The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches Read online

  Was this perhaps meant for her and Henry? – Jody was wondering, for she saw that Henry’s intended marriage with an American was bound to be discussed in these forums of public opinion. Her presence here was being well-noted: and that Henry had understood was shown by his coming to stand by her, his glass in one hand, the other at her elbow. In a moment he went on with remarks apparently not addressed to anyone in particular, to the effect that he needed someone to come and mend the roof.

  All this went on for a good hour or more, with people coming and going, but mostly coming: the pub was crammed. When the four left there were cries of, ‘See you soon, then,’ ‘You’ll be back? See you then!’ – from all over the room. Outside they set off with the wind behind them, this time four abreast, Henry at one end holding Jody’s hand, Angela at the other holding Sebastian’s, but Angela and Henry were telling a story and interrupting each other with much laughter, about an incident in the village. Some imperial pumpkin had invaded one garden from the next. The invaded owner had cut off a slice from a pumpkin big enough for Cinderella’s coach, on the grounds he had never tasted it, ill feeling had ensued … They did not go to ‘the cottage’ but to the house where Connie was. A small crowd of people already sat around a vast wooden table in another court, a smallish one this time, where the wind was shut out. A deep yellow sunlight filled it, pulling scent from the white roses that draped a brick wall. Connie was there, sitting with her friend Jane. Seen by daylight Connie was a tall slender child with dead black straight hair – Henry’s, and black doe eyes – Angela’s, both set off by the ivory cheeks of her sickness, which had apparently come on again. Jody (if not Sebastian, for he was probably used to it by now) suffered the usual shock of seeing intimately known features appropriated by a stranger. Connie and Jane were making a pair, isolating themselves against the grownups, who all recognized the need to allow Connie, allow Jane, to stare out at them with eyes full of the criticisms bred by their shared confidences, refined by the disdainful fastidiousness of their age.

  Jane was the daughter of Briony who managed this estate. Briony was a strong country woman, middle-aged, with short straw-coloured hair and healthy cheeks, observant blue eyes and muscular hands gained by all the work that went with fields, woods, gardens, buildings, and their maintenance, the colony of budding artists and their supervision. It turned out that she was the divorced wife of the owner of these properties, and the mother of a son shortly to be twenty-one, Jane’s elder brother by ten years or so. She had been running this place because ‘poor Oliver simply doesn’t have a clue, he never had, poor sweetie,’ but was looking forward to relinquishing the burden the very second her son took over, when she would revert to her own true nature and inclination, which was to make stained glass windows. Jody listened to all this with more than her usual feelings of being alien. She could not begin to understand why this woman had been prepared to spend her life as a sort of caretaker for a divorced husband. Without much recompense, it seemed, for she did remark that the estate could not afford to pay her much in the way of a salary, not if there was to be anything decent for Paul (the nearly twenty-one-year-old son) to inherit.

  Jody, who was sitting across the table from her hostess–soon to be, at least intermittently, a neighbour – inquired (though with the feeling that this would strike everyone as the sort of remark only to be expected from her) what she got out of it all?

  Briony broke bread comfortably between the fingers of her left hand, holding her wine glass in her right, and smiled. She bestowed on Jody a regard due to the outside world (outside these islands), noblesse oblige, and said. This is a good place to be. I’ve enjoyed it. I enjoy doing it. It’s rewarding.’ And she sat looking through the oblong gap between grey stone buildings where the fields could be seen ascending a sharp slope to a wood, brown glistening soil already ploughed for the winter crops.

  ‘Well,’ said Jody stubbornly, facing Briony whom she very much liked, although they were so different, one so smart and shiny, one so homely and work-used, ‘if it were me I’d feel I’d been made use of. You don’t. Couldn’t your–ex-husband have made arrangements for the estate to be run? When you leave here, what will you have to show for it all?’

  Briony’s nod acknowledged the justice of this. ‘Well, Paul has had a very nice place to come to for his holidays. And all his friends. Jane adores it – and her friends …’ Here she smiled affectionately at Jane, who returned an unwilling smile that acknowledged she had to admit the truth, even when bound to criticize the grownups. ‘You can’t have everything,’ Briony summed up at last. I know I could have been first-class at my job – the stained glass, but I’ll be good enough. And I’ve enjoyed everything here.’

  The word enjoy had come up again.

  It was an enjoyable, very long meal, with good country food, a lot of wine, and the sun pouring down into the walled place where, Briony said, the most wonderful peaches were grown every summer. Last month there had been hundreds of them. Along the wires that sectioned the walls horizontally, the peach branches stretched their now lightened branches, and a glass bowl of a rose-tinted concoction was pushed towards Jody: the peaches themselves, preserved in honey and wine.

