Selected Stories

That Sunday they stood talking in the graveyard when the handful of other parishioners had gone. ‘Come and I’ll show you the graves,’ he said, and led the way, knowing exactly where he was going, stepping on to the grass and feeling the first gravestone with his fingers. His grandmother, he said, on his father’s side, and for a moment Belle wanted to feel the incised letters herself instead of looking at them. They both knew, as they moved among the graves, that the parishioners who’d gone home were very much aware of the two who had been left behind. On Sundays, ever since Violet’s death, he had walked to and from his house, unless it happened to be raining, in which case the man who drove old Mrs Purtill to church took him home also. ‘Would you like a walk, Belle?’ he asked when he had shown her his family graves. She said she would.

Belle didn’t take the chickens with her when she became a wife. She said she’d had enough of chickens. Afterwards she regretted that, because every time she did anything in the house that had been Violet’s she felt it had been done by Violet before her. When she cut up meat for a stew, standing with the light falling on the board that Violet had used, and on the knife, she felt herself a follower. She diced carrots, hoping that Violet had sliced them. She bought new wooden spoons because Violet’s had shrivelled away so. She painted the upright rails of the banisters. She painted the inside of the front door that was never opened. She disposed of the stacks of women’s magazines, years old, that she found in an upstairs cupboard. She threw away a frying-pan because she considered it unhygienic. She ordered new vinyl for the kitchen floor. But she kept the flowerbeds at the back weeded in case anyone coming to the house might say she was letting the place become run-down.

There was always this dichotomy: what to keep up, what to change. Was she giving in to Violet when she tended her flower-beds? Was she giving in to pettiness when she threw away a frying-pan and three wooden spoons? Whatever Belle did she afterwards doubted herself. The dumpy figure of Violet, grey-haired as she had been in the end, her eyes gone small in the plumpness of her face, seemed irritatingly to command. And the unseeing husband they shared, softly playing his violin in one room or another, did not know that his first wife had dressed badly, did not know she had thickened and become sloppy, did not know she had been an unclean cook. That Belle was the one who was alive, that she was offered all a man’s affection, that she plundered his other woman’s possessions and occupied her bedroom and drove her car, should have been enough. It should have been everything, but as time went on it seemed to Belle to be scarcely anything at all. He had become set in ways that had been allowed and hallowed in a marriage of nearly forty years: that was what was always there.

A year after the wedding, as the couple sat one lunchtime in the car which Belle had drawn into the gateway to a field, he said:

‘You’d tell me if it was too much for you?’

‘Too much, Owen?’

‘Driving all over the county. Having to get me in and out. Having to sit there listening.’

‘It’s not too much.’

‘You’re good the way you’ve patience.’

‘I don’t think I’m good at all.’

‘I knew you were in church that Sunday. I could smell the perfume you had on. Even at the organ I could smell it.’

‘I’ll never forget that Sunday.’

‘I loved you when you let me show you the graves.’

‘I loved you before that.’

‘I don’t want to tire you out, with all the traipsing about after pianos. I could let it go, you know.’

He would do that for her, her thought was as he spoke. He wasn’t much for a woman, he had said another time: a blind man moving on towards the end of his days. He confessed that when first he wanted to marry her he hadn’t put it to her for more than two months, knowing better than she what she’d be letting herself in for if she said yes. ‘What’s that Belle look like these days?’ he had asked Violet a few years ago, and Violet hadn’t answered at first. Then apparently she’d said: ‘Belle still looks a girl.’

‘I wouldn’t want you to stop your work. Not ever, Owen.’

‘You’re all heart, my love. Don’t say you’re not good.’

‘It gets me out and about too, you know. More than ever in my life. Down all those avenues to houses I didn’t know were there. Towns I’ve never been to. People I never knew. It was restricted before.’