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CHAPTER 1
HETTY SLEEPING
Seeing the tall man's long back she thought with a lurch, 'It's like Heneker's back.' Then as he turned round she saw that it was Heneker.
He was standing on a pale strip of sand near the sea, looking down into the cold water, quiet as he had always been, peaceful, unmistakable.
'How could it be?' she thought. 'What nonsense! Of course it can't be.'
She went on folding the tee-shirts and jeans, gathering flung sandals, then made two neat heaps with a towel on each, for when the children came out of the sea. She took off her cardigan, pushed her hands back through her hair, gave her face for a moment to the sun; looked again.
She watched her two children run with drumming feet over the hard white strand, splash past the man into the sea, fling themselves into it in fans of spray, shrieking. Then she looked at the man again.
Long brown legs, long brown back. He was watching with a painter's concentration the movement of the water and the shapes of the children playing in it. Twenty, thirty yards away, yet she could not mistake the slow smile, the acceptance as he narrowed his eyes and looked at lines and planes and shadows, that there are wonders on the earth.
It was Heneker all right. Ten years older but decidedly and only Heneker.
He turned, came up the beach, dropped down beside her and said 'Hello.' He was wearing black swimming trunks and had a beard. 'Funny,' she thought, 'I always laugh at beards in the sea, but he looks all right. He always did look all right. Wherever he was.'
'Hello,' she said.
He hadn't said her name. Perhaps he'd forgotten it. He had never used people's names much. He had been cautious. Except in his work.
'Hello, Hetty,' he said. 'It's a long time.'
'It's a funny place,' she said. He smiled, not looking away from her face. 'To meet again,' she said. 'It's a long way from Earl's Court. Connemara.'
'A holiday,' he said gently and began to take the sand and sift it through his fingers. Her heart started to lurch again seeing his fingers. 'I know each nail,' she thought, 'I know each line on them. Every half moon. Oh God!'
There was a shriek from the sea and he looked over his brown shoulder at the children. 'Yours?' he said.
'Yes.' She began to babble. 'They're eight and four. Andy and Sophie. We're here for a fortnight. We've taken a house.'
'And their Papa?'
'He's following. He was to have come with us but at the last minute there was a crisis. We came ahead. We'd booked the house you see. The Pin.'
'The Pin? Lord Thing's house? Ballinhead?'
'Yes. It's a fishing lodge —'
'I know.' He swung round on to his stomach and got hold of her bare feet and held them tight. 'Hetty,' he said, looking closely at her toes. 'Wonderful feet,' he said. 'They always were. I once drew your feet. So you've married brass?'
'No,' she said. 'When we married there was no brass at all. He's clever. He's good. At his job. Marvellous if you want to know.'
'Top brass?'
'Not at all. Don't be silly. I was a painter. Would I have married top brass?'
'Very silly not to if you had the chance. Colonel and Lady Top-Brass, V.C., X.Y.Z. and Bar. Are you Lady Brass? You look it a bit, with your white, white skin.'
'Don't be silly —'
He held her feet tight and put his forehead against them. 'Lord and Lady Top-Brass and all the little alloys.'
'Shut up!' (This can't be happening! We arrived yesterday. We've hardly been here ten minutes! Heneker!) She tried to free her feet and giggled. 'You're tickling,' she said. 'Don't breathe over me.'
He let go of her feet and said, 'What is he then?'
'A banker.'
'Christ!'
'Do you know any bankers? Men with international work?'
'No, thank God. "Men with international work." Do you know any painters still?'
'No,' she said.
'Do you do any painting?'
After a long time she said no.
He lay flat on his back now on the sand and spread his arms far out and closed his eyes. His bearded, gentle face and fine nose and peaceful expression were like an icon. She thought, 'He ought to be picked out in jewels he's so beautiful. He's wicked as ever. Oh God, I love him,' and getting up she gathered the two heaps of clothes with a swoosh into the beach bag and the cardigan and her book and the towels in her arms, and was off down the beach to the sea's edge. 'I'm moving,' she called to the children. 'I'm going back up to the car. Don't be long, darlings. Ten minutes.'
