by Ted Lewis
We finally reached the bar where a few of the smoother members of the mob were gathered together doing their pre-party drinking. We joined them and immediately Arnold was all over them in order to find out where the party was. I made my presence felt as little as possible, remaining on the outside of the group, hoping that no one would start talking about Janet. I was standing next to Dick Castle, Karen’s boyfriend. He was quiet and polite and sensitive as usual, and I knew he understood better than the others how I was feeling and I hated him for it.
I kept looking back toward the entrance, and each time I expected with an awful certainty to see Janet and an escort come into the bar. The apprehension grew in intensity and after about half an hour, I decided I had better leave before Janet arrived, as I was sure she would.
“Do you fancy a change of scene?” I asked Dick. I didn’t want to leave on my own and have everyone realizing the reason for my separate departure.
“What, are you going somewhere else, Vic?” asked Arnold.
“It was an idea, yes.”
“Good one. It’s too crowded in here,” he said. “Anybody else keen?”
Everybody else was. So we all drank up and began to move off. Still, I thought, at least in another pub I’ll be safe. It was a relief to get out onto the pavement into the dark night air. Soft rain flicked about in the wind.
We stood round in front of the Miami, undecided where to go. I didn’t want to stay there another second so I said:
“How about the Phoenix? It’s handy and there’s a singing room.”
They managed to agree to my suggestion. We started off in the direction of the Phoenix.
Next to the Miami was a dark and narrow street. We were about to cross this street when a car swung into it from off the main road. We stood on the curb and let it pass then began to continue to cross the street. The car drew up about forty feet away on the left-hand side of the street. I heard the engine cut off and for no reason I turned my head in the direction of the car. A boy got out and when I recognized him, I stopped in the middle of the road.
“Come on, Vic,” said Arnold, hanging back from the others. He had recognized the boy, too. I wonder why Arnold wants to protect me, I thought, this being incongruously uppermost in my mind.
“No, hang on a minute, Arn,” I said, not looking at him but smiling the smile of a lunatic who tries to convince someone else of his reasonableness. Arnold took me by the arm.
“Come on, we’re off for a drink. Sharpish now,” he said. I didn’t move. I continued looking at the car and at the boy who was walking round to the nearside wing of the car. Arnold let my arm drop back to its side.
“What’s up?” I heard Dick Castle’s voice detach itself from the disappearing group and grow closer in the wind.
“Nowt,” said Arnold, not moving, looking at me intently. The boy opened the door on the nearside wing. As he did this, he saw me. He had the door half open. The girl’s legs began to swing out of the car. He said something. The legs hesitated a minute then completed their movement. Janet got out of the car. She didn’t look at me immediately but first smoothed out any creases there may have been in her coat. The boy again spoke to her and she shook her head, still looking at me. He shrugged nervously. Janet spoke to him, not looking at him, and they began to walk along the pavement toward the end of the street where we were, Dick and Arnold and me standing in the middle of the street with the traffic going past in the main road behind us and the wind blowing our hair about.
“Shan’t be a minute,” I said to Dick and Arnold. I began to walk toward Janet and Chris. A few drops of rain glanced onto the side of my face. Janet and Chris stopped when they saw me begin to approach them. Janet didn’t take her eyes off me at all. She looked lovely. Her loveliness startled me. A fortnight had passed and I wasn’t used to its effect anymore. Her expression reminded me of how she had looked when I told her to go away on the night of the college dance. She brushed a strand of hair from her forehead.
I carried on walking toward them. I felt sick, a sickness which was felt in every part of my body. But my mind was as though it was two minutes behind everything that was happening, and the wrongness, the unhappiness, and the pain of the situation seemed to be holding back so that the full impact could be felt wholly and completely only when every small detail of the scene had been accumulated.
I was in an emotional vacuum, my sickness quiveringly forming a periphery round the vacuum which was waiting to be filled by my latent pain.
“Hello,” said Janet forestalling me, pretending to be bright for a second but forcing the brightness terribly.
“Hello,” I said. “How are you?” I felt my face manage a smile.
“Oh, I’m fine thank you,” she said. “How are things with you?” She smiled and there was pain behind her eyes and as soon as I answered the smile disappeared momentarily to reveal her true expression.
“Oh, you know me. The same. A few drinks, all that kind of thing. You know, the way I’ve always been. I never change.”
“Yes, I know,” she said.
She brushed the hair from her forehead again.
“Well...” I said.
“You do know Chris, don’t you?” she said, smiling as hard as she could again.
“Oh, yes,” I smiled at him. How, I don’t know. “Hi, Chris. Nice night for a drink.”
“Yes, Vic. I suppose it is really,” he said, trying to smile, ner-vously removing his driving gloves.
