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At the back door of the house she stopped. ‘Can I go in once more? To see the dining room?’
‘Of course.’ He stood back so that she could go ahead of him through the kitchen and out into the corridor. The dining room door stood open, a wedge of light pouring from it across the floor.
They could both hear the music. Glen Miller. And the talk and laughter. The chink of knives and forks on crockery; they could both smell the cigar smoke, and through it all the faintest trace of oil paint.
Jan found she was holding Simon’s hand. She was trembling, but she could not resist going nearer. Slowly, step by step, they crept towards the dining room as gradually the noise of the dinner party got louder. She could smell other things now. Cooking. Carefully hoarded coffee. Wine. A woman’s scent. One hand firmly clutching Simon’s, she reached forward with the other and gently she pushed the door open a fraction.
The room was empty.
In the echoing silence she gave a little sob of disappointment.
It was Simon who spotted the soft curl of an ostrich feather drifting on the bare boards.
The Drop Out (#ucb02431f-148f-514c-8134-1ff71355e2c9)
Of course he wouldn’t really come. The idea was too bizarre. But then, a husband is a husband, even if this one had hardly fulfilled his matrimonial duties to the letter.
Zara leaned forward and gazed into the mirror. If he did come he was going to see quite a change in her after all this time. She vaguely recollected that her hair had been not only a different style but a different colour then. Her figure had improved out of recognition and maturity had brought sophistication and confidence.
‘I wonder if he’s got a paunch?’ she asked her reflection out loud. And giggled. Gerald with a paunch was unthinkable.
She looked at the letter again. It began, ‘Darling,’ – That too was unlike him. Gerald had never been one for endearments. He must be in trouble, she decided as she slipped on her elegant silk suit.
Money? She had always understood that he had plenty. He had been ‘something in the city’ when they married. She had never bothered to find out what. Certainly he had from time to time continued to pay handsome amounts into her account. For old times’ sake and when he remembered, she always thought, rather than for any mundane idea that he should support his wife. Not that she had needed supporting for years, of course, thank God. But, come to think of it, there had been no money now for nearly a year.
She stood sideways to the mirror and ran a critical hand down her flat stomach. No. She was the kind of woman who did well in business and thrived on it. Gerald’s conscience money or whatever it was had brought her some nice little extras, like the small Mercedes in the driveway. It had in no way gone towards her upkeep.
Well. If not money, what? Women. She knew some wives were called on to extricate their husbands from the clutches of too-persistent girlfriends, but Gerald had never had that problem. She had heard in fact that he merely turned the latest woman onto the last with a cold-blooded delight which often shocked both parties into flight. She paused for a moment. Perhaps he wanted a divorce? No. It was unthinkable. He, like her, found the state of absentee matrimony far too useful and pleasant an arrangement to end it.
The police? She looked at the mirror for a moment, her eyes wide, and then shrugged the idea away. It was too ridiculous to contemplate.
Zara gave up the idle speculation with a glance at her watch, ran downstairs, collected the car keys from the mantelpiece and went to the door. She was not usually given to conjecture and certainly not to day dreaming, and she had made herself uncharacteristically late for the board meeting.
He was sitting on the doorstep.
In rags.
For fully two minutes Zara looked down at her husband without speaking. Then, bleakly, she stood back and motioned him into the house, wrinkling her nose ostentatiously as he passed in front of her.
He walked straight to the drinks table and poured himself a Scotch. Then he turned and looked her up and down. He was slim still, no sign of a paunch, lean and hard, brown and fit, and his eyes twinkled mischievously.
‘Go and run me a bath, Za-Za, dear. Then you can stop holding your nose, and we can talk.’
‘But, Gerald!’ Her usually well-modulated voice had risen to a squeak. ‘What’s happened to you?’
‘Fate hasn’t been kind, lady.’ He put on what sounded like a very professional whine. But still his face was laughing. ‘Go on woman, before my fleas start hopping onto your Persian rugs.’
With a cry of horror she fled upstairs and, turning both taps on full, groped for the small bottle of Dettol in the medicine cabinet. It smelled very strong in the steam, but anything was better than Gerald’s … aroma.
While he bathed she washed his glass assiduously, sponged the outside of the whisky bottle and then got out the vacuum cleaner and ran it over the carpet where he had been standing. Fleas indeed! She shuddered.
