A La Carte Page 12

  Opening the salmon tin, Zoë travels again to the Alp Horn rendezvous. She wonders if it has changed and considers it unlikely. The long horn still stretches over a single wall. The same Tyrolean landscape decorates two others. There are the blue-and-red tablecloths. He waits with a glass of sherry, and then she’s there.

  ‘My dear!’

  She is the first to issue their familiar greeting, catching him unaware the way things sometimes do these days.

  ‘My dear!’ he says in turn.

  Sherry is ordered for her too, and when it comes the rims of their glasses touch for a moment, a toast to the past.

  ‘Grace,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it awful?’

  ‘I manage.’

  The waiter briskly notes their order and enquires about the wine.

  ‘Oh, the good old house red.’

  Zoë’s fingers, gripping and slicing a tomato, are arthritic, painful sometimes though not at present. In bed at night he’s gentle when he reaches out for one hand or the other, cautious with affection, not tightening his grasp as once he did. Her fingers are ugly; she sometimes thinks she looks quite like a monkey now. She arranges the fish and the tomato on a plate and sprinkles pepper over both. Neither she nor Charles ever has salt.

  ‘And you, Charles?’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘I worry about you sometimes.’

  ‘No, I’m all right.’

  It was accordion music that was playing in the Alp Horn the day Zoë’s inquisitiveness drove her into it. Young office people occupied the tables. Business was quite brisk.

  ‘I do appreciate this,’ Audrey says. ‘When something’s over, all these years I do appreciate it, Charles.’

  He passes across the table the packet of Three Castles cigarettes, and she smiles, placing it beside her because it’s too soon yet to open it.

  ‘You’re fun, Charles.’

  ‘I think La Maybury married, you know. I think someone told me that,’

  ‘Grace could never stand her.’

  ‘No.’

  Is this the end? Zoë wonders. Is this the final fling, the final call on his integrity and honour? Can his guilt slip back into whatever recesses there are, safe at last from Grace’s secondhand desire? No one told him that keeping faith could be as cruel as confessing faithlessness; only Grace might have appropriately done that, falsely playing a best friend’s role. But it wasn’t in Grace’s interest to do so.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll sell the house.’

  ‘I rather think you should.’

  ‘Grace did suggest it once.’

  Leaving them to it, Zoë eats her salmon and tomato. She watches the end of the television film: years ago they saw it together, before 1951, before Grace and Audrey. They’ve seen it together since; as a boy he’d been in love with Bette Davis. Picking at the food she has prepared, Zoë is again amused by what has amused her before. But only part of her attention is absorbed. Conversations take place; she does not hear; what she sees are fingers undistorted by arthritis loosening the cellophane on the cigarette packet and twisting it into a butterfly. He orders coffee. The scent that came back on his clothes was lemony with a trace of lilac. In a letter there was a mention of the cellophane twisted into a butterfly.

  “Well, there we are,’ he says. ‘It’s been lovely to see you, Audrey.’

  ‘Lovely for me too.’

  When he has paid the bill they sit for just a moment longer. Then, in the Ladies, she powders away the shine that heat and wine have induced, and tidies her tidy grey hair. The lemony scent refreshes, for a moment, the stale air of the cloakroom.

  ‘Well, there we are, my dear,’ he says again on the street. Has there ever, Zoë wonders, been snappishness between them? Is she the kind not to lose her temper, long-suffering and patient as well as being a favourite girl at school? After all, she never quarrelled with her friend.

  ‘Yes, there we are, Charles.’ She takes his arm. ‘All this means the world to me, you know.’

  They walk to the corner, looking for a taxi. Marriage is full of quarrels, Zoë reflects.

  ‘Being upright never helps. You just lie there. Drink lots of water, Charles.’

  The jug of water, filled before she’d slipped in beside him last night, is on his bedside table, one glass poured out. Once, though quite a while ago now, he not only insisted on getting up when he had a stomach upset but actually worked in the garden. All day, she’d watched him filling his incinerator with leaves and weeding the rockery. Several times she’d rapped on the kitchen window, but he’d taken no notice. As a result he was laid up for a fortnight. j

  ‘I’m sorry to be a nuisance,’ he says.

