‘What’s your poison, Angela?’ Gordon Spelle asked, and she said she’d like some sherry.
‘Dry?’
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter – well, medium, actually.’
He didn’t approach the bar but led her into a far corner and sat her down at a table. It was less crowded there and rather dimly lit. He said he wouldn’t be a minute.
People were standing at the bar, animatedly talking. Some of the men had taken off their overcoats. All of them were wearing suits, most of them grey or blue but a few of a more extravagant shade, like Gordon Spelle’s. Occasionally a particular man, older and stouter than his companions, laughed raucously, swaying backwards on his heels. On a bar-stool to this man’s right, in a red wool dress with a chiffon scarf at her throat, sat Miss Ivygale. The red wool coat that had been hanging just inside the outer office door all day hung on the arm of the raucous man: Miss Ivygale, Angela deduced, was intent on staying a while, or at least as long as the man was agreeable to looking after her coat for her. ‘You’ll find it friendly at C.S. & E.,’ Miss Ivygale had said. ‘A generous firm.’ Miss Ivygale looked as though she’d sat on her bar-stool every night for the past twenty-three years, which was the length of time she’d been at C.S. & E.
‘Alec Hemp,’ Gordon Spelle said, indicating the man who had Miss Ivygale’s coat on his arm.
The name occurred on C.S. & E.’s stationery: A. R. Hemp. It was there with other names, all of them in discrete italics, strung out along the bottom of the writing paper that had C.S. & E. and the address at the top: S. P. Bakewell, T. P. Cooke, N. N. E. Govier, A. R. Hemp I. D. Jackson, A. F. Norris, P. Onniman, the directors of the C.S. & E. board.
‘That’s been going on for years,’ Gordon Spelle said. He handed her her sherry and placed on the table in front of him a glass of gin and Britvic orange juice. His droopy eye had closed, as if tired. His other, all on its own, looked a little beady.
‘Sorry?’
‘Pam Ivygale and Alec Hemp.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s why she never married anyone else.’
‘I see.’
Miss Ivygale’s brisk manner in the office and her efficient probing when she’d interviewed Angela had given the impression that she lived entirely for her work. There was no hint of a private life about Miss Ivygale, and certainly no hint of any love affair beyond a love affair with C.S. & E.
‘Alec,’ Gordon Spelle said, ‘has a wife and four children in Brighton.’
‘I see.’
‘Office romance.’ His droopy eye opened and gazed bleakly at her, contrasting oddly with the busyness of the other eye. He said it was disgraceful that all this should be so, that a woman should be messed up the way Mr Hemp for twenty-three years had messed up Miss Ivygale. Everyone knew, he said, that Alec Hemp had no intention of divorcing his wife: he was stringing Miss Ivygale along. ‘Mind you, though,’ he added, ‘she’s tricky.’
‘She seems very nice –’
‘Oh, Pam’s all right. Now, tell me all about yourself.’
Angela lived in a flat with two other girls, a ground-floor flat in what had once been a private house in Putney. She’d lived there for three years, and before that she’d lived in a similar flat in another part of Putney, and before that in a hostel. Every six or seven weeks she went home for the weekend, to her parents in Exeter, Number 4 Carhampton Road. When she’d qualified as a shorthand typist at the City Commercial College in Exeter the College had found her a position in the offices of a firm that manufactured laminates. Three years later, after some months’ discussion and argument with her parents, she’d moved to London, to the offices of a firm that imported and marketed German wine. From there, she’d moved to the firm called C.S. & E.
‘You can hear it in your voice,’ Gordon Spelle said. ‘Exeter and all that.’
She laughed. ‘I thought I’d lost it.’
‘It’s nice, a touch of the West Countries.’
The laminates firm had been a dull one, or at least a dull one for a girl to work in. But her parents hadn’t understood that. Her parents, whom she liked and respected very much, had been frightened by the idea of her going to London, where there was loose living, so other parents had told them, and drinking and drugs, and girls spending every penny they had on clothes and rarely eating a decent meal. The German-wine firm had turned out to be a dull place for a girl to work in too, or so at least it seemed after a few years. Often, though, while finding it dull, Angela had felt that it suited her. With her poor complexion and her bulging contact lenses and her small, thin arms, it was a place to crouch away in. Besides herself, two elderly women were employed in the office, and there was Mr Franklin and Mr Snyder, elderly also. Economy was practised in the office, the windows seemed always to be dusty, electric lightbulbs were of a low wattage. On the mornings when a new pimple cruelly erupted on her neck or one of her cheeks, Angela had hurried from bus to tube and was glad when she reached the dingy office of the wine firm and lost herself in its shadows. Then a girl in the flat introduced her to Pure Magic, so good at disguising imperfections of the skin. But although it did not, as in an advertisement, change Angela’s life and could do nothing at all for her thin arms, it did enough to draw her from the dinginess of the wine firm. A girl in the flat heard of the vacancy with Miss Ivygale at C.S. & E. and, not feeling like a change herself, persuaded Angela to apply for it. The shared opinion of the girls in the flat was that Angela needed drawing out. They liked her and were sorry for her: no joke at all, they often said to one another, to have an inferiority complex like Angela’s. The inferiority complex caused nerviness in her, one of them diagnosed, and the nerviness caused her bad complexion. In actual fact, her figure and her arms were perfectly all right, and her hair was really pretty the way it curled. Now that she’d at last stopped wearing spectacles she looked quite presentable, even if her eyes did tend to bulge a little.
‘Oh, you’ll like it at C.S. & E.,’ Gordon Spelle said. ‘It’s really friendly, you know. Sincerely so.’
He insisted on buying her another drink and while he was at the bar she wondered when, or if, she was going to meet the people he’d mentioned, the other employees of C.S. & E. Miss Ivygale had narrowed her eyes in her direction and then had looked away, as if she couldn’t quite place her. The black-haired receptionist had naturally not remembered her face when she’d come into the bar with the two men. The only person Gordon Spelle had so far introduced her to was the man called Tommy Blyth, who had joined the group around the fire and was holding the hand of a girl.
‘It’s the C.S. & E. pub,’ Gordon Spelle said when he returned with the drinks. ‘There isn’t a soul here who isn’t on the strength.’ He smiled at her, his bad eye twitching. ‘I like you, you know.’ She smiled back at him, not knowing how to reply. He picked up her left hand and briefly squeezed it.
‘Don’t trust that man, Angela,’ Miss Ivygale said, passing their table on her way to the Ladies. She stroked the back of Gordon Spelle’s neck. ‘Terrible man,’ she said.
Angela was pleased that Miss Ivygale had recognized her and had spoken to her. It occurred to her that her immediate employer was probably shortsighted and had seen no more than the outline of a familiar face when she’d peered across the bar at her.
‘Come on, have a drink with us,’ Miss Ivygale insisted on her way back from the Ladies.