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.)‘Red or white?’ A tray with glasses of wine was being offered.‘That seems very basic, doesn’t it?’ said Claudia, in a light, friendly tone.‘Is the colour all we can expect to have explained to us?’‘We can see that for ourselves,’ said Emma, accepting a glass of something pale.‘What year were you up?’ Claudia asked.‘I wasn’t here – I was at L.S.E.I did anthropology there.’‘Of course, L.S.E.! And you know, or used to know, Graham.’‘Yes, I do know him.’ For some reason Emma found herself leaving it at that – that she knew Claudia’s husband.‘He’s taking a cottage somewhere in your neck of the woods.To finish his book, he says.’ Claudia laughed, as if it couldn’t possibly be true but that she hardly cared whether it was or not.‘Yes, it’s in the village where I’m living at the moment – and it literally is in the woods.’‘It would be nice to know you were keeping an eye on him.’‘Well, I’ll probably see him,’ Emma said.The friendly, almost cosy, note of their conversation seemed wrong, as if Claudia cared so little about Graham that he wasn’t worth anybody else caring about either, especially when she added that Emma would be a most suitable person to keep an eye on him because she had known Graham ‘all those years ago’.‘It wasn’t so very long ago,’ said Emma, stung by the implication of age and now uncertain whether Claudia was being cosy or just catty.‘I know – one feels the years just slipping away, especially at this kind of gathering.’ Claudia glanced round her as if in illustration at the groups of eager women reliving old times.‘Nothing that’s happened since seems all that important – people come up to you and call you by your name of twenty years ago.’And now somebody did come up to Claudia (‘Why, isn’t it Claudia Jenks?’), so she and Emma were separated.They had had their encounter, for what it was worth.It was more restful and certainly less demanding to be standing next to one of Beatrix’s colleagues, a mathematician who, it appeared, was responsible for the garden in some way and was worried about the drought and the effect it was having on the lawns.Emma found that she did not have to make any effort to respond – she just received and accepted the worry and helped herself to another glass of the pale wine.Pale and weak though it was, it did seem to blur her senses and induce a feeling of not caring what happened.Did people ever get drunk at these college gatherings, with their predominance of women? There were a few men present, mostly husbands, and she wondered if Graham had ever attended these functions in the past, if he had waited dutifully by the rather formidable Claudia, waiting to be introduced to her contemporaries or the dons who had taught her.She would have to ask him some time, when she described this evening and her meeting with Claudia – if she ever did.‘Did you have some interesting talk?’ Beatrix asked, coming up to her.‘Oh, yes – she seems a friendly sort of girl.I dare say we’d get on quite well if we ever had to.She thought I might keep an eye on Graham, by the way.’‘Well, she’d have to say something like that.’‘A kind of joking relationship between spouses,’ said Emma ironically.‘She obviously finds Graham as boring as I do.’‘Surely not,’ said Beatrix, wishing Emma wouldn’t talk in this way.‘But I do think she’s got other things on her mind at the moment.She told me she was busy moving into a new house in Islington and that must take up all her time.’Graham had mentioned something about this and also that the house was really too big for them and inconvenient, only two rooms on each floor, “but that Claudia had decided it was what she must have, so he really had no say in the matter.Perhaps the cottage in the woods had been chosen as a deliberately contrasting summer retreat from all this.And he did have a book to finish, whatever Claudia might imply.‘It looks out over the canal,’ Beatrix went on.‘A fashionable district, I believe.We shall just have to see how things go on.’We? Emma wondered, pondering on the obscurity of this last statement.It was almost as if her mother was arranging the whole thing.‘Graham is supposed to be arriving tonight,’ she said.‘I shall go round to see that he’s got everything he wants.’‘Are the requisites all in the toilet?’ Beatrix quoted.‘So important to remember details like that, as well as tins of soup and baked beans.And I suppose you could occasionally cook something for him.’‘Carry a casserole through the woods, you mean?’ said Emma.‘Yes, I suppose I could do that.’It was the next morning before Emma could go round to see Graham, and any feeling of excitement she might have experienced the evening before had evaporated on a hot walk through the village with a slight headache and dry mouth from drinking too much of the pale weak wine.The village street seemed empty and foreign, with dogs and cats sleeping in doorways, but Emma had the feeling that she was being observed and seen to enter the woods.Everybody would know where she was going, for it was of course common knowledge that Graham (Dr Pettifer) was renting the cottage, though what exactly he was doing was another matter.Some even thought that, being ‘Dr’, he was intending to set up in rivalry to Dr G.and Martin Shrubsole, but he could hardly be holding a surgery in the woods, could he, unless he was some kind of faith healer?The cottage looked attractive, shaded by trees even if it was damp, and the agent had arranged for the garden to be tidied and the brick path weeded.There were even a few flowers out, self-seeded marigolds and acceptable weeds, but the most interesting sight was Graham, sitting out on the grass with his typewriter at a small folding table, a stack of notebooks and files on the ground by his side – the perfect picture of an academic working on a book in rural surroundings.There was something self-conscious, even comic, about him and Emma found herself smiling with more than a normal welcoming smile.He looked up at her approach and her ‘Hullo – so you got here all right’ was returned cordially enough, but then he said, ‘I didn’t expect you till later on – don’t you usually work in the mornings?’‘Sometimes, but I thought I’d see if you’d settled in all right, got your milk and the groceries from the shop.’ Did I once love this man? Emma asked herself, feeling that perhaps they should have kissed or at least greeted each other a little more warmly.‘Yes, thank you – the milk came this morning and I found the box of groceries – rather an odd selection.’‘Odd? In what way? I just asked them to put in some necessities, bread and butter and cheese and various tins, to tide you over.’Graham smiled.‘I just thought it seemed odd to have tinned vegetables in the country – I’d imagined produce from people’s gardens, even yours.And I don’t much care for spaghetti hoops.’‘I don’t grow vegetables,’ said Emma, feeling nettled (surely that was the appropriate word?).‘You’ll probably be glad of a tin of peas or carrots one of these days.As for the spaghetti hoops, I suppose Mrs Bland at the shop thought they’d do for a light supper dish
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