The Pre-War House and Other Stories

It Has Happened Before

Eleanor, thinks Roger, is in love with the postman. Roger lunches regularly at Eleanor’s house and sees how she watches her driveway through the kitchen window, distracted from their conversation, alert to the approach of this striking young man who comes with the mail in the early afternoon, ensuring that when he does come, she is near the front door.

Or, there is somebody else in her life, from whom she anticipates love letters, gifts; someone she’s hiding from Roger. Except that nothing ever comes for her. She receives nothing but junk.

The postman is at least ten years younger than her. If Eleanor is in love with the postman, she is making a fool of herself, thinks Roger, who is older than her.

It has happened before. Roger’s own mother had a fling with the milkman. And Rosemary down the road was recently discovered, by her husband Victor, fucking the gardener on the kitchen floor. Victor walked out after that, late one night or early one morning — Rosemary woke up and found him gone. Victor took almost nothing, but he did take his wallet, so he is probably holed up in a hotel somewhere, punishing her.

Roger used to work a late shift in a factory out of town, getting home in the early hours and sleeping until noon. He is retired now but still sleeps late.

Rising much later today than he meant to, and full of bad dreams, somewhat shaken, he opens his curtains and peers across the road to see if Eleanor is in her kitchen having lunch. If she hasn’t already eaten, she might like to join him.

Eleanor, though, is not in her kitchen. She is standing on the pavement outside her house, crying in front of the postman, holding on to his sleeve, begging him; and he, the postman, touching Eleanor’s arm, nods.

Roger turns away from the window and goes downstairs. He puts his coat on over his pyjamas and swaps his slippers for shoes. Leaving the house, he finds Eleanor already gone, the postman too. At the end of his driveway, Roger stops, looking up and down the street, but no one is there.

He crosses the road to Eleanor’s house and knocks on her door but she doesn’t answer. He looks through her windows but doesn’t see her. Returning to his house, he telephones, letting it ring, but she doesn’t pick up. He watches her house for a while, an hour. He doesn’t think she’s there. He thinks about her crying and the postman touching her.

It occurs to Roger that he knows where the postman lives. He has driven past the postman’s house many times, heading out to the factory.

He misses working. He has plans, involving Eleanor or Europe, but he has so far just been sleeping his mornings away. He plays the lottery every week, hoping for a jackpot. It happens — why shouldn’t it happen to him?

He had planned, before sleeping so late, to make lunch for Eleanor today, for her birthday. He has bought flowers; they are waiting in water.

The postman’s house stands alone at the edge of town. It is just about the last thing you see as you leave. He has seen the postman sitting on his front doorstep wearing a string vest and shorts, or just shorts, drinking beer.

Roger puts on proper trousers, and a jumper under his coat — it is midwinter; it is frosty out there. Getting into his car, he drives to the outskirts.

What does he expect to find? Eleanor, in the postman’s bed? He found the milkman in his mother’s.

He would like to find letters and parcels, undelivered mail piled high, kids’ birthday cards ripped open for the cash. Then the postman would be sacked; he would be sent away.

Or knickers. A collection of knickers from the local women’s washing lines. Someone has been stealing ladies underwear as it hangs drying.

He has no idea what he might find.

Roger drives slowly past the postman’s house and parks down a track before walking back. There is no car in the postman’s driveway. There is a garage whose door is shut. Roger doesn’t know whether the postman has a car or just a bike. He crouches in the bushes at the side of the house. At least he doesn’t need to worry about being seen by neighbours. He waits, watching. He has a view of both the front door and the side door but no one goes in and no one leaves. He notes that the curtains in the upstairs windows are closed.

He takes out his cigarettes. He has tried to give up — Eleanor doesn’t like him smoking — but withdrawal gives him the shakes.

When he gets too cold and stiff, when the light starts to go, when he can no longer bear the smell of the shrubs, the jabbing of sharp branches, when he runs out of cigarettes, he stands. He is, he has decided, going in.

He is lucky, he thinks: the side door is not locked. Roger lets himself in, closing the door quietly behind him. He walks through the dim kitchen, through the buzzing of electricity, into the hallway. He looks at the shoe rack and the coat pegs, seeing nothing of Eleanor’s, only men’s things.

He steps onto the stairs, the bottom step, which creaks, and Roger wonders whether there is anyone in the upstairs rooms to hear. He wants to turn back now. He doesn’t want to know, he tells himself, but he keeps on moving, climbing up the gloomy stairs to the landing. He has no idea what he is going to find.

There are three doors. A bathroom, he supposes, and a bedroom or two, perhaps a bedroom and a spare room, the room in which the postman keeps the hoarded mail and the stolen knickers.

He reaches for the nearest doorknob and pauses, steeling himself.

When he turns it, opening the door, he finds a bedroom in darkness. He can discern, though, someone naked, facedown on the bed. Crossing to the window, he draws aside the curtain, but all daylight has gone now. He feels for the light switch, turning on spotlights trained on the bed, finding Victor, Rosemary’s Victor, on a waterproof sheet.

Roger gets close to Victor’s face, which is turned towards him, his cheek against the heavy-duty plastic. When Victor tries to speak, Roger sees how dry his lips are. He has the mouth of a man who is dying in the desert. And then Victor’s eyes swivel towards the door, and Roger looks too and sees the postman in the doorway, his uniform off, a beer bottle in his hand.

When Eleanor leaves her sister’s house, it is dark, which is a relief. She must, she thinks, look frightful. But she has splashed her face with cold water and combed her hair. She has calmed down.

She walks home, goes into her kitchen and puts on the light.

She can at least talk about it with her sister, who understands, of course, because it is her big brother, too, who has gone missing.

It has happened before. He went missing during his first term at university, leaving without a word and returning with a tan the following summer. He ran away on his wedding day and didn’t come home for six months. But he always sends a postcard, a birthday card, a Christmas card. Not this time though; it’s been a year now.

His absence has stirred in their mother a memory of the men who, in her youth, went to France and Belgium and never came back. Their small town, over time, was stripped of men. A whole generation, just gone.

Eleanor looks at the mail, the junk, on her kitchen counter, and throws it away.

She is all right now, she thinks. She will go to bed.

It will strike her, when she is all tucked up, that she has not seen Roger, but she will not get out of bed to call him, to see how he is, to suggest lunch the following day. She will already have taken a sleeping pill, and anyway — she will glance at her digital alarm clock glowing red in the dark — it will be too late.