Love in Our Time (13 page)

Mr. Hill was already standing there with his hat and coat on.

The outside of the Casino Royal in the early hours of morning showed mainly the debit side of civilisation.
There were not just one or two loose women waiting about, there was a whole desperate village of them. The police threaded their way in and out among them as though in ignorance of the facts of life. Two of the girls made a rush for Mr. Ankerson. But they were repelled by something stronger than continence. He seemed to think that they were after his whisky and defended himself accordingly. Buttoning his raincoat around the bottle he broke through by sheer weight alone. He seemed relieved when he found Mr. Vestry and Mr. Biddle already waiting for him in a taxi.

It was only then that they discovered that they had lost Mr. Hill. A moment before he had been with them pale and silent and disapproving; and now his place was empty. It was Mr. Biddle who spotted him. He was standing in a shop entrance on the opposite side talking to a small, sinister woman who was wearing a tight black costume with a spray of white flowers on it. The woman had her hand on Mr. Hill's arm. Mr. Vestry saw it all a moment later.

“Hallo, old Hill's got off,” he said.

Mr. Biddle shook his head, he knew Mr. Hill better than that.

“He's probably helping her,” he remarked.

And a moment later he was pleased to see Mr. Hill pat the woman on the shoulder and come in the direction of the taxi. But in a strange, intangible fashion it was a different Mr. Hill who came. He was no longer pale; his eyes were shining.

“Don't you wait for me,” he said in a high strained voice. “I've met a friend. Someone I used to know.”

Mr. Ankerson tried to reach out and grab him by the arm, but Mr. Hill avoided him. He stepped back and
then picked his way between the queues of taxi cabs to where his mysterious friend was still waiting. Then arm in arm they set off in the other direction, the lady friend's smart new shoes shining white underneath as she walked.

Mr. Ankerson was inclined to treat the whole incident as a huge, disreputable joke. But Mr. Vestry took it more seriously.

“Poor old Hill,” he said. “So that's his trouble.”

“Never tell with those quiet ones,” remarked Mr. Ankerson. “Goes and does that on lemonade”

“You don't know what he's going to do,” Mr. Biddle persisted. “Perhaps he's——”

“Perhaps he's Joan of Arc and I'm Florence Nightingale,” said Mr. Vestry briskly. “East Finchley,” he called out to the taxi driver. “Go on till you're lost, and then I'll tell you.”

The journey to East Finchley is not a thing to be undertaken lightly. There is an astonishing lot of it. A stranger might think he had reached the end of the world before he got to Camden Town; but Camden Town, when he came to look back on it from the Archway Tavern, would seem to be contiguous with Piccadilly; and eyen the Archway Tavern, when thought of from Tally Ho Corner, would seem to be in the centre of things. The streets, moreover, were deserted by the time Mr. Vestry's taxi left Tottenham Court Road. Their emptiness made them seem wildly and indefinitely longer. They stretched ahead like broken precipitous gorges in a fantastic landscape of plate-glass and discoloured brickwork. Coming up the Kentish Town Road was like cruising through a fjord.

There was one of their number, however, who was
entirely unaffected by his surroundings; and that was Mr. Ankerson. He was taking periodic sips from his whisky bottle and staring blankly at his feet. For all he knew it might have been The Boston or The Woodman or The Bald Faced Stag that they had come to. It was all one to him. He was quietly playing Caligula in his corner.

But he was not an ungenerous man, and when he noticed that Mr. Vestry was not drinking, he passed over the bottle spontaneously.

Mr. Vestry shook his head.

“Got nothing to drink out of,” he said.

A refusal was a challenge to Mr. Ankerson in his present mood. He looked round the interior of the cab and, with the inventive genius of the uninhibited, he removed the small cut-glass vase from the partition. There was a bunch of faded paper roses in it. With a flourish he threw these out of the window. Then he poured Mr. Vestry a vaseful.

“Whisky's a disinfectant,” he said. “Kills everything it touches.”

He spilt a little as he passed it and Mr. Vestry ignored him.

“Thanks,” he said. “I'd rather have the bottle.”

