My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (34 page)

‘We’d maybe talk about the brochures.’

He fancied her, she said to herself. He was making a pass, talking about brochures and lunchtime. Well, she wasn’t disagreeable. She’d meant what she’d said to Mavis: she liked an older fella and she liked his moustache, so smooth it looked as if he put something on it. She liked the name Norman.

‘All right then,’ she said.

He couldn’t suggest Bette’s Sandwiches because you stood up at a shelf on the wall and ate the sandwiches off a cardboard plate.

‘We could go to the Drummer Boy,’ he suggested instead. ‘I’m off at twelve-fifteen.’

‘Say half past, Mr Britt.’

‘I’ll be there with the brochures.’

Again he thought of Hilda. He thought of her wiry, pasty limbs and the way she had of snorting. Sometimes when they were watching the television she’d suddenly want to sit on his knee. She’d get worse as she grew older; she’d get scrawnier; her hair, already coarse, would get dry and grey. He enjoyed the evenings when she went out to the Club or to her friends the Fowlers. And yet he wasn’t being fair because in very many ways she did her best. It was just that you didn’t always feel like having someone on your knee after a day’s work.

‘Same?’ he said in the Drummer Boy.

‘Yes please, Mr Britt.’ She’d meant to say that the drinks were definitely on her, after what he’d spent last night. But in her flurry she forgot. She picked up the brochures he’d left on the seat beside her. She pretended to read one, but all the time she was watching him as he stood by the bar. He smiled as he turned and came back with their drinks. He said something about it being a nice way to do business. He was drinking gin and peppermint himself.

‘I meant to pay for the drinks. I meant to say I would. I’m sorry, Mr Britt.’

‘Norman my name is.’ He surprised himself again by the ease with which he was managing the situation. They’d have their drinks and then he’d suggest some of the shepherd’s pie, or a ham-and-salad roll if she’d prefer it. He’d buy her another gin and peppermint to get her going. Eighteen years ago he used to buy Hilda further glasses of V.P. wine with the same thought in mind.

They finished with the brochures. She told him she lived in Reading; she talked about the town. She mentioned her mother and her mother’s friend Mrs Druk, who lived with them, and Mavis. She told him a lot about Mavis. No man was mentioned, no boyfriend or fiancé.

‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘I’m not hungry.’ She couldn’t have touched a thing. She just wanted to go on drinking gin with him. She wanted to get slightly squiffy, a thing she’d never done before in the middle of the day. She wanted to put her arm through his.

‘It’s been nice meeting you,’ he said.

‘A bit of luck.’

‘I think so too, Marie.’ He ran his forefinger between the bones on the back of her hand, so gently that it made her want to shiver. She didn’t take her hand away, and when she continued not to he took her hand in his.

After that they had lunch together every day, always in the Drummer Boy. People saw them, Ron Stocks and Mr Blackstaffe from Travel-Wide, Mr Fineman, the pharmacist from Green’s the Chemist’s. Other people from the travel agency and from the chemist’s saw them walking about the streets, usually hand in hand. They would look together into the shop windows of Edgware Road, drawn particularly to an antique shop full of brass. In the evenings he would walk with her to Paddington Station and have a drink in one of the bars. They’d embrace on the platform, as other people did.

Mavis continued to disapprove; Marie’s mother and Mrs Druk remained ignorant of the affair. The holiday on the Costa Brava that May was not a success because all the time Marie kept wishing Norman Britt was with her. Occasionally, while Mavis read magazines on the beach, Marie wept and Mavis pretended not to notice. She was furious because Marie’s low spirits meant that it was impossible for them to get to know fellas. For months they’d been looking forward to the holiday and now, just because of a clerk in a travel agency, it was a flop. ‘I’m sorry, dear,’ Marie kept saying, trying to smile; but when they returned to London the friendship declined. ‘You’re making a fool of yourself,’ Mavis pronounced harshly, ‘and it’s dead boring having to hear about it.’ After that they ceased to travel together in the mornings.

The affair remained unconsummated. In the hour and a quarter allotted to each of them for lunch there was nowhere they might have gone to let their passion for one another run its course. Everywhere was public: Travel-Wide and the chemist’s shop, the Drummer Boy, the streets they walked. Neither could easily spend a night away from home. Her mother and Mrs Druk would guess that something untoward was in the air; Hilda, deprived of her bedroom mating, would no longer be nonchalant in front of the TV. It would all come out if they were rash, and they sensed some danger in that.

‘Oh, darling,’ she whispered one October evening at Paddington, huddling herself against him. It was foggy and cold. The fog was in her pale hair, tiny droplets that only he, being close to her, could see. People hurried through the lit-up station, weary faces anxious to be home.

‘I know,’ he said, feeling as inadequate as he always did at the station.

‘I lie awake and think of you,’ she whispered.

‘You’ve made me live,’ he whispered back.

‘And you me. Oh, God, and you me.’ She was gone before she finished speaking, swinging into the train as it moved away, her bulky red handbag the last thing he saw. It would be eighteen hours before they’d meet again.

He turned his back on her train and slowly made his way through the crowds, his reluctance to start the journey back to the flat in Putney seeming physical, like a pain, inside him. ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ a woman cried angrily at him, for he had been in her way and had moved in the same direction as she had in seeking to avoid her, causing a second collision. She dropped magazines on to the platform and he helped her to pick them up, vainly apologizing.

