Collected Stories

Virgins

Like a wasp, Laura says to herself, as she invariably does in the cathedral of Siena, with its violent argument of stripes. An uneasy place, her husband had been remarking only the other night, informing some other tourists in the Palazzo Ravizza.

In several languages, guides draw attention to the pulpit and Pastorino’s Last Supper. Wilting Americans rest on chairs, Germans work their cameras. An old Italian woman lights a candle, children chatter and are silenced. With dark glasses dangling from her fingers, Laura makes her way through the cathedral crowds, having quickly verified that Francesco Piccolomini became Pius III. She knew she’d been right; her husband had said it was Pius II Her husband is often wrong, about all sorts of things.

‘Laura? Is it Laura?’

She stares at the round face, flushed from the August heat. Hair, once coppery red, Laura guesses, is peppered now with grey; a dress is less elegantly striped than the architecture, in lettuce-green and blue. Laura smiles, but shakes her head. She passes her glance down the tired dress, to legs on which mosquitoes have feasted, to sandals whose shade of blue once matched the blue of the cotton above. She smiles again, knowing she knows this woman of fifty or so.

‘You haven’t changed a bit!’ the woman says, and immediately Laura remembers because the voice is as it has always been. Polite to say she hasn’t changed a bit; politely she lies herself.

‘Nor you, now that I look, Margaretta.’

But her tone is nervous, and her confidence melts as they stand among the tourists and the angry stripes. How odd to meet here, she says, knowing it is not odd at all, since everyone’s a tourist nowadays. She wishes they had not met like this; why could not Margaretta just have seen her and let her pass by?

‘It’s lovely to see you,’Margaretta says.

They continue to look at one another, and simultaneously, in their different moods, their distant friendship possesses them. Two marriages and their children are irrelevant.

The Heaslips’ house was in a straggling grassy square, dusty in summer. A brass plate announced the profession of Dr Heaslip; the oak-grained hall door was heavy and impressive, with brass that matched in weight and tone the nameplate. Near by, the Bank of Ireland was ivy-covered, less gaunt because of it than the Heaslips’ grey stone façade. Other houses, each detached from its neighbour, were of grey stone also, or colourwashed in pink or cream or white. In the approximate centre of an extensive area of shorn grass, green railings protected an empty pedestal, which Queen Victoria in her day had dominated. A cinema – the De Luxe Picture House, as antique as its title – occupied a corner created by the edge of the square and the town’s main street. Hogan’s Hotel filled the corner opposite.

One day in June, during the Second World War, a day when the brass plate shimmered in warm sunshine, a day Laura for all her life did not forget, Mrs Heaslip said in the drawing-room of the house:

‘Laura, this is Margaretta.’

Laura held out her hand, as she had been taught, but Margaretta giggled, finding it amusing that two small girls should be so formal.

‘Margaretta! Really, what will Laura think? Now, do at once apologize.’

‘We’re all like that in Ireland,’ Margaretta pronounced instead. ‘Bog-trotters, y’know.’

‘Indeed we’re not,’ protested Mrs Heaslip, a thin, tall woman in a flowery dress. With some panache she wore as well a straw hat with a faded purple ribbon on it. The skin of her face, and of her arms and legs, was deeply brown, as if she spent the greater part of her time outside. ‘Indeed, indeed, we’re not,’ she repeated, most emphatically. ‘And do not say “y’know”, Margaretta.’

They were nine, the girls, in 1941. Laura had been sent from England because of the war, called in Ireland ‘the emergency’: there was more nourishment to be had in Ireland, and a feeling of safety in an Irish provincial town. Years before Laura had been born, her mother, living in Ireland then, had been at a boarding-school in Bray with Mrs Heaslip. ‘I think you’ll like it in Ireland,’ her mother had promised. ‘If I didn’t have this wretched job I’d come with you like a shot.’ They lived in Buckinghamshire, in a village called Anstey Rye. In December 1939, when the war had scarcely begun, Laura’s father had been killed, the Spitfire he’d been piloting shot down over the sea. Her mother worked in the Anstey Rye clothes shop, where she was responsible for the accounts, for correspondence with wholesalers and for considerable formalities connected with clothing coupons. It was all very different from Ireland.

‘That’s what’s called a monkey puzzle, y’know,’ Margaretta said in the garden, and Laura quietly replied that she knew a monkey puzzle when she saw one.

Unlike Mrs Heaslip, Margaretta wasn’t thin. Nor was she brown. She was pretty in a sleepy, careless kind of way: her eyes were sleepily blue, her cheeks carelessly dimpled, her red jumble of hair the most beautiful Laura had ever seen. Margaretta would be astonishing when she grew up –what, Laura imagined, looking at her on that first afternoon, Helen of Troy must have been like. She felt jealous of the promise that seemed to be in every movement of Margaretta’s body, in every footstep that she took as she led the way through the garden and the house.

‘I am to show you everything,’ Margaretta said. ‘Would you be enormously bored to see the town?’

‘No, no, of course not. Thank you, Margaretta.’

‘It isn’t much, I’ll tell you that.’

The girls walked slowly through the wide main street, Margaretta drawing attention to the shops. All of them were cluttered, Laura noticed, except one, connected with a bakery, which seemed to sell, not bread, but only flour and sugar. They passed Martell’s Café, Jas. Ryan’s drapery and Medical Hall, Clancy’s grocery, which Margaretta said was a public house as well as a grocer’s, the Home and Colonial, a hardware shop and a shoe shop, other public houses. They paused by a window full of exercise-books and bottles of Stephens’ ink, which Margaretta said was her favourite shop of all. The window was strewn with packets of nibs and pencils, packets of rubber bands, rulers, pencil-sharpeners, and Waterman fountain pens in different marbled colours. There was an advertisement for Mellifont Books, and some of the books themselves, with garish paper covers: Angela and the Pixies in the Children’s Series, Murder from Beyond in Crime and Detection. The shop, Margaretta said, was called Coffey’s although the name over the door was T. MacCarthy. She liked it because it smelt so pleasantly of paper. Clancy’s smelt of whiskey and sawdust, the butcher’s of offal.

‘How’re you, Margaretta?’ Mr Hearne greeted her from his doorway, a heavy man in a blood-stained apron.

