Death of a Salesperson (10 page)

‘It's that claustrophobia thing,' said Mrs O'Hare, nodding her head grimly.

There came another shout, and another, then suddenly a howl, half human, grotesque, followed by another till it became continuous. The little shaft echoed with cries and sobs and moans, rising to a hideous intensity.

‘Did you say till Monday?' asked Mrs Makowski.

‘That's right,' said Mrs O'Hare. ‘It's his arthritis. We're the last ones in the building.'

They stood around, the little group of women, listening to the animal sounds of terror and outrage coming from the lift shaft.

‘I could do with a cup of tea,' said Mrs Makowski.

‘Tea?' said Susan. ‘That's an awfully typical women's drink, don't you think? I could do with something stronger.'

‘She keeps a bottle of bourbon in her room,' said Mrs Makowski.

‘Kept,' said Susan.

‘Come on, sisters,' said Mrs Makowski, waving her skeleton key. ‘Let's go have us a slug.'

D
erek Mattingley was unsure of the appropriate behaviour for a man whose ex-wife has just died. No doubt one of the with-it etiquette books had a section on it. Luckily mourning itself has practically passed away, so delicate questions of full or half-mourning did not present themselves. A sober suit was all that could be expected, and as a Lloyd's broker Derek wore a sober suit every day of his life. Similarly with his behaviour, which in working hours was habitually tinged with gravity, so that he had no difficulty in shaking his head sadly when anyone brought the subject up, or in offering remarks like: ‘It's Gavin I feel sorry for: only two years married.' With closer friends he ventured: ‘I often wondered whether she was entirely well when she was married to me.' Then he would dismiss the matter with another shake of the head: ‘It's a sad business.'

Inwardly, of course, he was over the moon with delight.

He had been married to Anne-Marie for seven years. She had cooked well, both for him and for the little dinner-parties which Derek rather went in for. She had looked decorative at the cocktail-parties they regularly threw, had turned eyes in the stalls at Covent Garden, or at Chichester, where they sometimes drove to take in a play at festival time. Sometimes on holiday—Sardinia, as often as not, or the dear old South of France, which Derek always said you still couldn't beat—she had looked perfectly stunning. Derek regarded her as an undoubted asset.

Which had made her announcement that she was leaving him such a hideous blow. It was all so damned unexpected. She had said she was just an adjunct to his business career. Well, why hadn't she complained before? And why had she made no bones about living off the proceeds of that business
career? She said he had no interest in her as a person. Good heavens, what nonsense! He'd married her, hadn't he? How could she say he wasn't interested in her as a person?

But the worst was to come.

‘Doesn't it mean anything,' he had demanded, ‘that we've had seven years together, day and night?'

‘Are you referring to bed?' she had asked. ‘Well, there was never much of interest in
that
department, was there?'

They were words from which Derek Mattingley flinched, as if struck. What had been wrong with their sex? It had seemed perfectly all right to him. What had she been expecting that he hadn't given her? And where had she formed her standards of comparison?

Part of the answer to that last question soon became obvious. She was leaving him, she said, for Gavin Hobhouse.

Derek really had to sit down and think who Gavin Hobhouse was. He barely knew the man, though it was true he had been to dinner. That was when Derek had thought he might be useful in the matter of National and Regional shares, but he hadn't responded to his prompting—in fact, he had hardly said a word all evening.

That, Anne-Marie said, was because they were already going to bed together. Gavin was a man of old-fashioned probity, of deeply conservative principles. He was embarrassed by the situation, and took refuge in taciturnity.

‘The strong, silent type?' inquired Derek satirically.

‘Well, yes, he is, rather. Strong, simple emotions.'

‘His conservative principles didn't stop him breaking up
my
hearth and home, did they?'

‘The fire was
out
, the home was a shell,' said Anne-Marie. ‘Otherwise I don't think he ever would have spoken.'

Gavin apparently was an ex-guardsman, but was now something in the City, as Derek—when he had racked his brains—knew. He was, from all he could learn, just as Anne-Marie described him: simple, passionate,
old-fashioned in his morality, strict in his standards. ‘She'd be well-advised not to play around while she's married to
him
,' said one of Derek's friends in the City. Then, with a sideways glance at Derek, he added: ‘But then, perhaps she won't want to.'

Before Derek shunted this particular stock-broker over to his list of ex-friends, he asked casually:

‘Jealous, would you say?'

‘As a tiger, I'd guess. That's just an opinion, of course. Until now he's never had anyone much to be jealous about.'

‘Quite,' said Derek.

After the separation Derek rebuilt his life, or rather took steps to ensure the smooth continuation of his old life in all essentials. In some respects very little needed to be done. The cleaning lady came in as before, and now and then left him a cold meal, or something that could easily be heated up in the oven. Mostly Derek ate out. The laundryman called, and Derek did a large shop once a fortnight at the local supermarket, just as he had in Anne-Marie's time. He found a very reliable Algerian couple, students, who would come in to cook for dinner-parties, or do the necessary at any other drinks-and-chat gatherings Derek might arrange. Life went on really very satisfactorily, except that sometimes in the middle of the night he would awake sweating and panting, and sometimes crying out with what he recognized was rage. Luckily there was no one in the house to hear him. He got into the habit, on these disturbing occasions, of going straight to the bathroom and taking a shower. In the mornings he was his usual cool self.

