On Friday evening Helena dictated an affectionate message to Mike’s answering machine, saying among other things that she hoped his week in New York had gone well. She then went to have dinner in a local Italian restaurant with Franny and Jack, who seemed to have made peace for the moment. When Helena got back home she ignored her own answering machine and went to bed.
The next morning she played her messages to make sure that Katharine Lidstone had not rung asking her to postpone her visit and heard Mike’s voice thanking her for her message, sending his love, and saying he hoped they would be able to meet on Sunday. Helena decided that she did not have time to ring him before she left for Worcestershire.
It was a glorious day and as soon as she was clear of the London suburbs she enjoyed the journey. The traffic was not too bad and the banks of the smaller roads she chose were starred with wild flowers. The orchards in the Vale of Evesham were a mass of blossom, and the grey stone and cream stucco villages looked prettily satisfied in the sun. The new bypasses and motorways might be damaging untouched fields and woods, she thought, but there was no doubt at all that they had released the ancient villages from the horror of standing traffic jams, fumes, and noise.
She reached Katharine Lidstone’s village just after noon, which left her with half an hour to kill. At eighty-three, Mrs Lidstone did not like shocks, unexpected visitors or anxiety-inducing lateness. She had asked Helena for twelve-thirty, and Helena would always rather waste time after an early arrival than rush and fret her way to a late one. There was almost always something to look at or buy in most places where she found herself with time to spare.
She parked her car in the small market square, bought a ticket from the ‘Pay and Display’machine and pottered happily about the shops. In a small grocer’s she found freshly made local pork pies and bought two, which she took back to the car before going into the antique shop she knew quite well. The proprietor recognized her, although he obviously could not remember her name, and they had a polite conversation about the dreariness of the trade generally and his hopes for plenty of American visitors in the holiday season. Helena sympathized and asked what he had bought recently. He showed her a nice enough folding tea table, for which she thought he was asking much too much, probably because of its recent varnishing, and then her eye was caught by a set of brightly coloured porcelain plates.
‘Those are nice.’
‘Aren’t they? China’s not one of my specialities, but I liked them.’
‘It’s not mine either. What are they?’
‘Nothing very special. Nineteenth-century European chinoiserie. There’s no maker’s mark, but that’s not particularly surprising. It was so popular that a lot of it was made. These are quite pretty, but, as I say, nothing very distinguished.’
‘Where did you find them?’
He raised his eyebrows at the question, but it was a reasonable one for a prospective purchaser to ask. After a moment he said casually: ‘A young woman brought them in a while ago. They’d been left to her by her grandmother.’
Helena nodded. ‘What are you asking for them?’
The dealer looked at her, rather too obviously trying to decide whether she might be a serious buyer or not, and then said with an expression of sympathetic apology: ‘A hundred and fifty, I’m afraid.’
Helena looked at them again. It was true that she knew very little about nineteenth-century porcelain, but there were ten plates; none of them had been repaired and there were only two little chips and three cracks in the whole set. They were attractive and, at fifteen pounds a plate, a good deal cheaper than most modern chain-store equivalents.
‘If you can do a little on the price,’ she said automatically, ‘I’ll have them.’
The dealer went through the usual performance of checking the stock number on the ticket, looking up the price he had paid, pretending to make all sorts of calculations on the back of an envelope and then said he could take off fifteen pounds. Helena, trying hard not to smile as she recognized a straight 10 per cent discount, nodded.
‘All right. Do you take Access or would you rather have a cheque?’
‘Any chance of cash? It’s just that with the banks shut for the weekend, it would be much easier.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t carry that much. I could give you thirty-five in cash and a cheque for a hundred. Would that help?’
‘That would be fine,’ he said.
She thought: yes, you’ll put a hundred through the books, showing only a tiny profit, and pocket the rest tax-free. I wonder how much you did pay the ‘young woman’and whether you checked that she had ever had a grandmother who owned the plates. I wonder whose they really were.
Then she castigated herself for her suspicions and remembered Mike telling her once that the world was not as dishonest a place as she seemed to think. While the owner of the shop was packing up the plates, she took three ten-pound notes and a fiver out of her wallet and wrote out her cheque.
‘Could you put your address on the back?’ he called from the back shop, re-awakening all Helena’s suspicions.
