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  This letter is special, of course, because of Grace’s death. Others have been different. Grace and I wondered how you are getting along these days … Grace and I have finally taken retirement … I’m to give you this address Grace says. Just in case you ever want to write … A seaside house. Grace always wanted that … In 1985, in 1978 and ’73 and ’69, Grace always had a kind of say. A quick lunch some time? each letter – this one too – suggests before the As ever my love and the single cross that’s a reminder of their kissing. Somehow, Zoë has always believed, the quick-lunch suggestion came from Grace. Did she, she wonders, make it again on her deathbed?

  The affair has developed in Zoë an extra sense. Without making an effort she can visualise a tall woman she has never met, now the lone occupant of a house she has never entered. She sees her smartly dressed in shades of maroon, iron-grey hair fashionably arranged, the clarity of her eyes a little clouded. Creases have multiplied on the skin of her face and are a map of wrinkles now. Zoë imagines her entering her kitchen and turning on the radio, to hear the same news she herself heard earlier: football fans on the rampage in a German city, shop windows smashed, a bus turned on its side. She imagines her standing with a cup of Nescafé in the bow-window of her sitting-room: seen through drizzle on a pane, the sea’s a pattern of undulations, greyish green, scuffed with white. The sky that meets it on the far horizon is too dull to contemplate. A single mackerel-trawler slips into view.

  If it’s inconvenient or if you’d rather not well of course I understand.

  The Alp Horn is where they lunch, have done so since 1951. Her inquisitiveness getting the better of her, Zoë went there once. She actually went inside, giving a name she had made up, of someone she was to meet there. A musical instrument, presumably an alp-horn, stretched the length of a wall; Tyrolean landscape decorated two others. There were checked tablecloths, blue and red; recorded music played; the place was modest. I’m awfully sorry,’ Zoë said to a waiter, half a lifetime ago it seems like because in fact it is. ‘Clearly there’s been a muddle.’

  She finds the Pritt where Charles keeps it, in the middle drawer of the dresser, with his writing things and sealing-wax, Sellotape and scissors. She boils the water in the kettle again, for coffee. She hears his footstep above her, crossing the landing from their bedroom to the lavatory, crossing it again to the bathroom. Pipes rattle when he turns on the hot water because he has never learnt not to turn the tap all the way in order to prevent its gushing so. All the years she has known him he has been impatient about things like that.

  ‘It’s time you saw Charles again,’ Zoë knows Grace used to say in that house, and guesses Audrey’s reply: that Charles has his own life now, that Charles made his choice. Grace always pressed, gently, because she loved Charles, too, but had to keep it to herself. ‘My dear, I’m certain Charles would welcome a sign.’ Anything could have happened: they’d never know.

  Forty years have passed since the year of the great passion: 1951. Charles and Audrey and Grace had met in that colourless time of disaffected lives and utility clothes when nobody was having much fun except the remaining spivs. Audrey and Grace had been in the ATS during the war, together all the time. When Charles arrived on the scene they were back in office life, both of them determined to use their secretarial posts as stepping-stones to something better. The day Charles appeared – the first time they laid eyes on him – he was being led around by the snooty, half-drunk Miss Maybury, both of them with glasses of vin rosé, which was what La Maybury – her office title – drank every afternoon, sometimes in the mornings also. ‘Hullo,’ Charles said, a lanky young man with floppy fair hair. It wasn’t difficult for Zoë to imagine the shy smile he’d darted at Audrey and then at Grace. Afterwards he’d told her about La Maybury and the wine and the tour round the office.

  ‘Poor Charles’ he had become in after years. Poor Charles alone with his unloved, unloving wife. What was the point of any of it, now that his children were grown up? In their seaside house they lived in hope – that one day he would sound less whispery on the telephone, passing on details of death by misadventure or disease. ‘Given six months, a merciful release.’ Or: ‘Just slipped. A wretched plastic bag. In the rain, near the dustbins.’

  Zoë places two slices of bread in the toaster but does not press the lever down because it isn’t time to yet. Before the affair got going it had been a subject of fascination to him that two such apparently close friends should, in appearance at least, be so vastly different. ‘Oh, that’s often so,’ Zoe said, citing examples from her schooldays, but he had never shown much interest in her schooldays and he didn’t then. ‘Grace, the lumpy one’s called,’ he said. ‘Back of a bus. Audrey’s the stunner.’ Old-fashioned names, she had thought, and imagined old-fashioned girls, frumpish in spite of Audrey’s looks. Later, he’d always included Grace in his references to Audrey, clouding the surface because of the depths beneath.

  She measures coffee into a blue Denby pot, the last piece of a set. There was a photograph she found once, Audrey as handsome as he’d claimed, a goddess-like creature with a cigarette, Grace blurred, as if she’d moved. They were sprawled on a rug beside a tablecloth from which a picnic had been eaten. You could see part of the back wheel of a car and it wasn’t difficult to sharpen into focus Grace’s frizzy hair, two pink-rimmed eyes behind her spectacles. Where on earth had that picnic been? What opportunity had been seized – a slack afternoon in the office?

  Zoë props the letter against his cup, doing so with deliberation. It will vex him that she has arranged it so, the gesture attaching a comment of her own; but then she has been vexed herself. She tore that photograph into little pieces and watched them burn. He never mentioned its loss, as naturally he wouldn’t.

  ‘Ah, good,’ she greets him, and watches while he picks the letter up. She depresses the lever of the toaster. The milk saucepan rattles on the gas, a glass disc bouncing about in it to prevent the milk from boiling over. She pours their coffee. He returns the letter to its envelope. She halves each piece of toast diagonally, the way he likes it.

  She hadn’t guessed. It was a frightening, numbing shock when he said: “Look, I have to tell you. Audrey and I have fallen in love.’ Just for a moment she couldn’t think who Audrey was. ‘Audrey and I,’ he repeated, thinking she hadn’t properly heard. ‘Audrey and I love one another.’ For what remained of that year and for several years following it, Zoë felt physically sick every time that statement echoed, coming back to her from its own Sunday morning: September 9th, 1951, eleven o’clock. He had chosen the time because they’d have all day to go into things, yet apart from practicalities there was nothing to go into. You couldn’t much go into the fact that he wanted someone else more than he wanted her. After five years of marriage he was tired of her. He had spoken in order to be rid of her.

  Finishing with the marmalade, she moves it closer to him. His face, less expert at disguise than once it was, hides nothing. She watches him thinking about the woman who has been left on her own, his sympathy reaching into a seaside house that’s now too spacious for one. But Charles is not an imaginative man. He doesn’t penetrate far. He doesn’t see in the old flame’s fridge a chicken joint for one, and fish for one tomorrow. Winter’s a melancholy time to be bereaved, a mood reflected in the cold and wet, winds rattling and whining. Audrey’ll miss her friend particularly when it comes to watching television, no one beside her to share a comment with.

  ‘Oh yes, the Alp Horn’s still there,’ Zoë hears a little later that morning, having eased open a door he has carefully closed. ‘Twelve forty-five, should we say? If your train’s a little late, anything like that, please don’t worry. I’ll simply wait, my dear.’

  He’d been saying something she hadn’t managed to hear before that, his voice unnaturally low, a hand cupped round the mouthpiece. Then there’d been the hint of a reprimand because the old flame hadn’t written sooner. Had he known he’d have gone to the funeral.

  ‘I’m sorr