The Husband

Mr Wakeham came home from Geneva on the Thursday evening.

He came home, as he always came home from Geneva, on the seven-thirty-two from Heathrow on the Heathrow Express, by black cab from Paddington to Belgravia, with his small navy overnight case in his right hand and his small navy leather briefcase in his left hand, and his coat — a charcoal cashmere overcoat his wife had bought him, Maeve had been told one morning, for our twenty-fifth anniversary, dear, and he has, in the manner of men, worn it more or less constantly since — folded over the briefcase, the way Mr Wakeham always folded it, with the lining out.

He did not, when he came in, call up the stairs.

He did not, when he came in, set his case down in the hall the way Maeve had read in the agency notes that the gentleman of the house always sets his case down in the hall before he kisses his wife. Mr Wakeham did not kiss Mrs Wakeham. Mr Wakeham did not, in three weeks of evenings, kiss Mrs Wakeham on coming home from anywhere, or kiss her on going to anywhere, or kiss her on any of the four occasions of getting up from the dining-room table on which Maeve had been clearing the dining-room and a kiss would, in another household, have ordinarily taken place.

Mr Wakeham walked from the front door of the Belgravia townhouse to the door of his study at the back of the ground floor, in his small even unhurried steps, in his good Lobb shoes, with his small navy overnight case in his right hand and the lining-out charcoal overcoat folded over the briefcase in his left hand, and he went into his study, and he closed the door behind him.

The door closed, as it always closed, with a small precise click.

Maeve, in the kitchen, with her hands wrist-deep in the rinse water of the supper plates, did not, this evening, look up.

—

She had not, in three weeks, looked properly at Mr Wakeham.

Mr Wakeham did not encourage being looked at.

Mr Wakeham was, Maeve had registered in the small precise way she registered the men in the houses she cleaned, perhaps sixty-three. Mr Wakeham was perhaps five foot eleven. Mr Wakeham was thin in the way Mrs Wakeham was thin, which is to say not from happiness but from a kind of governance. Mr Wakeham had thin grey hair brushed flat to his head every morning with a small soft brush of badger hair Maeve had been instructed to dust around but not to touch. Mr Wakeham had a small dark moustache he had worn — Mrs Wakeham had remarked once, very neutrally, while dusting the wedding photograph on the front-room mantel — since the first day of his second year at Christ Church. Mr Wakeham wore, in three weeks, only suits in a particular dark navy, and a particular dark grey, and a particular dark grey check, and white shirts, and ties Mrs Wakeham had told her had been made for him by a man in St James's whose name Mrs Wakeham had said with the small particular flatness of a woman who had not, herself, much liked the man.

Maeve, in three weeks, had not heard Mr Wakeham use her name.

Maeve, in three weeks, had not heard Mr Wakeham use his wife's name.

Maeve, in three weeks, had heard Mr Wakeham use no name at all.

She had thought, for three weeks, that this was simply the way Mr Wakeham was. She had thought of it the way she thought of a thing in the house that was small and odd and was nothing of hers — a salt cellar with a chipped lid, a chair the cat would not sit on.

She did not, this evening, think of it that way.

This evening she stood at the sink of the kitchen of the Belgravia townhouse with her hands wrist-deep in the rinse water of the supper plates, and she thought, in the small precise voice that had risen up in her in the south study on the Tuesday afternoon, Mr Wakeham. Mr Wakeham, what do you know.

—

Mrs Wakeham, in the doorway of the kitchen, in the dove-grey wool dress she always wore on the Thursday evenings of Mr Wakeham's return, in the small jet earrings she had worn every Thursday evening of the three weeks Maeve had been at the house, said, very quietly,

'Maeve, dear. Leave the plates. I shall finish them. He will not eat. He never eats on the night he comes back from Geneva. I shall bring him a small dish of cold roast chicken on a tray at ten. Will you, dear, go up to your room for the night. I have left a sandwich for you on the small table on the landing.'

Maeve said, 'Yes, Mrs Wakeham.'

Mrs Wakeham said, 'And dear.'

Maeve turned.

Mrs Wakeham was looking at Maeve in the slightly different way Mrs Wakeham had been looking at her, since the Tuesday afternoon. The way was small. The way was not visible across a room. The way was visible only across two yards of kitchen light, in the small unhurried way that had been Mrs Wakeham's face all of her adult life, with the very small particular addition — at the corner of the mouth — of an expression Maeve had not, before the Tuesday afternoon, been able to identify, but which she could, this evening, identify exactly. The expression was the expression of an old woman who had, on a Tuesday afternoon in November, after fifty years of carrying a thing alone, set the thing down on a desk in front of a young woman she had been waiting for, and watched the young woman pick the thing up, and watched the young woman lift it, with very steady hands, the rest of the way up to her shoulder.

Mrs Wakeham said, in the smallest voice she had ever used in front of Maeve, 'Lock your door tonight, my darling.'

She paused.