‘Laura’s come from England,’ Margaretta said by way of reply.

‘How’re you, Laura?’ Mr Hearne said.

In the weeks and months that followed, Laura came to know Mr Hearne well, for she and Margaretta did all the shopping for the household. ‘Meat and women,’ the butcher had a way of saying, ‘won’t take squeezing.’ He used to ask riddles, of which he did not know the answers. His wife, Mrs Heaslip said, was frequently pregnant.

The sweetshops of the town became familiar to Laura also, Murphy’s, O’Connor’s, Eldon’s, Morrissey’s, Mrs Finney’s. Different brands of icecream were sold: H.B., Lucan, Melville, and Eldon’s own make, cheaper and yellower than the others. Murphy’s sold fruit as well as confectionery, and was the smartest of the sweetshops. Margaretta said it smelt the nicest, a mixture of vanilla and grapes. They all sold scarlet money-balls, in which, if you were lucky, you got your money back, a brand-new ha’penny wrapped in a piece of paper. They all sold boxes of Urney chocolates, and liquorice pipes and strips, and Lemon’s Nut-Milk Toffees and Rainbow Toffees. In their windows, boxes of Willwood’s Dolly Mixtures were laid out, and slabs of Mickey Mouse Toffee, and jelly babies. Best value of all was the yellow lemonade powder, which Margaretta and Laura never waited to make lemonade with but ate on the street.

That first summer in Ireland was full of such novelty, but most fascinating of all was the Heaslip family itself. Dr Heaslip related solemn jokes in an unhurried voice, and his equally unhurried smile came to your rescue when you were flustered and didn’t know whether it was a joke or not. Mrs Heaslip read in the garden – books that had their covers protected with brown paper, borrowed from the library the nuns ran. Margaretta’s two younger brothers, six and five, were looked after by Francie, a crosseyed girl of nineteen who came every day to the house. Eileen and Katie between them did the cooking and cleaning, Katie for ever up and down the basement stairs, answering the hall door to Dr Heaslip’s patients. Eileen was quite old – Margaretta said sixty, but Mrs Heaslip, overhearing that, altered the estimation to forty-five – and made brown bread that Laura thought delicious. Katie was keeping company with Wiry Bohan from the hardware’s. Margaretta said she’d seen them kissing.

Dr Heaslip’s motor-car, unlike the others in the town, which for the most part were laid up because of the emergency, was driven every day out of the garage at the back by a man called Mattie Devlin. He parked it in front of the house so that Dr Heaslip could hasten to it and journey out into the country to attend a childbirth or to do his best when there’d been an accident on a farm. ‘Ah, well, we’ll do our best’ was a much-employed expression of his, issued in a tone of voice that did not hold out much hope of success though in fact, as Laura learnt, he often saved a life. ‘She’s out there ready, Doctor,’ Mattie Devlin every morning shouted up through the house at breakfast-time. He then began his day’s work in the garden, where, to Mrs Heaslip’s displeasure, he refused to grow peas, broad beans or spinach, claiming that the soil was unsuitable for them. He grew instead a great number of turnips, both swedes and white, potatoes, and a form of kale which nobody in the family liked. He was a man in a striped brown suit who wore both belt and braces and tucked the ends of his trousers into his socks when he worked in the garden. He never took off either his jacket or his hat.

Sometimes when Dr Heaslip was summoned on a call that involved a journey in his car he would invite the girls to accompany him, but he was insistent that they should make themselves as inconspicuous as possible on the back seat in case their presence should be regarded as a misuse of his petrol allowance. When they arrived at whatever house it was that required his skill he relaxed this severity and permitted them to emerge. ‘Go and look at the chickens and cows,’ he’d urge. ‘Show Laura what a chicken is, Margaretta.’ If the day was fine and the farmhouse not too far from the town, they’d ask if they might walk home. Later he would pass them on the road and would blow his horn, slowing down to give them a lift if they wanted one. But they usually walked on and no one particularly minded when they were late for whatever meal it was. Their plates of meat and vegetables would be taken from the oven and they’d eat at the kitchen table, gravy dried away to nothing, mashed potatoes brown. Or tea, at teatime, would have gone black almost, keeping hot on the range.

Headstrong and impetuous, Dr Heaslip described his daughter as. ‘Not like yourself, Laura. You’re the wise virgin of the two.’ He repeated this comparison often, asking Mrs Heaslip and sometimes Katie or Eileen, even Mattie Devlin, if they agreed. Margaretta ignored it, Laura politely smiled. Nothing much upset the Heaslip household and nothing hurried it. Mrs Heaslip’s only complaints were the manner in which her daughter spoke and Mattie Devlin’s ways with vegetables.

‘The Rains Came,’ Margaretta said. ‘All about India, y’know.’

They went to it, as they did to all the films at the De Luxe Picture House, which hadn’t yet acquired Western Electric Sound, so that the voices were sometimes difficult to hear. Dr Heaslip and Mrs Heaslip attended the De Luxe almost as regularly as Margaretta and Laura, who went three times a week, every time there was a change of programme. At breakfast the next day the girls reported on what they’d seen; Dr and Mrs Heaslip then made up their minds. Mr Deeds Goes to Town had for years been Mrs Heaslip’s favourite and The House of Rothschild her husband’s. Margaretta thought The House of Rothschild the most enormously boring picture she’d ever seen in her life, worse even than The Hunchback of Notre Dame. For her, and for Laura, the highlights of that first summer were Fast and Loose, Dodge City, His Butler’s Sister and Naughty Marietta; and best of all, they easily agreed, was The Rains Came. On Saturdays there was a serial called Flaming Frontiers, and there were travelogues and the news, and shorts with Charlie Chase or Leon Errol. ‘Don’t you love the smell of the De Luxe?’ Margaretta used to say after they’d dwelt at length on a performance by Franchot Tone or Deanna Durbin, exhausting the subject and yet unwilling to leave it. ‘Hot celluloid, I think it is, and cigarette-butts.’

The war ended in May 1945 and Laura brought back to England these memories of the family and the town, of the school she had attended with Margaretta, of the people and the shops. Margaretta wrote from time to time, a huge sprawling hand, words grotesquely misspelt: Mrs Hearne had called her latest baby Liam Pius, after the Pope; Cry Havoc was on at the De Luxe, The Way to the Stars was coming.

