Traveller_Levin's Blog

Flights of Fancy

by William Trevor

IN HER MIDDLE AGE Sarah Machaen had developed the habit of nostalgically slipping back into her childhood. Often, on a bus or at a dinner party, she would find herself caught in a mesh of voices and events that had been real forty years ago. There were summer days in the garden of her father’s rectory, her brothers building another tree-house, her father asleep in a brown-and-orange striped deck-chair. In the cool untidy kitchen she helped her mother to make strawberry cake; she walked with the old spaniel, Dodge, to Mrs. Rolleston’s Post Office and Stores in the village, her shoes dusty as soon as she took a single step. On wet winter afternoon, cosy by the fire in the drawing-room, the family played consequences or card games, or listened to the wireless. The war brought black-out curtains and rationing, and two evacuees.

At forty-seven Sarah Machaen was reconciled to the fact that her plainness wasn’t going to go away. As a child she had believed that growing up would put paid to the face she couldn’t care for, that it would develop prettily in girlhood, as the ugly duckling had developed. “Oh, it’s quite common”, she heard a woman say to her mother. “Many a beauty was as plain as a pikestaff to begin with.” But no beauty dawned in Sarah’s face.

Her older brother became a clergyman like their father, her younger one an engineer. She herself, in 1955, found employment she enjoyed in the firm of Pollock-Brown Lighting. She became secretary to Mr. Everend, who at that time was assistant to the director in charge of publicity, whom he subsequently succeeded. The office was a bust one, and although Sarah had earlier had ambitions to work in the more cultural ambiance of a museum or a publishing house she soon found herself taking a genuine interest in Pollock-Brown’s range of well-designed products: light fittings that were increasingly specified by architects of taste all over Britain and Europe. The offices of the firm were in London, a large block of glass and concrete in Kingsway. Twenty miles away, in factories just beyong the Green Belt, the manufacture of the well-designed fitments took place.

Since 1960 Sarah had had a flat in Tufnell Park, which was quite convenient, the Northern line all the way to Tottenham Cour Road, the Central on to Holborn. The brother who was a clergyman lived in Harrogate and did not oftn come to London; the one who was an engineer had spent his life building dams in Africa and returned to England only with reluctance. Sarah’s parents, happily married for almost fifty years, had died within a month of one another in 1972, sharing a room in an old persons’ home that catered exclusively for the clergy and their wives.

But even so Sarah was not alone. She had many friends, made in Pollock-Brown and through the Bach choir in which she sang, and some that dated back to her schooldays. She was a popular choice as a godmother. She was invited to parties and went regularly to the theatre or to concerts, often with her friends, Anna, whose marriage had failed six years ago. She lived on her own in the flat in Tufnell Park now: when first she’d lived there she’d shared it with a girl called Elizabeth with whom she’d been at school. Elizabeth, a librarian, was bespectacled and rather fat, a chatterbox and a compulsive nibbler. She hadn’t been all that easy to live with but Sarah knew her well and appreciated her kindness and her warmth. It had astonished her when Elizabeth began to go out with a man she’d met in her library, a man whom she later became engaged to. It seemed to Sarah that Elizabeth wasn’t the kind of girl who became engaged, any more than she herself was, yet in the end Elizabeth married and went to live in Cricklewood, where she reared a family. Sarah took in another girl but this time the arrangement didn’t work because the new girl, a stranger to Sarah, kept having men in her bedroom. Sarah asked her to go, and did not attempt to replace her.

Almost every weekend she made the journey to Cricklewood to see Elizabeth and her family. The children loved her and often said so. Elizabeth’s husband enjoyed chatting to her, drinking gin and tonic, to which Sarah had become mildly addicted. It was a home-from-home, and it wasn’t the only one. No husband disliked Sarah. No one found her a bore. She brought sall presents when she visited. She struck the right note and fitted in.

Now and again these friends attempted to bring Sarah into contact with suitable men, but nothing ever came of such efforts. There’d been, while she was still at the secretarial college she’d attended, a man called George who had taken her out, who had embraced her and had once, in his bed-sitting room, begun to undress her. She had enjoyed these attentions even though their perpetrator was not a person she greatly cared for. She had been quite prepared to permit him to take her clothes off and then to proceed in whatever way he wished, but he had suddenly ppeared to change his mind, to lose interest or to develop nerves, it wasn’t clear which. She’d felt quite sick and shaky, sitting on his lap in an armchair, while his fingers fell away from the buttons he’d been undoing. A moment later he’d clambered to his feet and had filled a kettle for tea. As an experience, it was one that Sarah was destined never to forget. She recalled it often as she lay alone in bed at night, extending her companion’s desire and sometimes changing his identity before she did so.

