by Annie Murray
But his mind soon leapt back to Sylvia. Sylvia . . . Every time he thought about the prospect of meeting her on Friday, his innards started churning like one of those new automatic washing machines.
4.
‘Mr B – what’s this?’ Vera, who had just gone to the sink, turned round, chuckling. It was Friday morning. She laughed even more at his dazed expression.
George went over, wondering what he’d done now. In the sink, neatly side by side, sat his brown suede chukka boots. Luckily there was no water in there. He frowned at them.
‘Did I put those in there? I don’t remember.’
‘Well I certainly didn’t,’ Vera said.
‘Hang on . . .’ He sifted his mind for some association . . . What had he been doing? ‘I think . . .’
Behind the back door, in the place where he normally left his shoes, was an egg-smeared plate with a remnant of bacon gristle on it and a knife and fork.
In a tone stranded between amusement and irritation, Vera said, ‘What on earth’s come over you?’
What indeed? This was not exactly something he could explain. Well, Vera, you see, it’s like this: ever since I met Sylvia Newsome I’ve been in an almost permanent state of sexual hunger and expectation. And the fact that every woman within a mile of here seems already to have a view about the news that I’m meeting Sylvia on Friday is bad enough, but it is as nothing compared with my own terror at the prospect. It’s more than two decades since I courted a woman – and in any case, she was a very different sort of woman. It’s just not very easy to concentrate, you see, when you feel like this.
He made vague noises of apology and departed in the direction of the barn as if to have urgent words with the men. But he veered away, remembering that Kevin had been keeping on, as only Kevin could, about going with him to another auction. He ended up standing in his shed in the back garden, gasping in deep breaths of the oily air, trying to calm himself down.
5.
She was waiting, as she had said she would be, an unmistakable egg-timer figure in an emerald frock, something pale draped over her left arm. Good heavens, George thought as he drew up to her. Were women really wearing their skirts that short these days? Her hair was piled on her head, the soft little bits curling round her forehead and ears. For a local woman she had a bold sense of style. George worried as to whether he would measure up.
He had dressed up in a light summer suit the colour of milky coffee. He decided to wear a dashing red bow tie and now wondered if that was all wrong and he should have worn a black evening suit, but it was too late. He had given the car a thorough brush-out to rid it of traces of dog hair and driven over with the windows open just in case. Braking just short of where Sylvia was standing, he leapt out and hurried round to open the passenger door.
‘Hello, George.’ Her voice was like the breath of a fan heater on the already warm summer air. To his considerable pleasure, she stepped right up and kissed his cheek. ‘Ooh, you do look smart,’ she said.
A few minutes later he was cursing himself. He should have told her how nice she looked. But he was overwhelmed by sensations: that perfume again, like bells jangling in his nose, the general fleshy press of Sylvia’s closeness and a sticky hint of her lipstick on his cheek. By the time they were both in the car, he had still scarcely uttered a word.
He drove with a sense of awe, as if he had a rare bird, falcon or eagle, captive on the seat beside him. As they drove the few miles across country to the Bridge Hotel, he made agreeable replies to her airy observations about the beautiful evening light and how nice it was of him to take her to such a lovely place and did he think there was going to be a storm? It was so close . . .
They turned into the car park of the hotel, a graceful, riverside place, its mellow walls woven across with wisteria in full bloom. The lights were warm and welcoming. A row of sumptuous cars – a Bentley, a Jag – were parked outside. George took it all in in surprise at finding himself here. His sort of pub was a bolthole for a pint or two where he could take Monty and relax in a smoky corner with his pipe. Win would not have approved of the Bridge Hotel. It was swanky and involved unnecessary expense. ‘I could cook that at home for a fraction of the price . . .’ But Sylvia gazed at it as he helped her from the car, with the expression of someone who has at last arrived home in their rightful place. She adjusted her skirt in a dainty manner. My goodness, George thought, that dress was daringly cut. Whoever made it had certainly not squandered any material in the process.
