by Helen Harris
‘Which do you think would be nicer?’ I asked him. ‘Boureki or Katafia?’
‘Boureki,’ he said trenchantly. ‘The Katafia looks like Shredded Wheat.’
‘What are you having?’ I asked him.
He studied the cake tray, which stood a little way away on the counter. ‘You know what I’d like?’ he said. Then he turned to me. ‘I’d like it if you felt like coming home with me tonight.’
He said it so lightly; it did not seem a great deal to ask. I said, ‘OK.’
Rob blushed ferociously. ‘Shit, do you really mean that?’ he said.
And I was so drunk on my bravado, I nodded blithely and I said yes.
Inside the front door of his flat, we didn’t draw things out. We didn’t drink drinks or play music. We went straight into his bedroom. And in the morning, I remember, the curtains in the living room greeted us already wide open, because we had not gone in there to draw them the night before.
Only in the museum, things have hardly changed over the past year. I still sit at the Enquiries Desk and snub tourists. I still spend the intolerably long afternoons proof-reading catalogues and writing little captions to illustrations which are then utterly rewritten by Mr Charles. Mary-Anne and I still flick magazines on our knees and gossip and have depressed lunches together in the canteen. But my museum colleagues soon noticed that life outside had changed for me. Even at the beginning, Rob didn’t often come to the museum to collect me; when I finished work, he was usually still writing. But he did come once or twice and on one of those early occasions, Milton spotted us leaving.
The next day, he said to me in the canteen, ‘Hah, I saw you with that writer.’
‘Did you now?’ I replied gaily.
‘Indeed I did! And I thought to myself, “Why’s that young lady been trying to lead me up the garden path, I wonder? Showin’ him round the museum a short while back and pretendin’ she didn’t even know him?”’
‘But I didn’t then!’
‘And now he comes hanging round here waitin’ to walk you home? Isn’t that the funniest thing?’
‘Milton!’ I protested. ‘I wasn’t pretending. Really, I’ve only just got to know him now.’ I added cockily – why is it that people who’ve recently fallen in love always think they’re so clever? – ‘He seems an extremely interesting person.’
‘Oh yes?’ said Milton. ‘What’s he researching now, then? A romance?’
Mary-Anne’s reaction was more spiteful. I did actually tell her what had happened since we spend all day together and, from a shortage of entertainment, we tend to tell each other most things.
‘Oh, no!’ she burst out. ‘Oh, I don’t believe it! Another good woman bites the dust.’
She scrutinized me carefully. ‘What is it? The irresistible lure of the lemming? The heady vertigo of the cliff-edge?’
‘Mary-Anne,’ I said irritably, ‘before you go on, I like him.’
‘Of course you bloody like him, more’s the pity. That’s nine-tenths of the problem. Listen, petal, let me tell you something, as someone who also likes you. Believe me, that is the very worst kind of man.’
‘You don’t even know him!’
‘I’ve seen enough. Believe the words of the wise old woman. That man is your classic “dark handsome stranger”. Otherwise known as a common or garden bastard. He’ll offer you sweets and then he’ll take you away and he’ll eat you.’
‘Oh, you think all men are monsters!’
‘But, my honey-child, they are! Well, go your own sweet way, if you must – but, mark my words, I’ll be around to see you regret it. Christ, why are we all so self-destructive?’
Mary-Anne’s dislike of Rob has not let up all year. Of late, she has hit on a new approach: ‘You always looked so blissful at the beginning,’ she said to me musingly last week. ‘I thought, OK, let’s wait and see what happens when the first flush wears off. Well, if I’m not mistaken, it’s certainly paling now, isn’t it? You’ve started to look positively downtrodden sometimes, you know. Are you still sure he’s – ha – ha – Mister Right?’
I tried to laugh her off. I pretended to be indignant. ‘Mary-Anne!’ I exclaimed. ‘Don’t you think that’s a bit presumptuous?’
‘I haven’t hit a sore spot, have I?’ she responded. ‘Don’t tell me you have found warts on Mister Wonderful?’
