Feeling unwell but not unhappy, Angela vividly recalled the face and clothes of Gordon Spelle. She recalled his hands, which tapered and were thin, and his sleek hair and droopy eye. She wondered how on earth she was going to face him after what had happened in the taxi, or how she was going to face Miss Ivygale because Miss Ivygale, she faintly remembered, had fallen against a table on their way out of the restaurant, upsetting plates of soup and a bottle of wine. When Angela had tried to help her to stand up again she’d used unpleasant language. Yet the dim memories didn’t worry Angela in any real way, not like her poor complexion sometimes worried her, or her contact lenses. Even though she was feeling unwell, she only wanted to smile that morning. She wanted to write a letter to her parents in Carhampton Road, Exeter, and tell them she’d made a marvellous decision when she’d decided to leave the German-wine business and go to C.S. & E. She should have done it years ago, she wanted to tell them, because everyone at C.S. & E. was so friendly and because you only lived once. She wanted to tell them about Gordon Spelle, who had said in the taxi that he thought he was falling in love with her, which was of course an exaggeration.
She drank half a cup of Nescafè and caught a 37 bus. Sitting beside an Indian on the lower deck, she thought about Gordon Spelle. On the tube to Earl’s Court she thought of him again, and on the Piccadilly line between Earl’s Court and Green Park she went on thinking about him. When she closed her eyes, as she once or twice did, she seemed to be with him in some anonymous place, stroking his face and comforting him because of his bad eye. She walked from the tube station, past the Rootes’ Group car showrooms and Thos Cook’s in Berkeley Street, along Lansdowne Row with its pet shops and card shop and coffee shops, past the Gresham Arms, the C.S. & E. pub. It was a cold morning, but the cold air was pleasant. Pigeons waddled on the pavements, cars drew up at parking-meters. Fresh-faced and shaven, the men of the night before hurried to their offices. She wouldn’t have recognized Tommy Blyth, she thought, or the man called Dil, or even Mr Hemp. Girls in suede boots hurried, also looking different in the morning light. She was being silly, she said to herself in Carlos Place: he probably said that to dozens of girls.
In Angela’s life there had been a few other men. At the age of twelve she had been attracted by a youth who worked in a newsagent’s. She’d liked him because he’d always been ready to chat to her and smile at her, two or three years older he’d been. At fourteen she’d developed a passion for an American actor called Don Ameche whom she’d seen in an old film on television. For several weeks she’d carried with her the memory of his face and had lain in bed at night imagining a life with him in a cliff-top house she’d invented, in California. She’d seen herself and Don Ameche running into the sea together, as he had run with an actress in the film. She’d seen them eating breakfast together, out in the open, on a sunny morning. But Don Ameche, she’d suddenly realized, was sixty or seventy now.
When Angela had first come to London a man who’d briefly been employed in the German-wine business used occasionally to invite her to have a cup of coffee with him at the end of the day, just as Gordon Spelle had invited her to have a drink. But being with this man wasn’t like being with Gordon Spelle: the man was a shabby person who was employed in some lowly capacity, who seemed to Angela, after the third time they’d had coffee together, to be mentally deficient. One Monday morning he didn’t turn up for work, and was never heard of again.
There’d been another man, more briefly, in Angela’s life, a young man called Ted Apwell whom she’d met at a Saturday-night party given by a friend of one of her flatmates. She and Ted Apwell had paired off when the party, more or less at an end, had become uninhibited. At half past three in the morning she’d allowed herself to be driven home by Ted Apwell, knowing that it was to his home rather than hers they were going. He’d taken her clothes off and in a half-hearted, inebriated way had put an end to her virginity, on a hearth-rug in front of a gas-fire. He’d driven her on to her flat, promising – too often, she realized afterwards – that he’d telephone her on Monday. She’d found him hard to forget at first, not because she’d developed any great fondness for him but because of his nakedness and her own on the hearth-rug, the first time all that had happened. There hadn’t, so far, been a second time.
