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  Yet she sensed that he was lonely, as lonely in his way as she was in hers, except that her loneliness was the outcome of a fiercely guarded reclusion, and all that she required to help her was a deeper sense of reverie. Young people were not given to reverie, were not particularly articulate, lacked the sort of patience that only the old could command. Seeing him moody and unoccupied made her feel sympathy for his predicament, yet she herself could provide few distractions. She pitied his straitened youth of jogging and rock music, yet on the rare occasions on which she had heard him speak he appeared to be educated, even gently bred, but determined to hide the fact. She had had to come to the conclusion that he preferred to live as he did, to have no regular employment, to drift into the company of those who might make his decisions for him. It was a sadness to her to contemplate such a life. Her own, by comparison, seemed infinitely rich.

  That afternoon, after lunch, she called in at a garage in the Fulham Road. Her own driving licence had long since expired, but a kind young man promised to deliver the car within two hours. When the telephone rang she was almost startled to receive news from the wider world: that was the negative result of her quiet days. But she had been drafted into a conglomerate; she had to read the balance sheet. Austin had not mentioned her hotel proposition, for which she felt no surprise; he had always been somewhat lazy, or perhaps merely subject to Kitty’s will. Kitty was like the enchantresses of old, those who ruled through fear. In this way she had bewitched her husband into eternal and unwavering sympathy. The alternative would be a crise de nerfs. She regarded this—as did Austin—as a legitimate manner of seeing that her wishes were granted. His rewards were also considerable: perfect management of his household, a physical loyalty that soothed and regenerated him. They never argued, or if they did, ended up on the same side.

  But on the telephone Kitty’s voice was dangerously lofty, hinting that some sort of argument was in train or had already taken place.

  ‘I’m expecting you for dinner on Friday, Thea.’ Her characteristic little laugh followed. Dare to refuse, said the laugh.

  ‘That will be very nice, Kitty.’

  ‘I’ve invited the Goldmarks. They can pick you up.’

  ‘No need. I’ve hired a car. Steve can drive me over.’

  There was a silence. ‘I hope you’re not making him feel too much at home, Thea. Don’t forget they’re supposed to be leaving directly after the wedding. In fact the whole thing’s been a terrible strain on me. And now Molly’s being difficult.’ Here an intake of breath presaged an outburst. ‘We had words. Too silly. I hate to quarrel with my sister.’

  ‘Is anything wrong? What has happened?’

  Kitty’s voice now appeared to have modulated without transition into the tearful. Perhaps the tears were always there, threatening to break cover without warning.

  ‘I asked her to take David until the wedding. Of course she said no. I can’t blame her for that. But I don’t want him either. And he gets on Austin’s nerves. It was the least Molly could do …’

  ‘Did she agree?’

  ‘Eventually. Oh, I dare say we’ll make it up, but it upset me. You know how sensitive I am. And Ann has been quite difficult. I’ve bought her one or two things, but she takes no interest. Just looks at me with a pitying smile, as if she were doing me a favour. If it were up to her she’d get married in that thing you saw her in.’

  ‘If you have a hand in the wedding it will be beautifully done,’ said Mrs May quite sincerely.

  ‘Thank you, Thea. It’s nice to receive a little support and encouragement. And how are you getting on?’

  ‘Oh, not too badly. Not too badly at all. But we shall all be pretty tired once they’ve gone.’

  ‘Austin insists that we go to Freshwater. You wouldn’t like to join us, I suppose?’

  This invitation, though quite possibly genuine, was couched in a manner and a tone of voice that expected a refusal.

  ‘You know how I enjoy my quiet way of life, Kitty. I don’t move far these days.’

  ‘No, you don’t, do you?’ said Kitty, refreshed by the thought. ‘Well, we’ll see you on Friday. Seven-thirty. Goodbye, now.’

  Mrs May replaced the receiver and was suddenly aware of a gap in the afternoon. She willed Steve to come back, if only to have a bath before going out again. ‘Look out of the window,’ she planned to say to him, quite casually. ‘I’ve hired it for you. It will give you a bit more freedom. And perhaps we could go out for a drive? At the weekend? If you’re not too busy, of course.’

  ‘How’s it going, Dorothea?’ Steve’s taciturnity was somewhat moderated by the sight of the car outside in the street, a fact which, although welcome as a sign of comradeliness, was nevertheless in some ways regrettable. It had suited them both to mount a certain reserve, a reserve made more piquant by a no less certain stealth: each would listen for the other going down the corridor, a metaphorical ear to the door. Now they were obliged to acknowledge proximity, although not as yet intimacy. She felt the weight of his appreciation—for the car, not for her person—in his cheery meaningless salutation, repeated several times a day when they were obliged to meet. He required no answer to his greeting, nor had she—after one fervent, ‘Oh, very well, Steve, and you?’—any answer to give him. In fact neither required the other to speak. She intuited that his greeting was defensive, pre-emptive, as though by offering this formula he was at the same time signifying that he was not available for questioning.

