by Nina Bawden
She let go my hand and relaxed in her chair. She smiled at me and I was resentful. She had persuaded me into a promise that I hadn’t wanted to make just so that she could feel the burden of decision was no longer hers. I had always known that she was a dependent sort of person, but if I had ever thought about it at all I had always imagined that she would be able to stand on her own if it were ever necessary. Now, for the first time, I doubted that. I saw her as weak and I very nearly despised her.
She got up and drew the curtains across the deep window bay and the moment passed. I thought of it, afterwards, with astonished guilt. I told myself that it is impossible to dissect your friends and separate the good from the bad, that you accept them as they are, imperfect as they are.
When she left the window she was again Celia, whom I loved from long habit. There were bruised shadows under her eyes and her thin shoulders drooped. She had broken the strap of her sandal; somehow this made her seem very vulnerable and pathetic and I felt tender towards her.
I said, “Look, dear. I shall be in London to-morrow. I’ll see Humphrey while I’m there.”
She shone with gratitude and I felt very male and protective. I tried to comfort her further by making light of what had happened, knowing that she was easily persuaded into believing what she wanted to believe.
When I went I kissed her warmly and she looked at me with great affection. She said, “Dear Will. What would I have done if you hadn’t been here?”
I said, “You’d have managed. But you don’t have to think about that.”
And then she closed the door and shut out the light. I walked back to the car and drove home. I went to bed and for a long time lay uneasily awake.
Chapter Two
I woke in the early hours of the morning. It was hot and airless and I could not go to sleep again. I tried to read but that didn’t help and I turned off the light and lay staring at the luminous switch of the bedside lamp.
I thought about the evening before and now, alone and in the dark, it seemed like a peculiarly grotesque nightmare. I thought of Humphrey and of Rose, of the people we knew and the shocked whispering over afternoon tea. I thought of all the paragraphs in the Sunday papers about respectable middle-aged men who seduced young girls. The palms of my hands were sweating.
In the end I got out of bed and went to the window. Below, in the dark town, the clock above the market cross struck three and the notes came up to me very sweet and clear. I gulped in the warm air and tried to think clearly. To-day I had to see Humphrey and I had to tell him that I knew about Rose. And that Celia knew. So far I was committed and for the moment it was quite enough. I tried to form sentences in my mind; just then it seemed agonisingly important that I should know exactly what I was going to say. It was the first time I had ever worried about what I was going to say to Humphrey and how I should say it. I had never thought of him before as I thought of him now, as a stranger.
I closed my eyes and I could see Humphrey’s face in front of me quite clearly as if he were in the room. I found myself thinking, dispassionately, that it was a face that women had always found attractive. He wasn’t handsome; with his big, beaked nose and narrow bones he was almost ugly, but it had never seemed to matter. Women had liked him; since he had left school his love affairs had been numerous and successful. Somehow, since he had married Celia I had assumed that he had been faithful to her. Perhaps it was natural for me to think like that; they had always seemed so happy and content together. And yet, remembering Humphrey as he had been at Oxford and afterwards when we had been in London together, it seemed an extraordinary assumption to have made. I began to wonder whether the life in Somerhurst which I found natural and easy might not have been, for Humphrey, very dull. It was a pleasant enough life if you didn’t expect too much of it. I found myself thinking in a half-dazed way that it might be this that was the matter with me: I expected too little.
I found myself feeling resentful towards Humphrey and I began to wonder if I had always resented him and that it had, only now, come out in the open. When we had been at school together I had hero-worshipped him in a schoolboy fashion. He had been a year older than me but I had been clever for my age and we had been in the same form. That special feeling for him had ended before we left school and went to Oxford together but I had never felt about anyone else in quite the same way.