Miss Ivygale did not come in that morning. Angela sat alone in the outer office, with nothing to do because there were no letters to type. A tea-lady arrived at a quarter past ten and poured milky coffee on to two lumps of sugar in a cup she’d earlier placed on Angela’s desk. ‘Pam not in this morning?’ she said, and Angela said no, Miss Ivygale wasn’t.
At ten past twelve Gordon Spelle entered the outer office. ‘Red roses,’ he lilted, ‘for a blue lady. Oh, Mr Florist, please…’ He laughed, standing by the door. He closed the door and crossed to her desk and kissed her. If anyone had asked her in that moment she’d have said that her inferiority complex was a thing of the past. She felt pretty when Gordon Spelle kissed her, not knowing what everyone else knew, that Gordon Spelle was notorious.
They had lunch in a place called the Coffee Bean, more modest than the Terrazza. Gordon Spelle told her about his childhood, which had not been happy. He told her about coming to C.S. & E. nine years ago, and about his earlier ambition to be a dance-band leader. ‘Look,’ he said when they’d drunk a carafe of Sicilian wine. ‘I want to tell you, Angela: I’m actually married.’
She felt a coldness in her stomach, as though ice had somehow become lodged there. The coldness began to hurt her, like indigestion. All the warmth of her body had moved into her face and neck. She hated the flush that had come to her face and neck because she knew it made her look awful.
‘Married?’ she said.
He’d only laughed last night in the taxi, she remembered: he hadn’t actually said he wasn’t married, not that she could swear to it. He’d laughed and given the impression that married was the last thing he was, so that she’d woken up that morning with the firmly established thought that Gordon Spelle, a bachelor, had said he loved her and had embraced her with more passion than she’d ever permitted in another man or youth. In the moments of waking she’d even been aware of thinking that one day she and Gordon Spelle might be married, and had imagined her parents in their best clothes, her father awkward, giving her away. It was all amazing; incredible that Gordon Spelle should have picked her out when all around him, in C.S. & E. and in the other offices, there were beautiful girls.
‘I didn’t dare tell you,’ he said. ‘I tried to, Angela: All last night I tried to, but I couldn’t. In case you’d go away.’
They left the Coffee Bean and walked about Grosvenor Square in bitter November sunshine. Men were tidying the flowerbeds. The people who had hurried from their offices last night and had hurried into them this morning, and out of them for lunch, were hurrying back to them again.
‘I’m in love with you, Angela,’ he said, and again she felt it was incredible. She might be dreaming, she thought, but knew she was not.
They walked hand in hand, and she suddenly remembered Mr Hemp telephoning in the sedan chair, cross and untruthful with his wife. She imagined Gordon Spelle’s wife and saw her as a hard-faced woman who was particular about her house, who didn’t let him smoke in certain rooms, who’d somehow prevented him from becoming a dance-band leader. She seemed to be older than Gordon Spelle, with hair that was quite grey and a face that Angela remembered from a book her father used to read her as a child, the face of a farmyard rat.
‘She’s a bit of an invalid, actually,’ Gordon Spelle said. ‘She isn’t well most of the time and she’s a ball of nerves anyway. She couldn’t stand a separation, Angela, or anything like that: I wouldn’t want to mislead you, Angela, like Alec Hemp –’
‘Oh, Gordon.’
He looked away from her and with his face still averted he said he wasn’t much of a person. It was all wrong, being in love with her like this, with a wife and children at home. He would never want her to go on waiting for him
, as Pam Ivygale had waited for twenty-three years.
‘Oh, love,’ she said.
The ice had gone from her stomach, and her face had cooled again. He put his arms around her, one hand on her hair, the other pressing her body into his. He whispered, but she couldn’t hear what he said and the words didn’t seem important. The hurrying people glanced at them, surprised to witness a leisurely embrace, in daylight, on a path in Grosvenor Square.
‘Oh, love,’ she said again.
The cold had brought out the defects on her face: beneath heavily applied make-up he noticed that the skin was pimply and pitted. Affected by the cold also, her eyes were red-rimmed. She reminded him of Gwyneth Birkett, a girl who’d been at C.S. & E. three years ago.
