by Angela Huth
Virginia had written him she would not be able to meet him because of school. She was coming up later, in the evening. They were to have dinner together, not far from the hotel, and see the cabaret. She had booked herself a room in his hotel and would stay in London for the weekend to show him the sights.
On the bus, on the way into London, Charlie took from his wallet a grubby little list on which he had doodled and made amendments to pass the time on the aeroplane. Stratford, it said. Windsor, Tower, British Museum, Zoo, Madame Tussauds, Tiberio Restaurant, football match (Chelsea), Canterbury, Vera Lynch. Canterbury he intended to go to because his maternal grandmother had come from there, somewhere called New Street – nine children brought up in a three-roomed house, his mother had said. He’d believe it when he saw it. After New Street, if there was time, he’d take a look at the cathedral. Vera Lynch was the name of a girl in a china shop in Regent Street with whom he’d been corresponding, about china, for the last five months, having seen an advertisement in The New Yorker.
Charlie was tired. But not too tired to appreciate his first glimpse of Piccadilly Circus, tatty in the drizzle, choked with shining wet traffic and a thousand umbrellas. Gee, he thought again.
He checked into his hotel, helping himself to a pile of Travel in Britain and Welcome to Britain brochures while he waited. Then he went up to his room, opened his dentresistant suitcase (because his mother had taught him that clothes, like humans, need air after a journey), lay on the bed without taking off the slippery cover, and slept.
When he woke, three hours later, he had a bad taste in his mouth, and his head felt heavy. Outside he could hear the drone of traffic. He rang for a Coke and bourbon. It appeared twenty-five minutes later, with no ice. But rather than complain, he drank it warm. Slowly, he felt better.
He unpacked, showered, changed. He slicked on hair grease, ran an orange stick round his nails, and slapped his neck with after-shave called Beast. He’d had it sent, mail order, from Kentucky. Then he sat in the one armchair reading his travelogues, waiting.
At precisely eight o’clock, the bell rang. Charlie counted three to himself, out loud, then strode slowly across the room to the door. Opened it. Before him stood a small, pale, thin girl with scraped-back coppery hair and huge blurry eyes. She stood huddled in the fur collar of her coat as if the blue carpeted corridor was a vast waste, and she was deserted, with no hope of ever seeing human habitation again.
‘Virginia Fly!’ He rolled the R.
‘Charlie Oakhampton!’ A narrow smile widened the edges of her mouth, forcing a play of light and shade round her cheeks and eyes. Charlie found himself walking backwards into the room. Virginia followed him, shutting the door behind her as she went, feeling for the handle.
‘Why, Virginia Fly, after all these years.’ Somewhere near the bed he squeezed her shoulders, feeling the bones.
‘I know. Isn’t it extraordinary?’ She looked up at him. ‘You’re quite like your photograph. I mean, I would have known you.’
‘You would? Well.’ Pause. ‘Well. How about that?’ They looked at each other again. ‘This calls for a celebration. How about a drink? D’you like champagne? Let’s go down to the bar. There’s plenty of time before the cabaret. We can go on over in a cab.’
‘We could walk, in fact,’ said Virginia. ‘It’s only a few yards.’
‘We’ll walk, then. We’ll walk. I could do with stretching my legs after that journey, I can tell you.’
‘Are you sure you’re not too tired?’ Virginia was vaguely hesitant.
‘Good heavens, no, Virginia. Good heavens, no. I’m on top of the world, I’m telling you. After all these years, here I am in London.’
In the lift he sensed that Virginia was a little tremulous, not quite relaxed, in spite of the twelve years of letters between them. A couple of glasses would do the trick, he thought. A couple of glasses.
Virginia slipped off her coat in the bar, to reveal a plain brown dress in jersey stuff, high to the neck, with a small pearl brooch on one shoulder. Charlie stared, fascinated. He could see her heart beating. Quickly he ordered champagne. When it came he held up his glass and drank to her.
‘Here’s to the end of our course in correspondence, and on to something more tangible.’ A shudder went down Virginia’s spine. Charlie smiled at her, friendly. She noticed his bottom teeth were thinly edged with black, as if each one was in an individual frame. Strange. She thought American dentists were meant to be the best in the world.