He was sure of himself, volatile and never gloomy. Life with him had been amusing and always unexpected. He was a good person to be with and he never made you feel a passenger. He was charming, witty and mercurial. I suppose it was because I felt myself to be none of these things that I had always felt for him, besides affection, a kind of admiration that was coloured by my boyhood feeling for him and almost entirely uncritical. It was not, as Celia said, that I could see no wrong in him; rather that I had not looked for it. He had been, for me, a quite special person whom I did not judge.
He got easily the things that I had to work hard for; amusements and friends and money. I told myself that this probably explained my present anger, that it is hard not to be angry with people who, having got a great deal in life, make a mess of it.
I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly four o’clock. I was cramped and cold. I knew that it would be sensible, knowing that I was not going to be able to sleep, to get up and dress. Instead I went back to bed and lay waiting for the next hour to strike. I must have slept then, if only momentarily, because the next time I looked at the window it was light with the dawn.
I got up and dressed slowly to fill in the time and went to the kitchen to make coffee. My eyes were sticky with exhaustion and when I had drunk the coffee I felt worse instead of better.
I wrote a note for the charwoman and went to the station to catch the early train. I usually drove to town but my head was heavy and dull and I felt that I could not face the long, traffic-blocked crawl from the suburbs to the city.
It was too early for the business men at the station and the platform was deserted. When the train came in it was almost empty. I found a carriage to myself and slept all the way to London, waking up with a bad taste in my mouth. I bought a paper on the station and went to the buffet for breakfast. The waitress was yawning and the place smelt of grease and cabbage. I ate scrambled eggs and stared at the paper without reading it.
It was not too early now to ring the flat. I paid the bill and went to the telephone booths. The station was busy and they were full. I felt relieved; there was time, before my first business appointment, to go to the flat and see Humphrey. It might be easier to see him and it would put off a bad moment.
I started down the slope to the tube trains and then, seized by an odd sense of urgency, I turned back and went to the taxi rank. I gave the address to the driver and got into the cab, leaning back against the cushions with a sick feeling in my stomach. I was having a bad attack of cowardice and I despised myself for it.
The taxi went down unfamiliar back streets past houses and village-like groups of shops where tired women with curlers in their hair walked with baskets and prams. We came out of the back streets into the known tumult of Marble Arch and drove up the Edgware Road, past the cinemas and the pawn shops and the dingy jewellers, up the rise and down into Maida Vale. We turned to the left and stopped outside the fiat.
I paid the driver and went up the steps, through the open door with the stained glass fanlight and up the dark stairs. I stopped at the door of the first floor flat and rang the bell. The door was opened by a woman with a flat, muddy face.
I said, “I want to see Mr. Stone. Mr. Humphrey Stone.”
“Yes,” said the woman. She moved away from the door and I stepped into the tiny hallway. The flat was stiflingly hot; Piers kept the central heating on throughout the year.
A voice called through an open doorway and, reluctantly, because above all things I had hoped to avoid Piers, I went into the room.
He was sitting up in bed, his fat shoulders covered with purple silk pyjamas, leaning back agai
nst the white pillows. He looked opulent; a breakfast tray was balanced on his knees and the morning papers lay on a table beside the bed. The skin of his face was as scrubbed and rosy and clean as a schoolboy’s straight from the bath; he looked more like a decadent Roman than ever. The Siamese cat crouched by his hand; when I came in it put back its ears and lifted the snake-like head with the pale, crooked eyes.
Piers said, “Well. William the Good. I’m delighted to see you, dear boy.” He called everyone “dear boy” with the slightest inflection of contempt in the voice that was a little too urbane, a little too public school. His bright little eyes sparkled with malice and I tried not to look at him. I hated to see how like Humphrey he was, as though he were Humphrey grown old and soggy and fat. They had the same sharp-ridged nose, the same thin, curving mouth.
I said, “I want to see Humphrey. Is he still in bed?”
Piers chuckled. “Of course not, dear boy. I didn’t think you’d come to see me, you know. Humphrey’s not in bed; he’s at his conference of pedagogues. He won’t be back till late to-night but I can tell you where to find him. Is it important. Is everything all right?”
