On the Streets
Arthurs ordered liver and peas and mashed potatoes in Strode Street. When it came, the liver didn’t taste good. A skin of fat was beginning to congeal on the surface of the gravy where the potato hadn’t soaked it up. The bright green peas were more or less all right.
He was a dark-haired man in his mid-fifties, with a widow’s peak and lean features that matched his spare frame, bony wrists protruding from frayed white cuffs. He wore a black suit, its black trousers being a requirement for a breakfast waiter beneath a trim white jacket.
‘You want a pot of tea with that?’ the elderly woman who had brought him his plate of liver enquired. She came back to his table to ask him that, her only customer at this time in the afternoon.
Arthurs said yes. The woman wasn’t a proper waitress; she didn’t have a uniform, just a flowered overall folded over, tight on her stomach. Nearly seventy she’d be, he estimated, a woman who should be sitting by a fire somewhere, the heat bringing out crimson rings on her legs. He could sense her exhaustion, and wondered if she’d talk about it, if a conversation might develop.
‘Finishing soon?’ he said when she brought the tea, speaking as if he knew her well, his tone suggesting that there’d been a past in their relationship, which there had not.
‘I go at three-thirty.’
‘Stop in tonight, will you?’
‘Eh?’ She looked at Arthurs with something like alarm in her tired eyes. Her hair was dyed yellowish, dewlaps of fat rolled over her neck. Widowed, he imagined.
‘Reckon I’ll stop in myself,’ he said. ‘Best if you’re feeling dull.’
The woman answered none of that. He wondered if he should follow her when she finished for the day. It was twenty past three now and he’d be ready to go himself by half past. He broke the Garibaldi biscuit she’d brought with the tea. Since childhood he had followed people on the streets, to find out where they lived, to make a note of the address and add a few details that would remind him of the person. The compulsion was still insistent sometimes, but he could tell it wasn’t going to be today.
‘There’s the television of course,’ he said, ‘if you’re feeling not up to much.’
‘No more’n rubbish these times,’ the woman said, allowing herself that single comment only.
‘Sends you to an early bed, does it?’
Again anxiety invaded the woman’s eyes. She passed the tip of her tongue over her lips and wiped away the coating of saliva it left. Silent, she stumped off.
A pound and a few pence the bill came to when she brought it, food cheaper here when the busy lunchtime hours had passed. He’d known it would be cheaper, Arthurs reminded himself.
*
Mr Warkely came in and said don’t start another batch or there’ll be a clog-up in the dispatch room. So Cheryl turned the machine off and saw Mr Warkely glancing at the clock and noting the time on his pad. Finishing a quarter of an hour early would naturally have to be taken into account at the end of the week.
The Warkelys’ business was in a small way, established three years ago in a basement, the retailing of scenic cards. Cheryl’s task was to work the machine that encased in strong plastic wrapping each selection of six, together with the one that displayed in miniature the scenes each pack contained. It was part-time work, two hours three days a week; there was also, mornings only, the Costcutter checkout, office cleaning evenings.
The Warkelys employed no one else: Mrs Warkely attended to the accounts, the addressing of labels, and all correspondence; Mr Warkely packed the packaged selections into cardboard boxes and drove a van with
WPW Greetings Cards
on it. What was called the dispatch room was where television was watched, with the Warkelys’ evening meal on two trays, evidence of their business stacked around the walls.
‘See you Thursday,’ Cheryl said before she went, and Mrs Warkely called out from somewhere and Mr Warkely grunted because his ballpoint was in his mouth. ‘Thanks,’ Cheryl said, which was what she always said when she left the basement. She didn’t know why she did, but somehow that expression of gratitude seemed to round off the couple of hours better than just saying goodbye.
She banged the door behind her and climbed the steps to the street, a thin, smallish woman, grey in her hair now, lines gathering around her eyes and lips. She had been pretty once and still retained more than a vestige of those looks at fifty-one. Shabby in a maroon coat that once she’d been delighted to own and now disliked, her high-heeled shoes uncomfortable, she hurried on the street. There was no reason to hurry. She knew there was not and yet she hurried, her way of walking it had become.