  She smoothes the bedclothes on her side of the bed, giving the bed up to him, making it pleasant for him in the hope that he’ll remain in it. The newspaper is there for him when he feels like it. So is Little Dorrit, which he always reads when he’s unwell.

  ‘Perhaps consommé later on,’ she says. ‘And a cream cracker.’

  ‘You’re very good to me.’

  ‘Oh, now.’

  Downstairs Zoë lights the gas-fire in the sitting-room and looks to see if there’s a morning film. Barefoot in the Park it is, about to begin. Quite suddenly then, without warning, she sees how the loose ends are. Everything is different, but nothing of course will ever be said. So good the little restaurant’s still there, the old flame writes. Just a line to thank you. So good it was to talk. So good to see him. So good of him to remember the Three Castles. Yet none of it is any good at all because Grace is not there to say, ‘Now tell me every single thing.’ Not there to say when there’s a nagging doubt, ‘My dear, what perfect nonsense!’ On her own in the seaside house she’ll not find an excuse again to suggest a quick lunch if he’d like to. He’ll not do so himself, since he never has. He’ll gladly feel his duty done at last.

  The old flame bores him now, with her scent and her cigarettes and her cellophane butterflies. In her seaside house she knows her thank-you letter is the last, and the sea is grey and again it rains. One day, on her own, she’ll guess her friend was false. One day she’ll guess a sense of honour kept pretence alive.

  Grace died. That’s all that happened, Zoë tells herself, so why should she forgive? ‘Why should I?’ she murmurs. ‘Why should I?’ Yet for a moment before she turns on Barefoot in the Park tears sting her eyelids. A trick of old age, she tells herself, and orders them away.

  THE VILLAGE

  A Christmas Story

  George Mackay Brown

  At five o’clock on Christmas morning a light went on in the top window of a tall house. Peedie Sigurd and his sister Gerd were the first folk to awake in the village. They were tearing string and paper from the gifts Santa had left. Sigurd had hardly slept all night. At ten to five he had shaken his sister awake. Between sleep and enchantment they sat on their beds, with apples, boxes of sweeties, books, a draughts-board, a doll, diaries, nuts, and a growing litter of string and fancy paper. Sigurd opened a soft parcel and pulled out a new knitted balaclava. He cried out in rage and threw it on the floor. (Sigurd hated above all things to be given clothes for a present.) Gerd fell back asleep on her pillow, clutching the doll.

  In the three fishermen’s houses above the pier, dark windows at six o’clock still. Normally, on such a quiet morning, there would have been moving shadows between lamps and uncurtained windows. But this was Christmas morning, when even fishermen could lie long. And their wives dreamed of seapinks. And their children dreamed of castles made of chocolate and marzipan, where the tables are loaded with all the good things in the world, swans and apples, everything except fish.

  At nine o’clock there was a hideous rattling and clangour and metal outcry just beside poor Miss Papay’s head. Miss

  Papay’s nervous system was in ruins each morning because of that alarm clock. ‘It’s a wonder,’ she said to Sam her white cat, ‘I’m not in the nut-house, with that alarm cloc
k!’ … Then Miss Papay remembered that it was Christmas morning. ‘A merry Christmas, Sam,’ she said. ‘I have a little something for you, Sam.’ Miss Papay went to the kitchen cupboard in her dressing-gown and brought out a little fish on a plate. It was a herring. The scales shone like stars. Miss Papay set the herring-plate on the stone floor beside the sink. ‘A merry Christmas to you,’ said Sam the cat. Or maybe he said, ‘Oh good, I like herring.’ Or maybe he said, ‘Here’s just another day and another breakfast.’ At any rate Sam meowed beautifully. And Miss Papay lit the fire with a tranquil hand and put on the kettle for her breakfast. Miss Papay’s nerves soon recovered from the berserk yells of the alarm clock; she being a gentle old lady, in love with the cluster of flames in her fire and her singing kettle and knowledge that she had lived to see another Christmas, in spite of an ancient heartbreak.

