The Collected Stories

  The lavatory had a telephone in a nook in the wall and the seat was covered in brown-and-white fur. There were framed picture postcards on the walls, seaside cards with suggestive messages. They didn’t seem the kind of thing that should be so expensively framed, Eleanor considered, and was surprised to see them there, especially in such numbers. One or two, she noticed, were in German.

  ‘Same ’gain,’ said Mr Belhatchet in the sitting-room. ‘Sit yourself, Ellie.’

  She couldn’t see the designs he’d spoken of: she’d imagined they’d be spread all over the place, propped up on chairs, even on the walls, because that was the way he liked to surround himself with designs when he was making a selection in the office. She couldn’t even see a pile anywhere, but she put this down to the gloom that pervaded the sitting-room. It surprised her, though, that he’d addressed her as Ellie, which he’d never done before. Nobody, in fact, had ever called her Ellie before.

  ‘Know Nick’s?’ asked Mr Belhatchet. ‘Nick’s Diner? Okayie?’

  He smiled at her, blowing out Greek cigarette smoke.

  ‘What about the designs?’ she asked, smiling at him also.

  ‘Eat first,’ he said, and he picked up a green telephone and dialled a number. ‘Belhatchet,’ he said. ‘Andy. Table two, nine-thirty. All righty?’

  She said it was very kind of him to invite her to dinner, thinking that it couldn’t be more than half past seven and that for almost two hours apparently they were going to sit in Trilby Mews drinking gin and tonic. She hoped it was going to be all right.

  Besides Mr Logan, many men – most of them much younger than Mr Logan – had taken Eleanor out. One, called Robert, had repeatedly driven her in his yellow sportscar to a country club on the London–Guildford road called The Spurs. At half past three one morning he’d suggested that they should walk in the wood behind the country club: Eleanor had declined. Earlier that evening he’d said he loved her, but he never even telephoned her again, not after she declined to walk in the woods with him.

  Other men spoke of love to her also. They kissed her and pressed themselves against her. Occasionally she felt the warm tip of a tongue exploring one of her ears and she was naturally obliged to wriggle away from it, hastily putting on lipstick as a sign that the interlude was over. She was beautiful, they said, men she met at the night-school or men employed in Sweetawear or Lisney and Company or Dress-U. But when she resisted their ultimate advances they didn’t again say she was beautiful; more often than not they didn’t say anything further to her at all. She’d explained a few times that she didn’t want to anticipate marriage because she believed that marriage was special. But when it came to the point, although stating that they loved her, not one of them proposed marriage to her. Not that any of them had ever been right, which was something she felt most strongly after they’d made their ultimate advances.

  ‘Use grass?’ inquired Mr Belhatchet and for a moment, because of his economical manner of speech, she didn’t know what he was talking about: use grass for what? she wondered, and shook her head.

  ‘Mind?’ asked Mr Belhatchet, breaking open a fresh cigarette and poking what looked like another kind of tobacco among the leaves that were already there. He fiddled around for some time, adding and taking away, and then placed the untidy-looking cigarette between his lips. She asked again about the designs, but he didn’t seem to hear her.

  Eleanor didn’t enjoy the next two hours, sipping at her drink while Mr Belhatchet smoked and drank and asked her a series of economically framed questions about herself. Later, while they waited for a taxi, he said he felt marvellous. He put his arm round her shoulders and told her that the first day he saw her he’d thought she was fabulous.

  ‘Fabulous,’ he said in Nick’s Diner, referring to a bowl of crudités that had been placed in front of them. He asked her then if she liked him, smiling at her again, smoking another Greek cigarette.

  ‘Well, of course, Mr Belhatchet.’

  ‘Andy. What like ’bout me?’

  ‘Well –’

  ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ said Mr Belhatchet, hitting the table with the palm of his left hand. He was smiling so much now that the smile seemed to Eleanor to be unnatural. Nevertheless, she tried to keep smiling herself. None of the girls at Sweetawear had ever told her that there was anything the matter with Mr Belhatchet. She’d never thought herself that there might be something the matter with him: apart from his mode of speech he’d always seemed totally normal. His mother had set him up in Sweetawear, people said, occasionally adding that he’d certainly made a go of it.

