He set the glass down in front of her, gin and orange.
“Oh, no, no,” she said quickly, “this wasn’t what I meant.”
Colin’s face creased with concern. “I’m sorry, was it gin and tonic you wanted, you didn’t—”
He began to get heavily to his feet. She arrested him with a quick flicking motion of her hand.
“This will be fine.” She picked up the glass and looked down into it, as if it contained a rare fish. “I’ve never had one of these before,” she said.
She sipped the drink very quickly. She’s nervous, he thought, not as collected as she likes to appear, she’s a highly strung young woman.
“You have to ask for what you want,” he said gently, as if instructing a child.
She smiled. “Yes, I know.”
There was a pause.
“Sylvia always—Sylvia is my wife.”
“I didn’t think you were married.”
“No? I don’t look married?”
“You look unkempt.”
“She tries,” Colin said dismally. “I’m just an untidy person. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I brought my wife into the conversation.”
“There was no conversation for you to bring her into,” Isabel said. “There seems to be one now.”
“I suppose now that—well, you won’t want to…”
“What?”
“Have a drink.”
“Because you are married?”
“Yes.”
“Drinking gin is not really the same as committing adultery. Though I daresay it sometimes precedes it. I don’t know. I have no experience.” She took a sip from her glass, her eyes fixed on his face. “Would she mind?”
“I don’t know,” Colin said. He honestly did not. He wracked his brains, but could get no further. It must be very remote from Sylvia’s reckoning, that anyone would agree to have a drink with him. He wanted to say, why are you here, I am not good-looking, I have nothing you could possibly want.
“There’s Mr. Cartwright,” Isabel said. “His ears stick out, don’t they? I hope they’re not all going to come in here. Mr. Cartwright writes fairy stories.”
“What? Oh, yes,” Colin said. “I thought he wrote Humour in Uniform.”
“And fairy stories. Didn’t you listen?”
“No, I never listen.”
“He showed me one last week. I suppose he thought I might be sympathetic.”
Colin looked at her appraisingly. He would not have thought so, himself.
“Do you find it, you know, valuable, this class?” he asked her.
“No.”
“You don’t?”
“It’s not much our sort of thing, is it?”
Then she did see, she did feel, that there was some bond between them; Colin put the back of his hand to his forehead, as if he expected to find it warm. “Then why do you come?” he said.
“I don’t know. Why do you?”
“To get away from Sylvia.” He hunched forward. It had taken such a long time to grasp, such a short time to say. “Last year I took Italian conversation and car maintenance and Poets of the First World War.”
“Ah, yes,” Isabel said.
“You see some connection?”
“No.”
“You sounded as if you saw some connection. As if it were significant.”
“There is no connection. That is what is significant.”
“I am a schoolteacher,” Colin said.
“Ah, then the general information is of use to you.”
“No, not really.” He felt defeated. “I just do it, as I say, I want to get away from my wife.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Nothing. She’s a nice woman.”
“How many children have you got?”
“Three. Suzanne, she’s eight, Alistair’s nearly six, Karen’s three.”
“Are you going to have any more?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“I was watching you,” she said. “In the classroom. Trying to analyse you. You seem so discontented.”
“Do you like analysing people?”
“It passes the time.”
“Is that a main concern of yours?”
“Well, not really,” she said. “It passes itself, without our assistance. It has the knack.”
“I’m in love with you,” Colin said.
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, yes,” he insisted. “Absolutely true. Do you believe in love at first sight?”
“That’s academic,” Isabel said. “This is not first sight.”
“But I have been in love with you, since the first week. Tell me, do you believe in it?”
“I don’t think I believe in love at any sight,” she said grimly.
Colin’s face fell. “That’s a terrible shame. A terrible admission. For a young woman.” He took thought. “Another gin?”
“Please.”
“With tonic?”
“With tonic.”
“Look, you must feel my pulse,” he said. “Go on, feel it. My pulse-rate’s sky-high.”
“I don’t know.” She ignored his hand. “I don’t know anything about pulse-rates.”
“Am I embarrassing you?”
“No.”
“I thought I might be embarrassing you.”