They returned to the office. He released her hand and took her arm instead. He’d see her at half past five, he said in the lift. He kissed her in the lift because there was no one else in it. His mouth was moist and open. No one ever before had kissed her like he did, as though far more than kisses were involved, as though his whole being was passionate for hers. ‘I love you terribly,’ he said.
All afternoon, with no real work to do, she thought about it, continuing to be amazed. It was a mystery, a gorgeous mystery that became more gorgeous the more she surveyed the facts. The facts were gorgeous themselves: nicer, she considered, than any of the other facts of her life. In prettily coloured clothes the girls of C.S. & E. walked the green-carpeted corridors from office to office, their fingernails gleaming, their skins like porcelain, apparently without pores. In their suede boots or their platform shoes they queued for lunchtime tables in the Coffee Bean, or stood at five past six in the warm bar of the Gresham Arms. Their faces were nicer than her face, their bodies more lissom, their legs and arms more suavely elegant. Yet she had been chosen.
She leafed through files, acquainting herself further with the affairs of Miss Ivygale’s office. She examined without interest the carbon copies of letters in buff-coloured folders. The faint, blurred type made no sense to her and the letters themselves seemed as unimportant as the flimsy paper they were duplicated on. In a daydream that was delicious his tapering hands again caressed her. ‘I love you terribly, too,’ she said.
At four o’clock Miss Ivygale arrived. She’d been working all day in her flat, she said, making notes for the letters she now wished to dictate. Her manner was businesslike, she didn’t mention the evening before. ‘Dear Sir,’ she said. ‘Further to yours of the 29th…’
Angela made shorthand notes and then typed Miss Ivygale’s letters. He did not love his wife; he had hinted that he did not love his wife; no one surely could kiss you like that, no one could put his arms around you in the broad daylight in Grosvenor Square, and still love a wife somewhere. She imagined being in a room with him, a room with an electric fire built into the wall, and two chintz-covered armchairs and a sofa covered in the same material, with pictures they had chosen together, and ornaments on the mantelpiece. ‘No, I don’t love her,’ his voice said. ‘Marry me, Angela,’ his voice said.
‘No, no, that’s really badly done,’ Miss Ivygale said. ‘Type it again, please.’
You couldn’t blame Miss Ivygale. Naturally Miss Ivygale was cross, having just had her share of Mr Hemp, one night out of so many empty ones. She smiled at Miss Ivygale when she handed her the retyped letter. Feeling generous and euphoric, she wanted to tell Miss Ivygale that she was still attractive at fifty, but naturally she could not do that.
‘See they catch the post,’ Miss Ivygale sourly ordered, handing her back the letters she’d signed.
‘Yes, yes, of course, Miss Ivygale –’
‘You’ll need to hurry up.’
She took the letters to the dispatch-room in the basement and when she returned to the outer office she found that Miss Ivygale had already left the inner one. She put the grey plastic cover on her Remington International and went to the lavatory to put Pure Magic on her face. ‘I wonder, who’s kissing her now,’ Gordon Spelle was murmuring when she entered the outer office again. ‘I wonder who’s showing her how.’
He put his arms around her. His tongue crept between her teeth, his hands caressed the outline of her buttocks. He led her into Miss Ivygale’s office, an arm around her waist, his lips damply on her right ear. He was whispering something about Miss Ivygale having left for the Gresham Arms and about having to lock the door because the cleaners would be coming round. She heard the door being locked. The light went out and the office was dark except for the glow of the street lamps coming through two uncurtained windows. His mouth was working on hers again, his fingers undid the zip at the side of her skirt. She closed her eyes, saturated by the gorgeousness of the mystery.
Take it easy, he said to himself when he had her on the floor, remembering the way Gwyneth Birkett had suddenly shouted out, in discomfort apparently although at the time he’d assumed it to be pleasure. A Nigerian cleaner had come knocking at the door when she’d shouted out the third or fourth time. ‘Oh, God, I love you,’ he whispered to Angela Hosford.
