New and Collected Stories by Alan; Sillitoe Page B

boiled an egg for breakfast (fried with bacon on Sundays) and had something cold but solid for my tea every night. As things went, it wasn’t a bad life. It might have been a bit lonely, but at least it was peaceful, and it got as I didn’t mind it, one way or the other. I even lost the feeling of loneliness that had set me thinking a bit too much just after she’d gone. And then I didn’t dwell on it any more. I saw enough people on my rounds during the day to last me through the evenings and at week-ends. Sometimes I played draughts at the club, or went out for a slow half pint to the pub up the street.
    Things went on like this for ten years. From what I gathered later Kathy had been living in Leicester with her housepainter. Then she came back to Nottingham. She came to see me one Friday evening, payday. From her point of view, as it turned out, she couldn’t have come at a better time.
    I was leaning on my gate in the backyard smoking a pipe of tobacco. I’d had a busy day on my rounds, an irritating time of it – being handed back letters all along the line, hearing that people had left and that no one had any idea where they’d moved to; and other people taking as much as ten minutes to get out of bed and sign for a registered letter – and now I felt twice as peaceful because I was at home, smoking my pipe in the backyard at the fag-end of an autumn day. The sky was a clear yellow, going green above the housetops and wireless aerials. Chimneys were just beginning to send out evening smoke, and most of the factory motors had been switched off. The noise of kids scooting around lamp-posts and the barking of dogs came from what sounded a long way off. I was about to knock my pipe out, to go back into the house and carry on reading a book about Brazil I’d left off the night before.
    As soon as she came around the corner and started walking up the yard I knew her. It gave me a funny feeling, though: ten years ain’t enough to change anybody so’s you don’t recognize them, but it’s long enough to make you have to look twice before you’re sure. And that split second in between is like a kick in the stomach. She didn’t walk with her usual gait, as though she owned the terrace and everybody in it. She was a bit slower than when I’d seen her last, as if she’d bumped into a wall during the last ten years through walking in the cock o’the walk way she’d always had. She didn’t seem so sure of herself and was fatter now, wearing a frock left over from the summer and an open winter coat, and her hair had been dyed fair whereas it used to be a nice shade of brown.
    I was neither glad nor unhappy to see her, but maybe that’s what shock does, because I was surprised, that I will say. Not that I never expected to see her again, but you know how it is, I’d just forgotten her somehow. The longer she was away our married life shrunk to a year, a month, a day, a split second of sparkling light I’d met in the black darkness before getting-up time. The memory had drawn itself too far back, even in ten years, to remain as anything much more than a dream. For as soon as I got used to living alone I forgot her.
    Even though her walk had altered I still expected her to say something sarky like: ‘Didn’t expect to see me back at the scene of the crime so soon, did you, Harry?’ Or: ‘You thought it wasn’t true that a bad penny always turns up again, didn’t you?’
    But she just stood. ‘Hello, Harry’ – waited for me to lean up off the gate so’s she could get in. ‘It’s been a long time since we saw each other, hasn’t it?’
    I opened the gate, slipping my empty pipe away. ‘Hello, Kathy,’ I said, and walked down the yard so that she could come behind me. She buttoned her coat as we went into the kitchen, as though she were leaving the house instead of just going in.