He’d forgotten Daisy’s jealousy of Louisa and Louisa’s silence about her – except for that letter of condolence. He suddenly found himself crumpling into an account of Daisy’s long illness and her death, and how a week before she died her hair seemed to be golden again, as it had been when she was a girl and how her colour came back. The tear fell and slipped into the corner of his mouth.
‘And you still live in that big house?’ Louisa said.
He recovered.
‘No, we moved into a smaller place five years ago, when I retired.’
Louisa approved of the smaller house. ‘That was wise, I’m sure.
‘How do you manage by yourself?’ she said without concern. ‘Who looks after you?’
He had not come to talk to Louisa about this, but since his wife’s death he had taken to rambling on to local people in the shops, even in the street where he lived, to anyone, about the bemusing novelty of his new life. He could not stop himself. Grief had made him novel, and he called himself ‘you’.
‘You get up in the morning,’ he was saying to Louisa, ‘if you don’t forget to set the alarm the night before, and you go down and potter about in the blessed kitchen, so to speak, getting a cup of tea, and you start taking it upstairs and then you stop: you see, you can have your tea where you like, upstairs or down, and you look into the refrigerator to see what is there – sometimes things smell, go wrong. You don’t cook much, you fry something perhaps, there’s no decent restaurant near where we live. You forget things – don’t lay the table. The laundry’s the bother – a girl comes in, but these girls never clean properly and’ (suddenly making a face) ‘her husband has a van or something, they’re up all night dancing at clubs, gambling by the sound of it, bingo or whatever they call it, some such name. Can’t make a bed. Comes when she thinks she will.’ And, with passion, ‘No idea how to brush a carpet.’
Andrews frowned at the wall.
The gingery young man next door had turned up the volume on his record-player and the music came whirling through the wall like a typhoon that blew through his clothes into his skin. It thumped and twanged and swirled in sounds nasal and self-pitying, men groaning, girls screaming their skirts off. He held up his hand to stop the noise. Raising his voice as if to order it to stop he said, embarrassed, ‘Her husband knocks her about: she showed me the bruises on her leg and on her shoulder: “Look at these bruises, they come up black and blue in the night,” right up her bare leg,’ he said. ‘These young people laugh. I don’t know what the idea is.
‘I’ve got to get rid of that girl!’ He was shouting again. For the moment he was addressing Daisy, the town, the world, and he looked startled when he saw Louisa again.
‘Girls are hard to get,’ Louisa said placidly. ‘Sarah can’t get anyone.’
‘I’ve got to get away, sell the house,’ he said. ‘I was saying to Sarah a town like this would suit me,’ he said. ‘A blow from the sea.’
‘Houses are expensive here,’ she said in her bookkeeping voice. ‘You’d better stay where you are. You’d miss your children.’
‘They’ve got their own lives,’ he said. And he made his message clear to her. ‘One thing I’ve learned is that you can’t live in the past.’
They had been standing, but now she sat down at the table while he went back to the armchair. She had loosened her overcoat, as if to let out the woman in her, but she held on to the handbag standing on the table. The music had stopped strangling the air but it had fallen into long hiccuping passages of monotonous indifferent drumming. The sound was like the sound of the wheels of the train when he had come up in the morning and when the trees had looked girlish in the fields and he had imagined her as she used to be, before the quarrel – a friend, more intelligent than poor Daisy had been. He had looked out of the window of the train, once just in time to catch sight of a wide estuary where the sailing boats were moored, and in that glimpse of the sea he saw it had lost its air of heaving and grieving at its stored-up deaths. It was waving like a flag. It had struck him when he walked up from the station that the shopping street of the town was full of men and women whose arms and legs had been coiled up in bed with one another all night. Scores of women passed him, women you didn’t know but who might slap your face if you stopped them and explained your situation. Yet, as they hurried by, they seemed to ask you why you didn’t. What could you say? How do you begin it? You have to get to know them – the boredom of that – at his age he hadn’t time for that sort of thing. The one woman he knew was this Louisa – she knew him and he knew her. In a funny sort of way they had had years of marriage in the office.
