What they had to work out where Hilda was concerned were the economics of the matter. He would never, at Travel-Wide or anywhere else, earn a great deal of money. Familiar with Hilda’s nature, he knew that as soon as a divorce was mooted she’d set out to claim as much alimony as she possibly could, which by law he would have to pay. She would state that she only made jewellery for pin-money and increasingly found it difficult to do so due to a developing tendency towards chilblains or arthritis, anything she could think of. She would hate him for rejecting her, for depriving her of a tame companion. Her own resentment at not being able to have children would somehow latch on to his unfaithfulness: she would see a pattern which wasn’t really there, bitterness would come into her eyes.
Marie had said that she wanted to give him the children he had never had. She wanted to have children at once and she knew she could. He knew it too: having children was part of her, you’d only to look at her. Yet that would mean she’d have to give up her job, which she wanted to do when she married anyway, which in turn would mean that all three of them would have to subsist on his meagre salary. And not just all three, the children also.
It was a riddle that mocked him: he could find no answer, and yet he believed that the more he and Marie were together, the more they talked to one another and continued to be in love, the more chance there was of suddenly hitting upon a solution. Not that Marie always listened when he went on about it. She agreed they had to solve their problem, but now and again just pretended it wasn’t there. She liked to forget about the existence of Hilda. For an hour or so when she was with him she liked to assume that quite soon, in July or even June, they’d be married. He always brought her back to earth.
‘Look, let’s just have a drink in the hotel,’ he urged. ‘Tonight, before the train. Instead of having one in the buffet.’
‘But it’s a hotel, Norman. I mean, it’s for people to stay in –’
‘Anyone can go into a hotel for a drink.’
That evening, after their drink in the hotel bar, he led her to the first-floor landing that was also a lounge. It was warm in the hotel. She said she’d like to sink down into one of the armchairs and fall asleep. He laughed at that; he didn’t suggest an excursion to the bathroom, sensing that he shouldn’t rush things. He saw her on to her train, abandoning her to her mother and Mrs Druk and Mavis. He knew that all during the journey she would be mulling over the splendours of the Great Western Royal.
December came. It was no longer foggy, but the weather was colder, with an icy wind. Every evening, before her train, they had their drink in the hotel. ‘I’d love to show you that bathroom,’ he said once. ‘Just for fun.’ He hadn’t been pressing it in the least; it was the first time he’d mentioned the bathroom since he’d mentioned it originally. She giggled and said he was terrible. She said she’d miss her train if she went looking at bathrooms, but he said there’d easily be time. ‘Gosh!’ she whispered, standing in the doorway, looking in. He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her inside, fearful in case a chambermaid should see them loitering there. He locked the door and kissed her. In almost twelve months it was their first embrace in private.
They went to the bathroom during the lunch hour on New Year’s Day, and he felt it was right that they should celebrate in this way the anniversary of their first real meeting. His early impression of her, that she was of a tartish disposition, had long since been dispelled. Voluptuous she might, seem to the eye, but beneath that misleading surface she was prim and proper. It was odd that Hilda, who looked dried-up and wholly uninterested in the sensual life, should also belie her appearance. ‘I’ve never done it before,’ Marie confessed in the bathroom, and he loved her the more for that. He loved her simplicity in this matter, her desire to remain a virgin until her wedding. But since she repeatedly swore that she could marry no one else, their anticipating of their wedding-night did not matter. ‘Oh, God, I love you,’ she whispered, naked for the first time in the bathroom. ‘Oh, Norman, you’re so good to me.’
After that it became a regular thing. He would saunter from the hotel bar, across the huge entrance lounge, and take a lift to the second floor. Five minutes later she would follow, with a towel brought specially from Reading in her handbag. In the bathroom they always whispered, and would sit together in a warm bath after their love-making, still murmuring about the future, holding hands beneath the surface of the water. No one ever rapped on the door to ask what was going on in there. No one ever questioned them as they returned, separately, to the bar, with the towel they’d shared damping her compact and her handkerchief.
