LILIAN, on waking, reached up her arm to pull back the curtain from the window above her bed. The cretonne roses, so recently hung that their folds were still awkward and raw-smelling, tinkled back on brass rings, and sunlight fell around the walls in honey-colored warpings. It was like being under water, she thought, bathed in that delicate light; she had forgotten these contradictions of spring in England—chill, dreary evenings like yesterday’s, and bright mornings full of early flowers. She pushed the blankets away and knelt up on the bed to look out the small, paned window. The outer air, the garden glittered; the meadows—for they could hardly be called anything less—unfolded beyond, crowned by a glimpse of the village and the fifteenth-century church. All as suitable, as immaculate as the white window sill on which her elbows rested.
But the room was, of course, cold, and she sank back
into the bedclothes. During the night, she had wakened several times to hear the wind rattling the windowpanes and had pushed herself further down the bed, trying to warm her shoulders. (The little electric radiator had been taken away during the day to dry the baby’s washing and had not been returned.) Going to bed last night, she had actually consoled herself with the prospect of departure—that it would be her last night in the house. And tonight, no doubt, back in London, she would wonder about the weekend, and comfort herself by telephoning Julie and by thinking out the long, loving letter she would write when she got back to New York. The letter, in her mind, was already some paragraphs advanced.
Like some desolating childhood disappointment, she thought, this anxiety to get away when she had so longed to come here—so longed to see them, and to see Julie most of all. Because, even though Ben was her own brother, it was to Julie she felt closer; Julie she had missed more in these two years away. Given only this weekend, Lilian felt the need to precipitate confidences—“Are you happy, is this really what you want?” she had almost asked Julie last night, coming upstairs. Which was nonsense, impertinence ; one couldn’t ask it, and in any case Julie would have laughed and told Ben afterward (“What ever do you think Lilian said to me?”). Married couples always betrayed their friends that way—probably for something to say, being so much together. And Ben, indifferent, would say: “How perfectly extraordinary,” or “I’m not in the least surprised,” or “Poor old Lilian.”
Lilian’s room was in the old part of the house—seventeenth-century, Julie had said. Lilian allowed a century either way, for Julie’s imprecision and the exaggeration of the estate agent. She lay approving the uneven walls, the heavy beams of the roof, the sturdy irregularities of the window and door. The only furniture other than her bed was a new chest of drawers, a cane chair, and a small, unsteady table. On this table stood a china lamp and Poets of the Present, a frayed volume in which Thomas Hardy was heavily represented. The room—in fact, the whole house—looked bare. They needed so many things, Julie had said—practically everything—but for a while nothing more could be done; buying the house had taken every penny. On Friday, when Lilian arrived, Julie had shown her around, walking through the rooms with her hand in the crook of Lilian’s arm, separating apologetically at doorways. (All the rooms were at slightly different levels, and there was a step or two at each entrance——sometimes dropping, dangerously, beyond a closed door.) Julie’s shy, artless face, lowered so that strands of silky hair drooped on Lilian’s shoulder, had seemed tired, frail. Her sweater and skirt were aged, unheeded. Too much for her, Lilian thought, this house, and the baby, though I’m sure it’s lovely. “Lovely,” she had repeated later, in the nursery, over a mound of blue blanket. In the hallway, it was Lilian who linked their arms again.
She pushed the bedclothes back once more, and lowered her feet to the cold, glossy floor. And Ben, she thought, shivering and resting her elbow on her knee and her chin
on her hand. She found it hard to believe in Ben as Julie’s husband, Simon’s father, a member (as she supposed he must be) of the community, traveling up to London every morning of the week, and at home seeming settled and domestic, reading the evening paper with the air of one who must not be disturbed. She supposed that in his way he must love Julie, but she couldn’t really imagine him intimate with anyone. She thought of him as a source of knowledge rather than experience; a good, though not contemporary mind, a person rather than a man.
“I adore you,” Ben said, without opening his eyes, “but why are you up so early?”
Julie, at the mirror, uttered a strangled sound. She took a bobby pin from between her teeth and fastened up the last, escaping lock of hair. “I have to take care of Simon until the girl arrives. And think about lunch … And then, there’s Lilian.”
“What about her?” Ben stretched out into the depression left by Julie’s body in the other half of the bed. His eyes, now open, were surprisingly alert. “Come and talk to me.”
She came and sat beside him, reaching her arm across his body to rest her hand on the bed. “I just mean I have to think of her—make sure she’s not cold or anything.”
