for twenty years and already she’s into the accusations. But he doesn’t even hear her.

‘Say where and when. I’ll be there.’

She runs her diary through her head to scramble all other thoughts.

‘How about today week? Next Wednesday.’

‘How about tomorrow?’

She has no idea what’s happening tomorrow except that it’s too soon.

‘Friday. We’ll give you supper. You can meet Henry and the children.’

‘Fine. Friday.’

She gives him her address and phone number.

‘Right,’ he says. ‘Friday.’ And he’s gone.

He never was good on the phone. Laura presses the end-call button and realizes she’s given him her mobile number, not the house line. She’s become two people. The other one, the secret one, is doing things behind her back.

And yet what is there to be ashamed of? An old friend, a former boyfriend, is coming to supper with her family. Henry won’t mind. He’ll be curious to meet him.

She goes on sitting in the derelict lake house absorbing the brief phone conversation. She begins to find contradictions. He implied he had only a few days in the country. So why send a letter? He could easily get her parents’ number from Richard. Why not phone them? If he’s staying with Richard, he must know her married name. Richard was at the wedding. So why write to her under her maiden name?

I always knew you’d come back one day.

This unbidden thought appals her. She thinks of Carrie and her crisis at school. Of Jack’s strange composition that Henry likes so much. Of Henry deep in the seventeenth century, explaining to her over dinner the sin of idolatry. The Puritans called the defacing of statues the sacrament of forgetfulness. Henry loves that.