The Likes of Us

by Stan Barstow

  It was his secretary. He had not spoken to her earlier, but left a message in her absence. Now she asked how he was and if he thought he would be well enough to keep an appointment he had made for Thursday morning with the representatives of the unions.

  Jordan’s firm enjoyed good industrial relations, but increasingly sophisticated technology entailed keeping the unions sweetened. It was vital always that nothing should go by default.

  ‘If I feel like I do now,’ he told Mrs Perrins, ‘I’ll be in at the usual time tomorrow.’

  The first thing he noticed when he came into the house after work on Thursday was her envelope lying on the hall table. With her wages he had slipped in a note saying, ‘Do please think seriously about the coat.’

  Wondering why she had not telephoned, it occurred to him that she probably did not know his office number. Perhaps she would ring this evening. Perhaps, on the other hand, she was ill and could not leave the house.

  It came to him now how little he knew about her. He had never made a note of the address she had given him and his only clue to where she could be found was the name of the pub where she had said she was working. It took him a few minutes, while he poured himself a drink and began preparing his evening meal, to bring that to mind.

  He looked it up in the yellow pages, then got out a street map of the city and its suburbs. He did not like to think of her being short of money over the weekend, nor of the possibility that she was too ill to get out to the shops.

  There had been no call from her by mid-evening, when he got his car out again and drove across the city. The Royal Oak was a big, square, late Victorian pub with two floors of letting rooms above the tall windows of the public rooms on the ground floor. Its best days had obviously finished when commercial travellers abandoned the train for the motor car and no longer spent three or four nights in one place. Now its badly lighted and greasily carpeted bars served as a local for the occupants of the score of streets of three-storey redbrick terraces which climbed the hill beside the main road – and, Jordan thought, only the seediest of them. He detested everything about the place, from the smell of stale beer and the garish wallpaper to the few people he could see – the lads in motor bike gear round the pool table under the wall-mounted television set; the shabby, earnestly gesticulating men drinking in the passage by the back entrance; and the shirtsleeved landlord who put his cigarette on the rim of an already full ashtray before coming to serve him. Jordan wondered when trade here justified Mrs Nugent’s wages. He ordered a Scotch and looked with distaste at the glass it came in.

  ‘Does Mrs Nugent work here?’ he asked when the man brought his change.

  ‘Audrey?’

  ‘Yes. Is she on tonight?’

  ‘She should be, but she sent word she was poorly.’

  ‘Does she live nearby?’

  ‘Are you looking for her?’

  ‘I’m a friend of hers from when she worked at the Beehive.’

  The landlord had taken in his clothes and now an expression Jordan couldn’t read flickered briefly in his pale eyes.

  ‘She lives in Birtmore Street.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Second on your left going back towards town. I couldn’t tell you what number. Happen the wife’d know.’

  ‘I’d be grateful if you’d ask her.’

  ‘You’re sure you’re not after her for something else?’

  ‘I don’t follow you,’ Jordan said. Perhaps the publican did not know that Mrs Nugent had another job. How did Jordan know what compartments she chose to divide her life into? He had told the man enough of his business.

  ‘Some folk round here, y’know,’ the landlord said, ‘they’re no better than they ought to be.’

  ‘I’m only enquiring about Mrs Nugent,’ Jordan said. ‘I’m not interested in anybody else.’

  Jordan sipped his whisky. The man nodded at the glass as he put it down. ‘Same again?’

  Jordan looked. There was still some left. ‘Go on, then.’

  The man went away, taking the glass, and spoke into a house phone.

  ‘She’ll be down in a minute.’

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be enough work for a barmaid,’ Jordan said.

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong. We get the young ’uns in disco nights.’

  ‘Is that the kind of thing you enjoy yourself?’

  ‘Times is bad. You’ve got to move with ’em. When Audrey and the missus are on together, I get in the public bar and leave ’em to it.’

