My Name is Michael Sibley

by John Bingham

  Ironically, the access of money which Cynthia Harrison imagined would bring our marriage nearer only served to render its fulfilment less likely. Wider horizons were opening up, and within the picture I saw no figure which resembled a local Palesby girl. There were women in the picture, but now they were women of a more exotic and sophisticated kind; I record this with some shame.

  Nevertheless, outside the world of dreams, Cynthia was still there; we were exchanging letters full of endearments, and I had already paid one visit to Palesby, staying at the Station Hotel, and seeing her almost the whole weekend. She herself was to come to London soon for a weekend. And lurking in the wings, unseen but ready to step upon the stage, was Prosett.

  I never harmed a hair on his head, but he struck back at me after his death. Nor am I certain now what I could have done to prevent it.

  It was November before I called on Kate Marsden.

  Indeed, I only did so because I had nothing better to do. I had spent two evenings in succession at my short stories, and felt like taking an evening off.

  I looked down the list of films showing in the West End, and saw nothing that attracted me. Entirely on impulse, I made my way to Manchester Square. Her room was no longer at the top of the house, but it was still small. It was hardly bigger than a normal bathroom. It was distempered in cream, and had the usual bed-settee, one small easy chair, a hard chair, a basin with hot and cold water, and a small folding table which she had bought herself. Against one wall was a bookshelf, and there was a small chest of drawers in one corner. She kept her dresses on hangers behind a cheap curtain which covered a recess in one of the walls.

  She was sitting in front of a gas fire reading when I knocked and went in. I noted that she had had to take to using spectacles, and was wearing a blue horn-rimmed pair. This was a pity because her eyes had been her best feature. She quickly put down her book and got up.

  “Hello, little stranger,” I said, taking her hand, “how are you?”

  “This is lovely,” she replied. “This is a great evening. Sit down, Mike. I was going to make a cup of coffee, so you’ve come at a good moment.”

  I went to fetch the hard chair from the side of the room, but she insisted on me sitting in the easy chair while she made coffee.

  I asked her how life had been treating her. She had taken off her spectacles, and now she looked round at me from the basin, where she was putting some water into a saucepan, and smiled.

  “Not too badly. Office, and the flicks now and again. The usual thing.”

  “Still at the same office?”

  She nodded, stirring some coffee into the water. “Same old place, same old faces. Still, I suppose there are worse faces around the town.”

  “Home every weekend?” I asked.

  “No; I don’t go home much now. Mummy died, and Daddy married again six months ago. It made a bit of a difference. She’s a very nice woman, I suppose, but it’s not the same. I don’t think she likes having me around very much. I expect she thinks I remind Daddy of the past, and all that. You can’t blame her, really. It’s not what she says. She’s always very polite. Rather cool and indifferent, you know. Nothing you could pick on, but I just think they are happier if I don’t go down too often.”

  “That’s bad luck.”

  “Oh, well, it’s just one of those things. Really, it is nice to see you. You’ve been a rotten correspondent, you know.”

  I offered her a cigarette and a light. I said, “My trouble is, I can never write a short letter. And that means that, as I know I’m going to write a long one, I always keep on putting it off till I’ve got more time.”

  “Well, it’s a bad habit.”

  She was sitting on a cushion on the floor by my side, a position of hers which I was to get to know well in time. She peered up at me a trifle shortsightedly and smiled.

  “It is,” I agreed.

  I thought that the intervening years had added depths to her voice. She was also taking much more trouble with her appearance. She was wearing a brown coat and skirt, and her hair, though still rather lank, was neatly done, and her feet were neatly shod. I told her about my transfer to the London office.

  “That’s fine for you! You’re getting on fine, aren’t you?”

  After a while she got up and brought out half a bottle of tawny port from a little cupboard under the window sill. She poured some into two cheap glasses, and handed me one. She raised her glass and said, “Let’s celebrate your return to London.”

  “The prodigal’s return?”

  “If you like. Anyway, here’s success to you.”

  It was not very nice port, and I thought it fitted in well with her dreary existence. On the other hand, I assumed in the way men do that she didn’t mind living in that horrid little room. I thought she had probably grown accustomed to it and was even content. She told me some more about her life, and about her friend Marjorie, and I outlined a few things about Palesby.

  “Do you always go to the cinema with Marjorie?”

  “If you mean, have I got any boyfriends, the answer is no.”

  “What, none?”

  “No. One or two people have taken me out now and again, when they’ve had nothing better to do, but that’s all there is to it.”

  She added with that devastating ability to face the truth which I was to associate with her later, “I’m not very good-looking, you know.”

  “You’re being a bit modest. You look very nice to me.”

  “I’m not being modest. I may be shortsighted, but I can still recognize what I see in my mirror.”

  “Well, I think you look much nicer than when I went away, you’re more soignée and assured.”

  “So are you. You would never have noticed that ten years ago, or said it even if you had.”

  “We’ve both grown up a good deal.”

  She smiled at me rather wistfully. “Growing up is a two-edged weapon for a woman. It’s different for a man.”

