Selected Stories

A mass of odds and ends gathered in Philip’s mind. ‘The number of this taxi is 22003,’ he had said after he’d kissed Francesca in it. Their first embrace, and he had read out the number from the enamel disc on the back of the driver’s seat, and neither of them had since forgotten it. The first present Francesca gave him was a book about wine which to this day he wouldn’t lend to people.

No one was as honest as Francesca, Philip reflected as the woman blundered on: it was impossible to accept that she had told lies, even through reticence. Yet now there were – as well – the odds and ends of the warm summer that had just passed, all suddenly transformed. Dates and the order of events glimmered in Philip’s brain; he was good at speedy calculation and accurately recalling. Excuses, and explanations, seemed elaborate in the bare light of the hindsight that was forced upon him. A note falling to the floor had been too hastily retrieved. There were headaches and cancellations and apologies. There’d been a difference in Francesca that hadn’t at the time seemed great but seemed great now.

‘Yes, Sebastian’s very nice,’ Philip said.

‘It’s over,’ Francesca said in their bedroom. ‘It’s been over for weeks, as a matter of fact.’

Still dressed, sitting on the edge of their bed, Francesca was gazing at the earrings she’d just taken off, two drops of amber in the palm of her hand. Very slowly she made a pattern of them, moving them on her palm with the forefinger of her other hand. In their bedroom the light was dim, coming only from a bedside lamp. Francesca was in the shadows.

‘It doesn’t make much difference that it’s over,’ Philip said. ‘That’s not the point.’

‘I know.’

‘You’ve never told lies before.’

‘Yes, I know. I hated it.’

Even while it was happening, she had sometimes thought it wasn’t. And for the last few lonely weeks it had felt like madness, as indeed it had been. Love was madness of a kind, Margy had said once, years ago, and Francesca at that time hadn’t understood: being fond of Sebastian in the past, and loving Philip, had never been touched by anything like that. Her recent inexplicable aberration felt as if she had taken time off from being herself, and now was back again where she belonged, not understanding, as bouts of madness are never understood.

‘That’s hardly an explanation,’ her husband said when she endeavoured to relate some of this.

‘No, I know it isn’t. I would have told you about it quite soon; I couldn’t not tell you.’

‘I didn’t even notice I wasn’t loved.’

‘You are loved, Philip. I ended it. And besides, it wasn’t much.’

A silence grew between them. ‘I love you,’ Sebastian had said no longer ago than last June, and in July and in August and September also. And she had loved him too. More than she loved anyone else, more than she loved her children: that thought had been there. Yet now she could say it wasn’t much.

As though he guessed some part of this, Philip said: ‘I’m dull compared to him. I’m grey and dull.’

‘No.’

‘I mooch about the garden, I mooch about on golf courses. You’ve watched me becoming greyer in middle age. You don’t want to share our middle age.’

‘I never think things like that. Never, Philip.’

‘No one respects a cuckold.’

Francesca did not reply. She was asked if she wanted a divorce. She shook her head. Philip said:

‘One day in the summer you and Margy were talking about a key when I came in, and you stopped and said, “Have a drink, darling?” I remember now. Odd, how stuff’s dredged up. The key to Margy’s flat, I think?’

Francesca stood up. She placed her amber earrings in the drawer of their bedside table and slowly began to undress. Philip, standing by the door, said he had always trusted her, which he had said already.

‘I’m sorry I hurt you, Philip.’ Tiredly, she dropped into a cliché, saying that Sebastian had been banished as a ghost may be, that at last she had got him out of her system. But what she said had little relevance, and mattered so slightly that it was hardly heard. What was there between them were the weekends Philip had been in charge of the children because Francesca needed a rest and had gone, with Margy, to some seaside place where Margy was looking after a house for people who were abroad. And the evenings she helped to paint Margy’s flat. And the mornings that were free after she gave up helping in the Little Acorn Nursery School. Yes, that key had been Margy’s, Francesca said. Left for her under a stone at the foot of a hydrangea bush in Pimlico, in a block of flats’ communal garden: she didn’t add that. Found there with a frisson of excitement: nor that, either.

‘I’m ashamed because I hurt you,’ she said instead. ‘I’m ashamed because I was selfish and a fool.’

‘You should have married him in the first place.’

‘It was you I wanted to marry, Philip.’