They were a conspiracy, a tacit alliance. Weeks and months might go by without contact, and then they would resume the association as though they had parted yesterday. Phone calls were elliptical, each knowing how the other would react. “Why aren’t you a man?” said Kath. “Or why can’t we be gay? Then that would be me all sorted out.” If any of her men met Mary they shied away, sensing some sort of competition that they could not match. Kath never asked what Mary thought of this man, or of that; she would just say, eventually, “He was no go, of course.” And they would talk of something else. She was blithely agreeable to Mary’s occasional lovers; when they were gone she would say, “Poor him. But he wouldn’t do. And you don’t even need him, do you?”
Over the years, they were close, yet also far apart—separate lives linked only by the crucial semaphore of friendship. Kath observed the lame ducks, the hangers-on, alert to their status; but when such people were around Mary she was at her warmest, her most friendly. Once, when they were alone after a succession of such importunates, she said, “Am I like that? Come on, you can be honest.” And Mary had said, “You never could be. Whatever happens to you, that’s impossible.”
She knew what happened, from time to time. Not always. On occasion, she knew from Kath’s shuttered look; she saw that beneath the surface gaiety something darkly thrashed. She knew also not to ask. She saw Kath as in perpetual flight from inquiry, from scrutiny; whatever it was that went on there could only be glimpsed. But once in a while she would learn in full: “Sorry about this,” Kath would say. “But I need to dump on someone, and it seems to be you. Actually, there is only you.”
Glyn Peters and Mary Packard circled one another like suspicious dogs. On the first occasion that they met, Mary felt her own rictus of welcome to be more like bared fangs. Why him? she was thinking. Why this one? Why now? She had noted Kath’s state of tension. She saw Glyn as some kind of opportunist marauder, a sexual freebooter. When Kath told her—when she announced, “Actually, I’m going to marry him”—Mary had said, “You’re not pregnant, are you?”
Kath went suddenly still. She looked away. “Oh no,” she said. “Oh,
dear
me, no.” There was a silence. Then Kath spoke again—a small, quiet voice: “I think he loves me.” Mary could find nothing to say.
And so, on this day so much later, when Mary watches Glyn get out of his car, look around, open the gate, and walk up her garden path, she sees a man who carries baggage—the baggage of all those years. He is freighted with her own initial mistrust—mistrust which gave way eventually to tolerance. She sees a man she once disliked, and then got used to, because there was no alternative and he was by then an unavoidable feature of her friend’s life. She sees a man she sparred with on occasion, a man she thought too ready with an opinion, a man inclined to talk everyone else into the ground. She is startled to see that this man is now an older man, and then remembers her own grizzled head. All the same, he is palpably the same man, and all around him there float other times, and other people. He brings Kath; he brings Kath’s voice saying, Glyn this, Glyn that, Glyn’s away for a few days so I’m going to play hooky and come to see you, right? He brings that house of theirs in Melchester, which Mary seldom visited and always found in some way a house without a heart, a house in which two people came and went but in which they somehow did not live. He brings Elaine and Nick and their place—gatherings in that crowded kitchen, Kath with Polly dancing attendance, Elaine dishing up food to a dozen people, Nick on a roll about some project, Oliver whatsit hanging about at the edge. He brings . . .
Glyn arrives at the cottage door. He lifts a hand and knocks. Mary opens the studio window. “I’m in here,” she says.
When Glyn opens the garden gate, he is pitched into uncertainty. He no longer knows quite why he has come to see Mary Packard. What on earth got into him? Why did he make that impulsive phone call, so essential at the time?
He rallies. He takes in his surroundings; he sees a limestone cottage with mullioned windows, seventeenth-century, with brick chimney and slate roof of a later date. He heads up the garden path and knocks at the door. And a voice comes at him sideways. He looks round, and sees her. Oh, it is her all right, though he is surprised to see that she too has . . . well, moved on.
“Ah,” he says. “Mary.”
