As I said it, I realized it was uncomfortably close to the note of, “I’ve just missed the crossed treble by a whisker,” that tolled the passing of her virginity, but all she said was, “I’ll be dressed in a few minutes.”
“Take as long as you like. The sun is out. We can walk.”
I drank another whiskey as I waited.
“Kiss me,” she said when she appeared.
“I hope you don’t mind the whiskey.”
“Maybe we can come back and eat later?”
“Sure. Or we can eat out.”
“If we weren’t coming back I’d feed the cats now.”
“Feed the cats, then. That way you don’t have to worry about it. We have more choices that way.”
As I listened to her feeding the cats downstairs, I poured another whiskey, mentally taking leave of the room, all the preparations for my coming pointing the frail accusing fingers at me of all rejected poor endeavour. If I could possibly avoid it, I promised, I’d never set foot in that room again.
A brief sun was out and we walked to the pub, an enormous coaching inn close to the station. Its solid lovely structure had been battered by several puzzling decorational assaults and there was a bandstand at the back. I brought the pint of bitter, an orange and two evening papers to the table beside the bandstand.
“Spurs won. Two to one. They got the winning goal in the last quarter. That last great roar that went up must have been for the winner.”
She smiled a nervous smile that seemed to say that she was happy because I seemed happy. We swapped the thin sheets. I got another pint of bitter from the bar but she had enough orange. She took a packet of crisps. We had exhausted the papers by that. A pretty woman somewhere in her thirties came round wiping the tables, and hearing our accents spoke to us.
“What part do you come from? Are you on holiday or living here?” She was from Dublin and worked weekends in the bar when a group played.
I offered her a drink. She had a lager and lime and sat with us. Though she was paid from six o’clock it was often eight before she had any work, and she was blinded with work from then till closing time. The best part of the night was when they sat behind the counter with a nightcap after the washing and cleaning was done, she told us.
She had a story. For all her prettiness her mouth was thin and bitter and she kept tugging nervously at the finger that would have worn a wedding ring.
She’d a clerk-typist’s position in Guinness’s Brewery in Dublin. She emphasized it as a position rather than a job. In those days if you got into Guinness’s you were secure for life. It was harder to get into than into the civil service or a bank, and she’d already got her first promotion when she met this man, an Englishman, an engineer, who was over installing some new plant in the brewery. She married him, left her job, came with him to London, where they had two children, two boys, and then, after seven years, discovered that the man she thought of as her husband all those years had been married to another woman, who he was seeing all that time, when she thought he was away on jobs. She still got angry when the lies she’d swallowed hook, line and sinker came back to her. She’d left him, of course, at once. It all poured out one night he’d had too much to drink. No, she didn’t think she’d ever marry again, once burned ten times shy. She’d a good job now in the Westminster Bank, and the weekends she worked in the pub made that little difference of presents and extra luxuries for her two boys.
I was delighted with the story and bought her two more lagers and lime, encouraging her to elaborate, as Maloney’s words came back to me, “It makes us all feel good. It makes us all feel very good.” Compared to the despicable wretch this woman had the misfortune to meet up with, my own questionable conduct appeared positively exemplary. She only left us when the musicians came in and began to take the wraps off their instruments.
“I suppose we should go before the crowd starts to come in,” the pub was already filling.
“That’s if you can bear to miss another slice of that woman’s life,” the angry answer came.
“She seemed to want to talk.”
“You encouraged her, went on buying her drinks, when we had only this amount of precious time for ourselves.” It was precisely that same precious time that I had been anxious to avoid.
“Her story was sort of interesting, it was kind of a version of ours, but far worse. She seemed decent enough and I was thinking that if you were feeling low or anything you could drop in. She’s Irish. Having gone through that herself, she’d know what you are going through here in London.” A sudden flushed stare from behind two rows of bottles along the counter mirrors told me I was already well on the way to being fuddled as we left the bar.
“That’s all I’d need if I was low,” she said with angry contempt. “Go into that bar and listen to her story. That’s what’d cheer me up. Boy, isn’t that just the holy grail I’ve been looking for all this time. Come in and listen to a tale of woe that’ll cancel your own woe out.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean any harm. I meant it all for the best. What would you like to do now?”
“Why don’t we go back to the flat? I’ll cook us dinner there. There’s plenty of wine and drink.”
“I don’t want you cooking. I want to take you out for dinner tonight. It’d be fun. It’s Saturday night too.”
“All right. We’ll go out to dinner then,” she smiled and we kissed. “I need to clear my ears after that woman’s story. I guess that was just about all I needed.”
“Will we go back into town and eat in Soho?”
“Everywhere’ll be crowded tonight. I’d rather stay round here. There’s a little French place round the corner, run by a fat Breton, who’s cook and waiter and everything. I was there once. It’s a bit on the expensive side though.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
It could have been a hairdresser’s window, except for the lobster pot and a piece of torn netting with rectangular cork floats and lead sinks. Inside, four of the eight or ten tables were full. The man was very fat, in a chef’s hat and apron, arms bared, and he was sweating profusely. I was still not hungry and ordered a steak tartare as an excuse to drink. I then pressed her to eat as much as she was able. There was much laughter as the chef helped her to order. When she did, he brought us a carafe of wine, and we drank as we watched him cook. I ordered a second carafe when he brought our dishes.
