by Nina Bawden
She turned off the engine and said, “I think you had better catch your train.”
Her face looked set and miserable. I didn’t know what to say to her. I felt angry suddenly, and a little hurt. I got out of the car and fished my cases out of the boot. She looked at me unsmilingly through the window, and then she got out of the car and came up to me. Her voice was unhappy and hesitant. “I’m sorry, Paul,” she said. “I’d like to have lunch with you, very much, if there is another train you can catch.”
I wanted to hurt her. I said, “Oh, I think you were probably quite right. I don’t expect there’s another decent train, so it wouldn’t be worth it.”
She went a bit white, and picked up one of the suitcases and made off into the station with it bumping against her legs. She stood beside me at the booking office while I bought a ticket, and then she followed me to the train. When I found an empty carriage, I got in and swung the case I was carrying on to the rack. Then I turned to the door and she was holding up the other suitcase for me to take. Her eyes had smudges beneath them, and she looked very thin, and somehow forlorn. I got out on to the platform, and we looked at one another. Something made me say, “Look, I’m sorry, I don’t have to take the beastly train,” but then the whistle blew and the train started to jerk and clatter. I remembered the case on the rack, and I got back into the carriage and she chucked the other one in after me. The door swung shut, and I could see her through the dirty window. She was running beside the train, and she was saying something, but I couldn’t hear what it was. The window was stiff, and by the time I had got it down she was left behind. For a moment I could see her face clearly, and then smoke bellied up from the line and when it cleared she was a still, distant figure. For some idiotic reason I waved for a long time after she could see me, and then I gave it up and sat down in the corner seat.
When we got to London it was still raining, and beginning to be foggy. The streets were full of seeping yellow stuff and my taxi crawled, honking, from traffic light to traffic light. When we got to the flat the fog had worsened, and I couldn’t see the people who were coughing on the pavements. When I let myself into the flat, the fog seemed to come in with me. Everywhere smelt stale and shut-up and even when I had switched on all the lights and lit the gas-fire it didn’t look any pleasanter. There was a dingy emptiness about the place. I went into the kitchen and looked in the cupboard where I kept the drink. I wanted brandy, but there wasn’t any. There wasn’t anything except a drop of Pernod in the bottom of a bottle. It wasn’t what I wanted just then, but it was better than nothing, so I poured it into a glass and added water, watching it turn yellow, like the fog. I took it to the fire and sat down.
While I drank, I looked round the room. It looked different. There wasn’t anything you could put your finger on and yet I knew, quite certainly, that something was wrong. I hated pictures to be crooked on the walls, and one that Venetia had given me, a nice little landscape in the Constable style, was showing a fraction of the unfaded wallpaper behind it. Everywhere was dusty, but on the sofa table before the fire, a cigarette box had been moved. I was sure of it, because it was sitting askew on the patch of dust-free surface that had been beneath. It wasn’t the daily woman; she had no key, and I always let her in myself before I went out.
An uncanny feeling came over me. It was like knowing someone was watching you, and yet not being able to see them. I began to sweat a little. I went over to my desk, and unlocked the drawers one by one. The locks hadn’t been forced, and everything was in its place as far as I could remember. Only the trouble was that I couldn’t remember.
The drawers had never been very tidy; they looked in their usual state of disorder. I sat in the swivel chair and stared at them one by one, trying to think back to the last time they had been open in front of me. Had the box of carbons been lying on the file beneath them at just that angle? Or had it been carefully replaced to look as if it had not been touched? I went through all the drawers, and opened all the files, and the thing grew like a nightmare when the terror is always hidden behind the next door or beyond the next corner. There wasn’t anything in my desk except the ordinary sort of junk … old receipts and out-of-date business letters that I had always been meaning to throw away. Not many personal letters; I never had many, and those I did have I never kept after they had been answered. Not from any fixed principle, but just because it happened that way. There didn’t seem to be anything missing, but I was not particularly methodical, and I knew that I wouldn’t know if there had been. I closed the desk drawers and went on a tour of the flat.
