by Maeve Binchy
And it was what they called a glorious day on the weather forecast, very flowery indeed for the Met Office, but that was the word the man had used, and she had run to the window to see if he was right, and he was. There were railings across the road and people were putting up pictures, and postcards, and souvenirs, to sell to the passing tourists. And they seemed to be shouting to each other and laughing. They must know each other from meeting every week-end here, and they didn’t sound like rivals or enemies. They didn’t look as if they’d mind if a passing tourist bought from one rather than another. They were unpacking little canvas stools as well, and some of them had flasks. They were old and young. Lisa thought it was a funny kind of life. She wouldn’t be able for it, her old anxiety would show. People wouldn’t buy from her because she would have an anxious face wanting them to buy, and the more they passed her by because of her anxious face the more anxious it would become. But then that was the same kind of vicious circle that everyone kept getting caught in. It was like the whole problem with Him. If she felt unsure of him and thought that he was losing interest in her, she became strained and worried and not the carefree girl he had once fancied, and so he did start to lose interest, and because she could see this happening she became more strained and worried, and he lost more interest.
But stop, stop. Not today, today is glorious. It has been defined as such by the weatherman on the radio, than whom there must be surely no saner, soberer judge. And today you don’t need to act at being relaxed, you are. He’s there in the bathroom shaving, he’s happy, he’s glad you’re here. You’ve made love a half an hour ago, he liked it, he’s humming to himself. You make him happy or happier than he’d be if you weren’t here. You’re fine really. Remember that. He didn’t have to take you with him to London for the conference, now did he? He couldn’t have been planning something else, something awful like meeting someone else, if he took you so readily.
Lisa smiled happily, thinking of how readily he had agreed to take her with him. She hadn’t meant to ask at all. She had packed his case yesterday morning . . . was it only yesterday? Friday, it must have been. She had been polishing his shoes.
‘You don’t need to do that,’ he had said, a bit embarrassed.
‘I was doing my own,’ she had lied.
‘They’re suede, funny face,’ he had said, laughing.
What was it? It couldn’t have been funny face, he called her that a lot, it was meaningless as an endearment, it wasn’t even special. He called his daughter funny face on the phone . . . often. He called his secretary funny face. Once she had been holding for him on the phone, and she could hear his voice clearly as he crossed the office. ‘Get me a cup of coffee, funny face,’ he had said. ‘I’ve got a bugger of a day.’ It was probably because he knew she wore suede shoes. Idiotic, it couldn’t have been that. Put badly it was really madness. What was it then? Why did two tears fall down onto the shining leather shoes in her hand? She could have hit herself with rage. It wasn’t as if she knew it was going to happen. You always sort of know when you’re going to cry but not this time. It was automatic, as if someone had tinkered about with her tear-ducts when she wasn’t looking. And once started there was no stopping. She dropped the shoes and said a hundred times that she was sorry, she didn’t know what was wrong. She tried to laugh through this appalling shower of tears, and that made her worse. She would sort of catch her breath and cough, and then it would get worse, and there were actual whoops coming out of her at one stage.
He was astounded. He thought he was to blame.
‘What did I say, what have I done?’ he had said over and over. ‘You knew I was going away today, you knew,’ he had repeated. He felt cornered, he felt she was blaming him. She couldn’t even stop this terrible heaving to assure him that of course she knew, and that today wasn’t any worse than any other day. He looked very wounded.
‘The conference starts on Monday. I want to get into top form for it, I don’t want to arrive exhausted. I want to be there and rested, and to have made my own tour of the hotel. I don’t want to be thought of as your typical Northern hick who arrives all impressed by everything. It’s important, Lisa. You said you understood.’
The use of her name maybe. She stopped for a moment. She actually had breath to speak. But instead of saying what she meant to, something like of course she understood, she heard her own voice betraying her, ratting on her. She actually said, ‘Why do you have to go away? We could have had this week-end together, just the two of us. Nobody would have known we were here, it would have been lovely.’
When the words were said, she decided that she had now lost everything, that the whole hard uphill race had been lost. She didn’t know to whom she had lost, but she had lost. He couldn’t stand people who begged, people who made demands. He had told her that was why he had left his wife, why the great love of his life (which had not been his marriage) had ended, because these women made demands. They wanted more of him than he could give, they saw something wonderful in a forced intimacy, they thought that the phrase ‘just the two of us’ was safe and reassuring. He thought it was threatening and claustrophobic.
And because Lisa had thought that she had lost him, she abandoned herself to the tide. It was a great luxury, like getting into a warm bath when you’re tired and cold. She had said all the unsayable things, the whines, the moans, the loneliness, how hard it had all been on her. How she had given him, if not the best years, then all the fun hours of her life, and for what? Nobody could know they lived together. Nobody could see them out together. It was clandestine and anxious-making, and leading nowhere, and she, Lisa, who was free, was abandoning every other man, every other chance of happiness, and for what? For someone who didn’t give two damns about her. Well all right, it was all right. She kept repeating the words ‘all right’ as if they were a magic charm. She had no idea what she meant by them, but they were safer and less final than saying something even more hackneyed like ‘it’s all over’.