She had vodka and lime in the Gresham Arms because she felt she needed pulling together and one of the girls in the flat had said that vodka was great for that. It had been very painful on the floor of Miss Ivygale’s office, and not even momentarily pleasurable, not once. It had been less painful the other time, with Ted Apwell on the hearth-rug. She wished it didn’t always have to be on a floor, but even so it didn’t matter – nor did the pain, nor the apprehension about doing it in Miss Ivygale’s office. All the time he’d kept saying he loved her, and as often as she could manage it she’d said she loved him too.
‘Must go,’ he said now with sudden, awful abruptness. He buttoned the jacket of his pepper-coloured suit. He kissed her on the lips, in full view of everyone in the Gresham Arms. She wanted to go with him but felt she shouldn’t because the drink he’d just bought her was scarcely touched. He’d drunk his own gin and Britvic in a couple of gulps.
‘Sorry for being so grumpy,’ Miss Ivygale said.
The Gresham Arms was warm and noisy, but somehow not the same at all. The men who’d been there last night were there again: Tommy Blyth and the man called Dil and all the other men – and the black-haired receptionist and all the other girls. Mr Hemp was not. Mr Hemp was hurrying back to his wife, and so was Gordon Spelle.
‘What’re you drinking?’ Miss Ivygale asked her.
‘Oh no, no. I haven’t even started this one, thanks.’
But Miss Ivygale, whose own glass required refilling, insisted. ‘Sit down, why don’t you?’ Miss Ivygale suggested indicating the bar-stool next to hers. ‘Take off your coat. It’s like a furnace in here.’
Slowly Angela took off her coat. She sat beside her immediate employer, still feeling painful and in other ways aware of what had occurred on Miss Ivygale’s office floor. They drank together and in time they both became a little drunk. Angela felt sorry for Miss Ivygale then, and Miss Ivygale felt sorry for Angela, but neither of them said so. And in the end, when Angela asked Miss Ivygale why it was that Gordon Spelle had picked her out, Miss Ivygale replied that it was because Gordon Spelle loved her. What else could she say? Miss Ivygale asked herself. How could she say that everyone knew that Gordon Spelle chose girls who were unattractive because he believed such girls, deprived of sex for long periods at a time, were an easier bet? Gordon Spelle was notorious, but Miss Ivygale naturally couldn’t say it, any more than she’d been able to say it to Gwyneth Birkett or Tamar Dymorid or Sue, or any of the others.
‘Oh, it’s beautiful!’ Angela cried suddenly, having drunk a little more. She was referring, not to her own situation, but to the fact that Miss Ivygale had wasted half a lifetime on a hopeless love. Feeling happy herself, she wanted Miss Ivygale to feel happy also.
Miss Ivygale did not say anything in reply. She was fifty and Angela was twenty-six: that made a difference where knowing what was beautiful was concerned. The thing about Gordon Spelle was that with the worst possible motives he
performed an act of charity for the girls who were his victims. He gave them self-esteem, and memories to fall back on – for the truth was too devious for those closest to it to guess, and too cruel for other people ever to reveal to them. The victims of Gordon Spelle left C.S. & E. in the end because they believed the passion of his love for them put him under a strain, he being married to a wife who was ill. As soon as each had gone he looked around for someone else.
‘And beautiful for you too, my dear,’ Miss Ivygale murmured, thinking that in a way it was, compared with what she had herself. She’d been aware for twenty-three years of being used by the man she loved: self-esteem and memories were better than knowing that, no matter how falsely they came.
‘Let’s have two for the road,’ murmured Miss Ivygale, and ordered further drinks.
Mr McNamara
‘How was he?’ my mother asked on the morning of my thirteenth birthday.
She spoke while pouring tea into my father’s extra-large breakfast cup, the last remaining piece of a flowered set, Ville de Lyon clematis on a leafy ground. My father had a special knife and fork as well, the knife another relic of the past, the fork more ordinary, extra-strong because my father was always breaking forks.