  “When did you start wearing glasses?”

  “About a year ago. We work in an electrically lit office. It’s a strain on the eyes. Of course, I only really need them for reading. I can see all right without them, otherwise.”

  “Can you?”

  “Well, fairly well, anyway.”

  “I think glasses suit some girls. I think they suit you. They enhance the delicacy of some people’s faces.”

  She put her hand on my knee impulsively. “Dear old Mike! Still trying to say what you think people wish to hear?”

  “Well, it’s true in your case, anyway,” I insisted.

  She sat staring at the gas fire for a while saying nothing. Suddenly I saw the pathos of her position. I saw her coming home each evening to that room and cooking her meal, and sometimes going to the cinema with her girlfriend. I thought it must be pretty miserable to be a girl who was not wanted by anybody in particular, not even her own parents. A girl who was neither remarkably good-looking, nor very intelligent, nor even very witty. It must have seemed so hopeless.

  When finally I got up to go, I said on the spur of the moment, “What are you doing on Sunday, Kate?”

  She made no pretence of thinking if she had an engagement. She said at once that she was doing nothing at all, and that since she had stopped going down to her parents’ she very rarely did do anything on Sundays.

  “What about driving out to Hampton Court, and then having tea and coming back and going to a cinema?”

  “I’d love to, unless you’ve got anybody better to go with.”

  “There is nobody I would rather go with,” I answered firmly, “nobody at all.”

  I did not wish her to think that I was taking her for a trip to Hampton Court because I felt sorry for her.

  Yet what a dangerous thing pity is! It warps judgments, deflects justice, raises false hopes; it makes men risk worthwhile things for something which may be fundamentally of only transient worth; it will colour a man’s whole outlook so that he forgets honour, morality, honesty, ev
en personal safety. Pity is much lauded, yet in excess it can be an insidious poison which can make a man mad and lure him to destruction. But I did not know all that when I invited Kate to Hampton Court the following Sunday.

  I only saw a girl who was lonely.

  No doubt I should have known that each evening in her room she would be looking forward to Sunday, reckoning it a day when a boy-and-girl romance, interrupted by events, would be renewed, and that when she had almost reconciled herself to a life of work and monotony a chance seemed to be offered her to seize something which she thought had eluded her forever.

  I did not understand how far I was committing myself when I extended that casual invitation in her room that evening.

  So we went to Hampton Court and strolled about the palace and gardens, and afterwards had tea in a hotel opposite the main gates. You could get a good tea out in those days, and we had crumpets thick with butter and sandwiches and cakes, served to us near a big fire as the day was closing in. Afterwards we drove back and went to an early film. I have forgotten what we saw, but I know that later we went to a restaurant in Frith Street, and had dinner.

  It was a pleasant enough day, and I found Kate a pleasant enough companion. The shyness and reserve which I had associated with her from earlier days had largely disappeared when she was with me; it had almost gone, together with the ill-arranged stockings, the untidy hair, and the face devoid of make-up. She used a fair amount of make-up now, taking advantage of her natural sallowness rather than seeking to hide it, using a suntan cream and powder, and an orange lipstick. She was certainly not beautiful, with her horn-rimmed spectacles and ungainly walk; and I could well see that her serious manner and deliberate speech might put men off. But she was no longer dowdy, and if she had not Cynthia’s rather brittle prettiness, she was a more attractive conversationalist.

  Cynthia spoke of practical everyday things. Her talk was full of what she had done, and what she proposed to do later in the day, tomorrow and next week. She related what people had said to her and what she had replied; what she had bought and what she would like to buy.

  Kate did not strike me as very practical; having left home soon after she became an adult, she had not the domestic experience and interests of Cynthia. On the other hand, she had read widely and more selectively. She had in her bones a sense of history, a feeling for the past, a love of old things and ways, of traditions and customs. It is a curious yardstick by which to measure them, but I should say that of the two Kate was the more patriotic. Her great interest was in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and she had read the lives of Nash, Brummel, Sheridan, Parson Woodford, and many others.

  She had also developed a pleasant facility for doing pen and wash drawings. They were not great art, but they had a freshness and spontaneity which were attractive. I presumed, and rightly, that she had developed this talent, for such it was in a small way, to give her something to do when she went away on her summer holidays. She usually went alone.

  When I paid the bill after dinner, and said I supposed we had better be going home, she agreed readily enough, but I noticed that the sparkle died out of her eyes.

  I thought: she is like a child who has come to the end of a party to which she had been looking forward for a long time.

  She said frankly, “This has been one of the loveliest days I’ve had for months.”

  “Well, maybe we can go out again some other time.”

  “I’d love to.” She hesitated. “What do you do in the evenings? I suppose you are very busy?”

  I told her that sometimes I wrote my stories, at other times I had a job for the office, or had to go round and see my aunt. Yes, I said, I was pretty busy on the whole.

  I had no desire to leave myself wide open.

