‘I don’t know what it is about that chap,’ Marie confided to Mavis. ‘Something, though.’
‘Married, is he?’
‘Oh, he would be, chap like that.’
‘Now, you be careful, girl’
‘He has Sinatra’s eyes. That blue, you know.’
‘Now, Marie –’
‘I like an older fella. He’s got a nice moustache.’
‘So’s that fella in the International.’
‘Wet behind the ears. And my God, his dandruff!’
They left the train together and parted on the platform, Marie making for the Underground, Mavis hurrying for a bus. It was quite convenient, really, living in Reading and travelling to Paddington every day. It was only half an hour and chatting on the journey passed the time. They didn’t travel back together in the evenings because Mavis nearly always did an hour’s overtime. She was a computer programmer.
‘I talked to Mavis. It’s OK about the insurance,’ Marie said in Travel-Wide at half past eleven that morning, having slipped out when the shop seemed slack. There’d been some details about insurance which he’d raised the evening before. He always advised insurance, but he’d quite understood when she’d made the point that she’d better discuss the matter with her friend before committing herself to the extra expenditure.
‘So I’ll go ahead and book you,’ he said. ‘There’ll just be the deposit.’
Mavis wrote the cheque. She pushed the pink slip across the counter to him. ‘Payable to Travel-Wide.’
‘That’s quite correct.’ He glanced at it and wrote her a receipt. He said:
‘I looked out another brochure or two. I’d quite like to go through them with you. So you can explain what’s what to your friend.’
‘Oh, that’s very nice, Mr Britt. But I got to get back. I mean, I shouldn’t be out in the middle of the morning.’
‘Any chance of lunchtime?’
His suavity astounded him. He thought of Hilda, deftly working at her jewellery, stringing orange and yellow beads, listening to the Jimmy Young programme.
‘Lunchtime, Mr Britt?’
‘We’d maybe talk about the brochures.’
He fancied her, she said to herself. He was making a pass, talking about brochures and lunchtime. Well, she wasn’t disagreeable. She’d meant what she’d said to Mavis: she liked an older fella and she liked his moustache, so smooth it looked as if he put something on it. She liked the name Norman.
‘All right then,’ she said.
He couldn’t suggest Bette’s Sandwiches because you stood up at a shelf on the wall and ate the sandwiches off a cardboard plate.
‘We could go to the Drummer Boy,’ he suggested instead. ‘I’m off at twelve-fifteen.’
‘Say half past, Mr Britt.’
‘I’ll be there with the brochures.’
Again he thought of Hilda. He thought of her wiry, pasty limbs and the way she had of snorting. Sometimes when they were watching the television she’d suddenly want to sit on his knee. She’d get worse as she grew older; she’d get scrawnier; her hair, already coarse, would get dry and grey. He enjoyed the evenings when she went out to the Club or to her friends the Fowlers. And yet he wasn’t being fair because in very many ways she did her best. It was just that you didn’t always feel like having someone on your knee after a day’s work.
‘Same?’ he said in the Drummer Boy.
‘Yes please, Mr Britt.’ She’d meant to say that the drinks were definitely on her, after what he’d spent last night. But in her flurry she forgot. She picked up the brochures he’d left on the seat beside her. She pretended to read one, but all the time she was watching him as he stood by the bar. He smiled as he turned and came back with their drinks. He said something about it being a nice way to do business. He was drinking gin and peppermint himself.
‘I meant to pay for the drinks. I meant to say I would. I’m sorry, Mr Britt.’
‘Norman my name is.’ He surprised himself again by the ease with which he was managing the situation. They’d have their drinks and then he’d suggest some of the shepherd’s pie, or a ham-and-salad roll if she’d prefer it. He’d buy her another gin and peppermint to get her going. Eighteen years ago he used to buy Hilda further glasses of V.P. wine with the same thought in mind.
They finished with the brochures. She told him she lived in Reading; she talked about the town. She mentioned her mother and her mother’s friend Mrs Druk, who lived with them, and Mavis. She told him a lot about Mavis. No man was mentioned, no boyfriend or fiancé.
‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘I’m not hungry.’ She couldn’t have touched a thing. She just wanted to go on drinking gin with him. She wanted to get slightly squiffy, a thing she’d never done before in the middle of the day. She wanted to put her arm through his.
‘It’s been nice meeting you,’ he said.
‘A bit of luck.’
‘I think so too, Marie.’ He ran his forefinger between the bones on the back of her hand, so gently that it made her want to shiver. She didn’t take her hand away, and when she continued not to he took her hand in his.
After that they had lunch together every day, always in the Drummer Boy. People saw them, Ron Stocks and Mr Blackstaffe from Travel-Wide, Mr Fineman, the pharmacist from Green’s the Chemist’s. Other people from the travel agency and from the chemist’s saw them walking about the streets, usually hand in hand. They would look together into the shop windows of Edgware Road, drawn particularly to an antique shop full of brass. In the evenings he would walk with her to Paddington Station and have a drink in one of the bars. They’d embrace on the platform, as other people did.
Mavis continued to disapprove; Marie’s mother and Mrs Druk remained ignorant of the affair. The holiday on the Costa Brava that May was not a success because all the time Marie kept wishing Norman Britt was with her. Occasionally, while Mavis read magazines on the beach, Marie wept and Mavis pretended not to notice. She was furious because Marie’s low spirits meant that it was impossible for them to get to know fellas. For months they’d been looking forward to the holiday and now, just because of a clerk in a travel agency, it was a flop. ‘I’m sorry, dear,’ Marie kept saying, trying to smile; but when they returned to London the friendship declined. ‘You’re making a fool of yourself,’ Mavis pronounced harshly, ‘and it’s dead boring having to hear about it.’ After that they ceased to travel together in the mornings.
The affair remained unconsummated. In the hour and a quarter allotted to each of them for lunch there was nowhere they might have gone to let their passion for one another run its course. Everywhere was public: Travel-Wide and the chemist’s shop, the Drummer Boy, the streets they walked. Neither could easily spend a night away from home. Her mother and Mrs Druk would guess that something untoward was in the air; Hilda, deprived of her bedroom mating, would no longer be nonchalant in front of the TV. It would all come out if they were rash, and they sensed some danger in that.
‘Oh, darling,’ she whispered one October evening at Paddington, huddling herself against him. It was foggy and cold. The fog was in her pale hair, tiny droplets that only he, being close to her, could see. People hurried through the lit-up station, weary faces anxious to be home.
‘I know,’ he said, feeling as inadequate as he always did at the station.