After Rain Read Free

irritatingly to command. And the unseeing husband they shared, softly playing his violin in one room or another, did not know that his first wife had dressed badly, did not know she had thickened and become sloppy, did not know she had been an unclean cook. That Belle was the one who was alive, that she was offered all a man’s affection, that she plundered his other woman’s possessions and occupied her bedroom and drove her car, should have been enough. It should have been everything, but as time went on it seemed to Belle to be scarcely anything at all. He had become set in ways that had been allowed and hallowed in a marriage of nearly forty years: that was what was always there.
        A year after the wedding, as the couple sat one lunchtime in the car which Belle had drawn into the gateway to a field, he said:
        ‘You’d tell me if it was too much for you?’
        ‘Too much, Owen ?’
        ‘Driving all over the county. Having to get me in and out. Having to sit there listening.’
        ‘It’s not too much.’
        ‘You’re good the way you’ve patience.’
        ‘I don’t think I’m good at all.’
        ‘I knew you were in church that Sunday. I could smell the perfume you had on. Even at the organ I could smell it.’
        ‘I’ll never forget that Sunday’
        ‘I loved you when you let me show you the graves.’
        ‘I loved you before that.’
        ‘I don’t want to tire you out, with all the traipsing about after pianos. I could let it go, you know.’
        He would do that for her, her thought was as he spoke. He wasn’t much for a woman, he had said another time: a blind man moving on towards the end of his days. He confessed that when first he wanted to marry her he hadn’t put it to her for more than two months, knowing better than she what she’d be letting herself in for if she said yes. ‘What’s that Belle look like these days?’ he had asked Violet a few years ago, and Violet hadn’t answered at first. Then apparently she’d said: ‘Belle still looks a girl.’
        ‘I wouldn’t want you to stop your work. Not ever, Owen.’
        ‘You’re all heart, my love. Don’t say you’re not good.’
        ‘It gets me out and about too, you know. More than ever in my life. Down all those avenues to houses I didn’t know were there. Towns I’ve never been to. People I never knew. It was restricted before.’
        The word slipped out, but it didn’t matter. He did not reply that he understood about restriction, for that was not his style. When they were getting to know one another, after that Sunday by the church, he said he’d often thought of her in her brother’s jeweller’s shop, wrapping up what was purchased there, as she had wrapped for him the watch he bought for one of Violet’s birthdays. He’d thought of her putting up the grilles over the windows in the evenings and locking the shop door, and then going upstairs to sit with her brother’s family. When they were married she told him more: how most of the days of her life had been spent, only her chickens her own. ‘Smart in her clothes,’ Violet had added when she said the woman he’d rejected still looked a girl.
        There hadn’t been any kind of honeymoon, but a few months after he had wondered if travelling about was too much for her he took Belle away to a seaside resort where he and Violet had many times spent a week. They stayed in the same boarding-house, the Sans Souci, and walked on the long, empty strand and in lanes where larks scuttered in and out of the fuchsia, and on the cliffs. They drank in Malley’s public house. They lay in autumn sunshine on the dunes.
        ‘You’re good to have thought of it.’ Belle smiled at him, pleased because he wanted her to be happy
        ‘Set us up for the winter, Belle.’
        She knew it wasn’t easy for him. They had come to this place because he knew no