‘The theatre, though. You said you were a theatre man. Well, so am I a theatre enthusiast. Lavish musicals are very much my line.’ She was happy again, smiling generously at him, gesturing, her eyes dancing about. ‘Musicals,’ repeated Mrs le Tor, ‘and anything historical. And you?’
‘More intimate theatre really.’ He was feeling good. He did not often drink wine. He relaxed in euphoria, seeing Mrs le Tor a little blurred but pleasantly so.
‘Revues and that? How modern of you, Major.’
‘African ballet is what I like. I will travel a long way to see a black ballet.’
‘I do not think I have ever come across the like. You don’t mean the Black and White Minstrel Show?’
Major Eele laughed loudly and poured the rest of the wine.
‘No, I do not mean that. If it were not a bit late I would suggest we went along to an African ballet tonight.’
‘We have come to the end of another bottle. Should we finish up and go together to the corner for a nightcap? Though if you like I will take the African ballet in my stride.’
‘You might not like it, madam.’ Major Eele coughed and giggled, thinking about the man with the flashlight, and the one-bar electric fire to keep the girls from getting cold.
‘Well, what about it? Shall we pay up here and make our way to the upstairs lounge at the corner? I am not a drinking girl myself, but somehow it would pleasantly round off the evening.’
‘Brandy would be nice,’ said Major Eele. ‘Surely these ladies have brandy laid on? Twice I have been out for bottles.’ He banged the table lightly with a spoon, though not as lightly as the Misses Gregory would have wished.
‘Brandy,’ he repeated, speaking to the sister who had served them, who shook her head, reminding him that the café was not licensed.
‘Slip out for half a bottle of a good brew, that we may drink it with our coffee. What do you say, Mrs le Tor?’
She clapped her hands together, playfully admiring his go-ahead ways. ‘Brandy would be lovely,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t the ladies join us over a bottle, Major, since they have laid on such a feast?’
Major Eele heard these casually spoken words and did not much approve of them. He could not say so, since the woman still stood by the table. He said to her:
‘Well, can you get it? Half a bottle of Martell or something?’
Miss Gregory smiled and seemed at a loss. She said she’d ask her sister.
‘What on earth did you say that for?’ cried Major Eele, rounding on his guest. ‘We don’t want these women drinking with us. Don’t mention it again, and we’ll hope they won’t have the neck to press it.’
Mrs le Tor said she had meant it only as a gesture, a sign of appreciation, since everything had been so well arranged and seen to. She touched the back of Major Eele’s hand, implying apology. ‘I never knew anything about African ballet,’ she said, giving in to him, making the point that he was the richer in experience and savoir faire.
‘I’m ever so sorry,’ said Miss Gregory. ‘We think it is too late to go out for brandy. We’re ever so sorry.’
‘You run a restaurant, don’t you?’ Major Eele demanded roughly. ‘I myself have messengered twice tonight. What are we paying for?’
‘We’re very sorry–’
‘Think nothing of it,’ cried Mrs le Tor. ‘Bring the bill, my dear, and we two night birds shall be smartly on our way.’
In the upstairs lounge of the public house they settled down in a corner over their brandies. After his second Major Eele said:
‘I thought you were a pro, you know.’
‘This other man,’ said Mr Sellwood, ‘the one with the monkey’s face, is by far the swifter operator.’
She wanted the thing to happen; she wanted it to happen once, so that in the future she could think that it had occurred, that a man had tried something on.
‘The monkey-faced waiter of the people beside us took only fifteen seconds. Ours took twenty-two.’
She wanted him to make the gesture, to make it finally clear that he had for weeks been leading up to this, that all the conversations about the Pearl Assurance Company and the banks had an end in an hotel in Leeds. It was not that she desired it in order to rebuff Mr Sellwood: the rebuffing would not be easy; it would put her in the wrong, making her seem a grasping kind of woman, and Mr Sellwood might well demand an explanation. She would not enjoy that side of it: Mr Sellwood at a loss for words, issuing his nervous laugh that reminded her of Venables in The Boarding-House.
