Distant Voices

‘Money for what?’ You earn a damn good salary, so you don’t need it. I don’t need it. You had a house, I had a flat, did we need both, for God’s sake? Why should I risk a coronary for the sake of a subscription to a golf club full of bores and for the Inland Revenue?’

‘Gerald, that’s a very trite and short-sighted remark, if you don’t mind my saying so. And how,’ she flashed at him suddenly, ‘do you know how much I earn?’

‘I own your company, dear. No,’ he raised his hand as she put down her cup indignantly, about to speak. ‘No. You got your job on merit alone, and I am totally uninterested in policy. Now, as I was saying, I thought, Why don’t I drop out like all those delightful chaps one sees singing in the underground. The trouble is, I can’t sing. I expect you remember that. I can’t paint, or pot or woodcarve, to earn enough money to subsist, so I had to resort to begging. More coffee, please.’

She poured it for him without a word.

‘I told James to stop the car. I told him to take a month’s salary in lieu, drive the car home, lock it up, turn off the gas and the electricity in the flat, stick the keys back through the letter box – oh and empty the fridge. I thought of that. Then I called the office and said, “I’ll be away for a year or so,” and gave my solicitor a ring, about power of attorney and that sort of thing. I bought a large cream doughnut, simply oozing cholesterol, and a can of beer, put all my loose change in the hat of one of those pathetic young men you see sitting leaning against walls with their dogs beside them and started walking. Right then and there, in my city suit.’ He threw back his head and laughed. ‘I bet you didn’t recognise it when I came in.’

‘Did you enjoy yourself?’ Zara tried not to sound shocked or angry.

‘Marvellously.’ He reached for the breadknife, cut an enormous wedge of bread and began heaping butter onto it. ‘I’ve been all over the south of England and right down to Cornwall, to all the little off the road places one misses in a beastly car. I’ve stuck it for eight months.’

‘Why did you come back here then?’

‘For one thing I was hungry this morning. For another, I wanted to see you again.’

‘Gerald. How could you afford the stamp and the paper for that letter?’ She was suddenly suspicious.

He looked embarrassed for the first time. ‘Well, the trouble is Zara that I’ve begun earning money again. First it was only casual jobs: car cleaning, fruit picking, even potato lifting once – God! What a job that was. Then one night in a pub, I happened to recite one of the poems I’d been making up on the road as I walked along. They passed the hat round and I made about seven pounds fifty. A fortune! Well, I’ve gone on from there. Each town and village I visited after that I’d chat up the landlord and stick a notice in his pub saying I was going to give a recital. Then afterwards I’d pass round the old hat.’

‘Gerald, you’re not serious!’ Zara looked at him with real admiration.

‘Well, the truth is dear,’ he looked down at the cup, half embarrassed. ‘I think I need an agent or something. You see I want to have them published. I know it’s silly, but I’ve got ambitions for them. I’ve found out what life is all about, you see. For me, it’s poetry.’

‘And you’d like me to act for you?’

‘Would you?’ He looked up eagerly.

‘Of course.’

Zara enjoyed dressing her husband as a poet. She spent the morning buying him jeans and shirts and a rather expensive-looking leather jacket. She even debated whether he would wear beads or a necklace, or a thong around his neck with a bead on it, but decided finally against it. He had after all been in the habit of wearing a pinstripe suit.

She had left him before setting out on her spree, reciting his poems to her dictating machine. When she got back, her cleaning lady was standing open-mouthed at the drawing room door, listening.

‘It’s filth, Mrs Lennox, real filth,’ the woman complained, jumping guiltily when she saw her employer. ‘But it’s beautiful. I could listen for hours, so I could.’ She giggled skittishly.

Zara stood beside her and together they heard Gerald reciting. It was indeed beautiful.

After a moment he swung round, microphone in hand, and saw them. To Zara’s amazement he broke off abruptly, blushing. ‘I didn’t know there was anyone there,’ he murmured and then he laughed. ‘They’re not really for ladies’ ears.’

‘Nonsense. They’re damn good.’ Zara went in and reaching up planted a quick kiss on his cheek. ‘I’ll start putting them on the word processor for you this afternoon.’

They decided they would call him Noxel, which was Lennox inside out. No other name. It looked right in print, and would sound good, Zara thought, on the radio. She ignored his comment that it made him sound a little like a lavatory cleaner.

Gerald Lennox had been, they both agreed, a bore.

She took him round London, showing him off to her new, trendy friends, and she bathed in reflected glory as Gerald’s exquisitely metred adjectives and highly coloured phraseology assailed their ears. She had always suspected they cultivated her acquaintance for her money and contacts. Now she had produced someone who belonged to their world. More than belonged. He actually did things. Most of them, she now discovered, claimed themselves passive rather than active participants in the arts. Zara felt herself to be one-up at last and was very pleased with her eccentric, wandering poet.

Together they giggled over the raised eyebrows of the neighbours. It seemed no one recognised him.

Then Zara’s lover came back from two months in Cape Town. He let himself in half an hour before she was due home from the office and found Gerald sitting at her computer.

