The Girl Who Came to Stay

by Ray Connolly

  Next it would be the paper boy, hurling his papers fifteen feet from the gate to the top step these days, with an overarm toss that rarely missed. And then the postman, at the gate, and up the steps. Familiar friendly feet. But still no Clare.

  At nine o’clock she came home, slamming the taxi door and tripping quickly up to the front door. I waited, silently in bed, ears straining to hear her, my mind numbed of the pain that had wrecked my night. And carefully I listened as I heard her climb quickly up the stairs, pausing for a second to step over the creaking board by my half-open door and then moving swiftly on up to her room, until with a click I her door was closed, and she was safe.

  For a long time I lay there, making up excuses for her and telling myself that whatever she told me I would believe. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I’d been imagining. My jealousy had been running away with me. She’d be able to explain it. It would be nothing.

  Yet I couldn’t sleep. Occasionally I heard movements from the floor above which indicated that she hadn’t gone to bed when she got in, but I’d no idea what she might be doing. At twelve fifteen I got up, put on my dressing gown and went down to make some coffee. Briefly it occurred to me that perhaps I ought to make two cups, and take one up for her, but then I knew I wouldn’t dare approach her.

  There was no need. As I climbed back up the basement stairs I heard her voice: ‘Yes … Rigby … that’s right, Campden Hill Road … about five minutes? Thank you very much. I’ll be waiting.’ A taxi? She was going somewhere?

  We met in the hall. By her cases. For a few seconds we looked at each other, and then almost together tried to avoid each other’s eyes. She was completely packed. Ready to go. Cases, paper bags, tennis racket still in its leather jacket, and her posters, neatly rolled, poking out of an Alitalia airline bag she’d picked up somewhere. Nervously she bit the inside flesh of her bottom lip. I pulled my dressing gown tighter around me—it was a cold morning—and then slowly dragged my eyes back to her. She was back in her jeans and navy blue poloneck sweater under a fur jacket. The glamour of last night washed away by the morning. She looked pale and tired, and frightened. Absently she pulled her fur hood around her head. An alternative to conversation.

  ‘You don’t have to go, Clare.’ I could hear myself talking, could almost see the two of us as if we were in a dream.

  Clare rubbed her eye.

  ‘I knew you’d say that. I’ll be at Tibby’s if you need me for anything. You can send my mail on there … I’m sorry, Benedict.’

  ‘Don’t worry … it’s probably for the best … or something. Um, well, have you got everything?’

  Clare nodded. Her eyes were brimming. Arms wrapped around myself, I stared at the ground. There could be no consolation now.

  ‘I’ve just made some coffee. Would you like some?’ A lump stuck in my throat, and my voice sounded off-key. My tongue was stone dry with shock.

  ‘No thank you. The taxi’ll be here any second. I phoned Tibby. She’s expecting me.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  The front door bell rang—a shrill alarm.

  ‘How’s that for timing?’ Trying to be lighthearted. I stooped down and carried her bags to the door, while she ran to open it. The taxi driver took them from me, and then returned to help with the paper bags and loose clothes. For a moment we were alone again.

  ‘I’ll come and see you soon. And we can talk. There are some of my things scattered around the house.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ I tried a smile. Still Clare waited. And for a moment I thought she was going to kiss me, but then she pulled open the door and walked out onto the steps.

  ‘Thanks for … well, you know … everything.’

  I nodded vacantly. ‘Happy New Year.’

  And then my little girl Clare, Clare my nurse, always so clean, and neat, Clare the girl I loved, began to cry, letting great streams of tears run down her cheeks. And turning quickly she was through the gate and into the taxi. Sitting staring up from the cab at me, looking so incongruous there in my pyjamas and dressing gown, on the top step of this large and lonely house that she had made into my home, with her little ways, her tittle-tattle conversation, her cooking, her affection. And my love. And then she was gone.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘This is a recording. I am not at home at present. If you want to leave a message please leave your name and phone number when the whistle stops. Speak clearly, because if you don’t I won’t be able to tell a word you’re saying on this new-fangled machine. Start talking now…’

  I listened carefully as the whistle blew, and then, satisfied that the machine was working properly, put down the telephone. It was strange to ring myself up and be told by myself that I wasn’t in. For a moment I considered the dozens of daft people who would start leaving asinine messages, and made a mental vow not to answer them. The machine had been installed for one call only. There was only one message that I didn’t ever want to miss, although I was beginning to doubt whether it would ever come.