  She knew nothing about him beyond the fact that he was reasonably tactful; beyond that, and his reclusiveness, which almost matched her own, there was no evidence of nurturing. It was impossible to imagine him sitting in the same room as a mother or a father, yet she thought she detected a dolefulness in his always retreating figure that made her feel protective. Although he looked like a man he was at pains to conceal a boy’s feelings. She admired the set of his features, which gave nothing away, and thought that any girl who set her sights on him would have a hard time. Mrs May doubted whether he had lived at such close quarters with a woman since leaving home: body building seemed to have replaced any interest in the opposite sex in his particular physical economy. Living at such close quarters she had become more readily acquainted with his appearance: the short dark hair, the pleasantly blank smile, the mouth which, when not under strict control, betrayed his dissatisfaction, the neat concentrated body, of average height, that spoke of punishing exercise, the bare feet that rejected shoes until the last minute. She thought too that she detected something disturbingly affectless about him, as if he were some sort of mercenary, home on leave from a distant war zone, scrupulously cleaned up, and all at once bored.

  She had no idea what he did with his time. Apart from dinner at the Levinsons his days were unaccounted for. Running served him in lieu of an occupation; she was given to understand that he met David in the park and ran round Kensington Gardens with him. She assumed that they spent the morning together, or part of it, and possibly got themselves something for lunch. She did not know whether he had any money, a matter which tormented her. David, it was clear, at least it was clear to her, came from a comfortable background: he had the expansive manners and comfortable assurance that had apparently attracted the wary Steve in the first place. She thought she could understand that friendship, Steve paying with his silent loyalty for the attention of the other, while David gained an adherent who absorbed, without a hint of criticism, his evangelical observations. She found David, or what she had seen of him, unattractive, his prospective bride even more so. She sincerely sympathised with Kitty, whose objections to the situation were troubled, imprecise. At the same time she saw in Steve the victim of the others’ alliance, the third party unsure of his continued welcome by the other two. With this position she could also sympathise.

  Surreptitiously, under cover of preparing more coffee, she watched him eating his breakfast, a breakfast which became more lavish as she was convinced of, or imagined—it came to the same thing—his penu
ry. With breakfast in Fulham and dinner in Hampstead he would not go hungry. Then, safely behind the closed door of her bedroom, she would blush at her folly. As if this young man needed her protection! As if she needed his! Had she not spent fifteen largely successful years on her own, bothering no-one, needing no audience for her occasional fears, no concern for her attacks of breathlessness? Had she not got out of the habit of men, as old women will, and even congratulated herself that there was no longer any one of them to torment her? She had loved Henry, had loved even the trace of his presence—his signet ring left carelessly on the side of the washbasin, the smell of his cigar—yet when she had cleared his room after his death she had felt a sort of elation on realising that in the future she would not be disturbed. And she had not been. Living alone, she had discovered, was a stoical enterprise but one that could be rewarding. And now, after only a few days, she was once again anxious, fearful of displeasing this stranger in her house. The date of his departure, fixed for the Wednesday of the following week, when he was supposed to fly to Paris with the newlyweds, struck her as unreal; she was half convinced that at the last moment he would refuse to go. She did not think that she had made him so welcome that he would want to stay with her, although the idea made her blush again. She did not even know whether she would be glad or sorry when or rather if he went. She only knew that clearing up his empty room would not provide that curious relief that she had felt when clearing Henry’s room after his death.

  This puzzled her. After all she had loved Henry, and by no stretch of the imagination did she love Steve. He was not, she had to admit, immediately lovable, was too stony, too empty, too defiantly solitary. She thought that she had come to terms with childlessness, only very rarely thought how nice it might be to have a daughter, until she realised that any daughter she might have had would perhaps have resented the need to keep her company. She had never really envisaged the possibility of having a son. It was simply that in her case some authentic biological process had been omitted, and try as she may to rid herself of the prejudice, she felt that a son corresponded naturally to that process, gave a truer sense of achievement. So had she avoided joy, as she had in most of her dealings with the world, settling instead for reasonable satisfaction. Yet at this late stage of her life (but was that not the point?) she felt newly vulnerable to the sight of a young man’s head moodily bent as he disappeared down the corridor, or the soles of his feet pressed together like a baby’s under the breakfast table. He will have to go, she thought, or I shall soon have ruined the habits and the discipline of a lifetime, and it is by those habits, after all, that I’m obliged to live.

  She thought of ringing Kitty to ask whether David had had this effect on her, but suppressed the thought as ridiculous. For all her status as a tragic mother, Kitty was not permeable to the simpler affections. Besides, there was no reason why David should touch a maternal chord. The poor fellow, for some reason, inspired a certain contempt, whether for his easy convictions, or for his hapless good cheer, or for his all-embracing physical and emotional forbearance. Kitty might not be permeable to the simpler affections but she was extremely susceptible to masculine charm, and David possessed none. Even in their short acquaintance Mrs May had felt irritated by his gladness. Kitty probably dismissed him as a sort of eunuch. He had made no effort to tease her, to cajole her, which was what she may have expected; his innocence in this regard compounded his original offence, which lay in his problematic physicality. He had made his fiancée pregnant but seemed strangely removed from the evidence. Kitty would no doubt have appreciated a hint of licence: like many old women she looked to the young to gratify her in this particular way, to remind her of her own youth and its conquests, and of all that she had done to evince a certain reaction from a man, a reaction that David bafflingly refused her, so that she felt slighted, foolish. Dislike came more easily then, and dislike based on disappointment is difficult to dislodge.

