‘Both,’ he said, looking directly at her. She met his gaze and smiled, drew her hand away as if she’d not known his was there when she put it in that direction. He called the waiter. ‘I’ll get a taxi and take you up to your sister’s.’
‘Are you sure you want to bother? It’s out of your way.’
‘I’ll enjoy the ride,’ he said.
Wearing the same formal suit as on the previous night he left the hotel early and walked across Berkeley Square, streets deserted but for the occasional delivery van. The underground garage was like an air-raid shelter. An attendant pointed to his washed and fuelled car, its nose set towards the exit. It disgusted him the way they lavished so many ‘sirs’. Such treatment turned him sour — which seemed to increase their deference. He once told one attendant not to call him sir, but from then on he ceased to be helpful, and actually disliked him for reminding him of his unconscious servility. If you have money people try to take away your self-respect, believing that no one has a right to both.
After a long breakfast with Teddy Greensleaves, haggling over conditions for a big autumn show, he filtered his car up Baker Street and steered north towards Hampstead. Traffic not too bad. Smaller fry shifted aside for his Mini-crusher. It was cloudy here, but maybe blue above patchwork fields and closed-in woods. He’d enjoy a sunny ride to the freshets of Wash and Humber with Myra, only hoping no great disaster had smitten his hearth and home. A myriad of little ones no doubt had locusted there to chew up his peace of mind for a few days, but that was to be expected. He was in the mood for work, to sing and fly over the off-white canvas world, and once settling Myra into the family bosom he would set to and hope for the whistling best. The black gloom of last night was blown away by the brisk wind of morning. He pulled to the kerb near Hampstead station to look up Myra’s street in the A to Z.
Someone tapped the window, drawing his eyes from complicated street angles. ‘You can’t park here.’
Handley waved the ill-printed map, and without winding down the window shaped out an obscene word before drifting calmly off. One might momentarily think that, with his cap, he was driving the car for his employer, yet his sharp face of authority and ownership was immediately confounding. Prejudices went to pieces against the barbs of Handley’s classlessness, which disconcerted most of the English he bumped into. He was so remotely old-fashioned, and at the same time so in advance of most other people that he had few friends. Living without the topo-marks of convention gave a strength and a naivety hard to penetrate, an unbreakable wall of social will that was necessary for life in England.
Myra was waiting in the hall, Mark in his carrycot on the kitchen table. ‘Would you like some coffee before we go?’
‘We can have a jug on the road,’ he said, picking up her case.
He did a calm unhurried ton on the outside lane of the M1. They seemed reluctant to talk after the openness of last night’s supper, almost as if we’d been to bed together, he thought, and to say as much to himself was showing the black side of his nature swelling up from the sewer depths with vindictive suddenness. In his civilised mind he’d never think such words, but sometimes they caught him unawares, and weren’t to be ignored, for their springs often hid some secret truth he’d otherwise never have known among the shallow verbiage of normal daydreams.
Mrs Harrod was tidying the bedrooms, but left her vacuum-cleaner to look at the baby, the downcurved mouth of her round face reshaped by a smile: ‘He’ll soon be sitting up,’ she said, holding a finger to him, a wonder in her voice as if such a development was the first time it had miraculously happened. Mark looked at her, full of love it seemed to Albert, who sat in the kitchen while Myra made coffee.
Leaving Mark with Mrs Harrod, she showed him the house, feeling pleased that it belonged to her. He was the first person to see it since George died, and it was only now, after a promenade through the living-room where George’s books still lined the walls, then to his study bordered by shelves and files of maps, around the garden whose lawns and plots had merged under the unifying heaps of the months, and up into the untouched uninhabited flat over the garage in which George’s mother had died, that she realised the value of what was totally hers. ‘It may be wrong to own property, but I’m glad to have this house. I can shut myself off, and feel free, and it’s a good place to wait in.’
They stood on the lawn, by the garage door. ‘There’s nothing wrong in owning your own place,’ he said, ‘as long as you don’t exploit people by letting rooms and living off the rent. I’d always wanted to stop shelling out to a landlord, and the first thing I did on getting money was to buy the house we live in.’
When Mrs Harrod left, she insisted on making lunch, though he needed little prompting to accept. ‘I’m not expected till midnight,’ he said, ‘and if you read the map we’ll get across the country in no time.’
There was steak in the refrigerator, lettuce and potatoes in a box under the sink, and Albert went to the car for the bottle of champagne he’d been taking to Enid. He could give her the headscarf intended for Mandy, and give Mandy the necklace meant for Freda, and give Freda the Charlie Parker LP bought for the au pair girls, and the au pair girls would have to wait for their loot till he made another trip south or into Boston. Though creased by such manifold responsibilities he blessed them now as he set champagne on the table and saw the pleasure on Myra’s face at such delicate foresight. ‘I didn’t know when we’d need it,’ he said, ‘but I saw us parked in some desolate lay-by while you fed the baby. Since we’re drinking it here I can sling the paper cups, or use them some time to make sketches on if I’m stuck for paper!’
She went upstairs to feed Mark and change her clothes, came down wearing a white cotton blouse and dark skirt. While they were eating, the champagne dry enough to make a pleasurable meal, the air darkened and large pieces of rain flaked against the window. He frowned at it: ‘I was hoping for a sunny ride.’
‘Perhaps it’s only local,’ she said, ‘or it won’t last long.’
‘We’ll have a smoke after coffee, then go. I’ll switch on the heater and play soft music. If I could I’d draw the curtains and drive blind — radar-driving, switch on and go to sleep, with a bell to wake me after a hundred and umpteen miles. There was an article in that magazine Jerry-car. A good bit of steak, this.’
‘We’ve done nothing but eat since we met yesterday.’
‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘we’ll go long walks over the wolds with Enid. We often set out for the day, sometimes walking as far as the coast and taking a taxi back.’
The pitch and splash of rain increased, till he thought the outside world might be an aquarium, and fish would appear at the window, opening their hobgobble mouths, and waiting for the glass to break. Myra switched on the lights. There would be a storm whose force would press her to stay in the house, unable to leave unless the sky was blue and empty. Wet leaves brushed and slopped in the wind in a way they hadn’t when George was here because the trees were regularly pruned. Her neglect had changed the character of the house. Surrounding noises differed as well as interior settings of furniture. It took on her own temperament. Never in love with George, it needed a long time to forget his thick presence. Life was long and grief short, but in this case it didn’t seem so because, having met Frank just before George died, a low-grade grief for the six-year habit of George was enduring at the same time as her wait for Frank that might turn out to be a greater and more terrifying grief if he never came back. To end George’s nagging unnecessary memory maybe she should sell the house and go elsewhere, though now when the blue light bumped at the French windows she couldn’t bear to leave it, remembering so much while there that she was torn between wanting to lock all doors and windows on herself, and going out of it never to comeback.