She sees the rain, and going into the hall, takes the umbrella. Outside the front door, she puts it up. It is big, black and shabby, a man’s umbrella that she found on a train, where people usually lose them. At the time it was a godsend, because her own had just fallen to pieces and, having not much money and fewer prospects, every little helped.
Now, quite smart in her heavy, dark way, the umbrella is rather incongruous.
She walks slowly, calmly. The rain falls on the umbrella in quick mercury drops.
Living alone, she never has to explain. Explain why, so often, if the rain starts, she takes the opportunity to go out, with the umbrella.
The Sugar Girl had simply appeared one morning, out of the park.
She wore a floating amber dress, mid-calf length on her slim legs, and Roman sandals that showed gold-painted toenails. Her hair was fawn, long, silky, and her skin also fawn and silky. She was an image of honey brownness, with startling, contrastingly blue eyes. She had been doing a little shopping before going to work, presumably, for in one of those open doll’s baskets that had come back into fashion, lay three peaches, two bananas, a bottle of white wine, and a pound bag of sugar.
Sarah had at once the idea that these items would be used to concoct a fragrant and sticky sweet, somewhere cool, at one o’clock. Perhaps to be eaten alone or, more likely—there was rather a lot for one—with a companion.
In those days especially, Sarah tended to make up lives for those she saw on the streets, in the buses. The elderly woman with a wicked mouth who had murdered her lover. The fidgety housewife who had a house crowded with rare plants and a husband who never spoke. The writer’s mind, Sarah supposed. In those days too, Sarah was still a writer, even though she had to go to work in a damp little office, full of bombastic men and twittery small female clerks, who shared, all twelve of them, one ancient, smelly, unisex lavatory.
The Sugar Girl, the girl with the sugar in her basket, was more valuable to the writer’s mind than most. She might be up to anything, she had such elusiveness. Not beautiful at all, yet there was something. A grace, a quality of animal movement. Was she a dancer? The slim strong legs, the high firm small breasts, the perfect slender muscles of the arms. Sarah studied her, and was sorry to see, after they had all waited at the bus stop the regulation fifteen to twenty-five minutes, that it was another bus than her own which the Sugar Girl stepped in to.
Next morning, however, the Girl appeared again. Again she waited, although this time with only a shoulder bag, and in a white jacket, for the day was much cooler.
Sarah watched surreptitiously the unbeautiful yet flawless profile. The Girl’s nose was just a little too long. How wonderful. It was a face to paint or sketch in charcoal.
That evening Sarah attempted to draw the Girl, from memory; failed. Would she be there again the following day? She had appeared from nowhere. Perhaps a new job, or else a new route. Perhaps a new dancing tutor, a Madame Zinafskaya, with bracelets and memories of escaping something in the snow. “Now vee lifts zee left legs, zoh!”
The Girl appeared rather late, running down the park, her hair flying. She wore a blue skirt and a blue blouse, and big hoop earrings. Sarah, who had missed seeing her, felt her heart leap.
My God. I’m in love with her?
But if so, it was such a lovely love, so undemanding, not interfering with anything at all.
Two weeks passed, and every morning, the Sugar Girl arrived at the bus stop. Generally she stood, not in line, but to one side. Always, however, politely allowing those who had stood neatly in the queue to mount her bus before her. Two traits, then, a wish to non-conformity, a care of others.
She did not have a great many clothes, for there were quickly repetitions. The blue skirt and two or three tops, the amber dress and a grey one, the jacket, various transparent scarves. Sometimes her toenails were copper, sometimes gold or white. She wore no make-up but for a blue line drawn under her blue eyes, and what seemed to be dark blue mascara. Her lips were smooth as cream. She had short almond fingernails. Sarah told herself how the Girl had bitten her nails in adolescence, trained herself by willpower to stop. She was about twenty-two or three now, five years younger than Sarah then.
What was her name? Irene, with the last e properly pronounced? Julia, Laura, Isabel…, or something foreign—Sandrine, Natasha…
Perhaps it was something deliberately awkward and un-magical, in the manner of so many modern actors and dancers. Ginny Hinks. Trish Buckle.
Sarah broke into a second of audible laughter before she could prevent herself, and the man in front turned and glared at her. Sarah composed herself.
The Sugar Girl did not see. From her shoulder bag she had produced a plain book. Was it a novel? Something light, moronic, clever? Dance steps? Calculus? Sex?
The bus came, today Sarah’s before the Girl’s.
As Sarah rode towards her boring job, she thought, I could speak to her. The way people do. A cliché. These buses! or, cooler/hotter today, isn’t it? Why not?
Throughout the morning, filing impossible papers written in Martian in their normal mess, while one of the big men smashed bee after invasive bee—they had a nest under the roof—into Bee Nirvana, Sarah considered an opening gambit with the Sugar Girl.
And that evening, after her supper of cheese on toast, Sarah also thought about it. And in the bath. And in the bed. Suppose they spoke, suppose they made friends. They met for lunch. At the weekend they went on the river, Sarah rowing, and then the Girl, slimmer yet stronger, rowing better. And under a willow, as in the stories, sharing a bottle of Sauvignon, an apple, a sandwich. A kiss.
That smooth, pale, almost coffee-coloured mouth.
