Waking soon after eight, after a surprisingly undisturbed sleep, Irene lay in the huge empty bed thinking about her next encounter with Richard. It was not a scene she felt confident of playing. She considered a dignified apology the best way to start and set about preparing suitable dialogue. After a while she became aware that she was speaking both parts aloud and wondered what the people in the next room must be thinking. With luck, she thought, they might know that she was a dramatist and assume that she was working on a play.
In sudden amusement at her arrogance in believing that any stranger would know who she was – or care – Irene changed her mind about the forthcoming scene. The only reason to apologize would be to winkle yet more reassurance out of Richard. That would not only make her look silly; it would also suggest that he had power over her – or rights of some kind. Much more genuine dignity would come from ignoring the whole fiasco. Irene was not sure that she had the technique to carry that off, but she was determined to try.
Dressed in her dark purple trousers, but with a cream shirt and black jacket instead of the jaunty parrot colours she had chosen for their first encounter, she walked through the art-filled glass corridors of the hotel towards the breakfast room. It seemed important to look neither shifty nor swaggering, and she practised as she went. One or two people she passed looked at her oddly and one very young man in a dark suit had difficulty suppressing laughter. She did not mind that; it gave her useful feedback. By the time she reached the breakfast room, she had just about got her stride and her expression right.
Her efforts were quite unnecessary as it turned out, for Richard was reading the newspaper he held in one hand while raising his coffee cup to his mouth with the other. As Irene saw him miss his aim and slop coffee down his chin, she almost laughed. Muttering an imprecation about the unkindness of Schadenfreude, which did nothing to reduce her satisfaction, she chose a newspaper from the stack for herself, carried it over to Richard’s table and dropped it in the place opposite his.
‘Sorry to be late,’ she said lightly. ‘If they come with the pots while I’m getting my food, could you ask for coffee – black – please?’
‘Sure,’ he said, looking up briefly to smile at her.
She did not look at him and took her time choosing what to eat. It all looked so alluring that her usual delight in food overtook her embarrassment and her fears of what he might think of her behaviour the previous evening. By the time she returned to the table with a plate loaded with cumin-flavoured cheese, pumpernickel and fruit, she felt that she ought to be able to cope with anything he might do.
‘That looks modest,’ said Richard, looking up briefly from his newspaper. He said nothing else.
Relieved to have got off so lightly, Irene shook out her paper and opened it at the theatre reviews, reading them carefully as she ate and drank. One critic so enraged her that, with her mouth full of pumpernickel, she muttered: ‘It’s so bloody unfair.’
‘What?’
‘The way reviewers take this kind of godlike tone with playwrights.’ She swallowed and said more clearly: ‘Instead of just saying they don’t like something – or more likely can’t see the point of it – they lean down from their great height and announce that it is not good enough, often not even bothering to explain why. It’s just a question of taste and expectation after all, theirs versus the writer’s. The arrogance of it!’
Richard let his newspaper drop onto the table and picked up his cup, holding it lightly between both hands. He watched her. Determined not to let her eyelids flutter or her colour rise, she looked straight back at him.
‘You don’t like arrogance, do you?’ he said.
‘Who does?’
‘Lots of people, believe me. It gives them confidence.’
Irene smiled but decided it would be politic not to comment.
‘Don’t worry too much about the critics,’ he said. ‘Are you bothered about what they’ll write about The House on the Canal?’
‘Of course. Aren’t you?’
‘I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care,’ Richard said with a smile that was much lighter and more attractive than the seductive version he had used before. ‘But I am not anxious. It is such a good play that I’m sure between us all we can make it work. And I’m not entirely without influence, you know.’
‘No,’ she agreed, laughing and feeling some of her own confidence and strength of character returning, ‘I know you’re not. But you can’t mean that you’ll tell the critics what to write, or that if you tried they’d obey.’
‘No, they wouldn’t. The good ones are much too cussed for that. But there are things one can do to help them towards the right conclusion. I can’t guarantee good reviews, but I know we’ll get enough useful quotes out of them at least to hang up outside the theatre.’
‘What, you mean things like “Go and see this play” taken out of a review that says, “If you want to have the most boring and uncomfortable evening of your life, go and see this play”?’