‘Ha, ha, ha,’ said Mr Sellwood. ‘Miss Clerricot, do you know that joke about the couple who arrived at heaven’s gate unmarried? “Some vicar here will do the deed,” the man said, but St Peter only laughed and said that the vicars seemed all to go elsewhere. Do you understand that, Miss Clerricot?’
She nodded, smiling slightly, still thinking.
Mr Sellwood said: ‘I suppose that is what you would call humour by implication.’ He looked at his watch, and his eyes darted restlessly about the dining-room.
His wife will not listen to him, she thought. His wife sits there with her ears closed to all his speech. Efficiency and organization are words that have rung in the wife’s ears and which will ring no longer because they are words she will not have in the house. She looked at Mr Sellwood and saw all this in his face, above the moustache, in his eyes and in the lines about his eyes, below it at the corners of his lips.
‘Mr Sellwood?’
He did not hear her. She sighed slightly and kept her silence. Instinctively she knew that often in the past he had timed her too. She saw him sitting at his desk, his eyes surreptitiously on the minute hand of his watch, while she walked to the filing cabinet and opened it and sought inside for papers. She wondered if half the time he had really wanted the papers at all, if for twelve years she had not been performing chores so that Mr Sellwood could calculate her speed.
I am sitting with a grown man in a hotel in Leeds, thought Miss Clerricot, and he is playing a game, playing time and motion study with a series of waiters and assuming I take an interest.
‘One thing that puzzles me about the Pearl Assurance Company,’ Miss Clerricot said, because she felt she had to stop the other thing.
While he talked about the Pearl Assurance Company, in the dining-room and later over coffee in a lounge, she knew that he would not try anything on. He was far away from trying something on; he had never, even, had such a thing in his mind. And she, when she left Leeds and returned by train to London, listening to talk about efficiency in business, would still be what she had been: a woman whom no man had ever taken a liberty with.
‘I have a misery of a face,’ Miss Clerricot said, meaning not to say the words but only to think them. Mr Sellwood, pulled up in the middle of his subject and startled by what he heard, allowed himself to examine the face referred to and thought that there was not a great deal wrong with it. His secretary had become a little tipsy, he thought; which was rather a pity because he had been about to suggest that they should go out for a short walk. He thought it might be pleasant to walk about in Leeds, looking at cameras in the lighted windows of chemists’ shops: he was a keen photographer.
He has taken me to lunch, she thought, and he has taken me with him to Leeds for one reason only: because I listen to him, because I have never said: ‘Mr Sellwood, you are boring me.’ He has purchased me as an audience.
In The Boarding-House the television screen went blank and a high-pitched noise filled the television lounge. ‘Wake up, Mr Venables,’ cried. Nurse Clock in her dressing-gown and soft slippers. ‘You can hear that all over the house. I thought it was Mr Scribbin’s trains.’
‘I thought we might amble out for a stroll,’ said Mr Sellwood. ‘Are you feeling OK?’
Perhaps she had not said the words, she thought. Perhaps she had just imagined that she had spoken them when all the time they had only been in her mind.
‘A stroll?’she said.
‘A walk around the shops.’
‘I do not think so.’
‘You have a headache, have you? Are you feeling unwell, Miss Clerricot?’
Miss Clerricot shivered and then she wept. She bent her head down so that he should not see her face, which was worse now than ever, contorted and out of control. Her sobs were loud, and when they ceased words tumbled out of her and she told Mr Sellwood all the things she had thought that evening, while he had talked of banks and insurance and had timed the waiters. To Mr Sellwood it sounded confused, but what he made of it was that his secretary loved him in some way and had assumed that he loved her too. ‘I am a listening box to you,’ she had cried in her emotion. ‘A wireless in reverse.’
Mr Sellwood said nothing except that it was an awkward situation, but Miss Clerricot said it was more than that. She went in misery to her room and put her belongings back in her suitcase and took the night’s last train to London.
16
Mrs le Tor did not take kindly to Major Eele’s admission that he had imagined her to be a prostitute.
