‘She gets it,’ Mr Priddy said.
Sandra Pond had seen them and was looking aggrieved now, her head on one side. She sat down at the table and lit a cigarette. She crossed her thin legs.
‘Thank you very much,’ Sarah said, and Mr Priddy smiled graciously and went away to do his duty by some other lone woman.
‘Can’t stand him,’ Sandra Pond said. ‘Clammy blooming hands.’
Sarah drank some gin and tonic. ‘I say, you know,’ a man called out, ‘it’s a hell of a party, eh?’
He wasn’t sober. He swayed, with a glass in one hand, peering down at them. He was in charge of some department or other, Sarah couldn’t remember which. He spent a great deal of time in a pub near the Kingsway building, not going home until the last minute. He lived with a sister, someone had once told her.
‘Hey, who’s she?’ he demanded, wagging his glass at Sandra. ‘Who’s this one, Sarah?’
‘Sandra Pond,’ Sarah said sharply. ‘In the polishing department.’
‘Polishing, eh? Nice party, Sandra?’
‘If you like the type of thing.’
‘The drink’s good.’
‘It’s free, you mean.’
‘That’s what I mean, girlie.’
He went away. Sandra Pond laughed. She was a little drunk herself, she confessed. It took her like that, quite suddenly, after the fifth or sixth whisky mac. ‘How about you, Sarah?’
‘I’m just about right.’
‘D’you know what I’d like to do?’
‘What?’
‘Oh, no.’ She looked away, coyly pouting, the dimples in her cheeks working. ‘No, I couldn’t say,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t tell you, Sarah.’
The notion that the girl wanted to share her flat had remained with Sarah while she’d danced with Mr Priddy and while the man had swayed in front of them, saying the party was nice. It was still there now, at the very front of her mind, beginning to dominate everything else. It seemed to be an unspoken thought between them, deliberately placed there by the girl while she’d been saying that Tufnell Park was nice.
‘Actually I’m quite pissed,’ the girl was saying now, giggling.
The expression grated on Sarah. She could never see why people had to converse in an obscene way. It didn’t in any way whatsoever make sense for the girl to say she was urinated when she meant drunk.
‘Sorry,’ Sandra Pond said.
‘It’s all right.’
‘I offended you. It showed in your face. I’m sorry, Sarah.’
‘Actually, it’s time for me to go home.’
‘Oh, God, I’ve driven you away.’
‘It’s not that.’
‘Have another drink. I’ve spoiled your evening.’
‘No, not at all.’
‘You know how it is: everything smooth and unruffled and then everything going bonk! You know, Sarah?’
Sarah frowned, shaking her head.
‘Like if you looked down a well and then you dropped a stone in. Know what I mean? There’d be a disturbance. I had a friend said that to me once, we was very close. Hazel she was called.’
‘Well, I do know what she meant of course –’
‘D’you really, Sarah?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘She was talking about people, see. What happens to people. Like you meet someone, Sarah.’
It was the kind of cliché that Sarah didn’t care for, still water and someone throwing a stone. It was silly and half-baked, but typical in a way of what was said at an office party.
‘She was like that,’ Sandra Pond said. ‘She talked like that, did Hazel.’
‘I see.’
‘When she met me, she meant. A disturbance.’
‘Yes.’
‘Merry Christmas then, Sarah.’
‘Merry Christmas.’
As she edged her way around the dance-floor, she felt glad she’d escaped and was thinking that when Mr Everend collided with her almost. He always gave her a lift home after the Christmas party. He offered to now, sensing that she was ready to go. But he insisted on a last dance and while they danced he thanked her for all the work she’d done during the year, and for being patient with him, which she really hadn’t had to. ‘A last drink,’ he said as they stepped off the dance-floor, just beside where the drinks table was. He found her a gin and tonic and had a tomato juice himself.
In the arms of a black-haired youth, Sandra Pond danced by while the band played ‘Just One of Those Things’; her thin arms were around the youth’s neck, her head lolled on his shoulder. Her eyes were blank, Sarah noticed in the moment it took the couple to dance by.
‘Merry Christmas, Sarah,’ Mr Everend said.
‘Merry Christmas, Mr Everend.’
That night she lay in bed, feeling woozy after all the gin and tonic. Not really wishing to, and yet slowly and quite carefully, she went over everything that had happened since Sandra Pond had addressed her in the Ladies’ Powder Room. She remembered the grip of the girl’s fingers and the pout of her lips, and her bitterness when she spoke of Pollock-Brown and even when she didn’t. Had she really walked in on the dispatch manager’s wife and Chumm in a store-room? It was odd the way she’d spoken to her in the Ladies’ Powder Room, odd the way she’d spoken of Tufnell Park. For some minutes she imagined Sandra Pond sharing her flat with her as Elizabeth had, sharing the things in the kitchen cupboards, the Special Κ and the marmalade and the sugar. The girl was seventeen years younger, she didn’t have the same background or presumably the same interests. Sarah smiled a little in the darkness, thinking about what people would say if she began to share her flat with a polisher of plastic lampshades. People would think she was mad, her brother and his wife in their Harrogate rectory, her other brother and his wife in Africa, the friends whose parties she went to, the Bach choir, Elizabeth, Anne in Montreal. And of course they would all be right. She was well-to-do and middle-aged and plain. Side by side with Mr Everend she had found her way to the top of the firm. She would retire one day and that would be that. It didn’t make sense to share a flat with someone like Sandra Pond, but she sensed that had she stayed in Sandra Pond’s company the flat would have been openly mentioned. And yet surely it must be as clear to Sandra Pond as it would be to everyone else that they’d make a most ill-assorted couple? What was in the girl’s mind, that she could see the picture so differently? Thinking about it, Sarah could find only a single piece of common ground between them. It wasn’t even properly real, based neither on a process of deduction or indeed of observation. It was an instinct that Sandra Pond, unlike Elizabeth or Anne, wouldn’t marry. And for some reason Sarah sensed that Sandra Pond wouldn’t be difficult, as the girl she’d tried to share the flat with after Elizabeth’s departure had been. Her mind rebelliously wandered, throwing up flights of fancy that she considered silly almost as soon as they came to her, flights of fancy in which she educated Sandra Pond and discovered in her an intelligence that was on a par with her own, in which slowly a real friendship developed, and why should it not? Clearly there was a lot that Sandra Pond didn’t know. Sarah doubted that the girl had ever been inside a theatre in her life, except maybe to see something like the Black and White Minstrel Show or a Christmas pantomime. She wondered if she ever opened a book or listened to music or went to an art gallery.
For a week, at odd moments of the day, or at night, Sarah wondered about Sandra Pond. She half expected that she might hear from her, that the slack accents would drift over her telephone, suggesting a drink. But she didn’t. Instead, with the flights of fancy that she considered silly, she saw herself persevering in her patience and finally rewarded as Sandra Pond, calling on a sensitivity that had remained unaired till now, responded. Something assured Sarah that such a sensitivity was there: increasingly unable to prevent herself, she went over the course of their conversation in search of signs of it. And then, as if rejecting the extravagances of a dream in the first moments of consciousness, she would reject the fantasies that had not required a surrender to sleep. But all of them returned.