‘Look, could you come round?’
‘Come round where? I’m not going to the Clutch again, it’s a –’
‘No, no, come round now, to the office,’ Bobs squawked.
‘Your office? But it’s miles away and I’ve got to –’
I was about to invent some important meeting, but Bobs’s voice was so frantic that I let him interrupt me.
‘There’s a call I’ve got to stay in for at lunchtime, so could you come then, there won’t be anyone else around.’
As I came up the steps from the Underground at Marble Arch, a cold wet wind blew in my face. Outside the sandwich bar next to Go Now, the lunchtime queue was already out into the street, the queuers all with their back to the wind and the wet, so they looked as though they had all turned to watch an accident. Inside Go Now, there was just Bobs sitting behind a dusty festoon of little plastic flags and a plastic name panel which said ROBERT A. MOONMAN.
‘What’s the A for?’
‘Ambrose. He’s one of the Fathers of the Church.’
‘Thank you,’ I said coldly. ‘Well, what have you got me in here for? It took me nearly an hour.’
‘You could always take the Iberia flight to San Sebastian, though it would be quicker to –’
‘What –’ then I followed his eyes. A large man in an overcoat with hair en brosse came out of an inner office and proceeded on out of the glass door, breaking wind delicately as he passed my chair.
‘That’s the manager, he only goes out for half an hour.’
‘How long is this going to take then?’
‘Look, this is an emergency or I wouldn’t have asked you. Now you may or may not know that Helen and I have been having a thing together.’
He paused, unlike him, as though it was important to clock my reaction before moving on to the next stage. I gave him an unfriendly nod.
‘It started as little more than a flirtation but then as we got to know each other better we agreed that we might think about making it a physical relationship, to see if we were suited in that way as well, because often you know that you can get on with someone brilliantly but when it comes to fucking –’
‘Do we have to go through all that?’
‘I think it’s important to understand. Anyway, we slept together for the first time nine weeks ago, just after that Happening when my guernsey got ruined, and it was the bang of a lifetime. Absolutely fantastic.’
He gave me his furrowed look, the one he put on to explain how much faster his car could accelerate if he kept it in third. What I wanted to say was that I didn’t want to hear any of this, and that even if it was all true, and I had reason to believe it wasn’t, why was he telling me and would he please not mix up the talk about relationships with all the banging and fucking and choose a normal mode of speech, but all I said was:
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘But many of our customers prefer to take the train to St Jean de Luz and hire the car there, instead of changing gauge.’
I looked round to see the en-brosse man opening the door and returning, heavy-treaded to his office, from which he instantly emerged once more with an umbrella.
‘It was so fantastic that I wanted to see her all the time, not just, you know, when we’re all a bit pissed at the end of the evening so I said would she like to come and live with me.’
‘What, at Padders?’
‘We could do it up together, I mean, it’s potentially a great flat. Anyway, she said it wouldn’t be fair to Tolly. I said I wasn’t interested in being fair to Tolly, because I thought he wasn’t right for her. A person like that could drag you down, however strong you are and Helen is strong. I mean, when you get down to it he’s really a cheap crook going nowhere.’
‘Unlike you,’ I said cruelly.
‘I didn’t pretend my prospects were that terrific, but at least I would give her full commitment which is what she needs because she’s really rather an alone sort of person and she’s too proud to admit it.’
‘And how did she take this analysis of her plight?’
‘She didn’t lose her cool, not at all, but she did say she thought she was the best judge of how lonely she was and who was or wasn’t good for her, but she was incredibly grateful for my offer and of course she’d think about it, but she needed a bit of time. So I agreed to that.’
There were plenty more acid ripostes waiting to be unleashed, but his earnest little-boy look above his ginger tie with silver horse-shoes on it (a new addition to his limited wardrobe) melted me, so I merely asked how I could help him.
‘Well, you see, I gave her a month.’
‘You gave her a month?’
‘To make up her mind in. I promised not to mention the idea for a month if she promised to give me a firm answer at the end of it. So she said all right. And the thing is, the month was up last Tuesday and I’ve rung her and rung her and I can’t get hold of her at all anywhere, so finally I went round to her place and left a note saying how much I loved her and how my offer was as cast-iron as ever and I couldn’t live without her. Would you like to read it? I’ve got a carbon.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘not just now.’
‘So when I got back from an airline do earlier this morning, I found a message on my desk saying she was going to ring at lunchtime.’
‘That’s the call you’re waiting in for?’
‘Yes, I don’t know why she insists on calling me here.’
As it happened, I could see why she might prefer to make her call under constricting circumstances. But all I said was that I still couldn’t see why he needed me here to listen in.