Laura wrote neatly, with nothing to say because Margaretta couldn’t be expected to be interested in all the talk about building things up again and descriptions of utility clothes. Margaretta had become her best friend and she Margaretta’s. They had decided it the night before she’d returned. They’d shared Margaretta’s bed, talking in whispers from ten o’clock until the Donald Duck clock said it was twenty past two. ‘We’d better go to sleep, y’know,’ Margaretta had said, but Laura had wanted to continue talking, to make the time go slowly. After Margaretta put the light out she lay in the darkness thinking she’d never had a friend like Margaretta before, someone who found the same things as boring as you did, someone you didn’t have to be careful with. A wash of moonlight for a moment lightened the gloom, catching the untidy mass of Margaretta’s hair on the pillow. She was breathing heavily, already asleep, smiling a little as if from some amusing dream. Then a cloud slipped over the moon again and the room abruptly darkened.

It was that night that Laura afterwards remembered most. ‘You can’t find friends in a town the like of this,’ Margaretta had said. ‘Well, I mean you can, y’know. Only it’s different.’ And she mentioned the girls she knew in the town, whom Laura knew also. None of them would have been, fascinated, as they were, by the way Mrs Eldon of the sweetshop made her lips seem larger with the outline of her lipstick. None of them would have wondered how it was that Mr Hearne always had the same amount of stubble on his face. ‘One day’s growth,’ Dr Heaslip had said when they’d asked him. How could a man, every day, have one day’s stubble? ‘They want to be nuns and things,’ Margaretta said. These girls went to the De Luxe also, but they didn’t take much interest in the performances, nor in the trademarks of the films, the roaring lion, the searchlights, the statue with the torch, the snow-capped mountain, the radio aerial with electricity escaping from it. The girls of the town didn’t go in for finding things funny. Sometimes Laura and Margaretta found a remark a shopkeeper had made so funny that they had to lean against some other shopkeeper’s window, laughing so much it gave them a stitch. Sometimes the very sight of people made them laugh. Entranced, Margaretta listened when Laura had told her how her Uncle Gilbert had taken her on to his bony knee on her sixth birthday and softly spanked her for no reason whatsoever. Afterwards he’d given her a sweet and said it was their secret. ‘Keep well away from that fellow,’ Margaretta had sharply advised, and both of them had giggled, not quite knowing what they were giggling at. It was something Laura had never told anyone else.

It is so drab, Laura wrote. As you would say, enormously drab. Everyone said at first, you know, that the war would be over by Christmas. I remember people saying Hitler was a knut and didn’t know what he was doing. But now everything’s so drab after Ireland that you’d think he had won the thing. I haven’t had an egg for months.

And so, for nourishment only, since safety wasn’t in question any more, Laura’s mother sent her to stay again with the Heaslips. Mrs Heaslip had pressed for this, had pressed that Laura’s mother should accompany her.

‘They can’t spare her,’ Laura explained when she arrived, reiterating what her mother had written. ‘She’d really have loved to come.’ The drab austerity was as confining as the war there had been.

For Laura, that summer had the pleasure of familiarity revisited in place of the novelty there had been when she’d first arrived in the town. Mrs Hearne might possibly be pregnant again, Mrs Eldon’s lipstick still generously recreated her lips, Murder from Beyond, with curling, yellowed edges, was still in the window among the nibs and rubber bands.

Margaretta had acquired a bicycle during the year, and the saddle of Mrs Heaslip’s Humber was lowered for Laura. For mile after mile of flat, undramatic landscape they talked, as they cycled, of the past performances at the De Luxe Picture House: Claudette Colbert in Boom Town, William Powell and Myrna Loy in The Shadow of the Thin Man, Ray Milland in The Doctor Takes a Wife. They turned off the tarred roads that were so easy to go fast on and explored countryside that was hilly and more interesting. Eileen made them sandwiches, which they carried in Margaretta’s saddle-bag, and they were given money for lemonade. They usually ate the sandwiches in a field, leaving their bicycles by the roadside and chattering for ages in the sunshine. Once they took their clothes off and bathed in a stream, shrieking because it was so cold. But what they liked best of all was to call in at some cottage and ask for a drink of water. They would be invited into the kitchen and two cups of water would be fetched from a bucket or a pump. On one occasion a very old woman insisted on giving them tea, with boiled eggs and bread, although they kept telling her they’d just eaten a lot of sandwiches. She showed them photographs of her son, who was in Chicago, and made them promise they would call at her cottage again. But even if all they received was the water they asked for there was always the excitement, afterwards, of talking about whoever had given it to them. Scrutinizing people, remembering every word that was spoken and every detail of a kitchen: that became a kind of game. If they were far enough away from the town they called themselves by names that were not their own. ‘Annabella Colman,’ Margaretta replied when asked, and Laura gave the name of a girl she knew in England, Isabel Batchelor-Tate. They were Dublin girls, Margaretta once added, on holiday in Hogan’s Hotel. Her father was a hay merchant and Laura’s a taster of teas. ‘I shouldn’t tell people stuff like that,’ Dr Heaslip reprimanded them one lunchtime. ‘I’m quite well known, you know.’ He went on humming after he’d spoken and they were unable to hide their fiery red faces, made to feel foolish because he had not been cross. Afterwards Mrs Heaslip looked at them amusedly, and suggested they should visit the de Courcys if they were bored.

‘Oh, but we’re not, Mrs Heaslip,’ Laura protested vehemently. ‘Not in the very least.’

‘Take her to the de Courcys, Margaretta. I don’t know what we’ve been thinking of not to introduce Laura to the de Courcys before this.’

‘But, God, they’re miles away.’

‘Do not say “God”, Margaretta. There is an invalid in that house. Of course a visit must be made. Eileen will make you salad sandwiches.’

They went the next morning. They cycled for nine miles and then they turned into an avenue with a gate-lodge from which a man carefully eyed them, from their sandals and white socks to their straw hats. He stood in the doorway, seeming to be listening to their conversation about Wiry Bohan’s courtship of Katie. He was wearing a Guard’s uniform, the coarse navy-blue tunic open at the neck, a cigarette in the middle of his mouth. He had grey hair and a grey, mournful face. When Margaretta said hullo he wagged his head but did not speak. They began to giggle when they’d cycled on a bit.