I didn’t find anything, not anything that I could have sworn to. There were quite a lot of things that seemed to be wrong, or slightly out of place, but I couldn’t make up my mind whether they were really placed differently from when I had seen them last, or whether I was imagining it. I went into the bedroom and switched on the light. The crimson curtains that Venetia had chosen for me were drawn, as I had left them, and the bed was roughly made, with the bedspread pulled over the rumpled sheets. I had done that myself before I had left London. A pair of dirty pyjamas lay where I had left them, on the rug beside the bed. It was all so expected and natural, that I began to feel a little better. I had my hand on the switch when two things happened.
The telephone bell rang, and I caught sight of the table at the side of the bed. My stomach seemed to turn over, and for a long, muddled moment I wasn’t sure why. Then I knew.
The bell went on ringing harshly, and I crossed the sitting-room to the desk. For a moment I wondered whether I should answer it, and then I thought that if I didn’t, it would go on and on and send me mad. I picked up the receiver and said, “Hallo?”
The voice at the other end seemed very far away, but I recognised it straight away. I said, “Hallo, Betty?”
I heard her laugh, as though she was nervous, and that surprised me because I had never remembered Betty being nervous.
She said, “Hallo, Paul. I’ve been ringing you all day.” There was a tiny pause, as though she hadn’t really expected me to answer the telephone, and then she said, “I saw about Venetia in the paper. I wanted to say how sorry I was.”
I said “Oh,” and neither of us said anything for a moment, and then we both started to speak at once. I stopped, politely, and she chuckled at the other end, as though she wasn’t nervous any longer.
She said, “Paul, dear. I want to see you. That’s what I really rang up about. Could you have lunch with me tomorrow?”
I hesitated, not because I didn’t want to, but because I wondered why she had asked me. But she didn’t explain. So I said, “Yes, of course, where?” She told me the name of a restaurant I had never heard of, in a part of London we had never visited together, and then, rather in the manner of the efficient secretary, she said goodbye, and rang off.
As soon as she had gone, I cursed myself for not thinking of something that would keep her on the other end of the line. I put the telephone back on the rest, and felt frighteningly alone.
Then I went back to the bedroom and went over to the bed. The photograph of Venetia smiled up at me from the table. It was a folding one, and as soon as I saw it there I knew that someone had been in the flat, and that it was no use ringing up the police and making a fuss about it. Whenever I went away, I always shut up the photograph folder and put it away in the desk because it was the only decent picture I had of her and I hadn’t wanted it pinched by a chance burglar who fancied the look of the crocodile-skin frame. There wasn’t a chance that I’d forgotten to do it.
And I was sure that there was only one person who would have bothered to take it out of the desk, and put it on the bedside table.
Chapter Sixteen
When I got to the restaurant, Betty was there before me. I saw her as soon as I went in. She was sitting at a table by the window and she was watching the door.
I went across to her, and she said, “Hallo, Paul,” and gave me her cheek to kiss. She smelt of soap and eau-de-Cologne, and
she was looking as lovely as I remembered her. Her skin was unblemished and smooth, and somehow so perfect that I felt disappointed. I had been wondering how I should feel when I saw her again, and now I knew. It was nice to see her and nice to look at her, but there was no more to it than that.
I sat down and she smiled at me. Then she said, “Darling, you look tired to death.”
I had hoped she wouldn’t notice. I grinned as cheerfully as I could and hoped that it would make me look a little better. I said, “Overdoing it, I expect. Riotous living.”
She shook her head. “No, not like that. Just as if you hadn’t slept.”
Then the waiter came, and we ordered lunch. It came quickly, and it was very good. We had a vegetable cream soup and fresh trout and little round beans cooked in butter, the way they cook them in France. We talked while we ate in a social sort of way and asked each other polite questions. Betty preferred to talk impersonally while she was eating, because she liked to concentrate on her food.
When the coffee came she poured it out and put on fresh lipstick with great care. Then she said, “My dear, I am so sorry about Venetia. It must have been very dreadful for you.” She was perfectly sincere about it; there was a hurt, troubled look in her eyes that was always there when she contemplated someone else’s unhappiness.
She put her plump, white hand across the table, and touched mine. “But that wasn’t why I asked you to lunch with me.”
“You didn’t have to have a reason, did you?” I said, and she smiled at me in the old way, and took her hand away.
“Of course not, you old silly,” she said. Then the smile went, and she said, “Paul, the police came to see me yesterday morning.”
“Whatever for?” I said, hoping that my voice sounded as I meant it to sound.
She went pink, and it suited her. She said, “I don’t suppose it was very important. You’ll probably think me dreadfully stupid. But I was worried, and I thought I should tell you about it. They came before I got up … at least, he did. There was only one. He was very nice and polite. He said he was sorry to wake me up, and I told him it was just as well he had done, because I should have gone on sleeping for ever.” She looked away from me, and played with her coffee spoon.
“Get on with it,” I said.
“It wasn’t very much. He wanted to know how long we’d been married, and why we had left each other. I said there wasn’t any very important reason, that it just hadn’t worked out the way we’d expected. Then he asked me if I’d seen about Venetia’s death in the papers. I said I had, but that it wasn’t anything to do with me, and anyway, they’d arrested her husband, hadn’t they? He laughed, and said he hadn’t thought I had anything to do with it, that they were just making a few routine inquiries. Then it turned out that what he really wanted to find out was about you and Venetia. He asked me about Henry, too, but as I’d never met either of them, I couldn’t tell him very much. Then he fidgeted a bit, and asked me whether I thought you had been in love with Venetia, and whether Henry knew all about it. I opened my eyes very wide and went all innocent, and said that that couldn’t possibly be true, because when you married me, you were in love with me. He must have thought me awfully stupid.” She gave her nice, chuckling laugh. “Then I pretended to be hurt, and he was awfully apologetic, and went away.”
I said, “Thank you for not giving me away.”
She said, “Darling, don’t be bitter. There wasn’t any question of that. I told him the truth, you see. You weren’t … in love with Venetia. You couldn’t have been … not in the way that he meant. If I’d told him that I’d left you because you thought about her so much, and about me so little, he would have thought me a dreadfully small-minded creature. Besides, he probably wouldn’t have understood.”
“What was his name?” I said. “The policeman’s, I mean?”
She wrinkled her forehead. “How stupid,” she said. “He did tell me. It was a very ordinary name. Wallace or Warden or something.”
“I see,” I said.
She looked at me anxiously. “Paul, darling, don’t worry,” she said. “I’m sure it was nothing, really. It was only my stupid way of making a mountain out of a molehill that made me think I should tell you about it.”
I managed to smile at her. “I’m very glad that you did,” I said. “I don’t think it was very important. But it’s pleasant to know you can still bother about me.”
She blushed beautifully, and said, “You old silly,” in tones of great affection. I grinned at her and took her hand.
“You retain a maternal interest in all your men, once their day is over, don’t you?” I said.
She laughed happily. “Do you think that’s all it is?” she said. I said, “Yes,” and laughed back at her. It may have been my fancy, but I thought she looked a little disappointed.
I walked with her to her office, which was just off the Strand. We went through Covent Garden, through the jostling lorries and the shouting porters. I held her arm lightly, and she talked and laughed every step of the way. We stopped outside a grey building.
“Here we are,” she said. Her face was flushed, and she looked lovely. I knew I should never see her again. I didn’t really want to, and, looking at her, I couldn’t understand why.
“You’re a nice person, Betty,” I said, “I wish things had worked out differently.”
I knew from the look of her face that she knew this was the last time. She said, “I wish I’d been better at playing second fiddle, darling.” She kissed me lightly on the cheek and then she went into the office building, without looking back.