Rather than have an argument about it, or explain why she did not particularly want strange antique dealers knowing where she lived, she wrote her name on the back and then the address of her bank. She saw him register what she had done when he came to write the number of her card on the back of the cheque and felt a mixture of relief and suspicion when he did not comment.
‘Thank you,’ he said, handing over the untidy parcel. ‘I hope you enjoy them.’
‘I’m sure I shall,’ she said. ‘Could I have a receipt, please?’
Looking furious, he pulled a duplicate book from a shelf above his till and scribbled a receipt on one of the numbered pages, stamping the address of his shop at the top of the sheet.
‘Thank you,’ she said, reading what he had written: Set of ten nineteenth-century porcelain fruit plates, one hundred and thirty-five pounds. ‘That’s lovely. Next time I’m in the area I’ll call back. I hope you have a good summer season. Goodbye.’
She reached Mrs Lidstone’s house at exactly twelve thirty and found her hostess bending stiffly over her bushy lavender hedge, pulling up weeds even though she was dressed for lunch rather than gardening. She straightened up at the sound of the gate and brushed some dry soil off her hands.
‘My dear, how kind of you to come! And such a long way. It’s very good of you to pander to my fears like this.’
‘It’s a pleasure,’ said Helena, shaking her hand with extreme care of the arthritic finger joints. ‘And the drive was nice. I avoided the motorway completely and had a good time. And I’ve just bought some nice Chinesey plates in the antique shop in the village.’
‘Hmm,’ said old Mrs Lidstone. ‘I hope he didn’t do you down. Some of his prices are exorbitant.’
‘In fact, I don’t think he did. Now, shall I fetch your girandole and get it safely into the house before we relax?’
‘Would you? And perhaps you could help me hang it, too.’
Helena carried it into the house, wincing as she saw all the gaps where the valuable furniture and paintings had once been. The walls had all been painted in a soft, bluish pink that had made a good background to both the mahogany and the satinwood furniture, but with nothing in front of it the colour looked thoroughly depressing, and the dust marks around the empty picture hooks made it even worse. She wished that she had thought to buy some flowers for her hostess. A vase or two of roses would have done a lot to cheer up the dismal room.
The old Persian and Chinese rugs had worn patches where the legs of the chests and tables had stood, and the darns in them showed up much more than they had when the rooms were full of furniture. Seeing the full devastation for the first time, Helena felt a mixture of deep sympathy for her hostess and powerful rage at what had been done to her. She would probably get the monetary equivalent of her possessions from her insurance company, and she could buy new furniture to replace the old as soon as she felt strong enough, but that would never make up for everything she was suffering. It seemed horribly unfair. Helena said as much.
‘I know,’ said Katharine Lidstone. ‘But I’m beginning to find that it’s possible not to think about it for hours at a time.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Helena, turning to smile at her. ‘I shouldn’t have reminded you, but it makes me so angry to see what they did to you. I’m not surprised you can’t bear to leave the house.’
‘And yet I don’t like being here alone either,’ she said, suddenly sitting down in one of the few chairs the burglars had left. It was one of a pair of thickly upholstered Edwardian armchairs covered in flowered cretonne, very comfortable but of no value. ‘I try not to be so silly, but, d’you know, when it gets dark I can hardly bear it here on my own. I suppose …’
Her face looked grey and the lines that ran from her nose to her chin, dragging down the corners of her lips, seemed very deep. Helena waited.
‘I suppose I ought to move into some kind of bungalow full of ramps and grab handles, with a warden and a batch of other dotty widows for neighbours,’ she said, trying to make it into a joke and failing. Both her voice and her hands were shaking.
‘Why not get an alarm here?’ suggested Helena. ‘If it were tied into the local police station, you’d feel safer, wouldn’t you?’
‘I’ve already got one. I did it straight away,’ said Mrs Lidstone, waving a brown-spotted hand at the infra-red detectors over the doors, which Helena had not noticed in her shock at the denuded state of the room. ‘And I have a panic button beside my bed and another by the front door in case someone calls and demands money with menaces, but I’m still stupidly frightened. I sometimes think I ought to have a dog, but at my age I’m not sure I could cope with one that was big enough to be useful.’
She breathed carefully and then smiled. Helena felt so proud of her courage and so sympathetic that she could not think of anything to say.
‘But it’s nice that Aunt Juliana’s girandole survived. I think I’d like it to hang where the Constable used to be. Could you manage that, Helena?’
