He went to bed early that night. When he dozed off he discovered that Beatrice had an embarrassing habit of removing her clothes in butcher shops. Quite a crowd gathered around. He told them all that Beatrice didn’t know any better, she was just a child.
The telephone woke him up. He picked up the receiver guiltily, afraid that Beatrice had in some obscure way divined that he was dreaming about her. But it was only the kitchen calling to see if his was the room that had ordered the cornflakes.
He said, “No,” and hung up again, wondering who in hell would want cornflakes at eleven-thirty at night.
There was a party going on in the room next door. One of the women had a shrill and continuous laugh, and someone kept thumping against the wall in time to the radio.
Usually he enjoyed hearing other people have a good time but tonight it just kept him awake. He even considered phoning a complaint down to the desk, though he knew he couldn’t do that any more than he could have refused Beatrice’s invitation to dinner or denied Brown the opportunity to show him the apartment. He seemed to have lost the ability to make any definite and immediate decisions. Though he was deeply suspicious of Charles’s “social conscience” and Martha’s offer of the apartment, and resented the patronage implied in it, he hadn’t been able to refuse outright. He had simply walked off, leaving the whole thing up in the air, giving himself a chance to change his mind. Perhaps it was weakness of character, lack of will. Or perhaps he no longer wanted anything badly enough to cause trouble to get it.
If I really want quiet, I can phone down to the desk. If I don’t want to see Beatrice again, I can ring her up and tell her so. If I want a decent place to live, I can move into the apartment tomorrow. Just three simple, straightforward telephone calls will do the trick. Forget about hurting Beatrice’s feelings, forget about Martha, don’t let a noisy party spoil your sleep.
Next door the party broke up suddenly, and someone turned off the radio.
That left two calls. Or, if you stopped to reason it out, one would do. He didn’t have to go to Beatrice’s house tomorrow, he could just move out of the hotel without leaving a forwarding address or telephone number. Beatrice could surely take a hint.
The plan began to grow in his mind. It seemed to him reasonable and sensible, not like a lot of crazy things he had done in his life on impulse. There were objections, certainly. But there always were in everything anyone planned. What did it matter how or why he got the apartment? Getting it was the important thing. To hell with Charles and his hives and his social conscience and his wife. He, Steve Ferris, was the person to be considered.
He went to sleep, secure in the knowledge that for once he had come to a decision in cold blood, without reference to anyone’s feelings but his own.
When he checked out of the hotel the following afternoon, he left his forwarding address and his telephone number, and he called Beatrice from a pay phone in the lobby. He told her he was terribly sorry he couldn’t come for dinner; he had found an apartment and was moving in right away.
She didn’t seem at all disappointed. She understood perfectly, she said, it was perfectly all right.
“I really am sorry,” he repeated. “Tell Aunt Vi, will you?”
“Oh, I will. Where are you moving?”
Without hesitation he gave her his address and his phone number, and accepted an invitation for dinner the following week. By next week he could be in Mexico, Cuba, Buenos Aires.
Chapter 9
When he arrived at the house he went around to the back door to get the key to the apartment. Brown let him into the kitchen, murmuring something formal in the way of greeting. He was more subdued in the house than he had been in the apartment. Steve thought it must be the woman’s influence.
The woman was introduced as Mrs. Putnam, the cook. She stood at the sink watering a windowbox of green stuff that looked like parsley. She was very short, with wide sloping shoulders like a man’s, and a drawn delicate profile. She acknowledged the introduction with a pained fleeting smile.
“What’s that stuff?” Steve said. “In the windowbox.”
“Parsley.”
“I thought it looked like parsley.”
“It is parsley.”
“Well, what do you know,” Steve said. He didn’t care what was in the windowbox, he wasn’t even consciously trying to make Mrs. Putnam like him. But whenever he met a woman, no matter what her age or appearance might be, he couldn’t resist trying to personalize their relationship right away.
Aware of Mrs. Putnam’s relentless back, he turned to Brown again.
“Do I pay the rent to you or Mrs. Pearson?”
“I’ll handle it.”
“All right.” Steve took fifty dollars from his wallet. Brown gave him a receipt and a key ring with six or seven keys on it.
“It’s Forbes’s key ring,” Brown explained. “One of the keys belongs to the apartment. The others you can ignore. Are you going to do your own cooking, Mr. Ferris?”
“I might make a stab at it.”
“If you find yourself starving to death, come over here for a meal. Mrs. Putnam won’t mind.”
“Pleased, I’m sure,” she put in.
“Thanks very much,” Steve said. He was pretty sure that Brown had extended the invitation merely for the sake of finding out how good a friend he was of Martha’s. A good friend of Martha’s wouldn’t want to eat in the kitchen with the servants. He added carefully, “I’ll take you up on that.”
Brown looked a little surprised, but he didn’t say anything.
Steve finished unpacking in ten minutes. He had only a few clothes, two new suits, his old service underwear and socks, a camera, a portable typewriter, the shaving kit Beatrice had sent him last Christmas, and a leather writing case with a snapshot of Bea and Aunt Vi sitting grim and indivisible on the front porch of their house. In the envelope folder there were other pictures. Most of them were members of his squadron, but there were a few whose origin he couldn’t even remember: a couple of Land Army girls giggling straight into the camera, some pigeons in Trafalgar Square, a castle, a plane with a missing wheel, and a dreary transient-looking building labeled “Home Sweet Home.” At the bottom of the pile there was a creased snapshot of Martha. She was leaning against a big oak tree. She wore a light summer dress and the wind was blowing the skirt and her short yellow curls. She was laughing and holding down the skirt of her dress with both hands.
He took the picture and put it in his wallet. He didn’t want Brown to come across it and recognize her. Brown was the kind of man who might like to snoop into other people’s things in an innocent way.
There was a chest of drawers built into the wall. He put all his stuff into the top drawer and left the others empty. Using just the one drawer made him feel better. It emphasized the fact that he needn’t stay if he didn’t want to, or if anything happened. He could pack in three minutes and be out of here.
He closed his suitcases and put them in the closet. Then he strolled around the apartment, looking into cupboards, turning the stove off and on, seeing if the bed was comfortable, examining the books Forbes had left in the bookcase. He sat down again and took out the key ring Brown had given him. The keys were labeled with bits of cardboard: Ignition Chev. Door Chev. Ignition Cad. Door Cad. Apartment. House B door. Garage.
Seven keys. And that wasn’t half the number Brown had on his own key ring. Well, the more money you had, the more you had to lose and the more you spent on locks and keys. He remembered the house Martha used to live in. It had two doors, too, but neither of them was ever locked because someone had lost the keys years ago. Anyone could walk into the place any hour of the day or night, but nothing was ever stolen.