  At ten o’clock Tom Keldie opened the village shop that sold everything: fishermen’s jerseys, and a hundred kinds of sweeties, and potatoes and newspapers and bottles of whisky and beer and sugar and lentils and tea. Tom Keldie gave a baleful glance at a rack containing 45 unsold Christmas cards. Tom Keldie’s shop was also the Post Office. Today there was only one letter to date-stamp, addressed to the Member of Parliament. What could Mrs Wilson of Fetters farm be wanting to write to the MP about? The MP wasn’t in London, he was home in Orkney for Christmas – only a very stupid person such as Tibby Wilson wouldn’t have realised that. Mrs Tibby Wilson was always writing letters to people in high places, but nothing seemed to come of any of her letters. Tom Keldie must have date-stamped and sorted a hundred of her letters to dukes and bishops and film stars in the course of the past year.

  Tom Keldie dipped a steel pen in a bottle of ink. He stroked out ‘Christmas’ on 45 cards, and wrote ‘New Year’ instead. A Merry New Year. A few folk for sure would have forgotten to send this one or that one a Christmas card; well, now they had a chance to make reparation.

  Willie Swart the beachcomber came in and bought a bottle of whisky for twelve shillings and sixpence.

  That was all the business that Tom Keldie did that day.

  At eleven o’clock Jock Arnison the beadle began to ring the kirk bell. Many a task Jock Arnison had to do, such as digging graves and bearing the big bible up to the pulpit, walking doucely in front of the minister. And going round the village with the communion cards. And giving boys the sharp edge of his tongue for playing ‘cops and robbers’ among the tombstones. And brushing stour and cobwebs and sweetie papers on a Monday morning from the aisles of the gallery.

  But this was the job Jock Arnison liked best of all, to ring the bell on Sunday morning. He pulled the rope; gravely the bronze head above nodded, and the clapper gave out such sweet pure brimming sounds that it was a joy to hear; it must (thought Jock) be the next best thing to the singing of the angels in heaven. How the village and the hill and the lock and the peat-bog and the Sound beyond had glory put upon them, Sabbath after Sabbath, by that roundel from the kirk steeple!

  And this was Christmas morning, and the bell rang with more joy than any other morning.

  In ones and twos, the villagers began to move towards the open door of the church, bonneted and bibled and bell-blessed.

  The minister walked down the steep brae from the manse nodding to this one and that on the road. “Well, well,’ said the minister to the horse at the Mill, that had helped to bring home the golden sheaves in August.

  At twelve o’clock noon, suddenly, the village was possessed by children. Each boy and girl was burdened with Christmas gifts. They showed books and dolls and games to each other. ‘I’ll tell you this,’ said a boy called Sander Sweyn, ‘promise you won’t tell the old ones, because then we mightn’t get presents another Christmas. This is a secret, I know because I saw it happening …’

  The scattered children clustered about Sander Sweyn, who always had dangerous and exciting news to tell.

  ‘Listen,’ said Sander in a swart whisper, ‘there’s no such person as Santa, it’s your father and mother that put things in your stockings at Christmas, all that about Santa’s a fairy-tale …’

  There was an appalled silence all around Sander Sweyn for – it might be – five seconds. Then, ‘You’re a liar!’ yelled Sigurd. ‘I was awake all night and I know, I heard him in our room. I didn’t see him because I kept my eyes shut. If you see him you get cinders in your stocking. But I heard him all right.’

  Gerd hit Sander Sweyn with her rag doll, again and again. Then the rag doll fell on the road, and Gerd began to cry.

  Other boys began to hit Sander Sweyn, and one kicked him hard on the shin.

  It’s hard to know what would have come of the iconoclast if Mr Allister the teacher hadn’t rapped sharply on his study window from the festive glow inside. He gathered his brows against them. His mouth went into different shapes. The children couldn’t hear what he was saying but they knew it must be something angry.

  They scattered like a shower of starlings, all but Gerd who stood over her rag doll, crying.

  At one o’clock in the afternoon, what loaded tables, what merriment, what bright faces, what feasting! Ham broth they had in the twenty-five village houses (with slight variations), roast beef and roast tatties and turnip and cabbage, plum pudding with threepenny-bits and rings and trinkets hidden among the seething spice and nuts and sultanas. Ginger wine for the children, bottles of stout for the men, tea for the women. And such great leaping fires that there was hardly need for the lamps on the sideboard.

  In one house, however, there was no such thing.

  Willie Swart sat beside the seawood fire and tilted his whisky bottle from time to time, between broken bits of song and insult.