The avenue was long, its surface badly broken, but pleasantly cool because the trees that lined it kept out the sun. Laura considered it romantic, like the avenue in Rebecca. But Margaretta said that was only Wishful thinking: there hadn’t been an avenue in Rebecca encased with trees and foliage. An argument began, which continued until the pink-washed house appeared, with white hydrangeas on either side of it, and tall windows, and an open hall door. The bicycles crunched over gravel that made cycling difficult. The girls dismounted and walked the last bit.

‘I’m Margaretta Heaslip,’ Margaretta informed a maid who was winding a clock in the hall. ‘We’ve been sent to see the de Courcys.’

The maid stared, appearing to be alarmed. She continued to wind the clock, which was on a table at the bottom of the stairs, and then she closed the glass of its face and put the key on a brass hook in an alcove; the time was half past eleven.

Tapestries hung by the staircase, curving with it as it ascended. Rugs were scattered on the darkly stained boards of the floor, as threadbare as the stair carpet and the tapestries, which were so faded that whatever scenes they depicted had been lost. There was a smell in the hall, as Margaretta said afterwards, of flowers and bacon.

‘Will you tell the de Courcys?’ she suggested to the maid, since the maid appeared hesitant about how to proceed. ‘Just say Margaretta Heaslip and a friend are here.’

‘The de Courcys went up to Punchestown races, miss.’

‘Is Ralph de Courcy here?’

‘He is of course.’

‘Will you tell him then?’

‘He didn’t go up to the races, miss, in case they’d strain him.’

‘Will you tell him Margaretta Heaslip and a friend are here?’

The maid was as young as Katie, but not as pretty. She had protruding teeth and hair that was in disarray beneath her white cap. She hesitated again, and then visibly reached a decision.

‘I’ll tell him so, miss. Will ye sit in the drawing-room?’

She left them where they stood. One door they opened led to a panelled room, too small and businesslike for a drawing-room. Another, with blue blinds pulled down, had dining-chairs arranged around a long table, its other furniture shadowy in the gloom. The drawing-room itself had a fire, although the day was so exceedingly warm that the windows were open. There were vases of flowers on the mantelpiece and on tables and on a grand piano, and family portraits were close to one another on the walls. An old black-and-white dog was lying on the hearthrug and did not move when the girls entered. It was the most beautiful room, Laura considered, she had ever been in.

They sat cautiously on the edge of a sofa that was striped in two shades of faded pink. They spoke in whispers, discussing the maid: would she be keeping company with the uniformed man at the gate-lodge?

‘Will ye wait a while?’ the maid invited, appearing at the door.

Margaretta giggled and put her hand up to her mouth; Laura said they’d wait. ‘I wonder what her name is,’ she added when the maid had gone.

‘Ludmilla, I’d say.’

The giggling began again, the dog snorted in his sleep. Through the open windows came the sound of pigeons.

‘Well, this is an honour,’ a voice said. ‘How do you do?’

He was older than they were by maybe as much as three years. He was pale and dark-haired, his eyes brown. He was dressed in flannel trousers and a green tweed jacket.

‘Margaretta Heaslip,’ he continued, smiling extravagantly. ‘I remember you when you were little.’

He spoke as if she still were, as if they were both not in the least grown up. His manner insisted that he himself belonged to the adult world, that he had long ago passed through theirs.

‘My mother said to call,’ Margaretta explained, disowning responsibility for their presence. ‘To inquire how you were, and to introduce Laura.’

‘How do you do, Laura?’

He held out a hand, which Laura received, allowing her own to be briefly clasped. His touch was cold. Like marble, she thought.

‘Laura’s English, y’know.’

‘Well now, and whereabouts in England, Laura?’

‘A village called Anstey Rye. In Buckinghamshire.’

‘How attractive that sounds!’

‘Dead as old mutton, Laura says. The war, y’know.’

‘Ah, yes. The horrible war. But at least the Allies won. You’re pleased, Laura?’

He had a precise way of speaking, his Irish accent drawling out his sentences, a smile rarely absent from his face. Set in hollows, his dark eyes were fixed on Laura’s, insistent that his interest in all she had to say was genuine.

‘Well yes, I am pleased.’

‘I used to listen to Lord Haw-Haw. He’s most amusing.’

The maid returned with a tray of teacups, a teapot and biscuits on a plate.

‘Thank you, Mary.’

As he spoke, Margaretta put her hand up to her face. But already he had noticed.

‘What’s the joke?’ he politely inquired.

The maid left the room, and because she knew that she, too, would begin to giggle if she did not speak Laura said:

‘Margaretta thought her name was Ludmilla.’

‘Ludmilla?’

It wasn’t funny any more, as it hadn’t been when Dr Heaslip had not been cross. Politely, Ralph de Courcy handed them their cups of tea. He was right: they were children and he was not.

‘Have a Marietta biscuit?’

They each took one. They felt silly and ashamed. Margaretta said:

‘Are you feeling better these days?’

‘I never feel ill at all.’ He turned to Laura. ‘My heart was weakened when I stupidly caught rheumatic fever as a boy. I’m meant to go carefully in case I die.’

They wanted to gasp in wonder at this reference to death, but they did not do so. Margaretta said:

‘Are you getting better all the time?’

‘Indubitably. I’m reading Thomas Mann. Buddenbrooks. Do you like Thomas Mann?’

They had never heard of this German author. Vaguely, they shook their heads. They had not yet read, Laura admitted, the book called Buddenbrooks:

‘Shall I show you about the garden when you’ve finished your Marietta biscuits?’

‘Yes, please,’ Laura said. ‘If you don’t think the strain –’

‘Strain is just a word they use. Your father came here once or twice, Margaretta, when I was at death’s door – called in to offer a second opinion. It wasn’t as disagreeable as it sounds, you know, being at death’s door. Though nicer, perhaps, to be a few footsteps further off.’

