‘I just thought –’ he began.
‘You always said pretty things, Fitz.’
‘I always meant them.’
It had been so romantic when he’d said she needed looking after. He’d called her winsome another time. He was far more romantic than any of the others had ever been, but unfortunately when being romantic went on for a while it could become a teeny bit dreary, no other word for it. Not of course that you’d ever call poor Fitz dreary, far from it.
‘Where d’you come from, Cesare?’ she asked the waiter, thinking it a good idea to cause a diversion – and besides, it was nice to make the waiter linger. He was better looking than the airman from the base. He had a better nose, a nicer chin. She’d never seen such eyes, nor hair she longed so much to touch. Delicate with the coffee flask, his hands were as brown as an Italian fir-cone. She’d been to Italy once, to Sestri Levante with a man called Jacob Fynne who’d said he was going to put on Lilac Time. She’d collected fir-cones because she’d been bored, because all Jacob Fynne had wanted was her body. The waiter said he came from somewhere she’d never heard of.
‘D’you know Sestri Levante?’ she asked in order to keep him at their table.
He said he didn’t, so she told him about it. Supposing she ran into him on the street, like she’d run into Fitz six months ago? He’d be alone: restaurant waiters in a city that was foreign to them could not know many people. Would it be so strange to walk together for a little while and then maybe to go in somewhere for a drink? ‘Are your lodgings adequate, Cesare?’ She would ask the question, and he would reply that his lodgings were not good. He’d say so because it stood to reason that the kind of lodgings an Italian waiter would be put into would of course be abominable. ‘I’ll look out for somewhere for you’: would it be so wrong to say that?
‘Would you consider it, Nancy? I mean, is it beyond the pale?’
For a moment it seemed that the hand which had seized one of hers was the waiter’s, but then she noticed that Cesare was hurrying away with his flask of coffee. The hand that was paying her attention was marked with age, a bigger, squarer hand than Cesare’s.
‘Oh Fitz, you are a dear!’
‘Well…’
‘D’you think we might be naughty and go for a brandy today?’
‘Of course.’
He signalled the waiter back. She lit another cigarette. When the brandy came and more coffee was being poured she said:
‘And how do you like England? London?’
‘Very nice, signora.’
‘When you’ve tired of London you’ve tired of life, Cesare. That’s a famous saying we have.’
‘Sì?, signora.’
‘D’you know Berkeley Square, Cesare? There’s a famous song we have about a nightingale in Berkeley Square. Whereabouts d’you live, Cesare?’
‘Tooting Bee, signora.’
‘Good heavens! Tooting’s miles away.’
‘Not too far, signora.’
‘I’d rather have Naples any day. See Naples and die, eh?’
She sang a little from the song she’d referred to, and then she laughed and slapped Cesare lightly on the wrist, causing him to laugh also. He said the song was very nice.
‘I’m sorry,’ Fitz was saying. ‘It was a silly thing to say.’
‘You’ve never been silly in your life, Fitz.’ She laughed again. ‘Except when you married me.’
Gallantly, he shook his head.
‘Thanks ever so,’ she called after the waiter, who had moved with his coffee flask to the table with the business people. She thought of his being in Putney, in the room she’d found for him, much more convenient than Tooting. She thought of his coming to see her in the flat, of their sitting together with the windows open so that they could look out over the river. It was an unusual relationship, they both knew that, but he confessed that he had always liked the company of older women. He said so very quietly, not looking at her, speaking in a solemn tone. Nothing would change between them, he promised while they drank Campari sodas and she explained about the Boat Race.
‘I shouldn’t have said it. I’m sorry, Nancy.’
She hummed a snatch of something, smiling at him to show it didn’t matter in the least. He’d made another proposal, just like he had when she’d been a sunflower at the Old Gaiety. It was a compliment, but she didn’t say so because she was still thinking about sitting with the windows open in Putney.
‘I must get back. I’ll take an earlier train today,’ he said.
‘Just a teeny ‘nother coffee, Fitz? And perhaps…’ She lifted her empty brandy glass, her head a little on one side, the way he’d so often said he liked. And when the waiter came again she said:
‘And have you always been a waiter, Cesare?’
He said he had, leaving a plate with the bill on it on the table. She tried to think of something else to say to him, but could think of nothing.
When they left the restaurant they walked with a bitter wind in their faces and he didn’t take her arm, the way he’d done last week and the week before. On a crowded street the hurrying people jostled them, not apologizing. Once they were separated and for a moment she couldn’t see her ex-husband and thought that he had slipped away from her, punishing her because she had been embarrassing with the waiter. But that was not his way. I’m here,’ his voice said.
His cold lips touched her cheeks, first one, then the other. His large, square fingers gripped her arm for just a moment. ‘Well, goodbye, Nancy,’ he said, as always he did on Thursday afternoons, but this time he did not mention next week and he was gone before she could remind him.
That evening she sat in her usual corner of the Bayeux Lounge, sipping vodka and tonic and thinking about the day. She’d been terrible; if she knew poor Fitz’s number she’d ring him now from the booth in the passage and say she was sorry. ‘Wine goes to your head, Nancy,’ Laurie Henderson used to say and it was true. A few glasses of red wine in the Trattoria San Michele and she was pawing at a waiter who was young enough to be her son. And Fitz politely sat there, officer and gentleman still written all over him, saying he’d sell his house up and come to London. The waiter’d probably thought she was after his body.
Not that it mattered what he thought, because he and the Trattoria San Michele already belonged in Memory Lane. She’d never been there until that lunchtime six months ago when old Fitz had said, ‘Let’s turn in here.’ No word would come from him, she sensed that also: never again on a Thursday would she hurry along to the Trattoria San Michele and say she was sorry she was late.
I’ll he around, no matter how you treat me now… She’d seen him first when they’d sung that number, the grand finale; she’d suddenly noticed him, three rows from the front. She’d seen him looking at her and had wondered while she danced if he was Mr R.R. Well, of course, he had been in a way. He’d stood up for her to his awful relations, he’d kissed away her tears, saying he would die for her. And then the first thing she’d done when he’d married her after all that fuss, when he’d gone back after his leave, was to imagine that that stupid boy with a tubercular chest was the be-all and end-all. And when the boy had proved beyond a shadow of doubt that he was no such thing there was the new one they’d taken on for his tap-dancing.
She smiled in the Bayeux Lounge, remembering the laughter and the applause when the back legs of Jack and the Beanstalk’s Dobbin surprised everyone by breaking into that elegant tap-dance, and how Jack and his mother had stood there with their mouths comically open. She’d told Fitz about it a few lunches ago because, of course, she hadn’t been able to tell him at the time on account of the thing she’d had with the back legs. He had nodded solemnly, poor Fitz, not really amused, you could see, but pleased because she was happy to remember. A right little troublemaker that tap-dancer had turned out to be, and a right little scrounge, begging every penny he could lay his hands on, with no intention of paying a farthing back.