  It was nearly five when the meal ended. They were all tipsy and full of well-being, even Jody. The four went back to the cottage, leaving Connie with Jane. She had confided to her mother that she still felt a bit funny, and Angela had told her she must telephone at once if she felt any worse, when both parents would be at her bedside within five minutes.

  A pity to waste what was left of the sunlight, not so dense and yellow here in the large court, but kind enough, so they sat drinking tea outside the kitchen windows. Swifts whirled and squealed about the pale blue sky. The dog, stretched out in bliss on the warm stones, flopped its tail about, when it remembered to. Bees were hard at work even after the light drained away, leaving a quiet, intimate dusk. No one said much. Of course Angela and Henry were tired, having woken so early. Once Jody made a remark that could have led to the good talk which was, she had felt, the point of this weekend, but neither Henry nor Angela took it up. She supposed she agreed with them: such an evening was too rare a thing not to be savoured minute by perfect minute.

  ‘We aren’t going to need much supper,’ announced Angela, as they got up out of their chairs in the now dark court, lit patchily from an upstairs window opposite.

  ‘No,’ said Henry, ‘not much, but some. I’ll make my potato soup. It’s quick and delicious.’ He went into the kitchen, and the others were about to go into the sitting room when the telephone rang, and Angela ran to it as if she had been waiting for it. Connie announced that she felt worse. Angela called Henry who came out of the kitchen, and the two went off to their daughter. Sebastian said he was capable of making as good a soup as Henry was, and Sebastian and Jody again took on the responsibilities of the kitchen. But Jody sat herself down at the table and began to cry, making no attempt to stop. She sat there, weeping, from an old, or at least well-established well of grief, her large grey eyes wide open and the tears running, staring past Sebastian and out into the dark where now the high yellow window spilled a single shaft of light. Sebastian stood slicing potatoes and onions into a saucepan, and sometimes looked at her, when he nodded sympathetically, but continued with the task of making soup.

  Her weeping made no claims on him, nor on the world. At one point he handed her a box of tissues. At another he pushed towards her a glass of wine – as if they had not already had enough of it. Later he inquired, ‘Your boy?’ and she nodded.

  ‘I’ve lost him, you see,’ she said.

  He gave her a long, acute look, checking for exaggeration, and then grunted an assent. He said, ‘I’m sorry, Jody. Well, it can’t be easy seeing how Henry and Angela deal with it’

  With a sigh she said, ‘As successful as possible, I suppose. And your child – Marion?’

  ‘Luckily she’s the same age as Connie.’

  ‘There’s your wife, not just Henry
and Angela.’

  He nodded. ‘Right. But Olga and I have made a point of not involving poor Marion in our disagreements. I don’t think we go to the lengths Henry and Angela do – to my mind they overdo it, but Marion’s all right.’ At her look he insisted, ‘Yes, really all right. She is doing well at school – surely that’s a pointer? She likes coming here with Olga – they were here only a month ago, the two of them.’

  ‘Your ex-wife Olga, and your daughter, and Henry and Angela and Connie and you?’

  ‘And some other people came too. A house party. A real one. No, I couldn’t make it, I was working. I do work, you know.’

  ‘So do I’, she insisted. I work hard.’

  ‘We all work hard. We are the hard working classes.’

  She had stopped crying. She sat straight up, as was her way, shoulders back, as if at some health course or other she had been instructed how to sit and had never compromised since. But her hands on the table in front of her were clenched in the tension of her misery.

  ‘Does your ex-husband know how you feel?’ Before she could explode at him, something he obviously felt was imminent, he went on steadily, keeping his eyes on her face, a kindly-meant warning, or pressure: I mean, I don’t think I would have known how Olga felt about it all if we hadn’t discussed it so much. And discussed it and discussed it -’ he continued, almost frivolously, but his laugh was rueful. ‘In my view, things can be discussed too much.’

  ‘So I have gathered.’

  ‘But Olga has always insisted. Everything that comes up with Marion, everything, we talk it over. And she was right.’

  Her wide eyes again spilled tears. I am sure Olga doesn’t realize how lucky she is. Nor does Angela.’

  ‘Have you actually tried to talk to him – to Marcus?’

  ‘I think that perhaps at the beginning – but no, it’s too late now.’

  ‘Has he married again?’

  ‘Yes, last winter.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Precisely. Ah. But there are such things as – situations you can’t do anything about.’

  “Well, I believe I am not prepared to admit to that.’ This had the same note of almost frivolity which she did recognize was an attempt to lighten this tragic scene. For it was that, they both knew it.

  When the outer door, and then the door into this kitchen slammed open, and Henry and Angela stood there, they were sparkling with the run across from the other house in the half dark of the lanes and paths, and then under the great arch and across this court. It was raining, they exclaimed, no, just a little, great big drops, they said. It was like a showerbath. They stood exclaiming and explaining, taking over the kitchen with their vitality.