Sarah was not obsessed by this and she made efforts not to dwell on it. She learnt to live with her frustrations, wondering as she grew older if some elderly widower, no longer moved by physical urges but seeking only and agreeable companion, might not one day propose marriage to her. Alone at night her thoughts went further, creating the widower as a blind man who could not even sense her plainness, whose fingers caressing her face felt a beauty that was not there. Other scenes took place, in which the widower ended by finding a vigour he thought he’d lost. It often astonished her in the daytime that she had imagined so.

On the other hand, her friend Anna, the one whose marriage had failed, lived a rackety life with men and sometimes said she envied Sarah the quietness of hers. Now and again, having dinner together after a visit to the theatre or a concert, Anna would refer to the lovers she’d had, castigating most of them as selfish. “How right you are”, she had a way of saying, “to steer clear of all that.” Sarah always laughed when Anna said that, pointing out that it hadn’t been her choice. “Oh, choice or not, by God you’re better off”, Anna would insist. “I really swear.” Then Anna met a Canadian, who married her and took her off to Montreal.

That was another person to miss, as she had missed the people of her childhood, and her friend Eliabeth – for it naturally wasn’t the same after Elizabeth married. She had often thought of telling Anna about her longing for a relationship with a man, but shyness had always held her back. The shyness had to do with not knowing enough, with having so little experience, the very opposite of Anna. Yet once, when they’d both had quite a lot of wine to drink, she’d almost asked her what she should do. “Just because I’m so wretchedly plain”, she’d almost said, “doesn’t mean I can do without things.” Nut she hadn’t said that, and now Anna was gone and there was no one else who wouldn’t have been just a little shocked to hear stuff like that. Not in a million years could she have said it to Elizabeth.

AND SO IT remained. No widower, elderly or otherwise, proposed marriage; no blind man proclaimed love. What happened was rather different from all that. Once a year, as Christmas approached, Pollock-Brown held its annual staff party at the factories beyond the Green Belt. Executive and clerical staff fro the building in Kingsway met the factory workers in their huge canteen, richly decorated now with Christmas hangings. Dancing took place. There was supper, and unlimited drinks at the firm’s expense. The managing director made a speech and the present chairman, Sir Robert Quinn, made a speech also, in the course of which he thanked his workers for their loyalty. A thousand Pollock-Brown employees let their hair down, typists and secretaries, directors, tea-women, mould-makers, van drivers, lorry drivers, warehousemen, finishers, polishers. In a formal manner Mr. Everend always reserved the first dance fr Sarah and she felt quite proud to be led on to the floor in the wake of Sir Robert and his secretary, a woman called Mrs. Mykers. After that the Christmas spirit really got going. Paper hats were supplied to everyone, including Sir Robert Quinn, Mr. Everend, and the managing director. One of the dispatch boys had once poured a little beer over Mr. Everend, because Mr. Everend always so entered into the spirit of things that horseplay with beer seemed quite in order. There were tales, many of them true, of sexual congress in out-of-the-way corners, particularly in store-rooms.

“Hullo”, a girl said, addressing Sarah in what for this one evening of the year was called the Ladies’ Powder Room. Female Staff a painted sign more ordinarily stated, hidden now beneath the festive card that bore the grander title.

“Hullo”, Sarah replied, unable to place the girl. She was small, with short black hair that was smooth and hung severely straight on either side of her face. She was pretty: an oval face with eyes almost as black as her hair, and a mouth that slightly pouted, dimpling her cheeks. Sarah frowned as the dimples came and went. The girl smiled in a friendly way. She said her name was Sandra Pond.

“You’re Everend’s girl”, she added.

“Secretary”, Sarah said.

“I meant that.” She laughed and the dimples danced about. “I didn’t mean nothing suspect, Miss Machaen.”

“Suspect?”

“You know.”

She wore a black dress with lace at her neck and wrists. Her feet were neat, in shiny black shoes. Her legs were slim, black-clad also. How nice to be so attractive! Sarah thought, a familiar reflection when meeting such girls for the first time. It wouldn’t even matter having a slack, lower-class accent, as this girl had. You’d give up a lot for looks like that.