Years instead of months began to go by. On the juke-box in the Drummer Boy the voice of Elvis Presley was no longer heard. ‘Why she had to go I don’t know,’ sang the Beatles, ‘she didn’t say… I believe in yesterday.’ And Eleanor Rigby entered people’s lives, and Sergeant Pepper with her. The fantasies of secret agents, more fantastic than ever before, filled the screens of London’s cinemas. Carnaby Street, like a jolly trash-can, overflowed with noise and colour. And in the bathroom of the Great Western Royal Hotel the love affair of Norman Britt and Marie was touched with the same preposterousness. They ate sandwiches in the bathroom; they drank wine. He whispered to her of the faraway places he knew about but had never been to: the Bahamas, Brazil, Peru, Seville at Easter, the Greek islands, the Nile, Shiraz, Persepolis, the Rocky Mountains. They should have been saving their money, not spending it on gin and peppermintin the bar of the hotel and in the Drummer Boy. They should have been racking their brains to find a solution to the problem of Hilda, but it was nicer to pretend that one day they would walk together in Venice or Tuscany. It was all so different from the activities that began with Hilda’s bedroom appetites, and it was different from the coarseness that invariably surfaced when Mr Blackstaffe got going in the Drummer Boy on an evening when a Travel-Wide employee was being given a send-off. Mr Blackstaffe’s great joke on such occasions was that he liked to have sexual intercourse with his wife at night and that she preferred the conjunction in the mornings. He was always going on about how difficult it was in the mornings, what with the children liable to interrupt you, and he usually went into details about certain other, more intimate preferences of his wife’s. He had a powerful, waxy guffaw, which he brought regularly into play when he was engaged in this kind of conversation, allying it with a nudging motion of the elbow. Once his wife actually turned up in the Drummer Boy and Norman found it embarrassing even to look at her, knowing as he did so much about her private life. She was a stout middle-aged woman with decorated spectacles: her appearance, too, apparently belied much.
In the bathroom all such considerations, disliked equally by Norman Britt and Marie, were left behind. Romance ruled their brief sojourns, and love sanctified – or so they believed – the passion of their physical intimacy. Love excused their eccentricity, for only love could have found in them a willingness to engage in the deception of a hotel and the courage that went with it: that they believed most of all.
But afterwards, selling tickets to other people or putting Marie on her evening train, Norman sometimes felt depressed. And then gradually, as more time passed, the depression increased and intensified. ‘I’m so sad,’ he whispered in the bathroom once, ‘when I’m not with you. I don’t think I can stand it.’ She dried herself on the towel brought specially from Reading in her large red handbag. ‘You’ll have to tell her,’ she said, with an edge in her voice that hadn’t ever been there before. ‘I don’t want to leave having babies too late.’ She wasn’t twenty-eight any more; she was thirty-one. ‘I mean, it isn’t fair on me,’ she said.
He knew it wasn’t fair on her, but going over the whole thing yet again in Travel-Wide that afternoon he also knew that poverty would destroy them. He’d never earn much more than he earned now. The babies Marie wanted, and which he wanted too, would soak up what there was like blotting-paper; they’d probably have to look for council accommodation. It made him weary to think about it,
it gave him a headache. But he knew she was right: they couldn’t go on for ever, living off a passing idyll, in the bathroom of a hotel. He even thought, quite seriously for a moment, of causing Hilda’s death.
Instead he told her the truth, one Thursday evening after she’d been watching The Avengers on television. He just told her he’d met someone, a girl called Marie, he said, whom he had fallen in love with and wished to marry. ‘I was hoping we could have a divorce,’ he said.
Hilda turned the sound on the television set down without in any way dimming the picture, which she continued to watch. Her face did not register the hatred he had imagined in it when he rejected her; nor did bitterness suddenly enter her eyes. Instead she shook her head at him, and poured herself some more V.P. She said:
‘You’ve gone barmy, Norman.’
‘You can think that if you like.’
‘Wherever’d you meet a girl, for God’s sake?’
