pouring himself a glass of whisky and quickly drinking it.
‘Julia seemed well,’ Cicily said, pushing the wooden bowl of salad across the kitchen table at him.
‘Yes, she did.’ It was singular in a way, he thought, that he and Cicily should have taken to their hearts a person who was, physically, so very much the opposite of them. Mags had been like a cuckoo in the midst of the handsome family, and he wondered if she’d ever noticed it, if she’d ever said to herself that it was typical of her tendency to misfortune to find herself so dramatically shown up. He wanted to talk to Cicily about that. They had to talk about everything. They had to clear the air; certainly they had to agree that they were at a beginning, that they could not just go on.
‘I suppose it was her looks,’ he said, aware that he was putting it clumsily, ‘that in the end didn’t appeal to Robert Blakley. I mean, not as much as he’d imagined.’
‘Oh, he was a horrid man.’
‘No, but I mean, Cicily –’
‘I don’t want to talk about Robert Blakley.’
Neatly she arranged ham and salad on her fork. Any time she wanted to, he thought, she could pick up an affair. Men still found her as worth a second look as they always had: you could see it at cocktail parties and on trains, or even walking with her on the street. He felt proud of her, and glad that she hadn’t let herself go.
‘No, I meant she wasn’t much to look at ever,’ he said.
‘Poor Mags had far more than looks. Let’s not dwell on this, Cosmo.’
‘I think we have to, dear.’
‘She’s dead. Nothing we can say will bring her back.’
‘It’s not that kind of thing we have to talk about.’
‘She wanted her clothes to go to Oxfam. Except what she left to Mrs Forde. I’ll see to that tonight.’
When, seven years ago, Cosmo had had an affair with a girl in his office the guilt he might have felt had failed to come about. His unfaithfulness –the only occasion of it in his marriage – had not caused him remorse and heart-searching, as he’d expected it would. He did not return to Tudors after an afternoon with the girl to find himself wanting at once to confess to Cicily. Nor did he walk into a room and find Cicily seeming to be forlorn because she was being wronged and did not know it. He did not think of her, alone and even lonely, while he was with the girl. Such thoughts were unnecessary because Cicily was always all right, because there was always Mags. It had even occasionally seemed to him that she had Mags and he the girl.
Cosmo had never in any way objected to the presence of Mags in his house. She had made things easier all round, it was a mutually satisfactory arrangement. Even at the time of his office affair it had not occurred to him that her presence could possibly be designated as an error; and in all honesty she had never been a source of irritation to him. It was her death, her absence, that had brought the facts to light.
‘We have to talk, you know,’ he said, still eating ham and salad. ‘There are all sorts of things to come to terms with.’
‘Talk, Cosmo? What things? What do you mean?’
‘We could have made a mistake, you know, having Mags here all these years.’
She frowned. She shook her head, more in bewilderment than denial. He said, ‘I think we need to talk about it now.’
But Cicily wanted to be quiet. Immediately after supper she’d go through the clothes, arranging them for Oxfam, keeping back the things for Mrs Forde. She wanted to get it done as soon as possible. She remembered being in the sanatorium one time with Mags, both of them with measles. They’d talked for hours about what they’d like to do with their lives. She herself had at that time wanted to be a nurse. ‘I want to have babies,’ Mags had said. ‘I want to marry a decent kind of man and have a house in the country somewhere and bring up children.’
‘You see,’ Cosmo was saying, ‘there’ll be a certain adjustment.’
She nodded, not really listening. Half of Mags’s desire had come about: at least she’d lived in a house in the country and at least she’d brought up children, even if the children weren’t her own. There still was a school photograph, she and Mags and a girl called Evie Hopegood sitting in the sun outside the library. Just after it had been taken Miss Harper had come along and given Mags a row for sprawling in her chair.
‘Incidentally,’ Cicily said, ‘the man’s coming to mend that window-sash tomorrow.’
Cosmo didn’t reply. Perhaps this wasn’t the right moment to pursue the matter. Perhaps in a day or two, when she’d become more used to the empty house, he should try again.
They finished their meal. He helped her to wash up, something that hadn’t been necessary in the past. She went upstairs, he watched the television in the sitting-room.
Young men and girls were playing a game with tractor tyres. They were dressed in running shorts and singlets, one team’s red, the other’s yellow. Points were scored, a man with a pork-pie hat grimaced into the camera and announced the score. Another man breezed up, trailing a microphone. He placed an arm around the first man’s shoulders and said that things were really hotting up. Huge inflated ducks appeared, the beginning of another game. Cosmo turned the television off.
He poured himself another drink. He was aware that he wanted to be drunk, which was, in other circumstances, a condition he avoided. He knew that in a day or two the conversation he wished to have would be equally difficult. He’d go on trying to have it and every effort would fail. He drank steadily, walking up and down the long, low-ceiling sitting-room, glancing out into the garden, where dusk was already gathering. He turned the television on again and found the young men and girls playing a game with buckets of coloured water. He changed the channel. ‘I can’t help being a lotus-eater,’ a man was saying, while an elderly woman wept. Elsewhere Shipham’s paste was being promoted.
‘It’s no good putting it off,’ Cosmo said, standing in the doorway of the room that had been Mags’s. He had filled his glass almost to the brim and then had added a spurt of soda water. ‘We have to talk about our marriage, Cicily.’