'But we've just got in! We were staying in all morning.'
'There's a wind.'
'But it's lovely!'
'No, it's cold. I'm moving out of the wind.'
'There's not a breath of wind,' shouted Andy. 'Not a bit. You're crazy. It's a boiling day.'
'I'll be up in the car,' and resolutely, not looking back, she tramped up the beach alone and sat by the car in the sharp grass among old picnic papers, where red ants nipped her and noisy wild dogs from the fishermen's cabins came and barked endlessly for food as she pretended to read.
She was bathing Sophie at The Pin that evening in water that foamed like Guinness into the noble old Guinness-stained bath-tub when a noise of thundering hooves began to rock the bathroom ceiling and the water from the tap turned to a trickle and died.
'Now what!' Hetty sat back on her heels. 'Sixty pounds a week! Sixty pounds a week! The phone is dead, the electrics flicker and the beastly peat ... And now this.'
'Whatever is it?' Andy came flying in.
'I don't know. I think it's the boiler or something. I think it's dry.'
'The water's hot as hot.'
'Yes, but it's stopped coming. The tank must be empty. It comes from that bog thing in the grounds — we saw it yesterday. I thought it looked awfully shallow.'
'It looked awfully dirty,' said Andy, 'and so does the bath.'
'No. It's lovely brown water,' she said. 'But, oh!'
'I expect it'll all blow up soon,' said Andy. 'Shall I go and throw the main switch? It might be safer.'
'No. Shush. Let me think.'
'Above the kitchen door. That great heavy big one?'
'No. Oh do shut up. Let me think. There's the pub. We might go to the pub. There might be a man.'
'There is a man.'
'At the pub?'
'No, here.'
'Here?'
'Yes. In the hall place. He's that man on the beach. He's playing with our plasticine. Wait, I'll ask him.'
Hetty on a cane chair by the bathroom window, with Sophie wrapped in a towel on her knee, saw Andy and Heneker walking thoughtfully together, hand in hand through the wild garden towards the source of the bathwater.
The thunder in the roof, however, continued.
When she brought Sophie down the stairs Heneker was at the big trestle table in the hall making a plasticine dinosaur and without looking up said, 'There seemed nothing wrong down there. Must be a block in the pipe.'
She sat down with Sophie at the far end of the table and the booming grew less, then less still and finally stopped. A blessed trickle into the tank could be heard.
He said, 'Irish plumbing.' Sophie eating biscuits sidled round to him and watched his fingers and Andy who had been having his bath, which for safety's sake had been Sophie's not-run-out, came down again and leaned against Heneker watching the emergence from the plasticine of a fat porcupine on elephant's legs, armour plated on the stomach and with a rhino's spike. Sophie coming closer gazed at it with love.
'Could I have it?' said Andy.
'Someone can,' said Heneker. He put it in the middle of the table with its nose in a bowl of fuchsias.
'Thirsty,' said Sophie. 'Poor pig.'
'It's not a pig. It's a — what is it, Heneker?'
'It's a swamp wanderer.'
'What's that?'
'It wanders through swamps. It squelches through bogs. It thunders in roofs —' They squealed with joy.
'Now then,' said Hetty, 'bedtime.'
Heneker made a roaring and thundering noise. They clung to him. 'Bedtime,' Hetty said, hearing her Surrey voice. 'Now that will do. You're over-excited. Go to bed.'
'Oh please —'
'No. If Daddy were here —'
'He's not. Can't we stay?'
'Off,' said Heneker. 'Quick before the squelcher gets you.'
They fled, Sophie stopping on the bend in the stairs, minute, delectable in a flowery nightgown. 'You won't go away? You'll come back tomorrow?'
'Yes,' said Heneker.
She brought coffee to the sitting room where he was sitting in one of the two comfortable, shabby armchairs and watching the crumbling peat fire. Four long windows lit the chintz sofa, the shelves of Lord Thing's books about fishing and birds. Outside shone the Irish night, black and silver, with long bumpy spars of land running out towards America. Not a sound anywhere, never a light moving along the road. There was the sense that all about the holiday house lay miles of silence, darkness, the ancient mountains inland making a long barricade against the usual world.