‘Oh George,’ Sylvia breathed, lips curving up in carmine delight and bringing out her dimple. George’s insides felt warmly viscous at the sight. ‘This is such a treat. You really know how to spoil me.’
As they went to go in, she reached for his arm. He stood straight as a general and they proceeded inside, George with a certain jauntiness to his walk.
‘Shall we start with an aperitif?’ he asked, amazed at himself even as he said it.
‘You must meet such interesting people in your line of business, George,’ Sylvia said, once the waiter had settled them at their corner table in the restaurant.
It had seemed dark to him as they first walked in. The long room had one chandelier hanging right in the middle, a rococo-style thing with candle-shaped bulbs and draped glass beads and prisms. The walls were graced with lights on wall brackets, their shades a rust-coloured brocade. As he walked between cloth-draped tables across the deep red, slightly sticky carpet, his eyes adjusted to the shadowy intimacy of the place. Any moment now, he would be sitting facing her, not in the crowded bar with its squirting soda siphons, clink of glass and prattle of other people, but at their own table, a distance from the other diners.
Sylvia had given the waiter an engaging smile as he unfolded a linen napkin onto her lap and waited for him to produce the wine list before she asked this next question. She was full of questions.
‘Interesting?’ He knocked back the last of his G and T, which he had brought with him from the bar. ‘Oh – yes. Very varied really.’
He took in the sight of Sylvia almost as if he was in a dream. The dim light stripped the sheen from her dress, making its green more subdued, and shaded the hollows below her cheekbones, the soft fold under her chin. She sat with her left arm resting on the table while the fingers of her other hand loosely grasped her glass of Martini and soda. As he spoke, she watched him, her eyes fixed with rapt attention, so that his every utterance seemed to attain more importance than he felt it really should have done.
‘I suppose I meant . . .’ She gave a little laugh, tilting her head. ‘Titled people. You know, those wealthy people you read about in the magazine, lords and ladies. So romantic – or I think so anyway.’
‘Oh yes. Those people.’ He found her naïve deference rather touching. ‘Some, yes, of course.’ The first titled person to elbow her way into his thoughts was Lady Eleanora Byngh. ‘Although it’s not all quite as glamorous as you might think. I can think of one or two who are dreadful old ragbags really. They’re not all necessarily rolling in money, you know, or not these days. What goes up must come down!’
His chuckling was met by a solemn look of incomprehension. Eleanora Byngh was not perhaps the kind of society person Sylvia had had in mind.
‘My David used to have some very interesting clients like that.’ In a voice of hushed reverence, Sylvia said, ‘I remember when the Linklaters came to live at that beautiful house near Benson. They’d just come back from Africa, I believe, and they needed David’s help with all the legal aspects of the house, the conveyancing and so on.’ George was starting to notice that whenever Sylvia spoke of her former husband’s work she began to speak in the tone of secretary to the Great Man. It rather amused him. ‘Do you ever come across them?’ she went on.
‘As a matter of fact,’ George thumbed the wine list open, thinking this was a test he could actually pass for once, ‘I paid a call on Mrs Linklater just yesterday.’
‘No! Did you really?’ Sylvia sat back in her
chair with such vigorous enthusiasm that she almost knocked the menus from the hands of a waiter approaching behind her. There was a pause while they deliberated. Sylvia was quick to make up her mind.
‘I’ll have the lobster,’ she instructed the waiter, without a trace of indecisiveness.
George felt a shock go through him. He was so used to Win, who never looked at the top end of any menu, however humble. She always worked up from the bottom, and not very far at that. Sylvia, however, ordered as if this was a life to which she was born, with no compromise. Grudgingly he admired this, though he felt that a moment’s hesitation, a hint of ‘would it be all right if . . . ?’ would have made him feel warmer towards her, made him feel he wanted to grant her anything at all.
His eye was roving further down, to the steak-and-kidney regions of the menu. But damn it, he felt like steak and kidney, even if it didn’t seem very glamorous. He’d have to up his game on the wine list though, not go for the Yugoslav Lutomer Riesling, the cheapest, that he had had his eye on.
