In her tidy drawing-room he poured the wine at lunchtime. Not feeling careless themselves, for they were not, they talked about the careless people of Scott Fitzgerald, about the Palace Flophouse, and Hangover Square and Dorlcote Mill. The struggles of Jude acquired new small dimensions, the goodness of Joe Gargery marked a day, as Mrs Proudie did and Daisy Miller. Ellen Wedgeworth died, Dermot Trellis slept. Maurice Bendrix embraced the wife of his friend.
They did not go in for telling one another the story of their lives. Their conversation was not like that, yet almost without their knowing it their lives were there, in a room made different by their friendship. They did not touch upon emotions, nor touch upon regret or anything that might have been; they did not lose control of words. They did not betray, she her finished past, he what still was there. She brought in coffee, he turned from gazing out at rain or cold spring sunshine, they spoke again of Wildfell Hall. Her front door wide behind her, she stood on the steps, and was there in his driving-mirror until the willow trees were there instead.
There was the beginning of gossip: his car seen on that road, people noticing that she came often to the library. It was not much but would become so; he knew that and so did she; they did not say it. When the days began to lengthen there had been three seasons. In summer they would sit outside, at the white table on the lawn, but summer did not come.
Graillis replaced on the shelves what had been returned earlier today,
He looked about him before he left. A poster hung from the counter by the door, advertising the Strawberry Festival in June. Above the door, in straw, there was St Brigid’s Cross. It was on the evening of the day the removal vans had clattered empty through the town and later lumbered away full of her possessions that she’d said she envied him. They’d had to wait until
He locked the door behind him and drove away.
Hearts were forming in the lettuces of his vegetable beds. He cut one, and chives and parsley. He walked about before he collected what he’d left on the path that ran beside his vegetables, adding a tomato that had ripened beneath a cloche. He had never become used to the emptiness of this return to his garden and his house, and he supposed he never would. In his kitchen he opened tins of soup and sardines. He washed the lettuce.
‘He phoned me afterwards,’ he imagined Clifferty saying now, standing in a kitchen doorway, going through his day, his solicitor’s caution estimating how much he could pass on. ‘I don’t know what that man’s trouble was,’ Clifferty said, and added that there hadn’t been much else today.
There was whiskey somewhere; Graillis looked for it and found it among the kitchen bottles. He poured a little, mixed oil and vinegar for his salad. On the radio there was agricultural news, the latest from the markets, and then a brash disc-jockey pumped out his chatter before a cacophony began. Silence was a pleasure after that.
Laying out a knife and fork on the kitchen table, Graillis wondered if either of his children would phone tonight. There was no reason why one of them should. There’d been nothing wrong, no cause for concern, when he’d heard from both of them not long ago. He poured more whiskey, not wanting to eat yet. He couldn’t remember any other time when he’d drunk alone in this house. He kept the whiskey for people who dropped in.
Taking his glass with him, he walked about his garden, among penstemons and roses and crocosmia not yet in bud. The row of artichokes he’d planted in February stood as high as empty sunflowers. Lavender scented the warm twilight.
The whiskey talk was private now, a whisper from his orderly remembering that no longer nurtured panic. In visiting the solicitor, in going to the house, he had touched what should not be touched except in memory, where everything was there for ever and nothing could be changed. Retirement from a branch library would not bring much and so there’d been a gesture. A stranger’s interpretation of that – what curiosity hatched or gossip spun – was neither here nor there. Again, instead, there was the fresh, bright face, the gentle shyness. Again, instead, the older woman lifted to her lips a tan-tipped cigarette touched with crimson. Again there was the happiness of marriage, again embraces were imagined.
There was no more, nor would there be. Not even an ornament, for that would cheat reality. Not even a piece of china, and he would write to say so. The winter flowers lay scattered in the shadow of a secret, deception honouring a silent love.
