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  Opening the salmon tin, Zoë travels again to the Alp Horn rendezvous. She wonders if it has changed and considers it unlikely. The long horn still stretches over a single wall. The same Tyrolean landscape decorates two others. There are the blue-and-red tablecloths. He waits with a glass of sherry, and then she’s there.

  ‘My dear!’

  She is the first to issue their familiar greeting, catching him unaware the way things sometimes do these days.

  ‘My dear!’ he says in turn.

  Sherry is ordered for her too, and when it comes the rims of their glasses touch for a moment, a toast to the past.

  ‘Grace,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it awful?’

  ‘I manage.’

  The waiter briskly notes their order and enquires about the wine.

  ‘Oh, the good old house red.’

  Zoë’s fingers, gripping and slicing a tomato, are arthritic, painful sometimes though not at present. In bed at night he’s gentle when he reaches out for one hand or the other, cautious with affection, not tightening his grasp as once he did. Her fingers are ugly; she sometimes thinks she looks quite like a monkey now. She arranges the fish and the tomato on a plate and sprinkles pepper over both. Neither she nor Charles ever has salt.

  ‘And you, Charles?’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘I worry about you sometimes.’

  ‘No, I’m all right.’

  It was accordion music that was playing in the Alp Horn the day Zoë’s inquisitiveness drove her into it. Young office people occupied the tables. Business was quite brisk.

  ‘I do appreciate this,’ Audrey says. ‘When something’s over, all these years I do appreciate it, Charles.’

  He passes across the table the packet of Three Castles cigarettes, and she smiles, placing it beside her because it’s too soon yet to open it.

  ‘You’re fun, Charles.’

  ‘I think La Maybury married, you know. I think someone told me that,’

  ‘Grace could never stand her.’

  ‘No.’

  Is this the end? Zoë wonders. Is this the final fling, the final call on his integrity and honour? Can his guilt slip back into whatever recesses there are, safe at last from Grace’s secondhand desire? No one told him that keeping faith could be as cruel as confessing faithlessness; only Grace might have appropriately done that, falsely playing a best friend’s role. But it wasn’t in Grace’s interest to do so.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll sell the house.’

  ‘I rather think you should.’

  ‘Grace did suggest it once.’

  Leaving them to it, Zoë eats her salmon and tomato. She watches the end of the television film: years ago they saw it together, before 1951, before Grace and Audrey. They’ve seen it together since; as a boy he’d been in love with Bette Davis. Picking at the food she has prepared, Zoë is again amused by what has amused her before. But only part of her attention is absorbed. Conversations take place; she does not hear; what she sees are fingers undistorted by arthritis loosening the cellophane on the cigarette packet and twisting it into a butterfly. He orders coffee. The scent that came back on his clothes was lemony with a trace of lilac. In a letter there was a mention of the cellophane twisted into a butterfly.

  “Well, there we are,’ he says. ‘It’s been lovely to see you, Audrey.’

  ‘Lovely for me too.’

  When he has paid the bill they sit for just a moment longer. Then, in the Ladies, she powders away the shine that heat and wine have induced, and tidies her tidy grey hair. The lemony scent refreshes, for a moment, the stale air of the cloakroom.

  ‘Well, there we are, my dear,’ he says again on the street. Has there ever, Zoë wonders, been snappishness between them? Is she the kind not to lose her temper, long-suffering and patient as well as being a favourite girl at school? After all, she never quarrelled with her friend.

  ‘Yes, there we are, Charles.’ She takes his arm. ‘All this means the world to me, you know.’

  They walk to the corner, looking for a taxi. Marriage is full of quarrels, Zoë reflects.

  ‘Being upright never helps. You just lie there. Drink lots of water, Charles.’

  The jug of water, filled before she’d slipped in beside him last night, is on his bedside table, one glass poured out. Once, though quite a while ago now, he not only insisted on getting up when he had a stomach upset but actually worked in the garden. All day, she’d watched him filling his incinerator with leaves and weeding the rockery. Several times she’d rapped on the kitchen window, but he’d taken no notice. As a result he was laid up for a fortnight. j

  ‘I’m sorry to be a nuisance,’ he says.

  She smoothes the bedclothes on her side of the bed, giving the bed up to him, making it pleasant for him in the hope that he’ll remain in it. The newspaper is there for him when he feels like it. So is Little Dorrit, which he always reads when he’s unwell.

  ‘Perhaps consommé later on,’ she says. ‘And a cream cracker.’

  ‘You’re very good to me.’

  ‘Oh, now.’

  Downstairs Zoë lights the gas-fire in the sitting-room and looks to see if there’s a morning film. Barefoot in the Park it is, about to begin. Quite suddenly then, without warning, she sees how the loose ends are. Everything is different, but nothing of course will ever be said. So good the little restaurant’s still there, the old flame writes. Just a line to thank you. So good it was to talk. So good to see him. So good of him to remember the Three Castles. Yet none of it is any good at all because Grace is not there to say, ‘Now tell me every single thing.’ Not there to say when there’s a nagging doubt, ‘My dear, what perfect nonsense!’ On her own in the seaside house she’ll not find an excuse again to suggest a quick lunch if he’d like to. He’ll not do so himself, since he never has. He’ll gladly feel his duty done at last.

  The old flame bores him now, with her scent and her cigarettes and her cellophane butterflies. In her seaside house she knows her thank-you letter is the last, and the sea is grey and again it rains. One day, on her own, she’ll guess her friend was false. One day she’ll guess a sense of honour kept pretence alive.

  Grace died. That’s all that happened, Zoë tells herself, so why should she forgive? ‘Why should I?’ she murmurs. ‘Why should I?’ Yet for a moment before she turns on Barefoot in the Park tears sting her eyelids. A trick of old age, she tells herself, and orders them away.

  THE VILLAGE

  A Christmas Story

  George Mackay Brown

  At five o’clock on Christmas morning a light went on in the top window of a tall house. Peedie Sigurd and his sister Gerd were the first folk to awake in the village. They were tearing string and paper from the gifts Santa had left. Sigurd had hardly slept all night. At ten to five he had shaken his sister awake. Between sleep and enchantment they sat on their beds, with apples, boxes of sweeties, books, a draughts-board, a doll, diaries, nuts, and a growing litter of string and fancy paper. Sigurd opened a soft parcel and pulled out a new knitted balaclava. He cried out in rage and threw it on the floor. (Sigurd hated above all things to be given clothes for a present.) Gerd fell back asleep on her pillow, clutching the doll.

  In the three fishermen’s houses above the pier, dark windows at six o’clock still. Normally, on such a quiet morning, there would have been moving shadows between lamps and uncurtained windows. But this was Christmas morning, when even fishermen could lie long. And their wives dreamed of seapinks. And their children dreamed of castles made of chocolate and marzipan, where the tables are loaded with all the good things in the world, swans and apples, everything except fish.

  At nine o’clock there was a hideous rattling and clangour and metal outcry just beside poor Miss Papay’s head. Miss

  Papay’s nervous system was in ruins each morning because of that alarm clock. ‘It’s a wonder,’ she said to Sam her white cat, ‘I’m not in the nut-house, with that alarm cloc