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The unlikely agent of her renewal laid down his knife and fork and smiled pleasantly at her, as if she and not he were the guest. He scrubbed his mouth with his napkin, a habit which normally irritated her. However, so indebted to him was she for her change of heart that she merely smiled warmly back.

‘Help yourself to bread,’ she said, and, following her former train of thought, added, ‘My husband and I were complete opposites in many ways. Yet we got on very well. Did you ring Kitty, by the way?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Neither did I,’ she reflected. ‘Will you pour me another glass of wine? Do you like it? And the tart? Yes? I’m so glad.’

He was probably bored by now, she reckoned, but she beamed beneficently at him anyway. For he would take her to the park, cancelling a dull Sunday, and she would no longer be alone with her thoughts, and only the prospect of a routine telephone call to break the silence.

She woke suddenly, thinking that she had heard Henry call out to her from his sickroom. Even though she knew that Henry was dead she was not quite convinced of the fact. Her heart beat heavily in the dark room while she sought to make sense of the noise that had woken her. Her inability to do so alarmed her, as did the torpor that kept her half sitting in the bed, although it would have made more sense to get up. Gradually she pieced together a few crucial facts. She had, in a spirit of reckless preparation for the day ahead, taken one of her pills, rather late, and this, on top of two unaccustomed glasses of wine, had proved a mistake. I have a hangover, she thought with horror, though her head was quite clear, and she was not ill. More facts emerged: it was Sunday. The room was dark because it was raining. The summer was apparently over. The sun had gone, and although it might return, might even return in a day or two, it had taken with it a measure of contentment, a child-like trust in a user-friendly universe, one in which the days were all alike, with no abrupt reversals, no surprises in reserve. Even, or perhaps especially, in this half-light, the chill was perceptible. Damp stole through the open windows,
and on the terrace rain fell on her abandoned table and chair. She would be obliged to drink her tea indoors, as she had not done for several weeks. This change of habit would be unwelcome: in fact all changes were unwelcome. Her present disarray might even have been a warning to her, as if some sort of general disruption were under way. Such a shame, she thought determinedly; people will be so disappointed to have their Sunday spoiled by bad weather. Fortunately, in the car we shall hardly notice.

A noise again: that was what had roused her. This time she was able to identify it quite prosaically as a knock on the door.

‘Come in,’ she quavered, in an old woman’s voice, the one that was rarely used so early in the morning. Hearing it now, as if for the first time, she was shocked. ‘Is that you, Steve? Is anything wrong?’

She could almost see him standing outside her bedroom door. A justifiable recoil would prevent him from entering. She was grateful for this; she was reluctant to be seen before she had bathed and dressed. It must be frightfully late, she thought, and reached for her clock. It was half past seven, two hours past her normal waking time. ‘Are you all right?’ she called.

‘I’m off, Dorothea,’ said the voice.

‘Where are you going? You’re not leaving?’

‘I’m going to see my folks. Cheltenham. All right if I take the car? I may stay the night; there’s nothing doing here while Ann and David are away. See you tomorrow, then. Okay?’

In the dark room she blushed, as she had blushed when she was a very young girl. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Drive carefully.’ A constriction in her throat made further comments impossible. She heard a shifting of feet outside in the corridor.

‘Until tomorrow, then. Oh, by the way, thanks for the fry-up; it was great.’ There was a pause. ‘You all right?’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘You get off. I’ll see you when I see you.’

At last the footsteps receded; the front door opened and closed. She sank back onto the pillows, mortified. That was her overriding reaction, one of intense embarrassment that she had so presumed on this young man’s indulgence, whereas in all truth he regarded her simply as one to whom he was momentarily obligated, so that a meaningless compliment from time to time might be in order. She had thought that they were getting on rather well, had been approaching a sort of intimacy. In fact, as this event proved, any illusion of friendliness had been simply that, an illusion. Or rather that she had committed her original sin of mistaking friendliness for friendship, as she had on more than one occasion in her early life. She had always had a too ardent desire for closeness, the closeness she had known with her mother, and on which she had relied, or hoped to rely, to see her through whatever difficulties might lie ahead. She had learned, painfully, that no friendship, however well aspected, can protect one in this way, and so had gradually withdrawn her natural desire for affection. She had found that an apparent detachment served her somewhat better than a show of eagerness. Even with Henry she had learned not to show too much zeal, so that concern and care had gradually taken the place of passion. Of passion she had a bad memory. She had taken note of the relief felt on a certain occasion, many years long since, and had resolved there and then never again to be led by her instincts. Even now she had only to visualise that dingy room in Down Street to feel shame, just as now, incredibly, she felt shame at having once more committed an act of misjudgment. She had made an error, and would have to repair it as best she could. Fortunately she was too well trained to voice any objections on her
own account. He had simply forgotten, she told herself; it was just as well that she had not reminded him. This was no doubt what the journalists and commentators called a defining moment. She had been passed over, returned to her habitual solitude by someone whose attention she had no right to think focused on herself. In fact nothing had been taken away from her: the bad news was that nothing had been added. And there was a long day ahead, and no help for it. She would simply have to try harder. Yet what she could only experience as Steve’s infidelity lingered in her mind. No respect, she thought fretfully, and reproached herself for being old, a failing for which there was no remedy.