  It was now late January: a damp and mild time, and for the first time in months I’d once again begun to go to the office every day—hardly a nine-to-five schedule, but at least a schedule. In at eleven. Coffee at eleven-fifteen. Work for a couple of hours. Lunch from one until three. Coffee at four, and home at four-thirty before the rush hour started. Since I was staying in every night, most of my actual writing was being done at home, whiling away the hours, doubling my output for the paper, doing the odd freelance interview and now trying to write a play for television. I suppose I was cramming my life with work, just as the best agony pages in the women’s magazines would have suggested.

  The days after Clare had left had been a silent journey: an exercise in retrospection. For two weeks I’d wandered around the house and waited for the phone. For hours I would sit by the window watching the people, pretending I wasn’t waiting for anything when I knew I was. In truth I hardly dared leave the house in case she might telephone and, finding me out, not bother to call again. Eventually, as if surfacing from a long sleep, I hit upon the idea of the answering-machine. At least if she needed me she could leave a message. She’d promised to come around to collect the rest of her things, but at the end of three weeks there hadn’t been a word from her. I could have phoned Tibby’s, but I didn’t. There was nothing I could have said. Instead I left Clare’s things exactly where she had left them. A couple of books, odd letters, a sewing box which I’d hardly ever actually seen her use, a manicure set in the bathroom, a hairbrush left on a chest by the side of my bed … there wasn’t really a great deal that was of crushing importance. Certainly nothing that she wouldn’t be able to live without.

  Mrs Pollock, on her first call after Clare’s departure, had asked if I’d like Clare’s room done out. But I said no, she would probably be back before very long, and would want to do it herself. Mrs Pollock looked sceptical but didn’t comment, and went about her other jobs, while I climbed to the top of the house as I’d done the day she left, and lay on her bed for a long time, staring at the scars on the plaster of the walls where she had pulled down her posters, and at the pretty new curtains which she’d made for her home, and then left behind in her hurry to leave. And I remembered that she’d once said she liked the curtains that I’d had put up before we met.

  I had no doubts about what must have happened after Rose’s party. But the pain of being cuckolded was nothing to that of finding myself alone again. She could come back any time she wanted. That was all that mattered. The desires and actions of the body could so often be so different from the desires of the emotions. And I was old enough to realise that sex normally had little to do with love. In my experience, in fact, with the exception of Clare, it had nothing at all to do with love. When love and lust meet it’s a happy coincidence. No more. And yet the wounds of her infidelity weren’t that easily healed. Night after night my mind would trace again our last evening together, and the long night alone, and each time my mind would re-create exactly the mental pictur
e of her betrayal that I’d conjured up as my torment. Almost as if I’d witnessed it all myself I constantly relived the torture of my own imagination. And yet, were she to come back, I would never have mentioned it. That kind of hurt would be a bearable penance. A ghost of attrition which would come to me in the night sometimes when I felt good, just to remind me of what could be bad. All that I could stand. You reap what you sow, I liked to tell myself. And I’d sown so much carnal carelessness about that I was hardly in any position to complain if my dreams were disturbed with an erupting ulcer of hurt. Just let her come back, I thought, and Fll cope with the other misery myself.

  ‘Lunch, Benedict?’ My daydreams burst open, and I was back at my desk, hand still resting on the telephone. Jack Roper, the features editor, was leaning over towards me and smiling. Tf you’re going to start coming into the office again, you’d better get your hand in at buying us all a round again.’