“I’m in polishing”, the girl said. “Your plastic lamp-shades.”

“You don’t sound as if you like it.” Sarah laughed. She glanced at herself in the mirror above one of the two wash-basins. Hurriedly she looked away.

“It’s clean”, Sandra Pond said. “A polishing machine’s quite clean to operate.”

“Yes, I suppose it would be.”

“Care for a drink at all, Miss Machaen?”

“A drink?”

“Don’t you drink, Miss Machaen?”

“Well, yes, but –”

“We’re meant to mix at a thing like this. The peasants and the privileged.” She gave a rasping, rather unattractive laugh. “Come on”, she said.

Beneath the prettiness there was something hard about her. There were flashes of bitterness in the way she’d said “the peasants and the privileged”, and in the way she’d laughed and in the way she walked out of the Ladies’ Powder Room. She walked impatiently, as if she disliked being at the Christmas party. She was a pricky girl, Sarah said to herself, and she wasn’t at all glad that she’d fallen into conversation with her.

They sat down at a small table on the edge of the dance-floor. “What d’you drink?” the girl said, immediately getting to her feet again in an edgy way. “Whisky?”

“I’d like a gin and tonic.”

The dimples came and went, cracking the brittleness. The smile seemed disposed to linger but did not. “Don’t go way now”, the slack voice commanded as she jerked quickly away herself.

“SOMEONE LOOKING after you?” Dancing with the wife of the dispatch manager, Mr. Everend shouted jollily at Sarah. He wore a scarlet, cone-shaped paper hat. The wife of the dispatch manager was eyeing, over his shoulder, a sales executive called Chumm with whom, whenever it was possible, she went to bed.

“Yes, thanks, Mr. Everend”, Sarah answered, waving a hand to indicate that he mustn’t feel responsible for her.

“Horrid brute, that man”, Sandra Pond said, returning with their drinks. “Cheers”, she said, raising and touching Sarah’s glass with it.

“Cheers”, Sarah said, although it was a salutation she disliked.

“It began last year here,” Sandra Pond said, pointing with her glass at the dispatch manager’s wife. “Her and Chumm.”

“I’ve never met her actually.”

“You didn’t miss nothing. That Chumm’s a villain.”

“He has that reputation.”

“He screwed her in a stor-room. I walked in on top of them.”

“Oh.”

“Oh in-bloody-deed.” She laughed. “You like gin and tonic, d’you? Your drink, Miss Machaen?”

“Please call me Sarah. Yes, I like it.”

“Whisky mac this is. I love booze. You like it. Sarah?”

“Yes, I do rather.”

“Birds of a feather.” She laughed, and paused. “I seen you last year. Dancing with Evered and that. I noticed you.”

“I’ve been coming for a long time.”

“How long you been at P-B, then?”

“Since 1960.”

“Jesus!”

“I know.”

“I was only a nipper in 1960. What age’d you say I was, Sarah?”

“Twenty-five?”

“Thirty. Don’t look it, do I?”

“No, indeed.”

“You live alone, do you, Sarah?”

“Yes, I do. In Tufnell Park.”

“Nice?”

“It is quite nice.”

Sandra Pond nodded repeatedly. Tufnell Park was very nice indeed, she said, extremely nice.

“You sit there, Sarah”, she said. “I’m going to get you another drink.”

“Oh no, Let me. Please.” She began to get to her feet, but Sandra Pond shot out a hand, a movement like a whip’s, instantly restraining her. Her small fingers pressed into the flesh of Sarah’s arm. “Stay right where you are”, she said.

An extraordinary thought occurred to Sarah as she watched the girl moving rapidly away with their two empty glasses: Sandra Pond wanted to share her flat.

“Now, now, now”, Mr. Priddy from

Accounts admonished, large and perspiring, staring down at her through thick spectacles. He reached for her, seemingly unaware of her protestations. His knees pressed into hers, forcing them into waltztime.

“They do an awful lot of good, these things”, Mr. Priddy confidently remarked. “People really get a chance.” He added something else, something about people getting a chance to chew the rag. Sarah nodded. “We’ve had a miracle of a year”, Mr. Priddy said. “In spite of everything.”

She could see Sandra Pond standing with two full glasses, looking furious. She tried to smile at her through the dancing couples, to make some indication with her eyes that she’d had no option about dancing with Mr. Priddy. But Sandra Pond, glaring into the dancers, hadn’t even noticed her yet.

