When the first shout for help sounded, the woman who was leaning on the rail started up and gave a little jump of surprise. She looked around quickly and saw sailing past her through the air this small man dressed in white shorts and tennis shoes, spread-eagled and shouting as he went. For a moment she looked as though she weren’t quite sure what she ought to do: throw a life belt, run away and give the alarm, or simply turn and yell. She drew back a pace from the rail and swung half round facing up to the bridge, and for this brief moment she remained motionless, tense, undecided. Then almost at once she seemed to relax, and she leaned forward far over the rail, staring at the water, where it was turbulent in the ship’s wake. Soon a tiny round black head appeared in the foam, an arm was raised about it, once, twice, vigorously waving, and a small faraway voice was heard calling something that was difficult to understand. The woman leaned still farther over the rail, trying to keep the little bobbing black speck in sight, but soon, so very soon, it was such a long way away that she couldn’t even be sure it was there at all.
After a while another woman came out on deck. This one was bony and angular, and she wore horn-rimmed spectacles. She spotted the first woman and walked over to her, treading the deck in the deliberate, military fashion of all spinsters.
‘So there you are,’ she said.
The woman with the fat ankles turned and looked at her, but said nothing.
‘I’ve been searching for you,’ the bony one continued. ‘Searching all over.’
‘It’s very odd,’ the woman with the fat ankles said. ‘A man dived overboard just now, with his clothes on.’
‘Nonsense!’
‘Oh yes. He said he wanted to get some exercise and he dived in and didn’t even bother to take his clothes off.’
‘You better come down now,’ the bony woman said. Her mouth had suddenly become firm, her whole face sharp and alert, and she spoke less kindly than before. ‘And don’t you ever go wandering about on deck alone like this again. You know quite well you’re meant to wait for me.’
‘Yes, Maggie,’ the woman with the fat ankles answered, and again she smiled, a tender, trusting smile, and she took the hand of the other one and allowed herself to be led away across the deck.
‘Such a nice man,’ she said. ‘He waved to me.’
William and Mary
First published in Kiss Kiss (1960)
William Pearl did not leave a great deal of money when he died, and his will was a simple one. With the exception of a few small bequests to relatives, he left all his property to his wife.
The solicitor and Mrs Pearl went over it together in the solicitor’s office, and when the business was completed, the widow got up to leave. At that point, the solicitor took a sealed envelope from the folder on his desk and held it out to his client.
‘I have been instructed to give you this,’ he said. ‘Your husband sent it to us shortly before he passed away.’ The solicitor was pale and prim, and out of respect for a widow he kept his head on one side as he spoke, looking downwards. ‘It appears that it might be something personal, Mrs Pearl. No doubt you’d like to take it home with you and read it in privacy.’
Mrs Pearl accepted the envelope and went out into the street. She paused on the pavement, feeling the thing with her fingers. A letter of farewell from William? Probably, yes. A formal letter. It was bound to be formal – stiff and formal. The man was incapable of acting otherwise. He had never done anything informal in his life.
My dear Mary, I trust that you will not permit my departure from this world to upset you too much, but that you will continue to observe those precepts which have guided you so well during our partnership together. Be diligent and dignified in all things. Be thrifty with your money. Be very careful that you do not … et cetera, et cetera.
A typical William letter.
Or was it possible that he might have broken down at the last moment and written her something beautiful? Maybe this was a beautiful tender message, a sort of love letter, a lovely warm note of thanks to her for giving him thirty years of her life and for ironing a million shirts and cooking a million meals and making a million beds, something that she could read over and over again, once a day at least, and she would keep it for ever in the box on her dressing-table together with her brooches.
There is no knowing what people will do when they are about to die, Mrs Pearl told herself, and she tucked the envelope under her arm and hurried home.
She let herself in the front door and went straight to the living-room and sat down on the sofa without removing her hat or coat. Then she opened the envelope and drew out the contents. These consisted, she saw, of some fifteen or twenty sheets of lined white paper
, folded over once and held together at the top left-hand corner by a clip. Each sheet was covered with the small, neat, forward-sloping writing that she knew so well, but when she noticed how much of it there was, and in what a neat businesslike manner it was written, and how the first page didn’t even begin in the nice way a letter should, she began to get suspicious.
She looked away. She lit herself a cigarette. She took one puff and laid the cigarette in the ashtray.
If this is about what I am beginning to suspect it is about, she told herself, then I don’t want to read it.
Can one refuse to read a letter from the dead?
Yes.
Well …
She glanced over at William’s empty chair on the other side of the fireplace. It was a big brown leather armchair, and there was a depression on the seat of it, made by his buttocks over the years. Higher up, on the backrest, there was a dark oval stain on the leather where his head had rested. He used to sit reading in that chair and she would be opposite him on the sofa, sewing on buttons or mending socks or putting a patch on the elbow of one of his jackets, and every now and then a pair of eyes would glance up from the book and settle on her, watchful, but strangely impersonal, as if calculating something. She had never liked those eyes. They were ice blue, cold, small, and rather close together, with two deep vertical lines of disapproval dividing them. All her life they had been watching her. And even now, after a week alone in the house, she sometimes had an uneasy feeling that they were still there, following her around, staring at her from doorways, from empty chairs, through a window at night.
Slowly she reached into her handbag and took out her spectacles and put them on. Then, holding the pages up high in front of her so that they caught the late afternoon light from the window behind, she started to read: