‘Mr Mileson, I don’t like that waiter.’
Mr Mileson cut his steak with care: a three-cornered piece, neat and succulent. He loaded mushroom and mustard on it, added a sliver of potato and carried the lot to his mouth. He masticated and drank some wine.
‘Do you know the waiter?’
Mrs da Tanka laughed unpleasantly; like ice cracking. ‘Why should I know the waiter? I do not generally know waiters. Do you know the waiter?’
‘I ask because you claim to dislike him.’
‘May I not dislike him without an intimate knowledge of the man?’
‘You may do as you please. It struck me as a premature decision, that is all.’
‘What decision? What is premature? What are you talking about? Are you drunk?’
‘The decision to dislike the waiter I thought to be premature. I do not know about being drunk. Probably I am a little. One has to keep one’s spirits up.’
‘Have you ever thought of wearing an eye-patch, Mr Mileson? I think it would suit you. You need distinction. Have you led an empty life? You give the impression of an empty life.’
‘My life has been as many other lives. Empty of some things, full of others. I am in possession of all my sight, though. My eyes are real. Neither is a pretence. I see no call for an eye-patch.’
‘It strikes me you see no call for anything. You have never lived, Mr Mileson.’
‘I do not understand that.’
‘Order us more wine.’
Mr Mileson indicated with his hand and the waiter approached. ‘Some other waiter, please,’ Mrs da Tanka cried. ‘May we be served by another waiter?’
‘Madam?’ said the waiter.
‘We do not take to you. Will you send another man to our table?’
‘I am the only waiter on duty, madam.’
‘It’s quite all right,’ said Mr Mileson.
‘It’s not quite all right. I will not have this man at our table, opening and dispensing wine.’
‘Then we must go without.’
‘I am the only waiter on duty, madam.’
‘There are other employees of the hotel. Send us a porter or the girl at the reception.’
‘It is not their duty, madam –’
‘Oh nonsense, nonsense. Bring us the wine, man, and have no more to-do.’
Unruffled, the waiter moved away. Mrs da Tanka hummed a popular tune.
‘Are you married, Mr Mileson? Have you in the past been married?’
‘No, never married.’
‘I have been married twice. I am married now. I am throwing the dice for the last time. God knows how I shall find myself. You are helping to shape my destiny. What a fuss that waiter made about the wine!’
‘That is a little unfair. It was you, you know –’
‘Behave like a gentleman, can’t you? Be on my side since you are with me. Why must you turn on me? Have I harmed you?’
‘No, no. I was merely establishing the truth.’
‘Here is the man again with the wine. He is like a bird. Do you think he has wings strapped down beneath his waiter’s clothes? You are like a bird,’ she repeated, examining the waiter’s face. ‘Has some fowl played a part in your ancestry?’
‘I think not, madam.’
‘Though you cannot be sure. How can you be sure? How can you say you think not when you know nothing about it?’
The waiter poured the wine in silence. He was not embarrassed, Mr Mileson noted; not even angry.
‘Bring coffee,’ Mrs da Tanka said.
‘Madam.’
‘How servile waiters are! How I hate servility, Mr Mileson! I could not marry a servile man. I could not marry that waiter, not for all the tea in China.’
‘I did not imagine you could. The waiter does not seem your sort.’
‘He is your sort. You like him, I think. Shall I leave you to converse with him?’
‘Really! What would I say to him? I know nothing about the waiter except what he is in a professional sense. I do not wish to know. It is not my habit to go about consorting with waiters after they have waited on me.’
‘I am not to know that. I am not to know what your sort is, or what your personal and private habits are. How could I know? We have only just met.’
‘You are clouding the issue.’
‘You are as pompous as da Tanka. Da Tanka would say issue and clouding.’
‘What your husband would say is no concern of mine.’
‘You are meant to be my lover, Mr Mileson. Can’t you act it a bit? My husband must concern you dearly. You must wish to tear him limb from limb. Do you wish it?’
‘I have never met the man. I know nothing of him.’