‘We’ll have a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape – the white, please,’ he said breezily, as if this was a run-of-the-mill sort of decision rather than one that was making him feel distinctly heady. A guinea for a bottle of wine – good God! ‘That’ll go very nicely with your lobster.’
‘Oh you are kind,’ Sylvia said.
‘Not at all – cheers.’ He held up the last of the gin. ‘Here’s to a lovely evening.’
He was met by a smile so fervent that he decided it was worth every penny.
‘You were saying,’ she prompted him, ‘about Mrs Linklater.’ Her eyes pressed into him, hungry for knowledge.
‘Well, I was sitting in her dining room, yesterday afternoon – sharing a magnum of champagne, to be precise.’ He produced this information feeling like a magician revealing a rabbit.
‘Were you?’ She leaned forward, her face avid. ‘Oh do tell me all about it, George. About the house? It’s very big, isn’t it? I bet it’s beautiful, like a palace inside.’
He agreed that it was. In fact that afternoon could have been mortifying in the extreme, had Mrs Linklater not been a woman of such good nature.
Shown along the flagged hall of the ample Georgian house by ‘Cobb’ the maid, he had been greeted by the plump figure of Mrs Arthur (he never had discovered her own name) Linklater, in a loose lilac dress. Her – he could only guess – dyed hair, pale blonde, was caught back in a loose chignon, tied with purple ribbon in a playful bow. She was scarcely five feet in height and tottered about in little cream shoes with thick heels. Mrs Linklater must have been in her early sixties, and her round face, wide grey eyes and purring voice all reminded him of a large, indulged pussycat.
‘Ah, Mr Baxter, do come in! We’re rather at sixes and sevens today – I’ve a little man in seeing to my electrics.’ She led him to the oak table occupying most of the dining room. Placed along it was a series of dainty bowls containing the garish colours of infant sweeties. The one closest to him held Smarties. ‘Have a jelly baby – do!’ She held one out towards him. ‘No?’ She popped a yellow and a green sweet into her own mouth and urged squelchily, ‘Sit down – do!’ Once perched on a chair, at the head of the table, her feet did not reach the floor. She gave one of her wide, disarming smiles.
‘Now, Mr Baxter – I’m so glad you’ve come to see me at last. I have been a faithful customer of yours, have I not? Now, about this bill for the armoire which I bought, in March, I believe.’
George nodded encouragingly. Vera had, so far as he knew, sent her the bill three times.
‘I’ve heard that your, er, woman, the one who does for you . . .’
‘Vera Day, yes.’
‘She issues the bills now, I gather? The thing is, Mr Baxter . . .’ Mrs Arthur Linklater folded herself in towards him, resting her chest on the table in a manner that he found somehow comforting. ‘I paid the bill there and then, when I bought it. I believe in getting these things out of the way at once, you see. So I think you had better take a look at your accounts.’
She sat back, her feline smile fending off George’s horrified apologies.
‘Just a minuscule mistake, Mr Baxter. Already forgotten! A difficult time for you, your lovely wife and so on . . . Now – I’m sure you’ve time for a drink with me. You can tell me all about your new exciting purchases and see if you can tempt me with anything.’ She slid from the chair and went to the door. ‘Cobb! A magnum of champagne to the dining room – two glasses please!’
By the time George staggered squiffily back to the car after a half-hour of amiable chatter with Mrs Linklater, the whole business of the bills seemed to be forgotten.
‘Now that,’ he had announced, pushing down the handbrake, ‘is what I call a lady.’
This he recounted to Sylvia Newsome. The story was greeted with rapture.
‘She sat and drank champagne with you,’ she breathed. ‘Oh, don’t you think that’s the mark of a real lady. Champagne any time you want!’
George could hardly disagree.
‘And what’s her house like? I bet it’s gorgeous.’
He described the details he had managed to take in while still sober: the ample table, thick, silky curtains at the window, the silver-edged rose bowl on the table with pink rose heads floating in it.
‘Oh, how lovely.’ Sylvia’s hands went to her cheeks in rapture. ‘Pink roses, in a bowl? Oh, it’d be so nice to live like that. Don’t you think so, George?’
