‘Oh yes, indeed,’ his wife agreed.
Marcus Stire arrived then, lanky and malicious. The couple with the house in Spain immediately moved away, as if they didn’t like the look of him. He laughed. They were embarrassed, he explained, because at another party recently they’d all of a sudden quarrelled most violently in his presence. The man had even raised an arm to strike his wife, and Marcus Stire had had to restrain him.
‘You’d never think it, would you, Jessica? All that guff about cosiness in Spain when more likely that smile of hers covers a multitude of sins.
What awful frauds people are!’ He laughed again and then continued, his soft voice drawling, a cigarette between the rings on his fingers.
He ran through all the people in the garden. Susanna Maidstone had been seen with Taylor-Deeth in the Trat-West. The Livingstons’ patched-up arrangement wouldn’t of course last. The Unwins were edgy, frigidity was Anthea Chalmers’s problem. ‘Suburban middle age,’ he said in his drawl. ‘It’s like a minefield.’ The Morrishes had had a ghastly upset a month ago when a girl from his office had pursued him home one night, messily spilling the beans.
Jessica looked at the Morrishes, so neatly together as they saw to people’s drinks, attending now to Mr Fulmer. It seemed astonishing that they, too, weren’t quite as they appeared to be. ‘Oh, heavens, yes,’ Marcus Stire said, guessing at this doubt in her mind.
His malice was perceptive, and he didn’t much exaggerate. He had a way of detecting trouble, and of accurately piecing together the fragments that came his way. Caught off her guard, she wondered what he said to other people about Malcolm and herself. She wondered just how he saw them and then immediately struggled to regain her concentration, knowing she should not wonder that.
He was commenting now on the girl who had persuaded the other children to play her version of Grandmother’s Footsteps, a bossy handful he called her. How dreadful she’d be at forty-eight, her looks three- quarters gone, famous in some other suburb as a nagging wife. Jessica smiled, as if he had related a pleasant joke. Again she made the effort to concentrate.
You had to do that: to concentrate and to listen properly, as Malcolm was listening, as she had listened herself to the talk about a house in Spain. You had to have a bouncy wallpaper all over the house, and fresh white paint instead of gravy-brown. You mustn’t forget your plan to get the garden as colourful as this one; you mustn’t let your mind wander. Busily you must note the damp appearance of a man’s moustache and the grey in a woman’s hair, and the malevolence in the eyes that were piercing into you now.
‘I’ve written off those years, Malcolm,’ Anthea Chalmers said, and across the garden Malcolm saw that his wife had collapsed. He could tell at once, as if she’d fallen to the grass and lay there in a heap. Occasionally one or the other of them went under; impossible to anticipate which, or how it would happen.
He watched her face and saw that she was back in 1954, her pains developing a rhythm, a sweltering summer afternoon. A message had come to him in court, and when he’d returned to the house the midwife was smoking a cigarette in the hall. The midwife and the nurse had been up all night with a difficult delivery in Sheen. Afterwards, when the child had been born and everything tidied up, he’d given them a glass of whisky each.
Like an infection, all of it slipped across the garden, through the cigarette smoke and the people and the smartly casual Sunday clothes, from Jessica to Malcolm. Down their treacherous Memory Lane it dragged them, one after the other. The first day at the primary school, tears at the gate, the kindly dinner lady. The gang of four, their child and three others, at daggers drawn with other gangs. The winning of the high jump.
‘Excuse me,’ Malcolm said. It was worse for Jessica, he thought in a familiar way as he made his way to her. It was worse because after the birth she’d been told she must not have other babies: she blamed herself now for being obedient.
They left the party suddenly, while the children still played a version of Grandmother’s Footsteps by the tool- shed, and the adults drank and went on talking to one another. People who knew them guessed that their abrupt departure might somehow have to do with their son, whom no one much mentioned these days, he being a registered drug addict. The couple who had spoken to Jessica about their Spanish house spoke of it now to their hosts, who did not listen as well as she had. Anthea Chalmers tried to explain to Marcus Stire’s friend, but that was hopeless. Marcus Stire again surveyed the people in the garden.
Anger possessed Malcolm as they walked across the common that had been peaceful in the early morning. It was less so now. Cricket would be played that afternoon and preparations were being made, the square marked, the sight-screens wheeled into position. An ice-cream van was already trading briskly. People lay on the grass, youths kicked a football.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jessica said. Her voice was nervous; she felt ashamed of herself.
‘It isn’t you, Jessica.’
‘Let’s have a drink on our own, shall we?’
Neither of them wishing to return immediately to their house, they went to the Red Rover and sat outside. She guessed his thoughts, as earlier he had seen hers in her face. When people wondered where all of it had gone, all that love and all those flowers, he would have liked to have shown them their darkened upstairs room. The jolly sixties and those trips to wonderland were there, he’d once cried out, with half-made aeroplanes gathering a dust. Their son had a name, which was used when they addressed him; but when they thought of him he was nameless in their minds. Years ago they’d discovered that that was the same for both of them.
‘Maybe,’ she said, referring to the future, trying to cheer him up.
He made a gesture, half a nod: the speculation was impossible. And the consolation that families had always had children who were locked away and looked after wasn’t a consolation in the least. They didn’t have to live with a monstrous fact of nature, but with a form of accidental suicide, and that was worse.
They sat a little longer in the sunshine, both of them thinking about the house they’d left an hour or so ago. It would be as silent as if they’d never had a child, and then little noises would begin, like the noises of a ghost. The quiet descent of the stairs, the shuffling through the hall. He would be there in the kitchen, patiently sitting, when they returned. He would smile at them and during lunch a kind of conversation might develop, or it might not. A week ago he’d said, quite suddenly, that soon he intended to work in a garden somewhere, or a park. Occasionally he said things like that.
They didn’t mention him as they sat there; they never did now. And it was easier for both of them to keep away from Memory Lane when they were together and alone. Instead of all that there was the gossip of Marcus Stire: Susanna Maidstone in the Trat-West, the girl from the office arriving in the Morrishes’ house, the quarrel between the smiling woman and her suede-clad husband, Anthea Chalmers, lone Mr Fulmer, the Livingstons endeavouring to make a go of it. Easily, Malcolm imagined Marcus Stire’s drawling tones and the sharpness of his eye, like a splinter of glass. He knew now how Jessica had been upset: a pair of shadows Marcus Stire would have
