William Trevor: After Rain

Francesca came in to help, and to open wine. Chatting about other matters, she laid out blue tweed mats on the Formica surface of the table, and forks and other cutlery and glasses. It wasn’t so much Philip, Margy thought; had he been married to someone else, she was sure she wouldn’t have minded him so. It was the marriage itself: her friend’s marriage astonished her.

Every so often Margy and Francesca had lunch at a local bistro called La Trota. It was an elegant rendezvous, though inexpensive and limited in that it offered only fish and a few Italian cheeses. Small and bright and always bustling, its decorative tone was set by a prevalence of aluminium and glass, and matt white surfaces. Its walls were white also, its floor colourfully tiled — a crustacea pattern that was repeated on the surface of the bar. Two waitresses — one from Sicily, the other from Salerno — served at the tables. Usually, Francesca and Margy had Dover sole and salad, and a bottle of Gavi.

La Trota was in Barnes, not far from Bygone Antiques, where Margy was currently employed. In the mornings Francesca helped in the nearby Little Acorn Nursery School, which both Jason and Ben had attended in the past. Margy worked in Bygone Antiques because she was, ‘for the time being’ as she put it, involved with its proprietor, who was, as she put it also, ‘wearily married’.

On the Tuesday after Philip’s discovery of the concrete in his golf-bag they lunched outside, at one of La Trota’s three pavement tables, the June day being warm and sunny Two months ago, when Margy had begun her stint at Bygone Antiques, Francesca was delighted because it meant they would be able to see more of one another: Margy lived some distance away, over the river, in Pimlico.

‘He was livid of course,’ Francesca reported. ‘I mean, they said it was a joke.’

Margy laughed.

‘I mean, how could it be a joke? And how could it be a joke to say Miss Martindale’s mother was dead?’

‘Did Mrs. Sleet’s headscarf ever turn up ?’

‘You don’t think they stole Mrs. Sleet’s headscarf?’

‘What I think is you’re lucky to have lively children. Imagine if they never left the straight and narrow.’

‘How lovely it would be!’

Francesca told of the quarrel that had followed the discovery of the golf-bag, the worst quarrel of her marriage, she said. She had naturally been blamed because it was clear from what had occurred that the boys had been alone in the house when they shouldn’t have been. Philip wanted to know how this had happened, his court-room manner sharpening his questioning and his argument. How long had his children been latchkey children, and for what reason were they so?

‘I wish I’d had girls,’ Francesca complained pettishly. ‘I often think that now.’

Their Dover soles arrived. ‘Isn’t no help,’ the Sicilian waitress muttered crossly as she placed the plates in front of them. ‘Every day we say too many tables. Twice times, maybe hundred times. Every day they promise. Next day the same.’

‘Ridiculous.’ Margy smiled sympathetically at the plump Sicilian girl. ‘Poor Francesca,’ she sympathized with her friend, taking a piece of lettuce in her fingers.

But Francesca, still lost in the detail of the rumpus there had been, hardly heard. An hour at the very least, Philip was arguing all over again; possibly two hours they must have been on their own. It was absurd to spend all morning looking after children in a nursery school and all afternoon neglecting your own. That Jason and Ben had been sent back early that day, that she had been informed of this beforehand and had forgotten, that she would naturally have been there had she remembered: all this was mere verbiage apparently, not worth listening to, much less considering. Mrs. Sleet left the house at one o’clock on the dot, and Francesca was almost always back by three, long before the boys returned. Jason and Ben were not latchkey children; she had made a mistake on a particular day; she had forgotten; she was sorry.

If you’re asked to do anything,’ had been the final shaft, ‘it’s to see to the children, Francesca. You have all the help in the house you ask for. I don’t believe you want for much.’ The matter of Andy Konig’s video had been brought up, and Jason’s brazen insistence at the time that it was for Social Studies. Andy Konig’s video wouldn’t have been discovered if it hadn’t become stuck in the video-player, repeating an endless sequence of a woman undressing in a doctor’s surgery. ‘You didn’t even look to see what was on it,’ had been the accusation, repeated now, which of course was true. It was over, all this was followed by; they would forget it; he’d drive to the Mortlake tip with the golf-bag, there’d be no television for thirty days, no sweets, cake or biscuits. ‘I would ask you to honour that, Francesca.’ As the rumpus subsided, she had sniffed back the last of her tears, not replying.

‘Oh Lord!’ she cried in frustration at La Trota. ‘Oh Lord, the guilt!’

Cheering her friend up, Margy insisted that they change the subject. She recounted an episode that morning in the antique shop, a woman she knew quite well, titled actually, slipping a Crown Derby piece into a shopping bag. She touched upon her love affair with the shop’s proprietor, which was not going well. One of these days they should look up Sebastian, she idly suggested. ‘It’s time I settled down,’ she murmured over their cappuccinos.

‘I’m not sure that Sebastian…’ Francesca began, her concentration still lingering on the domestic upset.

‘I often wonder about Sebastian,’ Margy said.

Afterwards, in the antique shop, it was cool among the polished furniture, the sofa-tables and revolving libraries, the carved pew ends and sewing cabinets. The collection of early Victorian wall clocks — the speciality of the wearily married proprietor — ticked gracefully; occupying most of the window space, the figure of Christ on a donkey cast shadows that were distorted by the surfaces they reached. A couple in summer clothes, whom Margy had earlier noticed in La Trota, whispered among these offerings. A man with someone else’s wife, a wife with someone else’s husband: Margy could tell at once. ‘Of course,’ she’d said when they asked if they might look around, knowing that they wouldn’t buy anything: people in such circumstances rarely did. ‘Oh, isn’t that pretty!’ the girl whispered now, taken with a framed pot-lid - an 1868 rifle contest in Wimbledon, colourfully depicted.

‘Forty-five pounds I think,’ Margy replied when she was asked the price, and went away to consult the price book. One day, she believed, Francesca would pay cruelly for her passing error of judgement in marrying the man she had. Hearing about the fuss over the golf-bag, she had felt that instinct justified: the marriage would go from bad to worse, from fusses and quarrels over two little boys’ obstreperousness to fusses and quarrels about everything else, a mound of pettiness accumulating, respect all gone and taking with it what once had seemed like love. Too often Margy had heard from married men the kind of bitter talk that was the evidence of this, and had known she would have heard still worse from the wives they spoke of. Yet just as often, she fairly admitted, people made a go of it. They rarely said so because of course that wasn’t interesting, and sometimes what was making a go of it one day was later, in the divorce courts, called tedium.

‘Look in again,’ she invited the summery couple as they left without the pot-lid.

‘Thanks a lot,’ the man said, and the girl put her head on one side, a way of indicating, possibly, that she was grateful also.

Margy had mentioned Sebastian at lunch, not because she wished to look him up on her own account but because it occurred to her that Sebastian was just the person to jolly Francesca out of her gloom. Sebastian was given to easy humour and exuded an agreeableness that was pleasant to be exposed to. Since he had once, years ago, wanted to marry Francesca, Margy often imagined what her friend’s household would have been like with Sebastian there instead.