the pensione?’
‘Oh dear me, now that’s very sad.’
He would not, when the moment came, pay for the mandarinettos or the cake he was now pressing upon his guests. He would discover that he had left his wallet in some other pocket.
‘You must not spoil your looks, eh?’ he said when Ingrid refused the cake. His smile nudged her in a way he might have thought was intimate, but which Verity observed the girl registering as elderly. Brigitta had already been biting into a slice of cake when the remark was made about the losing of looks. Hastily she put it down. They must go, she said.
‘Go? Oh, surely not? No, please don’t go.’
But both girls were adamant. They had been too tired last night to see the Bridge of Sighs by lamplight and they must see that before they left. Each held out a hand, to Verity and then to her father. When they had gone Verity realized she hadn’t addressed a single word to either of them. A silence followed their departure, then Mr Unwill said in a whisper:
‘Those Americans seem rather nice, eh?’
He would hold forth to the Americans, as he had to the German girls, concentrating his attention on the daughter because she was the most attractive of the three. The mother was vulgarly dressed, the father shouted. In the presence of these people everything would be repeated, the painting of the
‘No,’ Verity said. ‘No, I don’t want to become involved with those Americans.’
He was taken aback. His mouth remained open after he’d begun to say something. He stared at her, slowly overcoming his bewilderment. For the second time that evening, he asked her if she felt all right. She didn’t reply. Time of the month, he supposed, this obvious explanation abruptly dawning on him, wretched for women. And then, to his very great surprise, he was aware that his daughter was talking about her decision, some months ago, to return to the family home.
‘ “My father’s on his own now,” I told him, “so I have given up the flat.” As soon as I had spoken I felt afraid. “We must be together,” is what I thought he’d say. He’d be alarmed and upset, I thought, because I’d broken the pattern of our love affair by causing this hiatus. But all he said was that he understood.’
They’d known, of course, about the wretched affair. Her mother had been depressed by it; so much time passing by, no sign of a resolution in whatever it was, no sign of marriage. Verity had steered all conversation away from it; when the subject was discreetly approached by her mother or her brothers she made it clear that they were trespassing on private property; he himself had made no forays in that direction, it not being his way. Astonishing it was, that she should wish to speak of it now.
‘I didn’t in the least,’ she said, ‘feel sorry for your loneliness. I felt sorry for myself. I couldn’t bear for a moment longer the routine love-making in that convenient flat.’
Feeling himself becoming hot, Mr Unwill removed his glasses and searched in the pockets of his blazer for his handkerchief. He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. He listened while Verity more or less repeated what she had said already. There had been sixteen years of routine love-making, ever since she was twenty-two. Her love affair had become her life, the routine punctuated by generous gifts and weekends in beautiful cities.
There was a silence. He polished one lens and then the other. He tightened the screws of the hinges with the useful little screwdriver in his penknife. Since the silence continued, eventually he said:
‘If you made an error in coming back to the house it can easily be rectified, old girl.’
‘Surely, I thought, those brief weekends would never be enough? Surely we would have to talk about everything again, now that there was no flat to go to?’ She spoke of the cities where the weekends had been spent: Bruges, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Venice. Bruges had been the first. In Bruges she had assumed, although he had not said so, that he would leave his wife. They had walked through chilly squares, they had sat for hours over dinner in the Hotel Duc du Bourgogne. In Paris, some time later, she had made the same assumption. He did not love his wife; when the children grew up he would leave her. By the time they visited Venice, the children had grown up. ‘Only just grown up,’ she said. ‘The last one only just, that summer.’
He did not say anything; the conversation was beyond his reach. He saw his daughter as an infant, a nurse holding a bundle towards him, the screwed-up face and tiny hands. She’d been a happy child, happy at school, happy with her friends. Young men had hung about the house; she’d gone to tennis-club dances and winter parties. ‘Love’s a disease sometimes,’ her mother had said, angrily, a year or so ago. Her mother had been cross because Verity always smiled so, pretending the happiness that was no longer there, determinedly optimistic. Because of the love affair, her mother had said also, Verity’s beauty had been wasted, seeming to have been uselessly visited upon her.
‘It wasn’t just a dirty weekend, you know, here in Venice. It’s never just that.’
‘Please, Verity. Please, now…’
‘He can’t bring himself to be unkind to his wife. He couldn’t be bad to a woman if he tried. I promise you, he’s a remarkable man.’
He began to expostulate but changed his mind. Everything he tried to say, even everything he felt, seemed clumsy. She stared beyond him, through the smoke from her cigarette, causing him to feel a stranger. Her silliness in love had made her carelessly harsh, selfish and insensitive because she had to think so much about herself. In a daughter who was not naturally silly, who had been gentle as a child, these qualities were painful to observe. Once she could have imagined what it was like for him to hear her refer so casually to dirty weekends; now she didn’t care if that hurt him or not. It was insulting to expect him to accept that the man was remarkable. It dismissed his intellect and his sense.
‘It was ridiculous,’ she said eventually, ‘to give up my flat.’
He made some protest when she asked the waiter for the bill, but she didn’t listen, paying the bill instead. He felt exhausted. He had sat in this very cafe with a woman who was dead; the man his daughter spoke of was still alive. It almost seemed the other way round. He would not have claimed a great deal for the marriage there had been: two people rubbing along, forgiving each other for this and that, one left alone to miss the nourishment of affection. Yet when the coffin had slipped away behind the beige curtain his grief had been unbearable and had remained so afterwards, for weeks and months, each day a hell.