‘Over the chimneypiece? What a good idea! It’ll add light to the room, too.’
‘That’s what I thought. Although, they do say that you should never hang a glass above a fire because ladies will stand in front of it preening themselves and never notice when their skirts catch light.’
Helena laughed. ‘But so few of us wear those sorts of skirts nowadays.’
Katharine Lidstone nodded and looked down at her own sensible straight greenish tweed skirt, which came to just below her knees.
‘True. That must have been in the days of frothing muslins. Now, can I help? Would you like me to hold the steps?’
‘I’ll manage. Thank you. I’ve got hooks and hammers in the van. I’ll just go and fetch them.’
‘Excellent. I’ll pour out some sherry for us to have when you’re done.’
Together they decided exactly where the girandole was to hang and then Helena banged in the hooks, adjusted the wire at the back of the girandole and carefully hung it up.
‘How’s that?’
‘Lovely. Much better than the gap. Now, let’s take our sherry into the garden.’
They walked slowly along the old stone paths, sipping their wine and discussing roses and butterflies. Helena noticed that her old friend was walking more slowly than she had done even six weeks earlier, and there were many more weeds in the flower beds than there had been the last time she had visited the house. It was increasingly obvious that Katharine, who had always been astonishingly capable and fit for her age, was becoming less and less able to cope. Helena was wondering how she might phrase a sympathetic comment about hoping she had plenty of help in the house, when the old lady herself said: ‘I want to ask another favour, my dear, but I’m not sure whether it’s quite fair. I don’t want to take advantage of your good nature.’
‘Please ask,’ said Helena warmly. ‘I owe you so much that if there is anything I can possibly do, I’d love to. How can I help?’
‘Well, as you know, I told my insurance company about the burglary and sent them the list you helped me with on the telephone with photographs of the important things like the clock and the Constable, but now they’re sending me a loss adjustor and he telephoned yesterday to say that he wants more detail about some of the furniture, and I feel really rather helpless. I’ve told them everything I can remember. If he starts asking me questions, I shall only get muddled and sound silly. I do so hate getting old, you know.’
‘I’ll do anything I can,’ said Helena quickly. ‘Although I only know about the pieces you’ve sent me for mending over the years.’
‘I know. But that’ll help, and at least proper details about those things will show the young man that I’m not making it all up. I mean, if you can give practical descriptions of things like my bureau and explain where you mended it and what with. Things like that. Then, you see, perhaps he won’t think that I’m a batty old lady and dismiss everything I say.’
‘Of course I will.’ Helena was smiling. ‘Although I don’t for one moment believe that the loss adjustor would think any such thing, or that you were making any of it up. When I get home, I’ll copy all the survey sheets I have of your furniture and send them to you with prints of the before-and-after photographs I took. How would that be? The survey sheets have full descriptions, as accurate as I could make them, of the furniture with details of all the marks and flaws and an account of the repairs I carried out, and the photographs are pretty detailed, too.’
‘That would be marvellous. Have you really got all that?’
‘Yes. I always take photographs and draw up surveys before I start work and so far I’ve kept them all. Anything you’ve sent me will still have a file.’
‘Helena, my dear child, you have taken a load off my mind. The adjustor-man is coming next Thursday.’
‘Well, that gives us plenty of time. I’ll look out the files as soon as I get home and send you copies on Monday. Has your insurance company said anything about putting an advertisement in Find?’
‘Find, my dear? I’m afraid I don’t know what that is.’
They had reached the end of the lime walk and Katharine stumbled as she turned back towards the house. Helena put out a hand to steady her and, afraid that she might fall, gripped her wrist too tightly. As she saw Katharine wince in obviously serious pain, Helena quickly apologized.
‘Not your fault,’ said the old lady, breathing fast. She looked very pale and there was sweat on her upper lip. Once again Helena thought that she really should not be living alone. It was much too dangerous. What if she fell in the garden and could not get up?
‘I am going to have to think seriously about sheltered housing of some kind,’ Katharine said, struggling to sound casual. ‘But I do hate the idea. What if there were a bullying matron? Or unpleasant staff? Or horrid residents?’
Helena answered with all the sympathy she felt, wishing that she could do something useful to help and quite unwilling to offer spuriously comforting platitudes. Katharine Lidstone was far too intelligent and clear-sighted to want any such thing.
