‘Splendid,’ he said. ‘When shall we meet? Shall I take you to lunch? Yes, that would be best. Why don’t you come straight here from Waterloo? We’ll have coffee and decide what to do with the afternoon.’
‘Yes, lovely,’ she assented. ‘I thought I might find something for the children in Selfridges, if we’ve got time …’
‘Louise, I really want you to see the Sickert exhibition. You can do your shopping in Lymington.’
‘The trouble is, they like these electronic games.’
‘I should have thought Philip could have supplied those.’
‘Yes, isn’t it funny? He says he has enough of them at work, he doesn’t want to hear them at home. That’s why it’s so difficult. And they’ve already got their bikes …’
‘Louise, I’ll have to ring off. I’ve got a visitor. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘All right, dear.’ He was softened, as always, by her mild endearment. Such pliancy, such docility! It was at times like these that he remembered why he had so nearly married her, and why in the end he had decided not to. Perhaps there was no need to marry her. The relationship had always lacked urgency, even at the beginning. They had felt like two members of an endangered species, huddling together for mutual protection. And even after all these years something of that feeling remained.
He put the receiver back on its rest, and turned to the sofa, where Katy Gibb continued to watch him calmly.
‘Another busy day tomorrow,’ he said, again with that awful note of jocularity. He was wondering whether he would ever get rid of her.
‘So you won’t be around again,’ she observed. ‘What a pity. Never mind. I might give Moira a ring. Have you got her number?’
He wrote it down for her, watched her insert the piece of paper into the pocket of her rather too tight jeans. ‘Well …’ he said.
‘You want me to go,’ she stated. She made it sound ungracious, as perhaps it was. ‘I had hoped we could talk a few things through. About my plans, and so on. But it’s okay; another time.’
Having posed this interesting proposition she got to her feet, twiddled her fingers dismissively, and walked to the door.
‘Plans?’ he said. ‘That sounds most interesting. You must tell me more.’
Her answer was to twiddle her fingers again, and to leave. There was something inexorable about her departure. He felt as if he had been dismissed.
His evening was discordant. She had made it appear that she needed his co-operation in some way, or that she was about to divulge some information about herself which would make it imperative for him to approve the plans of which she had spoken. But what were her plans? And why had he not probed a little further? There was precious little to go on so far, only her vaguely asserted intention of starting up her own business. But her own business doing what? As far as he could see she was disastrously unqualified, and, in addition, the business and commercial worlds were in the grip of a recession which some were calling a slump. Who would put up the money (which she had said she needed) for a dubious enterprise based on some bogus import from California? No matter how many credulous people she might attract, the whole idea was shaky, evanescent. She would need premises; she would need staff. He shook his head. Even with the most magnanimous of sponsors he did not see how it could be done.
Of course, it was all nonsense, he thought later, as he was preparing for bed. There would be no sponsors and no money; he ought to have seen this before. And she had no money of her own; that much was clear even from so short an acquaintance. Her presence in the Dunlops’ flat was unexplained and was likely to become a problem, if it had not already turned into one. The memory of the twenty pounds he had handed over to Hipwood made him curse under his breath. None of this had anything to do with him! He only wanted the freedom to enjoy the rest of his life, or whatever of it was left. That was what he had wanted so passionately when he was young, when he was younger than that girl. But then he remembered how it had been to be so hemmed in and frustrated, and realised that the girl—whom he still thought of as the girl—was probably enduring the same restrictions as those which now came back to him with astonishing force. Young people, he thought, should not be so confined; it did them no good in later life. All at once he felt a powerful sympathy for the girl, marooned in that alien flat, and unable to get out of it, and with nowhere else to go.
