I tried to understand. But I seemed to see only a grey ghostly marriage, a kind of deadly, intellectual middle-aged companionship stretching back down the years. There was nothing there, I thought, that should be preserved. It would be so different for us, I thought, and I clung the more desperately. ‘I cannot live without you,’ I said, believing that I could not.
Our dilemma, Allan’s agony, was resolved by Katherine finding out. There was no drama, no scenes. During the next few months I never knew what passed between them. I dared not ask. I felt like a child whose parents are gravely discussing in the next room portents beyond its comprehension. But presently Katherine went unobtrusively back to Canada without Allan …
Allan shut up the house in Hampstead, and talked of selling it. We neither of us wanted to live there. Immediately after our marriage we came up to this cottage in the Western Highlands which we rented through an advertisement in the Times. That year Scotland had one of its rare perfect summers. We bathed and fished, and the long halcyon days passed over us with scarcely a break in the weather. I was blissfully happy. Free from the conflicts and indecisions of the past months, we turned again to each other, discovering new releases, a new and deepening absorption. Our cottage lay by the shore in a curve of the hills, and whenever I remember that summer it seems as if the falling tides of the Atlantic were always in our ears, and as if the white sands were always warm under our bare feet.
But again, it could not last. One scorching day in early September I came round the cottage at lunch-time, carrying a pot-roast over to the table under our rowan-tree. I found Allan sitting staring down at an open airmail letter that the postman had just delivered. He looked up as I put the pot-roast down. His face was dazed, and his hands were shaking.
‘Katherine is dead,’ he said incredulously. ‘Dead … This letter’s from her sister in Toronto … She says –’ and he stared again at the letter as though they were lying words, ‘she says – heart failure. Very peacefully, she says.’
His eyes went past mine to the open sea. Then he got up and went into the house, while I – I stayed, pleating the gingham cloth between my fingers. Once more I felt like the child who had inadvertently witnessed a parent’s distress – shocked yes, but horribly embarrassed. Then I followed Allan into the cottage, and I put my arms round him. All that day I watched over him in my heart as he moved about the place. But we did not mention Katherine – nor the next day – and, although I waited for Allan to speak, her name never passed our lips during the next three weeks.
Three weeks later to the day, among other letters forwarded from London by the Post Office, arrived the telephone bill for the Hampstead house – the second demand. We had forgotten about the first.
‘Damn,’ said Allan – we were once again eating our lunch in the garden – ‘damn, I ought to have had the thing disconnected before we ever left London.’
I picked up the envelope and looked at the date of forwarding. ‘They’ll probably have cut you off themselves by now,’ I said. But Allan was already crossing the grass to collect the pudding from the kitchen oven. ‘Go in by the hall,’ I called after him. ‘You can find out if it’s still connected by ringing the number. If you hear it ringing away at the London end you’ll know it’s still on.’
And I lay back in my deck-chair, staring up at the scarlet rowan-berries against the sky and thinking that Allan was beginning to hump his shoulders like an old man, and that his skin looked somehow as if the sea-salt were drying it out …
‘Well?’ I said. ‘Still connected?’ Perhaps I invented the slight pause before Allan carefully set down the apple-pie, and replied, ‘Yes – still connected.’
That evening I went up to bed alone, because Allan said he wanted to trim the lamps in the kitchen. I was sitting in the window in the late Highland dusk, brushing my hair and looking out over the sea, when I heard a light tinkle in the hall below. I turned my head. But the house lay silent. I went over to the door.
‘Hampstead 96843.’ Allan’s voice – low – strained – came up the stairs.
There was a long silence. And then my heart turned over, for I heard his voice again, whispering:
‘Oh, my dear – my dear –’
But the words broke off – and from the dark well of the hall came a low sob. I suppose I moved, and a floorboard creaked. Because I heard the receiver laid down, and I saw Allan’s shadow move heavily across the wall at the foot of the stairs.
We lay side by side that night, and we never spoke. But I know that it was daybreak before Allan slept.
During the next few days I became terribly afraid. I began to watch over Allan with new eyes, those of a mother. For the first time I knew a quite different tenderness, one that nearly choked me with its burden of grief and fear for him as he moved about the cottage like a sleepwalker, trying pathetically to keep up appearances before me, his face, as it seemed, ageing hourly in its weariness. I became frightened, too, for myself. I kept telling myself that nothing –