‘I beg your pardon, my dear. What a subject for a lovely day like this!’
‘Any subject as important as this is suitable for any kind of day,’ said Helena. ‘Have you started to look at places for if and when the time does come?’
‘Not yet. I am thinking about it and I have sent for some catalogues, but I haven’t been able to bear to open them yet. Friends have been telling me for years that one has to put oneself on a waiting list in good time, and pay a deposit, too. That’s rather large for the better places and I have not been able to afford it until now. The insurance company’s cheque will make all the difference. It is ironic, isn’t it? Perhaps it was fate that sent the burglars, both to show me how helpless I have become and at the same time to provide the capital with which to book myself into a comfortable nursing home.’ She shuddered and then said more cheerfully: ‘Let’s forget about it and have some lunch. It’s just a picnic, I’m afraid.’
‘That’s the best kind.’
‘There’s some smoked salmon, my dear. Could you open the packet for me? The cellophane is rather tough for my fingers.’
They ate smoked salmon and quails’eggs and salad, followed by bottled raspberries and whipped cream with shortbread.
It was only as they were finishing the shortbread that Mrs Lidstone remembered Helena’s mention of Find and again asked her what it was.
‘It’s a magazine,’ said Helena, ‘run from York. You can advertise in it when you have had things stolen so that if they’re offered to a dealer, he or she can identify them and alert the police so that you get your possessions back.’
‘Oh. I’m not sure whether … My insurance company said something about the Art Loss Register, which sounds much the same. I shouldn’t like to duplicate their work or tread on their toes or anything.’
‘It isn’t quite the same,’ said Helena. ‘Look, why don’t I send you some old copies of Find with the survey sheets so that you can see the sort of thing it is and decide whether you want to go to the expense of putting in an advertisement. You could always clear it with the insurers first if you do think you might like to do it. You might not want to bother since they’ll definitely pay you the value of what’s been stolen in any case.’
‘Eventually. What would happen if my claim was paid and then I got my possessions back?’
‘I think you’d simply explain and return the money they’d paid you. I’m not sure exactly what the law is. I mean, presumably, they would actually own your things by then, but I’m sure they’d rather have the money than your furniture and jewellery.’
‘Yes, I’m sure they would.’ Katharine Lidstone laughed shakily. ‘You’ve a very clear head, Helena, my dear. Now, we must stop talking about my sad affairs. Tell me how you are. Are you happy? You’re looking better than you have for some time. Is that because of the young man you told me about?’
Helena felt herself smile and, rather surprised at herself, nodded.
‘I suppose it is him. Did I really tell you about him?’
‘A little,’ said Mrs Lidstone, pushing herself up out of her chair and reaching for her stick. ‘Come and help me make the coffee and tell me more. I think you said that he was tall and good looking.’
Helena followed her into the kitchen and said: ‘I suppose he is in a way, but what I especially like about him is that he takes life so lightly. I don’t mean that he’s silly about it or irresponsible, but he can almost always find a way to laugh about the awful things that happen; he tells very good jokes, too; and even when he’s actually giving me a wigging of some sort, he usually manages to do it in an amusing way.’
Katharine, who had been carefully scooping coffee grounds into a cafetière, put down her spoon and turned to look at Helena with an expression of great severity on her soft, lined face.
‘I’m not sure that I like the idea of his giving you what you call a wigging about anything at all. What right has he to tell you what you should be doing?’
Helena brushed Katharine’s wrist in a gesture of reassurance, remembering the arthritis in time to take care to touch very lightly.
‘It isn’t like that,’ she said, realizing from her instinctive internal protest that she must feel even more loyalty to Mike than she had suspected.
‘Well, so long as it’s making you happy.’ Katharine turned back to make the coffee and Helena knew that she had been reprimanded in the gentlest possible way.
‘I’d like you to think of him with affection,’ she said at last. ‘He is making my life much better – happier – than it was without him.’
‘I’m glad. Can you manage the tray?’
‘Of course,’ said Helena, holding out her hands. ‘I think that you and Mike might have quite a lot in common,’ she said. ‘Next time you come to London, would you let me introduce you to him?’
‘I’d like that,’ said Katharine, looking surprised. ‘But I cannot see myself coming up for a while. I can’t even make myself go shopping just now, you know. I have everything delivered. And my dear GP is good enough to come and see me nearly once a week at the moment, and he brings me the pills I need for my heart. I hope I’ll brace up again soon, but …’ Her voice trailed into nothing and yet again Helena felt an anger against the burglars that was almost violent.