Heneker's face as he sat far back in his chair was in shadow. She put the coffee between them on a stool and leaned back in her chair, too. They did not speak for a long time.
'It might have been like this,' he said at last. She felt her heart begin to thump and hung on to the chair. (This is Heneker. Heneker I have thought of every day.)
'No,' she said.
He said, 'Yes. Oh God!'
'You never asked me,' she said. 'Not once.'
'Well you know why.'
'I don't know why.'
'Oh Hetty —'
'I don't know why. I never knew why. I couldn't ask you. All that year. That room . ?. ?. The bed made out of ropes. The roof like a greenhouse and the curtain over the corner.'
'Where our clothes were.'
'No. Our clothes were in heaps. Well your clothes were in heaps.'
'I loved your clothes.' he said. 'Always clean and neat. And small. All the buttons were real buttons with proper buttonholes.'
'I used to gather up yours,' she said. 'Like gleaning. A sock here. A shirt there, a shoe on the light.'
'On the light?'
'Yes. To dim it down. Very dangerous.'
'And smelly.'
She laughed.
'Oh go on,' he said.
'What?'
'Laughing,' he said. 'I'd forgotten.'
'And now you're famous,' she said, looking up at him. He had stood up, all the long length of him, resting his forehead against his arm on the high chimney piece and looking down at the grey fire. 'Heneker Mann.'
'"What a piece of work is Mann." Have you —?'
'Yes. I've been to all of them.'
'Exhibitions,' he said. 'God knows what they amount to really. I was doing better stuff that year.'
'No,' she said. 'You are very much better now.' (He still says things in order to be contradicted. He knows I will contradict. He knows that I know that he needs to be contradicted. Our thoughts move completely together. They always did. We sit here. We are like Darby and Joan . ?. ?. And it's ten years. He's wicked still of course. I suppose he's married, I wonder —)
'She's a painter,' he said to the fire.
Hetty said nothing.
'She's a painter, Lady Top-Brass, just a painter.'
'Well I suppose so. She would have had to be.'
'No. You know that. All that year you knew.'
'I didn't. Anyway, I was a painter.'
'No. You picked up my clothes. Took the shoe off the light.'
'Good painters are often tidy. Usually in fact. You must have been reading novels about painters, Heneker.'
'No,' he said. 'Not tidy like you. The tidiness was growing. It was getting dangerous. It got in the way.'
'Not often,' she said. 'As time went on you weren't there to see. I tidied round nothing and nobody. You were always out. Later and later. More and more.'
'You should have painted instead. If you'd painted then, instead of minding and tidying —' he flung away and looked out of a window at the gigantic sea. 'God, I missed you.'
One of the children called out upstairs and in a second she was out of her chair and the room and gone. Sophie lay like a seraph, her face lifted to the moonlight but Andy was flinging about in a heap, one arm flailing the air. 'A spike,' he cried. 'Kill it.'
'All right,' she said. 'Hush. Wake up a minute.'
'Beast,' he cried. 'Thump it.'
'It's just a dream,' she said. 'You're asleep. You're sleeping — remembering the water tank.'
'Huh!' he said and, turning into a hump, was asleep again. She stood looking at herself in the glass at the top of the stairs, put back a strand of hair. 'Thirty-one,' she thought. 'Honestly, you wouldn't think so.' She felt gloriously happy, drifted back to the sitting room. But Heneker was gone.
'After all, it was you left me,' he said.
'No.' She folded clothes. The children splashed, called, 'Heneker! Come and look. Crabs, Heneker!'
'Soon,' he said. He sat on a rock with a towel round his neck. She sat a little below him on the sand, his bare brown leg from knee to ankle beside her shoulder as she pushed Andy's socks into sandals. It was next day, still boiling, still un-Irishly hot.
'Your parting,' he said, 'is very beautiful.'
'"Was", I suppose.'
'No. Is. Your parting now, I mean. In your hair. All the hairs are bending back and shining down each side.'
'Oh, Heneker.' (Why is it that when he decides not to touch you it's as good as other men touching you? Better.) 'I thought you never liked my hair.'
