William Trevor - After Rain

At ten, when the cleaning woman comes, Mrs. Lethwes goes out to shop. She parks her small, white Peugeot in the Waitrose car park, and in a leisurely manner gathers vegetables and fruit, and tins and jars, pork chops for this evening, vermouth and Gordon’s gin, Edam, and Normandy butter because she has noticed the butter is getting low, Comfort and the cereal her husband favours, the one called Common Sense. Afterwards, with everything in the boot, she makes her way to the Trompe-L’Oeil for coffee. Her make-up is in place, her hair drawn up, the way she has taken to wearing it lately. She smiles at people she knows by sight, the waitress and other women who are having coffee, at the cashier when she pays her bill. There is some conversation, about the weather.

In her garden, later, the sound of the Hoover reaches her from the open windows of the house as the cleaning woman, Marietta, moves from room to room. The day is warm, Mrs. Lethwes’s legs are bare, her blue dress light on her body, her Italian sandals comfortable yet elegant. Marietta claims to be Italian also, having had an Italian mother, but her voice and manner are Cockney and Mrs. Lethwes doubts that she has ever been in Italy, even though she regularly gives the impression that she knows Venice well.

Mrs. Lethwes likes to be occupied when Marietta comes. When it’s fine she finds something to do in the garden, and when the weather doesn’t permit that she lingers for longer in the Trompe-L’ Oeil and there’s the pretence of letter-writing or tidying drawers. She likes to keep a closed door between herself and Marietta, to avoid as best she can the latest about Marietta’s daughter Ange, and Liam, whom Ange has been contemplating marriage with for almost five years, and the latest about the people in the house next door, who keep Alsatians.

In the garden Mrs. Lethwes weeds a flowerbed, wishing that Marietta didn’t have to come to the house three times a week, but knowing that of course she must. She hopes the little heart-leafed things she’s clearing from among the delphiniums are not the germination of seeds that Mr. Yatt has sown, a misfortune that occurred last year with his Welsh poppies. Unlike Marietta, Mr. Yatt is dour and rarely speaks, but he has a way of slowly raising his head and staring, which Mrs. Lethwes finds disconcerting. When he’s in the garden - Mondays only, all day - she keeps out of it herself.

Not Vivaldi now, perhaps a Telemann minuet, run Mrs. Lethwes’s thoughts in her garden. Once, curious about the music a flautist plays, she read the information that accompanied half a dozen compact discs in a music shop. She didn’t buy the discs but, curious again, she borrowed some from the music section of the library and played them all one morning. Thirty-six, or just a little younger, she sees Elspeth as, unmarried of course and longing to bear the child of the man she loves: Mrs. Lethwes is certain of that, since she has experienced this same longing herself. In the flat she imagines, there’s a smell of freshly made coffee. The fragile fingers cease their movement. The instrument is laid aside, the coffee poured.

It was in France, in the Hotel St-Georges during their September holiday seven years ago, that Mrs. Lethwes found out about her husband’s other woman. There was a letter, round feminine handwriting on an air-mail envelope, an English stamp: she knew at once. The letter had been placed in someone else’s key-box by mistake, and was later handed to her with a palaver of apologies when her husband was swimming in the Mediterranean. ‘Ah, merci,’ she thanked the smooth-haired girl receptionist and said the error didn’t matter in the very least. She knew at once: the instinct of a barren wife, she afterwards called it to herself. So this was why he made a point of being down before her every morning, why he had always done so during their September holiday in France; she’d never wondered about it before. On the terrace she examined the post-mark. It was indecipherable, but again the handwriting told a lot, and only a woman with whom a man had an association would write to him on holiday. From the letter itself, which she read and then destroyed, she learned all there was otherwise to know.

There are too many of the heart-leafed plants, and when she looks in other areas of the border and in other beds she finds they’re not in evidence there. Clearly, it’s the tragedy of the Welsh poppies all over again. Mrs. Lethwes begins to put back what she has taken out, knowing as she does so that this isn’t going to work.

‘ “Silly girl,” I said, straight to her face. “Silly girl, Ange, no way you’re not.” ‘

Marietta has established herself at the kitchen table, her shapeless bulk straining the seams of a pink overall, her feet temporarily removed from the carpet slippers she brings with her because they’re comfortable to work in.

‘No, not for me, thanks,’ Mrs. Lethwes says, which is what she always says when she is offered instant coffee at midday. Real coffee doesn’t agree with Marietta, never has. Toxic in Marietta’s view.

‘All she give’s a giggle. That’s Ange all over, that. Always has been.’

This woman has watched Ange’s puppy-fat go, has seen her through childhood illnesses. And Bernardo, too. This woman could have had a dozen children, borne them and nursed them, loved them and been loved herself. ‘Well, I drew a halt at two, dear. Drew the line, know what I mean? He said have another go, but I couldn’t agree.’

Five goes, Mrs. Lethwes has had herself: five failures, in bed for every day the third and fourth time, told she mustn’t try again, but she did. The same age she was then as she imagines her husband’s other woman to be: thirty-six when she finally accepted she was a childless wife.

‘Decent a bloke as ever walked a street is little Liam, but Ange don’t see it. One day she’ll look up and he’ll be gone and away. Talking to a wall you are.’

‘Is Ange in love, though?’

‘Call it how you like, dear. Mention it to Ange and all she give’s a giggle. Well, Liam’s small. A little fellow, but then where’s the harm in small?’

Washing traces of soil from her hands at the sink, Mrs. Lethwes says there is no harm in a person being small. Hardly five foot, she has many times heard Liam is. But strong as a horse.

‘I said it to her straight, dear. Wait for some bruiser and you’ll build your life on regrets. No good to no one, regrets.’

‘No good at all.’

Of course was what she’d thought on the terrace of the Hotel St-Georges: a childless marriage was a disappointment for any man. She’d failed him, although naturally it had never been said; he wasn’t in the least like that. But she had failed and had compounded her failure by turning away from talk of adoption. She had no feeling for the idea; she wasn’t the kind to take on other people’s kids. Their own particular children were the children she wanted, an expression of their love, an expression of their marriage: more and more, she’d got that into her head. When the letter arrived at the Hotel St-Georges she’d been reconciled for years to her barren state; they lived with it, or so she thought. The letter changed everything. The letter frightened her; she should have known.

‘We need the window-cleaners one of them days,’ Marietta says, dipping a biscuit into her coffee. ‘Shocking, the upstairs panes is.’

‘I’ll ring them.’

‘Didn’t mind me mentioning it, dear? Only with the build-up it works out twice the price. No saving really.’

‘Actually, I forget. I wasn’t trying to — ‘

‘Best done regular I always say.’

‘I’ll ring them this afternoon.’

Mrs. Lethwes said nothing in the Hotel St-Georges and she hasn’t since. He doesn’t know she knows; she hopes that nothing ever shows. She sat for an hour on the terrace of the hotel, working it out. Say something, she thought, and as soon as she does it’ll be in the open. The next thing is he’ll be putting it gently to her that nothing is as it should be. Gently because he always has been gentle, especially about her barren state; sorry for her, dutiful in their plight, tied to her. He’d have had an Eastern child, any little slit-eyed thing, but when she hadn’t been able to see it he’d been good about that too.