  He went to serve a youth in a studded leather jacket whose head was shaved to the bone up to the crown, where the hair sprayed out in lacquered vermilion fronds. When a woman with wispy fair hair, wearing a yellow hand-knitted jumper with short puffed-out sleeves appeared, she spoke to the man, who nodded his head in Jordan’s direction.

  ‘Audrey, was it, you was asking about?’

  ‘I’d be grateful if you’d give me her address.’

  ‘From the social security, are you?’

  ‘I’d have her address if I were, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Does she know you’re coming?’

  ‘I thought I’d see her here.’

  ‘You would have in the normal way, but she’s poorly.’

  ‘So your husband says. He says she lives in Birtmore Street. What number is it?’

  ‘Twenty-seven.’ She looked at him as though regretting the ready answer.

  Jordan left the premises wondering if everyone who frequented them had things to hide. It depressed him to think of Audrey Nugent spending her evenings there, and depressed him yet more to reflect that she had probably more in common with that place and its clientele than she had with the Beehive, and even more so than with him himself.

  He sat in his car for several minutes before starting the engine and considered the wisdom of what he’d set out to do. Would she welcome his visit or think he was prying? He did not, he admitted now, seriously think she was in need of the money – not in urgent need, or she would have taken steps to get it. Now that he knew her address, he could put it in the post. Yet if he turned back now he would only castigate himself for his indecisiveness. ‘Be honest,’ he said out loud. ‘Own up. You’ve come because you want to see her.’

  He drove in second gear back along the main road and turned up the hill when his headlights picked out the cracked nameplate on a garden wall. Some of the houses had been fitted with incongruous new doors and windows. Others showed neglect in broken gates and leggy, overgrown privet hiding the small squares of soil that passed for front gardens. One such was number twenty-seven, which Jordan found when he had traversed the length of

  the street and kerb-crawled halfway down again. A dormer window had been let into the roof of this house and a dim light showed through the frosted-glass upper panels of the front door.

  The money was in his pocket, still sealed in the envelope he had left for her with her name on it. All he need do was slip it through the letterbox. Then, he thought, she might, in that occasional direct way of hers, rebuke him later. ‘Why didn’t you knock? What were you scared of? Coming all that way and going away without knocking and having a word.’

  He got out of the car and approached the house, still undecided. He was standing there with the envelope in his hand when a shape loomed up between the source of the light and the door, and the door was suddenly flung open wide before him. A man coming out at speed stopped in his tracks as Jordan stepped back to avoid being shouldered aside.

  ‘Are you looking for somebody?’

  ‘I believe Mrs Nugent lives here.’

  The man grunted, his glance raking Jordan in a quick appraisal. ‘Number three, first floor back.’ He half turned and bawled up the stairs. ‘Audrey! Bloke to see you,’ then plunged out past Jordan, leaving him facing an empty hall
way, with an image of a strongly built man in his middle thirties, with close dark curly hair, a dark polo-neck sweater and a tweed jacket which Jordan, for some reason, was convinced had been handed on or picked up second hand.

  He stepped into the hall and closed the door as a woman’s voice called from above. ‘Who is it?’ He hesitated to call back and began to mount the stairs, hearing as he went up the creak of boards on the landing. ‘Are you still there, Harry?’ the voice asked. The woman’s head and shoulders appeared over the rail and as she saw Jordan’s shape she said sharply, her voice rising, ‘Who are you? What d’you want?’

  ‘It’s all right, Mrs Nugent. It’s only me – Mr Jordan.’

  She straightened up and stepped back as he reached the landing and light fell on him from the open door of the room behind her.

  ‘What the heck are you doing here?’

  Her question was almost insolent in its phrasing and abruptness. He would have reprimanded anyone at the works who spoke to him like that. But she was on her home ground: he was the intruder, and he had startled her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jordan said. ‘I came to bring your money and ask if you’re all right.’

  ‘Oh, that could have waited.’

  ‘And when there was no word...’

  She had backed into the doorway of her room and was standing with a hand on either jamb, as though denying him entrance, or – it suddenly struck him – looking, in the creased, floor-length plum-coloured housecoat, its neck cut in a deep V to a high, tight, elasticated waist which clung to her ribcage under her breasts, like a still from a Hollywood film noir of the 1940s.