For himself he felt only sadness, the sadness that seemed to hover like a shadow over the end of every day. To be young, to start again! But this time to be different, to be selfish, to be obdurate! One paid a heavy price for behaving well. This freedom of his was illusory, based on honourable retirement, it was true, but a poor facsimile of the real thing, which belonged to the fleet of foot, the light of heart. And it was too late even to feel anger, he thought, for anger had turned to sorrow. He felt such a constriction of the heart that he thought he might weep. Without Putnam, or even the office, to restore his self-respect, he was lost, his life mere boredom. Struck by this realisation he lay wide-eyed for a good part of the night, without a thought for lost rest, but with a desire for change that obliterated or subsumed all other desires, both those he had forgotten and those which burned in his consciousness, as if he were St Antony in the desert. The events of the day seemed to him curiously significant. He thought that they marked some sort of turning point, the true meaning of which would be revealed to him when time had run its course.
5
HALLOA!’ SHOUTED MRS CARDOZO FROM THE front door: her usual greeting. ‘Good morning!’ he shouted back, then went into the kitchen to prepare her coffee. So this was to be retirement, he reflected, tea with this one, coffee with that one, and none of it of his own choosing. But she was a cheerful, if noisy woman; he responded to her cheerfulness, and tried to rise above her outbursts of song and the ribald attitude she chose to take with regard to his puny arrangements. She frequently protested her loyalty to him; he in his turn was unwillingly dependent on her, and submitted with good grace to the half-hour which was set aside for coffee and conversation, although he did not always attend too carefully to what she was saying, having heard most of it before, and able to tune in to any new proposition as and when it came along.
She was married to a hospital porter who was always on the verge of losing his job. The reasons for this were mysterious. Bland had heard, on more than one occasion, an account of the machinations of the department in which he worked, and had tried to disentangle them, but without success. He had met the man once or twice when he had come to collect his wife; he had seemed decent and sensible, if anything more amenable than his riotous partner. Bland had offered to put in a word for him, if a personal reference were ever needed. Mrs Cardozo had dismissed the suggestion out of hand, not, she assured him, because she believed him to be without influence, but because she considered her husband a waste of time, a lost cause, like most men. Her view of Bland, whom she saw as a wealthy ninny, as she did most Englishmen, verged on the irreverent, sometimes the incredulous. Bland had learned to put up with this. Fortunately her contempt was largely reserved for her husband, to whose misdemeanours she alluded at some length. Gusts of laughter concluded this exchange, always the same, after which she would consent to rise from the table, turn on both taps and the radio, and begin her work. Bland, who found her heavy going, and something of a liability, consequently overdid his concern for her well-being. He thought it impolite to leave the flat when she was there, although the noise pursued him from room to room. On days like these he pitted himself against The Times crossword, forcing himself to finish it against the odds: the discipline, he thought, was good for his soul as well as his mind.
Today was to be Louise’s day, so he dressed carefully in his grey suit, mindful of his appearance, as she always was of hers. They had graduated to fine clothes after paltry beginnings, although in those early days in Reading she had always contrived to please him, in her simple blouses and her pleated skirts. She dressed, as he thought, politely, and he, as a man of
his generation and his class, considered politeness a virtue. Her only coquetry was her shining hair, which always had a sweet powdery smell, as if she had just emerged from a warm bathroom. They had met when they were both eighteen; he was a student, just beginning at university, and she was a clerk in the local branch of Lloyds Bank. Greatly daring, he had asked her out one day, and was much encouraged by her placid consent. She had seemed neither alarmed nor intrigued by his invitation, thus conferring on him a feeling of assurance, for he had been more nervous than he had allowed her to see.
She lived at home with her mother, as he did: their lives exactly mirrored each other’s. After that first visit to the cinema, at which decorum prevailed, they had taken to walking together on Sunday afternoons, which they soon agreed was more enjoyable. Her life was an open book to him, as his was to her; the thought had early occurred to him that he might marry her. But he was tied to his mother, who was deteriorating rapidly, although at that stage the decline was general, non-specific, and characterised by increasingly sarcastic behaviour and a refusal to do anything for herself that could be undertaken by her son. He sometimes thought that this was deliberate, as indeed it might have been. He was too young, and too inexperienced, to recognise its morbidity.
