Encounters Read online

  ‘Goodnight, Mark.’

  ‘What I mean is …’

  ‘Goodnight, Mark.’

  She heard him hesitate and then go, as she stood by the window, her arms protectively across her stomach, watching the silhouettes of the rooftops against the flickering sky. Not until the front door had banged behind him did she move. Then slowly she reached up onto the wardrobe for her own big suitcase. One by one she began to drop her books and her clothes and bits of make-up into the case. Wherever they went, she and the child within her, they would have each other. One day, perhaps she would give Mark her address; he had the right to know. But not yet.

  ‘Oh Mark, darling, you’re soaked through. Here let me help.’ Susannah had been waiting for him at the open door of her flat and her face, so recently white and strained, was suddenly happy in its relief. ‘You’ve been such a long time.’

  He smiled wearily. ‘It didn’t take long, Susie. I’ve just been driving around in the rain.’

  ‘Oh.’ She was chilled by his tone. ‘Well, come on; I’ve got a stiff drink poured for you. You must be exhausted.’

  He sat down on the edge of a chair, his drink clasped loosely, his hands between his knees. His face was grey with fatigue and she knelt quietly down to be near him, not daring to say anything.

  ‘I can’t do it to her, Susie,’ he said after a long silence.

  Susie climbed to her feet and walked away from him, determined he shouldn’t see her face. She went to the window and threw it open. The rain had stopped. There was already a grey lightening of the sky in the east.

  ‘You and I have known each other such a short time, haven’t we?’ She tried to keep her tone light, although she suddenly felt sick with apprehension. ‘If only we had met years ago.’

  ‘We could have been happy, Susie. You’re the only woman I’ve ever really wanted to marry.’

  She knew he meant it.

  ‘We still could, Mark?’ Her voice, trembling with hope was so quiet he could hardly hear it.

  His knuckles whitened on the glass as he shook his head. ‘It’s not just that; there are so many reasons it couldn’t work. Life’s not that simple.’ He took a gulp from his glass as the first cautious notes of a sleepy bird echoed across the room. In a moment it was silent again. ‘Love like this, that we feel for one another, it is self destructive. It must be. It would devour us, Susie, in time and devour itself too.’

  ‘Don’t decide too hastily, Mark,’ she whispered. ‘Please think a little longer.’

  But he had thought. For that hour, driving round peering through the rain-streaked windscreen at the black sky he had thought again and again. And realized with an unexpected feeling of relief that real though his sudden infatuation with Susie had been he could not, could never, change the love he felt for Annabel; the protectiveness which Susie had first aroused in him had now strangely transferred itself to Annabel, wrapping her round, making her safe, wanting so much to comfort her for the hurt he had caused her. It was strange to think of her as vulnerable and fragile and alone, but this evening he had realized that she was all of those things. He could not think how he had not seen it before. Susie had known him so short a time she would, he hoped, soon forget, without too much pain. Annie was different.

  He had known then that he had to go back. Nothing had really changed. Annabel was the woman he loved and she needed him. Suddenly and inexplicably she needed him.

  He drove home in the pale green dawn, the car window down so he could hear the full-throated roar of the birds greeting the day. The roads sparkled from the night’s rain and the heavy trees bowed under their frosting of raindrops. He parked, climbed stiffly out of the car and quietly shut the door, taking a deep breath of the clean air. For the first time in an age he felt light-hearted.

  He ran up the stairs three at a time and slotted his key into the lock. The room was as he had left it a few hours before; a few boxes and cases still piled by the wall ready for him to collect. He crept over to the bedroom door, picturing her lying there, her dark hair a blackbird’s wing across the white of the sheets. He would wake her with a kiss and beg understanding and forgiveness.

  But the bed was empty and neatly made. The room was unnaturally tidy, the dressing table bare and dusted. It was as though she had never been.

  He sat on the bed, kneading his eyes with his knuckles while the joyous chorus of birdsong flooded through the window; mocking him.