I told Rob once, a few months ago, about Mary-Anne’s campaign against him. He thought the whole thing was hilariously funny. ‘That frigid female!’ he scoffed. ‘That loopy lesbian.’ He has met Mary-Anne once or twice and he found her gruesome. He said she belonged in a nut-house or in a nunnery. He didn’t like to think of me sitting next to her all day long in case some of her nutty notions started to rub off on me. I tried suggesting to him that women of my age who are nutty the way Mary-Anne is are casualties of the battle won by his generation; they made access to women’s bodies so free and easy, and for women like Mary-Anne that freedom is frightening.
‘You mean they want to bring back purdah and chastity belts?’
‘Rob –’
‘Am I being unfair?’
When he had finished laughing at the expense of the prudes, ball-breakers and lesbians, he made one of his characteristically ‘free and easy’ remarks which, although it was doubtless intended as a joke too, upset me no end. ‘Of course, if you’re ever tempted to give anything piquant like that a try, Alison, you know that’s OK by me.’
So much for my first pathetic attempt at doing my own thing. I am really beginning to wonder what I have let myself in for. Mrs Alicia Queripel does not seem to be a particularly nice person. She had certainly gone to a lot of trouble for my visit last Sunday, tidying her horrid house and preparing the most ghastly lurid tea-table. But considering all the efforts she had gone to, she didn’t seem especially pleased to have me there. I got the feeling in fact that she didn’t like me. Or perhaps she didn’t know what to make of me, which was, I suppose, rather how I felt about her. She cross-questioned me ferociously and she didn’t seem to think much of my answers. I let her find out about Rob. I had thought this over. I decided that while it ought to be quite possible, for a time, to keep Mrs Queripel a secret from Rob, it would not be nearly as easy to keep Rob a secret from Mrs Queripel. First of all, she would want to know who I lived with. We wouldn’t have such a great deal to talk about otherwise, and in any case I guessed that she would be avidly interested. I guessed too that she would also be intensely disapproving but, apart from a moment’s affected pursed-lipped primness, she more or less wasn’t. In fact, she grew quite keen to find out about him and for a minute or two, it almost felt as if we were going to settle down together like two old gossips and juicily discuss the idiosyncracies of our menfolk. I only remembered in the nick of time that, of course, her husband was dead.
Mrs Queripel said one thing which set me thinking. In an effort to distract her attention from Rob, I asked her if the man with the twisted nose had been her husband. She gave me the most grandly theatrical answer. Sitting up quite straight, as though our conversation had now moved to higher matters, she said, ‘He was my life.’ I was duly impressed, but I didn’t like to question her any further. Only, cycling home, I thought some more about the words she had used and in the silly way that one might, I found myself wondering if I would ever one day say such a thing about Rob.
I gave Rob a Kashmiri papermâché letter-rack and a carved ivory Indian paper-knife for his birthday. I once read an article in a women’s magazine, I remember, which said that the true art of present giving lay in not trying to give someone something in which they are interested. The theory was that if a man is interested in fishing, he will know that you have bought him slightly the wrong rod. If a man is an India buff, he will know that you have bought him second rate papiermâché and a knife which isn’t really ivory. The article said that the solution was to continue to give the most traditional presents – silk ties and handkerchiefs and leather wallets – for they will always give pleasure.<
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We made love rather quickly on his birthday morning; I had to go off to work. When Rob was recovering beside me, I made him laugh by saying, ‘Many Happy Returns!’ Then I got out of bed and brought him his presents from the back of the wardrobe.
‘Ooh,’ he said. ‘Presents!’ He wasn’t quite recovered yet. He held them on his chest and looked at them. ‘Last year,’ he said drowsily, ‘you were my birthday present.’
Why does he always get that kind of thing wrong? I told him, ‘It happened the week before your birthday.’
‘Did it?’ he said. ‘I must have been in a hurry.’
He fingered my presents. ‘You always go in for such fancy wrapping.’
For a desolate moment, I wanted to snatch them away from him. I already knew they would be an anti-climax and I didn’t want to watch him open them. When I came back from the bathroom, he was holding them, still unwrapped, and looking at them blearily. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said. ‘I like them.’