‘That’s right.’ Richard drank some more coffee. ‘You really don’t need to worry so much. You’ve written the thing; it’s over to us now.’
‘But you said you’d want me there at rehearsals.’
‘Yes. There will probably be bits and pieces of rewriting that need doing, and it helps the actors if the writer can be there to answer questions. But the responsibility isn’t yours any more. You can let go.’ His eyebrows rose and he looked half wary, half mischievous. ‘Even though I realize that’s something you find quite hard to do.’
‘Oh, you rotter,’ she said before she could stop herself. ‘That’s not fair.’
He laughed and after a moment she joined in.
‘Yes, but we can’t pretend last night didn’t happen or that it is of any significance at all. It’s not. And we need to laugh about it or it’ll fester and cause trouble with the play.’
‘That sounds sensible. I am sorry, you know, Richard.’
‘Don’t be. You were honest and that counts for a great deal.’ He took off his reading glasses and let them drop against his chest, suspended from what looked like two old bootlaces knotted together. ‘A lot of women would have gone in for a spot of faking, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you didn’t. That took guts.’
‘Oh, Richard!’ His generosity made her regret both her own reluctance to apologize to him and her pleasure in the moment when he had made himself look only slightly foolish with the spilt coffee.
‘Well, come on then,’ he said a few moments later in a tone that made it clear he was enjoying a private joke. Irene could not make her brain work fast enough to understand it.
‘Come on, what?’ she said eventually, trying not to sound stupid or irritable.
‘I think the full quotation you’re looking for is, “O, Richard, o, mon roi.” Shakespeare.’ He sat up and looked down his long nose as though he were performing one of Ben’s acting exercises in regality.
‘You’re quite pleased enough with yourself without my addressing you as my liege lord,’ she said with asperity. She was so grateful to him for giving her back her sense of herself as an admirable human being that she could have kissed him.
‘That’s all you know,’ he said, looking pleased with her, too. ‘Now, have you had enough to eat? If so, we need to get back to work. I want to finish my notes while we’re here. We can always have more coffee sent in later.’
‘Great.’ Most of her pleasure in the play had been regained. The thought of working with Richard seemed possible again, and, more than that, exciting. The muddle they had made between them might even prove useful. They had got something important out of the way and now they could throw away all the baggage from the past that they had been lugging around with them for years and concentrate on the present.
Or at least, she said silently as she corrected herself, I can.
‘What will I have to do at the rehearsals?’ she said aloud.
‘Not a lot to start with. As you know I want you there for the first read-through, in case the actors have any questions, and then I’ll want you to disappear for a good week after that.’
At the sight of her face, losing all its amusement in the anxiety that made it look pinched instead of magnificent, Richard added: ‘We need time for blocking in the entrances and exits, which I think you’d find very dull. Then the actors need to find their way into the play and suck out the meaning and the ways in which they can bring it out for the audience. I think you might find that process disturbing. Anything and everything is allowed. It has to be. Actors say and do some thoroughly peculiar things then. I don’t want you to have to be involved at that stage; it might hurt.’ He paused and then smiled in reassurance. ‘And I don’t want you hurt, Irene; not any more and not for anything.’
‘Oh, Richard,’ she said again, trying to put all her gratitude and her affection into her voice. He looked at her and, recognizing a sly glint in his pale eyes, she quickly corrected her own expression.
‘Because that would undoubtedly affect the actors and I don’t want them to have to worry about you as well as their proper job,’ he said, making her scowl at him.
‘You are hard.’
‘Like you,’ he said lightly. ‘And to me that’s a compliment. Come on. We must get down to work if we’re to finish my notes before the last flight.’
They spent the rest of the day working. Irene often found herself
infuriated by something Richard said about what she had written
and, in trying to explain why he had so badly misread it, would stumble on a better way of putting what she had actually meant. Occasionally either he or she would play a bit of dialogue as though they were on stage to show the other what they meant and they slowly worked themselves into complete agreement. By the end of the day, tired though they both were, they were finishing each other’s sentences and answering their own questions as soon as they had articulated them, as though they were almost the same person.