“MRS. PRIDDY couldn’t come”, Mr. Priddy told her. “Tummy trouble.”

She said she was sorry, trying to remember what Mrs. Priddy looked like and failing in that.

“She gets it”, Mr. Priddy said.

Sandra Pond had seen them and was looking aggrieved now, her head on one side. She sat down at the table and lit a cigarette. She crossed her thin legs.

“Thank you very much”, Sarah said, and Mr. Priddy smiled graciously and went wawy to do his duty by some other lone woman.

“Can’t stand him”, Sandra Pond said. “Clammy blooming hands.”

Sarah drank some gin and tonic. “I say, you know” a man called out, “it’s a hell of a party, eh?”

He wasn’t sober. He swayed, with a glass in one hand, peering down at them. He was in charge of some department or other, Sarah couldn’t remember which. He spent a great deal of time in a pub near the Kingsway building, not going home until the last minute. He lived with a sister, someone had once told her.

“Hey, who’s she?” he demanded, wagging his glass at Sarah. “Who’s this one, Sarah?”

“Sandra Pond”, the girl said sharply. “In the polishing department.”

“Polishing, eh? Nice party, Sandra?”

“If you like the type of thing.”

“The drink’s good.”

“It’s free, you mean.”

“That’s what I mean, girlie.”

He went away. Sandra Pond laughed. She was a little drunk herself, she confessed. It took her like that, quite suddenly, after the fifth or sixth whisky mac. “How about you, Sarah?”

“I’m just about right.”

“D’you know what I’d like to do?”

“What?”

“Oh, no.” She looked away, coyly pouting, the dimples in her cheeks working. “No, I couldn’t say”, she said. “I couldn’t tell you, Sarah.”

The notion that the girl wanted to share her flat had remained with Sarah while she’d danced with Mr. Priddy and while the man had swayed in front of them, saying the party was nice. It was still there now, at the very front of her mind, beginning to dominate everything else. It seemed to be an unspoken thought between them, deliberately placed there by the girl while she’d been saying that Tufnell Park was nice.

“Actually I’m quite pissed”, the girl was saying now, giggling.

The expression grated on Sarah. She could never see why people had to converse in an obscene way. It didn’t in any way whatsoever make sense for the girl to say she was urinated when she meant drunk.

“Sorry”, Sandra Pond said.

“It’s all right.”

“I offended you. It showed in your face. I’m sorry, Sarah.”

“Actually, it’s time for me to go home.”

“Oh God, I’ve driven you away.”

“It’s not that.”

“Have another drink. I’ve spoiled your evening.”

“No, not at all.

“You know how it is: everything smooth and unruffled and then everything going bonk! You know, Sarah?”

Sarah frowned, shaking her head.

“Like if you looked don a well and then you dropped a stone in. Know what I mean? There’d be a disturbance. I had a friend said that to me once, we was very close. Hazel she was called.”

“Well, I do know what she meant of course –“

“D’you really, Sarah?”

“Yes, of course.”

“She was talking about people, see. What happens to people. Like you meet someone, Sarah.”

It was the kind of cliché that Sarah didn’t care fore, still water and someone throwing a stone. It was silly and half-baked, but typical in a way of what was said at any office party.

“She was like that”, Sandra Pond said. “She talked like that, did Hazel”

“I see.”

“When she met me, she meant. A disturbance.”

“Yes.”

“Merry Christmas then, Sarah.”

“Merry Christmas.”

As she edged her way around the dance-floor, she felt glad that she’d escaped and was thinking that when Mr. Everend collided with her almost. He always gave her a lift home after the Christmas party. He offered to now, sensing that she was ready to go. But he insisted on a las dance and while they danced he thanked her for all the work she’d done during the year, and for being patient with him, which she really hadn’t had to be. “A last drink”, he said as they stepped off the dance-floor, just beside where the drinks table was. He found her a gin and tonic and had a tomato juice himself.

In the arms of a black-haired youth, Sandra Pond danced by while the band played “Just One of Those Things”. Her thin arms were around the youth’s neck, her head lolled on his shoulder. Her eyes were balnk, Sarah noticed in the moment it took the couple to dance by.

“Merry Christmas, Sarah”, Mr. Everend said.

“Merry Christmas, Mr. Everend.”

THAT NIGHT she lay in bed, feeling woozy after all the gin and tonic. Not really wishing to, and yet slowly and quite carefully, she went over everything that had happened since Sandra Pond had addressed her in the Ladies’ Powder Room.

