VIVIENNE BLEW THE film of dust that the afternoon sun had made visible on the mantelpiece. Then she picked up the out-of-date At Home invitation propped up against the wall – Paula and Hartley asking them to lunch on Easter Sunday – and tore it in half.
‘Richard?’ Vivienne said.
He was sitting on the sofa, tipped back, staring up at the ceiling. ‘I was tired that’s all. It’s been a long week,’ he said.
‘We all have weeks,’ Vivienne said.
Through the closed door of the living room Richard could hear the clucking voices of cartoon characters of a DVD the girls were watching in the kitchen. ‘I know, I know, it was all my fault. I’ve said so. But I was only twenty minutes late. Diane Whats-her-name, the coach, was there. The girls were fine.’
Vivienne hadn’t reproached him when he first returned home from the tennis courts, choosing instead to have Saturday lunch in peace. Now he understood why she had shut all the doors.
‘That’s the second time you’ve been late picking the girls up,’ Vivienne said. She walked over to the waste-paper basket and dropped the two halves of the invitation into it.
‘When was the first, then? Tennis has only just started,’ Richard said.
‘After Julian’s party. I didn’t say anything about tennis.’
Richard got up from the sofa and walked over to the window, nearly tripping over the stack of English holiday cottage brochures that lay on the floor.
‘I’ll get rid of those. I keep forgetting about them,’ Vivienne said.
‘It’s not for another month or so, is it?’
There was no escaping Frances’s seventieth-birthday weekend. Whatever good feelings Richard had had about it had dispersed. A cottage near the Cuckmere estuary in Sussex had been chosen and a deposit put down. He tried to visualise the silvery loops of the Cuckmere River snaking down to the sea, as if he were seeing it from a light aircraft or a vantage point high on the Downs. He tried not to home in on the ‘Lovely cottage, sleeps six’. He thought of driving alone along the motorway – a long, grey, straight stretch between hills – and that also helped.
‘The first weekend in June. You definitely can’t get away on the Friday afternoon?’ Vivienne said.
‘No. I’ve already told you. I’ve got a dinner to go to. I’ll drive down later. There’ll be less traffic.’
The neighbour who lived across the road was about to cut his hedge with an electric trimmer. Wearing a baseball cap, goggles and heavy leather gauntlets, Craig looked like a dangerous gnome. He caught sight of Richard gazing out and raised his free hand. Richard responded with a nod. The motor started up and Craig began to plane the fuzzy top of the foliage with even strokes.
‘Is Julian the boy who lives in that huge house at the top of the Hill?’ Richard asked.
‘Yes. You remember going there, don’t you?’
Richard winced. ‘Why didn’t you talk about it then, if it bothered you? That was weeks ago. Why wait till now? That’s what I can’t understand about you, Vivienne.’
‘I wasn’t bothered.’
‘Exactly.’
The soundtrack from the DVD was suddenly louder. The girls must have turned up the volume. There was a crackle, as of explosives, and then the clatter of falling rubble. The girls burst out laughing.
‘I offered to go to the garden centre. You said that there was enough lawn fertiliser in the shed left over from last year. It was just a question of finding it,’ he said.
‘I did say that,’ she agreed.
‘So there was nothing you wanted me to do. I went for a walk. It was a beautiful day. It was a beautiful day.’ He glanced out again. Craig had started on the side of the hedge, was sweeping across it with diagonal strokes. The pavement was topped with a layer of leaves and Craig was ankle deep in them. Richard knew nothing about Craig. Only that he had a wife, Anne, twin boys and a vintage VW that was parked in the garage. Was there even the slightest chance that Craig would hang around outside a stranger’s house, or, when the stranger generously and hospitably took him in, inform her that she had mistaken her own identity? He thought, on the whole, not. And John Henry North, Judge of the Admiralty, would he have done such a thing? The inscription on the monument was full, but somehow, although John North had been ‘Deplored by the Irish Bar, the Senate and his County’, that particular unwise choice hadn’t been part of the list.
‘And before Julian’s party. Where were you then?’ Vivienne said.
‘Somewhere similar, I suppose. I can’t remember.’ Richard was beginning to dislike the sound of his voice.
‘It’s a good thing I didn’t say yes to the “Our Families” DVD,’ Vivienne said.
‘Say that again.’
‘I said, it’s a good thing I didn’t say yes to the “Our Families” DVD. Paula said Glen wants us to be in it.’
Richard couldn’t see Vivienne’s face. She was placing their used coffee cups on the tray. ‘You said no?’ he asked.
‘No, I just didn’t say yes.’ She straightened up.
‘That’s no bloody use with Paula. Who’s eligible?’
‘People like us, I suppose. We’re church members and we have children.’
‘So Paula and Hartley don’t qualify?’
‘They’re a couple, not a family.’
‘But they’re happy,’ Richard said. ‘Totally united, as far as one can see.’ He glanced at Vivienne and saw that the remark was unwelcome. ‘Not like two halves of an egg, more like a double buggy,’ he continued. But Vivienne failed to respond. Richard felt the weariness in his shoulders and his head, as if effort was needed to be held in place. He knew, in that moment, where his spine might protrude and cave in when he reached old age.
‘I’ll tell Paula a definite no, then,’ Vivienne said, her face poker calm, but her lower lip trembling in a disorganised way. ‘Do you think the girls would wander off on their own from the tennis courts? They said they were waiting by the entrance gate. Where would they go? They’re basically sensible, aren’t they?’ Her expression had changed, was now beseeching.
‘Yes,’ Richard said. ‘They’re basically sensible. And I did pick them up, albeit late – and useless.’
Richard took a deep breath and leant forward to gather up the pile of brochures. They would be better off without the presence of so many English cottages set against blue sky. ‘Sorry, Vivienne,’ he said.