Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (8 page)

‘If you
must
know, my name’s Rosie.’

‘Well, Rosie, from Pinner, where are we going for a drink?’

‘You rile me,’ she said, turning one shoulder. ‘And what’s more you get on my nerves.’

‘My name’s Ludovic. Ludo.’

‘You have to be joking,’ she said automatically.

Presently, in the silence in which they were sitting, he had an idea. He took from a pocket Mrs Palfrey’s five-pound note. He smoothed it carefully and, holding it by one corner, dangled it in front of Rosie. ‘Do you know this trick?’ he asked. As she did not answer, he went on quickly, ‘You’d think it quite simple. You’ll probably think
me
simple for suggesting it. But you’d be surprised. All you have to do is to catch it when I let go, and if you can, you keep it.’

She looked at him with astonishment – her first change of expression from disdain.

‘Come on!’ he said coaxingly, as if to a child. ‘Just snatch at it with your little paw.’

He let go of the note and she caught it between thumb
and finger and stared at him uncomprehendingly. Then she resumed her disdain and he in his turn looked astonished.

‘I’ve never seen that happen before,’ he said.

She held out the note to him, waving it impatiently, to be rid of it.

‘No, no, it’s yours,’ he said. ‘That was the bargain. All the same, I couldn’t be more amazed. Perhaps it was because you were sitting down. Not to make any difference to its being yours, but to satisfy my curiosity, see if you can do it again.’

‘Oh, belt up,’ she said. She flicked the note in his direction and went over to the spin-dryer with her polythene bag.

He was about to lose her.

‘Let’s go to the Chinese,’ he said desperately, when she turned towards the street door. ‘Rosie,’ he added pleadingly.

From habit she assumed a look of heavy boredom, of protective scorn; and then – ‘Rosie!’ he said again, softly – something in her face faltered, the drooping lines of it wavered, as if against her will. There had not, so far, been much variety in her expression, but here at last was something new. It was hunger, he thought.

A rather noisy little band of commercial travellers had invaded, quite late, the lounge of the Claremont. They were gathering overnight for a conference in the morning, and some uneasiness and false
bonhomie
hung
over them as one after another (and there was sometimes a good-humoured scramble), they got up to ring the bell for the waiter. Antonio came grudgingly, and in the end stood about, holding a tray, waiting to serve the next round.

The little band of regulars had gone to bed, which was as well; for of them only Mrs Burton could have borne the noise. She had been in one of her deep sleeps for an hour; only a parched mouth would awaken her.

Mrs Palfrey lay and listened to the murmur of a married couple in the next room. It was unrhythmical and intermittent, an exchange grown casual and homely over the years. She knew – looking back – how precious it could be, though not valued at the time.
His
low voice sometimes ran along with
her
lighter more floating one, speaking at the same time, and then for minutes they fell silent, moved about the room, opened and shut drawers: things were put down, dropped; furniture pushed about. The two were settling in for the night, peaceably, and at their accustomed pace; and Mrs Palfrey, hearing them, felt lulled and comforted.

‘It was really my week-end for going home,’ Rosie explained, stripping a spare-rib neatly with her sharp little teeth. ‘But my parents have gone winter-sporting.’

She had become less laconic in the darkness of the restaurant, with its stretches of shadow and painted dragons and tasselled lampshades. So different was it from the glare of the Coin-Op Laundry.

‘Every
other
week-end,’ she went on, screwing her greasy fingers into her paper napkin, ‘I go down there to stoke up for the next week. It’s worth the fare, because I eat like crazy. Roast beef and Yorkshire. All those things I loathed when I lived there. And I pinch great slabs of fruit cake out of the larder.’

She now dabbed at her glistening chin with the shredded napkin. ‘They live in another world,’ she said: and Ludo realised that this covered everything – all the differences in age and outlook. Her parents would not have understood that, for the girl flat-dwellers, clothes came before food; fun before comfort; privacy nowhere. To him, the priorities were reversed, with privacy first, the assuagement of hunger next (which was different from having a meal), and clothes last. The Chinese supper was instead of buying a new pair of shoes, as he had intended, and guessed that Mrs Palfrey hoped.

‘Yes, they live in another world,’ he agreed, keeping things going, while Rosie ate the last spare-rib. ‘My mother has a love-nest in Putney. She is a sort of kept woman.’

‘So?’ was all she said, beginning at one end of the bone and going fast up to the other, as if playing a mouth-organ. ‘Only sort of?’ she asked, when she had finished. She leaned back and sighed. ‘Kept woman, I mean?’

‘She does a part-time job as a receptionist; but I think the Major pays the rent.’

‘Another world,’ sighed Rosie, looking round and putting a finger-nail between two teeth, grimacing, then
sliding her tongue about her mouth. They never had any fresh ideas, did they? Oh, sweet and sour pork, how super!’ Her eyes flew fast from dish to dish, as the waiter arranged the table. ‘I’m sorry I was rather shirty in the coin-op,’ she went on, ‘but truly I thought you were a bit etcentric.’

‘Try again,’ he urged her. ‘I just can’t understand it.’ He took the five-pound note from his pocket and held it once more in front of her.

She put thumb and finger nearly together, leaned forward ready, and he saw the note flutter down to the carpet.

‘That’s how it’s meant to work,’ Ludo said, satisfied at last, bending to pick up the note.

‘Crispy noodles I dote on,’ she said, with a rapt and solemn look as if she were in church.

‘Well, I’m glad of that, about your not catching it, I mean. Now you won’t think me quite so “etcentric”, perhaps.’

