People she knew were not aware that she was a client at the Bryanston Square Bureau, not that she was ashamed of it. There would perhaps have been some surprise, but easily she could have weathered that. What was more difficult to come to terms with, and always had been, was the uneasy sense that the truth seemed to matter less than it should, both in the agency itself and in the encounters it provided. As honestly as she knew how, she had completed the personal details’ sheet, carefully deliberating before she so much as marked, one way or the other, each little box, correctly recording her age, at present fifty-one; and when an encounter took place she was at pains not to allow mistaken impressions to go unchecked. But even so there was always that same uneasiness, the nagging awareness that falsity was natural in what she was engaged upon.
*
‘You drive?’ he asked.
He watched her nod, covering her surprise. It always took them aback, that question; he couldn’t think why. She seemed quite capable, he thought, and tried to remember what it said on the information he’d been sent. Had she been involved with a language school? Something like that came back to him and he mentioned it.
‘That was a while ago,’ she said.
She was alone now; and, as Jeffrey understood it, devoted some of her time to charity work; he deduced that there must be private means.
‘My mother died in nineteen ninety-seven,’ she said. ‘I looked after her during her last years. A full-time occupation.’
Jeffrey imagined a legacy after the mother’s death; the father, he presumed, had departed long before.
‘I’m afraid photography is something I don’t know much about,’ she said, and he shrugged, vaguely indicating that that was only to be expected. A tooth ached a bit, the same one as the other night and coming on as suddenly, the last one on the right, at the bottom.
‘You found it interesting,’ he said, ‘languages and that?’
She was more promising than the insurance woman, or the hospital sister they’d tried so hard to interest him in. He’d said no to both, but they’d pressed, the way they sometimes did. He’d been indifferent this time, but even so he’d agreed. While he prodded cautiously with his tongue he learnt that passing on a familiarity with foreign languages was, in fact, not a particularly interesting way of making a living. He wondered if the barman kept aspirin handy; more likely, though, the barmaid might have some; or the Gents might run to a dispenser.
‘Excuse me a sec,’ he said.
‘Oh yes, there’s something in the Gents,’ the old barman said when the barmaid had poked about in her handbag and had shaken her head. ‘Just inside the door, sir.’
But when Jeffrey put a pound in nothing came out. Too late he saw – scrawled on a length of perforated stamp paper and stuck too high to be noticed – Out of order. He swore hotly. If the woman hadn’t been there he’d have created a scene, demanding his pound back, even claiming he had put in two.
‘You have a car?’ he enquired quite bluntly when he returned to the theatre bar, because on the way back from the Gents it had occurred to him that she had only said she could drive. Driver? it enquired on the wretchedly long-winded personal data thing; but he always asked, just to be sure. He was modest in his expectations where the Bryanston Square Introduction Bureau was concerned. He sought no more than a car-owner who would transport him and his photographic equipment from one chosen area of London to another, someone who – as privately he put it to himself – would be drawn into his work. He imagined a quiet person, capable after instruction of unfolding and setting up a tripod, of using a simple light-meter, of making notes and keeping a record, who would enjoy becoming part of things. He imagined conversations that were all to do with the enterprise he had undertaken; nothing more was necessary. He naturally had not revealed any of these details on the Bryanston Square application form he had completed eighteen months ago, believing that it would be unwise to do so.
‘It’s just I wondered,’ he said in the theatre bar, ‘if you possessed a car?’
He watched her shaking her head. She’d had a car until a year ago, a Nissan. ‘I hardly ever used it,’ she explained. ‘I really didn’t.’
He didn’t let his crossness show, but disappointment felt like a weight within him. It wearied him, as disappointment had a way of doing. The nearest there’d ever been was the social worker with the beaten-up Ford Escort, or ages before that the club receptionist with the Mini. But neither had lasted long enough to be of any real help and both had turned unpleasant in the end. All that wasted effort, this time again; he might as well just walk away, he thought.
‘My turn to get us a drink,’ she said, taking a purse from her handbag and causing him to wonder if she had an aspirin in there too.
He didn’t ask. He’d thought as he set out that if yet again there was nothing doing there might at least be the consolation of dinner – which references to toothache could easily put the kibosh on. He wondered now about L’Etape. He’d often paused to examine the menu by the door.
‘Wine, this was.’ He handed her his glass and watched her crossing the empty space to the bar. She wasn’t badly dressed: no reason why she shouldn’t be up to L’Etape’s tariff.
*
She listened while he went through his cameras, giving the manufacturers’ names, and details about flash and exposure. Nine he had apparently, a few of them very old and better than any on the market now. His book about London had been commissioned and would run to almost a thousand pages.