  ‘You took a bit of finding,’ Jordan said, and wondered at his exaggeration. Perhaps it was all of a piece with his new image of her as the femme fatale of a Fritz Lang movie.

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘I had to enquire at the pub.’

  ‘The Royal Oak, y’mean?’

  ‘Yes. I hope you don’t mind. They seemed a bit... a bit cagey.’

  ‘They wouldn’t know who you were.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you tell ’em?’

  ‘No. I didn’t think it was any of their business.’

  ‘You’re right, it isn’t.’

  Jordan held out the envelope. ‘The money’s here, just as I left it for you. You might need it if you’ve lost your wages at the pub as well.’

  ‘Thanks. You’re very thoughtful.’ Taking the envelope, she lifted both hands to rub at her upper arms. ‘There’s a rare draught coming up them stairs. Didn’t you shut the front door?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure I did.’ He went to the top of the stairs and looked down. ‘Yes, I did.’ He glanced back at her. ‘Well, I hope you’ll soon feel better. Can I expect you on Tuesday? I mean, don’t worry if you’re still not up to it.’

  ‘Don’t you want to come in a minute?’

  ‘I mustn’t disturb you.’

  ‘Come in, if you want. I’ll warn you, though, it’s a tip. I haven’t cleaned up today.’

  Jordan followed her into the room. A sink, electric cooker and a small fridge occupied a curtained-off corner. She cleared some garments and magazines off the seat of a wooden-armed easy-chair. ‘Sit down.’ She went and sat on the edge of a divan whose covers were crumpled as though she had been lying on it. ‘See how the other three-quarters live,’ she said. ‘Cosy, isn’t it?’ There was a sardonic glint in her eyes as she looked at him.

  ‘Is this all you have, just the one room?’

  ‘That’s all.’

  ‘You rent it furnished?’

  ‘If you can call this junk furniture.’

  Jordan’s was the only chair. He wondered where the man he had met at the door had sat, if he had been in the room.

  Mrs Nugent was tearing open the envelope. As Jordan remembered that his note about the fur coat was still in there, she took it out, glanced at it and replaced it with the banknotes, without comment.

  ‘You seem nicely back on your feet, anyway.’

  ‘I had a couple of important meetings. It seemed to leave me as quickly as it came. I hope you didn’t catch it from me.’

  ‘No, mine’s a woman’s ailment. I wait every month, wondering if it’ll be a bad one. When it is, it crucifies me. Fair cuts me in two. No wonder they call it the curse.’

  ‘Surely nowdays there are things…’

  ‘I was fine while I was on the pill. But then they began to get windy about keeping women on it too long.’ She shrugged. ‘So now it’s back to codeine and cups of tea.’

  ‘The chap I bumped into,’ Jordan said, ‘is he a fellow tenant?’

  ‘My step-brother. He comes and goes. Works away a lot. Oil rigs and suchlike. Sometimes abroad, among the Arabs.’ She got up. ‘He brought some whisky. Would you like some?’ There was a half-bottle of Johnny Walker on the draining board.

  ‘Well, I…’

  She was rinsing a tumbler under the tap. ‘Have a drink. You like whisky, don’t you?’

  ‘Just a small one, then,’ Jordan said. ‘I had a couple in the pub.’

  ‘Another one won’t get you into trouble.’

  He asked for water and she handed the drink to him, half and half.

  ‘Cheers, then.’

  ‘All the best.’

  ‘And thanks for coming over with the money.’

  ‘I had visions of you laid up without any.’

  ‘I wonder you’ve no more to think about than me. Do you look after all your people that way?’

  ‘I try to see they get a fair deal. But I have staff for that.’

  ‘Are there any jobs going at your place?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. We’ve enough on finding work for those we have. Perhaps when things pick up.’

  ‘If they ever do.’ She drank, her face suddenly sombre. Jordan wondered if she ever allowed herself to think about the future, or simply lived from day to day.