‘Maybe not,’ said Rosie, and she looked up at the Chinese waiter and her smile, rising from the corners of her lips, spread all over her face, seemed to lift her into the air. ‘Oh, water-chestnuts!’ she said softly, looking up into his pouchy eyes.

But water-chestnuts are expensive. They were sliced thinly and scattered only sparsely over the chicken. Rosie sorted them out with her chopsticks, savoured them. ‘They’re so inscrutable,’ she complained. ‘They never say anything or listen.’

‘It’s a texture quite on its own,’ Ludo said, and he
picked out all of his water-chestnuts and spooned them into her bowl. ‘Nothing else quite like them.’

‘Absolutely nothing,’ she agreed, accepting his share, looking thoughtfully into her bowl. ‘But what about you?’

‘As a matter of fact, my need isn’t as great as yours. I had a very good dinner last night.’

‘Where?’

‘At the Claremont.’

‘I never ever heard of it.’

‘No, I don’t suppose you did. I was invited there by an old lady I picked up.’

‘You’re a great one for that.’

‘Literally picked up, I mean. Off the pavement. She’d had a fall.’

Rosie wasn’t interested in old ladies falling about, or in Ludo’s chivalry. ‘What does your mother look like?’ she asked, finding the subject more to her liking.

‘She has bags under her eyes. Auburn hair, dark at the roots most of the time. Nice figure.’

‘Well, that’s something.’

‘Those sort of smart clothes you get from Jewish Madam shops; but somehow there’s the impression that all is not well beneath – you know, one imagines grubby shoulder-straps, sordid old roll-ons. Can’t think why it is. But one does.’

‘Jewish Madam shops? Sordid roll-ons! I
must
say. Where d’you get all that from?’

‘I’m a writer,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘Or … I am about to be a writer. I mean, I am
already
a writer, but…’

‘I thought we were talking about your mother,’ she said, in a voice from which patience was ebbing fast. ‘You know, and her sordid roll-ons. I didn’t know such things existed still. But I’d have thought this Major wouldn’t have cared much for all that. Where does he get his money from, anyway? My uncle was a Colonel, and he never had a halfpenny.’

‘No, this one of my mother’s is only one of those wartime Majors, but I think he rather fancies being called it, so he kept it on. He’s really in steel. Something in steel.’

‘He must be old.’

‘Why?’

‘From that war.’

‘I suppose he’s sixty-odd.’

‘Don’t! It makes me squirm.’ She squirmed.

‘You don’t like old people?’

‘I don’t choose to think about them.’

‘You’ll be old yourself one day.’

‘Why order all this food and then put me off it?’

‘What about your parents?’ Ludo asked.

‘Oh, they lark about in their way,’ she said. ‘They give awful drinks parties, with about a hundred people standing jam-packed, shouting at one another. Sometimes on a Sunday morning when I’m there I go round with a tray of stuff – pretend caviare on toast and all -and some of the men are quite
awful,
and the women say, “Oh,
how pretty”,
meaning the caviare and the bits of lemon, and the American ones say, “My, and
some
one’s been busy around here”. They’re so bright and
shouty, and hateful to me, really; because they know their old men are squinting down my dress at my bosom.’

‘But you haven’t got a bosom.’

‘And shall keep it that way, thank you. I suppose your mother has one of those enormous ones sticking out of her Jewish Madam clothes.’

‘You seem strangely fascinated by my mother. I told you she had a good figure.’

‘By whose standards? The Major’s, I suppose. But what about your father?’ she asked, and she helped herself to more fried rice.

‘He got very tired, and died,’ Ludo said.

‘Oh, sorry!’ Rosie said vaguely – even rather crossly, as if she wished she had not asked. ‘This rice soon got cold, I must say.’

‘I did my best. With my father. Tried to buck him up a bit. If you don’t praise people just sometimes a little early on they die of despair, or turn into Hitlers, you know.’

‘Do they?’ Rosie asked.

E
VEN for some time after her fall, Mrs Palfrey was too stiff to walk far, so that she found the days passing slowly. She often thought of Ludo and her pleasant evening with him, and wondered if he would ever come again, and felt that he would not. For he had been vague, had not left open the way to her renewing of the invitation. He had had a look of uncertainty – or reluctance – when she suggested it. The machinery for carrying on their acquaintance did not exist, though constant reference to him by Mrs Arbuthnot and Mrs Post unfortunately did.

‘If we went to the British Museum should we see him?’ Mrs Post asked, dangerously, had she but known it. The last thing she had ever imagined herself doing was endangering somebody, in which she was quite unlike Mrs Arbuthnot.

‘Oh, no,’ Mrs Palfrey said quickly, ‘he is tucked away in the archives.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Mrs Post.

Mrs Palfrey, feeling flustered, took herself off on one of her brief outings – just as far as the Square, where there were little hard buds on the lilac trees – she guessed they would be that boring pale mauve when they blossomed – and there was an unfolded crocus or two coming up from the black earth. There was also a
bitter wind, which tired her and seemed to set rigid all the down-going folds of her face.

It was late afternoon, a time of day which depressed her. There were now, there were beginning to be, little glimpses of domesticity through lit but not curtained windows. She could glimpse bed-sitting rooms – like Ludo’s, some of them – where once cooks had attended ranges, rattling dampers, hooking off hot-plates, skimming stock-pots, while listening to housemaids’ gossip brought from above stairs. Mrs Palfrey went slowly by, imagining those days, which were almost clearer to her than this present structure of honeycomb housing and the isolation of each cell, because they were the days that belonged to her being young, and so were the clearest of all to her.