As soon as I got out of the restaurant I staggered but covered up by thanking her profusely, “It was a wonderful meal and wonderful place. You have a real nose for restaurants.”
I was drunk, but with the drunk’s cunning of very limited, mostly negative ambitions: one, not to go back to the flat; two, not to have any serious discussion, which was easily achieved at this stage; three, to make trebly certain of avoiding serious discussions if there was any further need to be certain by going on drinking.
“I’m dying for a pint of bitter. Why don’t we go back into that pub? It’s the nearest and we don’t have to see that woman. The pub is enormous and she works the tables at the far end. We can just have a drink near the door. It must be almost closing time,”
The place was packed. Heads crowded together above the counter. A horn shrilled above frantic drums. There were glasses everywhere, cigarette smoke, flushed faces, the dark warm wood, grapes on the stained ceiling; but there were far too many faces to think of even catching a glimpse of the blonde Dublin woman among the dancers and tables around the bandstand in the distant crush and smoke. There was a table near the door where we could rest our glasses while we stood. The bitter tasted warm. There was no possibility of speech except in carefully thought-out monosyllabic shouts. The yellow bitter in its thin pint glass with the imperial stamp looked beautiful. I smiled and raised my glass and shouted, “Good health.” Across the counter between rings of smoke I watched a girl weave her bare arms in a dance, cracking her fingers above her head, the black dress so tightly sewn that her breasts looked crushed. As in a light dream on th
e edge of waking, faces floated close out of the smoke, seemed to smile, and drift far back only to draw near again.
“You seem to be having a wonderful time,” she shouted in my ear.
“I am,” I shouted back. “And you?” Before her wan smile could take on meaning, it drifted off into the noise and smoke and came back changed.
The summer air, the clean streetlights, their unreal clarity shook me when I stepped outside, and the harsh words, “You’re drunk.”
“I’m tipsy. How can a man know he’s drunk and still be drunk, know he’s a fool and still be a fool, be a thief. I must be drunk.”
“You’re tipsy, then. You’re far too tipsy to go back to the hotel. You can sleep the night in the flat. The short walk back there would even do you good.”
“I can’t,” I hiccuped, leaning against the outside wall of the pub, the car park and the forecourt crowded. Limited Plan Number One (not to go back to the flat) came floating silently to my aid, waving its delicate legs like a deep-sea diver approaching a submerged wreck.
“You wouldn’t have to sleep with me. I’ll sleep on the floor,” she said.
“I’d want to sleep with you. And it’s me that should sleep on the floor, but I can’t. I have to go to the hotel.”
“You can go in the morning.”
“No, I’m as well to go now. I’m well able to. I have to see if any message has come for me.”
“I’ll come with you, so,” she took me by the arm.
“I’ll be able to manage,” but she ignored it.
I stumbled on the stairs, but I was conscious enough on the journey to be grateful for the grace of complete avoidance of everything that my condition conferred, and at the hotel the note was waiting that I had arranged to be there. I gave her the note to read in the lobby. I had to go back the next day. It was not so urgent, I said, that I’d have to take a plane. I could go on the nightboat and train. That way we could have most of the day together. We kissed and I saw her to the door after she said she’d call for me at eleven the next morning. I got my key off the porter and I saw him take his eyes from whatever he was reading to watch my feet attempt the first few steps of the stairs.
I was awake but hardly daring to move with pain when she burst into the room the next morning. By the way she looked around I knew she’d been hurting herself with the fear that I might have some girl with me in the room.
“Is it eleven yet?”
“No. I’m early but when the man in the hall said you were in the room I thought I might as well come up rather than walk around till eleven.”
“That made sense. I feel horrible.”
“I don’t know what you wanted to go and drink so much for. Do you want me to go out and get you something for your head?”
“No. I might as well suffer it out now since I was so stupid. I’ll get up.”
Downstairs I paid for the room, and the man took in my bag behind the desk. The sun was out in Bloomsbury, the walls whitened with its light, and it hurt like hell. I was forced to laugh at the pain. We bought newspapers at the corner of Tottenham Court Road, crossed Oxford Street, and found an empty bench in Soho Square, and started to leaf in silence through the pages. Down in the bushes on the Greek Street side of the square a parliament of winos seemed to be in session. From time to time coins were collected on the grass, and one of their number left to return some minutes later with a quart of cider, which was passed around. To spin out this day like an invalid till the late train left Euston suited me well. When a person is both tired and ill they make few social mistakes. They make nothing.
“How do you feel now, love?” she leaned towards me after we’d been two hours or so on the bench and we kissed.
“Things are looking up. And you?”
“I feel a bit tired,” and she broke a long silence, “What are you thinking, love?”
“I was trying to figure out why those winos get all het up from time to time. And talk and jump about and wave. And they all just seem to sit down again.”
“Maybe that’s when something important comes up.”
“But what?”
“The price of cider? Who knows!”
