Mrs Gray for all her worked-at air of hazy detachment was, I have no doubt, permanently on tenterhooks, fearful that sooner or later I was bound to go too far and take a pratfall and send us both sprawling in the disarray of our perfidy at the feet of her astonished loved ones. And I, I am ashamed to say, teased her heartlessly. It amused me to let the mask drop now and then, just for a second. I would wink at her sultrily when I judged the others were not looking, or in passing would softly bump against some part of her as if by accident. I found endearingly erotic the way in which if, say, I touched her leg under the breakfast table she would try to cover up her start of fright, reminding me of the flustered, helpless attempts at modesty she used to make in our earliest days together when I would bundle her into the back seat of the station wagon and claw at her clothes in my haste to get at this or that high or hollow of her bared flesh as it shrank from me and at the same time enticed me onwards. What a pressure she must have been under at those times, in her own kitchen, what a panic-fright she must have felt. And how callous I was, how careless, to put her through such trials. Yet there was a side to her, the wanton side, that cannot but have thrilled, however fearfully, to these prods that I so cavalierly gave to the blandly domestic surface of her day.
I am thinking of the occasion of Kitty’s party. How did I come to be there, who invited me? Not Kitty herself, I know, nor Billy, and certainly not Mrs Gray. Curious, these holes one encounters when one presses over-insistently upon the moth-eaten fabric of the past. Anyway, for whatever reason, I was there. The little monster was celebrating her birthday, I do not remember which one—she always seemed ageless to me. It was an occasion of wild misrule. The guests were all girls, a score of undersized hoydens who romped unchecked in a pack through the house, elbowing each other and grabbing at each other’s clothes and screaming. One of them, a whey-faced creature, neckless and fat, displayed an alarmingly adhesive interest in me, and kept popping up at my elbow with a congested, insinuating smile; Kitty must have been talking about me. There were party games all of which ended in violent scuffles, with hair pulled and blows exchanged. Billy and I, whom Mrs Gray, before taking refuge in the kitchen, had charged with keeping order, waded into these melees shouting and slapping, like a bo’sun and his mate struggling to quell a riot among a gang of drunken sailors on shore leave in a dockside tavern of an unlicensed Saturday night.
At one particularly boisterous passage of these revels I too retreated into the kitchen, tousled and unnerved. Kitty’s fat friend, called Marge, if I recall—she probably grew up a sylph and broke men’s hearts with the arching of an eyebrow—tried to follow me but I gave her a Gorgon’s transfixing glare and she hung back dolefully and let me shut the kitchen door in her face. I had not come in search of Mrs Gray but there she was, in her apron, with her sleeves rolled and her arms floury, bending to lift a tray of fairy cakes from the oven. Fairy cakes! I was creeping up on her, intent on embracing her about the hips, when, still bending, she turned her head and saw me. I began to say something, but she was looking beyond me now, to the door through which I had just entered, and her face had taken on an expression of alarm and warning. Billy had come in unheard behind me. At once I straightened and let my hands fall to my sides, unsure, though, that I had been quick enough, and that he had not seen me there, advancing at a crouch, ape arms outspread and fingers hooked, towards his mother’s tautly proffered hindquarters. But luckily Billy was not an observant boy, and he swept us both with an indifferent glance and went to the table and took up a slice of plum-cake and began to stuff it into his mouth with slovenly dispatch. All the same, how my heart wobbled from the gleeful terror of such a close thing.
Mrs Gray, making herself ignore me, came and set the tray of cakes on the table and stood back, pushing out her lower lip and sending a quick puff of breath upwards to blow a stray fall of hair from her forehead. Billy was still chewing cake, mumbling complaints of his sister and her riotous friends. His mother bade him absently not to speak with his mouth full—she was still admiring the cakes, each in its fluted paper cup and snug in its own shallow compartment in the tray and smelling warmly of vanilla—but he paid her no heed. Then she lifted a hand and laid it on his shoulder. This gesture too was absent-minded, but for that reason all the more shocking, to me. I was outraged, outraged to see the two of them together there, she with her hand resting so lightly on his shoulder, in the midst of all that homeliness, that shared, familiar world, while I stood by as if forgotten. Whatever liberties Mrs Gray might grant me I would never be as near to her as Billy was at that moment, as he always had been and always would be, at every moment. I could only get into her from the outside, but he, he had sprung from a seed and grown inside her, and even after he had shouldered his brute way out of her he was still flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood. Oh, I do not say these are the things I thought, exactly, but I had the gist of them, and suddenly, in that moment, I was sorely pained. There was no one and nothing that would not make me jealous; jealousy crouched inside me like a bristling, green-eyed cat, ready to spring at the slightest provocation, real or, more often, imagined.