‘Well then, pretend. Pretend for the waiter’s sake. Say something violent in the waiter’s hearing. Break an oath. Blaspheme. Bang your fist on the table.’
‘I was not told I should have to behave like that. It is against my nature.’
‘What is your nature?’
‘I’m shy and self-effacing.’
‘You are an enemy to me. I don’t understand your sort. You have not got on in the world. You take on commissions like this. Where is your self-respect?’
‘Elsewhere in my character.’
‘You have no personality.’
‘That is a cliché. It means nothing.’
‘Sweet nothings for lovers, Mr Mileson! Remember that.’
They left the grill-room and mounted the stairs in silence. In their bedroom Mrs da Tanka unpacked a dressing-gown. ‘I shall undress in the bathroom. I shall be absent a matter often minutes.’
Mr Mileson slipped from his clothes into pyjamas. He brushed his teeth at the wash-basin, cleaned his nails and splashed a little water on his face. When Mrs da Tanka returned he was in bed.
To Mr Mileson she seemed a trifle bigger without her daytime clothes. He remembered corsets and other containing garments. He did not remark upon it.
Mrs da Tanka turned out the light and they lay without touching between the cold sheets of the double bed.
He would leave little behind, he thought. He would die and there would be the things in the room, rather a number of useless things with sentimental value only. Ornaments and ferns. Reproductions of paintings. A set of eggs, birds’ eggs he had collected as a boy. They would pile all the junk together and probably try to burn it. Then perhaps they would light a couple of those fumigating candles in the room, because people are insulting when other people die.
‘Why did you not get married?’ Mrs da Tanka said.
‘Because I do not greatly care for women.’ He said it, throwing caution to the winds, waiting for her attack.
‘Are you a homosexual?’
The word shocked him. ‘Of course I’m not.’
‘I only asked. They go in for this kind of thing.’
‘That does not make me one.’
‘I often thought Horace Spire was more that way than any other. For all the attention he paid to me.’
As a child she had lived in Shropshire. In those days she loved the country, though without knowing, or wishing to know, the names of flowers or plants or trees. People said she looked like Alice in Wonderland.
‘Have you ever been to Shropshire, Mr Mileson?’
‘No. I am very much a Londoner. I lived in the same house all my life. Now the house is no longer there. Flats replace it. I live in Swiss Cottage.’
‘I thought you might. I thought you might live in Swiss Cottage.’
‘Now and again I miss the garden. As a child I collected birds’ eggs on the common. I have kept them all these years.’
She had kept nothing. She cut the past off every so often, remembering it when she cared to, without the aid of physical evidence.
‘The hard facts of life have taken their toll of me,’ said Mrs da Tanka. ‘I met them first at twenty. They have been my companions since.’
‘It was a hard fact the lease coming to an end. It was hard to take at the time. I did not accept it
until it was well upon me. Only the spring before I had planted new delphiniums.’
‘My father told me to marry a good man. To be happy and have children. Then he died. I did none of those things. I do not know why except that I did not care to. Then old Horry Spire put his arm around me and there we were. Life is as you make it, I suppose. I was thinking of homosexual in relation to that waiter you were interested in downstairs.’
‘I was not interested in the waiter. He was hard done by, by you, I thought. There was no more to it than that.’
Mrs da Tanka smoked and Mr Mileson was nervous; about the situation in general, about the glow of the cigarette in the darkness. What if the woman dropped off to sleep? He had heard of fires started by careless smoking. What if in her confusion she crushed the cigarette against some part of his body? Sleep was impossible: one cannot sleep with the thought of waking up in a furnace, with the bells of fire brigades clanging a death knell.
‘I will not sleep tonight,’ said Mrs da Tanka, a statement which frightened Mr Mileson further. For all the dark hours the awful woman would be there, twitching and puffing beside him. I am mad. I am out of my mind to have brought this upon myself. He heard the words. He saw them on paper, written in his handwriting. He saw them typed, and repeated again as on a telegram. The letters jolted and lost their order. The words were confused, skulking behind a fog. ‘I am mad,’ Mr Mileson said, to establish the thought completely, to bring it into the open. It was a habit of his; for a moment he had forgotten the reason for the thought, thinking himself alone.
