Esther had dutifully attended every class and had just about scraped through to gain her certificate. Nina had been the star pupil.
‘Then I’ll be addressing envelopes later on for the Cannonbridge appeal,’ Esther continued. ‘I promised Nina I’d put in a couple of hours.’ Nina was a tireless worker for many good causes in the area. She had a good deal of professional expertise, having been a paid employee of a well-known charitable organization before her marriage. Esther greatly admired Nina; she would dearly have liked to achieve her confidence and elegance. She had even tried buying the same designer clothes but they never looked right on her, she couldn’t carry them off as her sister-in-law could.
The appeal currently occupying much of Nina’s attention was for a proposed new hospice over in Cannonbridge, a town somewhat smaller in size than Brentworth. Cannonbridge had only a small hospice, set up many years ago, at the start of the hospice movement, struggling along now in run-down and inconvenient premises.
A patient who had spent the final months of his life in the hospice last year, a well-to-do businessman with no surviving relatives, had made a new will shortly before he died, leaving his entire fortune to go towards the provision of a new, purpose-built hospice.
His proposal received enthusiastic local support and an appeal was set up to secure the rest of the finance. It wasn’t long before the project grew more ambitious. The hospice would now be larger than originally intended; it would, in certain circumstances, admit a proportion of patients from the rest of the county. The scope of the appeal widened and fundraising events were held in many towns and parishes. One such event was a buffet lunch, organized by a club James belonged to; the lunch would be held this coming Friday in a central hall in Brentworth.
James finished his breakfast and stood up from the table. ‘I’ll be eating out this evening,’ he said, as more often than not these days. Years ago, after the birth of her second child, Esther had begun to suffer from nervous trouble and had struggled against it ever since. James had early taken to entertaining clients and associates at a restaurant or one of his clubs, in order to save his wife trouble; he had never departed from the habit.
He gave her a perfunctory kiss on the cheek as he left; he always got to the office early. The forced lightness of Esther’s manner vanished as soon as he was gone, to be replaced by the inward looking expression, resentful and bitter, she now habitually wore when alone; it was beginning to show in her face in company these days more often than she realized.
She cleared the breakfast table, leaving everything tidy against the arrival of her daily help, a competent woman who had been with her for years. She went slowly up to her bedroom. The sky was now a soft blue, the morning sunny. Down in the garden there were drifts of snowdrops under the trees.
As she changed her housecoat for a towelling robe, she paused by the chest of drawers to look down at the photographs of her sons at various ages. She had been overjoyed when her first son was born. How proud and pleased James had been, how delighted her parents. What hopes she had entertained in that euphoric time that the birth of his first grandchild might bring her closer at last to her father. But that hadn’t come about. Nor had the birth of the second grandchild wrought the miracle either.
James had worked ever harder, pushing his way unflaggingly up the ladder; she saw less and less of him. She had made her life round her sons; that had got her along in a fashion. But as they grew older they clearly manifested themselves as their father’s sons, not hers – in looks, brains, interests, ambitions. They humoured her, patronized her, never sought her views on anything. Now they had grown up and gone. The elder was working for an international finance house and was currently spending twelve months in Tokyo; the younger was taking his master’s degree in business administration at Harvard.
She went along to the bathroom and ran her bath. Nina and Matthew had no children. Nina had made no bones about it: she didn’t want any. She had made that clear to Matthew from the start. Matthew, it seemed, hadn’t minded one way or the other and had cheerfully fallen in with her wishes. Esther had felt vaguely shocked and disapproving when Nina had first casually mentioned this – but look at the difference between her and Nina now. Nina leading a busy, extrovert life, happy and useful, totally absorbed in what she did, admired and welcomed everywhere, with a husband plainly devoted to her. Nina had kept her looks, her figure, had even improved on them since her marriage. And what of herself? What had she to show for twenty-six years of marriage and motherhood? A husband who addressed barely half a dozen sentences to her in the course of twenty-four hours, sons who condescended towards her. A personality, mouse-like enough to start out with but now so dimmed that she often felt invisible as she went through the motions of her routine existence. Much of the time she found her work for charity – the same work that gave Nina stimulus and satisfaction – little more than a tedious chore; on her worst days it served only to depress her still further.
She lay back in the water and raised one arm above her head. With her other hand she began her obsessive daily palpating of her breasts, always fearing to discover some tiny lump. Her mother had died of breast cancer at the age of forty-six, only two years older than herself at this moment. Esther had been fifteen when she first learned that her mother was ill, seventeen when she died. She and Matthew were both away at school or college in those years. Every holiday, when she came home, she would see the steady, remorseless decline. She had greatly loved her quiet, gentle mother; greatly grieved when she was gone.
One ray of hope she had permitted herself in all the heartrending sorrow: that it might bring her closer to her father. But that hadn’t come about.
She had minded a good deal when he had married again, three years later, although she had been married two years herself by then. She had tried hard not to mind his marriage, she didn’t want him to be lonely. The rational part of her understood and accepted the remarriage – but not the deeper, instinctive part.
She had never been close to her father. Bernard Dalton had been a reticent, undemonstrative man, a religious man of strong character and strict principles. Energetic and hard-working, devoting much of his time to building up the family business: printing, with a certain amount of specialist publishing. He did a good deal of charitable work, always endeavouring to put his principles into practice as a private citizen and in his business life.
Esther had always feared him, had always striven her utmost to please him. It was in an attempt to win his regard that she had first begun to work for charity.
But she had always been close to her brother. There had always been love between them, unalloyed and uncritical on her side, tolerant and understanding on Matthew’s. She had envied the seemingly easy way Matthew had been able as he grew up to shake himself free from the powerful governance of their father and strike out on his own, something she could never have dreamed of attempting herself.
It was through Matthew she had met James Milroy, a few months after the death of her mother. The two young men had been students together – not that they had ever been close friends, then or now; their temperaments were too different.
Esther had been very ready to fall in love; she saw marriage and motherhood as shining goals. She had been overjoyed when her father gave his blessing to the match. She had married before she was properly grown up, before she had tasted anything of life.
When she took her marriage vows she took them unequivocally, for life, in the certainty that James felt the same. They had both been brought up to shudder at the thought of divorce.
But she no longer shuddered at the thought. She yearned now to be done with her arid marriage. Time might be running out for her, as it had for her mother. If she was ever to gather the courage to make another life for herself she had better not leave it much longer.
What held her back? She could answer that in one