She had Billy take up the remaining slices of plum-cake on its plate and a big bottle of lemonade and, bearing an imbricated array of banana sandwiches on a wooden tray, went after him out of the kitchen. Was there a swing door? Yes, there was: she stopped and held it ajar with her knee and cast back at me a grimful sort of glance that had in it both reproof and pardon, inviting me wordlessly to follow her. I gave her a sulky scowl and turned aside, and heard the spring make its comical, rubbery sound—
Left alone, I lingered moodily by the table, glaring at the tin tray of cooling fairy cakes. All was still. Even the hoydens had gone quiet, temporarily silenced, it must be, by banana sandwiches and glasses of lemon pop. Winter sunlight—no, no, it was summer, for heaven’s sake keep up!—summer sunlight, calm, and heavy as honey, was shining in the window beside the fridge, which was silent too. Mrs Gray had left a kettle of water on the stove, grumbling to itself over a low flame. It was one of those conical-shaped whistling kettles that were so popular then and that one hardly ever sees nowadays, when everyone has given in to the electric kettle. The whistle was not on it, though, and from the stubby spout a broad slow column of steam was rising, dense with the sunlight in it and lazily undulant, and curling on itself in an elegant scroll at its topmost reach. When I made to approach the stove something of my own dense aura must have gone before me and this charmed cobra of steam leaned delicately away, as if in vague alarm; I paused, and it righted itself, and when I moved again it moved, too, as before. So we stood wavering there, this friendly wraith and I, held in tremulous equilibrium by the heavy air of summer, and all unexpectedly and for no reason I could think of, a slow burst of happiness enveloped me, a happiness without weight or object, like the simple sunlight itself in the window.
When I did return to the party, however, this bright and blissful glow was clouded on the instant by the unexpected arrival of Mr Gray. He had left his assistant in charge of the shop—a Miss Flushing; I shall get round to her presently, if I have the heart for it—and had come home bringing Kitty’s birthday present. Tall, thin, angular, he stood in the kitchen amidst a pool of little girls, like one of those poles that stick up crookedly out of the lagoon at Venice. He had a remarkably small and disproportionate head, which gave one the illusion that one was always farther off from him than was in fact the case. He wore a bedraggled, pale-brown linen jacket and brown corduroy bags and suede shoes scuffed about the toecaps. The bow-ties that he favoured were an affectation even in those archaic days, and represented the only mark of colour or character that I could discern in the otherwise washed-out aspect that he presented to the world. Spurning what must have been a shopful of styles and makes of frame, he chose to wear cheap, steel-rimmed spectacles, which he would remove slowly, holding them delicately at one hinge between a thumb and two fingers, as if they were pince-nez, and closing his eyes he would slowly massage with the first two fingers and thumb of his other hand the knotted flesh at the bridge of his nose, sighing the while to himself. Mr Gray’s soft sighs sounded at once imprecatory and resigned, like the prayers offered up by a minister who has long ago given in to religious doubts. He had about him permanently an air of troubled inadequacy, seeming incompetent to deal with the practicalities of everyday life. This dim distressfulness had the effect of rallying ministrators around him. People always seemed to be pressing forwards anxiously to aid him, to smooth his way, to make straight his path, to lift an invisible burden from his sloping shoulders. Even Kitty and her friends as they gathered about him now had a hushed and helping aspect. Mrs Gray, too, was solicitous, as she handed to him over the heads of the children his after-work half-inch of whiskey in a cut-glass tumbler, perhaps the very tumbler that I used to drink from with Billy, upstairs, and from which afterwards I would guiltily wipe my fingerprints with a less than clean hankie. How tired was the smile of thanks he gave to her, how weary seemed the hand with which he put the drink down on the table behind him, untasted.
And maybe, indeed, he was ill. Do I not recall hushed talk of doctors and hospitals after the Grays’ flight from our midst? At the time, sunk in bitter sorrow, I thought it must be just the town as usual spinning a story to cover over for decency’s sake a scandal the initial revelation of which had delighted so many. But maybe I was wrong, maybe all along he was suffering from some chronic ailment that was brought to crisis by the discovery of what his wife and I had been up to. That is an unsettling thought, or should be, anyway.
