The Collected Stories

‘Listen,’ Major Trubstall said, pushing a great crimson face into mine, ‘if a girl goes out drinking with four soldiers, d’you think she isn’t after something?’ The Red Hand of Ulster meant what it said, O Baoill told me: the hand was waiting to grasp the hammer and the sickle. He didn’t say it to his followers, and later he denied that he had said it at all.

Ruairi O Baoill is a sham, I wrote. And so, it would appear, is a man called Major TrubstalL Fantasy rules, I wrote, knowing it was the truth.

All the time in Northern Ireland and for three days in Spain Dorothea’s voice continued about Emma and Elinor and Elizabeth Bennet, and Mrs Elton and Mr Woodhouse. I kept imagining us together in a clean, empty house that appeared to be our home. Like smoke evaporating, my failed marriage wasn’t there any more. And my unhappy childhood slipped away also, as though by magic.

‘Dorothea?’

‘No, this is her mother. Please hold on. I’ll fetch her.’

I waited for so long I began to fear that this was Mrs Lysarth’s way of dealing with unwelcome telephone callers. I felt that perhaps the single word I’d spoken had been enough to convey an image of my unsuitableness, and my presumption.

‘Yes?’ Dorothea’s voice said,

‘It’s Terris. Do you remember?’

‘Of course I remember. Are you in Bath again?’

‘No. But at least I’ve returned from Northern Ireland. I’m in London. How are you, Dorothea?’

‘I’m very well. Are you well?’

‘Yes.’ I paused, not knowing how to put it.

‘It’s kind of you to ring, Terris.’

‘D’you think we might meet?’

‘Meet?’

‘It would be. nice to see you.’

She didn’t answer. I felt I had proposed marriage already, that it was that she was considering. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I began to say.

‘Of course we must meet. Would Thursday do? I have to be in London then.’

‘We could have lunch again.’

‘That would be lovely.’

And so it was. We sat in the bow window of an Italian restaurant in Romilly Street, and when anyone glanced in I felt inordinately proud. It was early September, a warm, clear day without a hint of autumn. Afterwards we strolled through Leicester Square and along Piccadilly. We were still in Green Park at six o’clock. ‘I love you, Terris,’ Dorothea said.

*

Her mother smiled a slanting smile at me, head a little on one side. She laid down an embroidery on a round, cane frame. She held a hand out.

‘We’ve heard so much,’ she said, still smiling, and then she introduced her sons. While we were drinking sherry Dorothea’s father appeared, a thin, tall man, with spectacles on a length of leather, dancing on a tweed waistcoat.

‘My dear fellow.’ Vaguely he smiled and held a hand out: an amateur archaeologist, though by profession a medical doctor. That I was the divorced middle-aged man whom his young daughter wished to marry was not a fact that registered in his face. Dorothea had shown me a photograph of him, dusty in a crumpled linen suit, holding between finger and thumb a piece of glazed terracotta. ‘A pleasure,’ he continued as vaguely as before. ‘A real pleasure.’

‘A pleasure to meet you, Dr Lysarth.’

‘Oh, not at all.’

‘More sherry?’ Dorothea suggested, pouring me whisky because she knew I probably needed it.

‘That’s whisky in that decanter, Dorothea,’ her brother Adam pointed out and while I was saying it didn’t matter, that whisky actually was what I preferred, her other brother, Jonathan, laughed.

‘I’m sure Mr Terris knows what he wants,’ Mrs Lysarth remarked, and Dorothea said:

‘Terris is his Christian name.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’

‘You must call him Terris, Mother. You cannot address a prospective son-in-law as Mister.’

‘Please do,’ I urged, feeling a word from me was necessary.

‘Terris?’ Adam said.

‘Yes, it is an odd name.’

The brothers stood on either side of Dorothea’s chair in that flowery drawing-room. There were pale blue delphiniums in two vases on the mantelpiece, and roses and sweet-peas in little vases everywhere. The mingled scent was delicious, and the room and the flowers seemed part of the family the Lysarths were, as did the way in which Adam and Jonathan stood, protectively, by their sister.

They were twins, both still at Cambridge. They had their mother’s oval face, the pale blue eyes their parents shared, their father’s languid tallness. I was aware that however protective they might seem they were not protecting Dorothea from me: I was not an interloper, they did not resent me. But their youth made me feel even older than I was, more knocked about and less suitable than ever for the role I wished to play.