She left the old lady soon after three o’clock, promising to come back again soon. She would have stayed longer if Katharine had shown any signs of wanting her, but she had begun to look tired and when Helena had asked directly whether she usually had a sleep in the afternoons, she had admitted that she liked to go to bed for an hour or two. Having helped to stack the washing up in the sink, which was all Katharine would allow, Helena drove away.
Reluctant to thunder boringly down the motorway all the way back to London, she took one of the smaller roads, planning to dawdle through some of the prettier villages and perhaps stop for tea somewhere. It was not until she was halfway to Oxford that it occurred to her to drop in on Ivo instead. She kept a lookout for a telephone box so that she could find out whether he was at home or not, but when she did not pass one in the first few miles she decided to take a chance. His farmhouse was not much out of her way and she would be amused to see it even if he were not there.
He had found it the previous summer in a typical example of the sort of luck that followed him everywhere. While Jane paid a large proportion of her allowance for an ill-furnished bed-sitting room in a dilapidated house in Durham, Ivo lived rent-free in three rooms of an attractive Cotswold farmhouse in return for light caretaking duties. The owner had apparently been posted to Hong Kong for a year with his company’s Far Eastern office and, rather than let the house, with all the attendant problems of agents, inventories and possible damage to his possessions, he had imported Ivo to monitor its alarms and guard against leaks and fires and other sorts of damage.
Helena had often written to him there and had letters back from him, but she had never seen it. She found the place without much difficulty, driving the last two miles down a rutted, unsurfaced private road between fields full of calm, fat Jersey cows, and thought she had rarely seen such a perfect example of England in early summer.
The wild roses were already flowering palely pink in the hedges while the last of the may was still out. The grass was green and succulent, the rutted chalk path brightly white and the cows the colour of half-crystallized honey. She caught sight of what must be Ivo’s house on the far side of a gate and pulled up so that she could get out to open it. Discovering that it was heavily padlocked, she assumed that must be part of the terms of his agreement with the real owner of the house and got back in the car to manoeuvre it up onto the shallow bank so that there would be room for another vehicle to pass, picked her handbag off the back seat, locked the car and climbed the gate, pulling up her short skirt so that she could swing her leg over it.
‘Cor!’ came a hoarse, admiring shout.
Standing insecurely astride the top of the gate, she looked around and saw an unfamiliar young man with a dog at heel, leaning against the flank of one of the honey-coloured cows in the field to the right of the house. He was dressed in baggy corduroys, boots, and a shirt in an even worse state than Ivo’s usually were and there was unmistakable lust in his eyes. Helena hastily pulled down her skirt.
‘Do you know whether the man who lives here is in?’ she asked. ‘Ivo Webton.’
‘Doubt it,’ said the young man in a strong Oxfordshire accent. ‘There’s no sign of his car. It’s an old Mini, you know.’
‘Yes, I do know.’ She smiled politely. ‘I’m his sister.’
‘Ah. Know you were coming, did he?’
She shook her head. ‘But it doesn’t matter. I’ll leave him a note. Thank you very much.’
The young man nodded and turned away, slapping the cow’s rump, calling to his dog and beginning to chivvy the rest of the herd up to the far end of the field. It dawned on Helena belatedly that he must be taking them for milking. For the first time she wondered how Ivo, as fully town-bred as she was herself, had taken to living in the middle of a working farm.
She rang the bell beside the back door of the house in case he was in after all and when there was no answer walked all round the house, peering in through the windows. She could see very little since most of them were firmly shuttered, but one gave her a good view of the kitchen, which looked pleasant, if in a typically Ivo-like state of mess with heaps of newspapers, books, bottles, socks, and shirts waiting to be ironed. She wondered whether the owner had any idea of the sort of man he had chosen to look after his house and saw her own affectionate smile reflected back at her from the window pane between the bars.
Eventually admitting that Ivo genuinely was not at home and that she was not going to be able to see him, Helena sat down on an old mounting block beside the door and took out her notebook and pen so that she could leave him a message. Thinking he might find it odd that she should have driven to see him without bothering to find out whether he would be there or not, she explained about her trip to Katharine Lidstone, described the sadness of her house stripped of almost everything, and ended:
And so not surprisingly she was both sad and fragile – although terrifically brave about it all – and I thought I’d like to see you to cheer myself up. Silly of me not to ring from her house. One of these days I really will buy a mobile.
