she’d done when he’d married her after all that fuss, when he’d gone back after his leave, was to imagine that that stupid boy with a tubercular chest was the be-all and end-all. And when the boy had proved beyond a shadow of doubt that he was no such thing there was the new one they’d taken on for his tap-dancing.
She smiled in the Bayeux Lounge, remembering the laughter and the applause when the back legs of Jack and the Beanstalk’s Dobbin surprised everyone by breaking into that elegant tap-dance, and how Jack and his mother had stood there with their mouths comically open. She’d told Fitz about it a few lunches ago because, of course, she hadn’t been able to tell him at the time on account of the thing she’d had with the back legs. He had nodded solemnly, poor Fitz, not really amused, you could see, but pleased because she was happy to remember. A right little troublemaker that tap-dancer had turned out to be, and a right little scrounge, begging every penny he could lay his hands on, with no intention of paying a farthing back.
If she’d run out of hope, she thought, she could have said yes, let’s try again. She could have admitted, because it was only fair to, that she’d never be like the responsible woman who’d gone and died on him. She could have pointed out that she’d never acquire the class of his mother and his sister because she wasn’t that sort of person. She’d thought all that out a few weeks ago, knowing what he was getting around to. She’d thought it was awful for him to be going to a bureau place and have women telling him about how the heat affected them. She’d imagined saying yes and then humming something special, probably ‘Love is the Sweetest Thing’, and leaning her face towards him across the table, waiting for his kiss again. But of course you couldn’t live in fantasies, you couldn’t just pretend.
‘Ready for your second, Nancy?’ the barmaid called across the empty lounge, and she said yes, she thought she was.
You gave up hope if you just agreed because it sounded cosy. When he’d swept her off her feet all those years ago everything had sounded lovely: being with him in some nice place when the war was over, never again being short, the flowers he brought her. ‘No need to come to London, Fitz,’ she might have said today. ‘Let’s just go and live in your house by the sea.’ And he’d have been delighted and relieved, because he’d only mentioned selling up in order to show her that he would if she wanted him to. But all hope would be gone if she’d agreed.
She sighed, sorry for him, imagining him in the house he talked about. He’d have arrived there by now, and she imagined him turning the lights on and everything coming to life. You could tell from the way he talked that there were memories there for him, that the woman he’d married was still all over the place: it wasn’t because he’d finished making a stone wall in the garden that he wanted to move on. He’d probably pour himself a drink and sit down to watch the television; he’d open a tin later on. She imagined him putting a match to the fire and pulling over the curtains. Probably in a drawer somewhere he had a photo of her as a sunflower. He’d maybe sit with it in his hand, with his drink and the television. ‘Dear, it’s a fantasy,’ she murmured. ‘It couldn’t ever have worked second time round, no more’n it did before.’
‘Warm your bones, Nancy,’ the barmaid said, placing her second vodka and tonic on a cardboard mat on the table where she sat. ‘Freeze you tonight, it would.’
‘Yes, it’s very cold.’
She hadn’t returned to the flat after the visit to the Trattoria San Michele; somehow she hadn’t felt like it. She’d walked about during the couple of hours that had to pass before the Bayeux Lounge opened. She’d looked in the shop windows, and looked at the young people with their peculiarly coloured hair. Two boys in eastern robes, with no hair, had tried to sell her a record. She hadn’t been keen to go back to the flat because she wanted to save up the hope that something might have come on the second post, an offer of a part. If she saved it up it would still hover in her mind while she sat in the Bayeux Lounge – just a chance in a million but that was how chances always were. It was more likely, when her luck changed, that the telephone would ring, but even so you could never rule out a letter. You never should. You should never rule out anything.
She wished now she’d tried to tell him that, even though he might not ever have understood. She wished she’d explained that it was all to do with not giving up hope. She’d felt the same when Eddie had got the children, even though one of them wasn’t his, and when they’d gone on so about neglect. All she’d been doing was hoping then too, not wanting to be defeated, not wanting to give in to what they demanded where the children were concerned. Eddie had married someone else, some woman who probably thought she was an awful kind of person because she’d let her children go. But one day the children would write, she knew that inside her somewhere; one day there’d be that letter waiting for her, too.
She sipped more vodka and tonic. She knew as well that one day Mr R.R. would suddenly be there, to make up for every single thing. He’d make up for all the disappointment, for Simpson and Eddie and Laurie Henderson, for treating badly the one man who’d been good to you. He’d make up for scrounging tap-dancers and waiters you wanted to be with because there was sadness in their faces, and the dear old Trattoria San Michele gone for ever into Memory Lane. You couldn’t give up on Mr R.R., might as well walk out and throw yourself down into the river; like giving up on yourself it would be.
‘I think of you only,’ she murmured in her soft whisper, feeling much better now because of the vodka and tonic, ‘only wishing, wishing you were by my side.’ When she’d come in at half past five she’d noticed a chap booking in at the reception, some kind of foreign commercial traveller since the tennis people naturally didn’t come in winter; fiftyish, handsomeish, not badly dressed. She was glad they hadn’t turned on the television yet. From the corner where she sat she could see the stairs, where sooner or later the chap would appear. He’d buy a drink and then he’d look around and there she’d be.
Drumgawnie the crossroads was known as, and for miles around the land was called Drumgawnie also. There was a single shop at the crossroads, next to a pink house with its roof gone. There was an abandoned mill, with tall grain stores no longer used for any purpose. Drumgawnie Rath, a ring of standing stones that predated history, was half a mile across the fields where Odd Garvey grazed his cattle.
It was in 1959, an arbitrary date as far as the people who lived in and around Drumgawnie were concerned, that visitors began to take an interest in the stones, drawing their cars up by the mill and the grain stores. English or French people they usually were, spring or summertime tourists who always called in at the shop to inquire the way. Mrs Mullally, who owned the shop, had thought of erecting a small sign but in the end had abandoned the notion on the grounds that one day, perhaps, a visitor might glance about her premises and purchase something. None ever had.
‘You have to cross the little stream,’ she informed a French couple in the early summer of 1968. ‘Continue on past where you’ve drawn your car in and then there’s rocks you can step on to see you over the bit of water. Go neither right nor left after that until you’ll strike the stones standing up in the grass.’
In her bedroom Dolores Mullally, then aged twenty-two, watched from her window, the lacy half-curtain pulled back at the edge. She had heard the car coming to a halt by the mill, and minutes later foreign voices had become louder as the visitors approached the shop. She had pushed herself up from her bed and limped across to the window. The woman was wearing a black leather coat, a thin woman with a smiling, slanted face, strange-looking and beautiful. The man had a moustache and a slender pipe.