‘Last year was better, though?’ I said mischievously and we got over the disappointment with that little joke.
When I came back from work, Rob was still writing. He stayed shut in so late that I started to get angry. I was going to make him a special meal for his birthday, but I couldn’t begin cooking until I knew when he would be ready to eat. At last, after nine o’clock, he came out of his study. He didn’t look very pleased. By now, I have been taught that there is one thing you must never do and that is ask how the writing went. So I said, as casually as I could, ‘At last! I was starving.’
‘You should have eaten without me,’ Rob said. ‘We don’t live in a feudal society, you know.’
‘And left you a slice of birthday cake with a single candle?’
‘Oh, cut it out, Alison! Birthdays aren’t such a big deal, you know that.’
‘If I’d known you felt that way, I wouldn’t have bought – listen – smoked trout pâté and steak and the cheesecake you like with kiwi fruit topping.’
He relented a bit while we were eating and told me that he had had a very bad day’s writing because he was so conscious all the time that it was his thirty-fifth birthday and by now he should have done better. I tried to use his kind of language; I told him that was ridiculously careerist. He didn’t seem to hear that I was imitating him, but he didn’t take much notice either.
After dinner, he was still restless. Although it was late for a weekday, he wanted to go out and see a late-night film. By the time we got back, we were both exhausted. Rob had another drink or two and fell asleep straight afterwards. But I lay awake beside him for a long time, thinking, and in the small hours I grew quite resentful, because why should I be lying awake, unsettled, when Rob was the one who claimed to be having a crisis?
*
‘He courted me for two years, you know,’ said Alicia. ‘He courted me, like the perfect gentleman, from the day I joined his company. He was an actor-manager. Do you know what that means? He took all the leading roles and it was also his company. I came to audition one season when they were playing at the Adelphi. I’ll never forget that day; being called forward to the front of the stage and suddenly seeing that beautiful face beyond the footlights. My breath caught in my throat. And that exquisite voice called up, “Can you sing something for us, Miss Evans?” A distinguished voice, like the radio news. A shiver ran down my spine when I heard it. And I was stuck up there, in front of everybody, going hot and cold, and tongue-tied. But I found a strength I didn’t know I had in me and I pulled myself together. I said, “Certainly, sir,” and I held my head up high and I clasped my hands and I gave them, “Early One Morning” for all I was worth. Best singing performance of my life, Leonard used to rib me later. Because I wasn’t by training a singer. Only, in those days, in a company that size, you had to be ready to turn your hand to anything. “If the manager can tune the paino,” Leonard used to say to us, “then you can take your turn at mending costumes.” There was a little pause when I had finished and I remember thinking my singing must have ruined my chances. But the voice called again from beyond the footlights, “Thank you, Miss Evans. Please wait on one side till afterwards,” and I knew I was in. That was the phrase which let you know whether or not you’d been accepted, you see. If they asked you to wait on one side, you knew you were all right. I remember the jealousy in the dressing-room afterwards. There were always plenty of hopefuls at an audition and, in those days, if you didn’t get a part, the chances were you didn’t get any dinner either. So some of the girls said the part wasn’t up to much and some of them said it wasn’t much of a company anyway. But I didn’t take a blind bit of notice because, inside me, my heart was singing. I had seen a vision of my future happiness on the other side of the footlights.
