Fiction
Love & Covid
By Liz McManus
‘Hello, is that Sally?’
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ she said, ‘Ambrose Marshall.’
‘That’s me. How are you?’
Outside the kitchen window a cat was stalking a magpie. The bird flew up to rest on the shed roof. In the grass, the cat waited, her tail twitching.
‘Where are you calling from?’ she asked. She had a memory of the two of them standing in a phone booth on Nassau Street. How long ago was it? Fifty-eight years. Now phone booths were a thing of the past. Ambrose was phoning from Westmeath. Of course, the family farm outside Moate. His voice was louder than she remembered. Probably going deaf. What age was he? Seventy-seven, the same age as she was. Ancient.
‘I was just thinking of you when out of the blue, I bumped into a college friend and she gave me your number. Talk about a coincidence.’
She was astonished. ‘You were thinking of me?’
In university the girls in her class had been mad about him. ‘Ambrose Marshall, or Marshall Ambrose if you prefer,’ he had said that day when he sat down beside her in the lecture hall. ‘We Prods are fond of surnames.’ She and he became friends by accident more than design. They were both studying archaeology and on field trips they paired up. Ambrose wore a cravat inside his frayed shirt and carried a silver cigarette case and spoke in a plummy accent. He was handsome in an old-fashioned squire way but she had found it hard to take him seriously.
Now they were catching up on spouses – he was on his second wife, she was still with Rory. Then the conversation moved on to how they were coping with lockdown.
‘I have nightmares that Covid is breaking into this house and wrecking the furniture.’
She laughed. ‘And what do you do?’
‘Oh, I take out my sword and smite the thing in two. All rather phallic, I suppose.’
She looked at her watch. ‘I have to go.’
‘May I phone you again?’
‘Oh yes, please,’ she said, without thinking. ‘I’d like that.’
It took her twenty minutes to drive to the day care centre. She liked working with old people and worried that she’d be told to stay home because of Covid. She was only a volunteer and yet the nurse depended on her. It was mainly women who came to the centre: the widows of farm labourers and forestry workers bussed there each morning and, in the evening, brought back to their isolated cottages. Farmers’ widows tended towards private nursing homes rather than the health board day care centre. There weren’t health boards anymore, Sally reminded herself. Only the HSE. She cut toenails and blowdried hair and chatted to the women and when she went home in the afternoon she wondered why the mundane work lifted her spirits so much. On the day the nurse told her not to come to the centre any more, Sally burst into tears.
‘You must understand, dear.’ The nurse was gentle. ‘At your age you are vulnerable. Anyway I expect the centre will be closed soon, as a precaution.’
‘It’s only a bit of voluntary work,’ she told Ambrose during one of their phone calls. ‘I don’t know why I got so upset.’
‘Covid gets to you in strange ways. I get a buzz from minding my cows. I talk to them a lot.’
She wanted to ask him if he remembered how she had disgraced herself: going to the Trinity Ball with one boy and leaving with another. That night, without a backward glance, she had walked out into the night with Ambrose Marshall. She hadn’t had much to drink so she had no excuse except that she was deliriously happy at the sight of him coming towards her through the hot, roaring crowd.
‘Will you come upstairs with me?’ he had said,lowering his head onto her shoulder. ‘To my room?’
The boy she’d come with hadn’t even noticed her leaving. He was very drunk and more interested in his mates than he was in her. Even so, she felt guilty for a long time after. Good girls didn’t do that kind of thing and she wanted to be good. Until then, her experience of boys had been unsatisfactory: clumsy fumblings in the backs of cars, and heavy petting sessions that had left her cold. Am I frigid? she had fretted.
That night, in the doorway of his rooms in Botany Bay, Ambrose had pulled her close and they had kissed for the first time. It was only after she was married that she understood how much her generation had missed out on: the freedom of the pill, smoking pot, the mad politics, Women’s Lib. Compared to her daughter who thought she had it made, all Sally had was a memory of Ambrose Marshall’s body on hers, naked, among the rumpled sheets.
Eventually she summoned enough courage to ask him. ‘Do you remember that night?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘When you kissed me that first time,’ she said shyly, ‘it was the most thrilling kiss I ever had, before or since.’
Silence.
‘Are you still there?’
‘Do you know,’ he said at last, ‘that is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. I remember everything about that night; you were so excited I could feel your heart beating against my chest. It made me half-crazy. Nothing could have come between us. If we’d been hosed down by a water cannon we wouldn’t have noticed.’
She burst out laughing.
‘And afterwards, you danced naked for me.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t remember that.’
‘Well, there you go,’ he said, ‘I do.’