He hadn’t seemed relieved that it was all over or all right or whatever she meant; he hadn’t seemed distressed, either. He looked interested, like he would have been interested in a farmer telling him about spraying crops, or a newsvendor explaining what margin of profit there was in selling papers. He sounded as if he might like to hear more.
‘Come with me then,’ he said.
He had never taken her anywhere before, it was too dangerous. He had always said that in his position he couldn’t afford anyone to point at him about anything. Times were too tricky, things were too rough. He couldn’t mean it now, he was just saying it to placate her, he knew she’d refuse for his sake. It was another ploy, another bluff. He had once explained to her why he won so much at poker. She had realised even then that the same rules that he used at the card-table he used everywhere.
As suddenly as he had asked her she accepted.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I will. Where shall I meet you?’
No back-tracking, no well-perhaps-not-this-time. He was on as well, that was one of the rules of the game. If you offer, you must follow through.
‘Nowhere near the office, too likely to be seen. Take a bus to the big petrol station on the London road. I’ll meet you there at . . . ten past four.’
‘Right,’ she said. He kissed her and said it would be great, he’d like showing her London.
‘You hardly know it any better than I do,’ she said.
No tears, no joy, no excitement, no gratitude. He looked at her approvingly. It was almost as if he thought she had gained a few housepoints. She had faked grief, she had got him to take her to London. Well done Lisa. He said jauntily that he wouldn’t wait a minute after a quarter past four, and she said equally lightly that that was fine, and he left, suitcase in his hand, and she heard the car starting as he went off to work and to talk to the office funny face.
Lisa had felt light-headed, like the time she once went out in a speedboat, and nothing had been real. She sat down to steady herself. She must
make a list. Obviously she wouldn’t go to work. So what excuse this time? She didn’t know how long she’d stay with him in London. The conference lasted four days, Monday to Thursday. She’d have to invent something that would take a week. Quick, she’d have to telephone in the next few minutes and alert the Head’s secretary, before Assembly began and someone started looking for her. A death. Exactly, a death in London. Better than flu, a woman’s disease, or a heavy cold. She dialled, she spoke, she waved her hands around in the air as she told the weary Miss Weston, the Head’s tame dog, that an aunt, her nearest relative, was dying. She even got a bit sad about it as she filled in the form and details of this mythical aunt. No, there simply was nobody else, nobody at all, she had to go. She’d ring from London next week to tell them what was happening. She knew how terrible it would be trying to find a substitute at this late stage, but she had heard only just now, this minute, and she was going to London this afternoon. ‘At ten past four,’ she said meaninglessly but to make it more real in her own mind. Miss Weston said she would tell the Head, and implied that the job of telling the Head was far worse than saying good-bye to a favourite aunt. Miss Weston was never very good with small chat anyway.
Now, on with the list. Lisa had to get a smart case, she only had an old grip, not suitable at all, and what else? Take money out of the bank, get her hair done, ring her brother to make sure he didn’t call her at school. He hadn’t telephoned her for four months, but there was always the chance. Her brother was in his usual bad humour.
‘You got me away from my scrambled eggs, they’ll be all hard. Oh all right. No, of course I wouldn’t telephone you, why should I? Oh very well. I don’t know what you think you’re doing. Have you read about the unemployment in this country? Where do you think you’re going to get another job if you’re fired? Sometimes I think you’ve no sense of responsibility. No, of course I won’t say anything to anybody, but Lisa, I wish you’d tell me what you’re up to. I was saying to Angela the other night that you are so secretive and you just ring me out of the blue to say the oddest kind of things. No, why the hell should I wish you a good time? I’m not able to run out on everything and everybody and dash off to London on some whim. Good-bye now, good-bye.’
No other friends to alert really. Funny after all the years of living in the same town. But she’d see Maggie at lunch and she’d tell her, and they’d have a bit of a giggle, and then Maggie would say, ‘Make sure he pays for you, I think he’s mean,’ and Lisa would defend him to the hilt, he wasn’t mean, he was careful with money, and that’s how he got where he was and had all the things he had. She admired him for it.
It was a rush but it was a great day. There had been a few valleys. Maggie said she had heard that his wife was expecting another baby. Lisa said that it couldn’t be true, he hadn’t even seen his wife for six months. Maggie said it took nine months to produce a baby and this one was nearly ready to be produced. Lisa said it was all ridiculous, he’d have told her, and Maggie said sure, and anybody would tell you it didn’t have to be his baby just because it was hers, and Lisa brightened. She darkened a bit at the bank when she tried to take out £60 from her deposit account and the clerk told her she had only £50 in it. She was sure there was over £200, but of course things like avocados were more expensive than the things she ate when she lived alone, and she did buy lots of little things for the flat.