They ate salted nuts. Charlie kept on smiling.
‘Well, Virginia Fly, one thing I must say: you’re the greatest little letter writer in the world. The greatest. I’ve never had such letters. I looked forward to them, you know. For twelve years I’ve looked forward to your letters. That’s quite something.’
Virginia couldn’t, in all honesty, return the compliment in its entirety. He was not an imaginative letter writer, but it was true she looked forward to his letters all the same. She said so.
‘Why, that’s really nice of you, Virginia.’ He laid one of his huge hands on her wrist, and spoke very low. ‘Say, wouldn’t it have been awful if we’d been disappointed in each other? If we’d found each other ugly and boring?’ He was so close to her she could smell strong toothpaste on his breath and a whiff of Beast coming from his thick neck. She quivered again – a familiar sensation. It was how she felt when approached by the dark-moustached man of her dreams. But she couldn’t think of anything to say. So Charlie went on:
‘You know, I guess there’s practically nothing about you I don’t know – except of course, how you feel, what you’re like to touch – ‘He gave a great bellowing laugh. Other nearby drinkers looked up. Virginia blushed, spluttered over her champagne and raised her second hand to her glass to steady it, forcing Charlie to leave go of her wrist. ‘There, now. Don’t say I’ve upset you? It was only a joke.’ Virginia smiled slightly. ‘No, but you know what I mean. I could walk into any part of your house and feel I’d been there a thousand times before – the way you describe it. I know what your bit of garden looks like in spring, summer, autumn and winter. I know all about your schoolroom – cold in the mornings, isn’t it, didn’t you say? I’d recognise the professor in any crowd – you describe it all so beautifully. I’d do anything to have a gift like that, myself.’
‘I have a very dull life, really,’ said Virginia. ‘Nothing ever happens. I always think it must make dull letters. So perhaps I colour it a bit, make it sound more interesting than it really is.’
They chattered on in a monochrome sort of way about their letters. Three glasses of champagne made everything skid about a little in Virginia’s vision, pleasantly. She found she could talk to Charlie without thinking and, equally, listen to him without thinking. Behind the drum of the words small pictures, like a miniature light-show, worked in her mind: Charlie across the breakfast table in a few years’ time, face more creased, but arms still muscular under his tee shirt; Charlie in gym shoes, bouncing on the balls of his feet, kicking a ball to one of their sons; Charlie, executive, picking her up from the supermarket in a Cadillac … All the neat confines of an American suburban life. She would like that. She would be a good wife to Charlie. She had never imagined anything else. No other possibility had ever presented itself.
They walked to the restaurant. It was still drizzling and cold. Virginia took Charlie’s arm and he took her hand. He inhaled great puffs of air, letting them out with a lot of noise. They rose in visible clouds of smoke into the multi-coloured rain.
‘It’s polluted air,’ apologised Virginia. To-night, Piccadilly Circus looked totally unfamiliar.
In thirty years, she had never been to a place remotely like the restaurant they now entered. It appeared to her in a mosaic of shaded lights and sparkling bosoms and high piles of lacquered curls. They seemed to be the youngest couple there, and it occurred to Virginia that compared with the scintillating average she must appear very drab. She was grateful to the dim lighting:
perhaps no one would notice.
They sat at a tiny table at the edge of a galleried tier, looking down on more eaters and an elaborate stage. The table was so small Virginia had to put her bag on the ground, and it was impossible for her knees not to touch Charlie’s underneath it.
‘This is what I call close,’ said Charlie. ‘Great.’
He ordered himself a large Martini – Virginia refused another drink – and dinner. It was while Virginia found herself hesitating between the fillet of steak and the fried scampi it occurred to her that up to now she had been a little dull. She felt the first uneasy sensations of panic within her. Several more hours of the evening to go, and so far she had done nothing to be attractive. She must liven up.
‘You must come home one day,’ she said, in a voice that was so bright it surprised even her. ‘Mother and Father have been looking forward to meeting you for years. Mother says your photograph is so – good looking.’ She smiled shyly.
