A Rather English Marriage by Angela Lambert Page B

their boy, their precious boy, their son and heir - smiling at each other in relief when the infant face crumpled in a petulant frown.
    â€˜What can he be dreaming?’ he would wonder. ‘He doesn’t know anything to dream yet.’
    â€˜He’s dreaming of before he was born, wishing he was still inside me,’ Grace would answer; and Roy would say, ‘So do I,’ and they would smile at one another and go back to bed.
    He washed his teacup, rinsed the pot, poured milk from the jug back into the bottle and put the bottle back into the fridge. Painstakingly he scoured the sink and work surfaces till they shone.
    Moving through the familiar chores, he felt as though he inhabited Grace’s body, yet stood outside it too, watching as her sinewy wrists wrung out the cloth and draped it limply over the taps. Her physical shape was so familiar to him that his mind was slow to believe that she no longer existed. He kept walking into rooms and mistaking an arrangement of colour and shape for her, so strong was his continuing expectation of seeing her. The eyes, he discovered, have their habits too, and the habit of seeing his wife was hard to relinquish.
O for the touch of a vanish’d hand/And the sound of a voice that is still!
    He had never ceased to find her attractive. It made no difference to him when she aged or became gaunt and stringy from the illness that chewed away her vital substance. She was always his girl, the only woman he’d ever known. Physical love was identified with her body. In their darkened bedroom, the street lamp shining through the bobble-edged slit between the curtains, what did lines and folds matter so long as the dear flesh still accommodated his?
    They had made love for the last time only a few days before she went into hospital.
    â€˜No, love, you don’t have to,’ he had said. ‘I’m afraid of hurting you.’
    â€˜But I want to. I may be a bit slow - you’ll have to be careful - but I want to, really I do,’ she had assured him.
    Gently he had gathered up her nervy body, feeling the bones like knife handles in his grasp, and she had stood docile and childlike as he undressed her. He folded her clothes on the chair and eased the eiderdown over her, for being so thin she felt cold and shivered, even in this warm weather. He undressed himself and slipped in beside her.
    Her noises had never changed; the quick intakes of breath that accelerated and held and shuddered a little … and then relaxed in a long smiling sigh.
    He looked at the clock on the wall. Seven. Five regular pips, and one longer one. Time for the news, and then he’d go up to the allotment. Must keep busy. Tomorrow he’d wear her apron, to bring her closer. He’d wear all her clothes if he could, if it weren’t that someone might catch him at it and think he was going a bit gaga. He could wear her nighties in bed, that was the answer. Not the hospital ones, but the brushed nylon ones in soft, pretty colours. No one would see, and it would feel as though he still had her next to him. Time to bring some fresh flowers down from the allotment for her shrine.
    The bell chimed its double note, like a church bell in countertenor, and Roy Southgate flicked the switch on the kettle before going to the front door. It was the social worker whom Grace and Roy had met earlier, when Billy and little Joe had come and spent a few weeks with them over Christmas, about the time their Dad was sent away. She had visited him a couple of times since Grace’s death; not, Roy believed, out of necessity let alone to check up on him, but out of friendship. Charity he could never have accepted; kindness was different.
    â€˜Afternoon, Roy! Oh, I’ve had such a day of disasters, you’ll have to cheer me up. How are you?’
    â€˜Come in Miss Hope –’
    â€˜Come
on
– Mandy,
please.’
    â€˜Tea’s on and I’m warming some scones in the