She bought him a Johnny Cash cassette that they could play in the car, the kind of music he liked. It was a new one, they assured her. She was there at 3.30 and by four o’clock she knew every car accessory that they make these days. She bought a chamois so that the assistant wouldn’t think she was loitering with intent. At five past four she got a horrible feeling that he might have been joking. She really should have rung him to make sure he meant it, but that would have looked humble and she didn’t want that. Suppose she saw his car flying past. Suppose just suppose he did stop there for petrol and saw her, and hadn’t meant to take her. That wouldn’t be merely humble, it would be pathetic. Lisa shook herself, physically, like a dog trying to get rid of drops of rain, but she was trying to get rid of these hauntings and fancies. She seemed to have them these days the way people got mosquito bites, or dandruff. And then she saw him pulling in and looking around for her.
And the four hours, well it had been like a dream sequence in a movie. Or rather, like one of those sequences where they show you people making a long journey across America, and they cut from shots of the car on one motorway to another, lights from petrol stations and hotels flash on and off, signposts to cities pass by – and they were in London, and they hadn’t talked much, just sat beside each other listening to both sides of the Johnny Cash over and over, and Lisa never asked where they’d be staying or how they’d hide from all the people from his company who were bound to be at the hotel, or what day she was going to be sent home. She didn’t want to break the magic.
And when they came to London he looked a bit helpless because he didn’t know which way to go, and he turned right once when there was no right turn and a taximan shouted at him, and Lisa was secretly delighted because he looked vulnerable then, and like a little boy, and she wanted to hug him to take the shame away, but she made no move, and finally after an hour of going backward and forward he found the hotel and suddenly he was his old self again. Because the world of hotels is pretty much the same everywhere, it’s just London traffic that can throw you.
She had wondered what to do about a wedding-ring. He had never bought her any kind of ring, and she hadn’t liked to get one this morning when she was shopping . . . well, in case he thought she was being small-townish about it all. Perhaps people didn’t wear rings when checking in, perhaps it was more sophisticated not to. She had worn gloves anyway, it seemed a good way of avoiding doing the wrong thing.
The foyer was huge and impersonal, but full of people and shops, and newspaper-kiosks and theatre booking-stands. It was very different from the hotel that she and Bill had stayed in when mother was ill, and had suddenly been taken into hospital in London. That time they stayed in a small hotel near the station, and the woman who ran it asked them for the money in advance, and Bill had said they would have to sleep in the same room to save paying for two. And the woman who ran the hotel had turned out to be nice and kind when she discovered that their mother was dying, and had made tea for Lisa, and had told her how her own mother had died.
And it was different from the hotel that they had all stayed in when mother and father and Bill and herself had come to London for a week one October as a treat. That had been owned by a friend of father’s, a North Countryman, and father said they wouldn’t be robbed there like they would everywhere else. And it had been a vaguely unsatisfactory holiday for no reason that any of them ever understood and none of them ever dared say. Just a lot less than they all had hoped for probably.
But here in Lancaster Gate it was a different world and a different life, and he looked pleased that she was there and that was all that mattered. She smiled at him as the porter took their cases. She had bought one very like his, and got a cosy warm feeling in the lift because the cases looked like matching luggage, the kind of thing they might have been given as a wedding-present if they had been a normal couple.
And he must have ordered a room with a double-bed specially because she saw from the brochure she had been looking at in the lobby that most of the rooms had twin beds. And he gave her a kiss when the porter had gone, and said, ‘There’s nothing like a life of sin. Let’s ring for a gin-and-tonic and let’s go to bed.’
And they did, and then they went out to a restaurant where the Italian waiter asked them if they were married and Lisa said ‘No’ very quickly so that he wouldn’t think she was trying to pretend in any way (except to the hotel) that she was his wife, and the waiter said he thought not, they looked too happy and too much in love. And Lisa’s heart which hadn’t pounded or thudded since that morning went into a little cotton-wool ball of happiness.
; So it was indeed funny the way things turned out, she thought again. Instead of losing out by behaving like a weak wife-type, clinging, dependent, she was being patted on the back and taken on a nice happy trip to London. There was a knock at the door and she leaped off the bed to answer it, thinking it was breakfast. It wasn’t, it was a bowl of fruit and some flowers with a Compliments card. She gave the boy twenty pence and hoped that it was enough. He came out of the bathroom, all clean and young-looking, a towel around his waist. He was as excited as a child and nearly as excited as she was.
‘Who’s it from, who’s it from?’ she begged.
He tried to look casual. ‘I always arrange little surprises like this for you,’ he said, teasing her, and they opened the card.
It was from the President of the Company, an American gesture, he said, to make the employees feel they are part of a happy family, to make them pull harder because they think they are being looked after. He was very pleased, even though he wouldn’t show it.
‘Must have taken a secretary a long time to write out all these personal cards,’ he said, not wishing her to think that he thought the President had written it.
‘Still,’ said Lisa. ‘They did go to the trouble.’
She reached out for the card, and her heart became a big ball of putty and sank down in her body. It was addressed to ‘Mr and Mrs’ and hoped that they would both enjoy their stay.
‘Is it . . . is it to tell you that they know you’ve brought a woman with you?’ she asked fearfully.
He looked unconcerned. Not at all, the secretary had probably found out from the hotel which delegates had checked in with their wives and put Mr and Mrs on those cards. Just administration. He was putting on the cufflinks she had given him and he gave her a kiss on the nose.