  From that single encounter over the tea table Mrs May had divined that Kitty felt for her inappropriate granddaughter the same emotion that had overwhelmed her when faced with the refractory child. She herself had felt for the girl a certain distaste which Ann had done nothing to justify. Perhaps it was the lazy turn of the head, a certain sly watchfulness, which may have signalled nothing more than an ability to gauge Kitty’s mood, that had awoken in Mrs May an unwelcome reminder of her own girlhood, which had been as innocent of sexual involvement as that of any Victorian maiden. Young men, the brothers of friends, had existed, but on the periphery, while she had sat at home reading Persuasion. Like Anne Elliot she believed that all she had to do was wait, and any slight disappointment she felt, when a belated consciousness of her unsought condition was brought home to her, was compensated by the thought of the lifelong fidelity with which she would reward the man who would eventually awaken her love.

  In the meantime she had been the object of a certain lazy scrutiny, not from the brothers of those friends with whom she had once walked home from school, but from the friends themselves. It was the same sly speculative look that she had seen on Ann’s face, as if Ann had crossed the line that marked out the experienced from the inexperienced. This was understandable, but nevertheless unwelcome. It was as if the girl took a pride in reminding old women like Kitty, like Mrs May, to whom nothing more could happen in the way of romance, that she at least was sexually active. Mrs May could have told her that her pride was misplaced, that she was in fact deluding herself if she thought she had acquired a singular advantage. Kitty too had felt the weight of that misplaced superiority. Even more than the exasperating David who, by comparison, seemed positively virginal, Ann, once more, had frustrated her. Kitty might have longed to offer advice, not knowing that mothers in these enlightened times frequently took advice from their daughters. Kitty, in short, would have liked to act as a matriarch, as a patroness, graciously revealing a little—but not too much—of that arcane knowledge that only married women possess. Instead of which Ann’s almost insolent smile—and it did indeed almost verge on insolence—had relegated her to the sidelines, and worse, had reminded her of her obsolete status, and with it her no doubt imperfect knowledge (for so it was judged) and her redundant maternity. Seeing Austin half lying in his chair, his pills carefully to hand, Ann could not help but revel in her own youth, her own fertility. Even if these were compromised, or at least not particularly well aspected, she had succeeded in exhibiting her trophy, and, young as she was, had thought that sufficient proof of sexual success.

  Mrs May could have told her otherwise. There is no longer any rule that states that a woman gains credit from the man with whom she is involved. Perhaps there never was. The beauty of Anne Elliot lay in her spotlessness, a quality in which Mrs May had long desired to believe. Yet in her own experience it was that very spotlessness that called forth that particularly insulting smile from those whom she had thought to be her friends. For too many years she had deliberately maintained her defences until at last she had wearied of them. Timid affections, even infatuations, had left her dismayed: it seemed to her that she was always being introduced to girls flourishing engagement rings, while she was still bewildered by the fact that she had not even been aware of them as rivals. The prestige of engagements in those far-off days! Mrs May thought that no modern relationship could carry the same charge. For years, it seemed to her, she had seen the identical small diamond flourished on the same plump hand, had detected the same degree of satisfaction as her own unpartnered state was revealed. If she were honest—and it was not a matter on which she cared to dwell—it was the superiority of those other girls, her one-time intimates, that had ended her innocence. It was when Persuasion no longer had any power to persuade that she had been forced to take matters into her own hands. Since there were no beneficent elders to instruct her, and none even to hold her back, for her equally innocent parents were quite content to keep her at home for as long as she wished, thinking her happy, she had, with uncharacteristic boldness, set about loo
king for a husband. She had not found one. It seemed that she was too unaware even for that stratagem to succeed. Almost unknowingly she had passed the age of early engagements, early marriages, and had become an old maid. That was what the smiles had forecast for her all along.

  Mrs May’s lips twisted wryly as she reviewed the facts that no-one had suspected. They were not facts on which she cared to dwell, yet in their way they were relevant to her eventual marriage, to her austere widowhood, even to her present position as Steve’s unwilling landlady. It seemed that all it took was that look of veiled derision on Ann’s face as she contemplated her grandmother’s transparent crossness to send Mrs May, a mere spectator, back to her own past, and the manner in which she had conquered the threat, as she saw it, of female calculation, and allied herself, however temporarily and dangerously, with the world of men. For she had become, for a brief and hallucinatory period, a woman for whom finer considerations were in abeyance, and all that was once signified by the thought of love conspicuously absent. And she had done this deliberately, aware of her fall from virtue, aware that innocence prolonged beyond a certain point can become ignorance, aware that the time had come to shed both. Persuasion was removed from her bedside table and put back on the bookshelf. She rather thought she had not taken it down since.