She remembered the grip of the girl’s fingers and the pout of her lips, and her bitterness when she spoke of Pollock-Brown and even when she didn’t. Had she really walked in on the dispatch manager’s wife and Chumm in a store-room? It was odd the way she’d spoken to her in the Ladies’ Powder Room, odd the way she’d spoken of Tufnell Park. For some minutes she imagined Sandra Pond sharing her flat with her as Elizabeth had, sharing the things in the kitchen cupboards, the Special K and the marmalade and the sugar. The girl was seventeen years younger, she didn’t have the same background or presumably the same interests. Sarah smiled a little in the darkness, thinking about what people would say if she began to share her flat with a polisher of plastic lamp-shades. People would think she was mad, her brother and his wife in their Harrogate rectory, her other brother and his wife in Africa, the friends whose parties she went to, the Bach choir, Elizabeth, Anna in Montreal. And of course they would all be right. She was well-to-do and middle-aged and plain. Side by side with Mr. Everend she had found her way to the top of the firm. She would retire one day and that would be that. It didn’t make sense to share a flat with someone like Sandra Pond, but she sensed that had she stayed in Sandra Pond’s company the flat would have been openly mentioned. And yet surely it must be as clear to Sandra Pond as it would be to everyone else that they’d make a most ill-assorted couple? What was in the girl’s mind, that she could see the picture so differently? Thinking about it, Sarah could find only a single piece of common ground between them. It wasn’t even properly real, based neither on a process of deduction nor indeed of observation. It was an instinct that Sandra Pond, unlike Elizabeth or Anna, wouldn’t marry. And for some reason Sarah sensed that Sandra Pond wouldn’t be difficult, as the girl she’d tried to share the flat with after Elizabeth’s departure had been. Her mind rebelliously wandered, throwing up flights of fancy that she considered silly almost as soon as they came to her, flights of fancy in which she educated Sandra Pond and discovered in her an intelligence that was on a par with her own, in which slowly a real friendship developed, and why should it not? Clearly there was a lot that Sandra Pond didn’t know. Sarah doubted that the girl had ever been inside a theatre in her life, except maybe to see something like the Black and White Minstrel Show or a Christmas pantomime. She doubted that if she ever opened a book or listened to music, or went to an art gallery.

For a week, at odd moments of the day, or at night, Sarah wondered about Sandra Pond. She half expected that she might hear from her, that the slack accents would drift over her telephone, suggesting a drink. But she didn’t. Instead, with the flights of fancy that she considered silly, she saw herself persevering in her patience and finally rewarded as Sandra Pond, calling on a sensitivity that had remained unaired till now, responded. Something assured Sarah that such a sensitivity was there: increasingly unable to prevent herself, she went over the course of their conversation in search of signs of it. And then, as if rejecting the extravagances of a dream, she would reject the fantasies that had not required a surrender to sleep. But all of them returned.

SARAH SPENT Christmas that year with Elizabeth and her family in Cricklewood. She relaxed with gin and tonic, listened to Elizabeth’s husband complaining about his sister, from whom he’d just bought a faulty car. She received the presents and gave them, she helped to cook the Christmas dinner. Preparing stuffing for the turkey, she heard herself saying:

“It’s the only thing that worries me, being alone when I’m old.”

Elizabeth, plumper than ever this Christmas, expressed surprise by wrinkling her nose, which was a habit with her.

“Oh, but you manage so well.”

“Actually the future looks a little bleak.”

“Oh Sarah, what nonsense!”

It was, and Sarah knew it was: she had learnt how to live alone. There was nothing nicer than coming back to the flat and putting a record on, pouring herself a drink and just sitting there listening to Mozart. There was nothing nicer than not having to consider someone else. She’d only shared the flat with Elizabeth in the first place because it had been necessary financially. That period was past.

“It’s just that whatever shall I do when I finish at Pollock-Brown?”

“But that’s years away.”

“Not really. Thirteen years. When I’m sixty.”

“They’ll keep you on, surely? If you want to stay?”

“Mr. Everend will be gone. I don’t think I’d want to work for anyone else. No, I’ll retire at sixty. According to the book.”

“But, my dear, you’d be perfectly all right.”

 “I kept thinking of the flat, alone in it.”

“You’ve been alone in it for years.”

“I know.”

She placed more stuffing in the turkey and pressed it down with a wooden spoon. Sandra Pond would be forty-three when she was sixty. She’d probably look much the same, a little grey in her hair perhaps; she’d never run to fat.