She said, 'It will not be necessary. He will not, this evening, leave the study. He never does, on a Thursday. But I have not, in thirty-four years, gone to sleep in this house on a Thursday without locking my own, and I am too old this week to begin a new habit. Lock your door, dear. The agency will have given you the key.'

She paused.

She said, 'I should also rather, dear, that on Friday at five o'clock you stand in the morning room when he winds the clock, and that you do not, at any point on Friday between five o'clock and quarter past, find yourself alone in any of the corridors of this house with him. The clock takes nine minutes. The clock has, for thirty-four years, taken nine minutes. He will take fourteen on Friday, because Friday is the day he is going to discover that the photograph has been moved in the drawer, and he will spend the extra five minutes, dear, of his clock-winding standing in front of the clock thinking about who in this house has moved it. I should rather you were standing, when he turns from the clock to find out, in the morning room with me.'

Maeve said, 'Yes, Mrs Wakeham.'

Mrs Wakeham said, 'Thank you, dear.'

Mrs Wakeham went back into the morning room.

The kitchen door closed behind her with a small precise click.

—

Maeve went up the marble staircase of the Belgravia townhouse, with the sandwich Mrs Wakeham had left on the small table on the landing in her left hand and the small enamel mug of milk Mrs Wakeham had also left, that Maeve had not asked for, in her right hand, and Maeve went into her own small room at the top of the house — the carer's room, three flights up, at the back, looking out over the mews — and Maeve closed the door.

Maeve locked the door.

The lock was a small brass mortice lock, of the kind installed in Belgravia in the eighteen-eighties. The key turned heavily but turned. The bolt slid into the keep with a small precise click.

Maeve sat down, with the sandwich and the mug of milk in her hands, on the edge of the carer's bed.

She did not, for a long while, eat.

She thought, in the small precise voice that had risen up in her on the Tuesday afternoon, about the third girl in the manuscript. The girl who had walked across the quad in the dark to the study door, on the second of April 1975, with the typed letter from her father's Olivetti. The girl who had said the thing to the right person. The girl whose name had been Tessa Halligan, the girl who had had a French plait done by her mother on a Sunday evening, badly — the girl whose name, the manuscript had told her in its sixteenth page, had been kept by the school in 1975 and again in 1976 and again in every year afterwards out of the official rolls, because the school had spent the next nine years arranging itself around the not-happening of what Tessa Halligan had walked into the study to say.

She thought about the right person.

The right person had not, in the manuscript, been named.

The right person had been described, in the manuscript, in a single short paragraph on page nine. The paragraph had said only —

He was, then, a young man. He was, then, the new bursar of the school. He was, then, by no one's account that anyone in St Brigid's would later be brave enough to set down on paper, the only person on the staff of the school whom the headmaster was, then, considering as a candidate for his own son-in-law.

The headmaster's daughter, the manuscript had not needed to tell Maeve, had been named Eleanor.

The young man at Christ Church who had grown a small dark moustache in the first day of his second year, and had worn it ever since, and had married the headmaster's daughter Eleanor Dorrien at St Margaret's, Westminster, on the eleventh of June 1981 — the manuscript had not needed to tell Maeve that either.

—

Maeve, on the edge of the carer's bed on the third floor of the Belgravia townhouse, with the sandwich and the mug of milk in her hands and the small mortice lock of the door turned, did not eat the sandwich.

She did not drink the milk.

She set them, very slowly, on the small bedside table.

She lay down on the carer's bed in her overall, on top of the white counterpane.

She thought, in the small precise voice — and the voice was, this evening, neither her own voice nor her mother's voice but the voice of the third girl in the manuscript, the voice of Tessa Halligan, who had typed her letter on her father's Olivetti on a Sunday afternoon in 1975 and had carried it across a quad in the dark to a study door she ought never to have opened — Maeve. He is going to know on Friday. He is going to know on Friday, and he is going to wait, and he is going to come for you, and you have, on Friday, between five o'clock and quarter past, exactly fourteen minutes in which to be in a room he is not in.

She closed her eyes.

She did not sleep.

Downstairs, in the morning room, the Knibb mantel clock made a small mechanical sound.

Three floors above, Maeve Brennan — who had, on the Tuesday afternoon in the south study, agreed to do, at five o'clock on Friday afternoon, the small last thing that Mrs Wakeham and Mrs Brennan and the third woman in the letter from Surrey had spent fifty years, between them, arranging the conditions for — Maeve Brennan turned, very quietly, in the dark, towards the wall.

She breathed, once, slowly, through her nose, the way she had been taught at the dentist when she was nine.

She slept, finally, at twenty past two.

She woke, with the morning, knowing exactly where the small brass key for the glass front of the Knibb mantel clock lived on Mr Wakeham's watch-fob, and knowing exactly what she would, on Friday at five past five, in the morning room of the Belgravia townhouse, in front of Mr Wakeham and Mrs Wakeham both, do with the key once she had taken it.

* * *