He remembered with shame his first attempt at hospitality. He had decided to take Louise home to tea, knowing that her excellent manners would protect them both. It was a Sunday afternoon, for by this time they always met on a Sunday, walking if it were fine, going to the cinema if it were wet. His mother, whom he had informed of this event, had declined to honour the occasion with any sort of preparation, had in fact remained in her chair with a quizzical expression, as if Louise were being presented at court. After Louise’s desperate pleasantries had finally petered out, and silence threatened to immolate the entire occasion, his mother had finally given tongue. ‘I hope you can do something with that son of mine,’ she had said. ‘He’s been a baby far too long.’ He had known what she had meant, and blushed. Louise’s hand had stolen into his, and he had loved her for that gesture, and for her simple sturdiness on his behalf. He had thought then, and he still thought even now, that her archetypal simplicity contained seeds of greatness of which she was entirely unconscious.
In fact Louise and he had become lovers some six weeks previously, in a borrowed flat, and for the space of a single afternoon. The event had been mutually satisfactory; they were content to postpone further explorations until they had achieved a better time and place. There had been a simplicity about that too, a lack of urgency which he found more acceptable than the more torrid conception of desire to which his youth entitled him. He was staid by nature, and fortune had provided him with an appropriate partner. She was calm, unflustered by his advances, which she reciprocated with a pleasure which he knew to be real, for she could not dissimulate, and this was another of her very real virtues, more precious to him then than his mother, squinting through her cigarette smoke, could ever appreciate. Since, on that one and only occasion on which they were to meet, it was quite clear that no attempt had been made at hospitality, Louise had said she must leave: her own mother was alone, and she liked to keep her company. Her thanks were profuse, and were lazily accepted, as if a favour had been conferred. He had burned with shame, but there was one consolation: with Louise he would never lose face.
Recklessly he had walked her to her door; recklessly she had invited him in. A small grey-haired woman had greeted them with some astonishment, but had agreed to make tea. She also decided to make them a sponge cake, for which they had to wait in embarrassed silence, while whiskings and whirrings seeped through from the kitchen. But it was a day for embarrassment, which in his mind was always connected with Reading, as if the emotion were Reading’s gift to her sons and daughters. Bland had praised the cake too effusively, and had found himself gazing into a face as calm and as colourless as a nun’s. A small grey eye had viewed him without indulgence. Mrs Wilson, who had drunk no tea herself, had taken the tray back to the kitchen and had stayed there, ostentatiously tactful, or perhaps genuinely indifferent to his presence. Louise had followed her shortly afterwards. Bland heard the words, ‘Is he still here?’ Then Louise returned, looking unhappy; he had taken her hand and kissed her, then, since it was expected of him, he had left. The incidents of that afternoon were never referred to again. To do so would have been to question their status in the world, their very identity. Without words they consoled each other as best they could.
He almost loved her, and would have married her had she been slightly but essentially different. He thought that she probably felt the same about him. Each was too loyal to admit that something else was desired, something less sedate. Louise, for all her placidity was a healthy woman, while he himself was bruised with unassuaged longings. Yet they were undoubted allies. Prepared for disappointment, they nevertheless made the most of their friendship, which became, and had remained, a civilised and affectionate affair, an affair of long walks, teas in distant hotels, discussion of the week’s news. Looking back, Bland found their innocence honourable. In those early days they were able to confess freely to each other their obligations towards their less than accommodating parents. They found comfort in their occasional intimacy. They progressed from the borrowed flat to a small hotel, then to a larger one, and after his mother’s death and his removal to London he had got in touch with her again, thanking her for her kind letter of condolence, and explaining that the events of that last year had been so sad (‘sad’ was the most neutral word he could find) that he had not been in touch, but that he longed to see her again. When could they meet?
