They walked hand in hand, and she suddenly remembered Mr Hemp telephoning in the sedan chair, cross and untruthful with his wife. She imagined Gordon Spelle’s wife and saw her as a hard-faced woman who was particular about her house, who didn’t let him smoke in certain rooms, who’d somehow prevented him from becoming a dance-band leader. She seemed to be older than Gordon Spelle, with hair that was quite grey and a face that Angela remembered from a book her father used to read her as a child, the face of a farmyard rat.
‘She’s a bit of an invalid, actually,’ Gordon Spelle said. ‘She isn’t well most of the time and she’s a ball of nerves anyway. She couldn’t stand a separation, Angela, or anything like that: I wouldn’t want to mislead you, Angela, like Alec Hemp –’
‘Oh, Gordon.’
He looked away from her and with his face still averted he said he wasn’t much of a person. It was all wrong, being in love with her like this, with a wife and children at home. He would never want her to go on waiting for him, as Pam Ivygale had waited for twenty-three years.
‘Oh, love,’ she said.
The ice had gone from her stomach, and her face had cooled again. He put his arms around her, one hand on her hair, the other pressing her body into his. He whispered, but she couldn’t hear what he said and the words didn’t seem important. The hurrying people glanced at them, surprised to witness a leisurely embrace, in daylight, on a path in Grosvenor Square.
‘Oh, love,’ she said again.
The cold had brought out the defects on her face: beneath heavily applied make-up he noticed that the skin was pimply and pitted. Affected by the cold also, her eyes were red-rimmed. She reminded him of Gwyneth Birkett, a girl who’d been at C.S. & E. three years ago.
They returned to the office. He released her hand and took her arm instead. He’d see her at half past five, he said in the lift. He kissed her in the lift because there was no one else in it. His mouth was moist and open. No one ever before had kissed her like he did, as though far more than kisses were involved, as though his whole being was passionate for hers. ‘I love you terribly,’ he said.
All afternoon, with no real work to do, she thought about it, continuing to be amazed. It was a mystery, a gorgeous mystery that became more gorgeous the more she surveyed the facts. The facts were gorgeous themselves: nicer, she considered, than any of the other facts of her life. In prettily coloured clothes the girls of C.S. & E. walked the green-carpeted corridors from office to office, their fingernails gleaming, their skins like porcelain, apparently without pores. In their suede boots or their platform shoes they queued for lunchtime tables in the Coffee Bean, or stood at five past six in the warm bar of the Gresham Arms. Their faces were nicer than her face, their bodies more lissom, their legs and arms more suavely elegant. Yet she had been chosen.
She leafed through files, acquainting herself further with the affairs of Miss Ivygale’s office. She examined without interest the carbon copies of letters in buff-coloured folders. The faint, blurred type made no sense to her and the letters themselves seemed as unimportant as the flimsy paper they were duplicated on. In a daydream that was delicious his tapering hands again caressed her. ‘I love you terribly, too,’ she said.
At four o’clock Miss Ivygale arrived. She’d been working all day in her flat, she said, making notes for the letters she now wished to dictate. Her manner was businesslike, she didn’t mention the evening before. ‘Dear Sir,’ she said. ‘Further to yours of the 29th…’
Angela made shorthand notes and then typed Miss Ivygale’s letters. He did not love his wife; he had hinted that he did not love his wife; no one surely could kiss you like that, no one could put his arms around you in the broad daylight in Grosvenor Square, and still love a wife somewhere. She imagined being in a room with him, a room with an electric fire built into the wall, and two chintz-covered armchairs and a sofa covered in the same material, with pictures they had chosen together, and ornaments on the mantelpiece. ‘No, I don’t love her,’ his voice said. ‘Marry me, Angela,’ his voice said.
‘No, no, that’s really badly done,’ Miss Ivygale said. ‘Type it again, please.’
You couldn’t blame Miss Ivygale. Naturally Miss Ivygale was cross, having just had her share of Mr Hemp, one night out of so many empty ones. She smiled at Miss Ivygale when she handed her the retyped letter. Feeling generous and euphoric, she wanted to tell Miss Ivygale that she was still attractive at fifty, but naturally she could not do that.