‘Why?’ she enquired, sitting away from him. ‘Why did you think that of me?’
‘Why not? I can tell you truly, Mrs le Tor, I felt embarrassed that day in Jubilee Road when the truth dawned on me. You will find it amusing, I know: I had imagined you were pressing your services on me.’
Mrs le Tor did not find it amusing and said so.
‘It is horrid of you, Major Eele,’ she cried.
He reached out to touch the back of her hand, to proffer some small comfort. His eyes were laughing: to Major Eele the misunderstanding was still funny. He said:
‘Come, now; anyone can make a mistake.’
But in a sulky manner Mrs le Tor withdrew the hand he sought. ‘Get us some more brandy,’ she ordered. ‘You have behaved disgracefully.’
‘Come now,’ he said again, and shambled off, affected by her displeasure, to fetch more brandy.
Mrs le Tor took against Major Eele after that. When he returned to her she exclaimed:
‘Well, I forgive you all.’ She smiled at him and let him touch her hand. She knew what she would do, and watched him becoming a little drunk. ‘How odd those letters were. Why did you write those letters? Was it just to give us a chance to meet? You had admired me from afar, had you? I must say your courting ways are a wee bit irregular.’
‘I did not write you letters.’
‘You wrote to say your Mr Bird had left me a donkey in his will, asking me to call at The Boarding-House. And then again saying to put a postcard in the window of a tobacconist’s shop.’
‘I did not‑’
‘Let’s have no secrets, Major. Why deny it? The second letter accused me of what you had in mind, of the horrid thing you said just now. Let’s have another drink. It seemed to me you were attempting to extort some money. Dear Major, you are welcome to all I have.’ Mrs le Tor laughed, nudging Major Eele with her eyes, playing a vengeful part.
‘Shall I tell you about those ballets?’ he asked.
‘Boeing-Boeing is more my line. Have you seen Boeing-Boeing superb farce.’
‘It is a little club I go to, introduced there by the late Mr Bird–’
‘Mr Bird,’ she cried. ‘Mr Bird, Mr Bird – one hears of nothing but Mr Bird.’
‘He took me to the Ti-Ti and signed me in – they created me a member on the spot. The black ballet is a non-stop performance from midday until two o’clock in the morning, though I confess I have never sat it through.’
‘A strip club,’ cried Mrs le Tor.
‘Ha, ha, ha.’
‘You frequent a strip club. My God, Major Eele, you’re a shady customer! ‘
He grinned, looking down.
‘Am I safe out with you?’ Mrs le Tor demanded. ‘What would the Misses Gregory say if they knew their fine old soldier was a degenerate? Am I safe with Major Eele?’ she called to the man behind the bar. ‘He goes to stripping clubs.’
Other people laughed, and Major Eele laughed too, after a pause, straightening his tie.
‘No wonder you took me for what you did,’ she whispered to him. ‘You know no other women, I dare say. Heavens above, what are you up to? Are you trying to get me into an organization?’
Major Eele saw the room move. The shining bottles behind the bar, and the tables and the barman, and Mrs le Tor and the other people present, all moved around, as though the place had suddenly been launched on to a sea.
‘These are on me,’ announced Mrs le Tor, making for the bar with their two glasses. ‘Doubles,’ she said.
‘What are you thinking when you watch the girls, Major Eele? Tell me about it. What kind of a place do you attend?’
He tried to tell her, but his sentences fell over one another. He spoke of the cinemas he went to; he told her about Bicey-Jones and the motherly tart of fifty years ago. ‘She took his blackheads out,’ he said.
Mrs le Tor had Major Eele well placed in her mind by now. He was, she saw, a sexual maniac who had insulted her and who would pay for that. She swiftly wrote him off as a companion and felt doubly bitter because a companion in the neighbourhood would have been rather nice. She had heard of many aberrations, among them, she supposed, the writing of incomprehensible letters with an undertone of sex. She thought he could be had up by the police for writing letters to women implying they were prostitutes.
‘You are a filthy man.’ She laughed as she spoke, implying that his filth had a gay aspect.