  Slowly, he stood up. He took off his jacket and walked back into the sitting room. Behind the sofa she had stacked all the wallpaper. Sadly he picked up a roll. At least he could finish the decorating for her.

  Two weeks later Mark let himself into the flat after work and glanced round wearily. The room looked good now that it was finished. Annabel would have liked it so much. Wandering rather aimlessly into the bedroom he flopped down onto the unmade bed, his arm across his eyes. The silence and emptiness of the place oppressed him and he hated being there in the evenings. Later, perhaps, he would go out and find himself something to eat. He lay there for a long time, his mind a blank, and then at last as the light slowly faded he dozed.

  He was awakened by the ringing of the phone. For a moment he lay still listening to the insistent sound coming from the room next door, tempted not to bother, then suddenly something made him throw himself out of bed. He ran, fumbled desperately with the door knob, wrenching it open and grabbed the receiver, his heart thumping, afraid the caller would hang up before he could answer.

  ‘Mark?’ Her voice came from a long way away. She had not dared to hope he might be at the flat. ‘Mark, I had to talk to you; are you alone?’

  His relief and happiness were so great that for a moment he couldn’t reply and in the long silence he heard her again. ‘Mark, are you there? Mark? …’

  The Indian Summer of Mary McQueen

  ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary,

  How does your garden grow?’

  Mary McQueen murmured the words to herself languidly as she stood at the veranda door, gazing through the mesh out to the barren, puddled lawns and the dripping maples. The rain was pouring straight down, a heavy curtain, never once slanted or scattered by the wind. She could hear the parched gardens gasping with gratitude beneath the weight of it.

  Inside, the house was as hot as ever, humid and so uncomfortable that in another five minutes she would have to go and change her dress. She glanced back into the living room with its freshly laundered drapes and pretty summery chintz and she could not face the thought of dragging herself up the stairs.

  If she did not look at the driveway where the gravel was rapidly disappearing beneath a sheet of slate-coloured puddles, for five whole minutes – not cheating – then, as she raised her eyes, surely she would see the biscuit-coloured Buick she had expected since breakfast, nosing in off the highway. She sat down on the rocking chair, her wrist dangling heavily across her knee. She immediately felt even hotter and more uncomfortable, but that way she could watch the tiny hands of the watch with the minimum of effort.

  Dan McQueen had given it to her on the plane after they got married, as he took her up to the house in Vermont for their honeymoon. Then they had returned to live in New York. Fifteen years later, after deciding to make their home there in the soft woods and hills of New England Dan had inexplicably walked out. Mary had never suspected another woman.

  ‘I have my English Mary,’ he used to say, with nauseating frequency, at dinner parties. ‘She’s just about the greatest!’

  Just about.

  She had resented his work and his devotion to golf as did all the other wives at the Garden Club. But never had she suspected Dan, sidesman at the local church and co-organizer of the Lake Falls Arts Festival, of hankering after another woman.

  Once, they had gone up to Tanglewood to listen beneath the great north American moon to Beethoven and Mozart. He had sat beside her on the grass holding her hand, trying to sneak little kisses like a boy of twenty. She had been so embarrassed. Dan was a m
an of fifty-six. But Dan did not like serious music – it was the organizing side of the Arts Festival he enjoyed, not the art – and they had not gone again.

  She glanced at the watch once more. Two minutes more and she would look up at the rain-swept drive.

  It was six weeks now since Dan had driven off with his bags to collect Sarah Walton. Mary could keep the house, he said. He would pay a regular allowance into her account.

  He had been as excited as a kid going on holiday with his cases and, of course, his golf clubs. He had worn his new shirt and the silk cravat she had given him. She had had it sent from Fortnum’s in London and she knew the label alone would have pleased him. That hurt as much as anything else; that he should wear her present when running away with another woman. It was as though he expected her to share his excitement, help him pack, even prepare the two of them some sandwiches.

  ‘Don’t you want to know where we’re going, honey?’

