Rosalie Warren

The End of Summer

© Rosalie Warren 2007

Barbara had decided, for some reason not fully clear to her, that on the first rainy day she would tell her husband, Geoff, about her affair.

It was August 1970 and the summer had been a warm one. Day after day, she woke up and looked at the slice of sky between the bedroom curtains. Relentlessly blue, so blue it had taken on the pinkish bloom of grapefruit skin, it granted her another day’s reprieve. Another day when she would finish work at the bank and leave toddler Laura for an extra hour at her mother’s while she went home and made the place beautiful for the arrival of Harry.

Harry, who would not notice the plumped cushions or the vase of scent-steaming roses on the piano, but who would play with Barbara on the sofa like the fifteen-year-olds they were when they first discovered sex.

Meanwhile, Geoff would be at work, lying with his head under a car, inhaling petrol fumes, his face poaching in its own sweat. He would be counting the hours and the minutes to knocking-off time, when he could shake himself free from his grease-thickened overalls and feel the air on his limbs as he pedalled home, thinking of iced beer on the doorstep with little Laura on his lap, pulling his hair and shrieking with joy.

Barbara had successfully subdued her conscience by a process of cloning herself into two distinct personalities. There was good Barbara: Geoff’s Barbara or Barbara-G, the devoted wife, mother and bank teller. Then there was Harry’s Barbara: Barbara-H, who should, perhaps, have been named Barbara-Horrid.

Barbara-G, after watering Geoff’s tomato plants in the tiny lean-to greenhouse adjoining their side wall, stared into the glass to see Barbara-H reflected back, like her but not her. Barbara-H was allowed to do all the things that Barbara-G wasn’t. Barbara-H was slimmer and possibly a little prettier, though that may have been the result of the snail-tracks on the glass blurring out some of her mid-thirties wrinkles. Barbara-H was less careworn because she did not have a husband and daughter. She had a job rather like her twin’s, but with more responsibility and better paid. Their worlds, apart from the matter of family, were very similar, the principal difference being that Barbara-H was free.

She was free to be with Harry, to forget all about Geoff and Laura for an hour, three afternoons each week. Not, of course, that Barbara-H had  to forget them, strictly speaking, since she did not know them in the first place. The logic was not quite perfect, but neither Barbara cared.

An hour could pass so quickly, yet contain so much. The sun traversed only 15 degrees or so of vacant blue while they kissed and embraced and made up for all those years of lost time. Barbara would have liked to make love out of doors, and the parched rectangular lawn was probably just big enough for the two of them to lie on, but she was afraid of the neighbours. Already she had had to concoct a story to account for her regular visitor, saying that he was redesigning their kitchen. She then had to explain further, when the neighbour called in for coffee, why no visible progress had yet been made.

Harry and Barbara had been lovers long before. In 1958 they were engaged, poised on the edge of marriage, ready for a big splash of a day that would start at All Saints’ Church and then move down the road to the church hall where Barbara’s mother and sister would be serving a home-made sandwich buffet. Barbara’s wedding dress was ready, the palest of pale green silk, adorned with a thousand sequins laboriously sewn on by Barbara’s mother, Dora. There was a matching feathered headdress and a short veil, and there would be roses from a generous neighbour’s garden.

But Harry changed his mind. He wrote Barbara a brief note, pushed it though the family letterbox two weeks to the day before the wedding, and vanished.

Barbara was, of course, inconsolable. She was also perplexed, being convinced, then as now, that Harry loved her. She could not understand his leaving. There had been no row. All she could think of was that she had mentioned children, how many she would like and when. Could that be it? Did Harry hate the idea of being a father so much it made him run away? She could come up with no other explanation.

There was a rumour that Harry, after the break-up, had gone north to Durham. Barbara did not try to contact him. Nothing she said now, she reasoned, would make him change his mind. Meanwhile, the wonderful dress rustled in her wardrobe and Barbara had to explain things to the Reverend John Bowman, whose clumsy attempts at sympathy brought on Barbara’s tears and embarrassed them both.

Barbara’s mother, to her credit, avoided any explicit ‘I told you so’, but it hung unsaid in the air between them. She had never liked Harry.

It took Barbara at least a year, possibly longer, to get over Harry’s desertion. She could not bring herself to go out with any other man, though several asked. Then, three years later, Geoff appeared, a car mechanic with huge, long-fingered hands that could coax life out of a failed engine and astounding beauty out of a Beethoven piano sonata. And also, it turned out, love out of a heart that Barbara had given up on.

Geoff and Barbara were married six months later. Both had some savings and the reception was held at a small out-of-town hotel. Barbara did her best to stifle the faint whiff of second-best, second-time-around, that drifted over the celebrations and the early years of her marriage. It wasn’t helped by the fact that the original green wedding dress still hung, unworn, among her clothes.