“Difficult to see how she can be anything else, when we’ve got both the radiators.”
“Oh, Lord! I forgot … . Don’t, darling, after all the trouble I took combing it.”
“Why is it done differently?” He loosened another strand.
“I don’t know—I suppose because Lilian eyes me as though I should Do Something with myself. She makes me feel that I look … married.”
“Scarcely astonishing, in the circumstances.” He drew her elbow back so that, losing the support of her arm, she collapsed against his breast. She remained there, and he put his arm around her. “‘Old, married, and in despair’—is that the idea?”
“Something like that.”
“Too soon for that,” he observed, encouragingly. “But I know what you mean. Since she’s been here I can hardly read the paper without feeling that I’ve sold my immortal soul.”
Julie giggled. “Don’t be awful.” She drew away from him and put her hands up to her hair, assessing the damage. “Do you think she’s happy? I get the feeling she doesn’t want anything—you know, doesn’t know what she should do with her life …” She opened another bobby pin with her teeth and replaced it at the back of her head. “We, at least know where we are.”
“‘I am between water and stone fruit in India,”’ declared Ben, looking up at Lilian over the Times. “In eleven letters.”
“Any clues?”
“None.”
“Pondicherry,” Lilian said, after a moment’s silence.
Ben wrote. Pleased with herself, Lilian curled her legs up on the sofa and wondered if she should be in the kitchen, helping Julie. There were to be guests for lunch.
“‘A secret’—blank—‘in the stream.’ Tennyson. Nine letters.”
“No clues?”
“Begins and ends with ‘s:”
“Sweetness,” said Julie unexpectedly from the dining room. She appeared for a moment in the doorway and added: “In Memoriam,” polishing a glass with a dish towel.
“Twenty across,” Ben resumed, but Lilian got up and followed Julie.
The kitchen smelled of roasting lamb, and of floor polish and mint sauce. What an appalling stove, Lilian thought; surely they’ll replace it.
“Do sit down,” Julie told her, pulling out a chair by the table. “We’ll be five for lunch—some neighbors called Marchant and the three of us. No, darling, thank you, there’s nothing; everything’s done. Unless perhaps you’d like to shell the peas.” She turned her attention to the meat. “It’s quite efficient, really, this kitchen—though, as you see, we had to put in a new stove.”
Lilian began to break pods over a colander. “What are they like, your neighbors?”
“The Marchants? We scarcely know them. They drove over one day, in a Volkswagen, to call—we’d been introduced by the previous owners of the house. And they
asked us to dinner last week, but we couldn’t leave the baby. Seem all right—a bit dull.” Having basted the lamb, Julie slid it back into the oven and straightened up. She plunged the basting spoon into suds in the sink. “Nothing against them, really, apart from the car.”
Arriving late in their Volkswagen, the Marchants brought with them a big, restless Dalmatian called Spot. Mr. Marchant was stocky and bald, with heavy glasses and a suit of limp tweed. Mrs. Marchant was slight and ginger-haired, and wore a green pullover and a gray flannel skirt. They stood for some minutes in the hall, commenting on improvements in high, authoritative voices, before they could be induced to enter the living room. Mrs. Marchant did not sit down at once, but moved across the room to stare at a picture before veering sharply away to the window. Rather, Lilian could not help thinking, like a small colored fish in an aquarium. Spot after a brisk canter around the furniture, flopped down to pant in a corner, where Ben was preparing drinks.
Mrs. Marchant gave Lilian her divided attention. “You’ve just been—thank you, with a little water—to America?”
“She lives there,” Ben said, stepping over the dog. “Out of the way, Fido.”
“Spot,” corrected Mrs. Marchant, scenting disparagement.
Mr. Marchant, who was a lawyer, produced some formidably documented views on the conduct of government
in the United States. Congressional legislation appeared to him as a series of venal disasters—catalogued, Lilian felt, with a certain satisfaction.
Julie was quietly interrogating the dog, now sitting at her feet. “Are you a good doggie?” Spot smiled, but kept his counsel.
Unable to refute Mr. Marchant, and badly situated for conversation with Spot. Lilian kept silent. Perhaps it’s a system, something one gets used to again, she told herself —like doing the Times crossword puzzle.
Mrs. Marchant was inclined to be tolerant. “The Americans who come over here seem pleasant enough, don’t you think?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Ben agreed. He put out his cigarette, and added: “A trifle assiduous, perhaps,” before lighting another.