‘Are you telling me now you are mad?’ asked Mrs da Tanka, alarmed. ‘Gracious, are you worse than a homo? Are you some sexual pervert? Is that what you are doing here? Certainly that was not my plan, I do assure you. You have nothing to gain from me, Mr Mileson. If there is trouble I shall ring the bell.’
‘I am mad to be here. I am mad to have agreed to all this. What came over me I do not know. I have only just realized the folly of the thing.’
‘Arise then, dear Mileson, and break your agreement, your promise and your undertaking. You are an adult man, you may dress and walk from the room.’
They were all the same, she concluded: except that while others had some passing superficial recommendation, this one it seemed had none. There was something that made her sick about the thought of the stringy limbs that were stretched out beside her. What lengths a woman will go to to rid herself of a horror like da Tanka!
He had imagined it would be a simple thing. It had sounded like a simple thing: a good thing rather than a bad one. A good turn for a lady in need. That was as he had seen it. With the little fee already in his possession.
Mrs da Tanka lit another cigarette and threw the match on the floor.
‘What kind of a life have you had? You had not the nerve for marriage. Nor the brains for success. The truth is you might not have lived.’ She laughed in the darkness, determined to hurt him as he had hurt her in his implication that being with her was an act of madness.
Mr Mileson had not before done a thing like this. Never before had he not weighed the pros and cons and seen that danger was absent from an undertaking. The thought of it all made him sweat. He saw in the future further deeds: worse deeds, crimes and irresponsibilities.
Mrs da Tanka laughed again. But she was thinking of something else.
‘You have never slept with a woman, is that it? Ah, you poor thing! What a lot you have not had the courage for!’ The bed heaved with the raucous noise that was her laughter, and the bright spark of her cigarette bobbed about in the air.
She laughed, quietly now and silently, hating him as she hated da Tanka and had hated Horace Spire. Why could he not be some young man, beautiful and nicely mannered and gay? Surely a young man would have come with her? Surely there was one amongst all the millions who would have done the chore with relish, or at least with charm?
‘You are as God made you,’ said Mr Mileson. ‘You cannot help your shortcomings, though one would think you might by now have recognized them. To others you may be all sorts of things. To me you are a frightful woman.’
‘Would you not stretch out a hand to the frightful woman? Is there no temptation for the woman’s flesh? Are you a eunuch, Mr Mileson?’
‘I have had the women I wanted. I am doing you a favour. Hearing of your predicament and pressed to help you, I agreed in a moment of generosity. Stranger though you were I did not say no.’
‘That does not make you a gentleman.’
‘And I do not claim it does. I am gentleman enough without it.’
‘You are nothing without it. This is your sole experience. In all your clerkly subservience you have not paused to live. You know I am right, and as for being a gentleman – well, you are of the lower middle classes. There has never been an English gentleman born of the lower middle classes.’
She was trying to remember what she looked like; what her face was like, how the wrinkles were spread, how old she looked and what she might pass for in a crowd. Would men not be cagey now and think that she must be difficult in her ways to have parted twice from husbands? Was there a third time coming up? Third time lucky, she thought. Who would have her, though, except some loveless Mileson?
‘You have had no better life than I,’ said Mr Mileson. ‘You are no more happy now. You have failed, and it is cruel to laugh at you.’
They talked and the hatred grew between them.
‘In my childhood young men flocked about me, at dances in Shropshire that my father gave to celebrate my beauty. Had the fashion been duels, duels there would have been. Men killed or maimed for life, carrying a lock of my hair on their breast.’
‘You are a creature now, with your face and your fingernails. Mutton dressed as lamb, Mrs da Tanka!’
Beyond the curtained windows the light of dawn broke into the night. A glimpse of it crept into the room, noticed and welcomed by its occupants.
‘You should write your memoirs, Mr Mileson. To have seen the changes in your time and never to know a thing about them! You are like an occasional table. Or a coat-rack in the hall of a boarding-house. Who shall mourn at your grave, Mr Mileson?’