  ‘Fabulous,’ said Mr Belhatchet when a waiter served them with fillet steak encased in pastry.

  They drank a red wine that she liked the taste of. She said, making conversation, that it was a lovely restaurant, and when he didn’t reply she said it was the best restaurant she’d ever been in.

  ‘Fabulous,’ said Mr Belhatchet.

  At eleven o’clock she suggested that perhaps they should return to Trilby Mews to examine the designs. She knew, even while she spoke, that she shouldn’t be going anywhere that night with Mr Belhatchet. She knew that if he was anyone else she’d have smiled and said she must go home now because she had to get up in the morning. But Mr Belhatchet, being her office boss, was different. It was all going to be much harder with Mr Belhatchet.

  ‘Age you now, Ellie?’ he asked in the taxi, and she told him she’d become twenty-seven the previous Tuesday, while he’d been in Rome.

  ‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘Fabulous.’

  He was still smiling and she thought he must be drunk except that his speech was in no way slurred.

  ‘It’s really so late,’ she said as the taxi paused in traffic. ‘Perhaps we should leave the designs for tonight, Mr Belhatchet?’

  ‘Andy.’

  ‘Perhaps, Andy –’

  ‘Take morning off, Ellie.’

  As they entered the flat he asked her again if she’d like to use the lavatory and reminded her where it was. While she was in there the telephone in the nook beside her rang, causing her to jump. It rang for only a moment, before he picked up one of the other extensions. When she entered the sitting-room he was speaking into the receiver, apparently to Signor Martelli in Rome. ‘Fabulous,’ he was saying. ‘No, truly.’

  He’d turned several lights on and pulled the green blinds fully down. The pictures that crowded the walls were more conventional than those in the lavatory, reproductions of drawings mainly, limbs and bones and heads scattered over a single sheet, all of them belonging to the past.

  ‘’vederci,’ said Mr Belhatchet, replacing his green telephone.

  In the room there was no pile of designs and she said to herself that in a moment Mr Belhatchet would make a suggestion. She would deal with it as best she could; if the worst came to the worst she would naturally have to leave Sweetawear.

  ‘Fancy drop brandy?’ offered Mr Belhatchet.

  ‘Thanks awfully, but I really think I’d better –’

  ‘Just get designs,’ he said, leaving the sitting-room.

  He returned with a stack of designs which he arrayed around the room just as he would have done in the office. He asked her to assess them while he poured both of them some orange juice.

  ‘Oh, lovely,’ she said, because she really felt like orange juice.

  The designs were of trouser-suits, a selection of ideas from four different designers. One would be chosen in the end and Sweetawear would manufacture it on a large scale and in a variety of colours.

  ‘Fancy that,’ he said, returning with the orange juice and pointing at a drawing with the point of his right foot.

  ‘Yes. And that, the waistcoat effect.’

  ‘Right.’

  She sipped her juice and he sipped his. They discussed the designs in detail, taking into consideration the fact that some would obviously be more economical to mass-produce than others. They whittled them down to three, taking about half an hour over that. He’d come to a final decision,
he said, some time tomorrow, and the way he said it made her think that he’d come to it on his own, and that his choice might even be one of the rejected designs.

  She sat down on the buttoned sofa, feeling suddenly strange, wondering if she’d drunk too much. Mr Belhatchet, she saw, had pushed a few of the designs off an embroidered arm-chair and was sitting down also. He had taken the jacket of his suit off and was slowly loosening his tie.

  ‘Okayie?’ he inquired, and leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

  She stood up. The floor was peculiar beneath her feet, seeming closer to her, as though her feet had become directly attached to her knees. It moved, like the deck of a ship. She sat down again.

  ‘Fantastic,’ said Mr Belhatchet.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve had a little too much to drink.’

  ‘God, those days,’ said Mr Belhatchet. ‘Never ’gain. Know something, Ellie?’

  ‘Mr Belhatchet –’

  ‘Mother loved me, Ellie. Like I was her sweetheart, Mother loved me.’

  ‘Mr Belhatchet, what’s happening?’