His eyes were greedy and curious. I said, “I should like to see him, that’s all. There’s nothing wrong.”
I thought that Piers looked disappointed. “He said he might go to a club in the Fulham Road after dinner. A nasty little place. But then Humphrey has always had a nostalgie de la boite.“ He smiled with sudden, spiteful enjoyment. “You know he doesn’t get enough boue in Somerhurst with that nice virgin he’s married to. Does she know that, I wonder? Dear Celia, she does dislike me so. Now what is the name of that club?”
He frowned, pretending to think, all the time watching me slyly, with pleasure. I waited and said nothing, not wanting to let him see that he had made me angry and uncomfortable; it was what he wanted. I had found that out long ago.
Once I had stayed in the flat with Humphrey for part of the long vacation. It had been apparent, from the beginning, that Piers had not wanted me there. I had not understood why. I had, I think, been young for my age, I know I had been clumsy and shy. I had been an easy target for Piers’s brand of contemptuous wit.
I had tried hard; I had learned to laugh at obscenities that privately shocked me because I knew that they were intended to shock me. I had tried to adopt an easy, man-of-the-world attitude. Naturally a Puritan, I had endeavoured to pretend that I was not.
Of course I had not succeeded. Piers was too clever and too venomous and my own defences too fragile. In the end, as had been inevitable, I had lost my temper and told Piers, in an outburst of trembling invective, what I thought of him.
He had listened to me in chilly silence and when I had stumbled to the end he had said a number of brutal things. Among them, that I was a middle-class prig whose life would never be anything but excessively dull, that I was crass, stupid and not at all amusing. There had been a lot more of it besides, all of it near enough to the truth to be wounding. Until that moment I had not realised the extent of Piers’s hatred for me; when he had finished I knew all about the hatred but I did not understand it. I had felt shamed and dirty and oddly afraid.
Piers said, “I have it now. The Odd Flamingo. Dreadful place with coarse paintings all over the walls. You’ll probably enjoy it. Provincials do. They think it is Bohemia. Will you have coffee?”
I said, “No thank you. I have to meet a client at eleven.”
Piers smiled, without friendliness. “Busy, aren’t you, dear boy? Work is one of the things I have never been able to fit in. Life’s too short. Why work, anyway, when so much is there for the taking? I work in my own way, of course. Aggie wakes me when she comes in and brings me my breakfast and I sit, propped up on the pillows like an elderly tart”—he liked the phrase and repeated it—” like an elderly tart, and watch the form. Hard work, racing, you know.” He added piously, “I thank God that with racing and women my life has been pleasantly supplied.”
He settled back against the pillows and began to pour his coffee. He tucked a spotless napkin under his chin. I noticed his hands; they were beautifully shaped, well-cared for and fastidiously clean. I wondered if he shaved the hair off the backs of them and decided that he did; there were dark bristles in the smoothness of the skin. For some reason this gave me a feeling of faint disgust.
Out in the street the air of the summer morning was clean and fresh after the staleness of the flat. I took a train to the city and almost forgot to get out at the Bank because I was wondering why Humphrey should still be going to The Odd Flamingo. That the place should be still in existence surprised me; it was fifteen years since I had first heard of it. We had just come down from Oxford and it had seemed, then, a rather dashing little place to belong to. It had been frequented by small criminals and down-at-heel prostitutes and we had felt that we were seeing life. Later, when the squalor and the general seediness of the place became apparent, I had allowed my membership to lapse. It had never occurred to me that Humphrey had not done likewise.
The day was hot and long and the things I had to do seemed very dull. I had dinner at my club; there was no one there that I knew and I was glad of it. I drank more than I usually did and tried to forget the distaste I felt for the job I had to do. I told myself that I must be detached about it, that I must forget that Humphrey was my friend and that I had always thought him a rather special sort of person. Until the thing was sorted out I must think of him as a client who had got himself into a mess. I would have to tell him that we should have to offer the girl maintenance for the child unless she could be persuaded to offer it for adoption. If she turned nasty and applied to the justices for a summons she wouldn’t be awarded more than twenty shillings a week. We could do better than that. With luck we might keep the whole thing quiet.