‘You getting on all right?’ The voice came from behind her, the question asked by the man she’d once been married to, whom she’d thought of since as the error in her life. Always the same question it was when he was suddenly there on the street. She turned around.
‘D’you want something?’ She spoke sharply and he walked away at once, her tone causing offence. She knew it was that because it had happened often before. She had never told him what her hours at the Warkelys’ were but he knew. He knew where her cleaning work was, he knew which Costcutter it was. Five months the marriage had lasted, before she packed her belongings and went, giving up a full-time position in a Wool-worth’s, because she’d thought it better to move into another district.
She stood where he had left her, watching him in the distance until he turned a corner. ‘I don’t think you should have married me,’ she’d said, more or less what Daph, who shared her counter in Woolworth’s, had been remorselessly repeating ever since the marriage had taken place, not that she’d admitted to Daph that things weren’t right, not wanting to.
On the pavement she realized she was in the way of two elderly women who were trying to pass. ‘I’m sorry,’ she apologized and the women said it didn’t matter.
She walked on, more slowly than she’d been walking before. When they married she had moved upstairs to his two rooms, use of kitchen and bath, the rooms freshly painted by him in honour of the change in both their lives, old linoleum replaced by a carpet. The paint had still been fresh when she left, the carpet unstained; she’d never begun to call herself Mrs Arthurs.
*
Later that afternoon, although he was not a drinking man, Arthurs entered a public house. Like the café in which he had earlier had a meal, it was not familiar to him: he liked new places.
He took the beer he ordered to a corner of the almost empty saloon bar, where the fruit machines were at rest, the music speakers silent. There was a griminess about the place, a gloom that inadequate lighting did not dispel. At the bar, on barstools, two men morosely sat without communicating. A shirt-sleeved barman turned the pages of the
Star.
The dullness Arthurs had mentioned in the café possessed him entirely now, an infection it almost felt like, gathering and clinging to him, an unhealthy tepidness about it. He sipped the beer he’d ordered, wondering why he had come in here, wondering why he wasted money. Time was when he’d have gone to a racetrack, the dogs at Wimbledon or White City. In the crowd, with his mind on something else, he could have shaken off the mood. Or he might have rid himself of it by getting into conversation with a tart. Not that a tart had ever been much good, any more than the elderly waitress would have been. He closed his eyes, squeezing back disappointment at being asked if he wanted something when all he was doing was being friendly. They might have sat down somewhere, on a seat in a park, the flowerbeds just beginning to be colourful, birds floating on the water. She knew how it had been; she knew he’d gone there at last, today. In their brief encounter, she had guessed.
People began to come into the saloon bar, another lone man, couples. Arthurs watched them, picking out the ones he immediately disliked. He wondered about phoning up Mastyn’s and saying he wouldn’t be in in the morning. A stomach upset, he’d say. But the hours would hang heavy, because he’d wake anyway at twenty past five, being programmed to it. And there’d be nothing to replace the walk to the Underground, and the Underground itself, and walking the last bit to the hotel; and nothing to replace the three and a half hours in the dining-room until at half past ten he could hang up his white jacket and unhook his black bow tie. Since the hours of his employment at Mastyn’s had been reduced, his earnings solely as a breakfast waiter were not enough to live on, but he made up the shortage in other ways. Since childhood he had stolen.
There was a telephone across the bar from where he sat, half obscured by a curtain drawn back from the entrance to the Ladies. Noticing it, he was tempted again. But whoever answered at the Reception would grumble, would say leave it until the morning, see how he was then. The conversation would be unsatisfactory, any message he left for the dining-room probably forgotten, and blame attached to him when he didn’t turn up even though he’d done what was required of him. None of that was worth it.
Why had she spoken to him like that? Why had her voice gone harsh, asking him if he wanted something? He had never asked her for money, not once, yet the way she’d spoken you’d think he’d been for ever dropping hints. Music began, turned down low but noisy anyway because that was what it was, more a noise than anything else. The last couple who’d come in were noisy too, laughter that could have been kept quieter, both wearing dark glasses although there hadn’t been sunshine all day. What he’d wanted to say was maybe they could go to a café for a few minutes. No more than that, ten minutes of her time.
