From anyone else, this might sound like a mere platitude. But from her, with what he now knows of her, it is something different.
He shuts his eyes. ‘There’s more, though.’ Might as well tell it all, now. How, after the war, he had gone to see Morris’ wife Flora. She had sat and wept quietly, politely, as though she was embarrassed by her show of emotion in front of this stranger. It should have been him. He didn’t have anyone relying on him to come home. Not to the same degree, anyhow. His parents – his mother, certainly – would have been devastated, but they had one another, and they had money. Looking at little Flora Eggers, in her flat that rattled with the movement of the passing trains, looking at the mismatched furniture and her cheap haircut, he had become very aware that Morris must have been everything to her and the boy, Fred, too solemn for such a small child. This was what love did to you, he thought, watching her.
He had gone back, a few months later. He had remembered some anecdotes that he wanted to share with her – Morris at his best. He had some idea that it would help. He had bought a tin of biscuits from the Woolworth’s next to the station, but then, looking at them as he waited for her to answer the bell, they became inadequate. He wished then that he had had the foresight to go to Fortnum’s, get her some of the really good sort.
A middle-aged woman had answered the door, and he had stepped back in surprise. Flora’s mother, perhaps.
She had frowned at him, then at the biscuits. ‘Sorry, dear,’ she said. ‘If I want to buy them, I can go and get them myself. Don’t like being sold to on my doorstep.’
‘Oh, no – I’m not selling.’
‘What are you after then?’
‘I was wondering if Flora was at home?’
‘Who?’
‘Mrs Eggers. Flora Eggers.’
Her demeanour had changed absolutely. ‘Oh,’ she had said. ‘Oh, my dear … you haven’t heard. And that poor little boy.’
She had gone out one morning, only a short walk to the track. Leapt into space.
There is a long silence.
‘Hal.’ She takes his hand, again with that tentativeness strange in two who are lovers. ‘Every day, since Tino died … it is what I go back to in sleep – every time a little different, but always with the same outcome. I’m too stupid, or too slow. I think of who he might have become. He was so bright, so interested in everything. He could have been a scientist, or an artist. He would have done a better job of living than I have. But,’ she grasps his hand with a new urgency, ‘hearing you talk of your friend has made me wonder something.’
‘What?’
‘Whether we blame ourselves because in a way it makes things easier to understand if they have a reason, a fault, behind them.’ She looks at him. ‘Do you think that could be part of it?’
For the first time he meets her gaze, and he finds no judgement there – only a surprising tenderness.
Later, it is his turn.
‘That night in Rome,’ he speaks into her hair, ‘why did you ask to come back to my apartment?’
‘I told you—’
‘No, you didn’t. All you said was that you had gone a little mad.’
‘I think I said, before, that I recently found out something about him. When I met him, I thought he was an International Brigadier, a man who had come to fight out of his sense of duty. They were everywhere in Madrid, at the time: every nationality, men who had come to stand up against Fascism. He let me believe it. I found out the truth a year ago, in Rome.’
*
Her
1950
It starts one day when my husband is away. He has business in Italy, now. The war, he tells me, has left it ‘wide open’ for investment.
I am in New York, at home in the apartment. There is a call from the concierge.
‘Excuse me, Mrs Truss? There’s a man here who has asked to speak to you. I think he’s from the press.’
I have been approached before by women’s magazines: will I speak to them about my decorative style, my wardrobe choices? My husband doesn’t want me to talk to them, though – he thinks it ‘tawdry’.
‘Please,’ I say, ‘tell them I’m not interested.’
‘All right, ma’am. That’s what I said to him before – though he’s persistent. He says he has something he wants you to hear, not the other way around.’
‘Oh.’ This is new. And for some reason, I feel a small trepidation. It is like catching the trace of something rotten on the breeze. ‘No,’ I say, feeling more sure than ever now, ‘I don’t want to talk to him.’
By the afternoon the apartment, despite its size, has become oppressive. I will go for a walk in the park, I decide. In the green surrounds I move quickly, not processing my surroundings, but pleased to be doing something that may take my mind off the thing that is troubling me. It is the idea of what the man wants to tell me. It looms large in my imagination. Perhaps, after all, I should hear him out. Knowing might be better than not.