‘Leonard was thirty-seven when I first set eyes on him and I was barely twenty-one. How I looked up to him! Between you and me, I was dreadfully worried at first that he might be already married and I would have to pine in vain. Well, he wasn’t. But everyone said he would never marry; he was wedded to the theatre. His company certainly was everything to him. He was a marvellous manager although, my word, how he drove us. Because he didn’t spare himself, because he gave each production his all, he expected everyone else to do likewise. He could be a terrible taskmaster. But, for the most part, we gave willingly. There was the occasional bad apple. But my first run, believe me, I worked like a Trojan. I couldn’t do enough to please him. It was only a small part really – I had to come on and sing a little song and strew some flowers. I was supposed to be a sylph, I believe – but I did it as though my life depended on it. And I made myself useful, did all the little extra jobs which needed to be done. I knew I hadn’t escaped Leonard’s attention. But I didn’t have ideas above my station at that stage. I was quite content just to worship him from afar. Leonard was far too discreet ever to show that he felt anything for me too. He had impeccable manners. He kept his distance. I might never have suspected anything if he hadn’t made his move. Sometimes I think he was doubly distant with me in the early days just so that no one should suspect his feelings. But I was happy there. I used to get up humming every morning and dress myself to the nines when it was time to go off to the theatre. I was enjoying myself so much, I kept worrying what would happen when the run was over. I couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing him again, and then came the bombshell. When the run was over, Leonard asked me to join the company.
‘They were two beautiful years. We travelled together up and down the country. We played up. North and in the summer we played on the South Coast. We spent hours and hours on trains and we stayed in dreary boarding-houses. Half the time, the theatres were cold and uncomfortable. But, believe me, those years were blissful. From the moment Leonard asked me to join the company, naturally everything changed between us. I was no longer a bird of passage, just filling in for a summer season. He began to give me better parts. Of course, that led to jealousy. There was I, the newcomer, getting the choicest morsels. It wasn’t long before some of the company started to suspect what was afoot. Some of them made remarks. Not that Leonard was ever indiscreet. He only very gradually gave any indication of what he felt for me. One night, I remember, it was shortly before Christmas, he had bouquets delivered to all the ladies. We had just finished a run and everyone was pleased with the box office. Beautiful bouquets they were, with roses and ferns, but only mine had a note hidden deep in the flowers. Would Miss Evans care for tea with Mr Queripel on Sunday afternoon?
‘I can remember every moment. He collected me on the dot of three from the boarding-house where I was staying. He had on a heavy overcoat because it was bitter, but a flower in his buttonhole. To me, he looked like a film star. We walked around the empty shopping streets in the centre of Manchester; we didn’t mind the cold. That year we were lucky; we’ve been in some dreadful places at Christmas. At last, when we couldn’t stand the cold any more, he took me into the smartest tea-room that was open in Manchester and he ordered the most splendid tea. Of
course, I was so nervous I could barely swallow a mouthful. Not that I wasn’t hungry; those theatrical landladies usually didn’t feed you properly. But I only had eyes for Leonard – or Mr Queripel, as I still called him then of course – and I’m afraid I didn’t do justice to his beautiful spread.
‘“Why, Miss Evans,” he said to me, “you eat like a bird.”
‘And I, who could usually put away enough to feed a family in those days, I blushed to the roots of my hair.
‘“Ah,” Leonard said, “but no bird ever blushed as prettily as that!”
‘From Manchester, I think we went on to Leeds and from Leeds to Newcastle. It was a hard winter. In Newcastle, the whole company was laid low with the Spanish flu and for four nights, imagine, we had to close the theatre. I remember I was staying in one of the most miserable boarding-houses on that tour, run by a terrible woman called O’Riley, and I was so poorly and sorry for myself that I just lay in bed and cried from home-sickness. One afternoon, there was a knock at the door and, without waiting for an answer – which anyway she wouldn’t have got – in marched Mrs O’Riley. She was a tall, bony woman with black hair done up in a towering bun. Her face was like thunder, but she was carrying a giant bunch of flowers, like this, at arm’s length, as though they might do her an injury. “A gentleman’s brought these for you,” she said shortly. I remember, I looked up at her all tearfully and I felt so dizzy and feverish, I couldn’t think for a moment who she might mean. Then I realized that, of course, it must be Leonard and my lonely heart leapt up.
‘“Is there a note?” I asked her.
‘“A note?” she snorted. “There’s a card of sorts and the gentleman himself is waiting downstairs in my front room to be told if you’re willing to see him.”
‘Willing to see him? Well, of course, I didn’t want Leonard to come up and see me looking such a fright. But, on the other hand, I didn’t want him to think I was sending him away because I didn’t want to see him. And I felt so low, I would have given anything for company.