In the room he was arguing with the drumming, which went on and on, and he was even tapping his foot. Louisa looked years away from him at the table. The crowds of women in the streets and shops had been too near, too sudden, but the distance of Louisa made him stop tapping his foot. He crossed his legs and felt the imposing stillness of a desire that he had never felt before. Desire in a cheap place like this!
He said, in an unnaturally high voice, going back to what he had already said, ‘Sarah looks well, and so do you.’
‘Thank you,’ said Louisa. ‘She is.’
‘You must have a lot to do, running this place,’ he said. ‘She said you were full-up.’
‘I believe she is,’ said Louisa. ‘Everything in the town gets full-up in the holidays. I don’t live here, you know,’ she said with a small condescending laugh.
‘I thought you did,’ he said, feeling in his pocket for her letter.
‘No, I’m at the hotel,’ she said. ‘More comfortable. We sold the old house in London when mother died.’
Moved to a hotel! She seemed to leave her distance and come closer to him. As a salesman he had spent so much of his life in hotels. He loved, of course, those great acres of carpets in the grand ones; hotels were palaces of pleasure and money. Their very upholstery sent messages of erotic sensation when one touched it. Even in the small hotel – in a town like this – the guests, the waiters, the servants and the clerks, were like figures in a dream as they walked silently from room to room. When telephones rang they carried voices from another world. One became a dream oneself.
‘I was going to say,’ he said, showing his new admiration of her worth, ‘that this place did not seem like you.’
And he waved disparagingly at the furniture.
‘You’ve done what I ought to do.’ He shouted for a third time decisively at the music. ‘Are you at the George?’ he challenged. ‘Don’t tell me you’re at the George!’ He laughed. ‘I had lunch there today. Very comfortable. Good fish. I didn’t see you!
He uncrossed his legs and felt himself become a wonder.
‘No,’ she said, smiling at him mischievously: her first real smile. ‘I’m up the hill near the church. The Clarence. Quieter. More select.’
‘Sea view?’ he said greedily.
‘Of course – every room – and a nice garden.’
It was yet another principle of his never to be at a loss. He pulled a list of local hotels from his pocket.
‘Yes, here it is. The Clarence, thirty-seven rooms, all with sea view.’
Louisa said, ‘Forty-five pounds a day. With bath. Service and VAT not included. Weekly terms.’
‘That’s right,’ said Andrews. And, congratulating her: ‘Pricey.’
‘Not for what you get,’ she said.
The Browders had been a poor skimping family, carefully putting money away. Extraordinary. Louisa must have saved a lot to be staying in an hotel like the Clarence.
‘Why don’t we have dinner there tonight? Let me buy you dinner,’ he said grandly.
‘I can’t do that, Morton,’ she said.
‘Or at the George,’ he said, ‘if you want a change. Funny thing about the George – they have got that carpet, like the one I sold when we were at Brighton years ago, one of our lines, the Demeter Floral – chocolate and flowers. You remember it I’m sure. Chrysanthemums in an urn.’
He
laughed eagerly.
‘It will be just like old times.’
Louisa frowned at that.
‘Morton, I’m not staying at the Clarence. I’m not a guest. I work there in the office. We’re very busy. I’ve got to go in a minute and see about the dinners. Twelve Germans have just booked in. That was reception ringing up when you were talking to Sarah.’
Louisa diminished in his eyes. He gaped.
‘Working there? Did you say working?’ said Andrews. He was offended with her because he had made a mistake. He turned on the boy next door. ‘I wish Sarah would make that boy stop his infernal noise. You can’t hear what anyone says.’
Louisa frowned at him.
‘Oh that! That’s Peter, my step-son, he’s working for his exams. He always puts his record-player on when he’s working. I’m used to it, I suppose, but it gets on his father’s nerves. That’s why we send Peter down here to Sarah’s, but he eats with us at the hotel. When you run a hotel you have to put the guests first.’
‘Step-son?’ he said.
