It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories by James Lasdun

of sap in the air. The wood was going to be sold at the lumberyard, and the women, who seemed to know about such things, were instructing the loggers to hide flaws in the trunks by roughing the surface with the toothed edge of the backhoe’s metal bucket.
    “More! More!” the old woman screeched at the driver over the roar and clank of the huge machine. “Good! Stop!”
    A week later bulldozers leveled the dirt, and soon after that the contractor brought in the steel and glass for the houses themselves. Tunnel frames with plastic sheeting would have been cheaper to build but harder to heat in winter, and in this, as in all other aspects of the project, the women had persuaded Conrad that the higher-priced option was the only one that could possibly merit serious consideration. There was something lofty, almost aristocratic about these women, Conrad thought, and he found that he approved of this. Lydia, with her queenly bearing and calm practicality, had begun to fascinate him.
    They liked to play bridge, and on discovering that Conrad knew the rudiments of the game, they invited him to join them, summoning for a fourth the tenant they had installed in the small cottage next to their house.
    This was an old man with little startled red-rimmed eyes and wisps of white hair standing upright as though he’d seen a ghost.
    His name was Mirek, and he too was Czech, a distant relative of theirs, who had managed to emigrate in the sixties and lived in Brooklyn, running a used book business until a few years ago, when the lease on his tiny store expired. When Olga and Lydia had looked him up, he was doing menial jobs for a coin and stamp dealer in Manhattan. He had complained so bitterly of the difficulty of keeping body and soul together in the city that later, when the time came for the women to find a tenant for the one-room cottage on their new property, they had decided to ask Mirek if he would like to move there himself. At first he had refused, even less certain of how he would make a living outside the city than inside. But in quick succession two things had happened to change his mind: he had been mugged on the subway, and then the dealer he was working for had moved to Florida. And so he had decided to take his chances with the women. The only job he had found so far was bagging groceries at a Grand Union two miles away, but he seemed cheerful and optimistic about his prospects.
    All this came out over the course of several evenings as the bridge games developed into regular weekly events. The four of them sat at a card table in the front room, which had been furnished in an ornate, old-fashioned style, with net curtains, gold-striped wallpaper, and a crimson plush sofa with lace antimacassars. The stakes were small, though the mother saw to it that debts were paid promptly, and she kept a tin box full of change for the purpose. Conrad and the old man partnered each other, and as they almost always lost, a rueful bond established itself between them, and they were able to make up for the sometimes awkward fact of their being barely able to understand a word each other said by an ongoing pantomime of commiserative gestures—sighs, grimaces, outstretched hands.
    After the game coffee would be served; then Olga would gather up the cups and withdraw to the kitchen, which would be the old man’s cue to leave. Conrad and Lydia would linger on in the front room, talking together with growing comfort and familiarity.
    One evening after Mirek had gone home and Olga had disappeared off to the kitchen, the two of them found themselves sitting together in an unusually charged silence. What was there to say? They knew as much about each other as conversation could reveal. Conrad had told her all about his past: growing up in Troy the son of an appliance dealer and an assistant school principal, his steady luck as an investor in local businesses, the feelings he still had for his wife, the brief relationships with other women he had