Mrs. Marchant persisted. “But I’ve always got on well with them. We had four in our house—remember, Hugh? —during the war. Well-behaved boys. They read aloud in the evenings.” She nodded to reinforce this surprising memory.
“Did they really?” Julie, who had risen, paused at the door of the dining room. “What?”
Mrs. Marchant’s approval diminished. “Well, I was hoping for Wordsworth, which Daddy would have so loved—my father was living with us then. But instead they read an interminable thing about a whale—a whale, I assure you. I though we’d never see the back of that
whale. But mercifully, when the good weather came, they opened the Second Front.”
Lilian, glancing up in dismay, was astonished to find Julie’s face disarrayed with amusement.
They sat down to lunch, and Ben carved the meat. Spot, having found his way under the table, squeezed back and forth among their legs, his firm, bristly sides heaving with cheerful interest, his tail slapping wildly. Julie looked pained, and once laid down her knife and fork as though she were about to speak—but didn’t. At last Mr. Marchant got up from the table, apologizing, and called the dog to the door.
“Out, damned Spot,” he said, pointing. Everyone laughed except Mrs. Marchant, who had heard the joke a hundred times. The dog pattered out as if he had intended this all along.
Julie washed the dishes, and Lilian dried them. The Marchants, waving, had disappeared with Spot in their car, shortly after lunch. Ben had gone out to work in the garden (“Before the rain comes,” Julie said, although there was no sign of rain ) . In the sun outside the kitchen window, Simon slept in his pram.
“Is he warm enough there?” Lilian asked.
Julie looked up, her hands in the sink. “Oh, don’t you think so?” she asked anxiously, alarming Lilian, who had expected a confident reassurance.
“It’s beginning to get chilly,” she said. Together, they
looked uncertainly at the strip of sunshine on the grass Their shoulders touched.
“Oh, God!” shouted Ben from the garden. He crossed rapidly in front of the kitchen window and came in at the back door, a bundle of drooping plants in his hands. “Julia,” he said, using her full name to emphasize his displeasure. (How infantile men are, Lilian thought.) “Julia, the lupines are all dug up. Will you please tell those people for Christ’s sake not to bring their filthy dog here again?”
“Yes, dear,” Julie replied seriously, apparently memorizing the message in order to convey it with complete accuracy. “Can’t they be replanted?”
He shook his head. “The blighter’s chewed them.”
Lilian wiped the draining board and hung the wet dish towel on a rod to dry. “I’ll bring Simon in, shall I?” she said smoothly, and made her way past Ben into the garden.
“Leave the pram,” Julie called. “Ben will bring it.”
Outside the kitchen door, the grass was sparse and trampled, and flaked with wood shavings from the recent passage and unpacking of furniture. Beyond, however, it became lavishly green, in need of cutting and scattered with spring flowers. The garden, more delicate than ever in the already dying light, was surrounded by ancient trees and, on one side, by a thick, trim hedge of box. A memory even as one stands here, Lilian thought, saddened by anticipation of her own nostalgia—and yet pleased all at once to have come out at this moment, to find the scene imposing some sort of misty symmetry on the untidy events
of the day. I may cry, she told herself with surprise, as she lifted the sleeping Simon.
Ben, still grasping the ravished lupines, looked at her with interest as he came out of the house.
Lilian gathered up the trailing blanket with her free hand and walked slowly away. He will say: “Poor old Lilian,” after I’ve left, she reminded herself. In the kitchen, she handed Simon over to his mother. “Now I must really go and pack,” she said.
Lilian leaned from the window of the train. “I’ll telephone you from London,” she told Julie.
It will come right again, on the telephone, they assured each other silently.
Julie, suddenly pale and tired, brushed away tears. “It’s cold. I should have brought a coat”
“What?”
“It’s cold.”
“Next time I’ll come in the summer.”
Crying, Julie laughed. “It’ll still be cold. But come back soon.”
“Do you have everything you need?” Ben asked, too late for ambiguity, glancing at the magazine stall.
“Yes, thanks. Oh, goodbye.” The train drew away. “Goodbye!”
“Goodbye! Lilian … goodbye.”
They waved, close at last for a moment, before the train ran into the darkness.
The two on the platform stood still for a few seconds, convalescent, before they walked away to their little car. In the clear, black, country air outside the station, Julie shivered again. The wind had risen, as it had the night before. They got into the car without speaking. Only when the engine started, on the third try, did Julie move up against Ben. He put his arm briefly around her, and then withdrew it. The car moved off.
“Poor old Lilian,” Julie said.