His conversation was extraordinary, Laura considered. In a way everything about him was extraordinary, not least his detached smile and his eyes. His eyes did not flit about. They were the steadiest eyes she had ever seen, especially when he spoke of death.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘they make a frightful fuss. Do you play tennis? You could stay to lunch and then we might play tennis.’

‘But surely –’ Margaretta began.

‘I may play a little tennis. If I agree, and promise, not to sit about afterwards without a sweater and a blazer, then I may play a little tennis. Or at least that’s what I say.’

Suppose he dies? Laura thought. Suppose he falls down on the tennis court and is unable to get up again? Imagine having to tell about that! Imagine Dr Heaslip saying nothing, but thinking what fools they were and how much they were to blame!

He took them to the garden. He didn’t appear to know the names of any plants or flowers, but with his pale, cold hands he pointed about. He led them through a glasshouse full of tomatoes and out the other end. He pointed again: peaches flourished on a brick-lined wall. ‘A la Dean Swift,’ he said: they’d no idea what, he was talking about.

He sat between them on a wooden seat. A lawn stretched all around, bounded by white hydrangeas in front of towering cedar trees. Another dog, a brown spaniel, ambled from some corner and sat with them. Margaretta said the garden was beautiful.

‘Sergeant Barry does it. Did you see Sergeant Barry by the gate-lodge?’

They said they had.

‘He resigned from the force because he couldn’t learn the Irish. He feared they might demote him and he couldn’t bear the thought of that. So he resigned as sergeant.’

In the drawing-room, when she’d brought the tea and biscuits, he’d told the maid that they would stay to lunch. They hadn’t dared to say that there were salad sandwiches in Margaretta’s saddle-bag.

‘You must be starving,’ he said now, ‘after such a journey. Heaven knows what they’ve managed to scrape together. Shall we go and see?’

He led the way back to the house and to the dining-room. The blinds had been raised, and places laid at the table. He pulled at a bell in the wall and some minutes later the maid brought in three soup plates on a tray.

‘Crosse and Blackwell’s,’ he said. ‘Leave it if you don’t like kidneys.’

All through the meal he asked questions, about Buckinghamshire and Anstey Rye, and if bombs had fallen near by; about the De Luxe Picture House, which he had been to once. There was a larger town, nearer to the de Courcys’ house than their own, which had a cinema called the Palace, with Western Electric Sound. He’d seen Gone with the Wind there, which he described as ‘light’. He’d like to see some German films, which he’d read about, but he doubted that they’d ever come to the Palace or the De Luxe. He related the plot of one, to do with the crimes committed by a man who was not sane, and enthusiastically they both said it sounded interesting. Perhaps now that the war was over these German films might be on in England, Laura added, and he agreed that that might be so. Then, quite abruptly, when they had all three finished their sago and stewed gooseberries, he said he was feeling a little tired. His smile continued. He was supposed to rest after lunch, he explained. It would perhaps be asking for trouble not to, today.

They stood up. They thanked him and hoped he would be completely better soon. It was as though tennis had never been mentioned; it was as though he had never said that people made a fuss. He did not move from where he sat at the head of the long table, but said that he had enjoyed their visit, that they were good to come all this way to bore themselves with the company of an invalid. Would they come again? he almost meekly asked.

‘Yes, of course,’ Laura replied, her assurance only moments ahead of Margaretta’s.

‘Please be careful,’ Margaretta said. ‘Please take a good rest.’

They rode in silence down the avenue, past the gate-lodge, where Sergeant Barry was reading a newspaper in his garden. He looked up from it to scrutinize them, another cigarette in the middle of his mouth. Again he wagged his head at them but did not attempt to speak.

‘God!’ Margaretta said when they were out of earshot. ‘God, did you ever!’

‘I hope we didn’t cause a strain.’

‘God, I know! I thought of that.’

When they next saw Dr Heaslip they asked him. ‘Oh no, no,’ he said. ‘Company probably does the poor fellow good.’ But neither Laura nor Margaretta could think of Ralph de Courcy as a poor fellow. A fortnight later they rode over to the de Courcys’ house again, and Sergeant Barry, apprehending them as they turned into the avenue, told them the de Courcys were all away in Dublin.

‘When will they be back?’ Margaretta asked.

‘Ah, not for a while. Not till the end of the month.’

A week later Laura returned to England. This time among the images she carried with her were ones of the hours they had spent in the de Courcys’ house and in their garden. The indistinct tapestries, the key of the clock hanging in the alcove in the hall, the black-and-white dog asleep on the hearthrug: such images came and went in her mind, giving way to the face of the maid, and the sergeant at the gate-lodge, and Ralph de Courcy in his flannels and green tweed jacket. She dreamed that she and Margaretta walked among the white hydrangeas and the cedar trees, that they sat again on the pink-striped sofa. In her dream the hands fell off the clock in the hall, which Dr Heaslip said sometimes happened, owing to strain.

Margaretta wrote to say that the de Courcys had returned from Dublin, so she’d heard, but on her own she naturally hadn’t had the nerve to cycle over. The De Luxe had at last acquired Western Electric Sound and the difference was tremendous. Wiry Bohan had been to the house to see about marrying Katie, and when Mrs Heaslip suggested that they should wait a little longer he’d gone red in the face and said he thought waiting wasn’t a good idea. Mr Hearne was dealing in black-market sugar and tea, making more than he’d ever made out of meat. But soon, so people said, he’d be arrested.

The following summer, to her great disappointment, and to Margaretta’s, Lauira did not visit Ireland. The reason for this was that her mother, suffering a bout of pneumonia in the early part of the year, did not recover quickly. She struggled back to her desk in the cubbyhole behind the Anstey Rye clothes shop, but an exhaustion that the illness had left her with would not lift, and when Laura’s summer holidays came Dr Farquhar advised that she should be responsible for all the housework and all the cooking, taking this burden at least from her mother. Had it not been for the postwar effort that was still required of everyone, he would have stipulated total rest for her mother, three months simply doing nothing. And he knew that ends had to be made to meet.

So Laura cooked her mother’s meals and her own, and Hoovered the rooms of their cottage. She made her mother rest on Sundays, bringing her trays in bed. She was conscientious about taking the wet battery of the wireless to be recharged once a week, she weeded the garden and transplanted the lettuce plants. All the time she cherished the hope that at the end of the summer, even for a week, she might be permitted to visit Margaretta. Her mother was clearly regaining her strength. She stopped spending Sundays in bed and instead sat in the garden. By mid-August she began to do the cooking again.

