been the endless lingering of a silent passion, startlingly different from the instant requiring of her own.
Through the muzziness of inebriation Beatrice glanced again across the bar. Behind her the Keegans were laughing, and the man she’d once so intensely loved was loudly laughing also. She heard the sound of the laughter strangely, as if it echoed from a distance, and she thought for a moment that it did not belong in the Paradise Lounge, that only the two old women and the old man belonged there. He was loved, and in silence he returned that love. His plump, bespectacled wife had never had reason to feel betrayed; no shame nor guilt attached. In all the years a sister’s dying had never been made use of. Nor had there been hasty afternoons in Rathgar Road, blinds drawn against neighbours who might guess, a bedroom set to rights before children came in from school. There hadn’t been a single embrace.
Yet the love that had continued for so long would go on now until the grave: without even thinking, Beatrice knew that that was so. The old woman paraded for a purpose the remnants of her beauty, the man was elegant in his tweed. How lovely that was! Beatrice thought, still muzzily surveying the people at the table, the wife who had not been deceived quite contentedly chatting, the two who belonged together occupying their magic worlds.
How lovely that nothing had been destroyed: Beatrice wanted to tell someone that, but there was no one to tell. In Rathgar Road her children would be watching the television, their father sitting with them. Her sister would die before the year was finished. What cruelty there seemed to be, and more sharply now she recalled the afternoon bedroom set to rights and her sister’s wasted face. She wanted to run away, to go backwards into time so that she might shake her head at her lover on the night they’d first met.
Miss Doheny passed through the darkened town, a familiar figure on a Saturday night. It had been the same as always, sitting there, close to him, the smoke drifting from the cigarette that lolled between his fingers. The girl by now would be close in a different way to the man who was somebody else’s husband also. As in a film, their clothes would be scattered about the room that had been hired for love, their murmurs would break a silence. Tears ran through Miss Doheny’s meticulous make-up, as often they did when she walked away from the Paradise Lounge on a Saturday night. It was difficult sometimes not to weep when she thought about the easy times that had come about in her lifetime, mocking the agony of her stifled love.
Neither Julia nor James could remember a time when Mags had not been there. She was part of the family, although neither a relation nor a connection. Long before either of them had been born she’d been, at school, their mother’s best friend.
They were grown up now and had children of their own; the Memory Lane they travelled down at Mags’s funeral was long; it was impossible not to recall the past there’d been with her. ‘Our dear sister,’ the clergyman in the crematorium murmured, and quite abruptly Julia’s most vivid memory was of being on the beach at Rustington playing ‘Mags’s Game’, a kind of Grandmother’s Footsteps; and James remembered how Mags had interceded when his crime of taking unripe grapes from the greenhouse had been discovered. Imposing no character of its own upon the mourners, the crematorium filled easily with such moments, with summer jaunts and treats in teashops, with talk and stories and dressing up for nursery plays, with Mags’s voice for ever reading the adventures of the Swallows and the Amazons.
Cicily, whose friend at school she’d been, remembered Miss Harper being harsh, accusing Mags of sloth and untidiness, and making Mags cry. There’d been a day when everyone had been made to learn ‘The Voice and the Peak’ and Miss Harper, because of her down on Mags, had made it seem that Mags had brought this communal punishment about by being the final straw in her ignorance of the verb
Cosmo, Cicily’s husband, father of James and Julia, recalled at Mags’s funeral his first meeting with her. He’d heard about her – rather a lot about her – ever since he’d known Cicily. The unfairness that had been meted out to Mags at school was something he had nodded sympathetically over; as well as over her ill-treatment at the hands of Robert Blakley, and the sudden and unexpected death of her mother, to whom she’d always been so devoted, and with whom, after the Robert Blakley affair, she had determined to make her life, her father having died when she was three. This is Mags,’ Cicily had said one day in the Trocadero, where they were all about to lunch together, celebrating Cicily’s and Cosmo’s engagement. ‘Hullo, Cosmo,’ Mags had said, holding out a hand for him to shake. She did not much care for men he’d thought, gripping the hand and moving it slightly in a handshake. She was tall and rather angular, with black untidy hair and unplucked eyebrows. Her lips were a little chapped; she wore no make-up. It was because of Robert Blakley, he’d thought, that she did not take to men. ‘I’ve heard an awful lot about you, Mags,’ he said, laughing. She declined a drink, falling instead into excited chat with Cicily, whose cheeks had pinkened with pleasure at the reunion. They talked about girls they’d known, and the dreadful Miss Harper, and Miss Roforth the headmistress. At Mags’s funeral he remembered that surreptitiously he had asked the waiter to bring him another gin and tonic.
They were a noticeably good-looking family. Cosmo and Cicily, in their middle fifties, were grey-haired but stylishly so, and both of them retained the spare figures of their youth. Cosmo’s noticeably blue eyes and his chiselled face had been bequeathed to his son; and Cicily’s smile, her slightly slanting mouth and perfect nose had come to Julia. They all looked a little similar, the men of a certain height, the two women complementing it, the same fair colouring in all four. There was a lack of awkwardness in their movements, a natural easiness that had often caused strangers to wonder where Mags came in.
The coffin began to move, sliding towards beige curtains, which obediently parted. Flames would devour it, they all four thought simultaneously, Mags would become a handful of dust; a part of the family had been torn away. How, Julia wondered, would her parents manage now? To be on their own after so long would surely be a little strange.
They returned to Tudors, the house near Maidenhead where the family had always lived. It was a pleasant house, half-timbered, black and white, more or less in the country. Cosmo had been left it by an aunt at just the right moment, when he’d been at the beginning of his career in the rare-books world; Julia and James had been born there. Seeing Tudors for the first time, Mags had said she’d fallen in love with it.
After the funeral service they stood around in the long low-ceilinged sitting-room, glad that it was over. They didn’t say much, and soon moved off in two directions, the men to the garden, Cicily and Julia to the room that had been Mags’s bedroom. In an efficiently drawn-up will some of her jewellery had been left to Julia and an eighteenth-century clock to James. There’d been bequests for Cicily and Cosmo too, and some clothes and money for Mrs Forde, the daily woman at Tudors.
‘Her mother had that,’ Cicily said, picking up an amber brooch, a dragon with a gold setting. ‘I think it’s rather valuable.’
Julia held it in the palm of her hand, gazing at it. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said. It had been Mags’s favourite piece, worn only on special occasions. Julia could remember it on a blue blouse, polka-dotted with white. It seemed unfair that Mags, the same age as her mother, should have died; Mags who had done no harm to anyone. Having never been married or known children of her own, it seemed that the least she deserved was a longer life.
‘Poor old Mags,’ her mother said, as if divining these thoughts.
