Lush used to say, and it was probably Simpson who had called it a gift. She couldn’t think why she’d ever allowed herself to marry Simpson, irritating face he’d had, irritating ways.
‘It’s been enjoyable, making the garden, building that wall. I never thought I’d be able to build a wall.’
He’d told her a lot about his house by the sea, a perfect picture it sounded, with flowerbeds all around the edge, and rustic trellising with ivy disguising the outside sanitary arrangements. He was terribly proud of what he’d done, and every right he had to be, the way he’d made the garden out of nothing. Won some kind of award the garden had, best on the south coast or the world or something.
‘I could sell it very well. I’ve begun to think of that.’
She nodded. Cesare was expertly gathering up the plates four businessmen had eaten from. The men were stout and flushed, all of them married: you could tell a married look at once. At another table a chap who was married also was taking out a girl less than half his age, and next to them a couple looked as though they were planning a dirty weekend. A party of six, men and women, were at the big central table, just beside where the salads and the bowls of fruit were all laid out and where the dessert trolley was. She’d seen that party here a couple of weeks ago; they’d been talking about
‘Once you’ve made something as you want it,’ Fitz was saying, ‘you tend to lose interest, I suppose.’
The head-waiter called out to the other, younger Italian, she didn’t know what his name was, lumpy-looking boy. But Cesare, because he was less busy, answered. ‘
‘You’re never selling up, Fitz?’
‘Well, I’m wondering about it.’
He had told her about the woman he’d married, a responsible type of woman she sounded, but she’d been ill or something and hadn’t been able to have children. Twenty-three years was really a very long time for any two people to keep going. But then the woman had died.
‘You get itchy feet,’ he said. ‘Even when you’re passing sixty.’
‘My, you don’t look it.’ Automatically she responded, watching the waiter while he served the party at the central table with T-bone steaks, a San Michele speciality. He said something else, but it didn’t impinge on her. Then she heard:
‘I often think it would be nice to live in London.’
He was eyeing her, to catch her reaction to this. ‘You’ve had a battered life,’ he’d said to her, the second time they’d had lunch. He’d looked at her much as he was looking at her now, and had said it twice. That was being an actress, she’d explained: always living on your nerves, hoping for this part or that, the disappointment of don’t- call-us. ‘Well, I suppose it batters you in the end,’ she’d agreed. ‘The old Profession.’
He, on the other hand, had appeared to have had quite a cosy time in the intervening years. Certainly, the responsible-sounding woman hadn’t battered him, far from it. They’d been as snug as anything in the house by the sea, a heavy type of woman, Nancy imagined she’d been, with this thing wrong with her, whatever it was. It was after she’d dropped off her twig that he’d begun to feel sorry for himself and of course you couldn’t blame him, poor Fitz. It had upset him at first that people had led unattached women up to him at cocktail parties, widows and the like, who’d lost their figures or had let their hair go frizzy, or were old. He’d told her all that one lunchtime and on another occasion he’d confessed that after a year or so had passed he’d gone to a bureau place, an introduction agency, where much younger women were fixed up for him. But that hadn’t worked either. He had met the first of them for tea in the Ceylon Centre, where she’d told him that her deceased husband had been an important figure in a chemicals firm and that her older daughter was married in Australia, that her son was in the Hong Kong Police and another daughter married to a dentist in Worcester. She had not ceased to talk the entire time she was with him, apparently, telling him that she suffered from the heat, especially her feet. He’d taken another woman to a revival of
‘Sorry?’ she said.
‘I don’t suppose you’d ever think of giving it another go?’
‘Darling Fitz!
She smiled at him. How typical it was that he didn’t know it was impossible to pick up pieces that had been lying about for forty years! The past was full of Simpson and Laurie Henderson and Eddie Lush, and the two children she’d borne, the girl the child of a fertilizer salesman, which was something Eddie Lush had never guessed. You couldn’t keep going on journeys down Memory Lane, and the more you did the more you realized that it was just an ugly black tunnel. Time goes by, as the old song had it, a kiss and a sigh and that was that. She smiled again. ‘
‘I just thought –’ he began.
‘You always said pretty things, Fitz.’
‘I always meant them.’
It had been so romantic when he’d said she needed looking after. He’d called her winsome another time. He was far more romantic than any of the others had ever been, but unfortunately when being romantic went on for a while it could become a teeny bit dreary, no other word for it. Not of course that you’d ever call poor Fitz dreary, far from it.
‘Where d’you come from, Cesare?’ she asked the waiter, thinking it a good idea to cause a diversion – and besides, it was nice to make the waiter linger. He was better looking than the airman from the base. He had a better nose, a nicer chin. She’d never seen such eyes, nor hair she longed so much to touch. Delicate with the coffee flask, his hands were as brown as an Italian fir-cone. She’d been to Italy once, to Sestri Levante with a man called Jacob Fynne who’d said he was going to put on
‘D’you know Sestri Levante?’ she asked in order to keep him at their table.
He said he didn’t, so she told him about it. Supposing she ran into him on the street, like she’d run into Fitz six months ago? He’d be alone: restaurant waiters in a city that was foreign to them could not know many people.