They caught the seven o’clock plane back to Heathrow in a mood of satisfaction with each other that could hardly have been bettered even if they had been lovers. The flight seemed to take less time than a tube journey across London and as they walked into the baggage-reclaim hall, they looked at each other. At Irene’s expression, Richard laughed, sounding resigned rather than amused.
‘You, too?’ she said.
‘Yes. There’s nothing like a weekend with a kindred spirit to make going back to an angry house and an unfriendly spouse seem … dull.’
‘As perfect an example of understatement as I’ve ever heard,’ she said. ‘Still, there’s always tomorrow.’
He hugged her. They seemed to have covered an immense amount of emotional ground and to have emerged onto a plateau of friendship that stretched ahead without any apparent hazards at all.
‘And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.’
‘I thought it was bad luck to quote from Macbeth,’ said Irene, crossing her fingers behind her back.
‘Only inside the theatre. And anyway, it’s a silly superstition. I don’t hold with that sort of thing. Isn’t that your bag?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, as she saw the red and black parachute bag twitch past.
They got it off the rollers the next time it came round and had to wait for another three whole revolutions before Richard’s expensive canvas and brown leather grip appeared. Then, carrying a bag in each hand, disdaining the trolleys, he walked ahead of her through the blue channel in the Customs hall. She hurried to catch up with his stride and they were nearly at the end of the broad white passage when an unimpassioned female voice said: ‘Just a moment, sir, madam.’
Irene looked round. A young woman in the sub-naval uniform of the Customs and Excise had appeared through a concealed door in the white wall, between two wide mirrors.
‘What is it now?’ asked Richard irritably.
Irene said nothing at all. She was appalled at the possibilty that there might be a tabloid journalist or a stray photographer passing by who recognized her. However dreary she found the prospect of going back to Herbert Crescent to play the part of Fin’s decorous wife again, she did not want to embarrass him with headlines about being arrested by Customs after a weekend in Amsterdam with a man to whom she was not married.
Casting a quick look at the luggage suspended from Richard’s large hands, she noticed that there were about four unlockable, zipped pockets in the outside of her bag. It dawned on her that it would have been exceedingly easy for someone to have planted drugs there. She felt the blood leaving her face and put a hand on Richard’s shoulder to stop herself keeling over.
After a moment the faintness receded and she let him go, telling herself to stop behaving as neurotically as Helena, who could hardly be restrained from going through the red channel and begging for her luggage to be opened just in case she might have forgotten that she had acquired something that she was not allowed to bring into the country. Noticing that there was a bulge in the biggest of the zipped pockets, Irene was about to say something when she heard Richard’s voice, as arrogant as it had ever been: ‘Don’t you think this is a little ridiculous? I know that this is one of your favourite flights. Everyone who goes to Amsterdam knows that. Do you not think that if I were criminal enough to want to use or import drugs I might have the intelligence not to choose a flight like this to bring them in on?’
‘Now, now, sir, please calm down. I am just doing my job. Would you please put the bags on this table?’
With a heavy sigh and a shrug, Richard swung the two bags onto the white table. He looked over his shoulder at Irene and saw several of the other passengers on their flight waltzing past with expressions of excited satisfaction at his predicament.
‘Sorry about this,’ he said to Irene. For a moment, she thought that he was confessing to something. ‘It tends to happen to me. It’s something to do with the way I look or dress. It makes me so angry that I can’t be rational about it.’
‘Are you aware of the regulations governing what you may and may not bring into this country?’ asked the officer with her hand on Richard’s khaki-canvas bag.
‘Yes, yes. Get a move on and get this farce over with. We’re tired and we want to get home.’
‘And you, madam?’
‘I know about the duty-free limits,’ said Irene with a smile, determined not to antagonize the woman and more in sympathy with her than Richard seemed to be.
Irene had always detested the thought of drugs and was deeply thankful that both her children had been sensible enough – and successful enough – to avoid them. When three boys from Ivo’s class at school had been expelled for smoking cannabis when they were sixteen, she had been worried enough to talk to him about it. His vast contempt for what he called their stupidity had reassured her. Ivo was very rarely contemptuous of anyone, but at that moment he might have been Fin at his most disdainful. In the circumstances, Irene had found it reassuring.
