‘I lie awake and think of you,’ she whispered.
‘You’ve made me live,’ he whispered back.
‘And you me. Oh, God, and you me.’ She was gone before she finished speaking, swinging into the train as it moved away, her bulky red handbag the last thing he saw. It would be eighteen hours before they’d meet again.
He turned his back on her train and slowly made his way through the crowds, his reluctance to start the journey back to the flat in Putney seeming physical, like a pain, inside him. ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ a woman cried angrily at him, for he had been in her way and had moved in the same direction as she had in seeking to avoid her, causing a second collision. She dropped magazines on to the platform and he helped her to pick them up, vainly apologizing.
It was then, walking away from this woman, that he saw the sign. Hotel Entrance it said in red neon letters, beyond the station’s main bookstall. It was the back of the Great Western Royal, a short-cut to its comforts for train travellers at the end of their journey. If only, he thought, they could share a room there. If only for one single night they were granted the privilege of being man and wife. People passed through the swing-doors beneath the glowing red sign, people hurrying, with newspapers or suitcases. Without quite knowing why, he passed through the swing-doors himself.
He walked up two brief flights of steps, through another set of doors, and paused in the enormous hall of the Great Western Royal Hotel. Ahead of him, to the left, was the long, curved reception counter and, to the right, the porter’s desk. Small tables and armchairs were everywhere; it was carpeted underfoot. There were signs to lifts and to the bar and the restaurant. The stairway, gently rising to his left, was gracious, carpeted also.
They would sit for a moment in this hall, he imagined, as other people were sitting now, a few with drinks, others with pots of tea and plates half empty of assorted biscuits. He stood for a moment, watching these people, and then, as though he possessed a room in the hotel, he mounted the stairs, saying to himself that it must somehow be possible, that surely they could share a single night in the splendour of this place. There was a landing, made into a lounge, with armchairs and tables, as in the hall below. People conversed quietly; a foreign waiter, elderly and limping, collected silver-plated teapots; a Pekinese dog slept on a woman’s lap.
The floor above was different. It was a long, wide corridor with bedroom doors on either side of it. Other corridors, exactly similar, led off it. Chambermaids passed him with lowered eyes; someone gently laughed in a room marked Staff Only; a waiter wheeled a trolley containing covered dishes, and a bottle of wine wrapped in a napkin. Bathroom a sign said, and he looked in, just to see what a bathroom in the Great Western Royal Hotel would be like. ‘My God!’ he whispered, possessed immediately with the idea that was, for him, to make the decade of the 1960s different. Looking back on it, he was for ever after unable to recall the first moment he beheld the bathroom on the second floor without experiencing the shiver of pleasure he’d experienced at the time. Slowly he entered. He locked the door and slowly sat down on the edge of the bath. The place was huge, as the bath itself was, like somewhere in a palace. The walls were marble, white veined delicately with grey. Two monstrous brass taps, the biggest bath taps he’d ever in his life seen, seemed to know already that he and Marie would come to the bathroom. They seemed almost to wink an invitation to him, to tell him that the bathroom was a comfortable place and not often in use since private bathrooms were now attached to most of the bedrooms. Sitting in his mackintosh coat on the edge of the bath, he wondered what Hilda would say if she could see him now.
He suggested it to Marie in the Drummer Boy. He led up to it slowly, describing the interior of the Great Western Royal Hotel and how he had wandered about it because he hadn’t wanted to go home. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I ended up in a bathroom.’
‘You mean the toilet, dear? Taken short –’
‘No, not the toilet. A bathroom on the second floor. Done out in marble, as a matter of fact.’
She replied that honestly he was a one, to go into a bathroom like that when he wasn’t even staying in the place! He said:
‘What I mean, Marie, it’s somewhere we could go.’
‘Go, dear?’
‘It’s empty half the time. Nearly all the time it must be. I mean, we could be there now. This minute if we wanted to.’
‘But we’re having our lunch, Norman.’
‘That’s what I mean. We could even be having it there.’
From the saloon bar’s juke-box a lugubrious voice pleaded for a hand to be held. Take my hand, sang Elvis Presley, take my whole life too. The advertising executives from Dalton, Dure and Higgins were loudly talking about their hopes of gaining the Canadian Pacific account. Less noisily the architects from Frine and Knight complained about local planning regulations.
‘In a bathroom, Norman? But we couldn’t just go into a bathroom.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, we couldn’t. I mean, we couldn’t.’
‘What I’m saying is we could.’
‘I want to marry you, Norman. I want us to be together. I don’t want just going to a bathroom in some hotel.’
‘I know; I want to marry you too. But we’ve got to work it out. You know we’ve got to work it out, Marie – getting married.’
‘Yes, I know.’
It was a familiar topic of conversation between them. They took it for granted that one day, somehow, they would be married. They had talked about Hilda. He’d described Hilda to her, he’d drawn a picture in Marie’s mind of Hilda bent over her jewellery-making in a Putney flat, or going out to drink V.P. with the Fowlers or at the Club. He hadn’t presented a flattering picture of his wife, and when Marie had quite timidly said that she didn’t much care for the sound of her he had agreed that naturally she wouldn’t. The only aspect of Hilda he didn’t touch upon was her bedroom appetite, night starvation as he privately dubbed it. He didn’t mention it because he guessed it might be upsetting.
What they had to work out where Hilda was concerned were the economics of the matter. He would never, at Travel-Wide or anywhere else, earn a great deal of money. Familiar with Hilda’s nature, he knew that as soon as a divorce was mooted she’d set out to claim as much alimony as she possibly could, which by law he would have to pay. She would state that she only made jewellery for pin-money and increasingly found it difficult to do so due to a developing tendency towards chilblains or arthritis, anything she could think of. She would hate him for rejecting her, for depriving her of a tame companion. Her own resentment at not being able to have children would somehow latch on to his unfaithfulness: she would see a pattern which wasn’t really there, bitterness would come into her eyes.
Marie had said that she wanted to give him the children he had never had. She wanted to have children at once and she knew she could. He knew it too: having children was part of her, you’d only to look at her. Yet that would mean she’d have to give up her job, which she wanted to do when she married anyway, which in turn would mean that all three of them would have to subsist on his meagre salary. And not just all three, the children also.
It was a riddle that mocked him: he could find no answer, and yet he believed that the more he and Marie were together, the more they talked to one another and continued to be in love, the more chance there was of suddenly hitting upon a solution. Not that Marie always listened when he went on about it. She agreed they had to solve their problem, but now and again just pretended it wasn’t there. She liked to forget about the existence of Hilda. For an hour or so when she was with him she liked to assume that quite soon, in July or even June, they’d be married. He always brought her back to earth.