‘Put it another way,’ Simpson went on. ‘What if my wife asked you and your lady friend to dinner behind my back? I trust you’d refuse.’
‘Need you ask?’ Edward said.
‘I don’t want you to run away with the idea that the wife’s narrow. She’s not, believe you me. I’ll tell you a little story. Keep it under your hat; I shouldn’t like it to go any further. She got a proposition from a mutual friend of ours well, wife of a friend of mine, as a matter of fact. Let’s call her X. X phoned the wife and said could she come round and talk to her—’
‘Whose wife?’ asked Edward.
‘Mine, of course,’ said Simpson. ‘It was absolutely vital that Y shouldn’t get to know—’
‘I don’t quite follow you,’ said Edward, mystified by Simpson’s alphabetical acquaintances. ‘Did your wife tell you she’d been propositioned?’
‘Don’t be dense,’ cried Simpson testily. ‘My wife wasn’t propositioned. X was.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Edward nodded. He didn’t want to antagonise Simpson, not when Binny’s dinner party hung in the balance. At this moment, he no longer cared about himself and the possibility of being caught out. He thought only of Binny, slaving over a hot stove. ‘Stupid of me,’ he admitted. ‘It’s my training, I suppose. Making sure the figures add up . . . that sort of thing. Do go on.’
‘It seems,’ continued Simpson, ‘that X was carrying on with Z. Had been for quite some time. Met him at a masonic do last year. Upshot of it was, X wanted the wife to lend out our spare room for the afternoon.’
‘Good God,’ murmured Edward. Though he had lost track of X and Z and was totally foxed by Y, he did sympathise with their general predicament.
‘The wife handled it rather cleverly, I thought,’ said Simpson. ‘She said they could have the room but would they please wash the sheets out afterwards, or leave money on the table for laundering. And would they keep the window and the door open.’
‘The window?’ said Edward. He thought Simpson’s wife must have a peculiarly coarse sense of humour. Or possibly she was a voyeur.
‘Took all the romance out of it,’ cried Simpson with satisfaction. ‘Exposed it for what it was. Put the kibosh on it, no two ways about it.’
‘Goodness, yes,’ said Edward, though it seemed to him, once they had come to some agreement about being spied upon, a small enough price to pay for a whole afternoon of love.
He fought his way to the counter and ordered another two pints of beer and waited, pipe clamped in his mouth like a dummy, craning upwards to see his reflection in the mirror above the bar. He needed a hair cut; a pale forelock dangled over one eye. He would have gone to the barber’s days ago – he’d noticed a few raised eyebrows in the office – but Binny had once remarked she liked men with untidy heads. He thought his forelock made him look rather boyish. Binny referred to it sometimes as a fetlock. At others, when she’d taken a glass or two of wine, she called it his foreskin. He’d better watch Binny’s intake tonight – he didn’t feel Simpson’s wife would go for that kind of table talk. Always supposing she intended to be present. What on earth was he going to tell Binny if the Simpsons backed out at this late hour? She’d sounded so argumentative on the telephone, though at the end she’d said he was lovely. She did care for him. She gave him her love mostly without trying to bind him, without endangering his marriage. It was true there’d been a few unfortunate lapses, like the weekend she’d rung his house from some drinking club in Soho. He’d answered the phone himself, thank God, but it was frightfully tricky, standing in the hall in his pyjamas in the middle of the night trying to convey through references to tax returns that he loved her, fearful of Helen on the landing listening to every word. There had been too that incident when he couldn’t see Binny because he wanted to prune his roses, and she’d threatened to come round in the night and set fire to his garden. Later, a small corner of the lawn had been found mysteriously singed, but nothing had ever been proved. In the beginning he had fallen in love with her because she advised him they must live each day as if it was their last: bearing in mind that any moment the final whistle could blow, it was pointless to spoil the time they had left with the making of impossible demands. ‘You don’t want to leave your wife,’ she’d said. ‘And I don’t want you to.’ But as the months passed and she made various disparaging remarks about married men and their duplicity, it occurred to him that possibly this was precisely what she required of him. It made him very uncomfortable. He tried once to bring the subject into the open. ‘We could be jolly happy,’ he supposed. ‘We’d drink far too much and go to bed in the afternoon’ – Helen disapproved of the afternoon – ‘if we lived together.’ Glaring at him as though he’d uttered a racialistic remark and snapping her rather large white teeth, Binny had cried, ‘You must be mad. Stark raving mad.’
