Mr Toppit (22 page)

He was shaving in the unheated bathroom opposite their bedroom when the bell went. The tap was running so it was a moment before he heard it. It was too early for the post, and although it was around the time the milkman usually came, he left theirs downstairs and only rang the bell once a week when the bill had to be paid, which Arthur had already done.

He had left Martha asleep when he had got up, but now he could hear her moving around their bedroom. “I’ll get it,” she called.

He peered round the bathroom door and saw her padding down the corridor in bare feet. She wore a slip and was pulling a cardigan round her shoulders. When she got to the entryphone by their front door, she picked up the receiver and said, “Yes?” in a croaky voice. Arthur could hear a distant squawk of what sounded like static and Martha said, “I’m sorry, I don’t—” but then she stopped and the static started again. Then she said, “Oh,” and took the receiver away from her ear. She let her hand drop so she was holding it against her leg. She stayed like that for a few seconds, her back very straight, and Arthur could see a little tear in the hem of her slip. Then she brought the receiver slowly back up to her ear. Her other hand was over her mouth and she had to take it away so she could speak. “No,” she said. “Wait there. I’ll come down.” She tried to put the receiver back into its cradle, but it slipped out of her grasp and fell, banging against the wall and swinging by its curly wire, like a pendulum. Martha picked it up and forced it into the cradle with a cry of frustration, then unbolted the door and vanished.

There was almost no sound now, only the soft receding thud of Martha’s bare feet on the carpet. The steam, which had hung in the bathroom like fog, was drawn out by the draught of the open front door and swirled into the corridor.

Back in their bedroom, Arthur looked at his watch. It was five past seven. Martha would be back any moment. He wondered whether he should make some coffee and heat the milk. He put his robe over his pajamas and went up the corridor. Before he got to the kitchen he stopped and waited. The apartment was silent. Then, without knowing why, he retraced his steps past the bedroom and went out through the front door that Martha had left open.

He could hear talking drifting up the stairwell from downstairs. Although he could not catch the precise words, he registered Martha’s voice rising and falling, his ears catching the high notes better than the low ones. Then the low notes fell away and there was the insistent high staccato of the same short word being said over and over again. He moved down the stairs to the half-landing. The word Martha was repeating was “no.”

“No,” she said. “No. No. No. No.” Her inflection was slightly different each time.

Through the metal grilles of the elevator shaft in the center of the stairwell, Arthur could see two pairs of legs standing against the front entrance, the bodies obscured by the lobby ceiling.

Then Martha said, “It’s simply not true.”

There was a silence. Then the other person, a woman, said, “But I know.”

“You’re wrong,” Martha said. “You must be mistaken. You
are
mistaken.”

“There’s no mistake. No mistake at all.”

“Look,” Martha said, “I don’t know how—”

“The bills. I’ve seen them.”

“Bills?”

“Hotel bills. For the
room,”
the woman hissed. “In Bloomsbury. Great Russell Street. I know the hotel.”

“It’s not
true
,” Martha said indignantly.

There was a pause. Arthur was thinking, Poor woman, what an embarrassing mistake to have made, what a terrible mix-up.

“Mrs. Hayman,” she said wearily, “I know about the French place, about Le Touquet.”

The woman pronounced it wrongly—she called it “Le Tooket”—but Arthur realized what she was talking about. He knew about Le Touquet as well. A few months before Martha had gone to France for the night. She had said a friend, someone she used to work with, had won a competition in the
Daily Express
. The prize was a ferry ticket and the friend said she couldn’t use it and had offered it to Martha. “It seems a shame to waste it,” Martha had said. “I could stock up on wine and food.” When she came back she brought with her a little tin of
foie gras
and a jar of green olives stuffed with pimentos wrapped in waxy white paper tied with a ribbon.

“And I’ve read the endearments,” the woman said. “I’ve
seen
them. In your little notes. So please—please don’t talk to me about mistakes.”

It was seven fifteen now. Arthur wondered what was going to happen, but he knew that, whatever it was, it would be better if he was dressed properly, not standing in the stairwell of a block of mansion flats in his pajamas and robe. As he crept back up the stairs he heard the woman say, “You’re ruining us, Mrs. Hayman. You have to get out of our lives. Please.” There was a catch in her voice.