‘Why, that’s nice of her. I’d love to come on down. I tell you what. This weekend I thought we’d put by for sightseeing, the Tower and all that. Monday through Friday next week I have a little business to attend to – I have to go to Manchester, I think it is, then I return here Saturday. Perhaps I could come on down then, and go from your house to the airport Sunday next?’
‘On Sunday?’
‘Yeah. Why?’
‘I thought – I thought you were staying, well, almost indefinitely.’
‘Oh no, honey. I can’t do that, now, can I? There’s work to be done.’
Virginia bit her lip. She tried to recall her mistake. She was positive he’d said he’d be over for some weeks, no definite date to go home … How, if he was leaving in a week, could all the arrangements be made in time? Well, no doubt he had some plan.
‘I suppose there is. You must be very busy.’
‘Expansion, you know. We’re expanding all the time. I have to be away from home more and more. Contact making from coast to coast.’
‘Your mother must miss you.’ She remembered how in his letters he wrote a lot about his mother. He was particularly fond of her and actively missed her when they were apart. Charlie nodded but didn’t reply. A little desperately Virginia tried to think what else Charlie wrote about. Strangely, it all seemed to have gone from her mind.
‘Your baseball – do you still play every weekend?’
‘Not as much as I used to. But yes, I do play most Saturday afternoons. Yeah.’ He was drinking his third large Martini.
Dinner came, small helpings of rather tasteless food served swiftly without elegance. They ate it in almost complete silence. Then the noisy cabaret, a lot of sparkling dancers, followed by a weedy comedian in a dazzling dinner jacket. Charlie didn’t smile because he didn’t understand the jokes. Virginia didn’t smile because she had a headache.
When Charlie asked Virginia to dance she followed him on to the floor wondering why the glamour, the great burst of glamour that had struck her when they came into the place, had evaporated. Down here on the floor the other customers, for all their false-hair and eyelashes and smiles and jewels, looked old and shabby, and the men were uniformly ugly. They hadn’t even got nice faces. She felt fleetingly proud of Charlie.
He danced quite well, but his hands were sweaty. He pushed his mouth into her hair and his loins against her stomach. She felt something in her throat begin to pulsate, so that it was hard to swallow and she forgot her headache.
‘You’re great, baby,’ he whispered, and clutched her tighter as the band wafted into a funeral version of “Blue Moon.”
Back at the hotel, as Virginia’s room was on the top floor and Charlie’s on the first, he suggested it would be more practical to stop off at his room for a nightcap. Virginia agreed. Coffee, she needed.
The room, lit only by the bedside light, looked slightly less offensive than it had done earlier. The dim light deadened somewhat the glare of the satinette curtains and the mock wood wardrobes. It was stiflingly hot.
Virginia took off her coat and sat in the only armchair. Charlie, too, took off his jacket and shoes and heaved himself on to the high, turned-down bed. He folded his hands awkwardly, like a man unused to prayer, and contemplated Virginia.
‘Well, honey,’ he said, ‘the night is young.’
Virginia smiled. She wondered how long she should stay before he would think she wanted to be seduced, and she wondered how and when he would bring up the subject of their future.
The waiter arrived with coffee and bourbon. Charlie tipped him but didn’t say thank you. Virginia imagined he must be preoccupied.
She took her coffee back to the armchair. Charlie remained on the bed.
‘Tell me about your life,’ he said.
‘You know all about my life.’
‘I only know what you’ve written me. That can’t be all. There must be a lot you’ve left out.’
‘No, I don’t think so. It’s just, as I said, I lead a very quiet life.’ Charlie looked at her with a quizzical smile, his lips wet from the drink.
‘You’ve never mentioned any lovers.’
‘Lovers?’ Virginia laughed. ‘I’ve never had any lovers. If you’d arrived a week earlier you could have seen me on a television programme explaining what it felt like to be a thirty-one-year-old virgin.’
‘Really? No joking?’
‘No joking.’
Charlie was silent for a moment. Then he said: ‘You know something? I think I believe you.’
‘Well, it’s true.’