With a sudden pang of guilt that she could so completely have forgotten her meeting she went to the phone and called the office to instruct her PA. ‘I don’t feel too well,’ she explained quietly into the receiver and was amazed to find it was the truth. She felt sick and slightly feverish.
He reappeared in half an hour wearing her bathrobe. Voluminous on her, it sat on him like an outgrown coat on a gangly schoolboy, exposing long muscular legs and arms, and an expanse of hard brown chest.
‘No sign of a man up there,’ he commented as he threw himself down on the leather sofa. ‘I could have borrowed his razor.’ He sounded faintly aggrieved.
‘I suppose you’re hungry?’ Zara ignored his remark loftily. She was indignant to find that her heart had started to bang rather hard beneath her ribs as it had, she distinctly remembered, when she first knew him.
‘I’m starving, lady. Not eaten since the day before yesterday.’ He reverted to his whine. She ignored it.
‘I hope you don’t still expect oysters for breakfast,’ she commented sarcastically from the kitchen as she filled the kettle, remembering some of his more extravagant tastes. Her hands were shaking.
‘A crust will do, lady, just a crust.’ He appeared immediately behind her suddenly, and put his hands gently on her shoulders. ‘I suppose you want an explanation?’
‘I think I do rather.’ She gave a small laugh.
‘You could say I’d been down on my luck.’ He looked at her hopefully, then on second thoughts shook his head. ‘No, I know. It’s not me is it. Would you believe that I did it on purpose?’ He paused. ‘You’d never credit the things people put in their dustbins, Za-Za. Someone ought to write a monograph on it: The world’s great untapped source of wealth.’
‘I’m sure the dustmen tap it successfully,’ she commented acidly, slipping two slices of bread into the toaster. ‘Judging by the things they nail to the fronts of their vans.’
‘Teddies,’ Gerald said reflectively. ‘Your dustman here nails teddies to his van. I saw him as I came up the road. How anyone could bear to throw their teddy out I shall never know. It’s worse than homicide.’
‘Gerald! You never kept yours!’
‘I did!’ Her perched on the edge of the breakfast table to take the toast as it popped up, snatched his fingers away and blew on them hastily. ‘Didn’t you even search my trunks and the things I left?’
‘Of course not. They were private.’
Gerald stared at her. ‘You are truly a wonderful woman Za-Za. I wonder why I left you?’ He buttered the piece of toast thoughtfully. She was also, he noted, slimmer, taller, if that were possible, and overall a thousand times more stunning than he remembered her.
‘You couldn’t stand me, dear.’ She smiled. ‘It’s a shame because I really rather liked you.’
‘Liked?’ He raised an eyebrow.
‘Loved, then.’
‘Still in the past tense?’
She smiled. ‘Stop fishing Gerald and tell me what you’ve been up to.’
The black coffee had steadied her, and she sat down opposite him, elegantly crossing her legs, waiting for him to begin.
For a few minutes he ate in silence, giving every impression that he really hadn’t eaten for days, then he sat back with a sigh and reached for his own cup.
‘One morning on the way to office, I thought, Gerald, old chap, what does it all mean? You know, the way one does? I couldn’t find a convincing answer. So I thought, Right. If there’s no reason for doing it, don’t.’ He grinned and reached for the sugar.
‘There’s always the need for money, Gerald.’ She tried not to sound prim.
‘Money for what?’ You earn a damn good salary, so you don’t need it. I don’t need it. You had a house, I had a flat, did we need both, for God’s sake? Why should I risk a coronary for the sake of a subscription to a golf club full of bores and for the Inland Revenue?’
‘Gerald, that’s a very trite and short-sighted remark, if you don’t mind my saying so. And how,’ she flashed at him suddenly, ‘do you know how much I earn?’
‘I own your company, dear. No,’ he raised his hand as she put down her cup indignantly, about to speak. ‘No. You got your job on merit alone, and I am totally uninterested in policy. Now, as I was saying, I thought, Why don’t I drop out like all those delightful chaps one sees singing in the underground. The trouble is, I can’t sing. I expect you remember that. I can’t paint, or pot or woodcarve, to earn enough money to subsist, so I had to resort to begging. More coffee, please.’
She poured it for him without a word.
‘I told James to stop the car. I told him to take a month’s salary in lieu, drive the car home, lock it up, turn off the gas and the electricity in the flat, stick the keys back through the letter box – oh and empty the fridge. I thought of that. Then I called the office and said, “I’ll be away for a year or so,” and gave my solicitor a ring, about power of attorney and that sort of thing. I bought a large cream doughnut, simply oozing cholesterol, and a can of beer, put all my loose change in the hat of one of those pathetic young men you see sitting leaning against walls with their dogs beside them and started walking. Right then and there, in my city suit.’ He threw back his head and laughed. ‘I bet you didn’t recognise it when I came in.’