“Do I look embarrassed?”
“No, I must admit, you look quite calm. I had to say all this, I hope you understand why. I couldn’t have lived with it for another week. To tell the truth, I can’t stand seeing you only once a week. Will you meet me some other night?”
“Where?”
He was aghast. “You will?”
She gave him a level stare. “I didn’t say whether I would or not, I said ‘Where?’”
“Wherever you like. I’ll collect you. I’ll pick you up. Where do you live?”
“I’ll write down my address.”
“Have you got a pen?”
“Of course,” she said, “I have a pen.” She took a small pad out of her bag, scribbled her address, and handed him the leaf. He put it in his wallet. His face showed disbelief.
“I live with my father,” she said.
“Do you? I didn’t think…”
“Why not?”
“I imagined you having a flat somewhere. With other girls. You know. To be honest I’m glad. I couldn’t see myself calling at a flat for you. I wouldn’t like to, you know, present myself.”
“You don’t think you’re presentable?”
“What about your mother, is she…?”
“Dead.”
“Sorry. Will you introduce me to your father?”
“I don’t think you’d have much in common. He’s old…he’s retired. He was a bank manager. He has hobbies.”
“Oh yes?”
“Early railways. Numismatics. Military history.”
Colin smiled. “I’ll have to take some more evening classes.”
“I’d rather you didn’t meet.”
“Would he disapprove of you…going out with me?”
“I don’t know. I can’t imagine what his opinion would be.”
“Aren’t you close?”
“We lead our own lives.”
“Isn’t it a bit dull, living at home?”
“No. It’s not dull.” She leaned forward. “So, Colin, am I right? Are you discontented?”
“Of course I am.”
“And do you think you will ever leave them?”
“Yes, I…” He dropped his eyes, shifted his feet a little under the table. “Yes, I think it quite possible that one day soon I won’t find it possible to go on as I am.”
Colin drained his half-pint. He took out a clean folded handkerchief and dabbed his top lip with it. Already he was making giant strides.
Out in the conservatory. It is not really worthy of the name, just a glass lean-to at the back of the house, but Evelyn calls it the conservatory. There have never been plants in it. Clifford had not been much of a gardener. Get some flagstones down, had been Clifford’s idea. Muriel could not tell flagstones from gravestones. She referred to them as such. Her morbid fancy has by now taken a thorough grip on Evelyn, who often imagines she is walking on the dead.
Out in the conservatory are Clifford’s collections. Newspapers: the local
Reporter
for all the years they had lived at Buckingham Avenue. There was no topic which had interested him, no local good work or sport or sewerage scheme. He had merely laid them aside in the spare room, week after week. After his death Evelyn had left them for a while, and then, sensing that the room was needed, had dashed them in great bales down the stairs and humped them along the hallway and out through the back door. It is absurd to say, she tells Muriel, that we do not have newspapers. They are all there, with stopped clocks and defunct lightbulbs and a mousetrap, postcards from relatives escaped to Bournemouth,
Little Dorrit
with the back off, a cakestand, a china duck, a railway timetable from 1954. They yellow and moulder. In a lesser neighbourhood, there would be rats. Perhaps there are.
Muriel often comes to sit here. She thinks it as good and orderly as anywhere in the house. Sometimes she looks inside
the decaying cardboard boxes which are piled almost to the roof. There is dust an inch thick in places, spiders’ webs like veils from long-postponed weddings.
Isabel Field, standing on the Axons’ front path, was growing irritable. Why is it, she thought, that I am sure there is someone in there? There was no movement behind the curtains, nothing to hear, and in fact the house had less life about it than most properties standing empty; yet she was sure that someone was there. How many letters? Three or four. What do they do, throw them away or leave them on the mat in the hall? It’s their privilege, she supposes. Most of the mildly handicapped, people like Miss Axon, live in the world with no one pestering them. She has more urgent cases, wretched and worn women keeping house for incontinent parents who have ceased to recognise them; the paranoid and the dangerously deluded and the terminally ill, the children in institutional cots staring without comprehension at the bars. With the very old and the very young, Isabel feels afraid. At the two poles of birth and death, she sniffs unbearable conjectures in the wind. She functions on the middle ground. By temperament and habit of mind, she is unsuited to her work.