‘At work. She’s there in Vincent Street. In a shop.’
‘And what’s she think of you, may I ask?’
‘She’s in love with me, Hilda.’
She laughed. She told him to pull the other one, adding that it had bells on it.
‘Hilda, I’m not making this up. I’m telling you the truth.’
She smiled into her V.P. She watched the screen for a moment, then she said:
‘And how long’s this charming stuff been going on, may I inquire?’
He didn’t want to say for years. Vaguely, he said it had been going on for just a while.
‘You’re out of your tiny, Norman. Just because you fancy some piece in a shop doesn’t mean you go getting hot under the collar. You’re no tomcat, you know, old boy.’
‘I didn’t say I was.’
‘You’re no sexual mechanic.’
‘Hilda –’
‘All chaps fancy things in shops: didn’t your mother tell you that? D’you think I haven’t fancied stuff myself, the chap who came to do the blinds, that randy little postman with his rugby songs?’
‘I’m telling you I want a divorce, Hilda.’
She laughed. She drank more V.P. wine. ‘You’re up a gum tree,’ she said, and laughed again.
‘Hildas –’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ All of a sudden she was angry, but more, he felt, because he was going on, not because of what he was actually demanding. She thought him ridiculous and said so. And then she added all the things he’d thought himself: that people like them didn’t get divorces, that unless his girlfriend was well-heeled the whole thing would be a sheer bloody nonsense, with bloody solicitors the only ones to benefit. ‘They’ll send you to the cleaners, your bloody solicitors will,’ she loudly pointed out, anger still trembling in her voice. ‘You’d be paying them back for years.’
‘I don’t care,’ he began, although he did. ‘I don’t care about anything except–’
‘Of course you do, you damn fool.’
‘Hilda –’
‘Look, get over her. Take her into a park after dark or something. It’ll make no odds to you and me.’
She turned the sound on the television up and quite quickly finished the V.P. wine. Afterwards, in their bedroom, she turned to him with an excitement that was greater than usual. ‘God, that switched me on,’ she whispered in the darkness, gripping him with her limbs. ‘The stuff we were talking about, that girl.’ When she’d finished her love-making she said, ‘I had it with that postman, you know. Swear to God. In the kitchen. And since we’re on the subject, Fowler looks in here the odd time.’
He lay beside her in silence, not knowing whether or not to believe what she was saying. It seemed at first that she was keeping her end up because he’d mentioned Marie, but then he wasn’t so sure. ‘We had a foursome once,’ she said, ‘the Fowlers and me and a chap that used to be in the Club.’
She began to stroke his face with her fingers, the way he hated. She always seemed to think that if she stroked his face it would excite him. She said, ‘Tell me more about this piece you fancy.’
He told her to keep her quiet and to make her stop stroking his face. It didn’t seem to matter now if he told her how long it had been going on, not since she’d made her revelations about Fowler and the postman. He even enjoyed telling her, about the New Year’s Day when he’d bought the emery boards and the Colgate’s, and how he’d got to know Marie because she and Mavis were booking a holiday on the Costa Brava.
‘But you’ve never actually?’
‘Yes, we have.’
‘For God’s sake where? Doorways or something? In the park?’
‘We go to a hotel.’
‘You old devil!’
‘Listen, Hilda –’
‘For God’s sake go on, love. Tell me about it.’
He told her about the bathroom and she kept asking him questions, making him tell her details, asking him to describe Marie to her. Dawn was breaking when they finished talking.
‘Forget about the divorce stuff,’ she said quite casually at breakfast. ‘I wouldn’t want to hear no more of that. I wouldn’t want you ruined for my sake, dear.’
He didn’t want to see Marie that day, although he had to because it was arranged. In any case she knew he’d been going to tell his wife the night before; she’d want to hear the outcome.
‘Well?’ she said in the Drummer Boy.
He shrugged. He shook his head. He said:
‘I told her.’
‘And what’d she say, Norman? What’d Hilda say?’
‘She said I was barmy to be talking about divorce. She said what I said to you: that we wouldn’t manage with the alimony.’
