A Sunday Lunch

The Sherborne Arms had a car park that had been a paddock and still sloped like one, and Margot put the old Mercedes nose-in beside a Volvo estate that could only be Helena's and sat a moment with the engine ticking before she went in. The drive over had taken her along lanes she did not know yet, between hedges high enough to hide the country, and once she had checked her face in the mirror and been cross with herself for checking. She was not sure what the lunch was. Helena had asked her as a neighbour asks, and Margot had said yes as you accept, and somewhere in the four days since, the thing had grown in her estimation well past the size a Sunday lunch ought to be.

It was the tidy kind of estate a careful person keeps for fifteen years and never quite fills, parked square between the lines while the Sunday cars around it had been left where they stopped. Margot's own car had cost two thousand pounds and been bought for the size of its boot, and on a warm day it still smelled of the boxes of books it had carried down from London. She had dressed the way you dress when you do not know how much a thing matters: the green coat, and the reading glasses left at home for once.

Inside there was woodsmoke. Someone had lit the bar fire though it was late September and the middle of the day, and the smell of it reached her with roasting meat and the warm reek of wet dog. The place was full in the ordinary Sunday fashion, families and walkers, a children's birthday loud at the long table by the door. Helena had the corner by the window, and lifted a hand, and the black labrador under the table thumped its tail twice against the boards and did not otherwise trouble itself.

'You found it,' Helena said.

'You give good directions.'

'I gave no directions. You found it.' She had a manner of correcting a thing that made the correction feel like a small present. 'Sit so you can see the room. People take the seat by the door without thinking, and then they spend the meal watching everyone who isn't them.'

Margot sat where she could see the room. A waiter brought menus that Helena waved off in favour of telling her what was good, which was the lamb, and proved to be. The pub did the work pubs do, and within ten minutes Margot had stopped being nervous and could not afterwards have said when she stopped. Helena was easy to sit across from. She asked questions a degree more interesting than the ones strangers ask and listened to the answers as though she might be examined on them later, and the effect was that Margot talked better than she usually did, knew it, and was grateful. Two other tables had nodded to Helena as Margot crossed to join her, and the girl who brought the menus had called her by name. She was, plainly, someone this room knew and was glad to have in it.

At the next table three people were most of the way through their lunch. Helena named them across the gap, first names only, with no account of who they were or how she knew them, and left them to sort themselves out.

'Hugh. Adrian. Antonia. This is Margot, who has the bookshop in Stow.'

Hugh was the one who stood. He was heavy-set and white-bearded and came up out of his chair with the small grunt of a big man who has eaten well, crossed to shake her hand, and kept it a moment in both of his. His fingers were stained black at the tips in a way no soap would shift. 'So you're the bookshop,' he said, as though it were good news he had been waiting on. 'Helena tells me you turned up a Repton. She has wanted one as long as I have known her, which is longer than either of us will own to at this table.' On the smallest finger of his hand was a worn gold signet, the device rubbed nearly flat. 'You must come and see what I have. Half of it is rubbish. The other half I am rather proud of.'

'He says that to everyone,' said Antonia, without looking up from her plate, 'and then keeps you standing in front of the rubbish for two hours.' She was silver-blonde and weathered and dressed in the unstudied country way that costs a great deal more than it lets on. When she did look up it was to take Margot in properly, coat and all, in one slow pass that managed not to be rude. 'That is a good coat. You cannot buy wool like it any more; they all want to sell you a thing you can put through the machine.' She had turned in her chair to say it, and a small brooch on her lapel took the light from the window and gave it back.

Adrian did not get up. He was lean and very upright, prematurely white, with the still and banked quality of a man used to being the one who is waited for. 'Where were you before Stow?' It was the only thing he asked her, in the tone of a man confirming a figure.

'London. Holborn.'

'Everyone is leaving London.' He leaned back, and his jacket fell open on a small pin through his tie, a detail you note about a man with money and no wish to be asked about it. 'I gave it up myself. No one believes you will, and then you do, and no one can think why they didn't.' He returned to his lunch, and that was the whole of Adrian, and Margot understood she had been weighed and set down again by a man who had spent four words on her.

The three of them were exactly as warm as strangers at the next table should be, and not a degree warmer. When they turned back to their own talk it had the shorthand of people who have eaten a great many lunches at the same tables, a name let drop without its surname, a joke finished before it was fairly begun, and Margot caught none of the sense of it and all of the ease. And yet she came away with the feeling of having been the reason the table was sitting there at all, which was absurd, and which she put down to the strangeness of a new place and to how a good lunch can leave you feeling briefly important. If she had pressed it, it was nearer to walking into a room where a conversation has that second stopped. She did not press it.

Their food came, and was as good as promised. Helena ate without hurry and without leaving anything on the plate, and asked about the column.

'It is only a column,' Margot said. 'Country Life, starting after Christmas. Nine hundred words a month on books and the country, and never on politics.'

'That is not only a column. That is a great many of the right people reading you over breakfast and coming to believe they thought of it themselves.' Helena filled Margot's glass and not her own. 'What will the first one be?'

'I haven't decided. Endpapers, perhaps. The marbled sort. Nobody ever looks at them and they are the most beautiful part of the book.'

