Emma Eldred was not a large woman, but gave the appearance of it: forty-eight years old, her face innocent of cosmetics, her broad feet safely encased in scuffed shoes decorated by leather tassels which somehow failed to cut a dash. Emma had known Ginny’s husband since childhood. She might have married him; but Felix was not what Emma considered a serious man. Their relationship had, she felt, borne all the weight it could. As Ginny approached, Emma shrunk into herself, inwardly but not outwardly. A stranger, only partly apprised of the situation, would have taken Ginny for the smart little mistress, and Emma for the tatty old wife.
The women stood together for a moment, not speaking; then as the wind cut her to the bird-bones, Ginny took a half-step closer, and stood holding her mink collar up to her throat. ‘Well, Ginny,’ Emma said, after a moment. ‘I’m not here to act as a wind-break.’ She drew her right hand from her pocket, and gave Ginny a pat on the shoulder. It was a brusque gesture, less of consolation than of encouragement; what you might give a weary nag, as it faces the next set of hurdles.
Ginny averted her face. Tears sprang into her eyes. She took out her tiny handkerchief again. ‘Why, Emma?’ she said. She sounded fretful, but as if her fretfulness might turn to rage. ‘Tell me why. You’re a doctor.’
‘But not his doctor.’
‘He wasn’t ill. He never had a day’s illness.’
Emma fixed her gaze on the tassels of her shoes. She imagined herself looking right through her dead lover; through his customary tweed jacket, his lambswool pullover, his striped shirt, through the skin, through the flesh, into the arteries where Felix’s blood moved slowly, a dark underground stream with silted banks. ‘No one could have known,’ she said. ‘No one could have spared you this shock, Ginny. Will you be all right, my dear?’
‘There’s plenty of insurance,’ Ginny said. ‘And the house. I’ll move of course. But not just yet.’
‘Don’t do anything in a hurry,’ Emma said. She had meant her question in a broad sense, not as an inquiry into Ginny’s financial standing. She raised her head, and saw that they were being watched. The eyes of the other mourners were drawn to them, however hard those mourners tried to look away. What do they all think, Emma wondered: that there will be some sort of embarrassing scene? Hardly likely. Not at this time. Not in this place. Not amongst people like ourselves, who have been reared in the service of the great god Self-Control. ‘Ginny,’ she said, ‘you mustn’t stand about here. Let Daniel drive you home.’
‘A few people are coming back,’ Ginny said. She looked at Emma in faint surprise, as if it were natural that she would know the arrangements. ‘You should come back too. Let me give you some whisky. A freezing day like this…Still, better than rain. Claire’s staying on over the weekend.’ Ginny raised her hand, and twitched at her collar again. ‘Emma, I’d like to see you. Like you to come to the house…Mrs Gleave is making vol-au-vents…’ Her voice tailed off entirely.
Emma’s brother, Ralph Eldred, loomed purposefully behind them: a solid figure, hands scrunched into the pockets of his dark wool overcoat. Ginny looked up. The sight of Ralph seemed to restore her. ‘Ralph, thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘Come back with us and have some whisky.’
‘I should take myself off,’ Ralph said. ‘I have to go to Norwich this afternoon to a meeting. But naturally if you want me to, Ginny…if I can be of any help…’ He was weighing considerations, as he always did; his presence was wanted on every hand, and it was simply a question of where he was needed most.
‘Why, no,’ Ginny said. ‘It was a courtesy, Ralph. Do run along.’
She managed a smile. It was her husband’s under-occupation that had freed him for his long years of infidelity; but Ralph’s days were full, and everybody knew it. There were advantages, she saw, in being married to a man who thought only of work, God and family; even though the Eldred children did look so down at heel, and had been so strangely brought up, and even though Ralph’s wife was worn to a shadow slaving for his concerns.
Ralph’s wife Anna wore a neat black pillbox hat. It looked very smart, though it was not remotely in fashion. Lingering in the background, she gave Ginny a nod of acknowledgement and sympathy. It was an Anna Eldred nod, full of I-do-not-intrude. Ginny returned it; then Ralph took his wife’s arm, and squired her away at a good clip towards their parked car.
Ginny looked after them. ‘You wonder about marriage,’ she said suddenly. ‘Are marriages all different, or all alike?’
Emma shrugged, shoulders stiff inside her old coat. ‘No use asking me, Ginny.’
Inside the car, Ralph said, ‘It’s not right, you know. It’s not, is it? For Emma to find out like that. More or less by chance. And only when it was all over.’
‘It was all over very quickly,’ Anna said. ‘From what I gather.’
‘Yes, but to have no priority in being told – ’
‘I expect you think Ginny should have rung her from the hospital, do you? Just given her a tinkle from the intensive-care unit?’
‘ – to have no right to know. That’s what galls me. It’s inhuman. And now Ginny gets all the sympathy, all the attention. I’m not saying she doesn’t need and deserve it. But Emma gets nothing, not a word. Only this public embarrassment.’
‘I see – you think that as Emma was the maîtresse en titre, she should be allowed to put on a show of her own?’ Anna sighed. ‘I’m sure Felix has left her some fine diamonds, and a château for her old age.’
A contractor’s van drew up in front of the Eldreds’ car, adding to the traffic jam; restoration work was going on at the church. Two workmen got out, and began to untie a ladder from the roof-rack. A lesser man with Ralph’s schedule would have fretted at the delay. But Ralph showed his impatience only by a little tapping of his forefinger against the steering wheel. There was a school nearby, and the voices of children drifted from the playground, carried on the wind like gulls’ cries.
The couple who blocked them drove off, nodding, raising hands in a stiff-fingered wave. The contractor moved his van. Ralph pulled out on to the road. Anna saw the children dashing and bumping and careening behind a fence: bullets trussed in duffle coats, their faces hidden under hoods.
The route home lay inland, through narrow lanes between farms: flat airy fields, where tractors lay at rest. Ralph pulled up to let a duck dawdle across the road, on its way from a barnyard to nowhere. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what’s the worst of it. Emma’s got nothing. Nothing. She’s given twenty years to Felix and now she’s on her own.’
‘Emma’s given something,’ Anna said. ‘I think to say that she’s given twenty years is being melodramatic.’
‘Why is it,’ Ralph said, ‘that women manage to be so cool in these situations? What’s all this keeping up a good front? Why do they think they have to do it? I heard Ginny talking about insurance policies, for God’s sake.’
‘I only mean, that Emma’s life has suited her. She had what she wanted – a part-time man. Felix didn’t use her. The reverse, I think. She could have married. If she’d chosen to. She didn’t have to wait on Felix.’
‘Married? Could she?’ Ralph turned his head.
‘Look out,’ Anna said, with a languor born of experience. Ralph put his foot on the brake; a farm truck slowly extruded its back end from a muddy and half-concealed driveway.
‘Sorry,’ Ralph said. ‘Could she? Who could she have married then?’
‘Oh Ralph, I don’t mean any one person, not this particular man or that particular man…I only mean that if she had wanted to marry, if that had been what she preferred, she could have done it. But marriage entails things, like learning to boil eggs. Things that are