It was confusing for him. He obviously served some purpose in her life. Often he was reminded of a Punch and Judy show he had watched on the sands at Eastbourne when he was a child. Hearing that nasal voice screaming above the incoming tide, ‘Who’s a naughty boy, then?’, and flinching at the sound of those repeated blows to the head, he had not understood what was expected of him. Clutching his bucket and spade, he hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry.
Binny could be so cold when standing up and facing him, or shouting at him down the telephone, and so warm when lying in his arms. When he thought of those snatched perspiring moments on the sofa, the bathroom floor, the divan bed in Binny’s back room, he felt he could forgive her anything and dreamed of devoting the rest of his life to making her happy.
He paid for the drinks and returned to the table. He looked down at Simpson’s balding crown and said firmly, ‘Look here, old man. What’s the form tonight? You are coming, I take it?’
‘Good Lord, yes,’ said Simpson. ‘I wouldn’t miss it for worlds.’
‘What about the wife?’
‘We’re both coming,’ Simpson said. ‘Depend on it. I just wanted to warn you it might be a bit sticky at first. Muriel might be a shade off-hand. But she’ll thaw.’ He patted Edward’s knee encouragingly.
‘You may find it a little bohemian tonight,’ said Edward. ‘Just a bit.’
‘Christ,’ cried Simpson. ‘I feared as much. Muriel won’t stand for it, you know.’
‘I meant domestically,’ Edward said. ‘Spacewise, facilities . . . knives and forks. See what I mean?’
‘Oh,’ said Simpson. ‘Rough and ready, is that it?’
‘A little,’ Edward said, feeling disloyal. ‘Binny’s not one for appearances.’
‘Say no more.’ Simpson nodded sympathetically. ‘Are you going home to change?’
‘No,’ said Edward. ‘It’s a shade awkward getting out again. I thought I might go back to the office and sign a little post.’
Simpson suggested Edward should come home with him for a wash-and-brush-up. Then they could all arrive together.
Edward accepted. ‘Have you mentioned to your wife,’ he said, ‘that we’re supposed to have met? Her and me. Binny particularly stressed that I should invite close mutual friends.’
‘Don’t push it, old boy,’ advised Simpson with some irritation. ‘It’s been difficult enough to persuade her to sit down with you, let alone pretend you’ve been friendly for years. And you’d better watch the hanky panky.’
‘Hanky panky?’
‘Touching . . . fooling about . . . any outward show. Muriel won’t like it.’
‘I have to be home by eleven,’ said Edward. ‘I don’t think there’ll be time for hanky panky.’
No further mention was made of his going back with Simpson for a wash. After a quarter of an hour Simpson got up to go and said he’d see him in the trenches at twenty hundred hours. He nudged Edward in the ribs. ‘Synchronise watches . . . we’ll go over the top together.’ Laughing heartily and thinking what a bloody ass the man was, Edward said goodbye. He bought a packet of cashew nuts to tide himself over until dinner, and on an unfortunate
impulse telephoned Binny.
‘What do you want?’ she asked.
‘Nothing really. I’ve just been chatting to old Simpson. He was a bit foolish, I thought.’
‘How surprising!’
‘I meant he spoke rather childishly. He’s not as broad-minded as one thinks.’
‘What’s all that noise?’ Binny said. ‘Where are you?’
‘In the office,’ he lied. ‘Simpson said what would I think if Helen asked him and his wife round for a meal.’
‘What are you on about? I thought they’d had dozens of meals at your house?’
‘I’m not explaining myself very clearly,’ he said. ‘I get the feeling he doesn’t approve of . . . well, you know . . .’
‘I don’t know,’ she snapped. ‘Spit it out.’
‘Us,’ he said lamely. ‘Carrying on.’
She fell silent. Edward ground the receiver so tightly against his ear, to drown the pub sounds all around him, that his eyes began to water.
