A thin woman in a mackintosh came out of the doorway of the National Westminster and stood for a moment looking at the traffic. The bowler-hatted man dropped his newspaper on to the hood of the pram and walked briskly away.
‘Look at that,’ said Binny, pointing. She watched him disappear into the entrance of the tube station.
‘Don’t be fickle, darling,’ reproved Alma. ‘You be content with your lovely Teddy.’ She was keen on Edward and he liked her, though he was not over fond of being called Ted.
The woman in the mackintosh descended the steps of the bank awkwardly, as though afraid she might lose her balance. Using her stomach to propel the pram, she picked up the rolled newspaper and tipped it over the edge of the storm shield.
‘Poor little thing,’ cried Binny, aloud. It was unthinkable that any mother should shove a dirty newspaper on to the pillow of a sleeping child. The world was menacing and full of alarms. ‘I can’t stand it,’ she told Alma. ‘It’s disgusting and frightening.’
‘What is?’ asked Alma, gazing in bewilderment at the plastic table top and the sauce bottle in the shape of a tomato, a crust like blood rimming the imitation stalk.
‘Anywhere you can possibly go,’ said Binny. ‘It’s waiting round the corner. Faces with scabs . . . hit-and-run drivers . . .’
Though most of her life she had rushed headlong into danger and excitement, she had travelled first-class, so to speak, with a carriage attendant within call. The world was less predictable now. The guard was on strike and the communication cord had been ripped from the roof. It wasn’t the same. In her day dreams, usually accompanied by a panic-stricken Edward, she was always being blown up in aeroplanes or going down in ships.
‘There, there,’ soothed Alma, taking Binny’s hand and patting it. ‘It’s probably the change that’s upsetting you, darling.’ And indeed Binny’s normally pale cheeks flamed a deep and fierce red.
‘I can’t help noticing details,’ said Binny. ‘Little clues and suchlike. I’d like to switch over, but I can’t.’
Alma looked at her.
‘I keep thinking I’m watching television,’ Binny said. ‘There doesn’t seem to be much difference.’ She stared mesmerised out of the window.
Alma asked for the bill and said she’d phone in the morning to see if Binny felt more settled. Better still, she could call round this evening for a little chat.
‘No,’ said Binny. ‘I shall go to bed early.’ At this lie her face flushed more than ever. ‘But I doubt if it will do any good. I don’t know how you can be so blind. The whole world’s changed. It’s not my little change that’s making the difference.’ Seeing that Alma appeared unconvinced she added, ‘I don’t suppose you called
your
mother a toe-rag.’
Alma agreed she hadn’t, but then in their day the word had been unknown. ‘Old cow,’ she admitted. ‘Or flipping swine. I got my face slapped.’ She touched her cheek at the memory.
‘I said bugger once,’ recalled Binny. ‘I said it to a chair in Mother’s bedroom and she overheard. She said a policeman would come round and wash my mouth out.’
‘You’re always looking for policemen,’ said Alma thoughtfully. She looked at the bill and was astonished at the service charge.
‘I wonder,’ asked Binny, ‘if we should hit the children more?’ She never had, not even when they punched her or broke something valuable. When she was younger she would have argued to the death that it was wrong to beat a child. Now she wasn’t so sure. Somewhere along the line mistakes had been made: the way everyone accepted those telephone calls in the night from the police holding the children in the cells for disorderly behaviour; the way the children lolled about the house, refusing to go out until the pubs opened. She had started with such liberal leftish ideas upon most things – education, socialism, capital punishment, sex and so forth – and then, like an old and tired horse knowing the road home, had veered inexorably to the right. Only the other day her son had called her a fascist pig. It was true she didn’t want to share anything any more, particularly not with the children.
‘You are in a state,’ Alma said. ‘Perhaps you need a little holiday.’
‘You know I can’t leave the children,’ said Binny hastily. Alma was always trying to get her to go on little holidays. Binny had accompanied her once to Brighton for three days and returned practically an alcoholic. Last summer Alma had wanted her to fly on a package deal to Tunisia. She said it was very cheap and would do her the world of good. Binny hadn’t gone. Alma had come home with a stubborn case of crabs which she said she’d caught off a camel.