Mr. Ankerson passed it over and drank from the vase himself. It was not easy. The taxi was bouncing about on the uneven wood blocks and Mr. Ankerson had to drink with his lips hovering round the cut-glass edge like a humming bird's. But he managed it. When Mr. Vestry returned the bottle he passed it across to Mr. Biddle.

“Have a drop,” he said. “Just the thing for a cold.”

Mr. Biddle drank. It was the first time he had ever
drunk whisky straight from a bottle and he took more than he meant. It ran down and filled his cheeks. Mr. Ankerson looked at him with disappointed surprise.

“Leave some for Vestry,” he said.

They finished the whisky between them just as they were passing Highgate Woods. Mr. Ankerson shook the bottle and listened, and also applied his eye to the top to make sure that he was not mistaken. Then he opened the window.

“What are you going to do?” Mr. Vestry asked.

“Get rid of this thing,” he said. “Don't want to go home carrying a lot of empty bottles.”

“You can't do that,” said Mr. Vestry. “Might hurt somebody.”

“There's nothing there to hurt,” Mr. Ankerson answered, and threw the bottle as far out as he could reach. It hit the kerb with the noise of a bomb and burst into a cascade of fragments. The driver braked hard and looked over his shoulder.

“S'all right,” said Mr. Ankerson. “You didn't do it.”

They dropped Mr. Ankerson first. He was very dignified about not being able to walk. As Mr. Vestry and Mr. Biddle helped him up the short gravel path and opened the front door for him, he kept apologising. “If anyone asks you where I've been,” he said, “tell 'em I've been seeing someone in hospital. Tell 'em I've been visiting a friend.”

Mr. Biddle was the next man to be dropped. He felt light-headed and insecure himself, but he did not show it. He paid Mr. Vestry a carefully calculated share of the expenses and got out on to the pavement. The stone seemed to give a queer little bump as he stepped on to it.

“I wonder how old Sneyd is?” he said. “I shouldn't like to be in hospital with that woman looking after me.”

He waved good-bye to Mr. Vestry as he said it and stood there waving long after the taxi had turned the corner and was out of sight.

Then he turned and very carefully went indoors.

Gerald lay in bed and looked up at the ceiling. There wasn't, he supposed, anything that could be done about it. Alice was going to have a baby; and that was that. It was simply up to him to find the money. But it seemed so wretchedly unjust all the same. They had always been such careful, modern lovers. There was nothing with which to reproach themselves except their failure.

He felt Alice stir beside him.

“Are you awake?” he asked.

“I've been awake for ages,” she said.

They neither of them spoke for a moment. Then he turned and put his arm round her.

“What do you reckon a kid costs once you've got it?” he asked.

“Not much,” she answered. “Not if you're careful.”

“How careful?”

“Pretty careful,” she admitted. “It means going without other things.”

“You bet it does.”

“I'm sorry,” she said, and she moved her body away from him. “I know you think it's all my fault,” she added.

“It isn't anybody's fault,” he replied slowly. “It's just bloody awful bad luck.”

There was a longer pause this time. Neither of them was anxious to break it.

“I'm getting up,” Alice said at last. “It's almost time.”

In the ordinary way this was the moment he looked forward to when he had the emptiness of the bed to himself. He felt like a satrap amid all those acres of sheets. But this morning it was different. He was simply lying there and adding up the future like a sum; and whichever way he added it, it came out wrong. Ever since they married, things had been pretty close. He supposed he ought never to have signed for that radio-gramophone while there were other things still not paid for; but Alice had wanted it and it had been pleasant to give her what she wanted. For the moment it had made him feel rich and self-assured like a stockbroker. And even with those extra, monthly payments to the wireless shop the Sneyd's family balance sheet had just been all right; they had been probably about as solvent as anyone else in Boleyn Avenue. It was simply the child that upset the balance; the child—and all the rest of it if anything happened to Mr. Sneyd.

When he could not bear thinking about it any longer he got up and went into the bathroom. It took his mind off it to be doing anything, even shaving. But for no reason at all as soon as he stood in front of the mirror he found that he was looking at himself. He had been shaving for over sixteen years and this was the first time he had really caught his own eye. It was a tired, worried eye at that. He was surprised, as he looked, to notice that he was no longer really what you would call a young man. There were lines and creases beside the mouth, and the hair was receding from the forehead.
All the old O.T.C. look he used to pride himself on had gone already.