‘Gosh!’ she murmured. Halfway through her third gin and tonic, she felt pleasantly warm, happy enough to be here, although she knew by now that none of this was any good. ‘Heavens, you’ll be busy!’ she said. His world was very different from hers, she added, knowing she must not go on about hers, that it would be tedious to mention all sorts of things. Why should anyone be interested in her rejection more than twenty years ago of someone she had loved? Why should anyone be interested in knowing that she had done so, it seemed now, for no good reason beyond the shadow of doubt there’d been? A stranger would not see the face that she still saw, or hear the voice she heard; or understand why, afterwards, she had wanted no one else; or hear what, afterwards, had seemed to be a truth – that doubt played tricks in love’s confusion. And who could expect a stranger to want to hear about the circumstances of a mother’s lingering illness and the mercy of her death in a suburban house? You put it all together and it made a life; you lived in its aftermath, but that, too, was best kept back. She smiled at her companion through these reflections, for there was no reason not to.
‘I was wondering about L’Etape,’ he said.
Imagining this to be another camera, she shook her head, and he said that L’Etape was a restaurant. It was difficult then, difficult to say that perhaps they should not begin something that could not be continued, which his manner suggested had been his conclusion also. They were not each other’s kind: what at first had seemed to be a possibility hadn’t seemed so after three-quarters of an hour, as so often was the way. So much was right: she would have liked to say so; she would have liked to say that she’d enjoyed their encounter and hoped he’d shared that with her. Her glass was nowhere near empty, nor was his; there was no hurry.
‘But then I’d best get back,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind.’
She wondered if in his life, too, there had been a mistake that threw a shadow, if that was why he was looking around for someone to fill a gap he had never become used to. She smiled in case her moment of curiosity showed, covering it safely over.
‘It was just a thought,’ he said. X’Etape.’
*
The interval curtain came down at an emotional moment. There was applause, and then the first chattering voices reached the bar, which filled up quickly. The noise of broken conversation spread in the quiet it had disturbed, until the Tannoy announcement warned that three minutes only remained, then two, and one.
‘I’m afraid we shut up shop now,’ the elderly
barman said and the plump barmaid hurried about, collecting the glasses and pushing the chairs against one wall so that the cleaners could get at the floor when they came in the morning. ‘Sorry about that,’ the barman apologized.
Jeffrey considered making a fuss, insisting on another drink, since the place after all was a public bar. He imagined waking up at two or three in the morning and finding himself depressed because of the way the evening had gone. He would remember then the stern features of Sir Henry Havelock in Trafalgar Square and the two girls giggling because he’d said something out loud. He would remember the Out of order sign in the Gents. She should have been more explicit about the driving on that bloody form instead of wasting his time.
He thought of picking up a glass and throwing it at the upside-down bottles behind the bar, someone’s leftover slice of lemon flying through the air, glass splintering into the ashtrays and the ice-bucket, all that extra for them to clear up afterwards. He thought of walking away without another word, leaving the woman to make her peace with the pair behind the bar. Ridiculous they were, ridiculous not to have an aspirin somewhere.
*
‘It was brilliant, your theatre-bar idea,’ she said as they passed through the foyer. The audience’s laughter reached them, a single ripple, quietening at once. The box office was closed, a board propped up against its ornate brass bars. Outside, the posters for the play they hadn’t seen wildly proclaimed its virtues.
‘Well,’ he said, though without finality; uncertain, as in other ways he had seemed to be.
Yet surely she hadn’t been mistaken; surely he must have known also, and as soon as she had. She imagined him with one of his many cameras, skulking about the little streets of Hoxton. There was no reason why a photographer shouldn’t have an artistic temperament, which would account for his nerviness or whatever it was.
‘I don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘you’d have an aspirin?’
He had a toothache. She searched her handbag, for she sometimes had paracetamol.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, still rummaging.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It’s bad?’
He said he would survive. ‘I’ll try the Gents in L’Etape. Sometimes there’s a vending machine in a Gents.’
They fell into step. It wasn’t why he’d suggested L’Etape, he said. ‘It’s just that I felt it would be nice,’ he said. ‘A regretful dinner.’
When they came to a corner, he pointed up a narrower, less crowded street than the one they’d walked along. ‘It’s there,’ he said. ‘That blue light.’
Feeling sorry for him, she changed her mind.
*
The hat-check girl brought paracetamol to their table, since there wasn’t a vending machine in the Gents. Jeffrey thanked her, indicating with a gesture that he would tip her later. At a white grand piano a pianist in a plum-coloured jacket reached out occasionally for a concoction in a tall lemonade glass, not ceasing to play his Scott Joplin medley. A young French waiter brought menus and rolls. He made a recommendation but his English was incomprehensible. Jeffrey asked him to repeat what he’d said, but it was hopeless. Typical, that was, Jeffrey thought, ordering lamb, with peas and polenta.
‘I’m sorry about your toothache,’ she said.
‘It’ll go.’
The place was not quite full. Several tables, too close to the piano, were still unoccupied. Someone applauded when the pianist began a showy variation of ‘Mountain Greenery’. He threw his head about as he played, blond hair flopping.
‘Shall I order the wine?’ Jeffrey offered. ‘D’you mind?’ He never said beforehand that he intended not to pay. Better just to let it happen, he always thought.
‘No, of course I don’t mind,’ she said.
