by Burke, John
From the hearty tone of his voice Ellen was sure that everything was far from fine. Something was brewing. She had a presentiment that someone had ‘come up with something’: one of those inspirations which would mean a rejigging of the whole project.
She was not far wrong. Alec said: “We’ve had rather a bright idea. I think you’ll go for it.”
“You do?”
“It’ll break the monotony for you.”
“Who’s complaining about monotony? Welsh lamb one day, escalope de veau the next, genuine home-massacred black pudding the next. What monotony?”
“We’re going to provide you with a sidekick.”
“A what?”
“Throw two of you into the arena at one time. Only for a few days. Just to test reactions.”
“Whose reactions?”
“The people who serve you, who else? With two of you, you can compare notes, vary the tactics...”
“You think I’m not to be trusted on my own.”
“Don’t sulk, ducks. Nobody says you’re not to be trusted. It’s only that we’re rather taken with the idea of trying two girls at once.”
“Kinky!”
“Look. Don’t you see the possibilities?”
Alec went on to explain. He was convinced – had been convinced by some bright spark – that the book would be incomplete without some observations on the general attitude towards two women at once. And later, he enthused, they might try another variation: they would fix for Ellen to join a coach party of German girl students just to see how they got treated, how patient waiters were if their customers had difficulty with their English. And so on.
“The book,” said Alec, “is to be comprehensive. Really and truly comprehensive.”
Ellen surrendered. She had no option. “Who is it?”
“Who’s what?” Alec had been ready to launch into further ambitious developments, and didn’t like being stopped.
“The other girl. The one you’ve chosen to come with me.”
“Oh. Dulcie Barrington.”
Ellen was relieved. Dulcie was sound, sensible, and good company.
“Come into the office on Monday morning,” said Alec, “and pick her up. You can send her back by train on the Thursday morning – unless you find it’s working out interestingly, and you want to carry out a few more experiments. See you Monday.”
“Monday,” said Ellen.
She rang off and went into the cocktail bar. It was festooned with horse brasses and hunting horns. There was an old print of a bearded man blissfully drawing on a long clay pipe, advertising cool golden shag at fourpence an ounce. Flanking it, on a deep window-ledge, was a cardboard cut-out of an improbably elongated girl breathing ecstatically into a bottle of mineral water.
Mark was sitting on a stool at the bar, pursing his lips over a page of scribbled notes. She hoisted herself on to the adjoining stool.
“Hello,” he said. “Surprise, surprise.”
“Do you think I could have a gin and French?”
Mark signalled the barman. “Won’t that take the bloom off your gustatory nerve?” “I’ll have it just the same.”
When she had been supplied with the drink, he said: “Aren’t we breaking the rules? I thought we were supposed to keep our distance as mealtimes loomed over the horizon.”
“You’re dining with me this evening.” The idea had just occurred to Ellen. “If we’re going to test the reactions of waiters to one girl, and two girls, and coachloads of girls, then why not their reactions to a girl ordering and paying for a gentleman’s meal as well? If the book’s got to be comprehensive, it’s got to be comprehensive.”
“Translation,” said Mark, “please.”
She told him about Alec’s fresh instructions.
“Which means,” he said quietly, “that you’d better dispose of me before Monday. I doubt whether your office would approve of my making up a threesome.”
“Oh. No, I suppose not.”
“The snide remarks. I can just imagine.”
“So can I.”
“It’s all right...my dear. I knew I’d have to be making my own arrangements pretty soon. This luxury was too good to last.”
“You’ll be glad, really.”
“Overjoyed. Can’t you hear me singing?”
“I’m sure my driving scares the daylights out of you.”
“Have I complained?”
“No.”
“Have I even winced when we went round corners?”
“No. But you haven’t really had much time.”
“It hasn’t been long,” he said, “and already it’s nearly over.”
They were talking shyly at wilful crosspurposes. Ellen, to her own wild alarm, wanted to tell him not to rush things, not to bother about a hire car if he didn’t really want one, to give her a few days to get rid of Dulcie and then …
And then?
It was unthinkable. He had his work to do, she had hers.
But we could stay together until the David Parr business is settled, couldn’t we?
That was absurd, too.
She said: “Anyway, shall I change my table booking and make it two?”
“I’m honoured.”
“But I do the ordering, mind. Any complaints, I’m the one to make them.”
“I shudder at the thought.”
“If you’d prefer not to...”
He swung round on his stool and took her hand. She sat there for more than a minute, content. He ordered another drink before she could insist that it was her round and that they had to play fair; and still his hand was warm on hers.
She asked the barman to pass the message on to the dining room. She lifted her glass with her left hand, Mark with his right.
She didn’t want to go back to London at all, even for a restful weekend.
Ellen had always enjoyed being on her own. She was not unsociable, but she never craved desperately for company: working at home, lounging at home, or driving long distances, she was quite happy with the immediate pleasures of her own senses. She saw, heard, and tasted. She did not have to have a companion to refer to. She did not feel desolate when there was no one to talk to, no one to listen to.
Yet Mark’s presence beside her in the Fiat had given a new savour to this last day and a half. He didn’t chatter and didn’t distract her. But he saw the same things she saw, and his responses were uncannily the same. They laughed at a couple of shop signs and at the antics of three small children by a farm gate. When they talked it was casually and unforcedly, because they both wanted to say much the same things at the same time.
Twice they stopped for fairly long periods while he checked on the widening of a road and on the ground plan of a small housing estate tucked away behind a brickworks. Driving on, he told her some of the things he had encountered while she was in Abermadoc and he was still persevering with his job. A right of way being obscured by a calculating builder, a half-finished bypass not marked on any official plan, a mountain byroad which he was sure hadn’t existed two years ago; and a small-town one-way system that would fox anyone without multi-faceted eyeballs.
Mention of Abermadoc brought them back to the question of David Parr.
Trying to fit in her assignments with their gnawing curiosity – yet reluctant to commit herself wholeheartedly to an enquiry that was none of their business – Ellen made a wide sweep down the Welsh marches in the hope of intercepting the mysterious truck. It was a vain hope, a chance in a million. How could they predict which route it would take, when they didn’t know where it was starting from: how guess the time, even the day on which it might or might not make one of its journeys? They were silent during most of this time; a tense silence at first, then one of resignation. No truck. No clue.
The time fled away. And Mark sat beside her.
He was sitting beside her as at last, on the Friday afternoon, she drove towards London.
They did not stop for anything now. No checking on meals, no observation of
side roads, no watchfulness. Just a drive back to the city.
Mark asked desultorily about her family. She told him about the hotels they had lived in, about the sudden changes of fortune – the busy and prosperous year on Jersey, the hard work in Kent and Surrey, the strange sensation of immobility when her father became an administrator rather than a harassed practitioner and they actually bought a house and settled – and about her own career, the year she had spent in France, the flat she now had in The Boltons.
And London drew closer.
“Pretty gardens,” said Ellen, as though it were up to her to justify the existence of the parallel chains of semidetached boxes on either flank.
“Yes, but you should see their backsides.”
She glanced at him, startled, looked away, and braked fiercely for a lorry which had turned in from a side road and then slowed down.
“Sorry,” said Mark. “Private joke. It was Grethe, in our office. Someone once rang about an invitation to a publicity spree, asking what time the balloon went up. It wasn’t on his card, he said. ‘You should look at your backside,’ says Grethe. Perfectly ordinary German, of course, but...” He laughed, and waited for her to laugh.
Ellen said: “I noticed there was German printing on that map I fetched for you.” “Yes. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing wrong. I just wondered.”
The light industries grew heavier. The semi-detached desirable residences thickened and grew less and less desirable. Ellen skimmed between chemical tankers and a disorganised queue of cars and transporters doing their multi-coloured conga into the great mesh of brick, concrete, smoke and scrap metal.
“Wondered?” said Mark. “We’re tied in with a German firm. Best map printers in the world. We’re just one subsidiary of a major company, breaking into international markets. It happens all the time.”
“I see.”
“You make it sound sinister. As though I’m a foreign agent. What about yourself?”
“What about me?”
“You and your firm. Entirely English?”
“We have American partners, but...”
“Ah!”
“It’s different.”
“Is it? Dollars are superior to Deutschmarks? Different to rely on American money, American taste...or lack of same. Different to go for American gimmicks?”
“There’s nothing gimmicky about my book,” said Ellen. “It’s going to be the real thing. As true as I can make it. Honest the whole way through.”
“Yes,” he said gently. “I think it may be just that. Honest enough to get you the sack.”
“The Lucullus Press doesn’t operate like that.”
“The what?”
“I’ve told you before.”
“No,” said Mark, entranced. “Not that bit, you haven’t.”
“The Lucullus Press,” said Ellen firmly.
“Phew!”
Ellen drove on faster than before, overtaking when it was safe but only just safe. For the first time she could tell that Mark was longing to protest and doggedly not doing so.
After she had frightened the driver of a pantechnicon clearly bound for a hallowed repository near Barnes, he said:
“Seriously. No big project gets off the ground today without three or four countries collaborating on the blastoff. It’s not economic to do it any other way anymore. Coloured picture books for America, England and France get printed in Italy. Magazines edited in Belgium are produced in Holland and collated in London, and sent out all over the world. My outfit makes maps for the whole of Europe – a quarter of them subsidised by an oil company so polyglot its head office skyscraper’s usually known as the Tower of Babel. And you? You make a scoff-guide for inmates and immigrants. So what’s the trouble?”
“You were saying,” said Ellen dispassionately, “that you had a German secretary.”
“Grethe? Not quite a secretary.”
“I see,” said Ellen again.
“Like hell you do. She’s one of those funny, devoted, efficient, round-the-bend loyalists. I remember...But no, you wouldn’t be interested.”
“Try me.”
“Oh, it was nothing.”
“All right. It was nothing.”
“But you don’t know how funny she is. How sweet.”
“No, I don’t.”
“She told me I was a fish.”
“Oh?”
“I don’t like the way you say that.”
“How did she say her little piece, then, about the fish?”
“Look, if you’re not interested...”
“I’m interested,” said Ellen frigidly.
