‘There is no point in raking up the past,’ Chloe’s husband Oliver says to her the next morning, as she sits on the edge of his bed and watches him pour coffee from a French pottery jug. This is the day Chloe’s life is to change – in the way that the lives of calm people do change, through some alteration of attitude rather than of conduct. To Chloe, it seems an ordinary enough morning, except that she woke with a feeling of cheerfulness, conscious of the notion that she was finally to be allowed out of mourning for her mother’s death; and that now, when Oliver says that there is no point in raking up the past, she quite violently disagrees with him.
As for Oliver, he is glad that the night is over, not because he has slept badly but because he has slept too well, and been savaged by nightmares. They hover permanently round his brass bedstead and if he sleeps too deep, or too trustfully, they pounce.
Oliver wears no pyjamas. He is a slight, muscular, hairy man and the hairs on his chest are turning grey. Once he sat up in bed against brave white sheets, shiny black body hairs lying smooth against an olive skin, and thick dark head hair springing up in tight curls from his temples, stimulated, Chloe used to think, by the passion of his opinions and the fury of his dislikes.
Now Oliver props himself against brown easy-care Terylene and cotton pillow-slips, and his grey chest gives him a dusty and defeated look, and even his furies have mellowed, and the hair on his head, now sparse, falls downward in a perfectly ordinary way. His family do not notice the change in him. They imagine he is still king in the outside world, as he is in his own territory; but in fact he abdicated from that empire long ago. He rules at home and nowhere else.
Oliver has breakfast brought to him on a tray. He does not eat breakfast with his family. His nerves shrink from noise and good-humour first thing in the morning. When the thoughts and feelings of the night are still with him, the shriekings and posturings of the children – so many of them not his own – seem like some horrific charade especially set up to mock him.
So while Françoise prepares the children’s breakfast, it is Chloe’s custom to take Oliver his tray. After breakfast he will go to his study to write, or try to write, his novel.
‘No,’ agrees Chloe, lying in her teeth, ‘there is no point in raking up the past.’
He is not to be placated even by instant agreement.
‘Then why,’ he asks, ‘do you suggest I have nightmares because of something which happened to me in the past? It’s much more likely to be Françoise’s dinners. She will cook with butter. Instead of offering me psychological platitudes, why not try getting her to cook in oil?’
‘Françoise comes from Normandy,’ Chloe says. ‘Not the South. The butter habit is very deep.’
‘You don’t think she’s trying to kill me off with cholesterol?’ He is half joking, half serious. The nightmares have not yet fully retreated.
‘If she wanted to kill anyone,’ says Chloe, ‘surely it would be me.’
But Oliver is not sure. There is a coldness in Françoise’s eyes, as she lies beneath him, which belies the obliging languor of her limbs and the sweet moanings of her breath. He says as much to Chloe, but this time Chloe does not reply at all.
‘You’re not in a mood, I hope,’ says Oliver, meaning that he himself trembles on the verge of one.
‘No,’ says Chloe, kindly. She pulls the blind high and looks out across the garden. It is March. The winter weather has broken: the sun shines on the green tips of the daffodils, just beginning to show through the black earth. Beyond the green wall of the yew trees she can see the copper spire of the village church, brilliantly tipped with green verdigris. She is elated.
But now the sun is shining into Oliver’s eyes. He protests, and Chloe lowers the blind again to save him discomfort, but not before she has seen, on the blank pillow next to Oliver’s, a long dark hair, Françoise’s. Chloe removes the hair, and drops it in the wastepaper basket. Oliver does not like untidiness.
‘I’m sorry if I was bad-tempered,’ says Oliver. ‘If you mind about Françoise, you know you only have to say.’
‘Of course I don’t mind,’ says Chloe, and as far as she can tell she doesn’t.
But something has changed in her. Yes it has. Listen to what she is saying.
‘I think I shall go up to London today,’ says Chloe, who hates cities, crowds and cars.
‘What for?’
She has to think before she can reply.
‘To see Marjorie and Grace, I suppose.’
‘What for?’
‘They’re my friends.’
‘I am very well aware of that. Why do you choose such odd friends?’
‘One doesn’t choose friends. One acquires them. They are as much duty as pleasure.’
‘You don’t even like them.’ He is right. Chloe sometimes dislikes Marjorie, and sometimes Grace, and sometimes both at once. But that is not the point.
‘How do you know they’ll be free to see you?’ he goes on. ‘Other people won’t just drop everything because you happen to remember they exist. You’re very egocentric.’
‘I’ll have to take that chance.’
‘The fare is monstrous.’ Oliver says. ‘And who will look after the children?’
‘Françoise will.’
‘You mustn’t impose on Françoise. Her function is to cook and clean and run the home. It does not include childcare.’
He waits for his wife to say what else it does not include, but Chloe merely says, mildly, ‘The children are old enough to look after themselves.’
And so they are.