‘And I can assure you that I have never had anything to do with drugs,’ she went on. ‘I loathe the very thought of them.’
‘Satisfied now?’ said Richard rudely.
‘Do you know that it is an offence to import pornography?’ asked the Customs officer.
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Richard sounded like a man at the end of his tether. ‘Do either of us look as though we’re likely to have brought pornography with us? Have you any idea who you are talking to?’
‘Richard, please don’t. Pornography is a red herring. This must be about drugs and that’s important. If we’re ever going to get rid of them from the country, this sort of thing has to be done.’ Irene turned to smile once more at the young officer. ‘Yes, we both know that. Would you like me to open my bag?’
‘Thank you, madam.’
Irene leaned forward to unzip the parachute bag and felt Richard’s hand on her wrist.
‘I don’t think you should,’ he said. ‘This is outrageous. They have to have some reason to search us and there isn’t any. It’s an infringement of our civil liberties. You mustn’t encourage them.’
‘It isn’t a problem, Richard,’ said Irene, trying to make him see sense. ‘I’m all for being searched, and searched quickly, so that we can get home. They have the right to do it. Get it over with. It’s not important.’
‘I disagree.’
‘Richard,’ she said firmly. ‘Stop behaving like a child and get a move on.’
Surprised by her tone, he stared at her.
‘You’re winding everyone up and making a completely unnecessary fuss,’ Irene went on, a little more calmly. ‘We’d practically be home by now if you hadn’t been so obstructive.’
‘Oh, all right then. But I think you’re making a serious mistake.’
Hoping that he had not been mad enough to buy anything illegal or cruel enough to plant it in her luggage, Irene unzipped her bag and stood back, watching Richard as he undid the buckles of the heavy leather straps and then the zip of his bag.
The Customs officer took out every single thing from both bags and felt in all the pockets. Irene was almost sick with relief when she saw that the lump she had noticed in one of the outer pockets was simply the outline of the bottom of her shampoo bottle, which had slipped down among her clothes. The Customs officer took the tops off all the bottles and smelled their contents, before trying to unscrew the bottom of a can of shaving foam that Richard had with him. He raised his eyes to heaven and sighed melodramatically. Irene was almost certain that if he had not been so unpleasant the search would have been infinitely less thorough.
Eventually the officer appeared to be satisfied and told them that they could repack. When Richard was about to swing the two bags off the table, she said:
‘Would you please come with me?’
‘What on earth now?’
‘Richard,’ said Irene, again in the tones of an exasperated nanny. ‘Co-operate.’
By the time she discovered that she was to be strip-searched, Irene herself was seething with annoyance. Because of her unchangeable belief in the necessity of keeping imported drugs out of the country, she could not let herself be angry with the Customs officers and had transferred all her fury to Richard. She privately admitted that it would serve him right if he were found to be carrying a minute amount of something like cannabis that would cause him embarrassment and a fine but not real trouble.
When the young officer had gained a senior’s permission to carry out a full search, she then informed Richard and Irene that they had the right to appeal to an independent senior officer or a magistrate. Richard was all for causing the maximum inconvenience and demanding a magistrate, but Irene eventually persuaded him that co-operation was the more sensible option.
Alone in a brightly lit, cream-painted room with two women officers, Irene was first frisked and then asked to take off her clothes. Humiliated and, in spite of her innocence, anxious, she did as she was told, folding her clothes neatly on the grey-topped table.
Remembering all the dimples and unattractive sagging flesh, she stood very straight, facing the two women and trying to pretend that she was no more than part of a scene she had invented. To her surprise neither officer touched her; they merely looked, asked her to move, looked again, made notes, thanked her for her co-operation and told her that she could dress and leave.
More upset by the whole episode than she wanted to believe, Irene pulled on her clothes as quickly as she could, trying not to remember the similar scene she had enacted in Richard’s hotel bedroom on Saturday night. The memories were so sharp that she could not wait to be gone and left half her buttons undone and one of the shirt tails hanging out over the back of her trousers. Without looking at the officers again, she pulled on her jacket. It caught in her hair, dragging out some of the pins. There was a mirror on the wall of the interview room beside the door, but she hardly glanced at herself. All she wanted was to be out of the place.