It was then, walking away from this woman, that he saw the sign.
Hotel Entrance
it said in red neon letters, beyond the station’s main bookstall. It was the back of the Great Western Royal, a short-cut to its comforts for train travellers at the end of their journey. If only, he thought, they could share a room there. If only for one single night they were granted the privilege of being man and wife. People passed through the swing-doors beneath the glowing red sign, people hurrying, with newspapers or suitcases. Without quite knowing why, he passed through the swing-doors himself.

He walked up two brief flights of steps, through another set of doors, and paused in the enormous hall of the Great Western Royal Hotel. Ahead of him, to the left, was the long, curved reception counter and, to the right, the porter’s desk. Small tables and armchairs were everywhere; it was carpeted underfoot. There were signs to lifts and to the bar and the restaurant. The stairway, gently rising to his left, was gracious, carpeted also.

They would sit for a moment in this hall, he imagined, as other people were sitting now, a few with drinks, others with pots of tea and plates half empty of assorted biscuits. He stood for a moment, watching these people, and then, as though he possessed a room in the hotel, he mounted the stairs, saying to himself that it must somehow be possible, that surely they could share a single night in the splendour of this place. There was a landing, made into a lounge, with armchairs and tables, as in the hall below. People conversed quietly; a foreign waiter, elderly and limping, collected silver-plated teapots; a Pekinese dog slept on a woman’s lap.

The floor above was different. It was a long, wide corridor with bedroom doors on either side of it. Other corridors, exactly similar, led off it. Chambermaids passed him with lowered eyes; someone gently laughed in a room marked
Staff Only
; a waiter wheeled a trolley containing covered dishes, and a bottle of wine wrapped in a napkin.
Bathroom
a sign said, and he looked in, just to see what a bathroom in the Great Western Royal Hotel would be like. ‘My God!’ he whispered, possessed immediately with the idea that was, for him, to make the decade of the 1960s different. Looking back on it, he was for ever after unable to recall the first moment he beheld the bathroom on the second floor without experiencing the shiver of pleasure he’d experienced at the time. Slowly he entered. He locked the door and slowly sat down on the edge of the bath. The place was huge, as the bath itself was, like somewhere in a palace. The walls were marble, white veined delicately with grey. Two monstrous brass taps, the biggest bath taps he’d ever in his life seen, seemed to know already that he and Marie would come to the bathroom. They seemed almost to wink an invitation to him, to tell him that the bathroom was a comfortable place and not often in use since private bathrooms were now attached to most of the bedrooms. Sitting in his mackintosh coat on the edge of the bath, he wondered what Hilda would say if she could see him now.

He suggested it to Marie in the Drummer Boy. He led up to it slowly, describing the interior of the Great Western Royal Hotel and how he had wandered about it because he hadn’t wanted to go home. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I ended up in a bathroom.’

‘You mean the toilet, dear? Taken short—’

‘No, not the toilet. A bathroom on the second floor. Done out in marble, as a matter of fact.’

She replied that honestly he was a one, to go into a bathroom like that when he wasn’t even staying in the place! He said:

‘What I mean, Marie, it’s somewhere we could go.’

‘Go, dear?’

‘It’s empty half the time. Nearly all the time it must be. I mean, we could be there now. This minute if we wanted to.’

‘But we’re having our lunch, Norman.’

‘That’s what I mean. We could even be having it there.’

From the saloon bar’s juke-box a lugubrious voice pleaded for a hand to be held.
Take my hand
, sang Elvis Presley,
take my whole life too
. The advertising executives from Dalton, Dure and Higgins were loudly talking about their hopes of gaining the Canadian Pacific account. Less noisily the architects from Frine and Knight complained about local planning regulations.

‘In a bathroom, Norman? But we couldn’t just go into a bathroom.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, we couldn’t. I mean, we
couldn’t
.’

‘What I’m saying is we could.’

‘I want to marry you, Norman. I want us to be together. I don’t want just going to a bathroom in some hotel.’

‘I know; I want to marry you too. But we’ve got to work it out. You know we’ve got to work it out, Marie—getting married.’

‘Yes, I know.’

It was a familiar topic of conversation between them. They took it for granted that one day, somehow, they would be married. They had talked about Hilda. He’d described Hilda to her, he’d drawn a picture in Marie’s mind of Hilda bent over her jewellery-making in a Putney flat, or going out to drink V.P. with the Fowlers or at the Club. He hadn’t presented a flattering picture of his wife, and when Marie had quite timidly said that she didn’t much care for the sound of her he had agreed that naturally she wouldn’t. The only aspect of Hilda he didn’t touch upon was her bedroom appetite, night starvation as he privately dubbed it. He didn’t mention it because he guessed it might be upsetting.

What they had to work out where Hilda was concerned were the economics of the matter. He would never, at Travel-Wide or anywhere else, earn a great deal of money. Familiar with Hilda’s nature, he knew that as soon as a divorce was mooted she’d set out to claim as much alimony as she possibly could, which by law he would have to pay. She would state that she only made jewellery for pin-money and increasingly found it difficult to do so due to a developing tendency towards chilblains or arthritis, anything she could think of. She would hate him for rejecting her, for depriving her of a tame companion. Her own resentment at not being able to have children would somehow latch on to his unfaithfulness: she would see a pattern which wasn’t really there, bitterness would come into her eyes.

Marie had said that she wanted to give him the children he had never had. She wanted to have children at once and she knew she could. He knew it too: having children was part of her, you’d only to look at her. Yet that would mean she’d have to give up her job, which she wanted to do when she married anyway, which in turn would mean that all three of them would have to subsist on his meagre salary. And not just all three, the children also.