‘Of course, I don’t want you to listen in. That would be quite out of order. I just want your advice, because this could be the most important half-hour of my life.’
‘Really?’ I said, returning to acid mode.
‘You see, I think she’s probably going to say no to my offer. And I can see why, she doesn’t want to close off her options at this stage. But the thing is, I can’t stand it if she says no.’
He leant so far forward across the prune-coloured Formica that his cheek was almost grazing the little plastic flags. Close to tears, I thought, feeling hot and cramped myself.
‘So?’
‘So what I want your advice on is, if she says no, should I say will you marry me. Might that tip the scales, make her realise how serious I really am?’
‘It would certainly show you were serious.’
‘Or would it put her off for good, so she never wanted to see me again?’
‘I don’t know. Why do you have to ask her today?’
‘I just know I have to. Can’t you see that? If I miss this moment, the whole thing will fizzle out. You must see that if you’ve got any soul in you at all.’
‘I haven’t trekked half-way across London to be told I’ve got no soul. Anyway, she doesn’t seem particularly keen to see you at all at the moment, so why should asking her to marry you make all the difference? It just doesn’t sound like real life.’
Bobs paid no attention and now began to talk in something closer to a mutter, as though rehearsing the arguments to himself, having given up on me:
‘Thing is, to place it on record. Might go either way, of course it might. But I owe it to myself, couldn’t forgive myself if I hadn’t made myself clear. Would go through life wishing I had. That would be –’
Then the telephone rang. Curious that it hadn’t rung before, it was usually impossible to get through to a travel agent at lunchtime. Probably someone asking the cheapest way to get to the Bahamas. But it wasn’t.
Bobs’s side of the conversation was mostly grunts and half-finished protests, not very coherent, with an occasional Yes, I see what you mean. I heard him try to arrange a time to meet or for him to ring her. Eventually, he put the phone down.
‘Well,’ he gulped, ‘I’m afraid there wasn’t much point in dragging you here after all, because as you heard I didn’t get much of an oar in, let alone make m
y famous offer she couldn’t refuse.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘She said she was awfully sorry she hadn’t managed to get in touch with me recently but she had a ghastly lot of arrangements to do with work that she had to get sorted and then she had to say goodbye to Tolly – which perked my spirits up when she said it, but then I immediately thought it seemed to take a bloody long time to say goodbye. And then she said straight out that she had thought over my offer but she didn’t think us living together would really work out. The other thing she was ringing up to say was she was going to Africa to do a job in mining – I would have asked her about that, it sounded dead interesting, but I was too upset – for a couple of years it would be, but I wasn’t to think that was the reason she couldn’t live with me, even if she hadn’t been going away she couldn’t, she was sorry but there it was.’
As he broke down into strange asthmatic sobs, not jerky but gravelly like an almost continuous snore, the glass door opened and the en-brosse man came in again, belching with equal delicacy as he passed us.
‘Let’s go out and get a breath,’ I said.
As Bobs got up, it looked as though he could scarcely walk, but then I saw he had stumbled over a box of leaflets for Bulgaria The Unusual Destination. In one hand he had picked up a styrofoam cup of potato and chive salad, which I hadn’t noticed on his desk.
‘That’s all I have for lunch now. I thought Helen might like it if I lost weight.’
We stood side by side outside while he ate the salad with a little plastic fork. The rain had stopped which only meant you could feel the damp more.
‘Mining,’ I said stamping my feet. ‘What does she know about mining, unless it’s an ice-cream mine?’
‘Well, Grabiner, you know, the people who owned Woodies, they went belly-up after that thing about the dodgy vitamin supplements, so she needed a job.’
‘Look, I’m afraid I really have to go now.’
‘You don’t care, do you? Couldn’t expect you to, I suppose. People don’t care about other people, not really. Anyway, you thought she deserved better. I can see that, don’t blame you. You haven’t seen how fabulously we got on together, you can’t imagine how sweet –’
‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, trying to cut him off.
‘Are you really?’ he said, giving me another of his furrowed looks, this one a good deal less friendly. ‘I expect you told her I wasn’t worth it.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘we never had that sort of conversation.’
‘Funny,’ he said bitterly, ‘it hadn’t occurred to me until this very minute, you and Helen probably spent all these evenings together swapping jokes about me. I mean, I can’t see what else you had to talk about. You’re not interested in science and she’s not interested in whatever it is you’re interested in. What are you interested in, as a matter of fact? I’ve never heard you start off a subject. You just like to knock, don’t you, pull other people’s pathetic little remarks to pieces, so I’m sure I wasn’t left out. Have you heard Bobs’s latest, you wouldn’t believe . . .’