It was quite innocent, she thought, talking on the phone to an old flame in the middle of a pandemic. All the same she didn’t tell her husband. Rory had lost interest in sex a long time ago. So had she, in her own way. After he retired, the garden kept them busy, and the grandchildren, of course. He had his golf and she had her voluntary work. Then the lockdown upended everything. The two of them stuck at home without a route out. She had Ambrose Marshall hidden in her phone but what, she wondered, did her husband have? When the taoiseach announced on television that golf clubs were to be closed, Rory had leapt up, snarling at the screen, You fucking, fucking bastard.
‘For heaven’s sake, Rory,’ Sally said. ‘Calm down.’
Then she saw the tears in his eyes.
‘I am sorry,’ she murmured but he had already turned away. Golf was the closest to passion that Rory got these days. If she disappeared in the morning, would he feel as strongly? Covid is hard, she thought, on both of us. That night she moved closer to him in the bed, whispering ‘Rory, love …’ but he had already fallen asleep and was snoring.
She looked forward to their aimless conversations.
‘That night, how did it happen?’ she wondered. ‘I mean, I never thought.’
‘You must have known that I fancied you,’ Ambrose said. ‘All those bloody field trips I had to go on just to be with you.’
She was mortified. ‘I didn’t know.’
As soon as term ended, Ambrose had gone away. Other students got summer jobs picking peas in the south of England or in canning factories. He went to London and wangled himself a job at the British Museum. By the time he returned that September, Sally was already engaged to Rory.
‘When this lockdown is over, would you like to meet me?’
Oh yes, she wanted to say but she couldn’t.
‘How about lunch in my club.’
She smiled. ‘You have a club. Why am I not surprised?’
‘It’s handy when I’m staying in town. It’s the only luxury I can afford although to be honest, I can’t really afford it.’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes to lunch?’
They had expected that everything would be back to normal by April but there were delays with the vaccines and a new variant of Covid caused a stir. It was late July before they could even talk about meeting. By then they had both been vaccinated and restrictions had been lifted.
‘So we will meet in Dublin,’ he said. ‘Can’t wait.’
It was madness, she thought, but there was no harm in it: two old friends meeting over lunch to reminisce. It wasn’t as if she was being unfaithful. Could you be unfaithful to a husband who wasn’t bothered? Rory was back out on the golf course, delighted with himself: that was all he wanted.
She looked around the bedroom, at the pictures on the walls, the photos of grandchildren. Here was evidence of the home and family she had made. She was seventy-seven years old, she reminded herself. It made no sense: inside, she was still a girl. She stared at her reflection in the mirror. Would Ambrose even recognise her? She paused for a moment, unable to remember what she was looking for. Ah yes, in the drawer, the black lacy underwear that she hadn’t worn for years. Why not? There was no harm in dressing up after months of lockdown and she thought of the elderly women in the day care centre, all gussied up with nowhere to go.
In the front hall of the club, Ambrose was waiting. He took her coat, handed it to the porter and then ushered her into the dimly lit bar where they sat down on high-backed chairs facing each other. Ambrose had weathered well, she thought, with his farmer’s tan and his grey hair in need of a cut. His long legs were encased in cavalry twill trousers. For heaven’s sake, she wanted to say, who wears cavalry twill nowadays? At the sight of his worn, polished brogues and the leather patches on the elbows of his shabby jacket, she softened.
‘You look good enough to eat,’ she said.
Smiling, he offered her a menu. ‘Now there’s a thought.’
The club dining room was like the inside of an auctioneer’s showroom, crammed with antique furniture and dust motes in the air. She looked down at the silver cutlery, the cut glass on the table and thought: this could be my last chance. The lacy strap of her bra was digging into her shoulder and she slipped her hand inside the collar of her dress to ease it. When she looked up, Ambrose was watching her with interest. ‘Is everything alright?’
She blushed. ‘Everything is lovely.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And so are you.’
She knew then what he was going to ask her after lunch was over.This is madness, she wanted to say but the girl inside her resisted. Why not take a risk? She had played safe for too long. Then she remembered that Ambrose had told her about his heart trouble, and the stents the surgeon had put in. How much excitement could he take? She visualised the tabloid headlines, ‘OAP Dies in Geriatric Love Nest,’ and she shuddered. The day could end in disaster. What a way to go … And yet, she thought, there were worse ways. Way to go, as her grandson was fond of saying. Way to go, Granny, heading for a fall.
‘Pudding?’
‘No, thank you. Just coffee for me, please.’
He leant back in his chair and spread his gnarled fingers on the tablecloth. She gazed down at his wedding ring and then at the gold ring on her own wrinkled hand. Anyone looking at the two of them would think they were an old married couple.
‘Will you come upstairs with me,’ he said, ‘to my room?’