I felt at a loose end. I wandered down into the Strand and looked aimlessly at the shops and wished that I’d gone along to the office. The sun came out in a listless sort of way, filling the street with a pale light that made it look unreal, like a scene in a film. I walked slowly along, looking at people, and at my own reflection in shop windows, until I began to feel like a character in a film myself. Jean Gabin, perhaps, walking down an endless, pointless road, in a thin, transparent light. In the end, I got tired of walking, and I got on a bus. I sat upstairs, in a window seat. The bus sailed through London like a great, rocking ship, and I sat in a kind of maze, watching the roads grow familiar, recognising the shops and the streets and the bomb-sites, until I knew that I was going home. I hadn’t been there for years. We came out of London through Hammersmith, and I leant forward, watching each landmark as we passed it. Now the roads were dreary, nasty little shops with flats above them, all with plaster statuettes in the windows and the same sort of curtains. Now we were in the suburbs, and the big, red, Victorian houses lined the pavements, rather gaunt and empty-looking, as if they had all been turned into apartment houses and no one bothered about them any more. When the bus stopped, I got out. There was only one other man in the bus, and he got out too, and started to walk away from me, down the road. The common was on my left, and the red houses on my right, looking across the starved grass to other and more distant suburbs.
I went along the road, my heart beating ridiculously fast. A few people came out of the houses and I looked at them half-furtively, almost expecting to see someone that I remembered. But I didn’t see anyone I had known; I don’t expect I should have recognised them if I had.
When I came to the turning, I stood for a minute on the corner, looking down the street, It was the same as it had always been; two rows of dull, Victorian houses, slightly smaller and less pretentious than the bigger ones that faced the common. They all had tiny, narrow gardens in front, with laurels growing in them. At the end of the road, the bomb-site was still there, only it was fenced in now with some weather-boarding that was falling down in places.
I walked down the road. At the end, by the grey fencing, I stopped and looked back. The street was empty. The house at the end of the row, next to the bomb-site, looked smaller and shabbier than I remembered it. It was a three-storied, narrow house, that looked taller than it was because of its bad proportions. The paint was pe
eling off the woodwork, and in the front windows there were grubby squares of net stretched across the lower part of the glass, as though the tenants were too poor, or too careless, to curtain the whole of the window. Venetia had always hated the house; I thought that if she could see it now she would say it had got what it deserved. I stood, looking up at the windows, feeling strangely close to her, as if, if I waited long enough, the door would open, and she would come flying down the front steps in her atrocious school uniform, her long hair flying loose. Then I saw a woman watching me from one of the first-floor windows. I could see her dimly behind the net curtain; the hunched shape of her shoulders, and the blur of her face.
I stayed a bit longer, so that she could see that I wasn’t to be driven away too easily, and then I turned away from the house and crossed the road to where there was a gap in the fencing that screened the bomb-site. I stepped through the hole, and stood in the derelict garden. It had been a pretty house before the bomb fell, big, and with a Georgian solidity about it that had made the brick houses that led away on either side of it look impermanent, and faintly common. When the bomb dropped, it had been completely destroyed except for three rooms that had been left at one side. The fourth wall of the rooms had been blown away, and they looked like the little box rooms of a doll’s house. Some of the furniture had stayed behind on the unsafe floors; presumably, no one had thought it worth salvaging. In the months that followed the bombing, it had disappeared piece by piece. Venetia and I had kept an inventory in a blank notebook. When I went to see her in hospital, I told her which things had vanished, and she crossed them off the list and we would guess wildly where they had gone. By the time she came out of hospital, all the furniture was gone, except for a French chair that had been blown on its side by a fireplace, its little, gilt legs waving sadly in the air. In the end, it was taken too.
Now the floors were gone, and the part of the house that remained looked like a cardboard shoe box standing on its end. The ground was covered with rubble and rotting timber that no one had thought it worth while to take away. I wondered why they had bothered to fence the place, and if they were going to demolish the rest of the house, or if it would stay there for ever, a reminder, like Pompeii.
