31st Of February (15 page)

Angela opened the parcel. A card dropped out, which she glanced at hurriedly and put into her pocket. “They’re lovely,” she said. “Thank you awfully.”

In words as clear as drops of water Mrs Vincent said:

“A card too. How very thoughtful Mr Anderson is. What does it say?”

“It just says happy birthday.”

“I am sure it must say something more interesting than that. Give it to me, Angela.”

“Would anybody mind,” Anderson said, “if I took off my overcoat?”

“My dear boy.” VV rushed forward. There was a little flurry. Anderson was freed of his overcoat. He turned round to see that Angela had torn the card to shreds. She faced her mother defiantly and said: “You shan’t see what’s on it.” Mrs Vincent’s limp hand came up and struck the girl upon the cheek. To Anderson she said with perfect politeness:

“You’ll excuse me, I am sure, Mr Anderson. I have a sick headache.” She was swallowed up in the darkness behind her.

Angela stood facing her mother’s closed door, cried two words at the top of her voice, and ran into another room, holding the ice skates in her hand. The first word Angela cried was “You.” The second pulled Anderson’s mind away from his surroundings to the establishment in Melian Street. Would there be any place for such words in Miss Stepley’s aseptic sexual paradise? Probably not. Or perhaps they might be uttered only by special dispensation as erotic stimulants.

VV sighed. “I expect you’d like a drink.” He led the way into a pleasant but untidy sitting room. “You see how it is. Of course, she’s not well. Any excitement upsets her and she has to go to bed. Nervous trouble – but I told you that, didn’t I? What can you do?” VV fiddled with the glasses. He was so unlike the benevolent dictator of the office that Anderson felt he was talking to a stranger.

He said with a shade of understatement: “She doesn’t get on with Angela?”

“That’s the trouble. The fact is that I love Angela like my own daughter. You’d think Mary would be pleased. But is she pleased? Instead she does everything she can to make life miserable for all of us. Do you know the cause of all this trouble just now? The theatre.”

“The theatre?”

“We were going to the theatre tonight for Angela’s birthday. But – Mary has a sick headache.” VV laughed without amusement, and yet with a faintly histrionic air. “I know what you’re going to say – why don’t we go without her? Impossible, my boy, impossible. She goes to our neighbours’ flats and becomes hysterical. She sleepwalks if she knows she’s alone. Once she fell out of a window. That was not here,” VV said in a regretful voice. “It was a first-floor window. Little damage was done. But she can’t be left alone.”

“I don’t see where I come in.”

“We’ve got to have our talk.” But VV said it with little energy or interest. “And the fact is, she’s been more than usually intolerable lately. I thought a visitor might – ease the strain. Perhaps I was wrong. Ah, here comes Angela. Now we can have – ah – have supper.”

Supper had a certain surrealist quality. VV ate only lettuce, seedless raisins, grated carrot and nuts, but he was anxious for Anderson’s welfare. “Eat up,” he said. “Take plenty of everything.” Anderson found it difficult to follow this advice. The food had come from the delicatessen counter of a very high-class store, and it was all covered with jelly. Anderson ate gingerly of cold consume followed by prawns in aspic and by chicken in a huge square jelly casing. The jelly stuck like glue to his teeth; the Russian salad that accompanied the chicken, on the other hand, tasted like small cubes of ice. Angela told him that Mrs Vincent had put it into the cold storage department of the refrigerator by mistake. The white wine afforded a contrast to the Russian salad, for it had inadvertently been placed by the electric fire, and was luke warm.

“Mother ordered everything from the food department of Jockney and Hanson,” Angela said demurely. “Did you think she had done it all herself?” She had changed both her dress and her appearance. She was now wearing a green evening frock and had swept up her red hair to reveal neat ears remarkably like her father’s. Only, of course, Anderson reflected, he was not her father, but her stepfather. The effect of the new hair style was to make her look eighteen instead of sixteen.

Anderson sloshed some warm wine about in his mouth. It removed pieces of jelly from his teeth and unfroze some small cubes of Russian salad. “Are you really only fourteen today, Angela? You look much older.”

“Do I?” She glowed. “You hear that, Victor?” VV nodded gloomily. She turned again to Anderson. “You didn’t buy me the ice skates, did you? The card said: ‘For Angela, with love.’ You wouldn’t have said that, would you?”