“How are things going?” Elizabeth’s husband demanded, coming into the kitchen in a breezy mood. “Drink for Sarah?”

She smiled at him as he took tonic bottles from the fridge. “I think she’s got the change”, she heard Elizabeth saying to him later. “Poor thing’s gone all jittery.”

Sarah didn’t mention the subject of her flat again that Christmas.

WELL IM A LES and I thought you was as well, the letter said. Im sorry Sarah I did’nt mean to offend you I did’nt no a thing about you. Ive loved other girls but not like you not as much. I really do love you Sarah. Im going to leave bloody PB because I don’t want reminding every time I walk into that bloody canteen. What I wanted was to dance with you remember when I said I wanted to do something? That’s what I ment when I said that. Sandra Pond.

SARAH TRIED NOT to think about the letter, which both upset and shocked her. She tried to forget the whole thing, the meeting with Sandra Pond and how she’d felt herself drawn towards having a friendship with the girl. It made her shiver when she thought about all that the letter suggested, it even made her feel a little sick.

Such relationships between women had been talked about at school and often occurred in newspaper reports and in books, on the television even. Sarah had occasionally wondered if this woman or that might possibly possess lesbian tendencies, but she had done so without much real interest and had certainly never wondered about such tendencies in relation to herself. But noew, just as she had been unable to prevent her mind from engaging in flights of fancy after her meeting with Sandra Pond, she was unable to prevent it from straying about in directions that were inspired by the girl’s letter. The man called George, who over the years had become the root of many fantasies, lost his identity to that of Sandra Pond. Yet it was all different because revulsion, not present before, seemed everywhere now. Was it curiosity of a kind, Sarah wondered, that drove her on, enslaving her to fancies she did not care for? No longer did she think of them as silly, malicious rather, certainly malign, like the stuff of nightmares. Grimly she watched while Sandra Pond crossed the floor of a room. Coming closer to her, smiling at her. As the man called George had, the hands of the girl undid the buttons of her dress, and then it seemed that fear was added to revulsion. “I really do love you, Sarah”, the slack voice said, as it had said in the letter, as no other voice had ever said. The passion had a cloying kind of headiness about it, like drunkenness. It was adoration, the girl said. Whispering now: it was adoration for every inch of skin and every single hair that grew from Sarah’s body, and every light in her eyes, and the beauty of her plainness. The pouting lips came closer to her own, the dimples danced. And Sarah, then, would find herself weeping.

She never knew why she wept and assumed it was simply an extension of her revulsion. She felt no desire to have this kind of relationship with a person of her own sex. She didn’t want a girl’s lips leaving lipstick on her own, she didn’t want to experience their softness or the softness of the body that went with them. She didn’t want to experience a smell of scent or painted fingernails.

In rational moments Sarah said to herself that as time passed this nightmare would fog over, as other occurrences in her life had fogged over with the passing of time. She had destroyed the letter almost as soon as she’d read it. She had made enquires: Sandra Pond, as she’d promised, had left Pollock-Brown.

Sarah visited Elizabeth and her family more frequently, she spent a weekend with her brother and his wife in Harrogate, she wrote at length to her other brother, saying they must not lose touch. She forced her mind back into childhood, to which it had regularly and naturally drifted before its invasion by Sandra Pond. It was a deliberate journey now, requiring discipline and concentration, but it was possible to make. Her father ambled into the sitting-room of the rectory, the spaniel called Dodge ambling after him. The wood fire brightly burned as indoor games were played, no one sulky or out of temper. “And the consequences were”, her brother who was an engineer said, “fire over England.” In the sunny garden she read about the girls of Chalet School. Her brothers, in short trousers and flannel shirts, ran about catching wasps in jam-jars. “The peace of God”, her father’s voice murmured, drifting over his small congregation. “Of course you’ll grow up pretty”, her mother softly promised, wiping away her tears.

The passing of time did help. The face of Sandra Pond faded a little, the wording of the ill-written letter became jumbled and uncertain. She would never hear of the girl again, she said to herself, and with an effort that lessened as more months passed by she continued to conjure up the distant world of the rectory.

THEN, ONE Saturday morning in November, nearly a year after the Christmas party, Sandra Pond was there in the flesh again. She was in the Express Dairy, where Sarah always did her Saturday-morning shopping, and as soon as she saw her Sarah knew the girl had followed her into the shop. She felt faint and sickish when Sandra Pond smiled her pouting smile and the two dimples danced. She felt the blood draining away from her face and a tightening in her throat.