I paid my bill and caught a bus to Chelsea. It was nearly nine o’clock. The window displays were lighting up and the evening sky threw a blue twilight over the streets. I got off the’bus at the stop I remembered and walked, looking for the club. When I came to the dingy door the name was painted over a lighted fanlight at the top.
Inside the door, the stairs leading to the basement were immediately in front of me; to the side was a narrow, lighted box tenanted by a dark, angry-looking man. He looked up and said, “Got your card?”
He looked a foreigner but he spoke with the accent of Bermondsey.
I said, “I haven’t got a card. I’m looking for a friend. A Mr. Stone. He’s a member, I think.”
“You’ll have to join if you want to go in,” the man said. He eyed me implacably, with dislike.
I said helplessly, “All right then. What do I do?”
He pushed a dirty yellow form at me. “Sign one of these,” he said. “It’s ten shillings for six months.”
The form said that The Odd Flamingo was licenced to serve drinks from three p.m. to twelve midnight. I signed the form, pushed a note through the grill, and went down the uninviting stairs. At the bottom there was a door leading to a lavatory; it swung open on drooping hinges disclosing a cracked washbasin and another door beyond. There was no door into the club; a curtain hung across the opening where the door had been. I pushed the curtain aside and beyond it there was a long, narrow room with apparently no ventilation so that the heat inside was solid, like a wall. At the nearer end of the room a bar had been built along one wall and there were a few, shabby chairs and plastic-topped tables painted in bright, chipped colours. The other half of the room was used as a dance floor; on a raised patform at the end three dispirited-looking men were playing a jazz tune. They played softly, not quite on the beat, as though they knew that no one would dance.
It was all much as I remembered it; the only thing that seemed to be new was the decoration on the walls of the club. They had been covered with painted, bright flamingos with thin, pink legs and feathered bodies but in each case instead of the long neck there was the upper part of a girl’s body drawn with sharp, bare breasts and a flat, smiling face.
The drawings had been done with skill and wit; they were intended to excite and amuse but they did neither. They gave me a bad taste in the mouth.
The people were the same kind of people. There was the usual mixture of lesbians and pimps with a sprinkling of students who had come to see the fun. Most of them looked bored.
I leaned against the bar and watched the doorway. After a little I felt too conspicuously alone and went to a table against the opposite wall. The club filled up slowly and noisily with grey-haired women in mannish coats and pretty boys with lipstick on their mouths. At about ten o’clock Humphrey came in. He had a girl with him, a tall girl with a long, clever face.
She had changed very little in ten years. Astonishingly, I felt my pulses quicken slightly and I felt a fool. I half-hoped they would not see me.
But they did. Humphrey smiled at the girl briefly and politely and then his eyes searched the club as though he were looking for someone else. He looked distinguished and a little rakish, his pale hair shone silkily under the light. He saw me and came across the room through the close-packed tables.
“Will,” he said, “how very nice. Seeking me out in my low haunts, you dog.”
His voice was forced and over-jocular as if he were embarrassed at finding me there. The girl had followed him uncertainly.
He said, “Will, this is Kate.”
She recognised me all right. She smiled and held out her hand and said, “You’ve introduced us a little late.” Her voice was natural and composed; it seemed that she felt no awkwardness at all.
Humphrey said, “Back in a minute,” and made his way towards the bar. Kate stood by the table and grinned at me.
“How are you, Willy? You do know who I am, don’t you?” She was the only person who had ever called me Willy.
I said, “Of course I know you, Kate. I didn’t know that you knew Humphrey.” As far as I remembered, they had never met; at the time that I had been in love with her I had been alone in London.