‘I must get on,’ said Binny, worriedly, rising from her seat, thinking at this rate she wouldn’t reach the bank before nightfall.
They kissed and parted outside Boots the chemist. Alma decided to wait for a taxi. Trying to keep warm, she hopped cheerfully from one leg to another, shouting Goodbye repeatedly above the din of traffic, as though for the very last time.
Binny went into the bank. In the queue at the cashier’s counter waited a thin woman in a mackintosh. Binny was so surprised she darted back to the door and looked outside. Perhaps the baby was parked in a side street – after all those warnings about leaving children unattended! She walked down the steps, though it was none of her business, and round the corner. There was no sign of a pram. The wind tore at her clothes. She thought she saw familiar faces, framed in windows, flickering past her as the cars swarmed toward the High Street. Confused, she raised her arm in greeting, imagining she heard above the fluttering of her headscarf a voice crying her name. ‘I’m all at sea,’ she said out loud and, trying not to tremble, returned to the bank.
The woman was now third in line at the cashier’s grill. Binny couldn’t see her face. She had short colourless hair, and grey stockings with a seam, and she carried a plastic shopping bag. At the counter, the fishmonger from Barretts, two fingers clumsy with sticking plaster, was stacking cellophane packets of small change into a hold-all. As he struggled with the zip of the canvas bag, the woman slipped from her place in the queue and joined the end of a third line of customers further along the counter. She looked directly at Binny. Many years ago, behind a wall and across the road from Binny’s house, there had stood a home for fallen girls. On Sundays, with heads grotesquely shaven to eliminate lice, the inmates formed in twos upon the pavement. In the bold eyes of the woman, Binny recalled instantly the glances of those other, indecent girls, bobbing beneath the branches of almond trees in bloom, swaying, with fragile necks exposed like stalks of flowers in a brutal crocodile to church. She blushed.
When she had cashed her cheque and was out in the street, she found that the noise and the cold no longer bothered her. Something had pleased her, raised her spirits, though what it was she couldn’t be sure. She bought the bread she needed and a carton of double cream. She swept in and out of shops and didn’t complain when various men jumped the queue and were served out of turn. She was able to smile quite charitably, after she had leapt to safety, at a youth on a bicycle who failed to run her down on the zebra crossing.
3
E
dward met old Simpson for a drink in the Hare and Hounds. The place was filled with tired businessmen pepping themselves up before returning home.
‘I see no reason why you shouldn’t claim a certain proportion for entertainment,’ said Edward. ‘None at all. Providing you can produce the restaurant bills.’
‘Quite so,’ agreed Simpson.
‘But I don’t feel we can justifiably put forward your wife’s hairdressing expenses. Not for the golf club night and so forth. It’s not strictly business. See what I mean?’
‘Yes,’ said Simpson, disappointed.
‘I mean, it’s not as if she’s a hostess in a night club, for instance. Or a television personality.’
‘I may have misled you about the wife,’ Simpson said. ‘She’s not altogether sympatico to this evening.’
‘Good Lord,’ cried Edward, instantly alarmed. ‘I thought you said she was a woman of the world?’
‘She’s that of course,’ said Simpson. ‘But the way she sees it, it’s a bit not on.’
‘She will come, won’t she?’ asked Edward. He felt like hitting old Simpson between the eyes with his fist. All that rubbish he’d talked about it being a bit of a lark and what a terrific sport the old woman was.
‘The way she sees it,’ explained Simpson, ‘it’s definitely a bit tricky. How would you like it if Helen was meeting some fellow on the side and she asked me round to your house to meet him?”
It seemed to Edward a highly unlikely situation, knowing what Helen thought about Simpson and fellows in general, but he nodded his head and pretended Simpson had a point there.
‘Put it another way,’ Simpson went on. ‘What if my wife asked you and your lady friend to dinner behind my back? I trust you’d refuse.’
‘Need you ask?’ Edward said.
‘I don’t want you to run away with the idea that the wife’s narrow. She’s not, believe you me. I’ll tell you a little story. Keep it under your hat; I shouldn’t like it to go any further. She got a proposition from a mutual friend of ours well, wife of a friend of mine, as a matter of fact. Let’s call her X. X phoned the wife and said could she come round and talk to her—’
‘Whose wife?’ asked Edward.
