‘Quite innocent.’ I didn’t bother to defend Terry, although I didn’t think the accusation true. I suppose I didn’t care.
Candida was staring at the fire. By this time I knew the process of what I had to put these people through. I’d arrive and suddenly the woman of the week would be plunged back into a world of four decades ago, which she hadn’t thought about in ages. ‘Golly, we had some funny times that year. Do you remember Dagmar’s dance?
‘Who could forget?’
‘When Damian gatecrashed and had a fight with-’ She put her hand to her mouth. She’d suddenly remembered the identity of Damian’s opponent. Our host shook out the pages of his magazine sharply.
‘I remember it well,’ I said. We shared the moment and tried not to look at the bump on the bridge of Andrew’s nose.
Candida sighed. ‘The main thing I recall is just how young we were. How little we knew of what was coming.’
‘I think we were great,’ I said. Which she took no exception to and smiled. ‘What’s your son doing now?’
‘I have two sons and a daughter, in fact.’ She flashed me a slightly defensive glance. ‘But I know you mean Archie.’ Perhaps sensing I meant her no ill, she relaxed. ‘He’s got his own property company. He’s frightfully rich and successful.’
Not half as rich and successful as he’s going to be, I thought. ‘Is he married?’
‘Absolutely. He’s got a wife called Agnes and two kids, the shopaholic daughter, who’s ten, and a son of six. Funnily enough, Agnes’s mother is a girl you used to hang about with, Minna Bunting. She married a chap called Havelock, who was in the army. Do you remember her?’
‘Very well.’
She pulled a slight face. ‘That’s the thing. I don’t. I never really knew her at the time, but of course now we pretend we were terrific friends and we’ve almost convinced each other it’s true.’
Was it comforting or smothering, this constant interlocking of the old patterns? Revolutions in morality might flare up, Socialism in all its indignant fury might come and go, but still the same faces, the same families, the same relationships, are endlessly repeated. ‘I like the name Agnes,’ I said.
‘So do I. Quite,’ she added, telling me more of what she thought of her daughter-in-law than she intended.
‘Was it very hard with Archie?’
Candida was silent for a moment. She paid me the compliment of not pretending she didn’t know what I was asking. ‘It was easier in a way than it would have been for some. Both my parents were dead and so was my grandmother by then. Just. I hated my stepmother and couldn’t have given a monkey’s tiddly what she thought about anything. I was terribly broke, of course. My stepmother wouldn’t give me a penny and by the end she didn’t have much to give, but at least I didn’t have to feel I was letting everyone down. Actually, Aunt Roo behaved very well, given that she thought I was out of my mind.’
‘But?’
‘Same as the earlier answer. My parents were dead and I hated my stepmother. I had no close family, no backup, beyond Aunt Roo and Serena, and they thought I’d gone mad. So did my friends, to be honest, but they were a little bit more circumspect about showing it.’
‘I know you married in the end.’
‘I did. A chap called Harry Stanforth. Did you ever come across him?’
‘His name seems familiar, since I first heard it, so maybe I did, but if so I can’t remember where. I was terribly sorry to hear what happened.’
‘Yes.’ She gave one of those twitchy smiles of bleak acceptance. ‘It is difficult when nothing’s ever found. I always used to feel for mothers of sons killed in foreign wars, who never got a body back to bury, and now I know just what it’s like. I don’t know why exactly, but you need a proper funeral with something there, something more than a photograph, which is what I had, in order to feel it really is the end.’
‘The Americans call it “closure.”
‘Well, I wouldn’t, but I do know what they mean. You keep imagining that he’s in a coma somewhere or struggling with amnesia, or he escaped and had a nervous breakdown in Waikiki. Of course, you tell yourself to accept it, not to believe anything different, but you can’t help it. Every time the doorbell goes unexpectedly, or the telephone rings very late at night…’ she smiled gently at her own foolishness. ‘You do get over it in the end.’
‘Awful.’
‘But you mustn’t think I’m a sad person. Please don’t.’ Candida’s tone had changed and she was looking straight at my eyes. I could see that she was keen to convince me, and I think she was telling the truth. I suppose it was somehow a case of being loyal to his memory. ‘I’m not at all sad. Really. I was sad before I met Harry, and trapped at the end of a cul-de-sac with a boy half my family felt uncomfortable with. I know you all thought me ridiculous in those days.’
‘Not ridiculous.’
‘Ridiculous. A loud, red-faced bed-hopper who was embarrassing to have around.’ This was all true so I didn’t contradict her, but as with almost all of the women I had visited I had that revelation of how much better we would have got on forty years before if we had only known each other’s true natures. Candida shrugged off these memories with happier ones. ‘Then Harry arrived one day and just saved me. He saved us. I don’t know to this day what he saw in me, but we never had an unhappy hour.’
‘He loved you.’ Funnily enough I meant this. I could sort of begin to see what he had loved in her now, which came as something of a surprise.
She nodded, her eyes starting to glisten. ‘I think he did. God knows why. And he took us both on. He adopted Archie, you know, completely legally, and then we had two more, and when he…’ I could see that despite her strictures her eyes were filling, and so were mine. ‘When he died it turned out he’d left some money equally to the three of them. Just split three ways. He made no distinction. And that meant so much to Archie. So very much. Did you know that all their mobiles worked, when they were trapped in the tower?’