'Write that one.' She said it as she had said you'll do better here, a fact she happened to hold and was passing across. 'People think the front of a book is the cover. The front of a book is the paper the binder marbled to hide his glue. There is a column in that, and you know there is.'

Margot laughed, taken by surprise, because it was exactly the column and Helena had found it in two sentences. After that the talk went easily. She told Helena about the worst book she had ever sold and the best one she had ever let go, and about a man in Cheltenham who collected only volumes that had at some point been rained on. Helena laughed in the right places and asked, after each, the question that showed she had been listening for the story underneath the story. It was the most Margot had talked about herself in a year. She was aware of it, and could not stop, and did not, in the end, want to.

Helena ordered them both a pudding neither had asked for, a treacle tart that arrived with a jug of cream and a second small jug nobody could account for, and over it she gave Margot the names of three people in the village she ought to know and one she ought to be wary of, and made the wary one sound the most charming of the four. Margot wrote none of it down and remembered all of it.

'You left the glasses at home,' Helena said then, with a glance at the bare bridge of Margot's nose.

'You noticed them in the shop.'

'I notice most things. Whose were they?'

'My grandmother's. She taught me the trade, more or less. A stall, then a shop, then a smaller shop, then the stall again at the end, which she said was the only honest size for the business.' Margot had not meant to give all of that and gave it anyway. 'She would have hated the internet and been frighteningly good at it.'

'My husband was the same about the telephone.' Helena turned her cup a quarter-turn on its saucer. 'He died eight years ago.' She gave it in the same even breath as the rest, neither inviting the question nor closing it, and let it lie, and added nothing, and moved the talk with one small motion back to the trade, where Margot stood on her own ground. It was done so lightly that she understood only afterwards she had been handed something true and given nothing she was allowed to do with it.

When Margot asked, plainly, what Helena did, the answer was as brief: she had been a barrister, and still was a little, out of a converted barn, for people who could not get sense anywhere else. She sat on a bench once a fortnight and chaired a trust that was trying to keep the trout in the Coln. She offered it without modesty and without expansion, and somehow Margot did not feel she had been refused. Once, between the lamb and the coffee, Helena asked whether she had been lonely, in Stow, these eighteen months. Not whether she liked it. Whether she had been lonely. Margot, who told everyone she loved the quiet, heard herself say that yes, she had been, rather, until lately. Helena nodded as though it were the right answer and not a sad one, and let it go.

A man at the bar lifted his glass.

He was tall and broad through the shoulders, a man who had played some hard game once and come well out of it, and he raised the glass an inch towards Helena without calling across the room. Helena tipped her head to him, once, and went back to her coffee. He did not come over. On the hand around the glass was a signet, worn as Hugh wore his, a thing that had always been there. Margot waited to be told who he was, was not told, and discovered she did not want to ask, the way you do not ask after a word in a language you have only begun to suspect is being spoken all around you.

'Coffee,' Helena said, 'and then I will let you go; you will want your afternoon. There are two books you ought to see. Hugh has them, the fool, when he might have let me have them years ago. Come to Glebe Court at the weekend and look at them.'

'I'd like that.'

'Saturday. Come for the afternoon and stay for an early supper. You will know half the table.' No diary came out, and nothing was written down. The arrangement was simply made, and then treated by both of them as a thing already settled. Glebe Court. Margot did not know where it was. She would find it that evening on the map and see that it was a house and not a village, which told her something, though she was not sure what.

Helena left first. Margot watched the Volvo take the slope of the car park without complaint and turn for home, and she stayed on a while over the last of the coffee, because she did not want the afternoon to begin being over. At the next table the three of them had ordered more wine. Nobody watched her go.

The lunch stayed with her on the road, warm and faintly unaccountable, like a compliment whose exact wording you cannot afterwards recall. She had liked them. She had liked being among them. She told herself she was a woman who had been to a good lunch and was driving home, and for most of the way she believed it. The other part of her, the part that had watched a man at the next table decide something about her in the space of four words, said nothing, and drove.

She went back the long way, through Bibury, where the gauge had been nagging at her for two days, and pulled into the small filling station on the far side of the village. She got out into the cooling afternoon, set the pump running, and stood with her hand on the nozzle, watching the numbers climb and thinking about nothing, which was its own small luxury.

At the next pump a man was filling a mud-spattered pickup. Tall, dark-haired, lean in the manner of someone whose work is outdoors, with a face that had not settled the question of whether it was handsome and had plainly never put the question to itself. He was looking at her. He had looked at the car, and now he was looking at her, and he did not stop when she met it. He did not smile, and he did not look away. Nor did he do the small thing a stranger does when he is caught, the half-smile that turns looking into nothing. He tipped his head a single degree, confirming to himself something she had not known was in question.

She finished, and went in to pay, and when she came out he had gone, the pickup already pulling onto the road.

She caught it on the straight out of Bibury, and then it turned off towards Bourton and she did not. In the mirror she watched it go small, the shape of the man dark behind the wheel, until the hedges took it. She put both hands back on the wheel. The road ran on in front of her, grey and ordinary, and it was hers. She looked at the mirror once more, at the place where the turning had been, and drove on home.