‘Mine, of course,’ said Simpson. ‘It was absolutely vital that Y shouldn’t get to know—’
‘I don’t quite follow you,’ said Edward, mystified by Simpson’s alphabetical acquaintances. ‘Did your wife tell you she’d been propositioned?’
‘Don’t be dense,’ cried Simpson testily. ‘My wife wasn’t propositioned. X was.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Edward nodded. He didn’t want to antagonise Simpson, not when Binny’s dinner party hung in the balance. At this moment, he no longer cared about himself and the possibility of being caught out. He thought only of Binny, slaving over a hot stove. ‘Stupid of me,’ he admitted. ‘It’s my training, I suppose. Making sure the figures add up . . . that sort of thing. Do go on.’
‘It seems,’ continued Simpson, ‘that X was carrying on with Z. Had been for quite some time. Met him at a masonic do last year. Upshot of it was, X wanted the wife to lend out our spare room for the afternoon.’
‘Good God,’ murmured Edward. Though he had lost track of X and Z and was totally foxed by Y, he did sympathise with their general predicament.
‘The wife handled it rather cleverly, I thought,’ said Simpson. ‘She said they could have the room but would they please wash the sheets out afterwards, or leave money on the table for laundering. And would they keep the window and the door open.’
‘The window?’ said Edward. He thought Simpson’s wife must have a peculiarly coarse sense of humour. Or possibly she was a voyeur.
‘Took all the romance out of it,’ cried Simpson with satisfaction. ‘Exposed it for what it was. Put the kibosh on it, no two ways about it.’
‘Goodness, yes,’ said Edward, though it seemed to him, once they had come to some agreement about being spied upon, a small enough price to pay for a whole afternoon of love.
He fought his way to the counter and ordered another two pints of beer and waited, pipe clamped in his mouth like a dummy, craning upwards to see his reflection in the mirror above the bar. He needed a hair cut; a pale forelock dangled over one eye. He would have gone to the barber’s days ago – he’d noticed a few raised eyebrows in the office – but Binny had once remarked she liked men with untidy heads. He thought his forelock made him look rather boyish. Binny referred to it sometimes as a fetlock. At others, when she’d taken a glass or two of wine, she called it his foreskin. He’d better watch Binny’s intake tonight – he didn’t feel Simpson’s wife would go for that kind of table talk. Always supposing she intended to be present. What on earth was he going to tell Binny if the Simpsons backed out at this late hour? She’d sounded so argumentative on the telephone, though at the end she’d said he was lovely. She did care for him. She gave him her love mostly without trying to bind him, without endangering his marriage. It was true there’d been a few unfortunate lapses, like the weekend she’d rung his house from some drinking club in Soho. He’d answered the phone himself, thank God, but it was frightfully tricky, standing in the hall in his pyjamas in the middle of the night trying to convey through references to tax returns that he loved her, fearful of Helen on the landing listening to every word. There had been too that incident when he couldn’t see Binny because he wanted to prune his roses, and she’d threatened to come round in the night and set fire to his garden. Later, a small corner of the lawn had been found mysteriously singed, but nothing had ever been proved. In the beginning he had fallen in love with her because she advised him they must live each day as if it was their last: bearing in mind that any moment the final whistle could blow, it was pointless to spoil the time they had left with the making of impossible demands. ‘You don’t want to leave your wife,’ she’d said. ‘And I don’t want you to.’ But as the months passed and she made various disparaging remarks about married men and their duplicity, it occurred to him that possibly this was precisely what she required of him. It made him very uncomfortable. He tried once to bring the subject into the open. ‘We could be jolly happy,’ he supposed. ‘We’d drink far too much and go to bed in the afternoon’ – Helen disapproved of the afternoon – ‘if we lived together.’ Glaring at him as though he’d uttered a racialistic remark and snapping her rather large white teeth, Binny had cried, ‘You must be mad. Stark raving mad.’
It was confusing for him. He obviously served some purpose in her life. Often he was reminded of a Punch and Judy show he had watched on the sands at Eastbourne when he was a child. Hearing that nasal voice screaming above the incoming tide, ‘Who’s a naughty boy, then?’, and flinching at the sound of those repeated blows to the head, he had not understood what was expected of him. Clutching his bucket and spade, he hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry.