‘And “I’ll Be Around”. ’Member “I’ll Be Around”?’ She sang again, very softly. ‘No matter how… you treat me now… Who was it sang it, d’you ’member?’
He shook his head. The waiter brought their trout and Nancy smiled at him. The tedium that had just begun to creep into these Thursday lunches had evaporated as soon as she’d set eyes on the Trattoria’s new waiter six or so weeks ago. On Thursday evenings, in her corner of the Bayeux Lounge, his courtesy and his handsome face haunted her. Yes, he was a little sad, she often said to herself in the Bayeux Lounge. Was there even a hint of pain in those steady Latin eyes?
‘Oh, lovely-looking trout,’ she said, continuing to smile. ‘Thanks ever so, Cesare.’
The man she had been married to was saying something else, but she didn’t hear what it was. She remembered a chap like Cesare during the war, an airman from the base whom she’d longed to be taken out by, although in fact he’d never invited her.
‘What?’ she murmured, becoming aware that she’d been asked a question. But the question, now repeated, was only the familiar one, so often asked on Thursdays: did she intend to remain in her Putney flat, was she quite settled there? It was asked because once she’d said – she didn’t know why – that the flat was temporary, that her existence in Putney had a temporary feel to it. She couldn’t tell all the truth, she couldn’t – to Fitz of all people – reveal the hope that at long last old Mr Robin Right would come bob-bob-bobbing along. She believed in Mr R.R., always had, and for some reason she’d got it into her head that he might quite easily walk into the Bayeux Lounge of the Sceptre Hotel. In the evenings she watched television in her flat or in the Bayeux Lounge, sometimes feeling bored because she had no particular friend or confidante. But then she’d always had an inclination to feel a bit like that. Boredom was the devil in her, Laurie Henderson used to say.
‘Thanks ever so,’ she said again because Cesare had skilfully placed a little heap of peas beside the trout. Typical of her, of course, to go falling for a restaurant waiter: you set yourself out on a sensible course, all serious and determined, and the next thing was you were half in love with an unsuitable younger man. Not that she looked fifty-nine, of course, more like forty – even thirty-eight, as a chap in the Bayeux Lounge had said when she’d asked him to guess a month ago. Unfortunately the chap had definitely not been Mr R.R.
‘I just wondered,’ Fitz was saying.
She smiled and nodded. The waiter was aware of her attention, no doubt about it. There was a little wink she was gifted with, a slight little motion of the lids, nothing suggestive about it. ‘Makes me laugh, your wink,’ Eddie Lush used to say, and it was probably Simpson who had called it a gift. She couldn’t think why she’d ever allowed herself to marry Simpson, irritating face he’d had, irritating ways.
‘It’s been enjoyable, making the garden, building that wall. I never thought I’d be able to build a wall.’
He’d told her a lot about his house by the sea, a perfect picture it sounded, with flowerbeds all around the edge, and rustic trellising with ivy disguising the outside sanitary arrangements. He was terribly proud of what he’d done, and every right he had to be, the way he’d made the garden out of nothing. Won some kind of award the garden had, best on the south coast or the world or something.
‘I could sell it very well. I’ve begun to think of that.’
She nodded. Cesare was expertly gathering up the plates four businessmen had eaten from. The men were stout and flushed, all of them married: you could tell a married look at once. At another table a chap who was married also was taking out a girl less than half his age, and next to them a couple looked as though they were planning a dirty weekend. A party of six, men and women, were at the big central table, just beside where the salads and the bowls of fruit were all laid out and where the dessert trolley was. She’d seen that party here a couple of weeks ago; they’d been talking about En Tout Cas tennis courts.
‘Once you’ve made something as you want it,’ Fitz was saying, ‘you tend to lose interest, I suppose.’
The head-waiter called out to the other, younger Italian, she didn’t know what his name was, lumpy-looking boy. But Cesare, because he was less busy, answered. ‘Pronto! Pronto!’
‘You’re never selling up, Fitz?’
‘Well, I’m wondering about it.’
He had told her about the woman he’d married, a responsible type of woman she sounded, but she’d been ill or something and hadn’t been able to have children. Twenty-three years was really a very long time for any two people to keep going. But then the woman had died.
‘You get itchy feet,’ he said. ‘Even when you’re passing sixty.’
‘My, you don’t look it.’ Automatically she responded, watching the waiter while he served the party at the central table with T-bone steaks, a San Michele speciality. He said something else, but it didn’t impinge on her. Then she heard:
‘I often think it would be nice to live in London.’
He was eyeing her, to catch her reaction to this. ‘You’ve had a battered life,’ he’d said to her, the second time they’d had lunch. He’d looked at her much as he was looking at her now, and had said it twice. That was being an actress, she’d explained: always living on your nerves, hoping for this part or that, the disappointment of don’t-call-us. ‘Well, I suppose it batters you in the end,’ she’d agreed. ‘The old Profession.’
He, on the other hand, had appeared to have had quite a cosy time in the intervening years. Certainly, the responsible-sounding woman hadn’t battered him, far from it. They’d been as snug as anything in the house by the sea, a heavy type of woman, Nancy imagined she’d been, with this thing wrong with her, whatever it was. It was after she’d dropped off her twig that he’d begun to feel sorry for himself and of course you couldn’t blame him, poor Fitz. It had upset him at first that people had led unattached women up to him at cocktail parties, widows and the like, who’d lost their figures or had let their hair go frizzy, or were old. He’d told her all that one lunchtime and on another occasion he’d confessed that after a year or so had passed he’d gone to a bureau place, an introduction agency, where much younger women were fixed up for him. But that hadn’t worked either. He had met the first of them for tea in the Ceylon Centre, where she’d told him that her deceased husband had been an important figure in a chemicals firm and that her older daughter was married in Australia, that her son was in the Hong Kong Police and another daughter married to a dentist in Worcester. She had not ceased to talk the entire time she was with him, apparently, telling him that she suffered from the heat, especially her feet. He’d taken another woman to a revival of Annie Get Your Gun, and he’d met a third in a bar she had suggested, where she’d begun to slur her speech after half an hour. Poor Fitz! He’d always been a simple soldier. She could have told him a bureau place would be no good, stood to reason you’d only get the down-and-outs.
‘Sorry?’ she said.
‘I don’t suppose you’d ever think of giving it another go?’
‘Darling Fitz! Dear darling Fitz!’
She smiled at him. How typical it was that he didn’t know it was impossible to pick up pieces that had been lying about for forty years! The past was full of Simpson and Laurie Henderson and Eddie Lush, and the two children she’d borne, the girl the child of a fertilizer salesman, which was something Eddie Lush had never guessed. You couldn’t keep going on journeys down Memory Lane, and the more you did the more you realized that it was just an ugly black tunnel. Time goes by, as the old song had it, a kiss and a sigh and that was that. She smiled again. ‘The fundamental things of life,’ she sang softly, smiling again at her ex-husband.