The girl shakes her head. Hair, in need of washing, flaps. She doesn’t want to go away, her whine protests. She wants to stay since she feels she belongs here.
‘It’s only, Sharon, that I thought it might be easier. A change of scene for a week or two. I know it’s hard for you.’
Again the head is shaken, the lank hair flaps. Granny spectacles are removed and wiped carefully on a patchwork skirt, or perhaps a skirt that is simply patched. Sharon’s loose, soiled sandals have been kicked off, and she plays with them as she converses. She is sitting on the floor because she never sits on chairs.
‘We understand each other, you see,’ Henrietta continues softly. ‘My dear, I do want you to realize that.’
‘It’s all over, the thing I had with the Orange People. I’m not like that any more. I’m perfectly responsible.’
‘I know the Orange thing is over. I know you’ve got your feet quite on the ground, Sharon.’
‘It was awful, ’smatter of fact, all that.’
The Orange People offer a form of Eastern mysticism about which Henrietta knows very little. Someone once told her that the mysticism is an excuse for sexual licence, but explained no further. The sect is apparently quite different from the Hare Krishna people, who sometimes wear orange also but who eat food of such poor quality that sexual excess is out of the question. The Orange People had camped in a field and upset the locals, but all that was ages ago.
‘And I know you’re working hard, my dear. I know you’ve turned over a new leaf.’ The trouble is that the leaf has been turned, absurdly, in the direction of Henrietta’s husband.
‘I just want to stay here,’ Sharon repeats. ‘Ever since it happened I feel I don’t belong anywhere else.’
‘Well, strictly speaking, nothing
‘It has to me, though, Henrietta.’
Sharon never smiles. Henrietta can’t remember having ever seen a smile enlivening the slack features any more than a hint of make-up has ever freshened the pale skin that stretches over them. Henrietta, who dresses well and maintains with care the considerable good looks she possesses, can understand none of it. Unpresentable Sharon Tamm is certainly no floosie, and hardly a gold-digger. Perhaps such creatures do not exist, Henrietta speculates, one perhaps only reads about them.
‘I thought I’d better tell you,’ Sharon Tamm says. ‘I thought it only fair, Henrietta.’
‘Yes, I’m glad you did.’
The girl stands up and puts her sandals on to her grimy feet. There is a little white plastic bow, a kind of clasp, in her hair: Henrietta hasn’t noticed it before because the hair has covered it in a way it wasn’t meant to. The girl sorts all that out now, shaking her head again, taking the bow out and replacing it.
‘He can’t hurt people,’ she tells Henrietta, speaking of the man to whom Henrietta has been married for more than twenty years.
Sharon Tamm leaves the room then, and Henrietta, who has been sitting in a high-backed chair during the conversation, does not move from it. She is flabbergasted by the last two impertinent statements of the girl’s. How dare she say he never would! How dare she imply some knowledge of him by coyly remarking that he cannot hurt people! For a moment she experiences a desire to hurry after the girl, to catch her in the hall and to smack her on the face with the open palm of her hand. But she is so taken aback, so outraged by the whole bizarre conversation, that she cannot move. The girl, at her own request – a whispery whine on the telephone – asked to come to see her ‘about something urgent’. And although Henrietta intended to go out that afternoon she at once agreed to remain in, imagining that Sharon Tamm was in some kind of pickle.
The hall door bangs. Henrietta – forty-three last month, dressed now in a blue jersey and skirt, with a necklace of pink corals at her throat and several rings on the fingers of either hand, her hair touched with a preparation that brings out the reddish brown in it – still does not move. She stares at the place on the carpet where the girl has been crouched. There was a time when Sharon Tamm came quite often to the house, when she talked a lot about her family, when Henrietta first felt sorry for her. She ceased to come rather abruptly, going off to the Orange People instead.
In the garden Henrietta’s dog, a cairn called Ka-Ki, touches the glass of the french windows with her nose, asking to be let in. Henrietta’s husband, Roy, has trained her to do that, but the training has not been difficult because the dog is intelligent. Henrietta crosses the room to open the french windows, not answering in her usual way the fuss the dog makes of her, scampering at her feet, offering some kind of gratitude. The awful thing is, the girl seemed genuinely to believe in the extraordinary fantasy that possesses her. She would have told Roy of course, and Roy being Roy wouldn’t have known what to do.
They had married when Roy was at the very beginning of his career, seven years older than Henrietta, who at the time had been a secretary in the department. She’d been nervous because she didn’t belong in the academic world, because she had not had a university education herself. ‘Only a typist!’ she used bitterly to cry in those early, headstrong quarrels they’d had. ‘You can’t expect a typist to be bright enough to understand you.’ But Roy, urbane and placid even then, had kissed her crossly pouting lips and told her not to be so silly. She was cleverer, and prettier, and more attractive in all sorts of other ways, than one after another of his female colleagues: ever since he has been telling her that, and meaning it. Henrietta cannot accept the ‘cleverer’, but ‘prettier’ and ‘more attractive’ she believes to be true, and isn’t ashamed when she admits it to herself. They dress appallingly for a start, most of the women in the department, a kind of arrogance, Henrietta considers.
She clears away the tea things, for she has naturally offered Sharon Tamm tea, and carries them to the kitchen. Only a little less shaky than she was in the sitting-room after the girl’s final statements, she prepares a turkey breast for the oven. There isn’t much to do to it, but she likes to spike it with herbs and to fold it round a celery heart, a recipe she devised herself. She slices parsnips to roast with it, and peels potatoes to roast also. It isn’t a special meal in any way, but somehow she finds herself taking special care because Roy is going to hate it when she mentions the visit of the girl.
She makes a pineapple pudding he likes. He has schoolboy tastes, he says himself, and in Henrietta’s view he has too great a fondness for dairy products. She has to watch him where cream is concerned, and she insists he does not take too much salt. Not having children of their own has affected their relationship in ways like this. They look after one another, he in turn insisting that she should not Hoover for too long because Hoovering brings on the strain in her back.
