In silence on the balcony they watched the dancers rotating below them. He wasn’t going to dance with her, she thought, because Poppy had died, because the occasion was a solemn one. She was aware of disappointment. Poppy had been dead for more than a year, after all.
‘It’s a horrible thing,’ he said. ‘A friend dying. In the prime of her life.’
‘I miss her.’
‘Of course, Alice.’
He reached across the tea-table and seized one of her hands. He held it for a moment and then let it go. It was a gesture that reminded her of being a girl. On television men touched girls’ hands in that way. How nice, she suddenly thought, the chap called Ashley was in Gone with the Wind. She’d seen the film with Poppy, revived a few years back, Leslie Howard playing Ashley.
He went away and returned with another pot of tea and a plate of Swiss-roll slices. Leo Ritz and his Band were playing ‘September Love’.
‘I thought I’d never lay eyes on you again, Alice.’
He regarded her solemnly. He didn’t smile when he said that the very first time he’d met her he’d considered her a very nice person. He was wearing a suit made of fine, black corduroy. His two grey hands were gripping his teacup, nursing it.
‘I came back to tell you about Poppy, Grantly.’
‘I kept on hoping you’d come back. I kept on thinking about you.’ He nodded, lending emphasis to this statement. Without drinking from it, he placed his teacup on the table and pulled his chair in a bit, nearer to hers. She could feel some part of his legs, an ankle-bone it felt like. Then she felt one of his hands, beneath the table, touching her right knee and then touching the left one.
She didn’t move. She gazed ahead of her, feeling through the material of her dress the warmth of his flesh. The first time they’d had tea with him he’d told a joke about three Jamaican clergymen on a desert island and she and Poppy had laughed their heads off. Even when it had become clear to Poppy and herself that what he was after was sex and not love, Poppy had still insisted that she should chance her arm with him. It was as though Poppy wanted her to go out with Grantly Palmer because she herself had gone out with the air-raid warden.
His hand remained on her left knee. She imagined it there, the thin grey hand on the blue satin material of her dress. It moved, pushing back the satin, the palm caressing, the tip of the thumb pressing into her thigh.
She withdrew her leg, smiling to cover the unfriendliness of this decision. She could feel warmth all over her neck and her cheeks and around her eyes. She could feel her eyes beginning to water. On her back and high up on her forehead, beneath the grey frizz of her hair, she felt the moisture of perspiration.
He looked away from her. ‘I always liked you, Alice,’ he said. ‘You know? I liked you better than Poppy, even though I liked Poppy too.’
It was different, a man putting his hand on your knee: it was different altogether from the natural intimacy of dancing, when anything might have been accidental. She wanted to go away now; she didn’t want him to ask her to dance with him. She imagined him with the pink woman, fondling her knees under a table before taking her to Maida Vale. She saw herself in the room in Maida Vale, a room in which there were lilies growing in pots, although she couldn’t remember that he’d ever said he had lilies. There was a thing like a bedspread hanging on one of the walls, brightly coloured, red and blue and yellow. There was a gas-fire glowing and a standard lamp such as she’d seen in the British Home Stores, and a bed with a similar brightly coloured cloth covering it, and a table and two upright chairs, and a tattered green screen behind which there’d be a sink and a cooking stove. In the room he came to her and took her coat off and then undid the buttons of her dress. He lifted her petticoat over her head and unhooked her peach-coloured corset and her brassière.
‘Will you dance with me, Alice?’
She shook her head. Her clothes were sticking to her now. Her armpits were clammy.
‘Won’t you dance, dear?’
She said she’d rather not, not today. Her voice shivered and drily crackled. She’d just come to tell him about Poppy, she said again.
‘I’d like to be friends with you, Alice. Now that Poppy has –’
‘I have to go home, Grantly. I have to.’
‘Don’t go, darling.’
His hands had crossed the table again. They held her wrists; his teeth and his eyes flashed at her, though not in a smiling way. She shouldn’t have come, her own voice kept protesting in the depths of her mind, like an echo. It had all been different when there were three of them, all harmless flirtation, with Poppy giggling and pretending, just fun.
There was excitement in his face. He released her wrists, and again, beneath the table, she felt one of his legs against hers. He pushed his chair closer to the table, a hand moved on her thigh again.
‘No, no,’ she said.
‘I looked for you. I don’t know your other name, you know. I didn’t know Poppy’s either. I didn’t know where you lived. But I looked for you, Alice.’
He didn’t say how he’d looked for her, but repeated that he had, nodding emphatically.
‘I thought if I found you we’d maybe have a drink one night. I have records in my room I’d like you to hear, Alice. I’d like to have your opinion.’
‘I couldn’t go to your room –’
‘It would be just like sitting here, Alice. It would be quite all right.’
‘I couldn’t ever, Grantly.’
What would Beryl and Ron say if they could see her now, if they could hear the conversation she was having, and see his hand on her leg? She remembered them suddenly as children, Beryl on the greedy side yet refusing to eat fish in any shape or form, Ron having his nails painted with Nail-Gro because he bit them. She remembered the birth of Ron and how it had been touch and go because he’d weighed so little. She remembered the time Beryl scalded herself on the electric kettle and how Lenny had rung 999 because he said it would be the quickest way to get attention. She remembered the first night she’d been married to Lenny, taking her clothes off under a wrap her mother had given her because she’d always been shy about everything. All she had to do, she said to herself, was to stand up and go.
His hands weren’t touching her any more. He moved his body away from hers, and she looked at him and saw that the excitement had gone from his face. His eyes had a dead look. His mouth had a melancholy twist to it.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘I fancied you that first day, Alice. I always fancied you, Alice.’
He was speaking the truth to her and it was strange to think of it as the truth, even though she had known that in some purely physical way he desired her. It was different from being mad for a person, and yet she felt that his desiring her was just as strange as being mad for her. If he didn’t desire her she’d have been able to return to the dance-rooms, they’d have been able to sit here on the balcony, again and again, she telling him more about Poppy and he telling her more about himself, making one another laugh. Yet if he didn’t desire her he wouldn’t want to be bothered with any of that.
‘Can’t fancy black girls,’ he said, with his head turned well away from her. ‘White women, over sixty if it’s possible. Thirteen stone or so. That’s why I go to the dance-rooms.’ He turned to face her and gazed morosely at her eyes. ‘I’m queer that way,’ he said. ‘I’m a nasty kind of black man.’
She could feel sickness in her stomach, and the skin of her back, which had been so damp with sweat, was now cold. She picked up her handbag and held it awkwardly for a moment, not knowing what to say. ‘I must go,’ she said eventually, and her legs felt shaky when she stood on them.
He remained at the table, all his politeness gone. He looked bitter and angry and truculent. She thought he might insult her. She thought he might shout loudly at her in the dance-rooms, calling her names and abusing her. But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything at all to her. He sat there in the dim, tinted light, seeming to slump from one degree of disappointment to a deeper one. He looked crude and pathetic. He looked another person.