68 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
his. Upstairs, clenching her fists, Serena
stood confronting the full-length mir-
ror in her room. Her ferocity hadn’t sub-
sided. She couldn’t bear the resumption
of the strimmer’s noise, and thought
that she had to go out; she painted on
a fresh slash of lipstick, changed her
heels for higher ones, fluffed up the
thick bird’s nest of her rust-black hair,
put on dark glasses. The picture panels
in the porch door juddered when she
slammed it behind her. On her way
down through the sloping residential
streets to the town’s center, breaking the
sleepy silence with the scrape and rap
of her heels, she felt at least the relief
of escape—anything was better than
that hospital. Then she sat solitary at
an outdoor table at a café on the main
street with a black coffee, lighting a cig-
arette and smoking it, the cigarette’s
poison a kind of bravado in the face of
sickness and death.
Since she’d first had any clear idea
of who she was, as a teen-ager, Serena
had seen herself as set apart like this:
dangerous and intriguing, her black
clothing outlined against the summer
pastels of sloppy holidaymakers in their
flip-flops, or the dowdy decency of her
own family. To her credit, she’d never
been interested in worldly success or
fame—though she had been talented,
in a minor way, as a singer and an ac-
tress. It had been hard enough, she con-
sidered, simply becoming
herself. She earned a living
now as a freelance legal sec-
retary, cared nothing for the
work, and was more than
competent, easily making
herself indispensable. Today,
in any case, over her coffee
cup—intense, absent, in-
different to her surround-
ings, not checking her
phone or reading—she had
an aura that was just as significant as if
she were a celebrity, improbably washed
up at the seaside, having shaken off her
entourage of admirers or detractors,
thirsting to be left alone with her lux-
uriant inner life.
The café was quiet; the town’s morn-
ing bustle had long since subsided, its
wash of tourists receded. Shops were
closing already. The trees’ elongated
shadows stretched at intervals across the
road. On the beach, the estuary waters
ran up across the flat sand, flooding the
stale pools that had been left behind
hours earlier in cracks in the jutting
shelves of shale; any remaining families
had retreated to a last redoubt, a bank
of pebbles marked with a crusty high-
tide line of dried seaweed, cracked plas-
tic bottles, washed-white bones, drift-
wood, and faded crisp packets. The water
was rich with silt, chocolate brown; a
few children investigated at its edge with
buckets, paddling where it foamed la-
zily, curling warm around their ankles,
sucking under their soles.A
fter Serena’s performance in the
garden, Sean might have avoided
her when he spotted her. Having finished
strimming, he was making his way home
to the caravan where he was living tem-
porarily because his wife had kicked him
out; on foot, because his vehicle was with
his brother-in-law, who was looking at
the fuel pump. But he was intrigued, and
drawn to Serena, who was dressed so
exotically and looked so concentrated
and self-possessed, with her small, heart-
shaped face and painted eyes and mass
of hair. He thought he recognized in
her—in her bearing and black clothes
and cigarette, in the sharp point of ex-
perience in her expression—the signs of
that freemasonry of difference, an alter-
native life style, to which he also be-
longed in his own way, though he’d taken
out his earring a while ago,
finding it childish.
When he was younger,
there’d been a passionate
frisson between boys like
him and certain middle-
class girls; those girls had
woken up to sex when the
boys of their own sort were
still playing Monopoly or
practicing wheelies on their
BMX bikes. Later, the girls
left, to go to university or to work else-
where, and Sean had left, too; he’d trav-
elled around in Europe and the Far East
and Australia, and then he’d come home,
and got married and had two kids. Ser-
ena didn’t look too bad, although he
had calculated, from things her mother
had said, that she must be fifty at least.
Her cheekbones jutted like knuckles
under her white skin. But then, he was
no oil painting himself these days.
He stood beside the café table, saidthat he was sorry she was upset, waited
so that she was forced to acknowledge
him: she looked up as if she, too, felt
the nudge of the old freemasonry, only
wearily. “Don’t worry about it. My sis-
ters annoy me.”
“You’re like your mother.”
She stiffened at his presumption.
“I’m not. Am I?”
“I offered to cut the grass a couple
of weeks ago, and she said, ‘No, why
bother?’ I think she liked it the way it
was, same as you do.”
Serena stubbed out her cigarette
thoughtfully, gratified. “So then what
did you do, when she said not to cut
the grass? Just go away? I suppose you
needed the money.”
You had to be careful with the truth
when it came to money, Sean knew, al-
though he’d never for one moment have
cheated the old lady. He told Serena that
he’d done all sorts of odd jobs for her
mother around the house: unblocking
sinks and changing light bulbs, open-
ing a jammed window, fixing the TV.
In fact, though, Evelyn often couldn’t
think of anything for him to do; if he
just sat drinking tea and talking with
her, she insisted on paying him any-
way. Sliding between his fingers in his
pocket the two twenties that Pippa had
given him, he asked Serena if he could
buy her another coffee; when she shook
her head, he believed at first that he
was dismissed. “Just a glass of water,”
she added, glancing at passersby in the
street as if they were more interesting
than he was.
It was a shame about the tooth, she
thought, watching him maneuver com-
petently around the tables on his way
back from the counter, bearing his own
coffee and her glass. Drawing up a chair
opposite hers, he sat ripping open lit-
tle packets of sugar one after another
to stir into his cup, which perhaps
helped to explain why the tooth was
missing. Still, he was good-looking:
strong, with wiry shoulder-length hair,
burned yellow by the sun and pushed
behind his ears, a skewed long nose that
might have been broken once, the haz-
ily intent gaze of a weed smoker. A
crowned tooth would be expensive, for
a casual laborer: though he told her that
he was trained as a joiner, with a job
coming up soon at the new power sta-
tion. Serena said that she hated the