  ‘Could I ask you,’ he said, ‘if it’s not too personal. But do you manage to make ends meet?’

  ‘Look at this place,’ she said, ‘and work it out for yourself.’

  After the chill of the night outside and the draughty stairs, the heat in the room was beginning to make Jordan’s head swim. An electric fire blazed at full a few feet from his legs. He would, he thought, have to take off his overcoat or leave. About, for the moment, to shift the chair back for

  fear of scorching his trousers, he paused in his movement and relaxed his weight as the orange glow of the fire’s elements suddenly faded to a dull red, then to black.

  ‘Blast!’ Audrey Nugent said. She reached for a purse and poked her forefinger into its pockets. Then she got up and looked on the narrow mantelshelf.

  ‘Is it on a meter?’ Jordan asked.

  ‘You bet it’s on a meter. He could nearly let you live rent-free, the profit he makes on that.’

  ‘Let me...’ Jordan took change out of his pocket and counted out half a dozen tenpence pieces. ‘Here...’

  ‘If you can make it up to the pound, I’ll give you a note for it.’

  ‘There’s not enough,’ Jordan said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  She knelt by the sink and fed coins into the meter. ‘Lucky you came.’

  As the fire began to glow again, Jordan said, ‘I wonder you can breathe in such heat.’

  ‘Happen you’re right. I do overdo it a bit when I’m not feeling well.’ She switched off one of the bars, then drew on a woollen cardigan over the housecoat. At once all the presence – the allure, even – bestowed by the coat was gone. ‘I was going to make meself a hot drink and get into bed, anyway.’

  ‘I’m being a nuisance,’ Jordan said.

  ‘You walk on eggshells trying not to offend people, don’t you?’
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  ‘Not everybody,’ Jordan said. ‘Not by any means.’

  ‘What’s so special about me, then?’

  ‘You’re in my private employ,’ Jordan said, and wondered what other, less pompous form of words he could have used.

  She drew the cardigan together across her chest and fastened the top buttons. Then she felt about in the crumpled folds of the divan cover until she found a cigarette packet, which she shook before tossing it towards a wastebox by the sink.

  ‘You wouldn’t have a cigarette on you?’

  ‘I don’t smoke,’ Jordan said. ‘I’ll go and get you some, if you like.’

  ‘Don’t bother. Harry ’ull bring some back with him, if he remembers.’

  ‘He’s coming back?’

  ‘He’s kipping down here for the time being.’

  ‘Oh...’ Despite himself, Jordan let his gaze take in once more the limits of the room. ‘You mean...?’

  ‘I mean in here. That’s his sleeping-bag on the floor behind your chair. It’s just till he finds a place of his own, or takes his hook again. It won’t be for long. He says it won’t, anyway.’ She shrugged. ‘It helps with the expenses.’

  Letting his imagination run free, Jordan had been rehearsing in it an exchange in which he offered to pay her rent for the privilege of visiting her one evening a week and making love to her on that narrow divan. Only an idle fantasy, he told himself. But he was sick of cold women with pretensions; he wanted someone direct, earthy, warm. He tried to imagine her response should he venture the suggestion, and saw her laughing in his face before ordering him out.

  An alternative began to form – one more drastic in its way, but an offer she could refuse without offence, while leaving him with room for further manoeuvre. While he was turning it over, wondering if now was the right time to put it to her, she got up with a restless movement and taking the whisky bottle held it out to him without speaking, her hips moving inside the housecoat as she shifted her weight from one leg to the other, like one waiting for some overdue event.

  She probably wanted him to go, he thought, as he shook his head and she carelessly slopped another half-inch into her own glass; wondering why he was hanging about now that his errand was done. Yet although this single cluttered room with its cheap tat of fittings and furniture oppressed him, he was held by the intimacy of their being alone here. The material of the housecoat – some kind of thin stretch velvet, he thought – hugged her hips in a clean slim line, and as she sat again its weight settled into the V of her thighs at the bottom of her flat belly. She carried no spare weight and her breasts would be small, small and firm and white, high on her long white body.