The air seemed to go out of his lungs with a whistle and his voice went up high as a boy’s, and she seemed to him to jump up and down, like a film gone wrong, between floor and ceiling.
‘I am a step-mother,’ she pronounced, as one who was equipped with a two-fisted power.
Andrews felt himself clamped between the arms of the narrow chair. His mouth was left open with no words in it, a foolish red hole he could not close. It seemed to him that she was not one woman but had become part of the general chorus of women he had seen in the streets of the town, impersonally swinging their handbags and lugging their shopping bags, taunting him with their indifference. In his bewilderment he lost all sense of time as he often did through living alone, and was on the point of saying aloud ‘Daisy will have a fit when I tell her this.’
He recovered enough to say, ‘I don’t believe you.’
A rival widower had stolen a march on him! There was also the affront that, as a former employee and office possession, she had not consulted him first.
He felt in his pocket for her letter, which lately he had taken to carrying about, as a kind of invoice. He took it out and, putting on his glasses, read it. Looking over the top of his glasses he said, ‘You didn’t say you were married here.’
It was signed with her maiden name.
‘I wasn’t married then,’ she said, formally. ‘Mr Forrester and I were married last year – when his divorce came through.’
Louisa fattened with pride when she threw out the word ‘divorce’. She was conveying that she was not a consoling nurse or frustrated spinster, fit only for an enfeebled widower. She was not a victim! She had attracted a man so much that he had divorced his wife. There was a note of rebuke in this: what had Andrews done for her? Casually she dropped the subject.
‘My husband manages the Clarence. We belong to a chain.’ The word ‘chain’ enlarged her importance. ‘So does the George. When we are full up we can always send people down there.’
Andrews could manage only a faint sarcasm.
‘You seem to own the town,’ he said.
Not leaving the matter there she pretended to be hurt. ‘I don’t know why you are so surprised, Morton. Actually you have met my husband.’
He was in the dock, accused. As coolly as he could he said: ‘Met him? I don’t think I have – where – what is his name?’
‘The same as mine,’ she said. ‘Forrester. Jack Forrester.’
He felt in his pocket again, but gave up.
‘I don’t remember any Forrester,’ he said.
‘Oh, Morton!’ she said archly. ‘Think! Brighton! June ’74. The trade exhibition. When you got that big contract for Demeter Floral. You remember that, I’m sure.’
There they were, bang in the middle of their quarrel. Surely, after all these years, she was not going to drag that up?
‘I remember I pulled off a £10,000 order,’ he boasted.
He could at any rate dismiss her marriage.
‘I am not talking about carpets,’ she said between her teeth. Her eyes, which were made larger by her glasses, seemed to him to be rummaging into their working life together, as if it were a waste. A question was in her eyes, idly put there to gratify some private vanity.
He was not going to be fool enough, in his present situation, to gratify that.
He knew the stare was unforgiving, that she might force her question upon him. He had smoothed away all his memories of that incomprehensible time at Brighton but now he remembered going back to the hotel where they had been staying, and that she had been waiting in the foyer for him. He remembered her saying with excitement, ‘Did you bring it off?’ And he had said, ‘Let’s get out of this.’ They had crossed the street to the promenade, and he remembered the long, gaudy, floodlit sea front with the flags flying from the hotels and from the tall lamp standards and how the lights had blacked out all sight of the sea. The front was like a stage set: the crowd looked clownish as they passed from lamp to lamp. She had put her arm on his as he talked about his success. Usually at trade exhibitions they dined at the hotel with people in the trade and early in the evening she left him with the men, but this night she had persuaded him to celebrate at a restaurant. They drank a glass or two of champagne and then they dawdled back to the hotel, and she had circumspectly taken her pinching hand from his arm as they went across the foyer to the lift; but there she held his arm again and squeezed it as they went up to their floor. At the door of her room, rather embarrassingly, she had kept him talking, her voice getting quieter. Her fingers pretended to pick a piece of cotton from the lapel of his jacket.
‘Come in for a minute,’ she mumbled, as if she were eating. And there was an eating look in her eyes.
Andrews had been startled. He remembered thinking he ought not to have let her drink champagne. He had looked at his watch and said: ‘Good God! Do you know what time it is? I haven’t rung Daisy yet to tell her the news. I’m late.’
It was then he saw her face turn and there had been a twist of anger on it. It became suddenly hard, empty-eyed, like a mask of brass in the sick yellow light of the hotel corridor as he said good night in a fatherly way and went down to his own room at the end of the corridor. He was surprised that she banged her door. He was glad: he couldn’t sit up half the night with her talking about the troubles of the Browder family.
But the next day! Andrews had never been able to tell his wife what happened on the second evening. Daisy wouldn’t have believed him. She would have shouted triumphantly that she had ‘known it’ for years. That evening contained a lump of his history, so heavy in his mind, so entangled in outrage and the inadmissible desire he had never recognised, that he had succeeded in locking it out of memory. Now, talking to this married Louisa, in this miserable little villa by the sea, every fragment of it came alive again.
The day after their ‘celebration’, Louisa was late at the firm’s stand at the show. Not surprisingly, she had a headache. He told her to go and lie down. He himself was so taken up with the details of his sale that he didn’t get back to his own room at the hotel until seven in the evening. When he got there the telephone was ringing. That pest Sarah! The Browder family up in arms! Where was Louisa? Sarah said she had been ringing all day. Their mother was ill again. Dying, of course. Old Mrs Browder was said to be dying in every call Sarah had made for years. Louisa must come home at once. If she did go, there was never anything wrong with Mrs Browder.
To cut Sarah short, he had said, ‘I’m sure she’s in her room. There must be some mistake. I’ll go and see.’
And he did go and knocked and knocked at the door, for he could hear voices. He heard a man’s voice call, ‘Who the hell is that? Tell him to go away.’
Louisa came to the door in a yellow dressing-gown – very yellow.
‘It’s only Mr Andrews,’ she called back to a red-haired man who came out of the bathroom, saying, ‘Tell him to buzz off and mind his own business.’
The man had a necktie in his hand and was barefooted. The scene had been so incredible to Andrews that he had scarcely recognised Louisa. He could not now remember if he said anything to her, but he congratulated himself on remembering the exact words he had said to the man: ‘I am addressing my secretary. Her mother is very ill.’
‘I’ll ring Sarah later, Mr Andrews’ was all Louisa said. ‘She’s always checking up on me.’
And she had shut the door in his face.
Even then he did not believe what he had seen. He went to his room. He rang Sarah and in a muddled way said first that Louisa was asleep and then that she was with friends.
‘That’s a lie,’ said Sarah. ‘She’s with you. I can hear her. Do you think I don’t know what’s going on between you?’
Andrews had had enough of the Browders. He lost his temper.
‘If you want to know, she’s picked up some man in the bar,’ he said.
Sarah astounded him by laughing.
‘That will stop you messing about, won’t it? I’ve always been sorry for your wife.’
Now, in Sarah’s house, with the old Browders looking at him from their photograph on the mantelpiece, he saw Louisa was waiting for him to speak.
‘You told Sarah you had met him,’ she said. ‘It was not very nice of you, Morton. He is my husband now, so really, you see, it might be awkward to have dinner with you. Really I don’t think this town would suit you, do you? And now I must go and you must catch your train. Sarah’s taking me to the Clarence and she’ll drop you at the station. Was there anything else you wanted to ask me?’
‘Nothing,’ he said.
The handle of the door moved. Sarah, he guessed, had been listening at the door, for in she came and said, ‘Now then, Louisa, your husband’s rung again.’
In the car Louisa said to Sarah, ‘Tell Peter to remember to put on a tie if he’s coming up to dinner.’
Nothing more was said.
Andrews watched her go into the Clarence, of course – but nothing, nothing, nothing, the wheels of the train hammered, like Sarah’s voice, as he was carried back to London. Passing the estuary in the dusk he saw the boats were flying no pennants and no flags.
A Careless Widow and Other Stories Page 7