He felt her eyes upon him; and the mockery of the words sank into his heart with intended precision. He turned to her and touched her, his hands groping about her shoulders. He had meant to grasp her neck, to feel the muscles struggle beneath his fingers, to terrify the life out of her. But she, thinking the gesture was the beginning of an embrace, pushed him away, swearing at him and laughing. Surprised by the misunderstanding, he left her alone.
The train was slow. The stations crawled by, similar and ugly. She fixed her glance on him, her eyes sharpened; cold and powerful.
She had won the battle, though technically the victory was his. Long before the time arranged for their breakfast Mr Mileson had leaped from bed. He dressed and breakfasted alone in the dining-room. Shortly afterwards, after sending to the bedroom for his suitcase, he left the hotel, informing the receptionist that the lady would pay the bill. Which in time she had done, and afterwards pursued him to the train, where now, to disconcert him, she sat in the facing seat of an empty compartment.
‘Well,’ said Mrs da Tanka, ‘you have shot your bolt. You have taken the only miserable action you could. You have put the frightful woman in her place. Have we a right,’ she added, ‘to expect anything better of the English lower classes?’
Mr Mileson had foolishly left his weekly magazines and the daily paper at the hotel. He was obliged to sit bare-faced before her, pretending to observe the drifting landscape. In spite of everything, guilt gnawed him a bit. When he was back in his room he would borrow the vacuum cleaner and give it a good going over: the exercise would calm him. A glass of beer in the pub before lunch; lunch in the ABC; perhaps an afternoon cinema. It was Saturday today: this, more or less, was how he usually spent Saturday. Probably from lack of sleep he would doze off in the cinema. People would nudge him to draw attention to his snoring; that had happen
ed before, and was not pleasant.
‘To give you birth,’ she said, ‘your mother had long hours of pain. Have you thought of that, Mr Mileson? Have you thoughts of that poor woman crying out, clenching her hands and twisting the sheets? Was it worth it, Mr Mileson? You tell me now, was it worth it?’
He could leave the compartment and sit with other people. But that would be too great a satisfaction for Mrs da Tanka. She would laugh loudly at his going, might even pursue him to mock in public.
‘What you say about me, Mrs da Tanka, can equally be said of you.’
‘Are we two peas in a pod? It’s an explosive pod in that case.’
‘I did not imply that. I would not wish to find myself sharing a pod with you.’
‘Yet you shared a bed. And were not man enough to stick to your word. You are a worthless coward, Mr Mileson. I expect you know it.’
‘I know myself, which is more than can be said in your case. Do you not think occasionally to see yourself as others see you? An ageing woman, faded and ugly, dubious in morals and personal habits. What misery you must have caused those husbands!’
‘They married me, and got good value. You know that, yet dare not admit it.’
‘I will scarcely lose sleep worrying the matter out.’
It was a cold morning, sunny with a clear sky. Passengers stepping from the train at the intermediate stations muffled up against the temperature, finding it too much after the warm fug within. Women with baskets. Youths. Men with children, with dogs collected from the guard’s van.
Da Tanka, she had heard, was living with another woman. Yet he refused to admit being the guilty party. It would not do for someone like da Tanka to be a public adulterer. So he had said. Pompously. Crossly. Horace Spire, to give him his due, hadn’t given a damn one way or the other.
‘When you die, Mr Mileson, have you a preference for the flowers on your coffin? It is a question I ask because I might send you off a wreath. That lonely wreath. From ugly, frightful Mrs da Tanka.’
‘What?’ said Mr Mileson, and she repeated the question.
‘Oh well – cow-parsley, I suppose.’ He said it, taken off his guard by the image she created; because it was an image he often saw and thought about. Hearse and coffin and he within. It would not be like that probably. Anticipation was not in Mr Mileson’s life. Remembering, looking back, considering events and emotions that had been at the time mundane perhaps – this kind of thing was more to his liking. For by hindsight there was pleasure in the stream of time. He could not establish his funeral in his mind; he tried often but ended up always with a funeral he had known: a repetition of his parents’ passing and the accompanying convention.
The Collected Stories Page 2