  She heard her own voice, as shrill as a bird’s, in the bright, crowded room. She didn’t want to move from the sofa. She wanted to put her feet up but she felt she might not be able to move them and was frightened to try in case she couldn’t. She closed her eyes and felt herself moving upwards, floating in the room, with a kaleidoscope in each eyelid. ‘Mr Belhatchet!’ she cried out. ‘Mr Belhatchet! Mr Belhatchet!’

  She opened her eyes and saw that he had risen from his chair and was standing above her. He was smiling; his face was different.

  ‘I feel,’ she cried, but he interrupted her before she could say what she felt.

  ‘Love,’ he murmured.

  He lifted her legs and placed them on the sofa. He took her shoes off and then returned to the chair he’d occupied before.

  ‘You made us drunk,’ she heard her own voice crying, shrill again, shrieking almost in the room. Yet in another way she felt quite tranquil.

  ‘We’re going high,’ he murmured. ‘All righty? We had it in our orange juice.’

  She cried out again with part of her. She was floating above the room, she said. The colours of the trouser-suits that were all around her were vivid. They came at her garishly from the paper; the drawn heads of the girls were strange, like real people. The purple of the buttoned sofa was vivid also, and the green of the blinds. All over the walls the pictures of limbs and bones were like glass cases containing what the pictures contained, startling on a soft background. Bottles gleamed, and silver here and there, and brass. There was polished ebony in the room, and ivory.

  ‘You’re riding high, Ellie,’ Mr Belhatchet said and his voice seemed a long way away, although when she looked at him he seemed nearer and more beautiful than before. He was insane, she thought: there was beauty in his insanity. She never wanted to leave the vivid room above which and through which she floated, depending on the moment. She closed her eyes and there were coloured orchids.

  Eleanor slept, or seemed to sleep, and all through her dreams Mr Belhatchet’s voice came to her, speaking about his mother. At the same time she herself was back at school, at Springfield Comprehensive, where Miss Whitehead was teaching Class 2 French. The clothes of Miss Whitehead were beautiful and the hairs on her face were as beautiful as the hair on her head, and the odour of her breath was sweet.

  ‘Mother died,’ said Mr Belhatchet. ‘She left me, Ellie.’

  He talked about a house. His voice described a house situated among hills, a large house, remote and rich, with an exotic garden where his mother walked in a white dress, wearing dark glasses because of the sunshine.

  ‘She left me the little business,’ he said. ‘The pretty little business. Flair: she had flair, Ellie.’

  He said he could remember being in his mother’s womb. She’d taught him to remember, he said. They read novels together. His mother’s hand took his and stroked the flesh of her arm with it.

  He took off his shirt and sat in the embroidered chair with the upper half of his body naked. His feet, she saw, were naked also.

  ‘I loved her too,’ he said. ‘She’s back with me now. I can taste, her milk, Ellie.’

  He was like a god in the embroidered chair, his bushy hair wild on his head, his pale flesh gleaming. His eyes seemed far back in his skull, gazing at her from the depths of caverns. Time did not seem to be passing.

  In the house among the hills there were parties, he said, and afterwards quiet servants gathered glasses from the lawns. Cars moved on gravel early in the morning, driving away. Couples were found asleep beneath trees.

  She wanted to take some of her own clothes off as Mr Belhatchet had, but her arms were heavy and in time, she guessed, he would take them off for her and that would be beautiful too. His eyes were a rare blue, his flesh was like the flesh of flowers. The room was saturated with colours that were different now, subtly changing: the colours of the trouser-suits and the purple of the sofa and the coloured threads of the embroidered chair and the green blinds and telephone. The colours were liquid in the room, gently flowing, one into another. People stood on banks of foliage, people at Mrs Belhatchet’s parties. Mrs Belhatchet stood with her son.

  She would like to have children, Eleanor said; she would like to be married. She’d noticed a house once, in Gwendolyn Avenue in Putney, not far from where her bed-sitting-room was: she described it, saying she’d once dreamed she lived there, married to a man with delicate hands.

  ‘I love you,’ she said, knowing that she was speaking to that man, a man she had always imagined, who would marry her in a church and take her afterwards to Biarritz for a honeymoon.

  ‘I love you,’ she said again, with her eyes closed. ‘I’ve waited all my life.’