'I never said that. Just thought it was — too symmetrical in those days. Over-nice. Better now.'
'I wasn't over-nice in the end.'
'Indeed no,' said Heneker. 'It was you left me, as I remarked.'
He slid down off the rock and sat beside her. 'And got married,' he said, leaning the back of his head against the rock he had been sitting on, 'about ten minutes later. God knows all about it I suppose. I didn't. The boy next door. Number three in The Times. Wedding in Scautland among all the dowdy dowagers. To which I was not invited.'
'Hardly.'
'Incidentally, is dowager a derivative? Of dowdy? One should look it up. Will you be a dowager? I'll marry you.'
'You're being cruel.' She began to get up.
'STOP!'
The long brown hand, ten years older but as familiar as her own, at last fastened over hers. 'Stop. Don't go.'
'Why the hell shouldn't I?'
'Don't go. With your white, white skin.'
'If I'm dowdy —'
'Oh, Het. Shut up.'
They sat on the almost empty strand. Some Dubliners far across were assembling a boat. There were one or two other people. Two fishermen trudged up from the day's work carrying a plastic bag with heavy fish in it staining the bag with blood. They were dressed in ageless clothes. They had very ancient faces. But for the plastic bag they might have been ghosts. They walked up past Sophie and Andy who were digging a fortress, Sophie patting the top of a Norman keep with a little pink spade. Her forearms were gold.
''Tis a beautiful day,' said the older fisherman as they passed by. 'You have beautiful children.' The younger fisherman looked at Hetty. They went on up the beach.
'I love you so,' said Heneker.
She pulled hard against his tightening hand.
'So what did you do?' she asked in the end.
He was leaning back still with eyes closed.
'Got married I suppose.'
'Suppose? You must know. To the one who — to the one you were —'
'No,' he said, sitting up. 'Not her.'
'Well, to a painter.'
'Yes. To a bloody good painter if it is of any interest to you.'
Andy came up and flung down crabs. Sophie fell on a squishy thing and cried. Comfort. Handkerchieves. Clothes. Home for lunch and the children's rest; Heneker back to the pub where he was staying.
'Will you come up after and do plasticine beasts, Heneker?'
'Yes, all right, Andy. Half past seven.'
'I was supposed to be a bloody good painter too.' She put down the coffee tray again between them, tried to brighten the fire, opened the curtains wider to the evening sea. 'Until I met you.'
'That's what I mean.'
'You destroyed it.' She poured the coffee into mugs. 'That's all. Anyway you were no good to me. You're no good to any woman.'
'Any brown sugar?' he said.
'No.'
'I'd have thought that Lord Thing kept brown sugar for his coffee, Lady Top-Brass. Lady Brass-Tops.'
'The groceries aren't in with the rent. They're provided by me. Well, by Charles. You can't get demerara in the village —' she had to stop.
'Darling,' he said, coming over and taking her hands. 'Darling, for God's sake, don't. Don't cry. Whatever —'
'You're so bloody cruel. You always were so bloody cruel.'
'But truthful,' he said squeezing her hands so that they hurt. 'Always that. And to no one else. Not truthful like this.'
'Thank you very much.'
'Oh, Het. Don't be cruel back. God, you were always crueller. You know you were, too. You could get in where it hurt. Because you knew — Where're you going?'
He caught up with her as she reached the hall, at the foot of the stairs beside the telephone which stood in the curl of the banisters — an old-fashioned telephone with a trumpet and a very old wire drooping out of it like a brown string chain. 'Het,' he said, grabbing her. The telephone tottered and he caught it and, 'Marvellous!' he said, looking at the telephone. 'God, it's nice. Like a black daffodil. Does it work?'
She flung off up the stairs leaving him with the telephone next to his heart. 'I'll go back to the pub then.' She answered by closing her bedroom door and heard him walk slowly down the weedy drive between the giant rhubarb, the wilderness of fuchsias, to the great, crumbling gate-posts. Once, twice she heard him stop. Savagely, delightedly, she imagined him looking back at the house all in darkness, her bedroom window dark as all the rest.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Stories"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Jane Gardam.
Excerpted by permission of Europa Editions.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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