Arthurs stared into the beer he hadn’t drunk, at the scummy froth becoming nothing. The sympathy she could call upon was a depth in her, surprising in a woman who wasn’t clever. He had been aware of it the first day on the stairs, when they’d got into conversation because he happened to be passing by. ‘You like a cup of tea or something?’ she’d offered, her key already in the lock of the door; and he’d said tea, two sugars, when they were in her room. He told her about the lunchtime complaint in the dining-room of Mastyn’s because it was a natural thing to do; she said she’d wondered why he looked upset and then said anyone would be, a horrible thing to happen. He repeated the remarks that had been made, how he’d stood there having to listen, how the man had demanded the manager, how he’d said, ‘We apologize for troubling you’ when Mr Simoni came. Mr Simoni had held his hand out but they hadn’t taken it.
Arthurs wondered for a moment if, that first day or later, he’d told her this too – that Mr Simoni’s outstretched hand had been ignored. He couldn’t remember saying it. A dotted bow-tie the man had been wearing, white dots on red, a chalk-striped shirt. The pepper had been ground over her risotto with a mutter that sounded insolent, the woman said. The coffee had been cold. ‘Well, there’ll certainly be no charge for the coffee,’ Mr Simoni’s immediate response was. Something special, this lunch should have been, the man said, and the woman called the lunch a misery before she threw her napkin down. They’d gone away, not knowing what they left behind. ‘Breakfasts only after this,’ Mr Simoni murmured while bowing and scraping to the people who’d gone silent at the other tables. ‘Take it or not.’ Beneath the thrown-down napkin there was a shopping list on a letter that had been half written and then abandoned, the shopping items pencilled on the space remaining.
Dear Sirs
,
An electric fire I purchased from you is faulty
had a jagged line drawn through it; there was a date in the same handwriting, and an address embossed in blue at the top of the single sheet.
Arthurs reached into an inside pocket and took from it this same writing paper, now folded to a quarter of its size. Frayed at the edges, it was dog-eared and soiled, one of the folds beginning to give way, and he didn’t open it out for fear of damaging it further: it was enough to hold it for a moment between thumb and forefinger, to know that it was what he knew it was, kept by him always. A year ago he’d gone into a Kall-Kwik and had had it photographed twice, nervous in case one day the original might, somehow, not be there: he did not trust, and never had, any time that was yet to come or what might happen in it. He knew the address by heart, even in his sleep, in dreams; but who could tell what might happen to memory? Not that it mattered now, of course.
He returned the folded paper to his pocket and stood up. Seven o’clock she finished in the offices, ten past she was out on the streets again. Five to six it was and he sat for a little longer, thinking about her. For a long time before the day she’d asked him into her room he’d seen her coming and going. They had passed often on the stairs of the house where his own two rooms were a flight above hers, cheaper than the other rooms because of their bad state of repair. He hadn’t known she was a widow, thinking her to be unmarried ever since she’d come to the house a year or so ago. A ticket man on the Underground apparently her husband had been.
He left his beer, pushing the glass away in case a sleeve caught it while he was putting his overcoat on. He buttoned the coat slowly – black like his suit – then crossed the saloon bar and stepped out into the darkening twilight. The folded paper was not something to keep, not any more, but even so he knew he could not destroy it. There was that, too, to tell her: that the shopping list would always be a memento.
*
Her encounter with her ex-husband had not particularly upset Cheryl: she was too used to his sudden appearances for that. As she emptied waste-paper baskets and gathered up plastic cups, uncoiled the long flex of her vacuum cleaner and began on the floors, she yet again blamed herself. She had been foolish. Lonely, she supposed, missing what death had taken from her, she had seen the man differently; it had felt natural, saying yes. Daph had been a witness in the register office, with a man they’d fetched in from the street. Afterwards they’d sat with Daph in the back bar of the Queen’s Regiment and when a few people from the house turned up later they’d gone in a crowd to Brace’s Platter, above the Prudential Office. They’d kept calling her Mrs Arthurs, making a joke of it once the wine got going, but all that time he was very quiet until she heard him telling Daph about the lunchtime complaint, and every few minutes Daph – outspoken when she’d had a few too many – saying people like that didn’t deserve a life. ‘You hear that?’ he said afterwards. ‘What your friend remarked?’