clerical laugh, and she replied that Mr Ayrie had gone on until seventy. Sixty, the clergyman repeated with another laugh, was the post’s retirement age. Children were a handful nowadays.
She smiled, thinking of her sixteen docile charges. They had chattered to their parents, and the parents had been shocked to hear that they’d been told of a man decapitated and a girl raped seven times. School was not for that, they had angrily protested to the clergyman, and he had had no option but to agree. At the end of the summer term there’d be a presentation of Waterford glass.
‘Every day in my schoolroom I should have honoured the small, remarkable thing that happened in this town. It matters that she died in despair, with no faith left in human life.’
He was brisk. For as long as most people could remember she had been a remarkable teacher; in no way had she failed. He turned the conversation to more cheerful topics, he ate more biscuits and a slice of cake. He laughed and even made a joke. He retailed a little harmless gossip.
Eventually she stood up. She walked with her visitor to the hall, shook hands with him and saw him out. In the sitting-room she piled the tea things on to a tray and placed it on a table by the door. She turned the television on again but when the screen lit up she didn’t notice it. The face of Penelope Vade came into her mind, the smile a little crooked, the freckled cheeks.
Various people awoke with a sense of relief. Sleepily, Colin Rhodes wondered what there was to be relieved about. As he did in the moment of waking every morning, he encased with his left hand one of his wife’s plump breasts and then remembered the outcome of last night’s meeting. Miss Cogings, alone in her narrow bed and listening to a chorus of house-martins, remembered it with the same degree of satisfaction. So did the Poudards when their Teasmade roused them at a quarter to seven. So did the Reverend Feare, and Mr Mottershead and Mr and Mrs Tilzey, and the Blennerhassetts, who ran the Village Stores. Mrs Feare, up since dawn with an ailing child, was pleased because her husband was. There would be peace when there might have been war. A defeat had been inflicted.
The Allenbys, however, awoke in Luffnell Lodge with mixed feelings. What to do with the Lodge now that it remained unsold? How long would they have to wait for another buyer? For having made their minds up, they really wanted to move on as soon as possible. A bridging loan had been negotiated at one point but they’d decided against it because the interest was so high. They planned to buy a bungalow in a part of Cornwall that was noted for its warmth and dryness, both of which would ease Mrs Allenby’s arthritis. Everything that had been said at the meeting made sense to Mr and Mrs Allenby; they quite understood the general point of view. But they wished, that morning, that things might have been different.
‘That’s really bizarre,’ Hugh said in the Mansors’ breakfast-room.
‘Dreams often are.’
‘But butterflies –’
‘It has to do with the meeting.’
‘Ah, of course, the meeting.’
He saw at once what had been happening. He traced quite easily the series of his wife’s thoughts, one built upon the last, fact in the end becoming fantasy.
Emily buttered toast and reached for grapefruit marmalade. ‘Silly,’ she said, not believing that it was.
‘A bit,’ he agreed, smiling at her. He went on to talk of something else, an item in
The sun filled their breakfast-room. It struck the bones of his compact features; it livened his calm grey hair. It found the strawberry mark, like a tulip, on her neck; it made her spectacles glint. They were the same age, fifty- two, not yet grandparents but soon to be. He dealt in property; she’d once been a teacher of Latin and Greek. She was small and given to putting on weight if she wasn’t careful: dumpy, she considered herself.
‘Don’t let it worry you,’ Hugh said, folding
He was handsome in his thin way, and she was plain. Perhaps he had married her because he had not felt up to the glamour of a beautiful woman: as a young man, unproved in the world, he had had an inferiority complex, and success in middle age had not managed to shake it off. It wouldn’t have surprised him if the heights he’d scaled in his business world all of a sudden turned out to be a wasteland. He specialized in property in distant places, Jamaica, Spain, the Bahamas: some economic jolt could shatter everything. The house they lived in, on the edge of a Sussex village, was the symbol of his good fortune over the years. It was also his due, for he had worked doggedly; only his inferiority complex prevented him from taking it for granted. It puzzled him that he, so unpromising as a boy at school, had done so well; and occasionally, but not often, it puzzled him that they’d made a success of their marriage in times when the failure rate was high. Perhaps they’d made a go of it because she was modest too: more than once he’d wondered if that could be true. Could it be that Emily, so much cleverer than he, had found a level with him because her lack of beauty kept her in her place, as his inferiority complex kept him? She had said that as a girl she’d imagined she would not marry, assuming that a strawberry mark and dumpiness, and glasses too, would be too much for any man. He often thought about her as she must have been, cleverest in the class; while he was being slow on the uptake. ‘You’re very kind’ was what most often, in the way of compliments, Emily said to him.
‘Have a good day’ was what she said now, forcing cheerfulness on to her face, for the dream she’d had still saddened her and the memory of the meeting worried her.
‘I’ll be on the five o’clock.’ He touched her cheek with his lips, and then was gone, the door of the breakfast- room opening and closing, the hall door banging. She listened to the starting of the car and the sound of the wheels on the tarmac, then the engine fading to nothing in the distance.
She felt as he did, that together they had not done badly in twenty-seven years of marriage. She’d been a Miss Forrest; becoming Mrs Mansor had seemed the nicest thing that yet had happened to her; and for all their married life – the worries during the lean years, the bringing up of their three children-she had regretted nothing, and in the end there’d been the reward of happiness in middle age. She missed their son and daughters, all of whom were now married themselves, but in compensation there was the contentment that the house and garden brought, and the unexacting life of the village. As well, there were the visits of their children and her memories of girls whom she had taught, some of whom kept up with her. It was still a pleasure to read Horace and the lesser Greek poets, to find in an experimental way a new interpretation in place of the standard, scholar’s one.
Their house, in the style of Queen Anne though in fact of a later period, was hidden from the road and the surrounding fields by modest glades of silver birches. It was a compact house, easy to run and keep clean, modernized with gadgets, warm in winter. Alone in it in the mornings Emily often played Bach or Mozart on the sitting-room hi-fi system, the music drifting into the kitchen and the bedrooms and the breakfast-room, pursuing
