Caroline Graham: Written in Blood

Honoria hesitated, not from nervousness but from an inbred aversion to tangling with any situation not proceeding along smoothly conventional lines. She also had a distaste verging on abhorrence for minding anyone’s business but her own.

She decided to open the door just a chink to see if she could discover precisely what was going on. Unfortunately the door creaked. Loudly. Laura, who was sitting at the table, her head resting on her arms, weeping, looked up. The two women stared at each other. It was impossible for Honoria to withdraw.

Laura must have been crying, surely, Honoria thought, for some hours. She was so used to seeing the other woman’s skilfully made-up face regarding the world with cool detachment that she hardly recognised her. Eyes so swollen as to be almost invisible, scarlet puffy cheeks, damp hair hanging any-old-how. And still in her dressing gown.

Rigid with mortified disapproval, Honoria struggled towards speech, for it was plainly impossible to say ‘excuse me’ and leave. That would have looked appallingly heartless and, although Honoria was appallingly heartless, she had no wish to bandy the fact between all and sundry. Really, she thought crossly, if people choose to behave in such a loose manner they might at least have the decency to do so behind locked doors.

‘My dear,’ she said, and the endearment sat as awkwardly in her mouth as an ill-fitting tooth, ‘what on earth is the matter?’

After a long pause Laura gave the reply people nearly always do in such circumstances. ‘Nothing.’

Strongly tempted to reply ‘Well, that’s all right then’ and leave, Honoria descended two glossy stone steps and drew a wheelback chair out over the blue slate tiles. She sat down, saying, ‘Is there anything I can do?’

Of all the bloody awful rotten luck. Laura cursed herself for forgetting to put the Yale back down after signing for a registered package. Of all the bloody awful rotten people to walk in. Laura had looked up only briefly, but once had been enough. Honoria’s prurient disengagement and passionate wish to be elsewhere were unmistakable.

‘No, honestly.’ She took a tissue from a nearly empty box, scrubbed her cheeks, blew her nose and dropped the soggy ball into a waste basket. ‘I get like this sometimes.’

‘Oh.’

‘I guess everyone does.’

Honoria stared in disbelief. She had been brought up under the strict understanding that a lady never displayed her emotions. Honoria had never cried, not even when her beloved Rafe had died and she had been split asunder with the pain of it. Not then or at the funeral or at any time afterwards.

‘Shall I make you some tea?’

‘Tea?’ God, she’d be here for the duration. Making it, letting it stand, pouring it out. Milk and sugar. Bloody biscuits. Go away, you horrible old woman. Just go away.

‘That’s very kind.’

Honoria filled the kettle and got milk, still in its carton, from the fridge. The teapot, a pretty piece of Rockingham covered with blue flowers was, to her relief, sitting on the side. She hated the idea of opening cupboards. Seeming to pry. Which meant doing without a milk jug. The silver-gilt caddie held Earl Grey bags.

‘Do you have bis—’

‘No.’ Laura had stopped crying but her face remained crumpled, this time with incipient crossness. ‘I eat them all so don’t keep them in the house.’

‘I see.’ Honoria was unsurprised at this further example of undisciplined dishevelment. ‘What a charming pot,’ she added, whilst waiting for the tea to brew. ‘You have such lovely things. I suppose it’s being in trade.’

Laura blew her nose again, this time more loudly, putting the tissue in the pocket of her dressing gown. Actually when the drink came she was glad of it, for she had taken nothing since after dinner the previous evening.

What was it, she wondered, about the making and proffering of this, the English panacea? No matter how appalling the occasion - a devastating accident, incipient bankruptcy or news of bereavement - the shell-shocked survivors were offered a cup of tea. And after all, thought Laura, aren’t I newly bereaved? Deprived forever of the hope that once sprang eternal.

She sipped the fragrant, steaming liquid. The deceit of him. The deceit . Such rectitude. The lonely widower nursing his loss in pious and dignified silence. Refusing all comfort. His whole life a lie. Laura crashed her cup down into the saucer.

Honoria, sitting bolt upright and already gripping her handbag very firmly, now held it up before her in the manner of a shield. Anxious both to justify her presence and to get away she reminded Laura about the catalogue, concluding, ‘Of course it doesn’t matter now. I can come back again.’

‘Oh! Don’t do that.’ Laura sprang up with uncomplimentary speed. ‘I’m sure I know just where they are.’

She ran upstairs to her second bedroom, which doubled as an office, and started sorting through her in-tray. The catalogue wasn’t there. Or in the desk. Or in the Garden (Design) file. About to check her briefcase she remembered that she had been flipping through the thing the previous evening in the sitting room. And that was where she found it, in the magazine rack.

‘I’ve ticked the ones I thought might be suitable.’ Laura re-entered the kitchen. ‘There’s no hurry to bring it back. The sale isn’t for six weeks.’ She paused. ‘Honoria?’

Honoria jerked her head round suddenly as if she had been dreaming. She rose and took the catalogue without looking at Laura. Her lips, always of a censorious set, seemed even more rigidly clamped than usual. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes burned with a cold puritanical fire. Laura was glad when the front door closed behind her. And it wasn’t even as if anything would come of it. This wasn’t the first time such an idea had been mooted. Honoria was far too mean to spend five pounds, let alone five hundred.

It was when she was once more sitting at the table wondering whether to start crying again or make some fresh tea that she noticed the photograph. About half an hour before Honoria arrived Laura had removed it from its silver frame beside her bed and dropped it in the waste basket. Since then a certain amount of tear-soaked Kleenex had gone the same way but the picture was not quite concealed. Gerald’s face was still visible, smiling through the sog.

Had Honoria seen it? Seen it and filled in the missing links, crossing the ‘t’ in romantic and dotting the ‘i’ in despair. Laura raged at her own carelessness in forgetting the picture was in there. At Honoria for barging in. And at Gerald for being Gerald. Impelled by a mixture of anger and disgust she tipped the contents of the basket into the Raeburn and was immediately and bitterly sorry.

Rex was on the point of starting work. He had thoroughly masticated some bran and prunes, trotted his dog three times round the houses, taken fifty deep breaths in front of an open window and washed his hands. This last was of vital importance. Rex had seen a television interview once with a famous screenwriter during which the man had expressed great reverence for his hands, repeatedly referring to them as ‘the tools of his trade’. They were insured for huge amounts of money, ‘like the feet of Fred Astaire’, and the screenwriter washed them thoroughly each morning, using only the finest triple-milled honey and glycerine soap. After being carefully rinsed in spring water they would be patted dry with a virginally white, soft, fluffy towel kept pristine until that very moment beneath a sealed wrapper. Only then did the celebrated inkslinger even think of approaching his state-of-the-art computer.

Rex had been terribly impressed by the man’s faith in this ritual and straight away claimed it for his own. He knew the importance of routine. All the How To Succeed As A Writer manuals, of which he had practically every one extant, stressed it. Rex started work at eleven a.m. precisely. Not a minute later, not a minute earlier. There was a transistor on his desk to make sure he got it right. As the pips started he picked up his pen. By the time they finished he had written his first sentence. So vital was this procedure that if anything happened to disrupt it he never really recovered. He completed his two thousand words of course (writers write), but nevertheless felt peculiarly out of sync all day.