They ate their starter, honeydew melon with a sprinkling of ginger and moved on to the main courses, each with a glass of the clear, cool wine. The dining room filled gradually and soon they were in a convivial atmosphere of clinking glass, the scrape of cutlery on plates and spiking above the flat seam of conversation every so often, guffaws of laughter from a huge, whiskery gent encased in tweeds, seated under the chandelier. Spots of light reflected in the pool of baldness at the top of his head.
All the time, Sylvia asked questions and George, loosened by the wine, unfurled under her interest. In fact he could never before remember meeting a woman who had shown so much concentrated fascination in him. She extracted information in just the way she prised slivers of lobster from its shell. And she declared every other mouthful how lovely it all was, what a treat! He watched the movement of her plump hands, the curves of her arms, the way she paused, her lips shiny with the food, apparently drinking in everything he said. She would ask a question, then another, and off he went, the words prattling out of him.
He found himself telling her all about working for Joe and Walter Black’s big firm in London. He had moved on there from Arkwright’s when he was seventeen, wanting to branch out, needing more from life.
‘There I was, a real country boy, suddenly let loose in London,’ he said, sitting back with his glass, expansive after his handsome plate of steak-and-kidney pie. ‘They taught me everything they knew, though – I even ended up travelling overseas for them: America, Argentina . . .’ Seeing her eyebrows lift, he back-pedalled quickly. He didn’t want to go into all that now. ‘Every so often, when I first started, they used to send me out into the East End to the butcher’s down the street . . .’
‘The butcher’s?’ Her eyes widened. ‘Why – for lunch?’
‘No, no,’ he laughed. ‘The butcher’s used to wrap the carcasses in muslin covers, which would take in the fat from the animals. It was . . .’ He paused, disconcerted. What was that underneath the table, something pressing against his leg which felt remarkably like one of her legs? ‘The muslin was . . .’ His right calf was being nuzzled by something. This was not something he could blame on Monty on this occasion. Sylvia had finished her lobster. Her elbows were on the table, chin resting in her hands with an expression so rapt it was – almost – impossible to believe that she could be engaging any other part of her body. But there it was again.
‘It was used for polishing the furniture.’ Muzzy with wine, he was beginning to wonder if he was hallucinating. For a moment the
sensations stopped. Sylvia sat up straighter.
‘I suppose they were Jewish boys who made their fortune,’ she said with sudden crispness. ‘And you learned everything from them. You must be so knowledgeable, George. What a good business you chose to go into, mixing with all these wealthy people. You’ve obviously done very well for yourself.’
‘Oh I wouldn’t say I’ve done anything all that . . . You know, I just go along . . .’ He felt another definite caress, softer this time, at the side of his right leg. She must have slipped her shoe off. Her eagerness was almost childlike, at odds with whatever was going on under the table. ‘I mean, wealthy people aren’t all that interesting you know. Not necessarily anyway. It’s no good doing things just for money.’
No, he thought. He certainly didn’t want to start talking to her about Argentina. But in those seconds, looking at her avid face, he knew how much it had marked him. She was so innocent, he thought fondly, with this childlike awe of money. In Argentina he had met people whose blood seemed to pump round their bodies for the sole purpose of accumulating wealth. Everything could be bought, down to the dust of the land. No one seemed to think of anything else. This driven singularity – how it had bored and repelled him to the point of nausea.
‘It’s no good doing what I do for money,’ he lectured. ‘You have to love it – the wood, the artistry of it.’
‘Oh yes,’ she said fervently. ‘Of course you do, George. I only meant that you’re so lucky to earn your living from it as well, because you’re so clever.’ She gazed at him. ‘I’d so like to come and see it all – your business, I mean. It must be so lovely and so interesting.’
George reached for the wine bottle and topped up their glasses. He moved his feet so that they were tucked primly under his chair. The balance of the evening needed restoring, he felt. He had talked as if pouring liquid into an empty vessel. He had, in fact, been rather rude.