The flat was still silent when he came back in, and he decided to do what he had been going to do before he had gone to see who had rung the bell: he went to the kitchen, filled the percolator, and turned the gas on, then began organizing the milk. Back in the bedroom, he took a white shirt out of the chest of drawers and pulled on the gray flannel trousers that were hanging over the back of a chair. His black shoes were under Martha’s dressing table. He had polished them yesterday, but he buffed them up with a duster before slipping them on and tying the laces. He pulled his tweed jacket out of the wardrobe and, before putting it on, wrapped a dark blue patterned tie round his neck and knotted it.

The front door banged and he heard Martha come along the corridor. She stopped outside their bedroom. “It’s
cold,”
she said, shivering.

“I’ll do the fires in a minute,” Arthur said. “Who was at the door?”

“Your collar’s crooked,” she said. She came over to Arthur and straightened it. Her cheek brushed his and he felt how cold her face was. “Bloody woman doing a survey.”

“Survey?”

“From the council. Whether we’re happy with the street cleaning. Writing everything down on a clipboard.”

“I’ve never even seen a street cleaner.”

“That’s what I said.” She pulled the top drawer of the chest out, searching for something. Then she rummaged violently on the top of her dressing table. She kept running her fingers through her hair, which looked dirty. Arthur wondered if there would be enough hot water for her to wash it.

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

“My
bracelet,”
she said angrily. “The silver one, the African one.”

“It’s on the bedside table.”

She sat on the bed, reached over and slipped it on her wrist. He thought she would stand up immediately, but she just sat there, staring ahead.

“Are you all right?” Arthur said.

“I’m just cold,” she said. “What’s the time?”

“Nearly half seven.”

“No sound?”

“Not a squeak,” Arthur said.

“He’s normally like clockwork.”

“The milk’s on.”

As if by magic there was an angry cry from up the corridor and Martha smiled, as if she was relieved. She got up and was out of the room in a second. “Get the milk, will you?” she called.

When Arthur got to the baby’s room, Martha was kneeling beside his cot. He was standing up, holding on to the side and stamping up and down on his blanket. He was giggling and trying to tug at Martha’s hair as she moved her head back and forth towards his fat little hands.

When he saw Arthur holding the milk, the baby’s mouth widened into a lopsided grin. He reached out his hand.

“Hello, Jordan,” Arthur said. “Hello, little pig.”

Sometimes they saw each other every week and sometimes several weeks passed with no contact. Once they had even seen each other three days in a row, but after Ray’s wife had turned up on the doorstep, Martha knew it was over.

Since the doorbell had rung that cold morning, she had entered a state of what seemed to her like suspended animation. It
had a curious familiarity to it and it took her some time to realize that it was how she had felt when her father was dying. But the baby needed feeding and the diapers needed washing and Arthur’s sandwiches had to be made before he left in the morning for the studio, where he went every day, still waiting for his scenes in the French Revolution film to be shot.

The worst time was the afternoon, when the idiotic Spanish girl, Chita, who worked for them part-time and whom Martha was always about to sack, came in to look after Jordan so Martha could get on with her PhD, which she had been working on for more than ten years, interrupted fatally when she had gone to work for Wally Carter, researching his crusader film. She went into the bedroom, where there was a table she used as a desk, and sat moving her notes around and flipping through the books she had marked with thin pencil lines in the margins. She lit cigarettes, then put them out after a few puffs. She made cups of tea. She looked into the sitting room at Jordan and Chita playing. Sometimes she went for aimless walks through Soho, huddled in a coat and woolen scarf against the bitter cold.

She was living in dread of something happening or something not happening. She dreaded seeing Ray and she dreaded not seeing Ray. Most of all she dreaded Ray’s wife coming back and telling Arthur, but she also dreaded continuing in the state of limbo in which she and Arthur flapped slowly round the flat like dying moths.

So when the phone rang early one afternoon and it was Ray—he was conversant enough with her schedule to know that Chita turned up to look after Jordan just after lunch and therefore she would be able to talk—Martha did not know whether she was relieved or not.

