‘Use grass?’ inquired Mr Belhatchet and for a moment, because of his economical manner of speech, she didn’t know what he was talking about: use grass for what? she wondered, and shook her head.
‘Mind?’ asked Mr Belhatchet, breaking open a fresh cigarette and poking what looked like another kind of tobacco among the leaves that were already there. He fiddled around for some time, adding and taking away, and then placed the untidy-looking cigarette between his lips. She asked again about the designs, but he didn’t seem to hear her.
Eleanor didn’t enjoy the next two hours, sipping at her drink while Mr Belhatchet smoked and drank and asked her a series of economically framed questions about herself. Later, while they waited for a taxi, he said he felt marvellous. He put his arm round her shoulders and told her that the first day he saw her he’d thought she was fabulous.
‘Fabulous,’ he said in Nick’s Diner, referring to a bowl of crudités that had been placed in front of them. He asked her then if she liked him, smiling at her again, smoking another Greek cigarette.
‘Well, of course, Mr Belhatchet.’
‘Andy. What like ’bout me?’
‘Well –’
‘Ha, ha, ha,’ said Mr Belhatchet, hitting the table with the palm of his left hand. He was smiling so much now that the smile seemed to Eleanor to be unnatural. Nevertheless, she tried to keep smiling herself. None of the girls at Sweetawear had ever told her that there was anything the matter with Mr Belhatchet. She’d never thought herself that there might be something the matter with him: apart from his mode of speech he’d always seemed totally normal. His mother had set him up in Sweetawear, people said, occasionally adding that he’d certainly made a go of it.
‘Fabulous,’ said Mr Belhatchet when a waiter served them with fillet steak encased in pastry.
They drank a red wine that she liked the taste of. She said, making conversation, that it was a lovely restaurant, and when he didn’t reply she said it was the best restaurant she’d ever been in.
‘Fabulous,’ said Mr Belhatchet.
At eleven o’clock she suggested that perhaps they should return to Trilby Mews to examine the designs. She knew, even while she spoke, that she shouldn’t be going anywhere that night with Mr Belhatchet. She knew that if he was anyone else she’d have smiled and said she must go home now because she had to get up in the morning. But Mr Belhatchet, being her office boss, was different. It was all going to be much harder with Mr Belhatchet.
‘Age you now, Ellie?’ he asked in the taxi, and she told him she’d become twenty-seven the previous Tuesday, while he’d been in Rome.
‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘Fabulous.’
He was still smiling and she thought he must be drunk except that his speech was in no way slurred.
‘It’s really so late,’ she said as the taxi paused in traffic. ‘Perhaps we should leave the designs for tonight, Mr Belhatchet?’
‘Andy.’
‘Perhaps, Andy –’
‘Take morning off, Ellie.’
As they entered the flat he asked her again if she’d like to use the lavatory and reminded her where it was. While she was in there the telephone in the nook beside her rang, causing her to jump. It rang for only a moment, before he picked up one of the other extensions. When she entered the sitting-room he was speaking into the receiver, apparently to Signor Martelli in Rome. ‘Fabulous,’ he was saying. ‘No, truly.’
He’d turned several lights on and pulled the green blinds fully down. The pictures that crowded the walls were more conventional than those in the lavatory, reproductions of drawings mainly, limbs and bones and heads scattered over a single sheet, all of them belonging to the past.
‘’vederci,’ said Mr Belhatchet, replacing his green telephone.
In the room there was no pile of designs and she said to herself that in a moment Mr Belhatchet would make a suggestion. She would deal with it as best she could; if the worst came to the worst she would naturally have to leave Sweetawear.
‘Fancy drop brandy?’ offered Mr Belhatchet.
‘Thanks awfully, but I really think I’d better –’
‘Just get designs,’ he said, leaving the sitting-room.
He returned with a stack of designs which he arrayed around the room just as he would have done in the office. He asked her to assess them while he poured both of them some orange juice.
‘Oh, lovely,’ she said, because she really felt like orange juice.
The designs were of trouser-suits, a selection of ideas from four different designers. One would be chosen in the end and Sweetawear would manufacture it on a large scale and in a variety of colours.
‘Fancy that,’ he said, returning with the orange juice and pointing at a drawing with the point of his right foot.
‘Yes. And that, the waistcoat effect.’
‘Right.’
She sipped her juice and he sipped his. They discussed the designs in detail, taking into consideration the fact that some would obviously be more economical to mass-produce than others. They whittled them down to three, taking about half an hour over that. He’d come to a final decision, he said, some time tomorrow, and the way he said it made her think that he’d come to it on his own, and that his choice might even be one of the rejected designs.
She sat down on the buttoned sofa, feeling suddenly strange, wondering if she’d drunk too much. Mr Belhatchet, she saw, had pushed a few of the designs off an embroidered arm-chair and was sitting down also. He had taken the jacket of his suit off and was slowly loosening his tie.
‘Okayie?’ he inquired, and leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
She stood up. The floor was peculiar beneath her feet, seeming closer to her, as though her feet had become directly attached to her knees. It moved, like the deck of a ship. She sat down again.
‘Fantastic,’ said Mr Belhatchet.
‘I’m afraid I’ve had a little too much to drink.’
‘God, those days,’ said Mr Belhatchet. ‘Never ’gain. Know something, Ellie?’
‘Mr Belhatchet –’
‘Mother loved me, Ellie. Like I was her sweetheart, Mother loved me.’
‘Mr Belhatchet, what’s happening?’
She heard her own voice, as shrill as a bird’s, in the bright, crowded room. She didn’t want to move from the sofa. She wanted to put her feet up but she felt she might not be able to move them and was frightened to try in case she couldn’t. She closed her eyes and felt herself moving upwards, floating in the room, with a kaleidoscope in each eyelid. ‘Mr Belhatchet!’ she cried out. ‘Mr Belhatchet! Mr Belhatchet!’
She opened her eyes and saw that he had risen from his chair and was standing above her. He was smiling; his face was different.
‘I feel,’ she cried, but he interrupted her before she could say what she felt.
‘Love,’ he murmured.
He lifted her legs and placed them on the sofa. He took her shoes off and then returned to the chair he’d occupied before.
‘You made us drunk,’ she heard her own voice crying, shrill again, shrieking almost in the room. Yet in another way she felt quite tranquil.
‘We’re going high,’ he murmured. ‘All righty? We had it in our orange juice.’
She cried out again with part of her. She was floating above the room, she said. The colours of the trouser-suits that were all around her were vivid. They came at her garishly from the paper; the drawn heads of the girls were strange, like real people. The purple of the buttoned sofa was vivid also, and the green of the blinds. All over the walls the pictures of limbs and bones were like glass cases containing what the pictures contained, startling on a soft background. Bottles gleamed, and silver here and there, and brass. There was polished ebony in the room, and ivory.