Yes, maybe.
Or maybe not.
Now and then over the next year or so, in the term time when the boys were gone, Michael came to stay. She had Mrs T make up the spare room for him but the second time he came he slept in her bed, returned to his, sometimes but not always, before morning. What Mrs T noticed she couldn’t say. It wasn’t only Mrs T but the house that seemed to demand the propriety, even when almost a year had passed. Of course Michael, like most of the men she knew, had been in the war, but in the Navy, on the Arctic convoys. He almost never spoke of it. Only once he had mentioned that it was cold. And frightening? she had asked. Yes, he said, very frightening. But that was all he said, nothing else. And not a piece of it showed in him. How could she live again with a man who did not speak? Michael or any of these men she met. She was becoming used to being alone now, she knew that it wouldn’t work. She knew that it could be as lonely inside a relationship as outside of one. So she let him stay, only that. Sleep with her. She never told him about the broken city. Later there would be others, but never for long.
At half-term and end of term, she collected the boys from school and brought them home, driving and asking them questions as she drove, glancing across or back at them in the passenger seats, impatient to close the gap that had opened when they had been away. Each time, they looked the same and yet not the same. Each time, they knew more things that she didn’t know, Test Match scores, names of cars on the road, boys’ knowledge that set them apart. Never before had they had lives apart from hers. Billy would be there to help lift their trunks from the car and upstairs. Billy would greet them as if they’d never been away, Jess jump up and lick their faces and skitter after them about the rooms.
The noise was so sudden, even if long anticipated, breaking the accumulated silence of weeks. Was this how it had been, she thought, before? Last time? The boys or the sound of them seemed to fill every room at once.
Then there was the smell of them, the smell on the clothes that she unpacked the next day from the trunks and took in a great heap to carry down to wash. The dirt, the mess, the dried mud on their rugger boots that fell off in the pattern of their studs onto the bedroom carpet. So much she had forgotten, each time. She should have thought to have Billy leave the trunks downstairs so that she might have put all the dirty things into the scullery straightaway.
The summer holiday was the greatest liberation of all. The boys ran wildly through the house. With windmilling arms they mimed bowling, through the rooms and up the stairs. As she came onto the landing with their sports clothes in her arms she almost collided with Richard. She dropped all the clothes, shorts, shirts falling, as a hard red ball passed fast and close to her head and smashed the window behind her.
I didn’t mean to let go, Richard said. I was only practising my action. He cupped his hand again as if it held the ball. See, this is how I learnt to do it. Slowly, with deliberation, he raised his arm, wheeled it back and up, released his fingers, with a little twist of the wrist for spin. Like that, he said, his blue eyes direct and without apology.
But that ball was real, she said. It was a hard cricket ball. It might have hurt me.
He too, she saw, was real, substantial as the ball, separate from her idea of him. He had grown while he was away, at once taller and less sturdy. She thought of him always as such a sturdy boy. It would not be long before he was as tall as she was, but he was bold as if he had that height already, looking at her boldly eye to eye.
If you have a ball, she said, then you must do your bowling outside.
Outside, there was glass on the grass. She had to put on leather gloves and pick it up, piece by piece, before any person or animal walked there. She would wrap the pieces in newspaper before she put them in the dustbin. She didn’t want anyone cutting themselves. One of the splinters had made a tiny nick on her finger, where there was a tear in a glove. She took off the glove and put the cut to her mouth to suck away the blood. He was standing at the door watching.
You’ll have to pay for that window. You can clear out the garage and earn some money and pay for the glass.
She couldn’t help thinking how like his father he was. Those blue eyes, the squareness of the face, the long back that meant that he would be tall. Regular features, thick fair hair that wouldn’t brush down. Some silent weight in him, that she had found in Charlie, that she had not seen at first, that she had got to recognise over the years of their marriage, ugly and intractable. She had observed Richard intensely from the day he was born, because he was the first, and later perhaps with a kind of foreboding because he was like his father. He said nothing, but doggedly cleared the garage. He spent the whole day doing it. Never before and never again would she see it so tidy.
A morning like others
Time passed. Times returned. All days began the same way. They always had, days at