“Sorry”, Sandra Pond said instead of saying hullo, just standing there.

Sarah had a tin of Crosse and Blackwell’s soup in one hand and a wire shopping basket in the other. She didn’t know what to say. She thought she probably couldn’t say anything even if she tried.

“I just wanted to say I was sorry”, Sandra Pond said. “I’ve had it on my mind, Miss Machaen.”

Sarah shook her head. She put the Crosse and Blackwell’s soup back on the stack of tins.

“I shouldn’t have written that letter’s what I mean.”

The girl didn’t look well. She seemed to have a cold. She didn’t look as pretty as she had at the Christmas party. She wore a brown tweed coat which wasn’t every smart. Her shoes were cheap-looking.

“I don’t know why I did it, Miss Machaen.”

Sarah tried to smile because she didn’t want to be unkind. She ran her tongue about the inside of her mouth, which was dry, as though she’d eaten salt. She said:

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me. I couldn’t sleep nights.”

“It was just a misunderstanding.”

Sandra Pond didn’t say anything. She let a silence gather, and Sarah realized that she was doing so deliberately. Sandra Pond had come back to see how things were, to discover if, with time, the idea appealed to Sarah now, if she’d come to terms with the strangeness of it. As she stood there with the wire basket, she was aware that Sandra Pond had waited for an answer to her letter, that even before that, at the Christmas party, she had hoped for some sign. The girl was staring down at the cream-coloured tiles of the floor, her hands awkwardly by her sides.

The flights of fancy tumbled into Sarah’s mind, jogging each other for precedence. They came in flashes: she and Sandra Pond sitting down to a meal, and walking into the foyer of a theatre, and looking at the Madonna of the Meadow in the National Gallery, and then a scene like the scene with the man called George.

Sandra Pond looked up and at once the flights of fancy snapped out, like lights extinguished. What would people say? Sarah thought again, as she had on the night of the party. What would her brothers say to see passion thumping at their sister from the eyes of Sandra Pond? What would Elizabeth say, or Anna, or Mr. Everend, or her dead father and mother? Would they cry out, amazed and yet delighted that her plainness at last was beauty? Or would they shudder with disgust?

“I can’t help being”, Sandra Pond said, “the way I am.”

Sarah shook her head, trying to make the gesture seem sympathetic. She wanted to explain that she knew the girl had come specially back, to see what passing time had done, but she could not bring herself to. To have mentioned passing time in that way would have begun another kind of conversation. It was all ridiculous, standing here in the Express Dairy.

“I just wanted to say that and to say I was sorry. Thank you for listening. Miss Machaen.”

She was moving away, the heels of her shoes making a clicking noise on the cream-tiled floor. The smooth back of her head was outlined against packets of breakfast cereals and then against stacks of Mother’s Pride bread. Something about her shoulders suggested to Sarah that she was holding back tears.

“Excuse me, dear”, a woman said, poking around Sarah to reach for oxtail soup.

“Oh, sorry.” Mechanically she smiled. She felt shaky and wondered if her face had gone pale. She couldn’t imagine eating any of the food she’d selected. She couldn’t imagine opening a tin or unwrapping butter without being overcome by the memory of Sandra Pond’s sudden advent in the shop. Her instinct was to replace the goods on the shelves and she almost did so. But is seemed too much of a gesture, and too silly. Instead she carried the wire basket to the cashier and paid for what she’d chosen, transferring everything into her shopping bag.

She walked away from the Express Dairy, by the newsagent’s and the butcher’s and the Martinez Dry Cleaners, who were offering a bargain, three garments cleaned for the normal price of one. She felt, as she had when the man called George had suddenly lost interest in her body, a pain inside her somewhere.

There was a bus stop, but Sandra Pond was not standing by it. Nor was she on the pavements that stretched on either side of a road that was busy with Saturday-morning traffic. Nor did she emerge from the telephone box, nor from the newsagent’s, nor from Walton’s the fruiterer’s.

Sarah waited, still looking about. Sandra Pond had been genuinely sorry; she’d meant it when she’d said she’d hated causing the upset. “Please come and have coffee”, were the words Sarah had ready to say now. “It’s really quite all right.” But she did not say them, because Sandra Pond had not lingered. And in a million years, Sarah thought, she would not ever find her.