I have of course, she thought, a right to be here. It was more with herself than with the Axons she was irritated. She stepped off the path and peered into the bay window of the front room. It was too dark to see very much, just the outline of a fireplace and an old-fashioned dining suite. The high lattice gate to the back was not bolted. It creaked; of course, it would creak. These are two women alone, they do not maintain their property. She stepped through dead leaves, along a blank brick wall. A low sky, a neglected garden; October in melancholy retreat towards November. Sharply she knocked at the side door. It was four in the afternoon. She could see her own breath in the air, and a distant sickle moon. She knocked again; nothing. She
felt that someone was watching her, watching with interest; discounted it as absurd. The house was built on a slope, higher at the back than at the front, so that when she tried to peer into the kitchen window it was too high for her, the bottom frame almost level with the top of her head.
There were steps down onto the overgrown lawn. She looked around for something to stand on—a bucket, perhaps. She jumped into the air to try to see into the kitchen, but she caught only a glimpse of a varnished cupboard door with a calendar pinned to it. If anyone is watching, she thought, I must look absurd. She wondered if she could get a grip on the windowsill and pull herself up for long enough to see if there was anyone in the kitchen. No, she thought, I draw the line at gymnastics, I am not trained for it. There must be another door, she thought, going into the kitchen or the hall from this sort of greenhouse. The panes were so filthy that she could hardly see inside. It seemed to be full of rubbish, boxes piled high. Something scurried away from her feet and she jumped aside. It was beginning to drizzle, and she realised suddenly that she had become very cold, and wanted a cup of tea. She pushed up her coat sleeve to look at her watch in the fading light: something past four. She walked back around the side of the house. It was like a place not occupied but still furnished, she thought, where some old person has recently passed away; and the relatives are going to come next weekend with a van, and take away what they call the decent stuff, and sell the good solid wardrobes for a couple of pounds each. There was a clean milkbottle with an envelope inside it. She bent down and touched it; coins jingled. Milk-money. She removed her hand quickly, feeling like a petty thief. She could not grow accustomed to the license her profession gave her to enquire into the lives of other people. To look through their letterboxes, which she now did. It is beyond me, she thought, how anyone learns much by looking through letterboxes. The doormat said
WELCOME
, in green. There were no letters, no pile of circulars,
no bills left to lie by a person broken-hipped or hypothermic. It was early in the year for hypothermia. And the daughter was quite young, wasn’t she, and able-bodied, and reasonably capable? She had enough sense to get help, if anything was really wrong. The note in the milkbottle, left early, suggested people who had gone out and would be away for the evening; as if they might come back late, talkative and giddy, and forget to do it. It seemed an unlikely picture, but she supposed they might have friends, this odd mother and daughter who were familiar to her only from a buff-coloured file. The strangest people have friends, she thought, even me.
On the front path, she hovered again. One day, she thought, I shall always know what to do in these doubtful situations. When I am perfectly wise. When I am thirty years old. The rain began to fall harder. Deciding quickly, she turned and dashed back to the car, splashing the back of her tights. She was just going to miss the rush-hour traffic.
Up at her bedroom window, Florence turned away, to resume the living of her own life.
The new offices were open-plan. It was four-thirty-eight when Isabel got in. The day was winding down. In the old offices, with their brown peeling doors, over-subscribed lavatories, dingy walls, you could shut yourself into the little cubbyhole that was designated to you and rub your hands over your own one-bar fire. They had merits, but they were not pleasant for the clients to visit.
“Tea?” she said unhopefully.
“We’ve had it.”
“Messages?”
“On your desk.”
She walked over the expanse of blue cord carpet. There had been a phone call from the Probation Service. The Housing
Aid office reported their failure to find housing for someone. A child with leukaemia would have to go back to hospital. What concerns are these of mine, she thought tiredly. The Education Welfare office had been ringing. And Mr. Sidney. This year social workers had become “generic.” It was a new dispensation, for everybody to know everything about everything: and how to heal it.