Letters from Margaretta asked if there was any chance, but in Anstey Rye Ireland was not mentioned. Instead, Laura’s mother spoke of their straitened circumstances this year: because of her pneumonia, she had not earned as much for those few months as she might have; ends had not yet begun to meet again. So Laura wrote to Margaretta, explaining.

Isn’t it strange, Margaretta herself wrote, long after that summer had passed and Laura’s mother had entirely recovered, that there should have been two invalids, your mother and Ralph de Courcy? Her handwriting was less wild than once it had been, her spelling much improved. My father says he’s only slowly mending. And in a daydream Laura allowed herself to pretend that it was he she had looked after, carrying trays up the curving staircase, carrying cushions to a chair in the garden. She wondered if she’d ever see that house again, and Sergeant Barry at the gate-lodge. Isn’t Linda Darnell beautiful? Margaretta wrote. I’d love to look like that. Have you seen Tortilla Flat?

In 1948 Laura went again to Ireland. Katie had married Wiry Bohan and had had a baby. There was a new maid with Eileen in the kitchen, Mattie Devlin’s daughter, Josie. The shopkeepers said Laura was getting prettier all the time, but Laura knew that it was Margaretta who was the beautiful one and always would be, her marvellous hair and her headstrong manner that Laura admired so. She’d been going to a boarding-school ever since Laura had last visited the Heaslips, the one in Bray where Mrs Heaslip and Laura’s mother had met. ‘You’re better looking than Linda Darnell,’ Laura said, meaning it.

They were too shy to cycle to the de Courcys’ house. They didn’t realize at first that such a shyness had developed in them, but when they talked about that warm day two summers ago they realized that they could not attempt to repeat it. Two children, with white socks and straw hats, had cycled up the avenue, chattering and giggling: it would be awkward now. But one evening, watching Thunder Rock at the De Luxe, they saw Ralph de Courcy two rows in front of them, with a blonde-haired girl. ‘You’re never Margaretta and Laura?’ he said when the film had come to an end and they met him face to face in the aisle.

‘Yes,’ Laura said, aware that she reddened as she spoke. When she glanced at Margaretta she saw that she had reddened also.

‘This is a sister of mine,’ he introduced. ‘Hazel.’

Margaretta said:

‘I think I met you, Hazel, years ago when we were kids.’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘This is my friend Laura.’

‘I’ve heard about the day you both came to see us, when we were all at Punchestown except Ralph.’

‘You never came again,’ he chided, through the smile that was always there. ‘You said you would, you know.’

‘Laura didn’t stay with us last year.’

‘You could have come on your own.’

Margaretta laughed, blushing again.

‘That was really an appalling film,’ he said. ‘A waste of money.’

‘Yes,’ Laura agreed, although she did not think so. ‘Yes, it was.’

The de Courcys had driven to town in a car powered by propane gas, a relic of the emergency. To Laura and Margaretta it looked like any other car except for an attachment at the back. Although the night was warm, Ralph put on a muffler and an overcoat before taking his place at the driver’s wheel. Unlike her mother, Laura thought, he was not totally well again.

‘Come and play tennis one day,’ his sister invited. ‘Come in the morning and stay to lunch.’

‘Come on Friday,’ he said.

‘My husband is an eye specialist,’ Laura says in the cathedral.

‘Mine makes radio components.’

Margaretta had remained in the town, marrying Shulmann, who had set up his factory there in 1955. Shulmann was with her in Siena, resting now in their pensione. Their three children are grown up.

‘I guessed you would have married,’ Laura says.

‘And I you.’

What does the eye-specialist look like? Is Shulmann thin or fat? Laura remembers Margaretta’s hair on the pillow, spread out in the moonlight, and Margaretta saying that the smell in the De Luxe Picture House was of hot celluloid and cigarette-butts, and how they giggled because they’d considered Sergeant Barry comic. How different would their lives have been if the friendship had continued? Some instinct tells her as they stand there among the tourists that their friendship in its time went deeper than the marriages they have mentioned. She sees them on their bicycles, and the curiosity of Sergeant Barry passing from their sandals and their white socks to their beribboned straw hats. ‘Ludmilla’, Margaretta says on the pink-striped sofa. Is friendship more fragile, Laura wonders, the more precious it is? And Margaretta reflects that in the thirty-eight years that have passed the friendship might have made a difference in all sorts of ways. They are tourists like the others now, strangers among strangers.

They rode over early on the Friday of the tennis party, but as they arrived at the de Courcys’ house rain began to fall. Other people were there, friends of Hazel de Courcy who had also come to play tennis but who now stood about forlornly because the rain persisted. Then someone suggested whist and the occasion became a different one from the occasion the visitors had anticipated. The fire blazed in the drawing-room, there was tea and Marietta biscuits at eleven o’clock, and lunch at one; there was tea and cake, with bread and butter and scones, at four. Ralph de Courcy rested after lunch, but soon appeared again. He talked to Margaretta alone, questioning her about the boarding-school at Bray, about the buildings and the playing-fields and the food. He asked her if she was happy there.

‘Oh, it’s all right,’ Margaretta replied, and she described the big assembly hall that was known as the ballroom because that was what it had been before the house became a school. A draughty conservatory served as the senior lounge; cold, gaunt dormitories contained rows of beds, each with its narrow pine cupboard and wash-stand. The two headmistresses were sisters, in tweed skirts and jumpers on which necklaces bounced. The food was inedible.

‘Poor Margaretta,’ he murmured.

She was about to say it wasn’t as awful as it sounded but changed her mind because his sympathy was pleasant. He said he Would think of her at the school, eating the inedible food, being polite to the headmistresses. She felt a shiver of warmth, in her head or her body, she wasn’t sure which: a delicious sensation that made her want to close her eyes.

‘It’ll be lovely for me,’ Ralph de Courcy said, ‘being able to imagine you there, Margaretta.’

