himself.
‘Yes, there was something wrong,’ he says.
They have been through all that. They talked about it endlessly, sending themselves to sleep with it, lazing with it on a Sunday morning. Henrietta found it hard to forgive the girl for being ungrateful. Both of them, she considered, had helped her in so very many ways.
‘Shall we forget it all now?’ she suggests, knowing that her voice has become nervous. ‘Everything about the wretched girl?’
‘Forget?’
That is impossible, his tone suggests. They cannot forget all that Sharon Tamm has told them about her home in Daventry, about her father’s mother who lives with the family and stirs up so much trouble, about her overweight sister Diane and her brother Leslie. The world of Sharon Tamm’s family has entered theirs. They can see, even now, the grandmother in her special armchair in the kitchen, her face snagged with a sourness that has to do with her wastrel husband, long since dead. They can see the saucepans boiling over on the stove because Mrs Tamm can never catch them in time, and Leslie’s motor-cycling gear on the kitchen table, and Diane’s bulk. Mr Tamm shouts perpetually, at Leslie to take his motor-cycling clothes away, at Diane for being so fat, at his wife, at Sharon, making her jump. ‘You are stupid to an extent,’ is the statement he has coined specially for his wife and repeats for her benefit several times every evening. He speaks slowly when he makes this statement, giving the words air, floating them through tired exasperation. His noisy manner leaves him when he dispatches these words, for otherwise – when he tells his wife she is ugly or a bitch – he shouts, and bangs anything he can lay his hand on, a saucepan lid, a tin of mushy peas, a spoon. The only person he doesn’t shout at is his mother, for whom he has an exaggerated regard, even, according to Sharon, loves. Every evening he takes her down to the Tapper’s Arms, returning at closing time to the house that Sharon has so minutely described: rooms separated by walls through which all quarrels can be heard, cigarette burns on the edge of the bath, a picture of a black girl on the landing, a stair-carpet touched with Leslie’s motor-cycling grease and worn away in places. To Henrietta’s sitting- room – flowery in summer because the french windows bring the garden in, cheerful with a wood fire when it’s cold – these images have been repeatedly conveyed, for Sharon Tamm derived considerable relief from talking.
‘Well, she told me and I’ve told you. Please can we just put it all aside?’
She rises as she speaks and hurries to the kitchen. She opens the oven and places the pineapple pudding on the bottom shelf. She bastes the turkey breast and the potatoes and the parsnips. She washes some broccoli and puts it ready on the draining board. He has not said, as she hoped he would, that Sharon Tamm is really a bit pathetic. Ka-Ki sniffs about the kitchen, excited by the smell that has come from the oven. She trots behind Henrietta, back to the garden.
‘She told you too, didn’t she, Roy? You knew all this?’
She didn’t mean to say that. While washing the broccoli she planned to mention MacMelanie, to change the subject firmly and with deliberation. But the nervousness that Sharon Tamm inspired in her when she said that Roy couldn’t hurt people has suddenly returned, and she feels muzzy due to the sherry, not entirely in control of herself.
‘Yes, she told me,’ he says. ‘Well, actually, it isn’t quite like that.’
He has begun to sweat again, little beads breaking on his forehead and his chin. He pulls the dotted handkerchief from his pocket and wipes at his face. In a slow, unwilling voice he tells her what some intuition already insists is the unbelievable truth: it is not just that the girl has a silly crush on him but that a relationship of some kind exists between them. Listening, she feels physically sick. She feels she is asleep, trying to wake herself out of a nightmare because the sickness is heaving through her stomach. The face of the girl is vivid, a whitehead in the crease of her chin, the rims of her eyes pink. The girl is an insult to her, with her dirty feet and broken fingernails.
‘Let’s not mention it ever again,’ she hears herself urging repetitiously. ‘MacMelanie,’ she begins, but does not continue. He is saying something, his voice stumbling, larded with embarrassment. She can’t hear him properly.
There has never been an uneasiness about their loyalty to one another, about their love or their companionship. Roy is disappointed because, professionally, he hasn’t got on, but that has nothing to do with the marriage. Roy doesn’t understand ambition, he doesn’t understand that advancement has to be pursued. She knows that but has never said it.
‘I’m sorry, Henrietta,’ he says, and she wants to laugh. She wants to stare at him in amazement as he sprawls there, sweating and fat. She wants to laugh into his face so that he can see how ridiculous it all is. How can it possibly be that he is telling her he loves an unattractive girl who is thirty years younger than him?
‘I feel most awfully dejected,’ he mutters, staring down at the paving stones where they sit. Her dog is obedient at his feet. High above them an aeroplane goes over.
Does he want to marry the girl? Will she lead him into the house in Daventry to meet her family, into the kitchen where the awful grandmother is? Will he shake hands with stupid Mrs Tamm, with Leslie and Diane? Will he go down to the Tapper’s Arms with Mr Tamm?
‘I can’t believe this, Roy.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Do you adore her?’
He doesn’t answer.
‘Have I been no good to you all these years, Roy?’
‘Of course you have.’
They have made love, the girl and he. He tells Henrietta so, confessing awkwardly, mentioning the floor of his room in the department. He would have taken off the girl’s granny glasses and put them on the fawn vinyl by the leg of his desk. He would have run his fingers through the lustreless hair.
‘How could you do this, Roy?’
‘It’s a thing that happened. Nobody did anything.’ Red-faced, shame-faced, he attempts to shrug, but the effort becomes lost in his sprawling flabbiness. He is as unattractive as the girl, she finds herself reflecting: a stranded jellyfish.