  He had sounded quite hurt and when she shook her head, wordlessly miserable, he looked upset and worried and took her hand rather as an anxious mother takes the hand of her child to feel if it has a fever.

  She had waved him goodbye though.

  That night, inevitably, Cyrus Walton had driven up complete with Californian wine and barbecued chicken. As inevitably after they had eaten he had expected them to go to bed together. Even in Lake Falls it seemed wife swapping could be viewed with equanimity if it salved one’s hurt and avenged one’s pride. But she proved contrary and Cyrus at last went home, hiccoughing and unfulfilled to his empty bed. She had sat a long time after she had locked up that night, considering whether she had been foolish and should have accepted his offer. Perhaps if he had been different she would have. But she had always found Cyrus the worst type of boorish male. She preferred her loneliness. Then.

  The hand on the watch had traversed its full five minutes but she was reluctant to look up now and break the spell she had woven.

  She could hear the rain pounding down onto the leaves and the roof and the gravel outside, but no scrunch of car tyres. She would wait another two minutes, she bargained with fete, and then go in if he hadn’t appeared and fix herself a cold fattening drink.

  After all, it had not been such a definite arrangement that he arrive this morning. She pictured again the square jaw, the fair untidy hair, the piercing eyes which seemed to see her soul, of the man with whom she had shared martinis and lunch on the plane down to New York three weeks before.

  They had got talking, as people do on planes. He helped her with her seat belt and adjusted the air conditioning. Then they had a drink and relaxed.

  By the time they had reached cruising altitude they had been chatting like friends; by the time they approached LaGuardia they had both felt, she was certain, that they were friends.

  They were both pressed for time, but parting had seemed inappropriate and too hurried. Then she had remembered the new car, a biscuit-coloured Buick, which he was to pick up on this trip and drive back north. ‘Come by, won’t you?’ She had asked and he had agreed. They had held hands for a moment and exchanged glances, she had thought, of significance and promise.

  The two minutes were up. At last she raised her eyes again to the dripping garden. It was curtained by the falling rain, scented, beautiful. It smelt, she thought, like every beautiful smell there had ever been, but it was empty of life.

  Getting up from the rocking chair she went through to the kitchen. Ice cream in the freezer. Maple syrup in the cupboard. Soda somewhere. To hell with the inches.

  Then abruptly she slammed the carton back into the freezer. No. Bravado aside, she wanted a cup of tea, however hot it would make her feel.

  Then she would go up and change her dress. And if she had a quick shower as well, he would probably arrive then. People so often call when one is in the shower.

  She snapped on the radio as she waited for the kettle to boil. A phone-in show was on, as always, with lonely women pouring out their hearts in the seclusion of their kitchens to the public anonymity of the air. American women have such shrill voices, she thought suddenly with a shudder, and they are always complaining. But that, after all, was the purpose of the programmes. Suffering in silence may be dignified and English but was it any better for one’s peace of mind? She thought not.

  She switched off and looked instead out of the back window over vistas of dripping bushes and trees, down towards the lake. She and Dan used to keep a boat down there. Then, two years before, he had suddenly announced he was too old and sold it. It was the first time he had done anything like that without consulting her and she had been heartbroken, both for the boat itself, which she loved and for the precedent which, she had felt somehow even then, might bode evil for the future.

  She made the tea with a teabag in her cup and carried it, steaming, up to her bedroom. It looked out over the front of the house, so she could see him if he came.

  If he came?

  So she was having doubts now. She sat down at the dressing table and wondered for the first time whether he would come at all. She had been so certain. She had even bought a new dress for the occasion. She glanced sadly at the bed where she had thrown it, crumpled and damp with perspiration.

  If only the rain would stop. If only she dared run down to the garden, naked. If only there would be a premature frost.

  As she did every day of every summer she thought nostalgically of the summers at home in England with the cool fresh winds and early morning mists and felt homesick once more for her happy girlhood.

  If I had stayed at home, she thought again, where would I have been now? And what would I have been? Not, certainly, a middle-aged American matron, husbandless and hunting for a man.