Major Eele laughed too. He said:
‘You are twice the woman of Mrs Andrews.’
‘Now, now, Major.’
‘I mean it, madam. I wish it had been you who put a hand on my head in Amesbury. We would have got on very well-I can see us, you and I, laughing our heads off at some joke. You would not always be getting your hair done.’
She whispered: ‘Is this a proposal, my dear?’
‘Proposal?’
‘You are making me blush,’ cried Mrs le Tor. ‘A proposal of marriage has taken place,’ she exclaimed aloud so that all might hear, and eyes were turned on Major Eele.
‘On the house?’ she said to the barman. But the barman, who had come across such excitements before, shook his head.
A man with another man and two women called out:
‘What are you drinking?’
‘Oh dear, brandy; said Mrs le Tor.
The man bought them brandies and invited them to join his party.
‘Come on,’ said Mrs le Tor, not smiling at Major Eele but smiling at the man. ‘Come on, then.’
He was reminded of Mrs Andrews again. Mrs Andrews had always been involving him with other people, people she knew, in restaurants and other public places. There was always somebody in the Berkeley bar, and in the cavern restaurant a man had winked at Mrs Andrews all through a meal once, and she had winked back. He had sat there watching them, his wife and a strange man winking at one another every few minutes for an hour or more.
‘Let’s stay here,’ he said.
‘He’s bought us a drink. The gentleman has bought us a round.’ She walked to the other table, and he followed. ‘My newly betrothed,’ she said, ‘was trying to get out of buying a round.’ Everyone laughed except Major Eele. ‘Are you sick?’ asked Mrs le Tor, and he shook his head, trying to smile. ‘A terrible fellow,’ she said to the others. ‘He tried to bring me to a strip club.’
‘Paddy, Joan, Edwin, Kate,’ said the man, making introductions.
‘Maria,’ said Mrs le Tor, ‘and Bill.’
‘Hullo, Bill,’ said the two women together.
‘Bill?’said Major Eele.
Mrs le Tor remarked that it was quiet this evening.
‘Strip club?’ said one of the men, quietly to Major Eele. ‘Strip club, Bill? A local place?’
‘What?’
‘The lady said a strip club. Do you go to a strip joint. Bill? I was wondering, was it local?’
‘Why are you calling me Bill? I do not know you, sir.’
‘Sorry, old boy. I thought the lady said Bill. What then?’
‘I am Major Eele.’
‘Our round,’ cried Mrs le Tor. ‘Now, what is everyone having?’
She walked to the bar and ordered the drinks, returning while they were being poured to ask her escort for a pound.
Major Eele, intoxicated, remembered something he had done a few years ago and which he had never really been able to account for. He had long since put it from his mind, but now, unable to control something, the whole scene rose before him and depressed him further.
‘Maria and Bill,’ said the man called Paddy, the man who had invited them to join his party. ‘To Maria and Bill.’ He held his glass in the air and the others clinked theirs against it in an expert way, as though similar occasions often arose.
‘Speech,’ the others cried, and there was a pause and someone said: ‘He’s past it.’
Through the mist Major Eele saw himself walking into St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner. He could not remember the details of what he had said or what anyone had said to him, but in his sober moments the words were all there, engraved with accuracy.
He had, that day, a hot autumn day in 1961, made at once for the outpatients’ department and then had walked straight ahead, towards a counter divided into sections. He approached the area marked New Patients.
‘May I see the doctor on duty?’ Major Eele had said, keeping his voice low.
A young woman in a green overall smiled at him, or half smiled at him, putting him at his ease. She asked if he were a casualty.
‘No, no. I would just like to see the doctor in charge.’
The young woman smiled further, enticing him to present information, trained in her job. ‘Could you be,’ she said, ‘a little more explicit? The nature of the ailment?’
‘I need advice,’ said Major Eele. ‘I need advice on a medical matter. It is simply a question of a consultation with a doctor. This is an affair of urgency– I have come today in the heat for that very reason.’
The Boarding-House Page 17