‘All righty, Eleanor?’ pursued Mr Belhatchet a year later, referring to his suggestion that she should help him sort out dress designs in Trilby Mews. ‘Okayie?’
‘Yes, of course, Mr Belhatchet.’
Trilby Mews was where Mr Belhatchet lived. He’d often mentioned it and Eleanor had often imagined it, seeing his flat and the mews itself as being rather glamorous. Occasionally he telephoned from there, saying he was in bed or in the bath. He couldn’t bear a room that did not contain a telephone.
They left the office at a quarter past six, having finished off what work there was. Eleanor was wearing a pale blue suit in tweed so fine that it might have been linen, and a pale blue blouse. Around her neck there was a double row of small cultured pearls. Her shoes, in darker blue, were square-toed, as current fashion decreed.
That evening she was due to attend the night-school where, once a week, she learned Spanish. It wouldn’t matter missing a class because she never had in the past. Several of the other girls missed classes regularly and it never seemed to matter much. They’d be surprised not to see her all the same.
In the taxi Mr Belhatchet lit a Greek cigarette and remarked that he was exhausted. He’d had an exhausting week, she agreed, which was true, because he’d had to fly to Rome in order to look at designs, and then to Germany. In the taxi he said he’d spent all of Tuesday night examining the Italian designs, discussing them with Signor Martelli.
‘Dog’s Head,’ he suddenly ordered the taxi-driver, and the taxi-driver, who appeared to know Mr Belhatchet personally, nodded.
‘Join us, Bill?’ Mr Belhatchet invited as he paid the fare, but the taxi-driver, addressing Mr Belhatchet with equal familiarity, declined to do so on the grounds that the delay would cost him some trade.
‘Two gin, tonic,’ Mr Belhatchet ordered in the Dog’s Head. ‘Large, Dorrie,’ he said to the plump barmaid. ‘How keeping?’
The barmaid smiled at Eleanor even though the bar was full and she was busy. She was keeping well, she told Mr Belhatchet, whom she addressed, as the taxi-driver had, as Andy.
A Mr Logan, who taught golf at the night-school, had asked Eleanor to have a drink a few times and he’d taken her to a place that wasn’t unlike the Dog’s Head. She’d quite liked Mr Logan at first, even though he was nearly thirty years older than she was. On the third occasion he’d held her hand as they sat in a corner of a lounge bar, stroking the back of it. He’d confessed then that he was married – to a woman who’d once dropped, deliberately, a seven-pound weight on his foot. He wanted to leave her, he said, and had then suggested that Eleanor might like to accompany him to Bury St Edmunds the following Saturday. They could stay in a hotel called the Queen’s Arms, he suggested, which he’d often stayed in before and which was comfortable and quiet, with excellent food. Eleanor declined, and had since only seen Mr Logan hurrying through the corridors of the night-school. He hadn’t invited her to have another drink with him.
Mr Belhatchet consumed his gin and tonic very quickly. He spoke to a few people in the bar and at one point, while speaking to a man with a moustache, he put his arm round Eleanor’s shoulders and said that Eleanor was his secretary. He didn’t introduce her to any of the others, and he didn’t reveal her name to the man with the moustache.
‘Feel better,’ he said when he’d finished his drink. He looked at hers and she drank the remainder of it as quickly as she could, finding it difficult because the ice made her teeth cold. She wanted to say to Mr Belhatchet that she was just an ordinary girl – in case, later on, there should be any misunderstanding. But although she formed a sentence to that effect and commenced to utter it, Mr Belhatchet didn’t appear to be interested.
‘I just thought–’ she said, smiling.
‘You’re fantastic,’ said Mr Belhatchet.
They walked to Trilby Mews, Mr Belhatchet addressing familiarly a newsvendor on the way. The flat was much as she had imagined it, a small, luxuriously furnished apartment with green blinds half drawn against the glare of the evening sun. The sitting-room was full of small pieces of Victorian furniture and there was a large sofa in purple velvet, fashionably buttoned. The walls were covered with framed pictures, but in the green gloom Eleanor couldn’t see what any of them were of.
‘Want loo?’ suggested Mr Belhatchet, leading her down a short passage, the walls of which also bore framed pictures that couldn’t be properly seen. ‘’Nother drink,’ he said, opening the lavatory door and ushering her into it. She said she’d better not have another drink, not really if she was to keep a clear head. She laughed while she spoke, realizing that her head was far from clear already. ‘Fix you one,’ said Mr Belhatchet, closing the door on her.
The lavatory had a telephone in a nook in the wall and the seat was covered in brown-and-white fur. There were framed picture postcards on the walls, seaside cards with suggestive messages. They didn’t seem the kind of thing that should be so expensively framed, Eleanor considered, and was surprised to see them there, especially in such numbers. One or two, she noticed, were in German.
‘Same ’gain,’ said Mr Belhatchet in the sitting-room. ‘Sit yourself, Ellie.’
She couldn’t see the designs he’d spoken of: she’d imagined they’d be spread all over the place, propped up on chairs, even on the walls, because that was the way he liked to surround himself with designs when he was making a selection in the office. She couldn’t even see a pile anywhere, but she put this down to the gloom that pervaded the sitting-room. It surprised her, though, that he’d addressed her as Ellie, which he’d never done before. Nobody, in fact, had ever called her Ellie before.
‘Know Nick’s?’ asked Mr Belhatchet. ‘Nick’s Diner? Okayie?’
He smiled at her, blowing out Greek cigarette smoke.
‘What about the designs?’ she asked, smiling at him also.
‘Eat first,’ he said, and he picked up a green telephone and dialled a number. ‘Belhatchet,’ he said. ‘Andy. Table two, nine-thirty. All righty?’
She said it was very kind of him to invite her to dinner, thinking that it couldn’t be more than half past seven and that for almost two hours apparently they were going to sit in Trilby Mews drinking gin and tonic. She hoped it was going to be all right.
Besides Mr Logan, many men – most of them much younger than Mr Logan – had taken Eleanor out. One, called Robert, had repeatedly driven her in his yellow sportscar to a country club on the London–Guildford road called The Spurs. At half past three one morning he’d suggested that they should walk in the wood behind the country club: Eleanor had declined. Earlier that evening he’d said he loved her, but he never even telephoned her again, not after she declined to walk in the woods with him.
Other men spoke of love to her also. They kissed her and pressed themselves against her. Occasionally she felt the warm tip of a tongue exploring one of her ears and she was naturally obliged to wriggle away from it, hastily putting on lipstick as a sign that the interlude was over. She was beautiful, they said, men she met at the night-school or men employed in Sweetawear or Lisney and Company or Dress-U. But when she resisted their ultimate advances they didn’t again say she was beautiful; more often than not they didn’t say anything further to her at all. She’d explained a few times that she didn’t want to anticipate marriage because she believed that marriage was special. But when it came to the point, although stating that they loved her, not one of them proposed marriage to her. Not that any of them had ever been right, which was something she felt most strongly after they’d made their ultimate advances.