William Trevor: After Rain

‘Hullo,’ her employer said, entering the shop with a Regency commode and bringing with him the raw scent of the stuff he dabbed on his underarms, and a whiff of beer.

‘Handsome,’ Margy remarked, referring to the commode.

It was Francesca who telephoned Sebastian. ‘A voice from the past,’ she said and he knew immediately, answering her by name. He was pleased she’d rung, he said, and all the old telephone inflections, so familiar once, registered again as their conversation progressed. ‘Margy?’ he repeated when Francesca suggested lunch for three. He sounded disappointed, but Francesca hardly noticed that, caught up with so much else, wondering how in fact it would affect everything if, somehow or other, Sebastian and Margy hit it off now, as she and Sebastian had in the past. She knew Sebastian hadn’t married. He had been at her wedding; she would have been at his, their relationship transformed on both sides then. Like Margy, Francesca imagined, Sebastian had freewheeled through the time that had passed since. At her wedding she had guessed they would lose touch, and in turn he had probably guessed that that was, sensibly, what she wanted. Sebastian, who had never honoured much, honoured that. When marriage occurs, the past clams up, lines are drawn beneath a sub-total.

‘Well, well, well,’ he murmured at La Trota, embracing Margy first and then Francesca. There were flecks of grey in his fair hair; his complexion was a little ruddier. But his lazy eyes were touched with the humour that both women remembered, and his big hands seemed gentle on the table.

‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ Sebastian said, choosing Francesca to say it to.

‘Oh heavens, I’ve said the wrong thing!’ a woman exclaimed in horror at a party, eyes briefly closed, a half-stifled breath drawn in.

‘No, not at all,’ Philip said.

‘It’s just that — ’

‘We see Sebastian quite often, actually’

He wondered why he lied, and realized then that he was saving face. He had been smiling when the woman first mentioned Sebastian, when she’d asked how he was these days. Almost at once the woman had known she was saying the wrong thing, her expression adding more and more as she stumbled on, endeavouring to muddle with further words her original statement about trying unsuccessfully to catch Francesca’s and Sebastian’s attention in Wigmore Street.

‘So very nice,’ the woman floundered, hot-faced. ‘Sebastian.’

A mass of odds and ends gathered in Philip’s mind. ‘The number of this taxi is 22003,’ he had said after he’d kissed Francesca in it. Their first embrace, and he had read out the number from the enamel disc on the back of the driver’s seat, and neither of them had since forgotten it. The first present Francesca gave him was a book about wine which to this day he wouldn’t lend to people.

No one was as honest as Francesca, Philip reflected as the woman blundered on: it was impossible to accept that she had told lies, even through reticence. Yet now there were — as well — the odds and ends of the warm summer that had just passed, all suddenly transformed. Dates and the order of events glimmered in Philip’s brain; he was good at speedy calculation and accurately recalling. Excuses, and explanations, seemed elaborate in the bare light of the hindsight that was forced upon him. A note falling to the floor had been too hastily retrieved. There were headaches and cancellations and apologies. There’d been a difference in Francesca that hadn’t at the time seemed great but seemed great now.

‘Yes, Sebastian’s very nice,’ Philip said.

‘It’s over,’ Francesca said in their bedroom. ‘It’s been over for weeks, as a matter of fact.’

Still dressed, sitting on the edge of their bed, Francesca was gazing at the earrings she’d just taken off, two drops of amber in the palm of her hand. Very slowly she made a pattern of them, moving them on her palm with the forefinger of her other hand. In their bedroom the light was dim, coming only from a bedside lamp. Francesca was in the shadows.

‘It doesn’t make much difference that it’s over,’ Philip said. ‘That’s not the point.’

‘I know.’

‘You’ve never told lies before.’

‘Yes, I know. I hated it.’

Even while it was happening, she had sometimes thought it wasn’t. And for the last few lonely weeks it had felt like madness, as indeed it had been. Love was madness of a kind, Margy had said once, years ago, and Francesca at that time hadn’t understood: being fond of Sebastian in the past, and loving Philip, had never been touched by anything like that. Her recent inexplicable aberration felt as if she had taken time off from being herself, and now was back again where she belonged, not understanding, as bouts of madness are never understood.

‘That’s hardly an explanation,’ her husband said when she endeavoured to relate some of this.

‘No, I know it isn’t. I would have told you about it quite soon; I couldn’t not tell you.’

‘I didn’t even notice I wasn’t loved.’

‘You are loved, Philip. I ended it. And besides, it wasn’t much.’

A silence grew between them. ‘I love you,’ Sebastian had said no longer ago than last June, and in July and in August and September also. And she had loved him too. More than she loved anyone else, more than she loved her children: that thought had been there. Yet now she could say it wasn’t much.

As though he guessed some part of this, Philip said: ‘I’m dull compared to him. I’m grey and dull.’

‘No.’

‘I mooch about the garden, I mooch about on golf courses. You’ve watched me becoming greyer in middle age. You don’t want to share our middle age.’

‘I never think things like that. Never, Philip.’

‘No one respects a cuckold.’

Francesca did not reply. She was asked if she wanted a divorce. She shook her head. Philip said:

‘One day in the summer you and Margy were talking about a key when I came in, and you stopped and said, “Have a drink, darling?” I remember now. Odd, how stuff’s dredged up. The key to Margy’s flat, I think?’

Francesca stood up. She placed her amber earrings in the drawer of their bedside table and slowly began to undress. Philip, standing by the door, said he had always trusted her, which he had said already.

‘I’m sorry I hurt you, Philip.’ Tiredly, she dropped into a cliche, saying that Sebastian had been banished as a ghost may be, that at last she had got him out of her system. But what she said had little relevance, and mattered so slightly that it was hardly heard. What was there between them were the weekends Philip had been in charge of the children because Francesca needed a rest and had gone, with Margy, to some seaside place where Margy was looking after a house for people who were abroad. And the evenings she helped to paint Margy’s flat. And the mornings that were free after she gave up helping in the Little Acorn Nursery School. Yes, that key had been Margy’s, Francesca said. Left for her under a stone at the foot of a hydrangea bush in Pimlico, in a block of flats’ communal garden: she didn’t add that. Found there with a frisson of excitement: nor that, either.

‘I’m ashamed because I hurt you,’ she said instead. ‘I’m ashamed because I was selfish and a fool.’

‘You should have married him in the first place.’

‘It was you I wanted to marry, Philip.’

Francesca put on her nightdress, folded her underclothes, and draped her tights over the back of a chair. She sat for a moment in front of her dressing-table looking-glass, rubbing cold cream into her face, stroking away the moisture of tears.

‘You have every right to turn me out,’ she said, calmly now. ‘You have every right to have the children to yourself.’