They stood up. They thanked him and hoped he would be completely better soon. It was as though tennis had never been mentioned; it was as though he had never said that people made a fuss. He did not move from where he sat at the head of the long table, but said that he had enjoyed their visit, that they were good to come all this way to bore themselves with the company of an invalid. Would they come again? he almost meekly asked.
‘Yes, of course,’ Laura replied, her assurance only moments ahead of Margaretta’s.
‘Please be careful,’ Margaretta said. ‘Please take a good rest.’
They rode in silence down the avenue, past the gate-lodge, where Sergeant Barry was reading a newspaper in his garden. He looked up from it to scrutinize them, another cigarette in the middle of his mouth. Again he wagged his head at them but did not attempt to speak.
‘God!’ Margaretta said when they were out of earshot. ‘God, did you ever!’
‘I hope we didn’t cause a strain.’
‘God, I know! I thought of that.’
When they next saw Dr Heaslip they asked him. ‘Oh no, no,’ he said. ‘Company probably does the poor fellow good.’ But neither Laura nor Margaretta could think of Ralph de Courcy as a poor fellow. A fortnight later they rode over to the de Courcys’ house again, and Sergeant Barry, apprehending them as they turned into the avenue, told them the de Courcys were all away in Dublin.
‘When will they be back?’ Margaretta asked.
‘Ah, not for a while. Not till the end of the month.’
A week later Laura returned to England. This time among the images she carried with her were ones of the hours they had spent in the de Courcys’ house and in their garden. The indistinct tapestries, the key of the clock hanging in the alcove in the hall, the black-and-white dog asleep on the hearthrug: such images came and went in her mind, giving way to the face of the maid, and the sergeant at the gate-lodge, and Ralph de Courcy in his flannels and green tweed jacket. She dreamed that she and Margaretta walked among the white hydrangeas and the cedar trees, that they sat again on the pink-striped sofa. In her dream the hands fell off the clock in the hall, which Dr Heaslip said sometimes happened, owing to strain.
Margaretta wrote to say that the de Courcys had returned from Dublin, so she’d heard, but on her own she naturally hadn’t had the nerve to cycle over. The De Luxe had at last acquired Western Electric Sound and the difference was tremendous. Wiry Bohan had been to the house to see about marrying Katie, and when Mrs Heaslip suggested that they should wait a little longer he’d gone red in the face and said he thought waiting wasn’t a good idea. Mr Hearne was dealing in black-market sugar and tea, making more than he’d ever made out of meat. But soon, so people said, he’d be arrested.
The following summer, to her great disappointment, and to Margaretta’s, Lauira did not visit Ireland. The reason for this was that her mother, suffering a bout of pneumonia in the early part of the year, did not recover quickly. She struggled back to her desk in the cubbyhole behind the Anstey Rye clothes shop, but an exhaustion that the illness had left her with would not lift, and when Laura’s summer holidays came Dr Farquhar advised that she should be responsible for all the housework and all the cooking, taking this burden at least from her mother. Had it not been for the postwar effort that was still required of everyone, he would have stipulated total rest for her mother, three months simply doing nothing. And he knew that ends had to be made to meet.
So Laura cooked her mother’s meals and her own, and Hoovered the rooms of their cottage. She made her mother rest on Sundays, bringing her trays in bed. She was conscientious about taking the wet battery of the wireless to be recharged once a week, she weeded the garden and transplanted the lettuce plants. All the time she cherished the hope that at the end of the summer, even for a week, she might be permitted to visit Margaretta. Her mother was clearly regaining her strength. She stopped spending Sundays in bed and instead sat in the garden. By mid-August she began to do the cooking again.
Letters from Margaretta asked if there was any chance, but in Anstey Rye Ireland was not mentioned. Instead, Laura’s mother spoke of their straitened circumstances this year: because of her pneumonia, she had not earned as much for those few months as she might have; ends had not yet begun to meet again. So Laura wrote to Margaretta, explaining.
In 1948 Laura went again to Ireland. Katie had married Wiry Bohan and had had a baby. There was a new maid with Eileen in the kitchen, Mattie Devlin’s daughter, Josie. The shopkeepers said Laura was getting prettier all the time, but Laura knew that it was Margaretta who was the beautiful one and always would be, her marvellous hair and her headstrong manner that Laura admired so. She’d been going to a boarding-school ever since Laura had last visited the Heaslips, the one in Bray where Mrs Heaslip and Laura’s mother had met. ‘You’re better looking than Linda Darnell,’ Laura said, meaning it.
They were too shy to cycle to the de Courcys’ house. They didn’t realize at first that such a shyness had developed in them, but when they talked about that warm day two summers ago they realized that they could not attempt to repeat it. Two children, with white socks and straw hats, had cycled up the avenue, chattering and giggling: it would be awkward now. But one evening, watching
‘Yes,’ Laura said, aware that she reddened as she spoke. When she glanced at Margaretta she saw that she had reddened also.
‘This is a sister of mine,’ he introduced. ‘Hazel.’
Margaretta said:
‘I think I met you, Hazel, years ago when we were kids.’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘This is my friend Laura.’
