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‘Can I leave my stuff here?’

‘I’d rather you didn’t.’ This sounded so unkind that she immediately retracted it. ‘Are you looking for a place in London, then? Perhaps until you found one …’

‘Nah. I’ll go back to the States with Ann and David. I’ve got the ticket.’

‘But my dear boy, you can’t live with them once they’re married.’

‘I don’t see why not. David needs a friend. Ann’ll soon get tired of him. And pretty soon she won’t need his money if her grandpa coughs up.’

‘That’s a dreadful thing to say. Surely it can’t be true? They are getting married, after all.’

‘You’re sweet, Dorothea. Too too sweet.’

She wondered where he had heard such suddenly exaggerated diction, such as she had been accustomed to hearing in her youth. She then reflected that she was willing to overlook this moment of mockery in favour of having made it clear that he was to move on. At least, she thought she had made it
clear. At least, she had said something to that effect. He was grinning at her, showing his fine teeth.

She rose, collected the dirty dishes. As ever, he had eaten heartily. ‘What will you do today?’ she asked, a note of formality in her voice.

‘Oh, I’ll go out, don’t you worry.’

‘You can eat here this evening, if you’ve nothing better to do.’

‘Thanks, that’d be great.’

‘I’m not a cook like Mrs Levinson,’ she warned him. ‘It’ll probably be something from Marks and Spencer. Oh, and you won’t forget to ring Mrs Levinson, will you? Just thank her and give her my love. Tell her I’ll ring her tomorrow. I expect she’s rather tired.’

‘No doubt about it.’

She saw that he was about to break into another bout of impersonation, and moved quickly to forestall it.

‘Then we’ll meet here at seven,’ she said. ‘Have you got a coat? It looks like rain.’

‘No.’

She hesitated. ‘There’s a jacket of my husband’s you could borrow. The only one I kept. You’ll take care of it, won’t you?’

The jacket, slightly waisted, fitted him perfectly. ‘Of course it doesn’t look quite right over a T-shirt,’ she said. ‘Where’s that shirt you wore last night?’

‘I put it in the washing machine when I took it off. If I do it now it’ll be ready for tonight. Must be properly dressed if I’m to dine with you, Dorothea.’

She thought he was probably making fun of her, and felt foolish. Though I don’t know why I should, she thought. He is really quite irritating, and after all nothing to do with me. She switched on the washing machine and left the dirty dishes
in the sink, as if waiting for Steve to take care of them. When, with a sigh, she ran the taps, she felt a quiver of longing to be on her own again. She put the kitchen to rights, amazed that it still belonged to her. Yet she felt unsettled, and when Steve reappeared wearing Henry’s jacket she felt slightly worse. How angry Henry would have been, she thought. The jacket was still redolent of Henry’s vanilla cologne, soon to be banished by the young man’s alien smell.

Yet, ‘You look very nice,’ she managed to say.

He put an arm round her shoulders. Henry’s ghostly aroma enveloped her more closely.

‘You’ve been a brick,’ he said warmly, again with that faintly parodied intonation. ‘We could go for a drive tomorrow, if you like. A spin. Out in the country somewhere.’

‘That would be delightful,’ she said, but her heart leapt. Richmond Park, she thought. And tea at Kew. It was years since she had been there, walking slowly, pensively, as in days of old. ‘Don’t forget to ring Kitty,’ she reminded him. ‘Tell her I’ll ring her tomorrow.’ If I have time, she thought.