‘That’s kind of you.’ He felt better than he had all evening, in spite of the nagging in his lower jaw and that, he knew, would lessen when the paracetamol got going. It was always much better when they said yes to a regretful dinner, when the disappointment began to slip away. ‘We’ll have the Lamothe Bergeron,’ he ordered. ‘The ’95.
*
She was aware that a woman at a distant table, in a corner where there were potted plants, kept glancing at her. The woman was with two men and another woman. She seemed faintly familiar; so did one of the men.
‘Madame,’ the young waiter interrupted her efforts to place the couple, arriving with the escalope she’d ordered. ‘Bon appetit, madame.’
‘Thank you.’
She liked the restaurant, the thirties’ style, the pale blue lighting, the white grand piano, the aproned waiters. She liked her escalope when she tasted it, and the heavily buttered spinach, the little out-of-season new potatoes. She liked the wine.
‘Not bad, this place,’ her companion said. ‘What d’you think?’
‘It’s lovely.’
They talked more easily than they had in the theatre bar and it was the theatre bar they spoke about, since it was their common ground. Odd, they’d agreed, that old barman had been; odd, too, that ‘barmaid’ should still be a common expression, implying in this case someone much younger, the word hanging on from another age.
‘Oh, really…’ she began when a second bottle of wine was suggested, and then she thought why not? They talked about the Bryanston Square Bureau, which was common ground too.
‘They muddle things up,’ he said. ‘They muddle people up. They get them wrong, with all their little boxes and their questionnaires.’
‘Yes, perhaps they do.’
The woman who’d kept glancing across the restaurant was listening to one of the men, who appeared to be telling a story. There was laughter when he finished. The second man lit a cigarette.
‘Heavens!’ Evelyn exclaimed, although she hadn’t meant to.
*
Jeffrey turned to look and saw, several tables away, four smartly dressed people, one of the two women in a striped black and scarlet dress, the other with glasses, her pale blonde hair piled elaborately high. The men were darkly suited. Like people in an advertisement, he thought, an impression heightened by the greenery that was a background to their table. He knew the kind.
‘They’re friends of yours?’ he asked.
‘The woman in red and the man who’s smoking have the flat above mine.’
She’d sold some house or other, he heard; a family house, it then became clear. She’d sold it when her mother died and had bought instead the flat she spoke of, more suitable really for a person on her own. Pasmore the people she had suddenly recognized were called. She didn’t know them.
‘But they know you, eh?’
He felt quite genial; the diversion passed the time.
‘They’ve seen me,’ she said.
‘Coming and going, eh?’
‘That kind of thing.’
‘Coffee? Shall we have coffee?’
He signalled for a waiter. He would go when the wine was finished; usually he went then, slipping off to the Gents, then picking up his coat. Once there had been a complaint to the bureau about that but he’d said the woman had invited him to dinner – Belucci’s it was that time – and had become drunk before the evening finished, forgetting what the arrangement had been.
‘I’ll hold the fort,’ he said, ‘if you want to say hullo to your friends.’
She smiled and shook her head. He poured himself more wine. He calculated that there were four more glasses left in the bottle and he could tell she’d had enough. The coffee came and she poured it, still smiling at him in a way he found bewildering. He calculated the amount she’d had to drink: two gin and tonics he’d counted earlier, and now the wine, a good four glasses. ‘I wouldn’t even know the Pasmores’ name,’ she was saying, ‘except that it’s on their bell at the downstairs door.’
He moved the wine bottle in case she reached out for it. The pianist, silent for a while, struck up again, snatches from West Side Story.
‘It’s lovely here,’ she murmured, and Jeffrey would have swor
n her eyes searched for his. He felt uneasy, his euphoria of a few moments ago slipping away; he hoped there wasn’t going to be trouble. In an effort to distract her mood, he said:
‘Personally, I shan’t be bothering the Bryanston Square Bureau again.’
She didn’t appear to hear, although that wasn’t surprising in the din that was coming from the piano.
‘I don’t suppose,’ she said, ‘you have a cigarette about you?’
Her smile, lavish now, had spread into all her features. She’d ticked Non-smoker on the information sheet, she said, but all that didn’t really matter any more. He pressed a thumbnail along the edge of the transparent cover of the Silk Cut packet he had bought in the Salisbury and held it out to her across the table.
‘I used to once,’ she said. ‘When smoking was acceptable.’
She took a cigarette and he picked up a little box of matches with L’Etape on it. He struck one for her, her fingers touching his. He lit a cigarette for himself.
‘How good that is!’ She blew out smoke, leaning forward as she spoke, cheeks flushed, threads of smoke drifting in the air. ‘I used to love a cigarette.’
She reached a hand out as if to seize one of his, but played instead with the salt-cellar, pushing it about. She was definitely tiddly. With her other hand she held her cigarette in the air, lightly between two fingers, as Bette Davis used to in her heyday.
‘It’s a pity you sold your car,’ he said, again seeking a distraction.
She didn’t answer that, but laughed, as if he’d been amusing, as if he’d said something totally different. She was hanging on his words, or so it must have seemed to the people who had recognized her, so intent was her scrutiny of his face. She’ll paw me, Jeffrey thought, before the evening’s out.