Past Imperfect

‘The Americans call it “closure.”

‘Well, I wouldn’t, but I do know what they mean. You keep imagining that he’s in a coma somewhere or struggling with amnesia, or he escaped and had a nervous breakdown in Waikiki. Of course, you tell yourself to accept it, not to believe anything different, but you can’t help it. Every time the doorbell goes unexpectedly, or the telephone rings very late at night…’ she smiled gently at her own foolishness. ‘You do get over it in the end.’

‘Awful.’

‘But you mustn’t think I’m a sad person. Please don’t.’ Candida’s tone had changed and she was looking straight at my eyes. I could see that she was keen to convince me, and I think she was telling the truth. I suppose it was somehow a case of being loyal to his memory. ‘I’m not at all sad. Really. I was sad before I met Harry, and trapped at the end of a cul-de-sac with a boy half my family felt uncomfortable with. I know you all thought me ridiculous in those days.’

‘Not ridiculous.’

‘Ridiculous. A loud, red-faced bed-hopper who was embarrassing to have around.’ This was all true so I didn’t contradict her, but as with almost all of the women I had visited I had that revelation of how much better we would have got on forty years before if we had only known each other’s true natures. Candida shrugged off these memories with happier ones. ‘Then Harry arrived one day and just saved me. He saved us. I don’t know to this day what he saw in me, but we never had an unhappy hour.’

‘He loved you.’ Fu

She nodded, her eyes starting to glisten. ‘I think he did. God knows why. And he took us both on. He adopted Archie, you know, completely legally, and then we had two more, and when he…’ I could see that despite her strictures her eyes were filling, and so were mine. ‘When he died it turned out he’d left some money equally to the three of them. Just split three ways. He made no distinction. And that meant so much to Archie. So very much. Did you know that all their mobiles worked, when they were trapped in the tower?’

I nodded. ‘I read about that.’

‘And what was so extraordinary, what was wonderful really, was that they didn’t, most of them anyway, ring to yell for help. They rang the people who were nearest to them, their wives and husbands and children, to say how much they loved them. Harry did that. Of course I’d turned mine off – typical – and when I tried to call him back I couldn’t get through, but he left a message saying how marrying me was the best thing he’d ever done. I saved it. I’ve got it now. He thanks me for marrying him. Can you imagine that? In the midst of all that fear and horror he thanked me for marrying him. So you see, I’m not sad at all in the greater scheme of things. I’m lucky.’

I looked at her coarse, ruddy face and her brimming eyes, and I knew she was absolutely right. ‘So you are,’ I said. I had arrived prepared to pity her, but in fact the time she’d spent since we last really talked had been infinitely more satisfactory than that same period in Terry’s life or Lucy’s or Dagmar’s or, heaven knows, Joa

She nodded. ‘I did. But proper publishing. Not the vanity stuff I thought would be my only way in. Harry made me. He pulled a string and got me a job as a reader at a small outfit that specialised in women writers. But I stuck at it and they kept me on. Eventually I edited quite a few books.’

‘But not any more?’

‘Not at the moment. I felt I needed to take time off, when…’ I nodded, anxious not to return her to that dreadful day. ‘But I’m thinking of going back. Actually, I was rather good at it.’ In this simple phrase I knew what her debt to Harry Stanforth was and why she still fought for people to appreciate her luck in finding him. This Candida had self-worth, of which there’d hardly been a trace when I had known her in her ugly, angry, unhappy youth. In those days her childhood was too recent for its ill effects to have been set aside. ‘The fact is I had twenty-three years with a terrific, honourable, lovely, loving man.’ It was a simple, moving tribute and I had no difficulty in liking Harry enormously on the strength of it. She leant towards me and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘I’d rather be in my shoes than Serena’s.’ And we laughed, which brought things to an end. Not long afterwards, we went upstairs to change.

I was sleeping in a panelled, corner room, painted off-white, with large windows on two sides, and far-reaching views across the well-wooded park. There was a pretty, canopied bed, upholstered in good, if old, chintz and some Audubon prints of birds around the walls. It was all reasonably attractive, if unoriginal, but the faded colours of the material and the bright shocking pink of the mounts on the pictures made the whole effect feel very 1970s, as if no money had been spent anywhere in its vicinity for thirty years at least. I had my own bathroom, with more of the same colour scheme and a hot tap that made distant, gurgling noises full of intent but the water, when it came, was less than tepid. I sponged myself down as best I could and pulled some clothes out of the case.

The posh English love to sound informal. ‘Nobody’s coming,’ they say. ‘It’ll just be us.’ Which it seldom is. ‘You won’t have to do a thing,’ when of course you will. Most of all, when they say ‘don’t change’ they don’t mean it. They do mean you are not to put on a di

The re-rise of grand is rather interesting in this context as well, or it is to me. Contrary to the expectations of only a few years ago, di