She tried to focus. Harry was gone, she had Geoff, and he was good to her. They had a successful marriage, she repeatedly told herself, though their mutual goodwill was stretched by years of failing to conceive, followed by four miscarriages. But, finally, the struggle was over, and Laura was born on July 21^st 1969, the day of the first moon landing. Barbara was assured of Geoff’s devotion by his abandoning the TV coverage of Apollo 11 to take her to hospital. He missed Armstrong’s famous words but instead saw his daughter born, and would maintain, ever after, that he had made the right choice.

Laura was a delightful baby and for a while they were happy.

Harry turned up, unexpectedly, one day in May of the following year. Barbara was sorting cheques behind her desk at the bank and did not immediately recognise him as he waited for her attention.

Then, ‘How are you doing, Babs?’ he asked, and her heart leapt and started pounding. All the blood in her body rushed to fill her face and she dropped her pile of cheques, which lay unheeded on the floor.

Harry told her he was married to a hairdresser called Sandra and they had just moved back down from Newcastle. They had no children, yet.

As he and Barbara exchanged information, each scanned the other’s face, looking for signs of interest. Both found it and saw that the other had seen it, too. It flashed back and forth between them like light in a laser, intensifying with each reflection. But nothing of any significance was said that day.

There would never be many words in their affair. After about a fortnight, Harry started coming to the house those three afternoons a week. The arrangements were easily made and the whole thing seemed ‘meant’, as Barbara put it to herself. She continued, as Barbara-G, to look after her family with her usual devotion, making Geoff’s packed lunch every day, bathing, feeding and playing with Laura, tending the house and garden as well as doing her part-time job at the bank.

The summer crept on, sunny day by sunny day, and the sense grew in Barbara that this could not last for ever, at least in its present form. She conceived, somewhere in the depths below conscious thought, of a bifurcation, a branching into two separate, but equally real, worlds. In one, Barbara-G had Geoff and Laura, while in the other, Barbara-H had Harry.

What was needed now, Barbara believed, was something to trigger the splitting: something to create, with appropriate changes, the necessary copies and allow the parallel worlds to be formed.

And that something, Barbara knew, would be the telling of Geoff, and it would take place on the first day that she woke up to see grey skies and hear rain on the window.  Meanwhile, the days turned over and the summer went on.

But Barbara was pre-empted. On the last Wednesday of August, Harry arrived as usual, with the sun shining through a lemon haze that threatened rain. It was still a pleasant afternoon, however, and they took a few minutes to sniff the roses in the back garden. Or, at least, Barbara sniffed. Harry was trying to say something that she did not want to hear. Barbara-H, it must be said, lacked some of the empathy and subtlety of her twin. She was, perhaps, a little coarse by comparison.

Harry could not get her attention. The atmosphere was thickening rapidly into cloud, and, just as they finally noticed the failing sun, the first cold raindrops plopped onto their overheated skin. They savoured the contrast for a minute or two, until the rain gathered force and began to soak them. Then Harry propelled Barbara into the greenhouse. Barbara saw her twin, the reliable Barbara-G, looking in at her from the outside, happy as always and no doubt already planning supper.

‘I’ve got something to say.’  Harry suddenly had too many arms and legs, took up too much room in the confined space, leaving nothing for Barbara. His voice was muffled and scratchy like an old record of Dora’s.

Barbara wanted to kiss him instead of listening. But Harry, for once, didn’t even want to touch her. He must talk, he must tell her that it was finished, that they would have to stop. That he was very sorry.

The windows were steaming up; there was a crazy drumming and clattering on the plastic roof. Barbara thought of Geoff pounding out one of his sonatas. It was stiflingly hot and almost impossible to breathe. Harry’s words condensed onto the cool windows and metal struts of the greenhouse: visible globules of truth, droplets of cold reality.

We have to end this. Sandra has guessed something. I have to save my marriage. You too. Geoff, Laura…

 The air was wet against their skin. Barbara-G had disappeared and all that could be seen in the window was a coating of steam on the inside, punctuated by snail-tracks. Outside, rain coursed down the glass to the hard-baked soil.

Instead of the desired branching, a merger had taken place; there had been a re-convergence of Barbara-H and Barbara-G. There was only one Barbara now. Harry was leaving; in a moment he would slide open the door, it would make its familiar rasping sound and he’d be gone, running between the drops, as they used to say as children, back to his own world. Just one Barbara would be left, with far too much of a load for any single person to carry. There would be just one of her to face Geoff when he came home from work and she had to explain her tears, the lack of dinner and the fact that Laura was still at her Gran’s, waiting to be picked up and brought home.

Seeing her upset, Geoff would take Barbara in his arms and ask her what was wrong. She would tell him the truth, because she could no longer bear it alone. He would gaze wide-eyed, without comprehension, until she had finished, at which point he would suddenly understand and erupt in a howl. Then he would push his grimy feet into the wet sandals he had left on the mat  and leave, slamming the door so hard the house shuddered.

Barbara would stand in the hall looking at the closed door with its letterbox sprung open, tasting stomach acid in her mouth. The phone would ring: her mother, wondering why she hadn’t come to collect Laura.

And outside, from a sky that was still yellow, it would continue to rain.