‘I’ve never met any kind of a virgin before, as far as I recall, let alone a thirty-one-year-old one. That’s quite something.’ Virginia felt his tone was admiring.
‘These days,’ she said, ‘people go on about virgins as if they were museum pieces. We’re perfectly ordinary human beings, you know, but we just haven’t come across the chance. Chance, in respectable suburbia, isn’t as plentiful as the women’s magazines make out.’
‘You sound quite defiant.’
‘I’m not really defiant. I’m used to being a curiosity.’
Charlie loosened his tie and undid the top button of his shirt.
‘Hey, what about some bourbon?’
‘I’ve never tasted it. I don’t think I’d like it.’
‘Have a try.’ He filled the second glass but didn’t move from the bed. ‘It’s good stuff. Come on.’
Virginia went over to him. He gave her the glass. She took a sip and made a face. Charlie laughed.
‘Have another try. It needs a little perseverance.’ In persevering himself, Virginia noticed, he had already drunk almost half the bottle.
This time, while she took another sip, he put his hand round her bottom and patted it. She stood, transfixed, the glass poised at her mouth, the colour rushing to her face. Unable to move she felt his hand creep under the back of her skirt and scratch her thigh.
‘I don’t like it,’ she said, finally.
‘What, the bourbon?’ Again Charlie laughed, rather swimmily, wrinkling up his nose and showing a lot of brownish gum. Virginia put her glass back on the tray. Charlie did likewise. Then he took both her wrists.
‘Well, beautiful, thirty-one years is like a long time.’
Virginia felt immensely hot, her clothes were too tight and there was a constriction in her throat. Now, she knew, was the time to leave.
‘Yes,’ she heard herself saying, ‘it’s a long time, but as I said, there’s never really been the opportunity–’
‘What the hell do you think I am if not the opportunity?’ Charlie had raised his voice and there were bubbles in the corner of his mouth. Before Virginia could answer he had dragged her down to him, was holding on to her head by the hair, and kissing her greedily.
‘Oh, no, Charlie. Please.’ Virginia tried to drag herself away from him. She half wanted not to resist him, but he was too rough, too fast. ‘I must go to bed.’
‘Indeed you must, Virginia Fly. Indeed you must.’ He suddenly pushed her
away from him but still kept hold of her wrists. His hair, crew-cut, was standing straight up. Virginia longed to smooth it down. ‘Christ, what a girl.’ He spoke more gently. Then he let go of one of her wrists, and ran his hand down from her shoulder over her breast, and finally latched on to her waist. ‘Come on, honey. Don’t wait any more. I’ll be careful of you.’
Virginia felt tears pricking her eyes. She didn’t say anything, but made to back away from Charlie. He let go of her.
‘Do you really want to go?’
A kind of roulette wheel spun in her head, marked with the words Yes and No. At which word would the spinning wheel stop?
‘No,’ she said.
‘Of course you don’t.’ His words were a little thick, smug. His smile knowing. He didn’t do anything about his hair. ‘Let’s get into bed, then.’
He ripped off his shirt very fast, unzipped his trousers and threw them on to the floor. Then he lay back on the bed again in tight, aerated underpants and duck-egg blue angora socks. Virginia remained motionless, looking at his body. He was muscular, pale, big. His stomach rolled over the elastic of his pants. His legs were matted with sandy hair.
‘Come on. I’ll help you,’ he said. Virginia went over to him as if in a trance, turned round and let him unzip her dress. Letting it fall to the ground, she stepped out with her back still to him. She felt his hands running over her shoulder blades and swooping towards the fastening of her bra.
‘No!’ She gasped.
‘I’ll do it.’ He had already undone it and was slipping the straps over her shoulders. ‘Oh, Charlie!’ She felt ludicrous.
‘Turn round, honey. You can’t keep your back to me all night.’ He sounded a little impatient.
Putting her hands over her breasts, Virginia turned round slowly.
‘That’s my girl.’
Virginia closed her eyes. God, please don’t let him do it with his socks on, she prayed. With her eyes still closed she pulled off her tights and pants. Charlie was laughing.