‘See they catch the post,’ Miss Ivygale sourly ordered, handing her back the letters she’d signed.
‘Yes, yes, of course, Miss Ivygale –’
‘You’ll need to hurry up.’
She took the letters to the dispatch-room in the basement and when she returned to the outer office she found that Miss Ivygale had already left the inner one. She put the grey plastic cover on her Remington International and went to the lavatory to put Pure Magic on her face. ‘I wonder, who’s kissing her now,’ Gordon Spelle was murmuring when she entered the outer office again. ‘I wonder who’s showing her how.’
He put his arms around her. His tongue crept between her teeth, his hands caressed the outline of her buttocks. He led her into Miss Ivygale’s office, an arm around her waist, his lips damply on her right ear. He was whispering something about Miss Ivygale having left for the Gresham Arms and about having to lock the door because the cleaners would be coming round. She heard the door being locked. The light went out and the office was dark except for the glow of the street lamps coming through two uncurtained windows. His mouth was working on hers again, his fingers undid the zip at the side of her skirt. She closed her eyes, saturated by the gorgeousness of the mystery.
Take it easy, he said to himself when he had her on the floor, remembering the way Gwyneth Birkett had suddenly shouted out, in discomfort apparently although at the time he’d assumed it to be pleasure. A Nigerian cleaner had come knocking at the door when she’d shouted out the third or fourth time. ‘Oh, God, I love you,’ he whispered to Angela Hosford.
She had vodka and lime in the Gresham Arms because she felt she needed pulling together and one of the girls in the flat had said that vodka was great for that. It had been very painful on the floor of Miss Ivygale’s office, and not even momentarily pleasurable, not once. It had been less painful the other time, with Ted Apwell on the hearth-rug. She wished it didn’t always have to be on a floor, but even so it didn’t matter – nor did the pain, nor the apprehension about doing it in Miss Ivygale’s office. All the time he’d kept saying he loved her, and as often as she could manage it she’d said she loved him too.
‘Must go,’ he said now with sudden, awful abruptness. He buttoned the jacket of his pepper-coloured suit. He kissed her on the lips, in full view of everyone in the Gresham Arms. She wanted to go with him but felt she shouldn’t because the drink he’d just bought her was scarcely touched. He’d drunk his own gin and Britvic in a couple of gulps.
‘Sorry for being so grumpy,’ Miss Ivygale said.
The Gresham Arms was warm and noisy, but somehow not the same at all. The men who’d been there last night were there again: Tommy Blyth and the man called Dil and all the other men – and the black-haired receptionist and all the other girls. Mr Hemp was not. Mr Hemp was hurrying back to his wife, and so was Gordon Spelle.
‘What’re you drinking?’ Miss Ivygale asked her.
‘Oh no, no. I haven’t even started this one, thanks.’
But Miss Ivygale, whose own glass required refilling, insisted. ‘Sit down, why don’t you?’ Miss Ivygale suggested indicating the bar-stool next to hers. ‘Take off your coat. It’s like a furnace in here.’
Slowly Angela took off her coat. She sat beside her immediate employer, still feeling painful and in other ways aware of what had occurred on Miss Ivygale’s office floor. They drank together and in time they both became a little drunk. Angela felt sorry for Miss Ivygale then, and Miss Ivygale felt sorry for Angela, but neither of them said so. And in the end, when Angela asked Miss Ivygale why it was that Gordon Spelle had picked her out, Miss Ivygale replied that it was because Gordon Spelle loved her. What else could she say? Miss Ivygale asked herself. How could she say that everyone knew that Gordon Spelle chose girls who were unattractive because he believed such girls, deprived of sex for long periods at a time, were an easier bet? Gordon Spelle was notorious, but Miss Ivygale naturally couldn’t say it, any more than she’d been able to say it to Gwyneth Birkett or Tamar Dymorid or Sue, or any of the others.