After Rain Read Online Free PDF Page B

someone else’s wife, a wife with someone else’s husband: Margy could tell at once. ‘Of course,’ she’d said when they asked if they might look around, knowing that they wouldn’t buy anything: people in such circumstances rarely did. ‘Oh, isn’t that pretty!’ the girl whispered now, taken with a framed pot-lid - an 1868 rifle contest in Wimbledon, colourfully depicted.
        ‘Forty-five pounds I think,’ Margy replied when she was asked the price, and went away to consult the price book. One day, she believed, Francesca would pay cruelly for her passing error of judgement in marrying the man she had. Hearing about the fuss over the golf-bag, she had felt that instinct justified: the marriage would go from bad to worse, from fusses and quarrels over two little boys’ obstreperousness to fusses and quarrels about everything else, a mound of pettiness accumulating, respect all gone and taking with it what once had seemed like love. Too often Margy had heard from married men the kind of bitter talk that was the evidence of this, and had known she would have heard still worse from the wives they spoke of. Yet just as often, she fairly admitted, people made a go of it. They rarely said so because of course that wasn’t interesting, and sometimes what was making a go of it one day was later, in the divorce courts, called tedium.
        ‘Look in again,’ she invited the summery couple as they left without the pot-lid.
        ‘Thanks a lot,’ the man said, and the girl put her head on one side, a way of indicating, possibly, that she was grateful also.
        Margy had mentioned Sebastian at lunch, not because she wished to look him up on her own account but because it occurred to her that Sebastian was just the person to jolly Francesca out of her gloom. Sebastian was given to easy humour and exuded an agreeableness that was pleasant to be exposed to. Since he had once, years ago, wanted to marry Francesca, Margy often imagined what her friend’s household would have been like with Sebastian there instead.
        ‘Hullo,’ her employer said, entering the shop with a Regency commode and bringing with him the raw scent of the stuff he dabbed on his underarms, and a whiff of beer.
        ‘Handsome,’ Margy remarked, referring to the commode.
        
        It was Francesca who telephoned Sebastian. ‘A voice from the past,’ she said and he knew immediately, answering her by name. He was pleased she’d rung, he said, and all the old telephone inflections, so familiar once, registered again as their conversation progressed. ‘Margy?’ he repeated when Francesca suggested lunch for three. He sounded disappointed, but Francesca hardly noticed that, caught up with so much else, wondering how in fact it would affect everything if, somehow or other, Sebastian and Margy hit it off now, as she and Sebastian had in the past. She knew Sebastian hadn’t married. He had been at her wedding; she would have been at his, their relationship transformed on both sides then. Like Margy, Francesca imagined, Sebastian had freewheeled through the time that had passed since. At her wedding she had guessed they would lose touch, and in turn he had probably guessed that that was, sensibly, what she wanted. Sebastian, who had never honoured much, honoured that. When marriage occurs, the past clams up, lines are drawn beneath a sub-total.
        ‘Well, well, well,’ he murmured at La Trota, embracing Margy first and then Francesca. There were flecks of grey in his fair hair; his complexion was a little ruddier. But his lazy eyes were touched with the humour that both women remembered, and his big hands seemed gentle on the table.
        ‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ Sebastian said, choosing Francesca to say it to.
        
        ‘Oh heavens, I’ve said the wrong thing!’ a woman exclaimed in horror at a party, eyes briefly closed, a half-stifled breath drawn in.
        ‘No, not at