‘Did you enjoy yourself?’ Zara tried not to sound shocked or angry.
‘Marvellously.’ He reached for the breadknife, cut an enormous wedge of bread and began heaping butter onto it. ‘I’ve been all over the south of England and right down to Cornwall, to all the little off the road places one misses in a beastly car. I’ve stuck it for eight months.’
‘Why did you come back here then?’
‘For one thing I was hungry this morning. For another, I wanted to see you again.’
‘Gerald. How could you afford the stamp and the paper for that letter?’ She was suddenly suspicious.
He looked embarrassed for the first time. ‘Well, the trouble is Zara that I’ve begun earning money again. First it was only casual jobs: car cleaning, fruit picking, even potato lifting once – God! What a job that was. Then one night in a pub, I happened to recite one of the poems I’d been making up on the road as I walked along. They passed the hat round and I made about seven pounds fifty. A fortune! Well, I’ve gone on from there. Each town and village I visited after that I’d chat up the landlord and stick a notice in his pub saying I was going to give a recital. Then afterwards I’d pass round the old hat.’
‘Gerald, you’re not serious!’ Zara looked at him with real admiration.
‘Well, the truth is dear,’ he looked down at the cup, half embarrassed. ‘I think I need an agent or something. You see I want to have them published. I know it’s silly, but I’ve got ambitions for them. I’ve found out what life is all about, you see. For me, it’s poetry.’
‘And you’d like me to act for you?’
‘Would you?’ He looked up eagerly.
‘Of course.’
Zara enjoyed dressing her husband as a poet. She spent the morning buying him jeans and shirts and a rather expensive-looking leather jacket. She even debated whether he would wear beads or a necklace, or a thong around his neck with a bead on it, but decided finally against it. He had after all been in the habit of wearing a pinstripe suit.
She had left him before setting out on her spree, reciting his poems to her dictating machine. When she got back, her cleaning lady was standing open-mouthed at the drawing room door, listening.
‘It’s filth, Mrs Lennox, real filth,’ the woman complained, jumping guiltily when she saw her employer. ‘But it’s beautiful. I could listen for hours, so I could.’ She giggled skittishly.
Zara stood beside her and together they heard Gerald reciting. It was indeed beautiful.
After a moment he swung round, microphone in hand, and saw them. To Zara’s amazement he broke off abruptly, blushing. ‘I didn’t know there was anyone there,’ he murmured and then he laughed. ‘They’re not really for ladies’ ears.’
‘Nonsense. They’re damn good.’ Zara went in and reaching up planted a quick kiss on his cheek. ‘I’ll start putting them on the word processor for you this afternoon.’
They decided they would call him Noxel, which was Lennox inside out. No other name. It looked right in print, and would sound good, Zara thought, on the radio. She ignored his comment that it made him sound a little like a lavatory cleaner.
Gerald Lennox had been, they both agreed, a bore.
She took him round London, showing him off to her new, trendy friends, and she bathed in reflected glory as Gerald’s exquisitely metred adjectives and highly coloured phraseology assailed their ears. She had always suspected they cultivated her acquaintance for her money and contacts. Now she had produced someone who belonged to their world. More than belonged. He actually did things. Most of them, she now discovered, claimed themselves passive rather than active participants in the arts. Zara felt herself to be one-up at last and was very pleased with her eccentric, wandering poet.
Together they giggled over the raised eyebrows of the neighbours. It seemed no one recognised him.
Then Zara’s lover came back from two months in Cape Town. He let himself in half an hour before she was due home from the office and found Gerald sitting at her computer.
‘My dear chap,’ Gerald glanced up and then rose, his hand outstretched. ‘I knew you must exist, but she never admitted it, bless her.’ He grinned amicably.
The other’s mouth fell open, and he felt uncertainly for the nearest chair and sat down heavily. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t believe we’ve met?’
Gerald leaned back in his seat. ‘I’m Zara’s husband, actually. But not to worry –’ as the other man rose abruptly to his feet, Gerald lifted his hand to reassure him. ‘I’m off. I’ve been wanting to move on for some time now, but I didn’t like to leave her on her own. She’s been a brick these last few weeks.’