“I might have said it,” Anderson replied gallantly, “but I didn’t buy the ice skates.”

“But still it was sweet of you to try to get us out of trouble.”

She looked archly at VV, who was scooping the last mouthful of carrots and raisins from his plate. “We’re always in trouble with Mummy, Victor and I. Do you like ice skating?”

“I’ve never tried.”

“It’s so graceful – you just fly along. Victor sometimes comes with me, don’t you? I say, this wine is nice, isn’t it?”

“Delicious.”

“Mummy doesn’t let me drink wine. Isn’t it lucky she’s ill?” She gazed from one to the other of them.

Anderson coughed. “Perhaps she would like a little – a little consommé.”

“Oh no, Mummy enjoys being ill, I say, shall we have some more wine? I know where there’s another bottle.”

VV said weakly: “You’ve had enough to drink.”

“It’s my birthday,” she pouted. She was certainly remarkably pretty. “And I want it. I’m going to get it.” She jumped up and ran out into the kitchen. While she was out of the room VV rolled his brown eyes ceilingward in mock appeal. Angela came back with another bottle. VV pushed away his plate with an air of hunger. “I think I might have a little sweet. What is it?”

“Fruit and ice cream.” Anderson brightened, but the fruit arrived embedded in jelly. His spoon slid off the stiff surface of the ice cream. He thrust furiously at the jelly and succeeded in extracting small, tasteless pieces of cherry, pear and banana. VV pushed his sweet aside and sat picking his teeth with a silver toothpick. Angela ate the whole of her sweet with much apparent enjoyment. Anderson tried a mouthful of wine and found that the second bottle was, if anything, warmer than the first.

“It’s good wine, isn’t it?” Angela said. “I mean, I don’t know anything about wine, but I like this, don’t you? Oh, but I asked you that before. You are a couple of deaf mutes, you two, aren’t you? I mean to say, can’t we do something? Oh well, if you’re not going to talk, I shall go out and make coffee.” She disappeared again.

Conspiratorially, VV leaned over the table. “I suppose you wouldn’t like to take Angela to the Palladium? I’ve still got the tickets, you know, and—”

“I’m afraid not,” Anderson said firmly. “I mean, I should like to, but I have to go along to a party.”

“You could take her with you.”

“And what about our talk?”

“Oh that – that can wait. Will you take her to the party?”

“Well really, I’m afraid—”

“No? No, I suppose not. You don’t mind my asking, do you?”

Angela came in a little unsteadily with coffee and biscuits on a tray “I say, let’s dance. You do dance, don’t you?” Anderson admitted that he did. “And so does Victor, only he never will. But tonight you
must
because it’s my birthday.” She darted over to VV, took his hands and pulled him from the chair.

“But what about the noise? Your mother—”

Oh, she won’t hear it if we have it low. After all, it’s my
birthday.
Next to ice skating, I love dancing more than anything in the world. Don’t you, Mr Anderson? I say, what’s your Christian name?”

“That’s something I never reveal.”

“Then I shall call you Andy. I’ll turn on the radio. Oh, but I suppose you want some coffee.” Anderson half expected the coffee to be warm jelly and was pleased to discover that it was quite drinkable. Encouraged, he bit into a biscuit, but his teeth refused to close on it. The biscuit bounded from his mouth on to the table. Angela was convulsed with laughter, as she explained that these rubber bouncing biscuits were kept specially for guests. Even VV came out of his abstraction to venture a sad smile. Anderson did not find himself much amused. The incident made him aware that he was painfully hungry.

In the sitting room the radio was playing dance music very softly. Only one light was switched on faintly illuminating walls and chairs and bookcases. “Come
on,”
Angela said. “Let’s dance.” She seized her stepfather by the waist and they began to shuffle over the carpet together. Anderson dropped into an armchair and twiddled with the half-full wineglass which he still held in his hand. Like somnambulists the two figures swayed in their erotic clinch as the radio played:

It was all over my jealousy;