They sat in silence. Eventually Marie said:
‘Then can’t you leave her? Can’t you just not go back? We could get a flat somewhere. We could put off kiddies, darling. Just walk out, couldn’t you?’
‘They’d find us. They’d make me pay.’
‘We could try it. If I keep on working you could pay what they want.’
‘It’ll never pan out, Marie.’
‘Oh, darling, just walk away from her.’
Which is what, to Hilda’s astonishment, he did. One evening when she was at the Club he packed his clothes and went to two rooms in Kilburn that he and Marie had found. He didn’t tell Hilda where he was going. He just left a note to say he wouldn’t be back.
They lived as man and wife in Kilburn, sharing a lavatory and a bathroom with fifteen other people. In time he received a court summons, and in court was informed that he had behaved meanly and despicably to the woman he’d married. He agreed to pay regular maintenance.
The two rooms in Kilburn were dirty and uncomfortable, and life in them was rather different from the life they had known together in the Drummer Boy and the Great Western Royal Hotel. They planned to find somewhere better, but at a reasonable price that wasn’t easy to find. A certain melancholy descended on them, for although they were together they seemed as far away as ever from their own small house, their children and their ordinary contentment.
‘We could go to Reading,’ Marie suggested.
‘Reading?’
‘To my mum’s.’
‘But your mum’s nearly disowned you. Your mum’s livid, you said yourself she was.’
‘People come round.’
She was right. One Sunday afternoon they made the journey to Reading to have tea with Marie’s mother and her friend Mrs Druk. Neither of these women addressed Norman, and once when he and Marie were in the kitchen he heard Mrs Druk saying it disgusted her, that he was old enough to be Marie’s father. ‘Don’t think much of him,’ Marie’s mother replied. ‘Pipsqueak really.’
Nevertheless, Marie’s mother had missed her daughter’s contribution to the household finances and before they returned to London that evening it was arranged that Norman and Marie should move in within a month, on the firm understanding that the very second it was feasible their marriage would take place. ‘He’s a boarder, mind,’ Marie’s mother war
ned. ‘Nothing but a boarder in this house.’ There were neighbours, Mrs Druk added, to be thought of.
Reading was worse than the two rooms in Kilburn. Marie’s mother continued to make disparaging remarks about Norman, about the way he left the lavatory, or the thump of his feet on the stair-carpet, or his fingermarks around the light-switches. Marie would deny these accusations and then there’d be a row, with Mrs Druk joining in because she loved a row, and Marie’s mother weeping and then Marie weeping. Norman had been to see a solicitor about divorcing Hilda, quoting her unfaithfulness with a postman and with Fowler. ‘You have your evidence, Mr Britt?’ the solicitor inquired, and pursed his lips when Norman said he hadn’t.
He knew it was all going to be too difficult. He knew his instinct had been right: he shouldn’t have told Hilda, he shouldn’t have just walked out. The whole thing had always been unfair on Marie; it had to be when a girl got mixed up with a married man. ‘Should think of things like that,’ her mother had a way of saying loudly when he was passing an open door. ‘Selfish type he is,’ Mrs Druk would loudly add.
Marie argued when he said none of it was going to work. But she wasn’t as broken-hearted as she might have been a year or so ago, for the strain had told on Marie too, especially the strain in Reading. She naturally wept when Norman said they’d been defeated, and so for a moment did he. He asked for a transfer to another branch of Travel-Wide and was sent to Ealing, far away from the Great Western Royal Hotel.
Eighteen months later Marie married a man in a brewery. Hilda, hearing on some grapevine that Norman was on his own, wrote to him and suggested that bygones should be allowed to be bygones. Lonely in a bed-sitting-room in Ealing, he agreed to talk the situation over with her and after that he agreed to return to their flat. ‘No hard feelings,’ Hilda said, ‘and no deception: there’s been a chap from the Club in here, the Woolworth’s manager.’ No hard feelings, he agreed.
The Collected Stories Page 87