say, smacking with her tongue when Grania picked a scab on her knee or made a pattern on the raked gravel with a stick.
In the kitchen they ate raspberries and cream. She asked him again about himself but he hardly responded, questioning her instead and successfully extracting answers. The raspberries were delicious; he put a punnet on the seat beside the driving seat in the car. They were for Desmond, but he didn’t say so. ‘Don’t feel awkward,’ he said. ‘I’m going back on Monday.’
A hare ran in front of the car on the avenue, bewildered by the lights. People would guess, she thought; they would see a solitary shadow in the car and they would know. It did not occur to her that if her expedition to the Prendergasts’ house had been as innocent as its original purpose the people who observed her return would still have seen what they saw now. In fact, the streets were quite deserted when she came to them.
‘God, I’m sorry,’ Desmond said, sitting up on the sofa, his white clothes rumpled, the texture of a cushion- cover on his cheek, his hair untidy. She smiled, not trusting herself to speak or even to laugh, as in other circumstances she might have. She put the raspberries in the refrigerator and had a bath.
In the Rhett Butler Room they began to change places in the usual way, after the Black Forest gateau. She sat by Francie and Mavis. ‘Good for Aisling,’ Francie insisted when Mavis described the chartered accountant; he did not seem old at all. ‘I’ll have it out with Martin when we get back,’ Mavis said. ‘There’s no chance whatsoever she’s been naughty. I can assure you I’d be the first to know.’ They lowered their voices to remark on Angela’s interest in the stranger. ‘The house would suit her rightly,’ Mavis said.
All the rooms would be done up. The slatted shutters that flanked the windows would be repainted, and the balustrade by the steps. There’d be new curtains and carpets; a gardener would be employed. Angela had never cared for the house her well-to-do husband had built her, and since his death had made no secret of the fact.
‘I’ll never forget that night, Grania.’ Francie giggled, embarrassedly groping for a cigarette. ‘Dancing with your man and Desmond going to sleep. Wasn’t it the same night I told you Maureen was on the way?’
‘Yes, it was.’
The three women talked of other matters. That week in the town an elderly clerk had been accused of embezzlement. Mavis observed that the surveyor from the waterworks was limbering up to propose to Una Carty-Garroll. ‘And doesn’t she know it!’ Francie said. Grania laughed.
Sometimes she’d wondered if he was still working in a pub and told herself that of course he wouldn’t be, that he’d have married and settled down ages ago. But when she saw him tonight she’d guessed immediately that he hadn’t. She wasn’t surprised when Desmond had said he was on his uppers. ‘I am going to do this’: the echo of her resolve came back to her as she sat there. ‘I am going to do this because I want a child.’
‘God, I’m exhausted,’ Mavis said. ‘Is it age or what?’
‘Oh, it’s age, it’s age.’ Francie sighed, stubbing out her cigarette. ‘Damn things,’ she muttered.
Mavis reached for the packet and flicked it across the table. ‘Present for you, Kevy,’ she said, but Francie pleaded with her eyes and he flicked it back again. Grania smiled because they’d have noticed if she didn’t.
In the intervening years he would never have wondered about a child being born. But if Angela married him he would think about it; being close by would cause him to. He would wonder, and in the middle of a night, while he lay beside Angela in bed, it would be borne in upon him that Desmond and Grania had one child only. Grania considered that: the untidiness of someone else knowing, her secret shared. There’d been perpetually, every instant of the day it sometimes seemed, the longing to share – with Desmond and with her friends, with the child that had been born. But this was different.
The evening came to an end. Cars were started in the yard of the hotel; there were warnings of ice on the roads. ‘Good-night, Grania,’ the man who’d come for the funeral said. She buckled herself into her seat-belt. Desmond backed and then crawled forward into West Main Street. ‘You’re quiet,’ he said, and immediately she began to talk about the possibility of Una Carty-Carroll being proposed to in case he connected her silence with the presence of the stranger. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said when that subject was exhausted, ‘I met that fellow of Aisling’s once. He’s only thirty-five.’ She opened the garage door and he drove the car in. The air was refreshingly cold, sharper than it had been in the yard of the hotel.
They locked their house. Grania put things ready for the morning. It was a relief that a babysitter was no longer necessary, that she didn’t have to wait with just a trace of anxiety while Desmond drove someone home. He’d gone upstairs and she knew that he’d done so in order to press open Judith’s door and glance in at her while she slept. Whenever they came in at night he did that.
At the sink Grania poured glasses of water for him and for herself, and carried them upstairs. When she had placed them on either side of their bed she, too, went to look in at her daughter – a mass of brown hair untidy on the pillow, eyes lightly closed. ‘I might play golf tomorrow,’ Desmond said, settling his trousers into his electric press. Almost as soon as he’d clambered into bed he fell asleep. She switched out his bedside light and went downstairs.
Alone in the kitchen, sitting over a cup of tea, she returned again to the August Saturday. Two of Trish’s children had already been born then, and two of Mavis’s, and Helen’s first. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ Billy MacGuinness had said, ‘if Angela doesn’t drop this one in a deck-chair.’ Mary Ann Haddon had just started her second. Older children were sitting on the clubhouse steps.
Grania forced her thoughts through all the rest of it, through the party that had happened by chance, the headlights picking out the rose-bed. She savoured easily the solitude she had disguised during the years that had passed since then, the secret that had seemed so safe. In the quiet kitchen, when she had been over this familiar ground, she felt herself again possessed by the confusion that had come like a fog when she’d seen tonight the father of her child. Then slowly it lifted: she was incapable of regret.
The greater part of the house was shabby from use. The white paintwork of the corridors and the rooms had been chipped and soiled. Generations of feet had clattered against skirting-boards; fingers had darkened an area around door- handles; shoulders had worn patches on walls. The part of the house known as ‘Private Side’ was in better decorative repair, this being the wing occupied by the Headmaster’s family – six people in contrast to the hundred and twenty-odd boys who comprised the boarding-school. In the holidays the house regained its unity, and the Headmaster’s children were together again. Jonathan returned to his own room from whichever dormitory he had occupied during the term, and was glad to do so. Margery, Georgina and Harriet explored the forbidden territory of the last few months.
Mr Arbuary, the children’s father, had bought the house with money left to his wife in a will. On learning about the legacy, the Arbuarys returned to England from Hong Kong, where Mr Arbuary had been a police officer. The legacy allowed them the first chance in their married life to ‘do something’, as they put it privately to one another. In those days Mrs Arbuary was on for anything, but had since developed a nervous condition that drained her energy. Only the two older children were born before the family’s return to England, Jonathan and Margery.