  She gazed up at herself in the mirror, suddenly appalled. Is that what she was? Is that what she, who so despised the other man-hunting women she had met, had become?

  She scrutinized her image carefully. She certainly looked the part. Her hair showed no thread of grey and every strand was immaculate, her hairdresser saw to that. Her tights came from Lord and Taylor, her dresses from only a few select couture shops. Even in that boat she had not been really casual. Her slacks were tailored cleverly to conceal any broadening of the hips which might have shown and her jackets were without exception long enough. She had always been careful not to chip her nails gardening or on the jetty.

  She stood up. Why in a temperature of over 100° and with the humidity unbearable was she wearing heavy make-up and tights at all? To impress a man she had picked up – oh yes, Mary, face the fact, that’s what you did, she thought – picked up, three weeks ago on a plane ride to New York. For three weeks she had been living in a breathless pause like a teenage girl with her first infatuation. It was shameful, shallow and childish.

  Looking back at the mirror she caught herself blushing with embarrassment and she felt suddenly more contrary than she had ever felt in her life before.

  Falling on her knees in front of the highboy in the corner she pulled open a heavy drawer. There, neatly packed away in tissue and lavender were some of the old clothes which she had never brought herself to give away to the Garden Club bazaar. Pulling them out she heaped them on the floor around her, searching through the well-remembered garments.

  She couldn’t make up her mind between the dark blue cotton shift and the slacks and cotton shirt. Both were a little shabby and badly needed pressing. Both had been hers when she had first come to the States so very long ago.

  She showered and removed her make-up and slipped at last into the shift, unwilling to try the test of time and her constant slimming by putting on trousers which she had worn as a girl.

  Then she stood bare-legged and barefoot before the mirror. The dress was creased and faded in the creases and shabby and the wrong length for today’s fashions but her legs, she decided critically, were perhaps not too bad. Her hair was all wrong. It was formal and stiff and, she suddenly realized, the colour was too hard for her face.

  She brushe
d it hard, trying to dislodge the careful style, but it would not be disarranged.

  Ten minutes later she was in the rain, her feet delightfully chilled in the cold grass, her shift black with absorbed water and clinging to her skin, her hair bedraggled, untidy and quite styleless. She cut armloads of roses, the raindrops still on their petals and watched the gentle curves of their leaves fill with more rain as they lay in the basket on the grass at her feet. She wondered if Sue Beckstein could see her across the lawn from her kitchen window. If so she would probably call up the local sanatarium.

  She laughed aloud at the thought, shook her head so the raindrops flew, then picking up her basket she almost danced back to the house.

  Her hair dried into tight little curls, with wisps and loose ends around her eyes. She stripped off the dress and threw it in the tub. Recklessly she tried on the old slacks. They still fitted after all those years.

  She rummaged in a drawer and found a copper-hammered pendant which went with the throbbing green of her shirt, then still barefoot she ran downstairs to arrange her flowers. Dan had always discouraged flowers indoors because he reckoned they gave him asthma and hay fever.

  The biscuit-coloured Buick arrived at ten after three. Mary was lying reading in the hammock on the veranda and hardly looked up as she heard the tyres on the drive.

  The rain had stopped at last and he stepped out on the wet gravel to a fitful sunshine. All around the sky was still heavy with black thunder-clouds.

  ‘Hi,’ she called. ‘I wondered if you’d turn up.’

  He hesitated and then came towards her, at first slowly and then sprinting up the veranda steps.

  ‘Have a cold drink,’ she said with a smile. ‘I’m sure you can do with a rest. My husband gets back about four. Perhaps you’d like to stay and meet him?’

  They drank soda together on the veranda, he uncomfortable and formal with tie and shoes and she relaxed and happy and untidy. The seam on her left hip started to go a little as she hitched back up into the hammock but she didn’t think he noticed. She saw him eyeing her unhappily as he laboured with polite conversation and remembered how he must have pictured her. Cool, friendly, immaculate and sophisticated. A rich woman on the make.