He dressed and went downstairs ten minutes before his usual time. But Alice took no notice of him. She went on laying the table as though he were not there. Even when he tried to take her hand as she passed, she avoided him.

She reached out for the front page of the paper without a word—from long habit he handed it to her—and settled down to read in silence. The longer the meal went on, the most distant she became; it was soon like having breakfast with someone in Australia.

She said good-bye in the same remote, unfriendly fashion. He waited to see if she were going to put her face up to be kissed but she went on reading the paper.

“Good-bye,” he said again.

“Good-bye,” she answered without moving.

Then he left her, slamming the front door after him as he went. They had not referred again to the one thing that was on their minds. It was as though by not talking about it, they were conspiring somehow to ward it off. Fully dressed and in their right minds, they didn't believe that it was really possible that it could happen.

It was not until Alice was sure that Gerald was not coming back—she had a sudden, idiotic idea that he would return and mysteriously make everything all right between them—that she got up. She was so wretched that she simply wanted to be alone and cry; it was astonishing how easy it was to cry nowadays.

She chose the bedroom and stretched herself out, pulling Gerald's dressing-gown round her for warmth. Then she lay there, too miserable to move.

Before he had reached the office, Gerald began to feel sorry; and now that he was too late to do anything he felt desperate. He wanted to rush home and take her in his arms and kiss her and tell her that he loved her and that they would manage somehow. But instead he went round to see Dentomint, the Proven Tooth Cleanser; Agincourt (Hard Courts) Ltd.; Robson's Sporting Guns; Typhoon Safety Pipes for Golfers; The Empire Wine Marketing Board; and Alkoe Anti-Acid Tablets. And he got one half-double out of the entire lot of them.

It was nearly half-past five before he got back to the office. By the time he came in there were three messages on his desk. The sight of them alarmed him: he had read of women doing desperate, crazy things when they were going to have a baby. But they didn't mention Alice: they were from the hospital and they asked him to telephone at once. At least, the first asked him to telephone; the other two simply told him to go there.

Mr. Hubbard was not pleased when he mentioned it. Apparently he resented the fact that Gerald should have a private life of his own which cut across the daily business of the I.P.P. In his world of half-doubles and three-inch singles and full-page spreads there was no room for anything else.

“Probably find it's nothing when you get there,” he said. “But if you want to go I suppose you'd better. Did you fix up anything with the Sauce people?”

“Nothing doing. They're simply going in to the Sunday papers.”

Mr. Hubbard shook his head. “Write me a report,” he said.

“O.K.,” said Gerald.

He wrote
Sce rep
. on his pad, hoped that he would remember in the morning what it meant, and set off for the hospital in a cab. On the way he felt curiously guilty. There was his father lying ill—just how ill he did not know—and he had thought of Alice first. It was strange the way marriage cut clean across everything else.

The taxi lurched round the corners of Pentonville's decayed Victorian village and drew up outside the hospital. Gerald paid the driver hurriedly and ran up the steps. It was not until he was inside and the smell of the disinfectant was in his nostrils that he remembered and tried to walk slowly. Soon even his footfalls were taken away from him; his feet on the rubber flooring of the upper corridor were silent. He padded along like an anxious, apprehensive ghost.

It was the Irish Sister who was on duty. She stopped what she was doing as soon as she saw him.

“You won't like the look of him at all,” she said. “He's only just come round.”

“Come round?” he asked blankly.

“Yes, they operated on him at lunch-time. Didn't you phone up? We've been trying to get you all this afternoon.”

He paused. The thought of an operation suddenly made him feel rather sick. “I—I didn't know they were going to operate so soon,” he said.

“They had to do it,” she said.

They had reached Mr. Sneyd's bed by now; it was completely screened off from the rest of the ward. And, inside that flimsy barricade of casement cloth, Mr. Sneyd himself was lying in a kind of cage. There was a huge unnatural hump in the bedclothes and from the top
protruded a puffy, shapeless expanse of face. He was breathing grossly and noisily. Every other breath seemed to stick somewhere in his throat. The Sister picked up a swab of cotton wool and passed it over his forehead.