“Christ,” he said chattily, “I’d have thought Mo had enough to do with the baby not to spend her time looking through my pockets. She’s been in a real state.”

“I’m sure,” Martha murmured sympathetically. She really wanted to ask why, if he was going to ring at all, he had taken so long to get round to it. She had half prepared herself never to hear from him again.

“How’s Jordy?” he asked. One of the few irritating things about Ray was that he called Jordan “Jordy.” Martha had once pointed out that that was not his name but, like a lot of what Martha said, it had clearly not sunk in.

“Jordan’s fine,” she said. There was a silence so she added, “Teething, of course.” She didn’t want to return the ball and ask about Ray’s daughter, Dawn, a spectacularly plain child, a new photograph of whom Ray produced nearly every time they met, but as talking about their babies was a ritual as predictable as foreplay—indeed, often was foreplay—she couldn’t think of anything to say other than “And Dawn, how’s she?”

“Lovely,” Ray said, with a smack of his lips, “Lovely. And how are you?” he asked.

“In a bit of a state, too, actually,” Martha said, as crisply as she could manage.

“Yeah, well. Sorry about Mo. I could have killed her.”

“Ray, you don’t think she’ll come again, do you? Or maybe write to … my husband?” She felt awkward mentioning Arthur by name, but as she and Ray hardly ever talked about him, the problem did not arise often.

Ray let out a horse-like whinny. “Shouldn’t think so,” he said breezily. “Hardly sends a postcard from the seaside. We’ve just got to be more careful, that’s all.”

Until that moment, it had not occurred to her that the affair could possibly continue.
“Ray!”
she said, her voice squeaking at the madness of the idea.

“I’ve missed you,” he said.

“We can’t—”

“Look,” he said, “I’ve got a surprise. Can you meet me at Golders Green?”

“No,” Martha said indignantly. “When?”

“Soon as you can. Now. Take the tube.”

“I can’t, Ray. I can’t. This is mad.”

“I’ll meet you there. I’ll be waiting.”

“No,” Martha said again. “No.”

The day, which had started out sunny, had clouded over when the train rattled out of the tunnel after Hampstead and rain was pouring by the time it reached Golders Green. Martha stood holding a newspaper above her head by the taxi rank outside the station while she looked around for Ray, who was nowhere to be seen. She lit a cigarette and waited. After she had been there for a few minutes, a man came up to her and asked for a light. She handed over a box of matches and waved them away when he offered them back to her. She moved up the pavement from him and turned her back, dropped her cigarette and stubbed it out under her shoe. When she looked up the man smiled at her. She pulled back the sleeve of her coat, squinted at her watch, then craned her neck and turned her head from side to side as if she was desperate to find someone. Her mime was so elaborate that she forgot for a moment she actually was desperate to find someone.

She began to panic. She was about to go back into the station to take the tube home when a horn honked several times and she saw Ray waving at her from inside his truck, which was just
pulling into the car park opposite. She let out a cry and threw the newspaper she had been using to keep the rain off her onto the ground. All she wanted was to get across the car park as quickly as she could.

Ray flung open the passenger door of the van and put out his hand to heave her into the cab. She slumped backwards into the seat as he pulled the door shut, gunned the accelerator, and tore off. She felt as if she had jumped into a getaway car after a bank raid. She thought she was going to faint. As they drove up the hill towards Hampstead, Ray changed gear, and instead of putting his hand back on the steering wheel, he rested it on her knee, then slid it up her skirt and hooked his fingers round the top of her stocking.

He turned the truck off the main road and parked in a cul-de-sac by Hampstead Heath. He told Martha to wait, then got out and went to the back of the van. Martha could hear him opening the doors and clattering around behind her. She closed her eyes. She was having some difficulty remembering how she had come to be there in the first place.

When Ray called her, she got out of the cab. The passenger side was parked right up against the grass verge and her feet sank into the wet earth. She wished she had worn flat shoes. She made her way along the side of the van to where Ray had put a wooden crate on the ground for her to use as a step. She climbed up and peered into the dark cavern.