After one o’clock we drifted down into a small pub that had flowers and bowls of nuts and a bald landlord leaned a shirt-sleeved arm on the counter. We had two drinks, stayed till it closed at two, and went back to the Italian restaurant we’d been to the day before. We teased out slow hours there with red wine and light dishes.
“It’s going to be a long, long winter. I should be in hospital by Christmas. The child is going to be a Christmas child. The worst will be the autumn. Some of my cousins will be in London for conferences. I’ll have to see them and it won’t be easy to hide my condition.”
“You can pretend you have to be out of town on some trumped-up business or other.”
“Not all the time. Tom, the engineer, the boy I used play with, has written with his dates already. He’ll be here in late October and staying at the Strand Palace. Boy, if I was out of town for that he’d not be long smelling a rat. He’d soon put two and three together.”
In the slow drip of her anxiety there was the temptation: let us get married, let us face out this horrible mess together, but a mere glimpse of the way she’d rise and warm to it was enough to kill it unspoken.
“You should have married Jonathan.”
“I should have done a lot of things and didn’t. There’s no use going over that now. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
“Was Jonathan much hurt when you wouldn’t?”
“I suppose he was. I think he was in love with me for years. For years he’d been trying to get me to give up the job in the bank and come to London. We used often to talk about that, the irony of how it happened when it did happen, getting pregnant. I suppose his vanity was hurt too, but what was shocking was how businesslike he was about it. I saw him for the first time in his true colours then,” she said bitterly. “For all the champagne and tears and roses, people to him were just ciphers. He was brutal and domineering as well as sentimental but above all everything had a price.”
“Strange, out of all the ups and downs how starkly simple everything is now.”
“How?” she said sharply.
“You’ll have the child at Christmas. You’ll either keep it or adopt it.”
“It might be even simpler than that. I’m not that young for it to be all that simple, having a first child.”
I wanted to say, it’s not true that the old have shorter lives than the young. Many did not even get as far as us, no one has any rights in that line; but we had been in these waters before. They were choppy and disagreeable and led nowhere. It was almost five when we stepped out of the restaurant onto Old Compton Street.
“The train goes soon after eight. Will we break up here? I just have time to get my bag out of the hotel and make my way to Euston.”
“I’ll see you off,” she said. “Otherwise I’d just go back to the house and mope and cry. All I’d think of is that the train is leaving in such and such a time and every five minutes I’d check the clock.”
We sat in the late sun for half an hour in Soho Square. Some of the winos we had watched that morning were asleep, but others were still moving the bottle. One of the women dressed in a blue military overcoat seemed particularly angry. She muttered to herself and then took fits of shaking some of the men sleeping on the grass awake, talking to them in rapid bursts. All of them seemed to listen carefully to whatever she said and then to fall back to sleep.
After that we picked up the bag at the hotel and walked to Euston. We had an hour to wait and sat in the station bar.
“Can I give you money? I have plenty of money.”
“No. I’m even saving money. When I have to stop work I may need some and I’ll ask you then.”
“Whenever you want, but maybe you should take some now, just in case.”
“No. But I’m grateful. Will you come to London soon?”
“I
don’t know. It doesn’t seem to do much good, does it, it’s outside the main problem now. You remember how in the beginning when both of us thought to come to London together, and live here till the child was born, it was decided that it wasn’t a good idea. And visiting seems to me even worse. It stirs things up, leaves everything exactly the same, so it’s worse than nothing. But I’ll come if you need me.”
“It’s going to be a hard time, but somehow deep down I know it’ll be all right.”
We kissed at the barrier and when I turned round before getting into the carriage she was still at the barrier. I waved and she started to wave back wildly.
It won’t be all right. Nothing will be all right. And it’ll end badly, I said to myself but had to admit that it was a very poor way of thinking. The train was set for Ireland. I started thinking of my mother to the carriage roll. There are women in whom the maternal instinct is so obdurate that they will break wrists and ankles in order to stay needed.
My mother, too, may have been such, if the old calendars were anything to go by: but then you could assert almost anything from those ranks of crossed out days, including, certainly, an impatience to get life over with.
The calendars were in a large bundle of papers, tied with yellowed twine. I got them when I was given formal possession of my parents’ estate in the room above Delehunty’s office, my aunt in another of the green leather armchairs with the row of brass studs, Delehunty’s easy beefsteak face across the roll-top desk, behind him an ancient Bible on the wooden mantel above the fireplace.
They were very ordinary calendars, with scenic views such as shops give out at Christmas. Encrusted around many of the dates were faded notes in some private shorthand that I found impossible to decipher and every date was covered with the same large bold X. Seven years were crossed out this way. The X’s stopped on the nineteenth of May, ten days before her death, around the time I’d been taken from the farmhouse to my aunt’s place in the town. I sensed that God, having veiled the earth in darkness and seen all nature to restoring sleep, could hardly have closed down each day with much greater sense of personal control than the march of my mother’s X’s across the years seemed to proclaim. Maybe I had been lucky in my mother’s death. Before she could get those X’s properly to work on me she’d been taken away. And was I now acting out the same circle in reverse—leaving her in London with her growing burden?