In Another Country by David Constantine

We’ve still got that one. What became of the others I don’t know. I don’t suppose many do marquetry nowadays. He was often down here in his shed after the war, but he didn’t make much, less and less in fact. Or he would go out in his boat but not really for the fishing.
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    I feel on edge, the least thing would do it. But also I feel something you’d hardly credit in me, an insouciance. Really I don’t much care what happens next.
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    31 December
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    Quite a few came to Brian’s Christmas party, thirty I should say. The men put on suits and ties and since I’d only ever seen them in work clothes before, they were very strange to me. I don’t mean they looked in the least ridiculous or uncomfortable. On the contrary, it felt like manners: this is an occasion, this is how you look. But their hands and faces, especially the boatmen’s, bare in their Sunday best, it brought the outdoors, the weather, the sea into the room, which Brian had gone to the trouble of decorating. The women had dressed up even more. They wore a good deal of makeup and jewellery. And the children, especially the girls, more children than I knew existed, they were also dressed for the occasion. I had no decent clothes to change into.
    The first glass and the mince pies were on the house. Then Brian went behind the bar and Chris joined him.
    I had a conversation with one of the boatmen—Matthew, I think his name was, he has a ginger beard—about the way things drift. I told him I’d found bits of charred wood here on the west side, bits of blue pallet, that I was pretty sure had come from the bonfire on the east side. He shrugged and said quite likely but I shouldn’t make a rule of it, you never could tell. Tide, current, wind, you never know. People go in the water here and are never seen again. Perhaps they land up somewhere, perhaps they don’t. Take Alf Lewis last summer, he went in the channel, drunk, so you can understand him drowning, but he’s never come up again so far as anyone knows. I don’t know about Alf Lewis, I said. Matthew shrugged. He blew in. Now he’s gone. Good riddance, some say. I waited but he wouldn’t say more. So instead I nodded towards the bar and said it was nice of Brian to give everyone a drink and a mince pie. Matthew nodded, but as though he’d have disagreed if I’d been somebody worth disagreeing with. Then I made a mistake. I asked did Lucy ever come to things like this. Matthew looked me in the eyes and slowly shook his head, which I took to mean, It’s none of your business, and not, No, Lucy never comes to things like this. He’s a big man, a big beard, with very small eyes. I asked would he like another drink. He said, No thanks, so I left him and went to the bar myself.
    Later—I was already thinking of making my surreptitious exit—Sarah and Elaine came over to me in the window. I had noticed their transformation, among the other women, but close up it shocked me, they seemed sent in their beauty and gaiety to remind me of what I had never striven hard enough to possess and now never would and did not deserve. Their arms were bare, Elaine wore a necklace of pale jade, Sarah a bracelet of lapis lazuli, her dress was a dark blue and that colour and the colour of Elaine’s dress, a blue-green, I had often watched travelling over the sea from the top of my ladder in Nathan’s fields in the wind and the swishing to earth of the olive-grey loppings of pittosporum. They were tipsy and full of mirth, knowing their own attractiveness, knowing how their dresses and the occasion, the decorations, the light of the sky and the sea through the window, the wine, how it all worked to increase their youthfulness and beauty, the life in them, beyond what I could bear to contemplate. They were close together, I think of them now as having each an arm around the other’s waist, and a glass in the outer hand,