Afterwards he will try to piece together what was said and will find that what he has is an accumulation of language and of feeling: her words, his mute responses. His own words are not much in evidence; he is conscious of having spoken at the outset and then fallen silent. At one point she too stops speaking and the silence hangs in the room—Mary’s deeply inhabited room, which is kitchen, sitting room, office, in which an old railway-station clock softly ticks and the dresser is crammed with seashells, lumps of rock, grasses, and a sheep’s skull. “I seem to have rather shut you up,” she says. “Sorry about that.” And he remembers spreading his hands in a gesture of . . . what? Defeat? Concession? Repudiation?
That would have been way on into the afternoon. After the initial niceties, the move into the cottage, the making of coffee. After his opening moves, Mary sitting there, saying nothing, that look in her eye. After he had made his pitch; after he had been careful, candid, persuasive.
Some while after that. After Mary had begun to talk, had been talking for what seemed a long time. Talking about Kath. You want to know about Kath? she had said. Right, then, I’ll tell you about Kath.
Actually, I’m not fooled, Glyn, she said. Stuff this memoir. There isn’t any memoir, is there? I don’t know what it is that’s bugging you—but, whatever it is, you’ve become obsessed with Kath, haven’t you? Obsessed in a way that you never were when she was alive, I suspect—at least not after you’d married her.
This is when the words begin to pile up, when he simply listens, despite himself, when he is conscious of kaleidoscopic emotions. A tide of resentment ebbs, and is replaced by something else that will surface fully much later on—tomorrow and tomorrow. Mary talks about a Kath whom Glyn seems not to have known. This is when she talks about the miscarriage. You never knew about that, did you? she says. Kath told me you didn’t. She wouldn’t have you know. You were away somewhere when it happened—in the States, I think she said. She was going to tell you about the pregnancy when you got back. It was a while ago—two or three years after you were married. She was working for some arts festival at the time.
You hadn’t realized she wanted a child. How much she did. Neither did I, until then. Afterwards, she said, Maybe just as well, Glyn wouldn’t have taken all that kindly to the idea. But it wasn’t just as well, it was just about as bad as anything could have been.
It was the second. The second miscarriage. The second non-baby. The first one wasn’t yours. Way back, that was. When she was in her twenties. She told me about it once in an offhand way—that way that always set alarm bells ringing. I asked her if she’d have stayed with the father, if things had turned out otherwise, if she hadn’t lost the baby—and she said, Oh yes, for that I would have. You bet. Anything, for that.
You want to know about Kath’s friends? Mary says. Well, that’s me, mainly. But you always knew about me. You want to know about Kath’s men friends, don’t you? Is that what’s bugging you? If so, you’re on a hiding to nothing, Glyn. There was no string of lovers. There’s nothing under the carpet.
So he tells her what is bugging him. At least he has a card to play.
Yes, I knew, she says. Afterwards, I knew. When she was busy hating herself. Hating herself even more than usual.
She told me. She said, I’ve been doing something so stupid. So bloody pointless. Nick. She said.
Nick
, of all people. I remember her sitting there, looking utterly bleak.
And, no, I don’t know why. The sort of thing that brings the analysts out of the woodwork, isn’t it? What I can tell you is that it didn’t go on for long, and when it was over it was over. Nick, of course, is . . . well, you know Nick as well as I do. Better, indeed. Nick blows with the wind, doesn’t he? A seize-the-day man, Nick. And there was a streak of that in Kath—more than a streak. But with her it was because it was the only way she could keep the demons at bay—whatever they were, whatever it was that boiled away there, every so often. She had to keep on the move—get out, go somewhere, do something.
So that’s what’s bugging you. I remember the picnic at the Roman Villa. She was staying here for a day or two and either Elaine or Nick rang up and suggested we all meet up. You were off somewhere, presumably. The photo call I do not remember.
Mary’s voice conjures up the photograph, which Glyn does not want to see, ever again. He sidesteps, he backtracks.
Hating herself . . . ?
You didn’t know about that? Well, she was good at smoke-screens. Maybe there was a touch of acting talent after all—perhaps she shouldn’t have quit drama school so precipitously. Most people would never have known. But you . . .
You were married to her; you lived with her for ten years. This is unspoken, but rings out between them.