The rain ceased after tea but the tennis court was too sodden by now to permit play that day, and soon afterwards the party broke up. Hardly speaking at all – not once commenting as they might have on Hazel de Courcy’s friends – the girls cycled back to the town, and when Dr Heaslip asked at supper how Ralph de Courcy had seemed neither at first replied. Then Margaretta said that he was quite recovered from his illness, even though he’d had his usual rest. Every day he was recovering a little more. Soon he would be just like anyone else, she said.

Laura cut her ham and salad into tiny shreds, not wanting to hear anything in the dining-room in case it impinged on what the day already meant to her. The sun had been warm during their ride back from the de Courcys’ house; the damp fields and hedges had acquired a beauty as if in celebration of what had happened. ‘Shall we write to one another?’ he had suggested in the moments when they’d been alone. He had asked her about England, about Anstey Rye and her mother. He smiled more than ever while he spoke, making her feel complimented, as if smiling was natural in her presence.

‘I didn’t know till now,’ Margaretta said a few days later, ‘that I fell in love with him the first time we rode out there.’

They were walking together on a dull road, just beyond the town. Margaretta did not add that he’d asked her about her school, that he had been interested in all that ordinary detail so that he could picture her there that autumn. She refrained from this revelation because she knew that Laura was in love with him also. Laura had not said so but you could see, and it would hurt her horribly to know that he had asked – passionately almost – about the gaunt dormitories and the ballroom that had become an assembly hall.

‘Well, of course,’ Laura said, ‘he’s very nice.’

There was nothing else she could say. Bidding her goodbye, he had clasped her hand as though he never wanted to let it go. His deep, brown eyes had held hers in a way she knew she would never forget; she was certain he had almost kissed her. ‘Are you good at secrets?’ he had asked. ‘Are you, Laura?’ She had only nodded in reply, but she’d known that what he meant was that all this should be kept between themselves, and she intended to honour that.

‘I simply think he’s a marvellous person,’ Margaretta said, possessively.

‘Oh, yes, of course.’

Already it was September, and they did not speak of him again. Laura within a week returned to England and a few, days after that Margaretta began another term at the boarding-school in Bray.

I see you so very clearly, he wrote. I think of you and wonder about you. I’ll never forget our being in the garden that day, I sometimes imagine I can still taste the tinned soup we had for lunch. Whatever can you have thought of me, going away to rest like that? Was it rude? Please write and tell me it wasn’t rude and that you didn’t mind. I rested, actually, with your face beside me on the cushion.

He did not beg for love in vain, and in Bray and Buckinghamshire they exulted in their giving of it, though both felt saddened that in their own communications, one to another, they did not mention Ralph de Courcy or his letters. I was glad when it rained because, actually, I don’t play much tennis. Oh, heavens, how I should love to be walking with you beneath the beech trees! Did you think I was at death’s door that first day – the day when I said to myself you were an angel sent to me? When we met in the De Luxe it was marvellous. Was it for you? Please write. I love your letters.

In Bray and Buckinghamshire they loved his letters also. They snatched at them impatiently: from the letter table in the senior lounge, from the hallstand in Anstey Rye. They bore them away to read in private, to savour and learn by heart. They kept them hidden but close at hand, so that when the yearning came they could raise them to their lips. Shall I come and see you in the holidays? Margaretta wrote. Or could you drive over in your father’s gas contraption and maybe we’d go to the De Luxe? I can’t wait till the holidays, to tell the truth. December the 16th.

These suggestions provoked a swift response. Their friendship was a secret. If Margaretta came to the de Courcys’ house would they be able to disguise it beneath the eye of the family? Of all absurd things, the family might mention strain, and a visit to the picture house was out of the question. Dear Margaretta, we must wait a little while yet. Please wait. Please let’s just write our letters for the moment.

But Margaretta, on the 18th of that December, was unable to prevent herself from cycling out of the town in the direction of the de Courcys’ house. It was a cold morning, with frost heavy on the hedges and beautifully whitening the fields. All she wanted was a single glimpse of him.

I cannot tell you the confusion it caused, he wrote, weeks later, to Laura, and how great the unhappiness has been for me. It was so sad because she looked bulky and ridiculous in the trousers she had put on for cycling. They thought she was a thief at least. Why on earth did she come?

Sergeant Barry found her among the rhododendrons and led her, weeping, to the house. ‘Goodness, Margaretta!’ Hazel de Courcy exclaimed in the hall while Margaretta tried to pull herself together. She said she’d just been passing by.

She seemed a different person from the girl who’d first come here with you, but that was perhaps because you were with her then. No one knew what to say when she stood there in the hall. I turned away and went upstairs. What else could I do?

Margaretta rode miserably back to the house in the square. She wrote immediately, apologizing, trying to explain, but her letter elicited no reply. She was unable to eat properly all the holidays, unable in any way to comfort herself. No letter arrived at the boarding-school in Bray. No letter, ever again, arrived for Margaretta from Ralph de Courcy.

Oafish, my sister said, and although it’s hard I thought the same. Not beautiful in the least, her cheeks all red and ugly. I had never thought Margaretta was stupid before.

Laura was hurt by this description of her friend, and she wished she might have sent her a line of consolation. Poor Margaretta had ridden out that day with no companion to lend her courage, and to everyone in the de Courcys’ house it must have been obvious that she was a lovesick girl. But by the summer she would have recovered, and Laura could gently tell her then that she and Ralph loved one another, because secrets could not remain secrets for ever.

But the summer, when it came, was not like that. In the February of that year Laura had become upset because her letters from Ralph de Courcy had ceased. A month later she received a note from Margaretta. I thought I’d better tell you. Ralph de Courcy died.

That summer, Margaretta and Laura were sixteen; and Mr Hearne, who had survived his years as a black-marketeer, was once again an ordinary butcher. ‘Women and meat won’t take squeezing,’ he said, eyeing the girls with lasciviousness now. At the De Luxe Picture House they saw Blithe Spirit and Green for Danger. Laura asked about Ralph de Courcy’s grave.

‘God knows where it is,’ Margaretta replied. ‘He could be buried under a road for all I care.’

‘We liked him.’

‘He was cheap.’

‘He’s dead, Margaretta.’

‘I’m glad he’s dead.’

Still Margaretta had not told her about her cycle ride on that bitter morning. She offered no explanation for this violent change of heart, so Laura asked her.