  She wanted him to come to her, to lie beside her on the sofa and gently to take her clothes off. In the room they would anticipate marriage because marriage was certain between them, because there was perfection in their relationship, because in every detail and in every way they understood each other. They were part of one another; only death could part them now.

  ‘Come to me,’ she said with her eyes still closed. ‘Oh, come to me now.’

  ‘Mother,’ he said.

  ‘No, no –’

  ‘Up here you can be anyone, Ellie. Up here where everything is as we wish it.’

  He went on speaking, but she couldn’t hear what he said, and it didn’t matter. She murmured, but she didn’t hear her own words either. And then, a long time later it seemed, she heard a voice more clearly.

  ‘The truth is in this room,’ Mr Belhatchet was saying. ‘I couldn’t ravish anyone, Mother.’

  She opened her eyes and saw Mr Belhatchet with his bushy hair, still looking like a god.

  ‘My friend,’ she said, closing her eyes again.

  She spoke of her bed-sitting-room in East Putney and the posters she’d bought to decorate its walls, and the two lamps with pretty jade-coloured shades that she’d bought in the British Home Stores. She’d said to her landlady that she was determined to make a home of her bed-sitting-room and the landlady said that that sounded a first-class idea. Her landlady gave her a brass gong she didn’t want.

  In the room their two voices spoke together.

  ‘I put my arms around her,’ he said. ‘With my arms around her and hers round me, it is beautiful.’

  ‘It is beautiful here,’ she said. ‘The foliage, the leaves. It is beautiful in the garden of your mother’s house.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘I am waiting here for a tender man who wouldn’t ever hurt me.’

  ‘That’s beautiful too,’ he said. ‘Your clothes are beautiful. Your blue clothes and the pearls at your neck, and your shoes. We are happy in this present moment.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We have floated away.’

  They ceased to speak. Time, of which as they dreamed and imagined neither of them was aware, passed normally in the room. At hal
f past six Eleanor, still feeling happy but by now more in control of her limbs, slowly pushed herself from the sofa and stood up. The floor swayed less beneath her feet; the colours in the room, though vivid still, were less so than they had been. Mr Belhatchet was asleep.

  Eleanor went to the lavatory and when she returned to the sitting-room she did not lie down on the sofa again. She stood instead in the centre of the room, gazing around it, at Mr Belhatchet with bare feet and a bare chest, asleep in his embroidered chair, at the designs of trouser-suits and the pictures of limbs and bones. ‘Mother,’ murmured Mr Belhatchet in his sleep, in a voice that was a whisper.

  She left the flat, moving slowly and gently closing the door behind her. She descended the stairs and stepped out into Trilby Mews, into fresh early-morning air.

  Police Constable Edwin Lloyd found Eleanor an hour later. She was lying on the pavement outside a betting-shop in Garrad Street, W.1. He saw the still body from a distance and hurried towards it, believing he had a death on his hands. ‘I fell down,’ Eleanor explained as he helped her to rise again. ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘Drugs,’ said Police Constable Lloyd in Garrad Street police station, and another officer, a desk sergeant, sighed. ‘Cup of tea, miss?’ Constable Lloyd offered. ‘Nice hot tea?’

  A middle-aged policewoman searched Eleanor’s clothing in case there were further drugs on her person.

  ‘Pretty thing like you,’ the woman said. ‘Shame, dear.’

  They brought her tea and Eleanor drank it, spilling some over her pale blue suit because her hands were shaking. Constable Lloyd, returning to his beat, paused by the door.

  ‘Will she be OK?’ he asked, and his two colleagues said that they considered she would be.

  In the police station the colours were harsh and ugly, not at all like the colours there’d been in Mr Belhatchet’s flat. And the faces of the desk sergeant and the policewoman were unpleasant also: the pores of their skin were large, like the cells of a honeycomb. There was something the matter with their mouths and their hands, and the uniforms they wore, and the place they occupied. The wooden seat was uncomfortable, the pages of a book in front of the desk sergeant were torn and grubby, the air stank of stale cigarette smoke. The man and the woman were regarding her as skeletons might, their teeth bared at her, their fingers predatory, like animals’ claws. She hated their eyes. She couldn’t drink the tea they’d given her because it caused nausea in her stomach.