Henry had been wearing a soft brown hat when he had raised her to her feet in St James Street. Even in her distress she had been aware of his elegance, as the hat was swept off. She had supposed such suavity to be the outward manifestation of comfortable circumstances. She had always dressed carefully herself, so that her eventual access to those same comfortable circumstances had not made a noticeable difference to her appearance. But initially she had marvelled at the number of suits and shirts that had made their way into the cupboards of her flat. He had liked her home, had not wanted to move. This had surprised her, until she realised that in an odd way he had always regarded it as temporary. Besides, he had been living with Rose, and was thus without a home,
having made over his flat in Basil Street to his first wife. Mrs May was prepared to regard herself as a safe haven, as indeed she turned out to be. But she had been unprepared for his fierce devotion to his sister, to the cousins, in whose presence he reverted to a more archaic version of his normal self, relaxing on the soft cushions of their sofas, accepting coffee and cake from Molly or Kitty, a cigar from Austin or Harold. ‘They’ve been through hard times,’ he would say as an excuse, though she could see no evidence of hard times in their luxurious appointments. Rose was the only one to whom she had been inclined to make concessions, and those concessions had hardened into an unbreakable routine. ‘I didn’t know you were so attached to your family’ was the only criticism she ventured, after yet another punishing dinner party. ‘Well, you wouldn’t’ had been his reply. ‘You’re such a solitary. I suppose that’s the main difference in our backgrounds.’ She had been mortified, thinking that he had been referring to class, whereas all he had in mind was disposition. He was not English, despite his English birth; he did not automatically think in terms of class. And she herself was perfectly civilised. Nevertheless she felt uncomfortable when she remembered that remark of his, for which, if she were honest with herself, she never quite forgave him.

Her bedroom mirror showed a careful, even distinguished woman, in whom she saw all too clearly the lineaments of the studious schoolgirl, and, even more, the faithful employee. ‘Dorothea can be relied upon at all times,’ her boss, Mr Grindley, had said, perhaps only dimly realising that she had been waiting to be such a paragon for the better part of a lifetime, all the more so because of the assignations in Down Street. She had, even then, been homesick for good behaviour. She smoothed back her still thick but quite grey hair, noticing, as
she did so, the veins standing out on the back of her hand. On impulse she telephoned the hairdresser to see if by any chance Jackie were free today instead of Monday, her usual day. Jackie could just fit her in at eleven, if she came promptly. Then a quick lunch, she thought, then the supermarket, although she rarely shopped on a Saturday. No, not the supermarket; the delicatessen in Marylebone High Street, where Kitty occasionally shopped, or where Harold would go, in search of something out of the ordinary. Or perhaps his gourmet habits had been curtailed by David. What did young men eat? Anything, she supposed, as long as it was put down in front of them. But she wanted to do them both credit. And he gave all the signs of harbouring a healthy appetite. She had been impressed by the neat way in which he had disposed of Kitty’s meal, leaning back comfortably from the table as he finished his wine.

In the busy salon, above the noise of the dryers, she enquired about Jackie’s young man, Neville, and about Neville’s difficult mother, with whom they lived. ‘What will you do when the baby arrives?’ she asked. ‘Will you go on working?’ She was told that Neville’s mother would give up her job at the dry cleaners to look after the baby. ‘Early retirement,’ explained Jackie. Mrs May thought that Neville’s mother might be barely forty. ‘Won’t she miss the company?’ she asked. ‘I’m sure I should.’ Jackie gave her a swift glance in the mirror: all right for some, said her expression. ‘You out tonight?’ she asked.

‘I have a guest for dinner this evening,’ she replied. ‘And I shall be out all day tomorrow. So it was kind of you to fit me in.’

‘No problem. You’ll need a trim next time. Monday week?’

‘No. I may be in next Tuesday. I’m going to a wedding.’

In Marylebone High Street she bought a carton of minestrone, an onion tart, some salad leaves, a wedge of Dolcelatte, and six fine peaches. I should do this more often, she thought, and knew that she would not, for where was the pleasure in shopping for oneself? It was the need to set one’s bounty before another that was so fundamental. Struggling with her bags she managed to find a taxi just as it was starting to rain. She got home just after two, almost too late for lunch: a scrambled egg would do. But she noticed that there was only one egg left, and consequently none for Steve’s breakfast. Although it was now raining quite heavily she went out to the shop on the corner and bought, in addition to eggs, a packet of bacon, though she disliked the smell. He is giving up a whole day for me, she thought; it is the least I can do. And he should have a decent breakfast if he is to do all the driving. On further thought she went back to the shop and bought tomatoes and mushrooms.