He shuffled his papers together and collected the pages he had been printing. ‘Give me ten minutes old chap. We’ll manage the turn-round before she gets home.’ He took the stairs two at a time.
The new arrival sat, looking rather stunned, for a moment. Then, a trifle wearily, he rose to his feet and went to pour himself a drink. When Zara came home he was in the bath with a large gin.
She saw the note from Gerald on the hall table and knew without reading it that he had gone. She considered for a moment and then breathed a deep sigh of relief. It had been an interesting interlude, but not one she had wanted prolonged. It spoiled her concentration at the office.
Moment of Truth (#ucb02431f-148f-514c-8134-1ff71355e2c9)
Steve and I had known each other since we were children, brought up in the same village, growing together, and at last, realising that we were in love, we became engaged on my eighteenth birthday. Then began our struggle to save enough money for a deposit on our own home. Steven didn’t want us to marry until, as he put it, he could support me properly, or at least put a roof over my head, and in spite of my pleas that it didn’t matter, our engagement stretched out for one and then two years. Steve was a mechanic at the local garage in the village and was hoping desperately to be offered a partnership by the owner, so the future looked good, if only we could save enough for that deposit. And then something happened which was to have a profound effect on our lives together. Steve’s great aunt Irene who had looked after him when he was a little boy suddenly had a stroke and they said that she would never be able to manage on her own again; even when she was strong enough to leave the hospital she would have to go into a home for elderly people where she could be properly looked after.
As soon as she was well enough to have visitors she called Steve and me to her bedside. She could hardly speak, and her poor withered hand lay paralysed on the sheet but she made it clear, with tears in her eyes, that her cottage was ours. It was to be a wedding present.
Six weeks later we were married. The cottage was tiny, but it was our own home at last and I adored it. The low oak-beamed parlour had two rocking chairs and a table and there was room for little else. The bedroom window opened out under the thatch and wisteria and honeysuckle climbed round it. I remember I leaned out of that window on the first morning after we moved in and took a deep breath of the fresh air and I could have cried for happiness.
I worked as a waitress at the local Tudor Tea Rooms before we married and I kept on my job. For one thing I enjoyed it; for another we were still saving all we could. The cottage needed modernising badly and we wanted to start a family of course, so it seemed sensible to work all the hours we could fit in, putting every penny we earned into the bank. Although we were both tired and strained more often than not, we stayed happy. Or I thought we did. But perhaps without our realising it, earning money had by now become for us both an end in itself, more important even than our love for each other.
The trouble started in the summer two years after we were married. We were always very busy at that time of year in the café, for hundreds of tourists crowded into our tiny Cotswold village to see its beauties and its famous manor house, and often I would come home too exhausted even to give Steve his supper before I tumbled into bed, falling asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow. I was much too tired to make love.
It was about then that Steve started working overtime in the evenings. ‘I might as well, for all I see of you,’ he said rather bitterly. ‘And besides, I can’t bear to see you so tired.’ And he had weighed my heavy blonde hair – the same colour as his almost – in his hands, and kissed me rather wistfully on the cheek. ‘If I work extra perhaps soon you can give up the waitressing altogether.’
I glanced up at him gratefully and tried not to feel guilty as I noticed, for the first time, that he too was tired, and his face pallid from lying all day under cars when everyone else in the village was deeply tanned from the summer sun.
And so it happened that we had hardly seen each other for the last three months or so at all. We were saving, yes; but without my realising it, our marriage was fading away.
I was feeling especially tired and depressed when one day, as I was serving at the front tables, the ones which looked out of the mullioned windows across the green, a young man came in. He was of middle height, not terribly good-looking, rather swarthy, but he had the most incredible eyes. Light grey, so light they were like silver streaks in his tanned face. He beckoned me over.
‘What’s your name, sweetheart?’ he asked in an American accent.
I smiled at him easily, whisking crumbs off the table with my cloth. I was used to this.
‘I’m Linda,’ I smiled. ‘What can I get you, sir?’
‘Tea. An English tea with cream cakes and scones please, Linda my love, and later perhaps you can show me the town?’
‘Sorry sir, my husband will be expecting me home,’ I answered with a practised smile. I turned to get his order.
Usually I dismissed passes like this man’s without another thought, but something about his eyes, and the way his face fell when his gaze rested on the wedding ring which I waved under his nose, tugged at my heart.
When I took the tray to his table I asked casually, ‘You all on your own then?’