  At two o’clock sleep went over the village in a sunset wave: all but the children who played ludo or snakes-and-ladders, and grew slowly nauseated with chocolate and ginger wine, and sometimes they growled at each other like dogs with bones. (The truth is, there had been too much excitement in too short a time, it was more than small creatures could endure.)

  Even Willie Swart slept a smouldering sleep in his rocking-chair beside the half-empty whisky bottle.

  And Miss Papay slept, dreaming of the time long ago when she had been a school-teacher in Edinburgh, and had a lover that had gone away and left her: or been drowned in the Pacific Ocean, he being a sailor.

  Sam her cat curled the last drop of milk round his tongue, and curled his lithe beautiful shape round his small pulsing heart beside the fire, asleep too.

  At three o’clock the first snowflake of winter fell on the blacksmith’s cold window, and clung there. A score, a hundred cold grey lingerers and loiterers followed; then a thousand came dancing down the hushed air, ten thousand, a million! It was as if an immaculate white cloth had been spread over the fields and the roofs and the village street. Then the snow-cloud moved over towards Hamnavoe and Hoy and Suleskerry. How brightly the lamps shone then in the village houses. (All except Willie Swart’s – his lamp was his whisky bottle.)

  At four o’clock the first star shone over the hill.

  Between the star outside and the leaping and purring fire inside his study, the Rev. Aeneas McTweedie fell asleep after his dinner and his glass of port. He dreamed he saw the three Magi, but they were three ragged tramps. As they came down from the hill to the village, the miller’s horse came to meet them, and it was a skeleton the rattling skeleton of a horse! And one of the tramps put a buttercup in the bone jaws; one gave the horse a shell; the third one gave a finger-lick of dew to the rattling framework. And then the horse-skeleton, clothed in wind and flame again, went romping round and round the meadow! Then the Magi-tramps stood on the steep brae above the village. They said, ‘Our names are Faith and Hope and Charity – we can’t stay here long – we have to visit every place in the world. There’s much need. We hope we’re not too late. But we bless this village, too.’

  Five o’clock till eleven o’clock the next morning, the great wave of a midwinter night crashed soundlessly, w
ith surf and spindrift of stars, upon the little community of boats and nets.

  Inside, they sat beside their lamps and fires and told stories.

  At twelve o’clock Willie Swart threw the empty whisky bottle into the stone corner of his room; it broke like a lamp, with many black smashings and tinklings.

  And Willie Swart slept with a flaming face in his rocking-chair, slouched sideways.

  And into every villager – Sigurd and Gerd, and the three fishermen, and Miss Papay and Sam the cat, Tom Keldie, Willie Swart, Jock Amison, Sander Sweyn and the minister and the miller’s horse – passed the dreaming shuttle.

  SOUND PROOF

  Angela Keys

  The child was restless.

  He had been fed twice that morning. He was always a hungry baby and had sucked strongly from the time that he was born. Her nipples were sore and she knew she would feed him again if he cried. It was the only way she could satisfy him. He was growing fast and strong and her pleasure in him and her love of him grew with the same steady force.

  Slowly she lifted him from his cot on the floor and held him in the air above her. His response was immediate, his face bursting with a smile. He was wet. She changed his towelling nappy and dressed him carefully and slowly, talking to him all the while in a soft caressing voice. She always talked quietly to him when he was awake. All his waking hours her voice washed over him: over and over in comforting waves. Never did her voice get harsh or sharp or anxious. It was always flapping against the shores of his consciousness. When he cried he could not hear her, but when he stopped he felt the voice soothe him again. She talked to him about how she felt: about what she had done in her life; about what she would go on to do. She talked about her absent family and friends and who he was like and of things she wanted to be reminded of. Her isolation in this strange part of Britain was not so painful and bitter now. Now that she had him to care for. Her husband usually left early in the morning and came back late at night. Often she and the child were sleeping when he left for work and sleeping when he returned. She had begun to notice how loudly he spoke and how rough and careless he seemed with the child. He would throw him into the air and catch him. He would shake him from side to side, twisting the child in the air. And he would sing those noisy Irish songs and recite Rabbie Burns to him in this isolated Welsh village. The child thrilled to it all.