She dropped a tweed skirt on to Mrs Forde’s pile on the floor. She frowned, thinking she must have misheard. It was unlike him to drink after supper, or indeed before. He’d brought a strong smell of alcohol into the room, which for some reason offended her.
‘Our marriage,’ he repeated.
‘What about it?’
‘I’ve been trying to say, Cicily. I want to talk about it. Now that Mags is dead.’
‘Whatever had poor Mags to do with it? And now that she
‘Actually she consumed it.’
He knew he was not sober, but he knew as well that he was telling the truth. He had a feeling that had been trying to surface for days, which finally had succeeded in doing so while he was watching the athletes with the tractor tyres: deprived of a marriage herself, Mags had lived off theirs. Had she also, he wondered, avenged herself without knowing it?
These feelings about Mags had intensified since he’d been watching the television show, and it now seemed to Cosmo that everything had been turned inside out by her death. He wondered if James and Julia, looking back one day on their parents’ marriage, would agree that the presence of Mags in the house had been a mistake; he wondered if Cicily ever would.
‘Consumed?’ Cicily said. ‘I wasn’t aware –’
‘We were neither of us aware.’
‘I don’t know why you’re drinking whisky.’
‘Cicily, I want to tell you: I had an affair with a girl seven years ago.’
She stared at him, her lips slightly parted, her eyes unblinking. Then she puckered up her forehead, frowning again.
‘You never told me,’ she said, feeling the protest to be absurd as soon as she’d made it.
‘I have to tell you now, Cicily.’
She sat down on the bed that had been her friend’s. His voice went on speaking, saying something about Mags always being there, mentioning the Glenview Hotel for some reason, mentioning Robert Blakley and saying that Mags had probably intended no ill-will.
‘But you liked her,’ she whispered. ‘You liked her and what on earth had poor Mags –’
‘I’m trying to say I’m sorry, Cicily.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I’m sorry for being unfaithful.’
‘But how could I not know? How could you go off with someone else and I not notice anything?’
‘I think because Mags was here.’
She closed her eyes, not wanting to see him, in the doorway with his whisky. It didn’t make sense what he was saying. Mags was their friend; Mags had never in her life said a thing against him. It was unfair to bring Mags into it. It was ludicrous and silly, like trying to find an excuse.
‘The whole thing,’ he said, ‘from start to finish is all my fault. I shouldn’t have allowed Mags to be here, I should have known.’
She opened her eyes and looked across the room at him. He was standing exactly as he had been before, wretchedness in his face. ‘You’re making this up,’ she said, believing that he must be, believing that for some reason he’d been jealous of Mags all these years and now was trying to revenge himself by inventing a relationship with some girl. He was not the kind to go after girls; he wasn’t the kind to hurt people.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m making nothing up.’ The girl had wept when, in the end, he’d decreed that for her there was too little in it to justify their continuing the association. He’d felt about the girl the way he’d wanted to feel about being unfaithful to Cicily: guilty and ashamed and miserable.
‘I can’t believe it of you,’ Cicily whispered, weeping as the girl had wept. ‘I feel I’m in an awful nightmare.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘My God, what use is saying you’re sorry? We had a perfectly good marriage, we were a happy family –’
‘My dear, I’m not denying that. All I’m saying –’
‘All you’re saying,’ she cried out bitterly, ‘is that none of it meant anything to you. Did you hate me? Did I repel you? Was she marvellous, this girl? Did she make you feel young again? My God, you hypocrite!’
She picked up from the bed a summer dress that had been Mags’s, a pattern of checks in several shades of blue. She twisted it between her hands, but Cosmo knew that the action was involuntary, that she was venting her misery on the first thing that came to hand.
‘It’s the usual thing,’ she said more quietly, ‘for men in middle age.’
‘Cicily –’
‘Girls are like prizes at a fun-fair. You shoot a row of ducks and there’s your girl with her child’s complexion still, and her rosebud lips and eager breasts –’
‘Please, Cicily –’
‘Why shouldn’t she have eager breasts, for God’s sake? At least don’t deny her her breasts or her milky throat, or her eyes that melted with love. Like a creature in a Sunday supplement, was she? Advertising vodka or tipped