But there was no temptation, on her back in the bed, for a straying of the hands. Sarah would not abuse the Sugar Girl. About some now or past actress, Sarah might fantasize—she could not be the only one who had disrobed an almost-persuaded Vivien Leigh, in a Victorian bathroom scattered with real fur rugs, been slapped into happy submission by a suddenly gay Bette Davis, or, more modernly, become the dresser of Janet Suzman at the National Theatre. But Sarah did not want to fantasize to the sexual end about the Sugar Girl. The Sugar Girl was a private citizen. Even in a dream, she must retain most of her space.
The following day, the Sugar Girl was late again anyway. She almost missed the bus entirely. But not quite. So there was no opportunity for the cliché, and the next day was Saturday.
In the third week, on Monday, the Sugar Girl was at the bus stop, and only three other people were there, apart from Sarah. The morning was soothingly hot. It was an ideal day to go near, to speak. Perhaps even, “Do you have the time? My watch seems to have stopped.”
Sarah stood in the queue, prickling with urgency. Sweat stippled out on her forehead and woke her deodorant to a sharp lemony rose scent.
But it was as impossible to go over to the Sugar Girl as to pull one’s feet out of a sucking quagmire. Sarah could not move. And then the buses came, one behind the other. And there was the usual flurry as the driver behind tried to evade the passengers, driving by before they could get on or off.
In the unpleasant office lavatory, window wide, Sarah stood and thought about why she had not spoken to the Sugar Girl. Was it fear? The Girl might have a frightening accent, from Birmingham, say, or a raucous version of the East End, or—worse—the over educated Oxbridge set.
But surely, in her case, it would not matter. A rebuff then. Go away, piss off—but the Girl would not behave like that. Not to a simple comment on weather or query on time. If she sensed in Sarah something unwanted, she would be—what?—firm but gracious. That was all. Nothing embarrassing or alarming.
Tomorrow then. Definitely tomorrow.
But the tomorrow came, like Macbeth’s, and several more tomorrows, and there was always now a reason not to speak. Too many people, an abnormal amount. A dangerous row going on across the road between two irate drivers. Finally, the Girl seemed deeply engrossed in another slim plain book, this one dark red: The Secret of the Ukrainian Pirouette, The Beginner’s Guide to Potato Peeling.
It’s absurd. Why not? Why not?
And now it was Friday again, and the Girl was late, rushing through the park under the green cauliflowers of the trees, in a new white broderie Anglaise top, and new white sandals.
Just in time for the bus. And Sarah almost stammered out, as the Girl ran by, “Just made it!” But that could be so annoying, somebody saying that, the obvious. She desisted.
The weekend passed in the ordinary way. Sarah did perfunctory cleaning, washing, shopping, read late in bed, listened to music, went out for dinner at the usual place, where they knew her.
On Sunday an attack of melancholy drove her up on to the heath. It was time she looked for another job. Preferably somewhere with a café nearby and more than one toilet. She had walked up here, with Karen, last year. But that was then, this now. Sitting under a spreading chestnut tree, she thought about the Sugar Girl, and sadly beheld the littleness of the game. For game it was. She did not care to speak because to speak would, one way or the other, cause the game to end.
On Monday morning, the hot weather broke in a downpour, and Sarah took from its cracked vase the man’s umbrella she had recently found on a train.
When she reached the bus stop, no one at all was there, and then, up through the rain, rain like a forest shutting all things away, walked the Sugar Girl. She wore her grey dress, now nearly black with wet, and over her head she balanced a cascading plastic carrier bag.
Sarah spoke at once.
“Will you share my umbrella? Its huge.”
“Oh, thanks so much,” said the Sugar Girl, and came in out of the forest of the water, and stood close to Sarah in the shadow.
The Girl smelled of rain, and Imprévu. Her hair was sprinkled with rain beads, and her blue mascara had smudged just a little, giving her the eyes of a feverish child that was also a were-albino-tiger.
“I thought it would,” said the Girl. She had no accent of any kind, like the very best sort of actress. “And then I left mine behind.” She meant, it seemed, her own umbrella.
“I expect that’s the summer gone,” said Sarah.
“Yes. Once it rains that’s always it, isn’t it.”
There was fresh mint on her breath, conceivably, from a Polo. She had the doll’s basket again, but inside everything had been covered by the wet plastic bag now crushed there.
“I love the rain though,” said the Sugar Girl.
“Yes, it’s very clean. Even though it isn’t.”
They laughed as one. Shiny crystals spangled under the umbrella. Then through the forest of the rain, the Girl’s bus manifested.
“Thank you again—you saved me from drowning!”
And she was gone.
But I did. I spoke to her, sheltered her.
And now—
On Tuesday, the Sugar Girl did not appear at the bus stop.
Sarah felt an odd compunction. Had the Girl caught a chill? Well, she was young and strong.
The days passed. The Sugar Girl did not come back. After ten days, Sarah stopped worrying. Stopped thinking, with a dry mouth, of accidents, violence, abrupt death. Because there was no way she could learn a thing, she would never know. She could do nothing.
For the next four weeks, as Sarah worked out her notice, she looked every morning still, half imagined she saw her moving through the park, or her shape among the crowd about the bus stop. But it was never her. The Sugar Girl never came back.
It was like wanting to cry, but the tears would not come. They could not get out, because you could not weep at a loss like this. There had been nothing at all to lose.
Now in the rain, walking, Sarah keeps the incongruous, unsightly umbrella over her head. Crystals no longer dance in the air. The Sugar Girl does not walk beside her.
It is only that, now and then, when the rain starts, she takes the umbrella, and walks under the umbrella alone in the rain.