  Immediately my first reaction was to refuse, as I’d done last week, but instantly I realised that I wanted to go.

  ‘Thanks. Yes. I’ll catch up. Where you going?’

  ‘The Seven Stars. Hurry up. All the lads on the table are going down today.’

  ‘Okay. I just have to do something … I’ll be right there.’

  I’ve nothing to do, I thought, but just give me a moment to pull myself together. It’s been difficult fitting in here again. As a freelance I never had to come into the office at all, but before Clare I was much more of a frequent visitor. Searching for company, I imagine. Then I had all I needed, and my visits became pretty well limited to once a week, running in, copy in hand, and then out again and home. Now I’m back, and using these people as a reservoir of friendship. Yet I really hardly know them now. A Friday lunchtime in the pub should be a good time to get reacquainted.

  The Seven Stars is one of the pubs near Fleet Street where generations of reporters and sub-editors have eaten badly and drunk too much, probably since the very founding of newspapers. It is small, cramped, built as a hostelry in the sixteenth century, when the average Englishman was presumably a dwarf, and virtually unmodernised.

  Four subs sat with Jack around the roughly hewn and varnished table, which the landlord misguidedly thought added some atmosphere to his miserable little place.

  ‘Oh great, here’s Benedict. What’ll it be?’ George, the chief features sub, was on his feet, giving me his chair, and ordering red wine for me almost before I got through the door. ‘And make that with a plate of beef, and some camembert and French bread, love. We’ll have to feed him up. You lost weight or something, Benedict? You’re not looking yourself recently.’

  ‘It’s probably battle-fatigue, being in the office so much,’ one of the other chaps commented, and everybody laughed, not because it was funny, but because it was a Friday afternoon, and the week was virtually over, and everybody was thoroughly glad, and would have laughed at anything. I’ve never been a great man for exclusively male associations, but there was always a certain crude vulgarity and fellow sympathy that I responded well to about these Friday lunchtime booze-ups, and although I hadn’t been to many, I was grateful to be asked at all. On top of that I have endless respect for the men who actually produced the paper—who made my column look good however bad it might be. On the far side of the table David and Alistair, two youngishly middle-aged layout men, were discussing someone, in expressions of long suffering contempt.

  ‘… he’s a cunt, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Oh, absolutely.’

  Curiously I wondered who was worthy of such derision. The editor? The assistant editor? The general manager? The news editor, maybe even the proprietor? Or what about the father of the chapel? Or the overseer in the composing room? Or one of the comps? It didn’t really matter, but I wanted to know.

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘Oh. Thanks. What have I done?’

  ‘Well, there you are, shacked up with some bird for months on end, no time to talk to anyone, and the minute you get bored with her you think you can come back and take up with us as though nothing had happened.’

  The mockery was gentle, and no harm was intended. I hadn’t been aware that they’d known about Clare, but I was glad that they didn’t know that she’d left me.

  ‘Nonsense, we’re glad to see him back.’ Jack, big beery Jack, was smiling all around the room. ‘Tell us, Benedict, have you had your end away with one of your dolly-girl interviews recently?’

  ‘Oh, come on, you know me better than that.’ I’d been through this conversation fifty times in four years.

  ‘No. He’s playing at being the monogamous man since he got this new bird, isn’t that right, Benedict?’ George answering for me.

  ‘The next thing we know even he’ll be married, and then what will we do for our cheap thrills?’ Everybody laughing. ‘I tell you, if it weren’t for knowing that young Benedict here is getting my share for me, I think I’d go back to playing with myself. Why weren’t we born into the permissive society like him?’ Jack, one blustering and kind arm on my shoulder. ‘Reassure us, Benedict. You’re not going to follow all of us into the trap of matrimony and mortgages are you?’

  The fun was opening up my wounds like lances; cutting away at the hardly grown stitches and twisting deep.

  ‘No. No, I’m not thinking of marrying anyone just at present…’ I said, and then noticing a slight lull in the tempo of the lunch, as though suddenly I might have betrayed myself by some manner of voice, I stumbled on, ‘… but if I do, well, I’ll let you all come and watch me consummate it on the first night—if your wives will let you.’