‘My dear chap,’ Gerald glanced up and then rose, his hand outstretched. ‘I knew you must exist, but she never admitted it, bless her.’ He grinned amicably.

The other’s mouth fell open, and he felt uncertainly for the nearest chair and sat down heavily. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t believe we’ve met?’

Gerald leaned back in his seat. ‘I’m Zara’s husband, actually. But not to worry –’ as the other man rose abruptly to his feet, Gerald lifted his hand to reassure him. ‘I’m off. I’ve been wanting to move on for some time now, but I didn’t like to leave her on her own. She’s been a brick these last few weeks.’

He shuffled his papers together and collected the pages he had been printing. ‘Give me ten minutes old chap. We’ll manage the turn-round before she gets home.’ He took the stairs two at a time.

The new arrival sat, looking rather stunned, for a moment. Then, a trifle wearily, he rose to his feet and went to pour himself a drink. When Zara came home he was in the bath with a large gin.

She saw the note from Gerald on the hall table and knew without reading it that he had gone. She considered for a moment and then breathed a deep sigh of relief. It had been an interesting interlude, but not one she had wanted prolonged. It spoiled her concentration at the office.

Moment of Truth (#ucb02431f-148f-514c-8134-1ff71355e2c9)

Steve and I had known each other since we were children, brought up in the same village, growing together, and at last, realising that we were in love, we became engaged on my eighteenth birthday. Then began our struggle to save enough money for a deposit on our own home. Steven didn’t want us to marry until, as he put it, he could support me properly, or at least put a roof over my head, and in spite of my pleas that it didn’t matter, our engagement stretched out for one and then two years. Steve was a mechanic at the local garage in the village and was hoping desperately to be offered a partnership by the owner, so the future looked good, if only we could save enough for that deposit. And then something happened which was to have a profound effect on our lives together. Steve’s great aunt Irene who had looked after him when he was a little boy suddenly had a stroke and they said that she would never be able to manage on her own again; even when she was strong enough to leave the hospital she would have to go into a home for elderly people where she could be properly looked after.

As soon as she was well enough to have visitors she called Steve and me to her bedside. She could hardly speak, and her poor withered hand lay paralysed on the sheet but she made it clear, with tears in her eyes, that her cottage was ours. It was to be a wedding present.

Six weeks later we were married. The cottage was tiny, but it was our own home at last and I adored it. The low oak-beamed parlour had two rocking chairs and a table and there was room for little else. The bedroom window opened out under the thatch and wisteria and honeysuckle climbed round it. I remember I leaned out of that window on the first morning after we moved in and took a deep breath of the fresh air and I could have cried for happiness.

I worked as a waitress at the local Tudor Tea Rooms before we married and I kept on my job. For one thing I enjoyed it; for another we were still saving all we could. The cottage needed modernising badly and we wanted to start a family of course, so it seemed sensible to work all the hours we could fit in, putting every penny we earned into the bank. Although we were both tired and strained more often than not, we stayed happy. Or I thought we did. But perhaps without our realising it, earning money had by now become for us both an end in itself, more important even than our love for each other.

The trouble started in the summer two years after we were married. We were always very busy at that time of year in the café, for hundreds of tourists crowded into our tiny Cotswold village to see its beauties and its famous manor house, and often I would come home too exhausted even to give Steve his supper before I tumbled into bed, falling asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow. I was much too tired to make love.

It was about then that Steve started working overtime in the evenings. ‘I might as well, for all I see of you,’ he said rather bitterly. ‘And besides, I can’t bear to see you so tired.’ And he had weighed my heavy blonde hair – the same colour as his almost – in his hands, and kissed me rather wistfully on the cheek. ‘If I work extra perhaps soon you can give up the waitressing altogether.’

I glanced up at him gratefully and tried not to feel guilty as I noticed, for the first time, that he too was tired, and his face pallid from lying all day under cars when everyone else in the village was deeply tanned from the summer sun.

And so it happened that we had hardly seen each other for the last three months or so at all. We were saving, yes; but without my realising it, our marriage was fading away.

I was feeling especially tired and depressed when one day, as I was serving at the front tables, the ones which looked out of the mullioned windows across the green, a young man came in. He was of middle height, not terribly good-looking, rather swarthy, but he had the most incredible eyes. Light grey, so light they were like silver streaks in his tanned face. He beckoned me over.

‘What’s your name, sweetheart?’ he asked in an American accent.

I smiled at him easily, whisking crumbs off the table with my cloth. I was used to this.

‘I’m Linda,’ I smiled. ‘What can I get you, sir?’

‘Tea. An English tea with cream cakes and scones please, Linda my love, and later perhaps you can show me the town?’

‘Sorry sir, my husband will be expecting me home,’ I answered with a practised smile. I turned to get his order.

Usually I dismissed passes like this man’s without another thought, but something about his eyes, and the way his face fell when his gaze rested on the wedding ring which I waved under his nose, tugged at my heart.

When I took the tray to his table I asked casually, ‘You all on your own then?’