  Jody was able to go quietly out, unremarked, to dry her eyes and make up her face.

  During the meal of soup and bread more wine was drunk. Angela and Henry began yawning again. They had been up since before six, they said; but Sebastian, for Jody, said that they must keep awake, because at some point this famous talk had to take place.

  ‘Well, of course,’ said Angela. ‘But we’ll all be here tomorrow, and it seems to me there isn’t so much to discuss. Aren’t we all perfectly reasonable people?’

  After the meal Henry and Angela went into the sitting room, while Sebastian made the coffee. Jody stayed behind with him, and then because he said he wanted to wash up – no, she shouldn’t bother – she followed the other two. When Sebastian entered the sitting room with the tray, Jody sat in the big chair opposite, chosen so the light was behind her. The other two chattered away about Briony, about Oliver, due to return from New Zealand soon, about Jane, about Jane’s coming to stay with Connie in London, about a weekend next month when it would be nice if everyone could be here again.

  The two sat close, turned towards each other, looking into the other’s face. As one finished a remark, or suggestion, Henry, or Angela, came smartly in. Again it was impossible not to remark what a pair these two made, alike physically and in their similar country-comfortable clothes … and wasn’t Angela wearing Henry’s shirt over her trousers, sleeves turned up, making her a vulnerable little morsel against his large and reassuring roundness? Two flushed faces, alike in the mysterious way of the long married, their eyes searching each other’s in a habit of picking up points where the other dropped them … As the talk went on, they turned still further around, were facing each other. Half an hour later, they were still at it. Grannie’s possible plans for Christmas in Switzerland, Connie’s need for music lessons …

  Sebastian broke in, ‘I think we should talk about how to incorporate Stephen – you know, Jody’s boy. He ought to be friends with our children.’

  This cut the exchange dead. Slowly Henry and Angela turned away from each other, and both leaned back and stared at Sebastian, at Jody – but her face was shadowed, as she had taken care it would be.

  ‘Well of course,’ said Henry. ‘Haven’t we discussed this, sweetie – surely we have?’ – to Jody.

  ‘It was mentioned.’

  ‘Perhaps he could come here when Marion and Olga come too some time over Christmas?’ This was Henry.

  ‘A bit spartan, really, in winter, but it’s lovely too.’ This was Angela.

  ‘Surely discomfort is what they are trained for,’ remarked Jody. Stephen was at a famous school, not known for its comfort.

  ‘It’s a pity Stephen is a boy,’ said Henry.

  ‘Yes. If you had a girl, it would be easy. Marion and Connie get along like anything. And Jane gets on with Marion too/ said Angela.

  Jody said, ‘At that school they are not exactly taught how to get on with girls.’ Her voice was dry, nothing of what she felt was being allowed to show. She sat with her coffee cup in her hand, the hand on the arm of the chair, a long, elegant well-kept hand. But the steady tinkle of the cup in the saucer caused Sebastian to lean forward, as if to take it from her, help her in something. Then he leaned back again, crossing his legs. She set the cup down.

  ‘All these public schools are better than they were/ said Henry.

  ‘Would Stephen’s father allow him to join us all here for a few days?’ Sebastian inquired.

  ‘I never know what Marcus is going to allow/ said Jody. ‘But if these three little girls are all such good friends, are they going to be happy with a strange boy suddenly foisted upon them?’

  ‘We should try it/ said Angela enthusiastically.

  ‘But we are talking as if Connie won’t be at your mother’s skiing/ said Henry. ‘Perhaps Easter would be better?’

  “When are we all going to get married?’ Angela asked Henry.

  ‘Surely you should ask Sebastian. Jody and I thought of October.’

  This linking of himself with Jody startled, so much had the two not been a pair this weekend.

  ‘October would suit me,’ said Jody.

  Angela said to Sebastian, ‘You suggested October, didn’t you? But perhaps November? There’s Connie’s school trip. She’s going to France with her school’, she explained to the others. ‘There’s got to be time for dresses, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were having a proper wedding,’ Henry said, put out. ‘If we all did something quick at the registry office, we can fit it in any time.’

  ‘What do you mean, a proper wedding?’ protested Angela. ‘Not the kind we had, but a wedding. I want Connie and Marion to be bridesmaids.’

  ‘Bridesmaids!’ said Henry, laughing.

  ‘Why not, they’d love it?’

  ‘I rather doubt whether my Stephen would love Henry’s and my wedding,’ said Jody. ‘So far he simply changes the subject.’

  ‘How did he handle your ex I mean, Marcus’s wedding?’ asked Sebastian.