A lecherous cowman whistled at my legs and told me you weren’t in, but I thought I’d check and prowled about a bit. Your employer is keen on security, isn’t he? It’s like a fortress here, even down to the bars in the kitchen window.
I thought I was neurotic about security, but this place makes me seem thoroughly casual. Terrifically therapeutic! Not as good as seeing you, but great nonetheless. I hope you’re all right. I’m about to start work on your desk.
All my love, Helena.
She ripped the pages out of the notebook, folded them in two, wrote Ivo’s full name on the outside and posted it through the door, noticing as she did so that there was a basket on the other side of the slot to catch anything that was pushed through.
More disappointed than she had admitted to herself, Helena drove back towards the motorway and London, feeling unusually lonely. Her own house seemed very empty, too, and much less of a sanctuary than she had expected. The sight of a winking light on her answering machine was welcome for once and she listened eagerly to the messages. There was another from Mike hoping that her day had gone well and adding that it would be good to see her on Sunday. It was so friendly and unthreatening that she immediately rang him back.
He reached the house an hour later and stood in the hall, hugging her as warmly and undemandingly as Irene might have done.
‘That was exceedingly nice,’ she said, pulling away. ‘Thank you, Mike. I must say you’re looking very well.’
‘Jet lag,’ he said casually. ‘Paradoxically it always gees me up. Takes me days to get calm again.’
‘I thought it might be some amazing coup you’d pulled off in New York.’
‘Well, there is that, too, but I didn’t want to boast about the fantastic deal I’ve just done. At least I hope I have. It’s not finalized yet and I’m probably going to have to go back again next week. But it’s looking good.’ He laughed and kissed her again. ‘And then there’s you. I must admit that your ringing me this evening has given me quite a kick.’
‘Has it?’
‘Yes. You must have really wanted to see me.’
‘Did you doubt it?’
He nodded. ‘You seemed so distant and so anxious to get away from me last weekend that I thought I might not hear from you again.’
She felt her eyebrows tightening over the top of her nose.
‘How could you possibly have thought that? You must have known …’
‘Now, now,’ he said, putting his hands on her shoulders and pushing against them. ‘That’s a bloke’s line. And I’m damned if I’m going to play the girl’s part.’ In a horrible, peevish falsetto, he added: ‘How can I know if you won’t tell me?’
‘I’m not sure of my lines here,’ Helena said, trying not to smile at his all-too convincing performance. ‘What do blokes usually say next?’
‘Say? Say?’ Mike’s voice of theatrical astonishment made her cheeks ache with the effort of keeping a straight face. ‘They don’t say anything. They grunt and shake the newspaper. You don’t know much, do you, Helena?’
She shook her head, allowing the smile out at last.
‘I’ve always refused to go in for that sort of thing – which I suppose could be why my affairs have tended to be rather short-lived,’ she said, adding less lightly, ‘I am as I am and if what I am is not wanted I don’t stay to hear about it. What’s the point?’
He nodded and let the muscles in his arms slacken so that she automatically moved closer to him. He lifted his right hand from her shoulder and drew a line from her chin down her neck and between her breasts.
‘How did you decide that they didn’t want you any more?’ he asked, looking at his hand rather than her face. He felt her responding to his touch and repeated it.
She picked his other hand off her shoulder and, holding it in hers, led him towards the stairs, saying over her shoulder: ‘When they stopped talking to me, or contradicted me too often, or put out that repelling miasma that people do when they’re bad-tempered, or used me as a target for all the rage they’d accumulated throughout the day.’
They reached her bedroom and she opened the door with her free hand. Mike stopped and held her back.
‘In other words,’ he said more seriously, ‘you decided that you didn’t want them. That’s rather what I’d assumed all along.’
‘I’m not sure which came first. After all, they couldn’t have behaved like that if they had wanted me.’ At the sight of his expression, she added: ‘Could they?’
‘A lot of people do behave like that for all sorts of reasons.’
‘Well, they shouldn’t,’ said Helena with unusual energy. She pulled her hand out of his and went to shut her bedroom curtains. ‘If they can’t be pleasant to people they care about they deserve to be thrown out.’