The time was past for making a dignified exit. I grunted an incoherent farewell, hoping it looked as if I was shattered by his cruel and unfair accusations, and turned off down the street, disregarding his half-raised hand with the little plastic fork in it.
His misery stayed with me like the damp which rose up against the windows of our office, blurring, then blotting out the trees long before the teatime dusk. The misery had shown how near the surface lay his consciousness of insignificance, which rather destroyed the joke of him. No, worse, it might show him to be superior to those of us who had that consciousness buried several layers deeper.
The whole business left me feeling restless and irritated, with both him and me, and guilty too, in fact mostly guilty. It did no good to argue that even if I had never met either of them Helen would never have gone to live with Bobs in a million years. And it was no good either to protest that it was he who kept seeking me out, which he did again, very late a few evenings later.
‘Ah there you are. Thank God.’
He sounded breathless, incoherent, drunk probably, not to be blamed for that, at that time of night.
‘I’m glad you phoned,’ I said. ‘Look, I really am very sorry.’
‘No time for that. Please you must come round now.’
‘Again?’
‘No, this time it’s urgent. You –’
Noise of telephone falling on floor. That sounded urgent enough and even if it was a joke he had a right to get his own back.
It wasn’t a joke. He was lying on the floor, on a dhurri in violent colours, orange, purple, sickly yellow. He was comatose or nearly, breathing heavily, not unlike asthmatic sobbing. Pills were scattered near his head around his spectacles which I didn’t know he wore and a string of amber worry beads. The whole scene was like a photographer’s set-up for a thriller-jacket.
‘Oh,’ he said, waking a bit, ‘there you are. Sorry to be a bore.’
Which was the first time he had apologised for that.
‘I’ll get a doctor.’
‘No, no, Helen, get Helen.’
His voice was very faint, not a hint of a yap in it.
‘I’ll get a doctor and Helen.’
He closed his eyes without another word and I began dialling while keeping a watch on him. The breathing was gentle and even, but then I didn’t know whether that was a good or a bad sign.
His cheek felt cold and bristly. I went next door for a blanket to put round him. By his bed, in a battered leather frame there was a photograph of Bobs and his brother in shorts, aged about five and fifteen, with their parents either side of them, the father already looking frail and mischievous, Bobs smiling, Gerald glaring. Curious to want to wake up to that every morning. On the chest of drawers a small pottery horse and hairbrushes with R.A.M. in tarnished silver letters on the back, a framed colour snap of a man waving in a blue vintage car, and next to it a sepia school group, the figures already sinking into the ivy-clad wall behind them. As I pulled the blanket off, I slipped on the tribal rug beside the bed and fell face down into the bedclothes. This tiny mishap stuck in my mind, so that ever afterwards I remembered my foot and the rug skidding on the lino underneath and the coarse mouthful of blanket.
The ambulance men came first, jocular, truculent, giving me the impression that they were like lifeboatmen dragged away from their real jobs to bail out this idiot who was entirely responsible for his own plight, not untrue in Bobs’s case, but I suspect they would still be like that if you were struck by lightning and utterly blameless. Then, as they got down to the business of putting Bobs on to the stretcher, they suddenly became so gentle that I forgave them. Perhaps the brusqueness was something they were taught, a way of taking command of the situation which then gave them room to be deliberate in moving the patient, and helped to calm the bystanders.
‘He’ll be all right once we’ve pumped him. Pulse is good.’
I saw them out into the gathering fog. Bobs gave a brave little wave at no one in particular as the doors closed behind him.
The fog was shifting, sometimes almost white then a murky grey under the street-light and thickening all the time. When I came down to answer the second ring, it was so thick that at first there seemed to be no one there. She came up the steps and it was like the first time we had met when she came out of the sea-fret: little pale face, golden hair, not quite real but strangely definite.
‘They’ve taken him? That’s good.’
‘Yes, they were quick. Said he looked as if he’d be all right.’
‘Oh’ – long drawn out, a sign of exhaustion as much as of relief. ‘That’s good. I’m glad I didn’t have to see him in that state. What did he look like?’
‘He just looked passed out.’
She gave another long sigh and hugged me against her cold cheek and fast-beating heart. Then sat down.
‘It was terrible what I did, I know it was, but I didn’t know what else
to do. He was so, well, insistent and then –’
She stopped, not to find a word but thinking where to go next.
‘We must go to the hospital, now,’ she said, briskly as though I had been delaying her.
‘Yes, though I don’t expect we can help much. They took the pills, so they know as much as we know.’
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