‘You told me he’d been to a V.D. clinic,’ said Binny finally.
Oh God, he thought, had he really confided that? She’d probably bring it up at dinner if things went badly. ‘Well, yes,’ he said.’ But there was never anything actually wrong.’
‘Who the hell does he think he is? He’s in no position to object to anybody carrying on.’
‘I think,’ said Edward, ‘that it’s his wife more than him.’
‘I’ll bet it is,’ Binny crowed. ‘She probably feels that if you’re doing it, then her old Simpson’s at it too.’
‘You are clever,’ he said tenderly. ‘I do love you, you know.’
‘Like bloody hell,’ she said, and told him she must get on.
She was a mystery to him; she had no small talk at all.
He returned to the office. Here he began to compose a fairly resentful letter to Simpson, indicating that he thought it inadvisable to claim such and such an amount for the cleaning of his business premises ‘. . . It would seem to me, in the circumstances, an unrealistic and preposterous sum, more in keeping with maintaining the hygienic standards of a research laboratory than a spare parts factory, and one which the Inspector of Taxes would undoubtedly and deservedly view with suspicion, etc., etc . . .’
4
Binny laid the dining-room table, still wearing her headscarf and outdoor coat. Underneath she had changed into her best black dress. The table was situated in the front half of the ground-floor room. The back half contained the kitchen. In it was a stove, a fridge and a very small draining-board. So great was Binny’s abhorrence of cooking that she’d torn down the shelving and plastic work surfaces installed by a previous owner and stacked everything – food, crockery, pans – into an article of furniture she called a wall cupboard. It was, in reality, a gentleman’s wardrobe, still fragrant with the smell of Havana cigars, complete with little compartments for starched and detachable collars in which Binny kept the knives and forks. From the back window there was a view of a yard, a brick wall, and a rabbit hutch that Edward had given her.
Moving about the table, cheerful and organised, Binny was interrupted by her daughter Lucy, who was eighteen and dressed as though ready for work on a building site.
‘Screw me,’ cried Lucy, smiling for once, eyeing the cut flowers and the folded napkins. ‘Having a knees-up, are we?’ She had known for days that Binny was expecting guests, but she liked to tease. She seized her mother by the shoulders and shook her. Binny’s headscarf slithered over her eyes. ‘Who’s a posh girl, then?’
‘Don’t, darling,’ said Binny.
Lucy flung herself sideways on to the sofa, crushing the newly plumped cushions. She began to roll a cigarette. She said critically, ‘I should wear something more suitable, if I were you. They’ll think you’re not stopping.’
Binny noticed that her daughter’s army boots, heavily studded, were scuffing a carpet already flecked with pieces of cotton thread and bits of fluff. It had started to rain when she’d returned from the bank and she hadn’t felt like going down into the yard to retrieve the hoover. The inside might have got wet and she didn’t want to risk being electrocuted. Perhaps no one would notice the carpet once the drink started going down.
‘I think, darling,’ said Binny, ‘you’d better be off. If that’s all right with you. Just pop the baby into the Evans’s, there’s a good girl.’
The baby, who was almost eleven years old, was quite capable of climbing the fence and going up the steps to the house next door, but Binny worried.
‘Where’s big-dick?’ asked Lucy.
‘Behave,’ pleaded Binny. She counted inwardly to ten and busied herself with titivating the table. Her son Gregory, bribed with a pound note, was, she hoped, halfway across London on the underground, bound for the house of his friend Adam.
Lucy appeared to have fallen asleep. Cigarette papers and grains of tobacco littered her chest. ‘Will you get up?’ said Binny. ‘At once. Please, dear.’
There was very little left for her to do. She’d peeled the potatoes, washed the lettuce, sprinkled herb things on the meat. Still, she wanted her daughters out of the way. Being constantly with the children was like wearing a pair of shoes that were expensive and too small. She couldn’t bear to throw them out, but they gave her blisters. It would be nice having Edward in the house with other people present. Adults. She could talk about things without having to explain herself, without endlessly repeating what she’d said in the first place. No one would interrupt her with requests for jam, or money for the bus. Nobody would tell her to shut up. She liked Edward when he’d had a lot to drink. His eyes, bloodshot and sleepy, gazed at her with passion. She would be able to lean against him and give him the biggest lamb chop. When he went into the bathroom he would notice how clean the bowl was and the basin. She knew it was important to him that the house should look like a good investment.