“Well, I…” I turned to Janet, “I don’t—I’ve got to be off. You know. Party. A few drinks and everything. I—well, good-bye. Must go.” I smiled tightly from one to the other. Janet’s smile disappeared again. There was a band of iron round my heart.
“Bye,” I said. I looked at Janet. “If—no, nothing. Must go. See you,” I turned and ran away from them as if I was just trotting off to rejoin some friends whose company I had been really enjoying. I ran back toward the main road and round the corner onto the broad pavement. Arnold had gone but Dick was still there waiting on the corner. I slowed down to a walk. Dick caught me up.
“Let me buy you a drink,” he said.
I carried on walking with Dick alongside me.
“Do you want to be on your own?” he asked.
“No. I don’t know. Oh, God, God. Dick, what a thing to happen. What a bloody thing to happen. Oh, hell. I don’t know what to do.”
“Come on. Come and have a drink. Come on.”
We walked back past the Miami, in the opposite direction from the Phoenix and the rest of the group.
“Will the White Horse be okay?” asked Dick.
“Yes. Yes. That’ll do fine. Thanks, Dick. Thanks a lot. Oh Jesus, what a thing to have to happen.”
“You’ll be all right when you’ve had a drink. Come on.”
We continued walking. We passed the Art School and then, in front of us, walking toward us, I recognized a friend of mine, Steve Moxey. We’d both started college at the same time and had been on the same course for two years. Then came Intermediate and he took painting and I took illustration. That wasn’t the only divergence. He didn’t go round with the jazz mobs, he didn’t look like an art student and he worked hard. We’d been great friends, but I hadn’t had as much to do with him over the last two years as I had when we had shared the same course. He had a great guffawing sense of humour that perfectly fitted his broad face and his ungraceful lope, and the moment he saw me he shouted at the top of his laughing energetic voice:
“Hey up! Now then you bugger. How are you getting on?”
He punched me on the upper arm.
“Now, Steve,” I said, smiling as best I could. “How are you doing?”
“Fine, fine . . . You know I’m at teacher’s training college in Leeds, don’t you?”
“Oh, yeah. All right is it?”
/> “It’s all right but it’s a bit of a waste of time. You know, I want to get on with painting, and they teach you how to show kids the best way to make potato cuts. But anyway, what about you?”
“Steve, do you mind if we carry on this conversation in a pub? I’ve just seen Janet with another lad and I want to get out of the way as soon as bloody possible.”
“Bloody hells bells. Janet?”
“Yes.”
I looked back toward the Miami. Chris and Janet were about fifty yards away from us talking with a group of people outside the bar. I saw Janet look in my direction.
“Come on, let’s go,” I said.
I stood at the bar with Steve and Dick.
“I knew how you felt about that lass, Victor,” said Steve.
“Aye, well, there it is. Let’s have another drink.”
“I mean, I knew how you felt. You could tell.”
“It seems she couldn’t,” I said.
“You didn’t help,” said Dick.
“No, I didn’t. No, you’re right,” I said. “Come on, drink up. I can’t go home sober tonight.”
“Anyway, it’s perhaps as well you saw her like that tonight,” said Dick.
“Oh? Why?” I said.
“Well, it just is.”
“What do you mean? Come on. If there’s anything I should know, tell me now. Now’s the time when I can’t feel any worse.”
“She—she has been seeing other people. Since before the party. Between your leaving college and the time you separated.”
“Oh.”
“Karen leads me a dance, you know. When they came back from holiday, she told me she’d been with other boys. I expected it. She told me Janet and she had had a good time together. You know what I mean.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know any details.”
“Tell me what you know.”
“Well, as far as I can gather, while Karen saw somebody different every night, I think Janet spent most of the time with one particular person.”
“I see.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Steve.
“I do,” I said.
“That’s all I can say,” said Dick. “That’s all I could gather from Karen.”
“You’re bound to believe it,” said Steve. “Feeling as bad as you do now, you’d believe anything. Anyway,” he said to Dick, “how do you know she’s been seeing anybody since Vic left college? Who’s she been out with, then?”
“I know because I’m at college. Do you want to know their names Vic?”
“No.”
“I don’t believe it, that’s all,” said Steve. “I just don’t believe that she’s a girl like that. A girl who’d start pissing Vic about as soon as he left college. You could tell.”
“Stranger things have happened,” said Dick.
“Let’s drop it,” I said. “Get those drinks in.”
Sunday morning.
I lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to take my eyes off the ceiling. I didn’t want to get out of bed, to talk to anyone, to keep staring at the ceiling or to be the person I was.
My mother brought me a cup of tea. “Shall I start doing your breakfast?” she said.
“If you like.”
“You were a bit under the weather when you came in last night, weren’t you?”
“What do you think?”
“Well, you were, weren’t you?”
“Yes. What does it matter?”
“It may not matter to you—”
“—but it matters to us. I know.”
“You’d better stay in bed if you’re going to be like that.”