Back in the flat she was surprised how dim and cold it felt, as if it were now truly autumn. The 15th tomorrow: Mother’s birthday. Yet no answering images came. Hardly surprising; she was now at the age at which her mother had died, although it felt quite different, of a different order of magnitude, now that there would be no-one to grieve for her. For she had grieved for her mother, that quiet modest woman, but so discreetly that no-one had noticed. The same had been true of her grief for Henry, but there the shock was greater; after his death, in the flat, her one wish had been to expunge every trace of his lingering illness, his relics, the sickroom odour. Relatives had inevitably arrived, and wept copiously, while she received them with no noticeable alteration in her normally self-contained demeanour. She thought that her impassivity, in those crucial days, was the main cause of the faint
disaffection that had sprung up between herself and the Levinson-Goodman clan, though there had probably been cause for comment on many previous occasions. She had not noticed at the time; only now was she aware of incompatibility, and she assumed that it was too late to remedy this. Besides, she had come to tolerate it, as if it were a genuine family characteristic, the stuff of well-worn discussions. Except that the discussions went on without her, as she no doubt deserved. After all, she had never truly belonged.

She laid the table in her rarely used dining room, and had only just put the finishing touches to her appearance when the front door opened and closed.

‘All right if I have a bath, Dorothea?’

‘Don’t be long,’ she warned.

Already the flat was filled with his noise, although initially he had been as silent as a cat. It was the radio, she supposed, as she heard it travelling along the corridor with him to the bathroom, the door of which was never quite closed. Yet when he reappeared, wearing a shirt and tie and Henry’s jacket, all she said was ‘You look very smart.’

‘Yeah, it fits, doesn’t it?’

‘You’d better keep it. Nobody else will wear it.’

‘Thanks. Your husband been dead long?’

‘Fifteen years. He was older than I was.’

‘And you’ve been alone since then?’

‘Yes.’

He whistled. ‘Tough. Still, you seem to be making a go of it. This flat is a veritable pocket of refinement.’

His voice had taken on the exaggerated fluting intonation that was perhaps his way of paying a compliment. Normally he was not loquacious, had signally failed to provide much-needed conversation. I probably strike him as impossibly affected,
she thought, yet I was brought up to speak like that. Most people were in those days—not that he knows anything about that. He must have seen old films on television: Ronald Coleman, Leslie Howard. Even I might think them slightly silly nowadays. But it had been Henry’s smoothness, no doubt rooted in exactly the same models, that had won her over, as if she were being given access to another world, a semi-fictional world that contained something of the glamour of the films that she and her mother had once faithfully gone to see. Yes, that was it: Henry was glamorous, far more glamorous than she could ever be. And she suspected that he had seen a natural affinity between his restless temperament and her apparent repose, so that he need never be discomfited or challenged by her quieter behaviour, as he had been discomfited, perhaps permanently, by the first wife he never mentioned. Yet she had seen him becalmed by the illness that had killed him, had seen his look of astonishment, as if illness were her domain, the domain of the repressed, and extravagant grief his own prerogative. And the illness that had taken him away had left her intact, and if lonely, at least acquiescent, devoting her energies, or what remained of them, to trying to work out what she should do if she were to encounter grave illness herself before the end. For that reason it would be well to be prepared.

Yet every living fibre protested against such preparation, and the sight of the young face opposite hers reinforced her desire to appropriate a little more of her life while there was still time. Everything is provisional, she thought recklessly. Nothing matters very much. It hardly signifies that this person is here, since sooner or later he will be gone. By the same token I may soon be gone myself; my heart, contrary to Monty’s anodyne assurances—not very convincing, now that
I come to think of it—is almost certainly in a state of disrepair. We could all go at any minute, even Kitty, whose calculations do not envisage any such eventuality. Curiously, this idea did not alarm her, alarmed her far less, in fact, than the prospect of more careful uninteresting days spent on unwelcome duties and observances. With the possibility of change before her she felt her spirits lift. There would no longer be any point in cautious husbandry, in the prudent expenditure of time and money. She saw the virtue—and it was a virtue—of living for the moment. She understood how adventurers could justify their actions. She sympathised with predators. Dizzy with this glimpse of freedom she smiled at Steve, for whom she felt a new affection. He had invited her out, as few men of her acquaintance had thought to do since Henry’s death. The prospect of her excursion, her interlude, brought a flush to her cheek. She drank her wine gratefully, resolving to do so more often: drinkers had more fun, were more approachable. Perhaps she would take a half of one of her pills tonight, so as to be rested for the following epochal day. All she had needed was a treat, she marvelled, and until now nobody had thought of it. She herself had hardly envisaged the possibility, so remote and impractical it had seemed.