‘Well, something happened if you must know.’

She related all of it, telling how she had begun to receive letters from Ralph de Courcy, how they had come, two and three a week sometimes, to the boarding-school at Bray.

‘I didn’t mean any harm, Laura. All I wanted was a glimpse of him. Of course I should have gone at night, but how could I? Nine miles there and nine miles back?’

Laura hardly heard. ‘Letters?’ she whispered in a silence that had gathered. ‘Love letters, you mean?’

The conversation took place in Margaretta’s bedroom. She unlocked a drawer in her dressing-table and produced the letters she spoke of, tied together with a piece of red string.

‘You can read them,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind.’

I rested, actually, with your face beside me on the cushion. In Laura’s own bedroom, among the love letters she had so sadly and so fondly brought with her to Ireland, were those words also. I said to myself you were an angel sent to me.

‘What kind of love was it,’ Margaretta cried, ‘that could evaporate in a second? Just because I made a mistake?’

The letters were returned to the dressing-table drawer, the key turned in the lock, the key itself secreted beneath a frilled cloth. Laura, catching a reflection of herself in the dressing-table looking-glass, saw that she had turned as white as powder. She felt weak, and imagined that if she stood up she would faint.

‘I don’t know why I keep his old letters,’ Margaretta said. ‘I honestly don’t know.’

That it had been Margaretta and not she who had been foolish was no consolation for Laura. That it was she, not Margaretta, to whom he had written for longer, until the day before his death, was none either. His protestations of passion seemed like mockery now.

‘Except I suppose,’ said Margaretta, ‘that I went on loving him. I always will.’

And I, too, thought Laura. She would love him in spite of the ugly pain she felt, in spite of not understanding why he had behaved so. Had two girls’ longing simply been more fun than one’s? Had he been as cruel as that?

‘I have a headache,’ she said, ‘I think I’ll lie down for a little.’

The days that followed were as unbearable for Laura as the days that followed her foolishness had been for Margaretta. Dr Heaslip said twice that their guest was looking peaky; she did her best to smile, ‘It’s all right, really,’ Margaretta reassured her, assuming that Laura’s lowness was a kind of sympathy. ‘It’s over now. He’s dead and gone.’

He was buried in a country churchyard a mile or so from the de Courcys’ house: that much at least Laura had elicited from Margaretta. One early morning, as dawn was just beginning to glimmer, she let herself out of the tall wooden doors through which Matt Devlin every day drove Dr Heaslip’s car, arid cycled out into the countryside. Trees that were at first only shadows acquired foliage as dawn advanced, hedges and fields softened into colour, stone walls and gates offered again the detail that night had claimed. Around the churchyard, rooks were noisy, and on the grave of Ralph de Courcy there were fresh flowers that Laura knew were Margaretta’s, conveyed there secretly also. She picked honeysuckle and laid it on the earth above his head. She knelt and spoke his name; she repeated what so often she had written in her letters. She couldn’t help loving him in spite of still not understanding.

‘You went, didn’t you?’ Margaretta accused. ‘You went in the middle of the night?’

‘In the early morning.’

‘He loved me, y’know, before I was so stupid. It was me he wrote letters to.’

The summer crept by. They talked much less than they had talked before. Politeness began between them, and smiles that were not meant. They missed the past but did not say so, and then – on the night before Laura was to return to England – Margaretta said:

‘I’ve hated you this summer.’

‘There is no reason to hate me, Margaretta.’

‘It has to do with him. I don’t know what it is.’

‘Well, I don’t hate you, Margaretta, and I never could.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘Don’t be unhappy, Margaretta.’

Why could she not have shared the truth? Why could she not have said that in the game he’d played he’d wanted to know all about Anstey Rye also? She might have pointed out that when you scraped away the superficialities of her early-morning journey – the peaceful dawn, the rooks, the honeysuckle – it had been less honourable and less courageous than Margaretta’s. In her wise virgin way, she had taken no chances in visiting only the dead.

‘Margaretta…’

She hesitated, unable to go on. And Margaretta said:

‘I’ll never forgive you for going to his grave.’

‘I only went to say goodbye.’

‘It was me he wrote to.’

Again Laura tried to say that she, as much as Margaretta, had been shamed. Sharing their folly, would they have laughed in the end over Ralph de Courcy, she wondered, as they had laughed over so much else? Would they have talked for half the night in Margaretta’s bedroom, exorcizing that lingering pain?

‘Margaretta,’ Laura began, but still could not go on.

The De Luxe Picture House has gone. Mr Hearne is dead. So is Mrs Eldon, her lips trimmed down to size. But Coffey’s still smells pleasantly of paper, and Murphy’s of vanilla and grapes. Wiry Bohan and Katie are grandparents now.

‘But oh, it’s not much changed, y’know,’

Dr Heaslip and his wife might or might not be dead also: this is not mentioned in Margaretta’s news. Her voice is spiritless, and Laura has to think as each name is mentioned. Margaretta’s features mourn the loss: a conversation, through desuetude, has lost its savour. It was harsh, so casually and so swiftly to have considered her bland and fat, implying insensitivity. Laura should reach out and kiss her, but the gesture would be false.

Margaretta remembers the flowers that year after year she has placed on the grave, and the bitterness she felt when she thought of Laura. She cycled in that same secret way to the churchyard, not caring if the de Courcys guessed that it was she who had picked the weeds from the mound that marked his presence. When she ceased to make the journey she had at first felt faithless, but the feeling had worn away with time.

For Laura there is the memory of the guilt that had remained for so long, the letters she had tried to compose, her disappointment in herself. Dear Margaretta: so many times she had begun her message, certain that there were words to soften her treachery and then discovering that there were not. In time she ceased also, weary of the useless effort.

Regret passes without words between them; they smile a shrugging smile. If vain Ralph de Courcy had chosen their girlish passion as a memorial to himself he might have chosen as well this rendezvous for their middle age, a waspish cathedral to reflect a waspish triumph. Yet his triumph seems hollow now, robbed by time of its drama and the heady confusions of an accidental cruelty. Death’s hostage he had been, a ghost who had offered them a sleight of hand because he hadn’t the strength for love. They only smile again before they part.