My crime was my blind jealousy…

The
Radio Times
was by his chair. Anderson picked it up and saw that the programme was “Hit Tunes of 1942.” Nineteen forty-two, he thought, nineteen forty-two. What did the date mean? That was the year when he was thirty-two years old. That was the year when he married Val. That was the year when he might have been called up – when, in fact, he would have been called up, but for Reverton. In that year Vincent Advertising had been told that they must cut down their staff. They cut, and cut again; and at last there came a day when either Anderson or a man named Goble had to be relinquished. Goble was a studio artist who made layouts for the Ministry of Knowledge and Communications schemes, on which Anderson was then writing the copy: he was thirty-five, two years older than Anderson; he had two children. Anderson would have had to go, there was no doubt about it, but for good old Rev. Good old Rev had been a tower of strength; good old Rev had not much liked Goble, who was inclined to be independent and sometimes came in late and had a habit of taking things to VV direct, over Rev’s head; good old Rev saw a chance of placing Anderson permanently in his debt. All this had been understood when good old Rev said: “It’s a toss-up, I don’t mind telling you that, Andy, but I’m going into that Board Meeting to fight like hell to have you retained. We’ve always got on together, haven’t we? But it’s not a question of that; it’s just a matter of which man is the most valuable to the organization.” And then good old Rev had paused, had taken the pipe out of his mouth shrewdly and then had looked shrewdly at Anderson. “Unless, of course, you feel that you must go, Andy.” That was the decisive question, the decisive answer, that put you in Rev’s power. For after you had equivocated, after you had said that if you had to go you’d do your bit as well as the next man, that if you really thought you’d be more useful in the army than here doing essential propaganda work you’d go like a shot, but it was obvious that you weren’t… After you’d said all that you’d delivered yourself over to good shrewd old Rev, and you could never really argue with him on even terms again. And that was all recognized when good old Rev put his pipe back again and said: “I want you to know, Andy, that I’m going to do my damnedest to swing it for you.” And good old Rev had swung it (or perhaps there had been no question of swinging it, perhaps that was just Rev’s fun, perhaps the votes of all the directors had gone to him without question), and Goble had been released from deferment and conscripted, and had died on the Normandy beaches, earning himself a posthumous MC. And the curious thing, Anderson thought as he sipped his lukewarm wine, is that I shouldn’t have minded the army at all, that I shouldn’t have minded dying, that I should have been very capable of the act of enforced heroism, the action to which there existed no alternative. And why did I accept good old Rev’s offer? Because it was the smart thing to do, because it was always foolish to stick out one’s neck. There, but for the grace of good old Rev…

“Andy, Andy,” Angela was calling him. “Come on, Andy. I’ve kept this dance for you on my card.”

VV’s face was very red. He dropped into a chair which was completely in shadow.

“VV,” Anderson said, “will you tell me something. Do you remember Goble?”

“Poor old Goble.” VV nodded.

Good old Rev and poor old Goble. “You remember we had to release him. Either he or I had to go; that’s right, isn’t it?” VV coughed. Anderson waved his hand impatiently. “I know that’s how it was. What I wanted to ask was this. How did the discussion go at the Board Meeting?”

“It’s a long time ago, Andy.”

“Don’t tell me you can’t remember,” Anderson said rudely. With a trace of his vanished Olympian office manner VV said: “I was going to say it’s a long time ago, and I don’t see it can do any harm to tell you. There wasn’t any discussion. We knew you were the man we had to keep.” He sighed. “And so poor old Goble went.”

“Oh, come
on,”
Angela said. “Don’t start jabbering.” She pushed herself into Anderson’s arms and he smelled her hair.

Good old Rev, Anderson thought; he fought for me right to the last ditch, only there wasn’t any fighting to do. He became aware that Angela was speaking. “I beg your pardon.”

“I said don’t you think this is a miserable way to spend a birthday?”

“I’m sorry, I’m afraid I’m not exactly gay company.”

“Oh, I don’t mind. I don’t suppose you like me at all, though, do you?”

“Certainly I do.” As much, he said to himself, as I like any girl or woman.

“I’ve always liked older men. I mean, you’re fairly old, aren’t you?”

“In my thirties.”

“That’s what I mean.” They shuffled round and round. A crooner sang:

I never said thanks

For that lovely weekend,

Those few days of heaven

You helped me to spend…

“I never did hear such a soppy old song,” sang Angela. “Did you?”

“Perhaps not. It was popular when I married my wife.”

“Oh, you’re married. Where’s your wife?”

“She died this month.”

“Oh yes, I’ve heard about you.”

“What have you heard?”

“Only that you were upset, behaving oddly, couldn’t forget her. I bet I could make you forget her.” She moved closer to him.