Again, don’t ask me why, says Mary. I don’t go in for amateur-shrink stuff. But that was how she was. Not always. Sometimes she could coast along fine. Then . . . wham! Oddly, she was often at her most beautiful when she was like that. Kind of glowing. Oh, you’d never have known. I only did because she told me. Once, just once. And after that I watched her.
I’ll tell you why she married you, Glyn. Out of all the men who went after her. She thought you loved her. Mary looks intently now at Glyn, and he finds he cannot meet her eye.
And at some point then, Glyn has had enough. He can’t manage any more of this, he wants out, he wants to get in the car and head away from Mary Packard, from what she has said. Except that nothing can now be unsaid, her voice will be there always. He must walk down her garden path with her words in his head, and take them home with him.
Elaine knows what she wants of Mary Packard, but she does not know how she will go about getting it. What she wants is precise in her mind, but is also impossible to specify. She wants to hear someone talk about Kath—someone who is not Polly, or Glyn, or Oliver Watson, or Nick—least of all Nick. Who is not maddening Cousin Linda. Someone who, like herself, speaks with authority. But something has happened to her confidence in that authority, over the last weeks; there have been subversive voices, there have been suggestions of lacunae, glimpses of things she does not understand.
She wants that confidence restored. She wants to hear that the voices are misleading, that she has not heard what she thinks she may have heard, that everything is as it always was.
She just wants to talk for a while about Kath to someone who knew her well. That is all she wants. Isn’t it?
And so she steps briskly from the car, opens the gate, walks up the path between the two little hedges of
Lavandula augustifolia
“Munstead” and raises her hand to knock on the door of Mary Packard’s cottage, which is thickly clad with
Clematis tangutica
and
Rosa
“New Dawn.”
“I’m afraid I’m a bit of a bolt from the blue,” says Elaine. “It’s been quite a while—”
“Not at all,” says Mary Packard. “I thought you’d come.”
Which is not what she should be saying, and Elaine is disconcerted.
That was at the beginning.
At the end, when Elaine walks away between the lavender hedges, she has this odd feeling that much time has passed, instead of an hour or two, during which she has become someone else. In one sense she is herself, but in another she has been entirely altered. The past has been reconstructed, and, with that, her own old certainties. She sees differently; she feels differently.
The nonbabies are now loud and clear, who did not exist a couple of hours ago. Kath’s nonchildren. Because of them—because of these beings who never were—there is a new flavor to much that was said, much that was done. When Kath speaks now, Elaine hears a new note in her voice. Kath says the same things, but she says them in a new way.
Why didn’t you
tell
me? says Elaine.
She sees Kath with Polly, dancing with her—small Polly, grown-up Kath—she sees her plaiting Polly’s hair, she sees her coming into the kitchen with Polly and a brimming basket of windfall apples.
I always thought you didn’t particularly
want
children, says Elaine. She speaks to the wheel of her car, to the driving mirror, to the tailgate of the lorry ahead of her, to Kath.
The nonchildren eclipse much else. She hears the nonchildren louder than anything that has been said. It is the nonchildren above all who have skewed things. They keep coming back—faceless, formless, significant.
Mary Packard knew, and Elaine did not. Friend; sister. Mary is perhaps embarrassed by this: I hadn’t entirely realized . . . she says. I knew that Glyn . . . but I thought that probably you . . . I see. Well, Kath would have had her reasons, I suppose, says Mary.
Quite, thinks Elaine. And the principal reason was probably me. How I am. How I was with her.
There is more, though. There is a subversive flow that occupies her as she drives mindlessly in the direction of home. The thing is, says Mary Packard, Kath always wanted to be someone else. She wanted to be you. She wanted to be me. She was stuck with the dictation of what she looked like, which pretty well determined her life, one realizes. If she hadn’t looked like that, quite different things might have happened. Different men. Different directions. She might have set to and learned a trade, like you and me. She once said—sitting out there, in my studio—she once said, There isn’t a single thing that I can do well, I’ve fiddled away at this and that ever since I can remember.
She wanted to be loved. Most people do, I suppose. But her more than most.