This morning, Noreen was gardening. She was not gardening strenuously but, looking out of the back window of the shop, I was amazed that she should be gardening at all. For a while, secateurs in knobbly hand, she dead-headed the roses. Then, kneeling on the mat which she always brings out for this task, she set about weeding the herbaceous border which she herself created three – or was it four? – summers ago. Could a solitary gold injection have had so rapid and so potent an effect? Or was this a case of what Dr Lewes calls ‘the placebo factor’ working a miracle? She has always been suggestible.
Eventually I threw open the window and called out to her: ‘Don’t overdo it! Don’t tire yourself!’
‘Oh, I feel marvellous. Terrific.’
Someone had entered the shop. I closed the window and turned to deal with him. He was a young man in jeans, a sweat-shirt and Doc Martens, with a coloured cloth bound, pirate-wise, round his head, who asked if I stocked any military insignia, I told him that I didn’t. He walked out of the shop without another word.
When I have closed up the shop and go through the door which leads from it to the sitting-room, in order to join Noreen for luncheon, I am surprised that the table is unlaid and that there is no sign of her. She is usually so punctilious.
‘Noreen!’ I call. ‘Darling! Where are you?’
‘Upstairs!’ Her voice is oddly muffled.
‘Are you all right?’ I begin to climb the narrow, steep stairs. When we bought this Elizabethan cottage, we never thought that one day Noreen would be an invalid.
‘Noreen!’
She is lying on the double bed, which we no longer share, since she has become so restless a sleeper. She is on her back, staring up at the ceiling.
‘I think I rather overdid things,’ she tells me, turning her head to give me a weak, apologetic smile. ‘ I felt wonderful. Now I feel awful,’ She struggles to get off the bed. ‘I’ll get the lunch.’
‘You’ll do no such thing. You just rest here and I’ll get it. I can bring a tray up.’
‘No, darling …’ Her protest is feeble. She looks extraordinarily, worryingly pale.
It is not much trouble to prepare the luncheon. We never eat anything other than a bowl of soup each, some salad and some French bread and cheese. There is always wine but we drink sparingly. I carry up the tray and place it on the bedside table. Then I draw up a chair for myself.
Suddenly, I do not know why, I am certain that what has made this change in Noreen has not been only the gardening, perhaps has not been the gardening at all. I gaze at her and briefly she gazes back at me, her glass of Muscadet almost touching her lips. Then she says: ‘Darling, I have a confession to make.’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t be cross. Promise not to be cross.’
‘Of course I won’t be cross.’
‘I looked in your desk. I found it. Read it. I mean, read what concerned you and me.’
I am astounded. It is, as far as I know, the first time that she has ever violated my privacy in such a way. I have never violated hers. ‘But Noreen, how – how could you?’
‘Yes, I know. It was terrible of me. But I knew that something was on your mind, something was worrying you. There was that time – do you remember? – when I came into the room and you threw something, in such a guilty way, into the drawer of your desk and then pushed it shut … That, well, alerted me.’ She gulps from the glass. ‘ So I came to feel that I – I had to know, just had to know.’ She looks over to me, her eyes apprehensive and wary. ‘Do you forgive me?’
‘Of course I do. Of course! But, oh, I do wish … I didn’t want you to know what was happening. I wanted to keep it from you.’
‘He’s going to destroy us,’ she says. ‘That’s what he always wanted to do and now, after all these years …’ She has never liked Bob. Just as he has always been jealous of her, so perhaps she has been jealous of him.
‘I have to appeal to him,’ I say. ‘I must go and see him. That’s what I’m planning.’
‘He won’t listen to any appeals,’ she says bitterly.
‘I don’t see why not.’ But, with a feeling of despair, I wonder if she may not be right. ‘After all, those chapters could easily be removed from his book. The book won’t suffer all that much … It’s rather a good book,’ I add.
‘Well, he’s always been clever – so that’s not surprising.’
‘I don’t want you to worry about it. Worry is the worst thing for you.’
She laughs. ‘I can hardly not worry. I just can’t go through the whole business again. And you can’t. Even more, you can’t.’
I shrug. ‘ Let’s see how he responds.’
Now it is past eleven o’clock and she has long since gone up to bed. I sit down here, the typescript on my knees. I wonder if there is any chance of getting him to do what Noreen and I want. I think of all the consequences if the press discovers where I am and what has happened to me and if, once again, we have to move on and remake ourselves.
Our two desks are side by side, hers and mine. As I replace the typescript in my desk, I turn, on an impulse, to hers and lift its lid. There, among a jumble of papers, is the glitterwax rose, as it used once to lie among a jumble of papers, tubes of paint, brushes and pens and pencils in her desk in the Black Box.
I pick up the glitterwax rose and weigh it in my palm. Then I raise it to my nostrils and again breathe in that faint smell of paraffin after all these years. It is the smell – yes, I am convinced of it – which establishes the link for me. The glitterwax rose is in my hand; and there, in my memory, are the scorched roses lying on the top of the incinerator. The glitterwax rose is the symbol of the love which has somehow survived all these long, often troubled years which Noreen and I have spent together. The burnt roses are the symbol of Bob’s lovelessness, in Ma’s rejection of him.
I place the glitterwax rose back where it was. With strange persistence, that faint smell of paraffin still lingers on my hand and even in my nostrils.