It was important to remember that nothing had been taken away; that was the thought to hold on to. In a few minutes she would get up and dress carefully and behave as though nothing untoward had happened, would resume her natural sobriety of demeanour, would make breakfast, and read the newspapers. But she knew that she would gaze unseeingly at the newsprint, would not switch on the radio, since the kindly voices would not be addressing her own predicament, a predicament which she would of course keep to herself. It was only an excursion to the park, she told herself, imagining the smell of the newly wet earth, but instead of an avenue of trees she saw an avenue of desks, the classroom of her secretarial school, and heard the scrape of chairs being pushed back when it was time to go home. It was an image of imprisonment, though she had not thought so at the time: she had been glad of the company of other girls, unwilling to endanger the safety she had known at school. And on Sundays she had walked in the park. That was what Sundays were for. In fact there was nothing to stop her calling a taxi and asking the driver to take her to Richmond. For a second or two she entertained
the idea, then dismissed it. The burden of the past was too heavy; she knew from experience that her exposed situation would favour further reminiscences, that the day would be coloured by memory, and that the inner world, in any contest, would win against the outer. And she had not telephoned Kitty to thank her for dinner. Kitty would not take this omission lightly. She would get in touch this evening, would pretend exhaustion, distress, exactly as Kitty would have done, had she been so remiss as not to offer thanks on a similar occasion. She would do all this—after all, she was exhausted, and perhaps not very well—but she would make a poor job of it, and the offence would remain, would indeed grow, an occasion for comment in the best family tradition.

The thought of Kitty made her feel worse, especially since Henry no longer provided support. Curiously, she did not think of Henry himself, and for a reason which she had long tried to ignore. It was because with Henry perfect fusion had never been effected. They had been seen as a devoted couple, and it was true that they were devoted, devoted to the task of making up for each other’s disappointment. He was a man whose natural disposition had been towards frivolity, and he had been permanently cast down by the defection of his first wife, his childhood sweetheart, whom he had married amid much splendour, and with family approval. Was she not in fact a remote relation? Mrs May never enquired, careful of her own peace of mind. The symbolism of Henry’s raising her to her feet in a busy street was not entirely lost on her. It had salved his sore spirit to be seen in this act of chivalry. ‘But why did you come back to the office that evening?’ she had asked him. ‘I couldn’t get your funny little face out of my mind,’ he had replied. ‘You looked so woebegone. I felt you needed looking after.’ For this perception—though it had been no
more than a passing remark—she had unstintingly rewarded him. But she had always known that she was not a fit companion for one with his exuberant nature, his moments of fatalism. She was utterly ignorant of the tantrums and stratagems that women used to intrigue or irritate men, and of which he, presumably, entertained a nostalgic memory. She had sensed this disappointment in him, had hoped that it was merely the effect of his age, had hoped that he too would realise that he was no longer the ardent young man of cherished memory, was in fact tired, disheartened. He had seen steadiness, an even temper. To him this had spelled novelty, and, half speculatively, he had succumbed to it.

And she? She had seen her one chance. She had known in her heart of hearts that if she did not seize it she would go through life as an orphan. She possessed nothing but her liberty, was without kinship, attachments. She was not prepared to look beyond this fact: it was Susie Fuller who did that. Susie, with her many boyfriends, was quite simply aghast at the idea that Henry might be relinquished. At one point Mrs May had thought that Susie herself was interested, but was quick enough to see that Susie’s boldness put her out of the picture: in Henry’s opinion only men were bold, or should be. He was in many ways surprisingly old-fashioned, courtly. It may even have been Susie’s cheerfully expressed interest that had brought forth in the normally undemanding Dorothea a faint spirit of rebellion. Thus a friendship had evolved into marriage. And she had appreciated him, and his persistence, until at last they sat, a little dazed, in the living room of the flat that was her pride and joy, and which he found surprisingly to his taste—but always with the unseen proviso that they could move on. Or that he could. Therefore she had made every effort so that he would want to stay.

Now that she had been a widow for so long, the years of her marriage appeared to her as years of normality, but normality as defined by other people. Alone, as she was now, she considered herself to be vaguely at fault, and was confirmed in this view by the attitude of other women, of whom perhaps Susie Fuller was the first. Yet they had been good friends, and Susie had been at her wedding, one lunch hour, in a register office, the awful news to be revealed to his family at a more propitious venue. So many people had had a proprietory interest in Henry that it was difficult for her at that stage to think of herself as his wife. She had felt more like an aspiring candidate for the position, even when she was sitting with him on the terrace of some luxury hotel and he was asking the waiter to bring champagne. Secretly she would have preferred coffee; the thought had made her slightly homesick. Marriage had meant learning new tastes and habits, and she had applied herself to the task. It was strange no longer to have to deal with Henry’s volatility, his restlessness. The absence from her life of those qualities meant that her condition was once again like that of an unawakened girl, waiting to be breathed into life by the advent of a stranger, someone by definition remote from her own life and all that she had ever known.

For a moment she contemplated ringing Susie Fuller in Chippenham. Susie had been kind to her after Henry’s death, had unhesitatingly put her dogs into kennels and made herself available. Fortunately her stepdaughter lived in London, so that Mrs May had not felt too badly about telling her when she was overcome by tiredness or by that curious dizziness—the first signs, perhaps, of her current malaise—and Susie had been quick to take the hint. Susie Fuller: once Harkness, later
Meredith, and now in widowhood restored to her original status as Susie Fuller, just as Mrs May was again and for ever-more Dorothea Jackson. They had had some good times together when they were young, in the office that Susie was in such a hurry to leave. Being assured of an early marriage, to one or other of her boyfriends, she had taken chances, had eaten forbidden snacks at her desk, had no hesitation in trying on the new clothes she bought in her lunch hour. Mrs May remembered a powder-blue sweater being hastily pulled down, a doughnut hastily swept into the drawer containing office supplies, as the door opened behind her and one of the partners came in to request her services, rather urgently, having had no success on the internal telephone, which Susie had assured him was out of order.