Close Relations by Deborah Moggach

staff’s company cars. He summoned them to meetings – Prudence and Stephen had one that afternoon – where he watched them shrewdly through a veil of cigarette smoke and asked them to update him on their projects.
    Prudence was thinking about this when she left the office for lunch. She was also remembering the last time she and Stephen had made love – a snatched hour in her flat ten days earlier. It was almost impossible for him to get away in the evening without arousing suspicion. Most of their lovemaking consisted of fumbles in doorways or in his car, with the windows steaming up as if the two of them were teenagers. Except teenagers seemed to be at it all the time.‘
What we’ve got is sex-free adultery
,’ she had complained to him, the week before. ‘
Like alcohol-free lager
.’
    She was remembering his tongue nuzzling her pubic hair when she stepped onto the pavement. The gardener’s van was still there. She gazed at it fondly, for it was imprinted with her erotic memories. The gardener leaned against it, eating a samosa. Prudence smiled at her. She hadn’t seen this one before. She was just about to cross the road when the woman said: ‘Hey, are you an editor?’
    Prudence stopped. ‘How can you tell?’
    â€˜You look like one.’
    Prudence was silent. She didn’t know how to take this.
    â€˜Wait a moment.’ The woman was tall and striking; a jewel winked in her nostril. Her hair was bundled up in an ethnic turban. She swallowed the last mouthful of samosa, wiped her hands and reached inside the van. She took out a mud-streaked folder and shoved it in Prudence’s hand. ‘Will you read this?’ It was more a command than a question.
    â€˜What is it?’
    â€˜My novel.’
    â€˜Goodness.’ It was heavy. Four hundred pages at least. ‘I’m non-fiction.’
    The woman laughed shortly. ‘We’re all non-fiction, aren’t we. If you think about it.’
    â€˜I mean –’
    â€˜My address is on the inside.’
    The woman strode off. She got into the van, slammed shut the door and started the engine.
    It was called The Birches, the house in Purley. There was a birch wood at the end of the garden. Silver birches, they reminded Dorothy of her eldest daughter Louise – slender, graceful, bending to the will of the wind. The wood was thin, however; just a belt of trees. Beyond it was the local comprehensive, a series of ugly modern buildings that were revealed each autumn when the leaves fell. Raucous shouts rang out atlunchtime. The pupils climbed into the wood and left behind a litter of sweet wrappers and worse. Depending on the season, the wood seemed either like a barrier sealing her home safe from the outside world or a sieve that let it all in. Whether this disturbed Dorothy varied according to her mood. Sometimes she welcomed the yells and laughter; they seemed the only sign of life in the hushed, respectable neighbourhood. Even with the windows closed she could hear them; they cheered her when she stood in the empty house.
    There was no one moment, of course, when her daughters had left home. It had happened gradually. For years they had left their things in their rooms; it had taken a long time for them to depart entirely. But they were gone now, they had been gone for almost two decades, and the house seemed huge without them. The bedrooms had reverted to just being bedrooms. Sometimes relatives came to stay. Sometimes even the grandchildren came to stay. But it was no longer a family home; it was a large house, with Gordon and herself rattling around in it. Now and then she grew restless. She told her husband that they must move somewhere smaller and more suitable but he wanted to stay put.
    Besides, they were too busy. At this moment, for instance, Gordon had seven jobs on, one of them the refurbishment of ten thousand feet of commercial premises down by the Elephant and Castle. In