  The danger was past and someone ordered another round of drinks. Four halves of bitter: two red wines. Almost as though my role in the conviviality was over, I was allowed to retreat from being the centre of attention, and the journalists went back to talking about the paper (It’s not a happy paper. There’s an atmosphere about the office’), to talking about their next holidays, about their cars, about repairs being done on their houses, and about their wives and children. They rarely talked of anything else at lunchtimes, and although they all made a pretence of lusting openly after the barmaid with her stockinged hen’s legs, skirt like a limp rag around her bottom and breasts pushing through her sweater like a couple of baby pyramids, it was to their wives and children in the suburbs that they rushed as soon as the last edition was finished.

  They might talk about marriage as though it were a trap, I thought, but how much more of a trap would it be to stay single because one couldn’t face up to the responsibility of sharing and taking care of a wife and children? The loneliness of the long-distance bachelors seemed too high a price to pay for the occasional affair, delicious though it might be, and an exorbitant fee for the dreary hopelessness of the one-night stand. And contemplating my huge empty house, I envied them their suburban cosiness; their arguments with the neighbours about overhanging branches; their weekends with their children; their night-times with their wives. The security of their situation.

  Ordering another round of drinks, I bought them all a cigar each. How absurd that they should envy me so much. It’s always greener on the other side, I knew, but not on my side. And yet I was happy to keep up the pretence of being the happy bachelor, well off, well paid, and with no heavy burdens about my ears. Benedict Kelly; living a lie, and almost liking it.

  ‘I’ve got to go now,’ I said at last, suddenly remembering my answering-machine, and feeling a deepening craving to be home again. Only at home did I feel close to her. ‘I’m off to have it away with Brigitte Bardot, and she asked me not to be too late. Or was it Raquel Welch? Better check in my diary…’ And to hoots and jokes I was out of the pub before I could be cajoled into another drink.

  There were three messages waiting for me: three voices of no account; three people asking favours. Why did no one ever phone except to ask some kind of favour? Rushing home through the traffic, I’d felt an eager excitement inside. But now I knew that it
was going to be another long and dull weekend of loneliness. And yet I was no stranger to myself as a companion. I’d been alone before and I knew the path well. And I knew that Friday night was the worst of the week. Monday to Friday you can make excuses so that you don’t have to be alone, you can go to work, go out on interviews, take people to lunch. But from Friday night until Monday morning it’s harder to fool yourself. And the memories crowd thick, and linger longer in your mind.

  Five o’clock found me lying back on Clare’s bed, willing the phone to ring. It was madness. I didn’t even know that she still worked for Paul. Or lived with Tibby. She might have got off with anybody by this time, and be living in the lap of luxury in some Mayfair penthouse. She might be doing anything. I stared out of the window; it was already dark. Best to go out to eat at that place round the corner. And sit with all the other single men, heads down behind our evening papers, ordering sirloin steak and baked potato with butter, and a half-bottle of red wine. And trying not to look as though I’m embarrassed about eating alone. Although everyone else is. Eight o’clock in the steak-houses of west London, where the better-off bed-sit men congregate every night to eat their one decent meal of the day. The men who are making it professionally, but have failed somewhere along the social line, and so hide themselves every night in the paper, or a book. And eat with methodical and mechanical gestures, right hand leaning out from behind the entertainments guide to feel for the wine, like those unconscious hands at the fairground that grip hold of boxes of matches, or little cars, or trinkets for you. All at tables for one. All alone. For a woman loneliness can be easier when it comes to eating. But men are lazy about cooking, and although they never speak, their nightly presence at least makes them a part of a fraternity. Eating early together, on the way home from the office, and before the couples come in to sit together, foreheads almost touching, to remind them of what they’re missing. I knew it all so well. I’d watched and seen it all happen so often in my lifetime, although recently I’d rarely been short of company.