Free Blaming (Virago Modern Classics) by Elizabeth Taylor Page A

“Though just as I was beginningto know him, he died. You’ve never thought of marrying?”
    “I was married, but my wife left me.” His eyes glinted. “She took the lot, everything she could lay hands on, the children, the television set, everything. I was left with the clothes I was standing up in when I got back from sea and found her gone.”
    “Why did she go, for God’s sake?”
    “That’s what I ask myself. She never wanted for anything from me.” His false teeth seemed to slip even more now, in his anguish at talking of these things. “It’s left me very lonely. What was it all for? I sometimes wonder.”
    “She fell in love with someone else, perhaps?” It seemed the kindest suggestion she could put forward.
    “Possibly,” he lisped.
    “And where is she now?”
    “I haven’t a clue,” he said impatiently, preferring to talk about himself. Now
he
lifted the saucepan and sniffed at the steam. “It does smell inviting, doesn’t it?”
    “Real good. You like cooking?”
    “I take a pride in it. There’s my little garden.” he said, moving to a row of pots on the window-sill. “My little treasures – basil, coriander, parsley. I like to watch over them. Snipping off the new leaves. ‘Grow when I say grow,’ I tell them.”
    “We must have another chat some time,” Martha said, having looked briefly at the herbs.
    Having been furious at her coming, now he was reluctant to let her go. When she did, he took out his false teeth.
    Amy was standing by the sitting-room fire, tapping a toe against the fender. When Martha came back, she lowered the pink newspaper she was reading. “I’ll get you a drink,” she said. “What would you like?”
    Martha studied the drinks tray, but as if she could not find anything there she recognised. Although she wrote a great deal about people drinking, it did not much enter into her own life. “What you’re having,” she said, lacking ideas. There were curious, indifferent areas in her mind, Amy decided. “I’ve been talking to Ernie about his ex-wife,” Martha went on. “I think in her place I’d have done the same as she.”
    “One doesn’t know what to believe. A good job it doesn’t matter. Anyway, please don’t lead him on. It will only set the flow going, and I have to live in the same house. But you said you had something to show me.”
    “To give you.” Martha opened her bag and brought out a photograph. Amy took it and sank slowly on the sofa. It was a very good photograph, with a grainy texture; shadows gave it depth, birds in the air an illusion of movement. Nick was standing by some roses in the gardens of the Topkapi Palace. His face had an eager look towards the camera, perhaps at thoughts of treasures he was yet to see. Amy sat on a boulder nearby, looking bored. Martha had taken infinite pains to exclude anyone else from the picture, though that afternoon the gardens had been full of tourists. Those two – Nick and Amy – seemed to be alone there. Amy remembered that she had become impatient of the long delays, waiting for people to move on; now she was infinitely grateful. For a while,she looked at the photograph in silence. When she raised her head, she said, “Yes, it’s something extra. And I’ve longed for that. Just something, another word or two, or finding a letter or a message. I couldn’t believe that a line was ruled under what had been, and that there wouldn’t be any more to come.”
    “I believe in an after-life of some sort,” said Martha.
    “How strange! I know some other people who believe in that. And in a way I can see how they must.”
    The front door-bell was rung, and before she could cross the room, Ernie had sped upstairs, snapping his teeth back into his mouth as he ran.

8

     
    “What a terrible man,” Martha said, as soon as Amy came back into the room after saying goodbye to Gareth Lloyd.
    “Terrible?” Amy was surprised.
    “So noble-looking. He gives an impression of massiveness, though