‘Really! What would I say to him? I know nothing about the waiter except what he is in a professional sense. I do not wish to know. It is not my habit to go about consorting with waiters after they have waited on me.’
‘I am not to know that. I am not to know what your sort is, or what your personal and private habits are. How could I know? We have only just met.’
‘You are clouding the issue.’
‘You are as pompous as da Tanka. Da Tanka would say issue and clouding.’
‘What your husband would say is no concern of mine.’
‘You are meant to be my lover, Mr Mileson. Can’t you act it a bit? My husband must concern you dearly. You must wish to tear him limb from limb. Do you wish it?’
‘I have never met the man. I know nothing of him.’
‘Well then, pretend. Pretend for the waiter’s sake. Say something violent in the waiter’s hearing. Break an oath. Blaspheme. Bang your fist on the table.’
‘I was not told I should have to behave like that. It is against my nature.’
‘What is your nature?’
‘I’m shy and self-effacing.’
‘You are an enemy to me. I don’t understand your sort. You have not got on in the world. You take on commissions like this. Where is your self-respect?’
‘Elsewhere in my character.’
‘You have no personality.’
‘That is a cliché. It means nothing.’
‘Sweet nothings for lovers, Mr Mileson! Remember that.’
They left the grill-room and mounted the stairs in silence. In their bedroom Mrs da Tanka unpacked a dressing-gown. ‘I shall undress in the bathroom. I shall be absent a matter often minutes.’
Mr Mileson slipped from his clothes into pyjamas. He brushed his teeth at the wash-basin, cleaned his nails and splashed a little water on his face. When Mrs da Tanka returned he was in bed.
To Mr Mileson she seemed a trifle bigger without her daytime clothes. He remembered corsets and other containing garments. He did not remark upon it.
Mrs da Tanka turned out the light and they lay without touching between the cold sheets of the double bed.
He would leave little behind, he thought. He would die and there would be the things in the room, rather a number of useless things with sentimental value only. Ornaments and ferns. Reproductions of paintings. A set of eggs, birds’ eggs he had collected as a boy. They would pile all the junk together and probably try to burn it. Then perhaps they would light a couple of those fumigating candles in the room, because people are insulting when other people die.
‘Why did you not get married?’ Mrs da Tanka said.
‘Because I do not greatly care for women.’ He said it, throwing caution to the winds, waiting for her attack.
‘Are you a homosexual?’
The word shocked him. ‘Of course I’m not.’
‘I only asked. They go in for this kind of thing.’
‘That does not make me one.’
‘I often thought Horace Spire was more that way than any other. For all the attention he paid to me.’
As a child she had lived in Shropshire. In those days she loved the country, though without knowing, or wishing to know, the names of flowers or plants or trees. People said she looked like Alice in Wonderland.
‘Have you ever been to Shropshire, Mr Mileson?’
‘No. I am very much a Londoner. I lived in the same house all my life. Now the house is no longer there. Flats replace it. I live in Swiss Cottage.’
‘I thought you might. I thought you might live in Swiss Cottage.’
‘Now and again I miss the garden. As a child I collected birds’ eggs on the common. I have kept them all these years.’
She had kept nothing. She cut the past off every so often, remembering it when she cared to, without the aid of physical evidence.
‘The hard facts of life have taken their toll of me,’ said Mrs da Tanka. ‘I met them first at twenty. They have been my companions since.’
‘It was a hard fact the lease coming to an end. It was hard to take at the time. I did not accept it until it was well upon me. Only the spring before I had planted new delphiniums.’
‘My father told me to marry a good man. To be happy and have children. Then he died. I did none of those things. I do not know why except that I did not care to. Then old Horry Spire put his arm around me and there we were. Life is as you make it, I suppose. I was thinking of homosexual in relation to that waiter you were interested in downstairs.’
‘I was not interested in the waiter. He was hard done by, by you, I thought. There was no more to it than that.’
Mrs da Tanka smoked and Mr Mileson was nervous; about the situation in general, about the glow of the cigarette in the darkness. What if the woman dropped off to sleep? He had heard of fires started by careless smoking. What if in her confusion she crushed the cigarette against some part of his body? Sleep was impossible: one cannot sleep with the thought of waking up in a furnace, with the bells of fire brigades clanging a death knell.
‘I will not sleep tonight,’ said Mrs da Tanka, a statement which frightened Mr Mileson further. For all the dark hours the awful woman would be there, twitching and puffing beside him. I am mad. I am out of my mind to have brought this upon myself. He heard the words. He saw them on paper, written in his handwriting. He saw them typed, and repeated again as on a telegram. The letters jolted and lost their order. The words were confused, skulking behind a fog. ‘I am mad,’ Mr Mileson said, to establish the thought completely, to bring it into the open. It was a habit of his; for a moment he had forgotten the reason for the thought, thinking himself alone.
‘Are you telling me now you are mad?’ asked Mrs da Tanka, alarmed. ‘Gracious, are you worse than a homo? Are you some sexual pervert? Is that what you are doing here? Certainly that was not my plan, I do assure you. You have nothing to gain from me, Mr Mileson. If there is trouble I shall ring the bell.’
‘I am mad to be here. I am mad to have agreed to all this. What came over me I do not know. I have only just realized the folly of the thing.’
‘Arise then, dear Mileson, and break your agreement, your promise and your undertaking. You are an adult man, you may dress and walk from the room.’
They were all the same, she concluded: except that while others had some passing superficial recommendation, this one it seemed had none. There was something that made her sick about the thought of the stringy limbs that were stretched out beside her. What lengths a woman will go to to rid herself of a horror like da Tanka!
He had imagined it would be a simple thing. It had sounded like a simple thing: a good thing rather than a bad one. A good turn for a lady in need. That was as he had seen it. With the little fee already in his possession.
Mrs da Tanka lit another cigarette and threw the match on the floor.
‘What kind of a life have you had? You had not the nerve for marriage. Nor the brains for success. The truth is you might not have lived.’ She laughed in the darkness, determined to hurt him as he had hurt her in his implication that being with her was an act of madness.
Mr Mileson had not before done a thing like this. Never before had he not weighed the pros and cons and seen that danger was absent from an undertaking. The thought of it all made him sweat. He saw in the future further deeds: worse deeds, crimes and irresponsibilities.
Mrs da Tanka laughed again. But she was thinking of something else.
‘You have never slept with a woman, is that it? Ah, you poor thing! What a lot you have not had the courage for!’ The bed heaved with the raucous noise that was her laughter, and the bright spark of her cigarette bobbed about in the air.
She laughed, quietly now and silently, hating him as she hated da Tanka and had hated Horace Spire. Why could he not be some young man, beautiful and nicely mannered and gay? Surely a young man would have come with her? Surely there was one amongst all the millions who would have done the chore with relish, or at least with charm?