“Well, it was all so funny. She said I was a fish, and I got a bit narked – you know, it didn’t sound too good – and I said, ‘What, you mean I’m a cold fish?’ and she said, ‘Oh, no, you are born under the sign of the fish.’ And then it dawned. She was one of the astrological bunch. Read every horoscope she could get her hands on, every day. The ridiculous thing was, it was true. I’m a Pisces type. But I don’t go in for any of that nonsense, and how she knew – well, I just don’t get it.”
“She didn’t tell you how she deduced it?”
“She said” – Mark grinned with infuriating complacency – “she’d always had trouble with men born under the sign of the fish.”
“Fascinating.”
“You don’t think it’s funny?”
“It may have seemed hysterical at the time.” Ellen knew she was sounding monstrously pompous.
Grethe. Who gave a damn about Grethe, about this stupid Teutonic blonde at the office (surely a massive Wagnerian blonde), this earnest pursuer of passion and portents?
Look where the Germans are today – right back on top! The echo of David Parr’s voice shivered disturbingly through her head.
She said: “It seems a bit weird to me that...” And then there was a traffic snarl-up and she had to insinuate herself into a lane that twisted sharply under a fly-over, and in no time at all she was setting Mark down on the fringes of Richmond, from where he said he could easily find his way home.
His hand on the door, he asked if she would have dinner with him on Saturday evening. Ellen said no, thanks very much. She had a lot to do, a lot of preparations to make. And as he urged her to have dinner with him then, or lunch on Sunday, a car behind began to trumpet its horn, and she drove on.
The noise in The Boltons took her aback. She had been away long enough to accept the great silences of Wales as normal and reasonable. London noise hammered in on her again. She had forgotten how pounding and penetrating it could be. The voices, the radios through open windows, the interminable sports car snarls, the taxi doors slamming, more voices, the throb that didn’t stop even in the middle of the night: she was pitched back into a turmoil she had half forgotten.
She was glad she had not accepted Mark’s invitation. She was in no mood to go out. Yet she was too lazy to cook anything very ambitious at home. She ate frugally, hoping that omelettes and a cheese salad would sharpen her appetite for the coming week or two, like the dry biscuit a wine taster nibbles between one chateau bottling and another.
On Monday morning she went to the office.
She had been expecting to find Fiona Freeman at the reception desk, imperiously established in the middle of the thick turquoise carpet, gushing a ‘darling’ a minute and ‘love’ every thirty seconds as she did to women she knew. With men it was different: her voice sank half an octave and she cooed.
But there was another girl on duty, much younger, with a skirt that was not so much mini as minikin.
“Miss Freeman not in today?” asked Ellen.
“She’s in with Mr Wood,” said the girl, “waiting for you. Oh, and there’s a message for you. Would you ring Mr Nicholson – I’ve got his number.”
She telephoned Mark.
He said: “Thought I’d let you know. I’ve been fired.”
“Oh, but...”
“They can’t be doing with alcoholic carto
graphers. Can’t rely on me to get the contours right.”
“Mark.” It was all she could say.
“Anyway, it leaves my hands free. I’ve got myself a car, and I’m going to see this thing through.”
“Highways and byways of Wales?”
“No. The byways of David Parr’s mind. Ellen, if you want me – you find anything, hear of anything – I’ll be at the Pride of the Valley. Or if I’m not actually in residence, I’ll leave word with Mr Owen.” He hesitated, then said: “I hope you’ll drop in and say hello, in any case. If you can find time between the Chateaubriand and the Brie.”
Ellen said: “Good luck. Happy hunting.”
“You haven’t said you’ll see me.”
“I...I’ll see you.”
She went into Alec Wood’s office.
Alec got up and came round his desk. His curry-khaki worsted jacket with its four tight buttons and his crampingly slimline trousers would have stimulated awed comment and some complex bardic improvisations in Abermadoc. “Ah,” he cried, “here we are, here we are. Miss Tastebud of 1970.”
Fiona was sitting beside the desk with her long sleek legs crossed. Her hair was more golden than Ellen remembered it, crimped into tight little pipings like some tubular segments from a child’s plastic construction kit. Her eyelids shimmered violet; her eyes, teeth and lips sparkled, and even when you thought what a synthetic contrivance it all was you could see why men – older men especially – found her so vivid and irresistible. She was so unequivocally there.
She smiled an ominously matey smile at Ellen.
Alec said: “You’re doing a grand job, duckie. Seriously, a grand job. Ready for the next lap?”
“Ready when Dulcie is,” said Ellen.
“There’s been a slight change of plan. Technical circumstances – or, rather, emotional circumstances – beyond our control.”
Ellen waited for the worst.
“Dear Dulcie,” Fiona contributed. “A crise. You know how it is. Emotional hoo-ha, as Alec says. We all have one now and then, but hers is the big family economy size, with the all-time disaster filling. But disaster, I kid you not. I’ve seen him. Poor dear, she’ll get over it. I mean, we all do, or what’s it all about? But she’s off her food, so she’d be a fat lot of good as a second-string gastronome. Just wasting away, as of Friday night.”