Mike had still not commented by the time she had drawn both pairs of curtains and turned to face him again.
‘Don’t you think that?’ She looked worried and as though she had sucked the whole of her body back into the shell again.
‘On the other hand,’ he said carefully, ‘there might be a school of thought that said that the other half of such a pair ought to be understanding enough to absorb some surly behaviour. It isn’t always possible to be charming and attentive, particularly if one is having a very bad time, say in the office.’
Helena knew perfectly well that they were exchanging notes about past relationships that had foundered. She also understood for the first time that the rocks on which hers had been wrecked might have been similar to the ones that had ruined his, even if they had been approached from opposite sides.
‘Not charming and attentive, perhaps,’ she said, watching him, ‘but do they have to be cruel or sullen? Is it too much to ask that they avoid active nastiness? Isn’t it possible to say: “I’m feeling like shit at the moment because of a, b, and c. I haven’t anything much to spare for you. I love you (or like, or am fond, or whatever) as much as I always have done, but I won’t be able to show it for a bit. Can you give me time to get myself straight again?” Wouldn’t that be fairer than just stomping about being disagreeable without any explanation and inviting retaliation?’
‘Much fairer,’ said Mike, walking towards her, ‘but awfully difficult to do when one is in the kind of state that too much stress causes. At times like that people one loves sometimes do seem to be part of the problem and, with the best will in the world, they do sometimes get blamed for it.’
‘Well, they shouldn’t,’ she said, thinking more of Fin and Irene than any of her own failed relationships. ‘It’s grossly unjust and I for one won’t have it. I warn you, Mike. It’s not conceit or anything. But I am not tough enough to take being treated like that. Perhaps I ought to be, but I’m not. That’s exactly why I go on about keeping what we have as we have it. If you get into a state like that, I’d much rather you stayed away in your flat until it was over.’
‘And if I needed you then, your support or your comfort? I’m not saying I’d have any right to it; I’m just saying I might need it. What would happen then?’
‘Then you’d have to ask for it. And if you asked, it would be all right and I’d put up with anything. Anything. It’s the unprovoked, unexplained aggression I can’t stand.’
‘If I were able to ask, I probably shouldn’t need it,’ he said, looking almost as though he was about to laugh, which bothered her. ‘It’s a real catch-22.’
‘If I understand you correctly,’ said Helena after she had had time to consider what he had said, ‘you’re suggesting that the more revoltingly you behave towards me, the more you might need from me. Have I got that right?’
‘Pretty much. It might never happen, but it would be silly to pretend that it never could.’
‘It has happened to you before, then?’ Since they were having what amounted to a serious contractual negotiation, Helena wanted to get everything absolutely clear between them.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, sitting down on the edge of her bed and taking off his shoes. ‘Just as it seems to have happened to you.’
‘To me and to other people I care about, which is why I’m so wary of getting myself into that sort of thing again.’ She did not want to betray Irene’s difficulties with Fin to someone who had not met either of them.
‘I know it is, but that wasn’t exactly what I meant. I expect you’ve done much the same as the men you’ve chucked out.’
‘Of course I haven’t,’ Helena said in outrage and then almost immediately added: ‘Have I been doing something like that to you?’
‘No, not yet,’ he said, ‘but I suspect you have to other people. It’s human nature, Helena; you must have understood that much by now, watcher that you are. Unmet needs do make people disagreeable to those nearest to them.’
‘That’s not fair,’ she said, coming to sit beside him.
‘What isn’t? My suggesting that you’re not always perfect?’
‘Lunatic! Of course not. No, I meant that it isn’t fair to be disagreeable about your unmet needs if you’ve never told anyone what they are.’
He smiled and lay back so that he was looking up at her. He blew her a kiss and said: ‘Most of us assume that if people say they care about us they will know what it is we need.’
‘Well, that’s completely barmy. Much sillier than anything I’ve ever said or felt. How can anyone know? That assumption is exactly how the trouble starts. And if you’re going to …’
‘I’m not. Don’t worry so much, Helena. It seems to me that while you and I can talk like this, we’re well on the way to being able to sort out most things.’
She leaned over him, searching his face. There was nothing in it to scare her, no coldness, no half-hidden dislike, no anger. Knowing that she was on the verge of committing herself to something, she took a breath and nodded, but she could not make herself say anything at all.