The next day Angela called Joanna.
‘How are you, darling?’ she asked.
‘Do you really want to know?’ asked Joanna.
‘Yes,’ said Angela, settling in to listen. Angela had undertaken to see Joanna through her divorce: so much one woman will often do for another, although with luck the service may never have to be reciprocated. But you never know, you never know! The burden of guilt, indignation, upset, and general sense of injustice must be handed round, communally shouldered: it is too much for one person, one ‘I’, to bear. The ‘you’ must take a hand. At first the phone calls come at any time of day or night: the woman wronged, the ‘I’, has no idea of time, place or pertinence: then the notion of the otherness of the recipient, the sharer of distress, the you reasserts itself: the calls are at least prefaced by ‘is the milk boiling over? the toast burning? is Hollywood on the other line? have you a minute?’ and it’s clear the healing process is under way. Joanna was by now far down the road to recovery: whole conversations could be held without mention of Carl. But of course Chernobyl and his face on the television screen that morning had stirred up what Angela saw as a good deal of muddy sediment: nasty little insects crawled again in and out of slime: they had only been playing dead: they were back again, spreading disease and discomfort.
‘When I think how Carl has behaved to me!’ said Joanna, and it was clear to Angela she had had quite a relapse. ‘When I think how I wasted my life, simply threw it away! Why did my parents allow it? Carl May was a completely unsuitable match: it was unforgivable of them. They just wanted me out of the house. I was born to have children, but no, Carl May wouldn’t have that: the day before we were married he told me he didn’t want any. What could I do? Everything arranged: all the guests: the presents: I had to agree. You know what he’s like. I was so young I thought it didn’t matter. Infatuated! His unhappiness had to be loaded on to me; that was what it was. He denied life, made me deny it too. He turned me into some sort of snow queen and when I made just one small attempt to thaw myself out he used it as an excuse to throw me out of his life – he set it all up, I swear he did. He was just waiting for the opportunity to be rid of me.’
‘Yes, but Joanna –’ said Angela, cautiously.
‘I’m sorry, am I boring you? You do agree, don’t you? I am right?’
‘Carl may look at it a little differently. Carl came into his art gallery one day and found you and that Egyptologist together.’
‘For heaven’s sake, Angela, I was over fifty.’
‘What has that got to do with it?’ Angela sounded really interested: she really wanted to know.
‘Obviously I was desperate and Carl should have understood that.’
‘But Joanna, I’m over fifty and I’m not desperate.’
‘But you’re happily married!’ Joanna’s normally quiet voice was suddenly quite loud.
‘And now you’re not married at all,’ replied Angela.
Joanna was silent. She sniffed a little.
‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me today. Why did Carl choose to come into the gallery at that particular time? He never went in, normally. Besides, I thought he was away: he usually was.’
‘Perhaps he suspected something. Perhaps you seemed unusually happy.’
‘Oh, I was. Isaac was so much the opposite of Carl. But he had to put paid to that, didn’t he? And then that accident – if accident it was.’
‘Of course it was, Joanna.’ Though nobody believed that for one minute – Isaac, crossing the road outside the Eton Square house, in too much of a hurry, knocked down and killed by Philip the chauffeur, reversing into the garage. Oh yes!
‘Carl was so hard and cold about it all: not an ounce of sympathy for me.’
‘Could you expect it?’
‘Yes I could! We’d been married for thirty years and it was always me looking after him, worrying about him, listening to tales of his dreadful childhood; didn’t I deserve anything in return? We were supposed to love each other.’
‘I think that’s what Carl believed, Joanna. And then you went and had an affair with another man; not even someone more important, or younger, or richer than him, but some penniless librarian with straggly hair. What an insult! Of course he reacted. I know you think he over-reacted, but men are like that, especially men like Carl, who are used to having their own way.’
‘Whose side are you on, Angela?’
‘Yours, Joanna, you know I am. But Carl did have a point of view.’
‘Well, I don’t see it. I suppose you’re busy.’
‘I am a bit.’
‘Your children are about to visit you, I suppose.’
‘Yes.’
‘And the grandchildren?’
‘Yes.’
‘You see, you have everything and I have nothing.’
‘Joanna,’ said Angela briskly, ‘you have a house worth two million pounds –’
‘It’s falling down, and Carl won’t pay a penny for repairs.’
‘You have a butler –’
‘He’s gay. Carl will only let me have gay servants. I’m surprised he doesn’t have them castrated as well, just to be on the safe side.’
‘And a gardener who shares your bed. Perhaps Carl is right. You are simply not to be trusted.’
‘How do you know about Oliver?’ asked Joanna, after a short silence.
‘It’s obvious.’
‘Don’t tell Carl,’ said Joanna, ‘or he’ll kill me.’
‘Or the young man, judging from past form,’ said Angela, quite bleakly, and quite seriously.
‘I’d thought of that,’ said Joanna.
‘And you let him take the risk?’
‘If I do,’ said Joanna, ‘so can he. It’s worth it. I don’t care any more. I don’t mind being dead. What have I got to live for? Next year’s crocuses?’
Angela said, ‘All I can say is, Joanna, keep your young man out of the garden for the time being. His parts might begin to glow in the dark, and you wouldn’t like that. Gerald seems to think we’re getting quite a lot of radioactivity over here.’
‘How lucky you are,’ was all Joanna said, ‘to have Gerald.’