  “Are you doing anything on Thursday? I was wondering if you would care to come along and meet Marjorie and have something to eat. Nothing much, or course. Just bacon and eggs or something, and a glass of beer. Rather dull, really. Still, if you’d like to come, just drop in. There’s no need to decide now. See what you are doing.”

  “I’d love to come if I can.”

  But I was pretty sure I wouldn’t go. I thought I’d like to see Kate now and again. She was a nice girl, but not wildly exciting like Cynthia under the sand dunes or even on the settee beneath the beady eyes of the little stuffed birds. Cynthia, for all her superficiality, had animal magnetism, and that is a deadly weapon when a girl is dealing with a young man.

  I knew now I didn’t want to marry Cynthia; I just wanted to see her from time to time. If the price was a few endearing letters, it was well worth paying. It was a dangerous and unscrupulous game, and I knew it, but I didn’t care. I thought in the end she would fall for somebody else, that it would all work out somehow. I thought I had the world under control and the skies would always be blue, or if not eternally blue at least only clouded from time to time by occasional swiftly passing showers.

  When I returned to my room after taking Kate out that evening, I found awaiting me a letter from Prosset which had been forwarded from Palesby. It was strange to find that the sight of his handwriting still gave me a curious twinge in the pit of the stomach. I thought I had got over that sort of thing. It was as though the ink itself radiated some strange aura of his domineering personality.

  I looked at the writing, forward-sloping and regular, the downward strokes thick and determined. I realized then that, despite what I had accomplished, despite my independence, I still stood in awe of John Prosset, the ill-paid bank clerk.

  As I took the letter to my room, I felt dismayed not because I was going to meet him again, but because I had not shaken off even now the feeling of inferiority which all those years before had made me rejoice when he went away to play a football match; and had left me, his so-called friend, free to talk and laugh as I wished without the threat of a sneer or a challenge from across the school dining-room table.

  But I was wrong in one thing. John Prosset was by now no longer a bank clerk. His letter read as follows:

  My Dear Old Mike

  How are you? A bloody fine correspondent, for a journalist, I must say. As you see, I have not gone to the East. All those plans have gone by the board. I waited some years before really pressing the bank for an overseas appointment. At first they held out high hopes of me going. But I believe there was a hell of a lot of wangling by chaps at head office. As you know, they are not a big bank, and there are not an awful lot of replacements needed abroad.

  Anyway, in the end I said that if they would not send me out soon I’d leave. They said if that was the way I felt I had better go right away. So I went. Luckily, Herbert Day—you remember him from that boozy party—had just started a small business of his own. I hadn’t any money saved up, but he agreed to take me as a partner.

  Jolly decent of him, I think, as otherwise I’d have been in a bit of a spot. I get quite a decent screw really, considering we’ve only just started. I have to travel about a good deal and am probably coming up your way soon, so don’t be surprised if I pop in on you. Let me know your news, you lazy skunk.

  Cheerio,

  John.

  Could I have broken things off at this point? I could have left his letter unanswered, but nothing would have been gained. It would never have occurred to Prosset that I did not want to see him. He would have been told in Palesby about my transfer to London, and when he returned he would have sought me out.

  Prosset’s letter was written on some cheap business notepaper bearing an address in Middlesex Street. I put the letter in my pocket and went to bed. The next morning I telephoned him at his office. He seemed pleased to hear from me and to learn that I was now in London permanently.

  “What about a bite of lunch together?” he asked.

  “Lunchtime is awkward for me. I never know where I’ll be.”

  “Well, what about a drink and a snack this evening?”

  “The last time I went drinking with you, you got me tight.”


  He laughed. “I suppose you know you still owe me ten bob from that evening?”

  “I’ll bring it along,” I promised.

  We arranged to meet at the Six Bells in Chelsea at 6:30 p.m. I was there a few minutes early and saw him walk in with a middle-aged man who from the cut of his clothes and his complexion seemed to be a foreigner. Prosset saw me and waved, but rather to my surprise did not come up to me; instead he went to the other end of the bar with his companion and ordered some drinks. When he had paid for them, he said something to his companion and came over to me.

  “Don’t think me rude, old man, but I’ve just got a couple of things to settle with this bloke and then I’ll be with you. OK by you?”

  “It’s OK by me.”

  I watched him walk back to the other end of the bar. He had filled out since I had last seen him and his face, instead of the healthy glow it used to have, had turned rather red. But he was still a remarkably handsome young man, his clothes were as well cut as ever, and he wore his pork-pie hat at a jaunty angle. When he walked he swung his arms across his body, in the way Cynthia did, but in a more pronounced manner.

  Prosset and the other man talked together for some fifteen minutes. Now and again they seemed to be disagreeing about something. The other man supplemented his words with quick little movements of his hands. Once, across the bar, I heard the stranger mention Herbert Day’s name. Prosset smiled and shook his head and did not seem to be much impressed. When they had finished their business, the other man went out and Prosset came over to me.

  “Sorry about that, old man. Max will talk such a lot.”

  “What are you having?” I asked.