By the time she had put on her shoes again, determined to have all her clothes cleaned or washed before she wore any of them again, she was even more furious with Richard than she had been before the search. The whole vile incident was his fault. If he had not annoyed the Customs officer in the first place, they could have answered her questions politely and been on their way. Planning exactly what she would say to Richard as she walked back towards the outside world, Irene suddenly stopped and thought about the powers he had.
Without Richard’s good will her play had no chance of success at all. Much though she wanted to get to the point where she could say everything she thought to anyone without fear of the consequences, she had to admit that she had not reached it yet. If she were to tell Richard quite how stupid, childish, destructive, infuriating and generally objectionable he had been, she might be jeopardizing the future for which she had worked so hard and of which she had dreamed for so long. She despised herself for what she saw as her cowardice, and hated the way it reminded her of the almost sycophantic way she had treated Fin in the early days of their marriage, but she could not see that she had any option.
Richard was waiting for her in the Customs hall when she stumbled out. He looked thoroughly impatient, but at the sight of her his expression changed. When she reached his side he put out both hands to touch the loose masses of hair that were falling about her neck.
‘Did they really rip out your hairpins?’ he asked. ‘I never meant our weekend to end like this. All in all it’s been a pretty good failure, hasn’t it?’
‘No,’ she said, sounding more definite than she felt because he looked so guilty. ‘It’s been a trifle odd, but no worse than that. And we got a lot of work done.’
‘So we did.’ His long face had relaxed and he was smiling much more naturally. ‘What a fighter you are! Thank you, my dear.’
‘Thank goodness there don’t seem to have been any journalists around to see us,’ said Irene as they eventually reached the taxi rank.
Richard laughed as he opened the door of the leading cab for her.
‘Good for you, Pollyanna. And there’s no queue here, either. We’re positively lucky, aren’t we?’
‘No,’ she said, trying not to sound at all sycophantic. ‘But I like to look on the bright side when I can.’
‘I know you do. You always did, even when you were finding Ben’s bullying just that bit too much.’ Richard slung her parachute bag into the cab at her feet and looked at her. ‘I suppose I ought to apologize to you for all that. It probably wouldn’t have happened in the first place if I hadn’t let that woman see that she’d got up my nose so badly.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Irene, almost completely disarmed. She had never expected Richard to admit that he might have been at fault.
He put his hand through the open window of the cab and tucked some of the hair behind her ear.
‘You are …’ he said and then shook his head as though he could not find the right words.
‘It was a fairly educational weekend, taken all in all, Richard. Thank you for being so … friendly about Saturday night.’
‘That was nothing.’ He smiled as though he meant it and added, sighing: ‘I wish I could take you home with me; or rather not home but somewhere else. But I don’t think we can. I’ll see you tomorrow week at the read-through. You know where to come, don’t you?’
Irene nodded and gave the driver her address, surprised to find that she was almost looking forward to being back with Fin. Trying to work out why her brief taste of freedom should not have left her wanting more, she decided that she must want to tell him about the unpleasant experience with the Customs officers in order to get it right out of her system. He, at least, shared her revulsion where drugs were concerned and the effect they had on some of the children who used them, and he would have understood exactly why she had urged Richard to co-operate with the searching of their luggage.
When she got home she found a note on the hall chest, written in Fin’s aggressively heavy, black italic hand: ‘Irene, you’re very late. I have an early start tomorrow and too much to do to wait up for you any longer. I shall sleep in the spare room. Have the goodness to try not to make your customary noise going to bed. I shall see you tomorrow evening. Fin.’
Outraged by the wholly unnecessary provocation of the note, and his assumption that the delay was her fault, Irene stumped angrily upstairs to her bedroom. She had only one comfort: at least Fin could have had no idea of her sentimental wish to tell him about what had happened to her.
It might have been only an accident that the handle of her bedroom door slipped out of her grasp so that the door slammed noisily enough to wake the heaviest of sleepers.