“I will.”
“Straighten your face up before you come downstairs, then.”
At four o’clock the phone rang. It was Janet.
“Why are you calling me?” I asked.
“I was out for a walk so I thought I’d telephone.”
“Really. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“It wouldn’t be to turn the final screw on last night, would it?”
“I’ll go, if you’d like me to.”
“No. No. I don’t want you to go.”
Silence.
“I’ve never felt so awful as I did last night,” I said. “Never. I never thought the day would arrive when I’d see you with someone else. It was terrible.”
“Was it?”
“I don’t suppose you thought so.”
“Yes, I did. You know I did.”
“Do I?”
“I wanted to come after you.”
“Oh? We could have had a nice time. You could have told me about your latest boyfriends.”
“No, it would have been boring. I would have had nothing to tell you.”
“Really. What you mean is there would have been a lot to tell but you wouldn’t have told me.”
“What do you mean? Do you still not believe I was telling the truth about Guernsey? After my finding out that it had been you all along who had been lying?”
“I didn’t lie. I didn’t tell you, but I didn’t lie, and all those bitches at college made a meal out of the little there was.”
“It was enough.”
“But apart from that I’ve been finding out some stuff, too. It wasn’t bad enough seeing you with that AA idiot last night. No, I was lucky enough to have a friend along who did the same for me as the girls at college did for you.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“It was a pretty good move on your part really. I didn’t realize you had that kind of intelligence.” She tried to cut in but I carried on. “Let me draw you the picture how I see it, or rather how I was made to see it last night. Right? This is how it is: I leave college. You love me, you don’t want me to leave. I love you, I don’t want to leave. We have, due to circumstances, to see less of each other. I don’t get a job. The Victor who was at the top at college is found to be very far from the top outside. Diminishing of gloss--- first part. People at college know about it and you realize this makes him less desirable. Let’s face it, it’s not much good prestige-wise going out with someone who no longer gets respect from the world at large. But this happens on your return to college. In the meantime, there was Guernsey. You always thought Victor attractive. After all, you loved him, you must have done. But what’s meat at home isn’t necessarily meat in Guernsey. You see all those guys with the holiday faces and you probably think: If they’re better looking than Victor, there’s no reason why their personalities shouldn’t be an improvement either. So you let yourself find out. You enjoy finding out. It’s exciting. Diminishing of gloss--- part two. You come back. The sun isn’t as warm and Victor’s still the same. Jobless, useless, short-tempered. He asks you about Guernsey; you don’t have the guts to tell him. You’ve always been a bit scared of him anyway. So you keep seeing him. But now you realize that Guernsey was just a beginning. The taste for admiration is being cultivated. You still like Victor, but it’s not enough just to know you’re admired; it’s more exciting carried a stage further. And after all, Victor’s bound to get a job sooner or later, and a girl has to lay in stock for the winter. How am I telling it?”
“Carry on, Vic. Tell me it all.”
“Good. So there you are. You’re seeing other people, you’re enjoying seeing them, but Victor’s still round to cramp your style. You feel sorry for him; you don’t want to hurt him. The party is a godsend. It leads to Monday morning. You feel bad about what you learn, your pride’s hurt, but you have a legitimate excuse to finish it without compromising your fine moral sense. He’s hurt you, so you can drop him. And now you’re free.”
She didn’t answer.
“Well, how about it? Am I right?”
“You think you are. In that case, you must be.”
“Come on, Janet. Less of the cat and mouse.”
“You worked it all out for yourself. You must be very proud of yourself. You can think what you like.”
“It’s not a question of thinking. I know—Dick Castle filled me in on the facts last night. He must have got it from the horse’s mouth. Karen, I mean.”
“Dick Castle?” She laughed. “Oh well, in that case, what could I say? It’s so conclusive. He’s so reliable.”
“He told me about your seeing other people. He told me about Guernsey. Why should he tell me if it wasn’t true?”
“No reason. No reason at all. You’re so damned clever. I’m surprised you needed anyone else’s help anyway.”
“No, not clever. Just sensible.”
“You think it’s sensible not to trust anyone? I suppose I’m inclined to agree.”
“My God, it’s a laugh. It really is. I thought we were through because you couldn’t trust me anymore, and really it’s the other way round.”
“You’re so sure, aren’t you? You’re so damned sure. You make me sick. Just the first person that comes along and tells you how unfaithful I’ve been and straight away, without any evidence, you believe them. If that’s the kind of faith you had in me, it’s as well we’re not seeing each other.”
“I don’t need evidence. Dick told me and I believe him.”
“You believe Dick Castle. Wonderful. Only just listen to me for one minute. Dick Castle has no reason to lie to you. Only the fact that last week he asked me to go with him on Saturday, last night, that is. And I refused and he kept pestering me so finally I had to be rude to him for him to leave me alone.”