‘Lucy,’ she said loudly. ‘It’s almost seven o’clock.’
‘Rubbish,’ Lucy said. ‘It can’t be. We’d have heard Mrs Papastavrou.’ Across the street was a post-war block of flats, lit at night like a ship on its maiden voyage and totally deserted by day. The rent collector and the man from the Providential were seen to walk along the concrete balconies, but the inmates remained hidden. The exception was Mrs Papastavrou, an elderly Greek now living on the top floor, who had originally occupied a flat on the ground floor and been carried aloft, out of harm’s way, after knifing the lady who brought the meals-on-wheels. Mrs Papastavrou had grown frail and thin before the wounding. Her tray was collected with the food untouched on her plate. In an effort to stimulate her appetite the Council provided her with stuffed vine leaves and cartons of taramasalata. Thinking she was being victimised, Mrs Papastavrou had struck back. Every evening since her removal upstairs, she appeared on the balcony on the dot of half past six and moaned loudly until seven o’clock. Sometimes, when the weather was particularly warm, she gave a matinee performance. Often, well-meaning passers-by called ambulances, but she was returned almost immediately.
Binny looked out of the window to make certain the old woman remained indoors, and was appalled at the amount of refuse lying about the path. There were even eggshells caught in the branches of the privet hedge. ‘Ought I to sweep it up?’ she asked aloud.
A tub, placed on bricks, stood in front of the row of dust bins. In it was planted some sort of bush that never did anything. It had been meant to act as a screen. The bin lids had been stolen long ago. A fat dog from up the street kept waddling in and tipping out the garbage.
‘Sweep what?’ said Lucy.
‘The front path. It’s a sight.’
‘Why not?’ said Lucy. ‘You could dust the weeds while you’re at it.’ She rolled off the sofa and lay face downwards, drumming on the floor with her toe-caps.
Even though it would be dark when the Simpsons arrived, the headlamps of their car would light up the square of garden laid with crazy paving. Mrs Simpson would see the rubbish clearly illuminate
d.
Below the window was a strip of earth dangerously littered with strands of barbed wire, intended to discourage cats from doing their business on the stunted daffodils. Wrought-iron railings ran from the side of the front door, along the flower border, and ended at the steps to the basement flat. The basement was owned by a young couple, though Edward, in Binny’s presence, had once told a colleague that it was hers and she rented it out. Anxious to boast of her assets, he referred to the young couple as her tenants.
Several betting slips, flung down by disappointed racing men, whirled upward from the path and, catching on the barbed wire, fluttered like sandwich flags among the daffodils.
I can do no more, thought Binny, rubbing at the window pane with a duster. She could hardly be blamed for the untidy habits of dogs and gamblers. And even supposing Mrs Simpson noticed the mess, it wasn’t likely she’d rush in muttering her complaints before she’d had a chance to be introduced.
Pushing the matter from her mind, Binny moved from the window and, tripping over her daughter’s body, ran headlong into the kitchen.
Lucy rose and went upstairs to fetch Alison. Binny knelt on hands and knees and picked up tobacco grains from the floor.
A low keening began outside in the street. Hands clutching the rail, clouds scudding above her bowed head, Mrs Papastavrou swayed backwards and forwards.
It was as well, thought Binny, that the Simpsons weren’t coming until eight o’clock. Edward pretended that he didn’t mind about Mrs Papastavrou, that he’d grown used to her. But he hadn’t. He stood well back from the window, both saddened and embarrassed, while the children snickered with laughter and the old lady, marooned on her balcony, wailed like a banshee.
‘Alison won’t,’ said Lucy, coming back into the room.
‘Well, make her,’ shouted Binny, stamping her foot. She was beginning to breathe quite heavily. ‘I would be grateful if you would get your own things together as well. Have you got your nightdress?’
Injury Time Page 3
