I had the odd feeling that Miss Awpit was going to die as she was speaking, before she could tell me. I said:
‘I assure you, you are doing the right thing. What did Mrs Maugham say?’
‘Well, it was at breakfast one morning. She hadn’t had a good night at all. So she said, but you know what it’s like with old people. I mean, quite frankly I had to get up myself in the night and I heard her sleeping as deep and sweet as you’d wish. Honestly, Mr Farrel, I often wish I had her constitution myself –’
‘You were telling me about Mr Higgs.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You were telling me about Mr Higgs.’
‘Well, it’s nothing really. You’ll probably laugh when you hear. Quite honestly I was in two minds whether or not to bother you. You see, all Mrs Maugham said was: “It’s funny that man suddenly talking about Mr Higgs like that. You know, Ethel, I haven’t heard Mr Higgs mentioned for almost thirty years.” So I said “Yes”, leading her on, you see. “And who was Mr Higgs, dear, thirty years ago?” And she said: “Oh nobody at all. He was just Elizabeth’s little friend!” ’
‘Elizabeth’s?’
‘Just what I said, Mr Farrel. She got quite impatient with me. “Just someone Elizabeth used to talk to,” she said, “when she was three. You know the way children invent things.” ’
‘Like Mambi,’ I said, not meaning to say it, since Miss Awpit wouldn’t understand.
‘Oh dear, Mr Farrel,’ said Miss Awpit, ‘I knew you’d laugh.’
I left the office and took a taxi all the way home. Elizabeth was in the garden. I sat beside her and I held her hands. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Let’s have a holiday. Let’s go away, just the two of us. We need a rest.’
‘You’re spying on me,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Which isn’t new, I suppose. You’ve got so mean, darling, ever since you became jealous of poor Mr Higgs. How could you be jealous of a man like Mr Higgs?’
‘Elizabeth, I know who Mr Higgs is. I can tell you –’
‘There’s nothing to be jealous about. All the poor creature does is to ring me up and tell me about the things he read in my diaries the time he came to paint the hall. And then he tries to comfort me about the children. He tells me not to worry about Lisa. But I can’t help worrying because I know she’s going to have this hard time. She’s going to grow big and lumpy, poor little Lisa, and she’s not going to be ever able to pass an exam, and in the end she’ll go and work in a post office. But Mr Higgs –’
‘Let me tell you about Mr Higgs. Let me just remind you.’
‘You don’t know him, darling. You’ve never spoken to him. Mr Higgs is very patient, you know. First of all he did the talking, and now, you see, he kindly allows me to. Poor Mr Higgs is an inmate of a home. He’s an institutionalized person, darling. There’s no need to be jealous.’
I said nothing. I sat there holding her two hands and looking at her. Her face was just the same; even her eyes betrayed no hint of the confusion that held her. She smiled when she spoke of Mr. Higgs. She made a joke, laughing, calling him the housewife’s friend.
‘It was funny,’ she said, ‘the first time I saw Christopher as an adult, sitting in a room with that awful woman. She was leaning back in a chair, staring at him and attempting to torture him with words. And then there was Anna, half a mile away across London, in a house in a square. All the lights were on because of the party, and Anna was in that red suit, and she was laughing and saying how she hated Christopher, how she had hated him from the first moment she saw him. And when she said that, I couldn’t remember what moment she meant. I couldn’t quite remember where it was that Anna and Christopher had met. Well, it goes to show.’ Elizabeth paused. ‘Well, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘I mean, imagine my thinking that poor Mr Higgs was evil! The kindest, most long-suffering man that ever walked on two legs. I mean, all I had to do was to remind Mr Higgs that I’d forgotten and Mr Higgs could tell me. “They met in a garden,” he could say, “at an ordinary little tea-party.” And Lisa was operated on several times, and counted the words in telegrams.’
Elizabeth talked on, of the children and of Mr Higgs. I rang up our doctor, and he came, and then a little later my wife was taken from the house. I sat alone with Lisa on my knee until it was time to go and fetch Christopher and Anna.
‘Mummy’s ill,’ I said in the car. ‘She’s had to go away for a little.’ I would tell them the story gradually, and one day perhaps we might visit her and she might still understand who we were. ‘Ill?’ they said. ‘But Mummy’s never ill.’ I stopped the car by our house, thinking that only death could make the house seem so empty, and thinking too that death was easier to understand. We made tea, I remember, the children and I, not saying very much more.
The headmaster of a great English public school visited every summer a village in County Galway for the sake of the fishing in a number of nearby rivers. For more than forty years this stern, successful man had brought his wife to the Slieve Gashal Hotel, a place, so he said, he had come to love. A smiling man called Mr Doyle had been for all the headmaster’s experience of the hotel its obliging proprietor: Mr Doyle had related stories to the headmaster late at night in the hotel bar, after the headmaster’s wife had retired to bed; they had discussed together the fruitfulness of the local rivers, although in truth Mr Doyle had never held a rod in his life. ‘You feel another person,’ the headmaster had told generations of his pupils, ‘among blue mountains, in the quiet little hotel.’ On walks through the school grounds with a senior boy on either side of him he had spoken of the soft peace of the riverside and of the unrivalled glory of being alone with one’s mind. He talked to his boys of Mr Doyle and his unassuming ways, and of the little village that was a one-horse place and none the worse for that, and of the good plain food that came from the Slieve Gashal’s kitchen.
To Jackson Major the headmaster enthused during all the year that Jackson Major was head boy of the famous school, and Jackson Major did not ever forget the paradise that then had formed in his mind. ‘I know a place,’ he said to his fiancee long after he had left the school, ‘that’s perfect for our honeymoon.’ He told her about the heathery hills that the headmaster had recalled for him, and the lakes and rivers and the one-horse little village in which, near a bridge, stood the ivy-covered bulk of the Slieve Gashal Hotel. ‘Lovely, darling,’ murmured the bride-to-be of Jackson Major, thinking at the time of a clock in the shape of a human hand that someone had given them and which would naturally have to be changed for something else. She’d been hoping that he would suggest Majorca for their honeymoon, but if he wished to go to this other place she didn’t intend to make a fuss. ‘Idyllic for a honeymoon,’ the headmaster had once remarked to Jackson Major, and Jackson Major had not forgotten.