By that time he was installed in the flat over Baker Street Station, and their meetings were frequent and easy. They had continued to come together until she had announced that she was getting married. By that time they had both come up in the world, but although free, had become trapped within the framework of their early relationship. They had continued to meet until she removed herself to Lymington and her awful husband. At least he thought of him as awful, having been introduced to him when the three of them met, not entirely by accident, at a concert at the Wigmore Hall. Tall, bony, and already nearly bald, the husband-to-be, a retired doctor, had given him a quasi-professional handshake—brief—but said little. Bland, who had not expected to like him, found him worse than expected, and prepared to wash his hands of the whole affair. But his heart was sore at the prospect of losing Louise, and in the end it had proved impossible to break the thread that bound them together, time, in this instance, being on their side.
Shortly after their son was born the husband had become some sort of an invalid, and had eventually died. This had not affected Louise unduly: by that time she had a son, a house, and a social position. He supposed that she had always been conventional by nature, for which he did not blame her; he was conventional himself. When a daily nanny was installed she resumed her visits to London. There was little love-making by this time, although no opportunity was wasted. She was quite calm about this, suffered, or appeared to suffer, no guilt. Curious, he had questioned her. ‘After all,’ she had replied, ‘I knew you before I ever met Denis.’ He was given to understand that this, in her eyes, validated an affaire which had never, technically, been an infidelity. Women, he thought, were sometimes more ingenious than men.
And ever since, the telephone calls had continued, still banal, but with a deep peace about them which comforted them both. Each, by this time, felt related to the other, bound by a common inheritance. The calls were perhaps more satisfying than the occasional meetings: their conversations were by now so schematic that they were almost abstract, each pursuing a familiar line of thought. In a way he loved her still, could not imagine her out of his life. Sometimes, when tidying her hair in his bedroom, she said, ‘Shall we?’ But he knew from her rueful smile that her heart was not in it. They had both aged, perhaps prematurely. There was no compulsion now, nor was there any need to explain, to make excuses. When he took her down to c
atch her taxi back to Waterloo his kiss was warm and loving. It was a blessing to him to know that she felt the same.
It had seemed that he could manage without marriage. From this he deduced that he was meant to be solitary, had always remained, and would always remain, the same. Solitude, which occasionally baffled him (how had it come to this?), felt familiar. As he made his way up the social and professional ladder, away from the greater solitude of his youth, he embraced what was probably freedom, or rather liberty, and this, he thought, had always been his greatest wish, his need. Away from his contentious parents, away from his love for Louise, away from modest single-bedroomed flats to his present almost superfluous comfort, in an enviable position, a few minutes from the park, he had embraced each change with ardour, but not, he thought, with satisfaction. The finer rooms, the larger windows, seemed to him part of a predestined flight, in the course of which he had obeyed impulses which he did not appear to generate of his own free will. He failed to supply the enthusiasm which should, ideally, have come from others. Carefully ordering carpets, curtains, wallpapers, he had arrived at a passionless good taste which was tolerable when he returned to it in the evening but oppressed him rather in the light of every day. Now there would be time to spare, and he would have to find some accommodation with his surroundings, or else some new interest to take him away from them, so that after an interval, repeated daily, he could feel once again a mild gratitude that his money had enabled him to live in such easeful splendour.
The internal telephone rang. ‘Mrs Arnold is here, sir,’ announced Hipwood. He approved of Louise, who in her turn knew the ropes. She always had a word with Hipwood, enquiring after his health; she even sent him a Christmas card, although Bland had told her that this was not necessary. She made a point of presenting herself, lest Hipwood should assume the worst. Bland knew that he did this automatically, but it was part of Louise’s curious innocence to believe that it was up to her to make people think well of her. In addition to this, she had, in recent years, taken on the mantle of a country gentlewoman, accustomed to receiving respect and acknowledging the obligation of being gracious in return. Sometimes Bland thought that if she were a little more devious she might be better company, but he knew that nothing would change her now, any more than he could change himself. His very slight boredom, he knew, came from lack of change, and the prospect of the long day ahead, together with their almost formulaic greeting, threatened to depress him. This had been the pattern of their relationship: an atavistic closeness, formed when they themselves were almost embryonic, balanced by a divergence of tastes which the passing years had only emphasised.
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