‘What was I talking about?’ she asked, looking fixedly at him. Her face took on a mask-like quality. ‘What did you say about Stockholm?’ With no marked transition from her state of confusion and without changing her tone of voice, she went on. ‘As I told you, my first husband was Swedish. He was a psychoanalyst, although he came to reject much of Freud’s teaching in view of his own experiences with his patients. I have his books over there; you must read them some time.’ She waved her stick in the direction of her bookcase. ‘I’m afraid I don’t look at them as often as I used to …
‘I helped him a great deal. He valued my feminine insight. Oh yes, there is such a thing as female insight, although people make themselves sick nowadays trying to deny it. Wearing tights, too, is bad for female hygiene …’
She looked for a long while at a picture of a horse and a peasant beneath a tree. ‘I’m afraid I’m rather tired, Alice … I wanted to ask you this: have you had any recurring dreams throughout your life? Perhaps you would bring me a glass of water.’
Distressed, Billing hurried to the kitchen to fetch her a drink. The kitchen was the room in which he had first met the Alice whom Gladys’s words accidentally conjured up.
He held the glass to Gladys’s lips. Her livid hooks of hands closed over his, shaking the glass until the water splashed her dress.
‘What can I do? Call the doctor?’
‘That man will do me no good. No, leave, Hugh, leave. I hate being ill. Even more, I hate you to see me ill. Leave. Come tomorrow, come tomorrow and I’ll be better. Come tomorrow and we’ll talk about dreams. You will come?’
He kissed her cheek. ‘Bless you, Gladys, dear. Of course I’ll come.’
Billing took a bus back to his digs. Mrs Dwyer was waiting for him, standing about the hall in her fawn coat, clutching a fawn handbag under one arm. His heart jumped.
‘I need a drink, Rose,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit upset. Come round the corner to the pub and let me buy you a drink. How are you? Lovely to see you.’
As they settled companionably at the bar, Mrs Dwyer said, ‘I was just going home. I’ve been hanging about here for an hour. I must be daft.’ She lit a cigarette from a gold lighter, looking him in the eye meanwhile.
‘My husband will be furious when I get home, want to know where I’ve been, what I’ve been up to and so on and so forth and all about it. I thought we were meant to be liberated, but not me, no.’ She laughed, a curt vexed action which pinched her face.
‘I’m sorry to keep you, Rose, I’ve been seeing an old friend. What’s the trouble?’ Even as he asked, he knew. He had not been to work for three days. He had simply forgotten.
It was none of Mrs Dwyer’s business, she said, messing about with an ashtray, and they scarcely saw anything of each other any longer, but she had been at head office and had happened to hear Mr Motts Senior say that he would be forced to sack Hugh Billing if he did not pull his socks up.
Billing clutched Rose Dwyer’s hand on the stained wood of the bar. It was a firm, dry hand, its nails painted carmine.
‘You’re good to me. Thanks for warning me.’
‘I’m fond of you, Hugh. You know that, I suppose. Why do I say such things? What’s your problem?
‘Have you got a woman or something? Your suit’s all creased.’
He looked anxiously round the lounge bar, searching the faces of the other drinkers. ‘What’s that tune they’re playing? It must be very popular nowadays. I’m always hearing it.’
‘I don’t hear any tune,’ she said flatly. ‘No juke box here. Only that Space Invaders contraption.’
‘Haven’t they got tapes or something playing? It can’t be in my head. Bugles or trumpets – I can’t quite tell which. Is it Herb Alpert?’
She looked impatiently at him, pursing her lips. ‘Stop changing the subject. If it’s not women, what is your problem?’
Shaking his head, he withdrew his hand. ‘It’s no good asking me, Rose. Somehow the bottom fell out of my life. You know I was a – what they call a drop-out in the States.’
‘Well, you’re back in bloody England now, mate. You want to be yourself. Hang on to what you’ve got and be thankful.’ She clutched the fawn handbag, illustrating her point by instinct.
He looked down at the beer stains. ‘But who am I? I lack continuity … I don’t know, Rose. Work’s not important to me.’
‘What is?’ she asked him sharply. Then, when he did not reply, repeated, ‘What is important to you, then?’
She puffed her cigarette, watching him not unkindly.
He drank his drink and looked across the bar. ‘I never have any luck. With women, for instance – I seem to lose them all. They never stay. Nothing’s permanent. That’s the hallmark of my existence. Nothing solid to show, just ruins.’
‘Don’t talk so silly, man. You’re lucky to have women at all … Besides, ruins are permanent. That sort of attitude will get you nowhere. Strike a light, Hugh, I don’t have to spell it out, but if I wasn’t married to Harry, I’d move in on you and try to set you to rights a bit, really I would.’
He laughed with sad pleasure. ‘I could do with a bit of that, that’s certain. How about trying anyway?’
Sighing, she said with a wistfulness unusual in her, ‘What a little lost lamb you are …’
She drained her glass. ‘I must get off home. Look at the time. Now, mind you turn up for work tomorrow and don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
‘Rose, dear, you’re lovely. London’s full of people and not a one like you.’
‘Just as well. Bloody fool that I am.’ She blew him a kiss as she went through the door.
He sat for a while over his empty glass before leaving. Rose’s cigarette stub smouldered in the ashtray beside him. He returned to his room. Drawing the curtains, he opened the cupboard where he stored biscuits and marmalade on one shelf and brought out his drawing materials from the lower shelf. Then he settled down at the table, shoulders hunched in concentration above the cartridge paper.
After work next day, he took his drawings round to Gladys. She had given him a key to her front door. As he let himself in, he wondered apprehensively if the time would come when he walked in and found her dead. Serve him right for making an insensitive remark about her looking permanent. Perhaps his little ex-wife was dead too, somewhere across the ocean.
But no, Gladys was as usual in her living room, standing with the aid of her stick, peering out of the window. He went over and kissed her furry cheek. She vibrated slightly.
‘I’ve brought you something to look at. It’s silly. I’m all right on plans but I can’t draw for toffee.’ Another English phrase.
He spread his pictures out on the floor as she settled herself slowly in her accustomed position on the chaise-longue.
‘How are you feeling today, Gladys?’
‘I’m all right,’ she said, constrainedly, looking down at what he had drawn. She spent so long looking at the pictures that he started to apologise all over again. Gladys cut him short.
‘Don’t run yourself down, dear. They’re rather good. They’d be better if you had proper artistic materials. The colours in fibretips are too garish, too what I call chemical. Think how lovely this church would look if you had a real stone tint, eh? Not that black.’
‘They call it grey on the lid. I tried to sketch phases of my recurring dream for you. You asked or I wouldn’t have bothered. My one recurring dream.’
Billing sat on the carpet by her feet and explained his dream. Pleasure filled him as he spoke. He suspected Gladys was lapsing into the insanity of the aged, but the thought did not alarm him.