It was some time before he made any approach to Gavin Hobhouse. To move too quickly would certainly arouse in that conventional, simple soul either distaste or suspicion. It would have, he knew, to be a fortuitous and spontaneous coming together. What in fact happened was that one lunch-time, in a City pub, Derek saw in the glass behind the bar that Gavin was standing by his shoulder
in the one o'clock scrum. Derek eased himself round.

‘Hello, old chap,' he said. ‘Too silly that we shouldn't talk, don't you think? Let me get you a drink.'

If Gavin Hobhouse had been what used to be called the injured party, it is likely that he would have rejected this advance. A situation where both men nodded frostily to each other when their paths happened to cross would clearly have been much more to his conventional taste. As the guilty party, however, it would certainly be churlish, not to say un-Christian, to reject the hand of friendship, or at least of reconciliation. He tried to keep the stiffness out of his voice when he said:

‘Scotch and water, please.'

He backed his way out of the scrum, and got them a place by a little ledge on a far wall, and there he waited for Derek and for the inevitable conversation that must ensue without any obvious signs of distaste on his handsome face.

‘How
is
Anne-Marie, anyway,' said Derek, coming back with the drinks.

‘Oh, fine. She's fine,' said Gavin Hobhouse.

‘Good. Good. You know, though I didn't think so at the time, I realize now that what happened was obviously the best thing in the long run. Common enough thing to happen, these days, after all—what? Easy to make a mistake in one's first marriage. Only sensible thing is to cut your losses and get out.'

It wasn't at all how Gavin Hobhouse viewed marriage, but in the circumstances he could only murmur, ‘Right.' Derek, on this first meeting, wisely turned the talk to the current scandals in the banking world, and to the position of the Governor of the Bank of England in them. It was only as they were getting ready to go back to their respective offices that Derek, obliquely, returned to the personal matters that lay between them.

‘Ever see anything of Anne-Marie's mother?' he asked, buttoning up the jacket of his pinstripe suit.

‘Yes. Oh yes. We went up to stay at Penstone a couple of months ago.'

‘Wonderful woman,' said Derek with enthusiasm. ‘A real legend in her own lifetime.'

Anne-Marie's mother had had a raffish career, which had begun when she was a member of the Princess Margaret set back in the 'fifties, and which, apart from various flings, had brought her no fewer than four husbands. She was currently Lady Crawley, with a country seat and a national reputation.

‘We always got on like a house on fire,' said Derek, as they threaded their way through the mob of City drinkers. ‘You can see where Anne-Marie got her—charm.'

That evening, as he sat watching Channel 4 news and forked absent-mindedly into his mouth a shepherd's pie that his daily had left ready for him, his meditations added spice to the humdrum fare. Clearly he was not going to be able to talk to Gavin Hobhouse too often. Any suspicion that he was waylaying him, cultivating him in any way, would be counter-productive. Conversation between them had to be very occasional, and apparently as fortuitous as that first meeting had been. Derek decided that his first priority must be to find out what Gavin Hobhouse did in his lunch-hour. No doubt he had various haunts—pubs, cafés, restaurants—depending on the dictates of his digestion. He, Derek, went to a variety of places. He was quite willing to add to their number.

Thus he had waved across the room to Gavin in Alberto's in Curtin Street a couple of times before, three months after their first meeting, they actually were seated close enough to talk. By a combination of planning and good luck he turned into the little eating place just two minutes after Gavin, and found that the table next to his was the only one vacant. They greeted each other very much as two City gentlemen will, when they have a definite but limited acquaintanceship. They swapped odd remarks about the
state of the economy and feeling in the CBI while Derek read the menu and ordered. They discovered (not very surprisingly, since Derek always winkled out Gavin's opinion first) that they felt pretty much the same about these topics. When Derek saw a couple standing waiting for a table he suggested that he move over to Gavin's—which was unusual, since he was neither generous by nature nor courteous, except within convention.

‘Silly to take up two tables,' he said, moving his things over. ‘It gets pretty crowded in here.'

‘Yes, it does,' said Gavin, eating, perhaps, a shade faster.

‘Used to go to the Coq d'Or at lunch-times—specially if Anne-Marie was up for the day. She loves French cooking, doesn't she? But either it's gone downhill, or it's not somewhere to go on your own. I prefer this place now.'

‘Anne-Marie's more into English cooking at the moment,' said Gavin, apparently to keep the thing going.

‘Really?
Really
? Not that she wasn't always perfectly good at the traditional English while we were married . . . I suppose that would be Cousin Simon's influence, wouldn't it?'

‘Couldn't say. I believe she has had some recipes from him, yes. She's been talking about a book.'

‘Oh, jolly good. I always said she ought to go into the cook-book business. See much of Simon, does she?'

‘Oh yes, now and again. He comes over to us, or she goes over to him.'

‘They're practically brother and sister, aren't they? Naturally, since they were brought up together. I used to think that if mother-in-law hadn't dumped Anne-Marie on to her sister during one of her grand passions, those two would probably have got married. I
like
Simon, though, don't you?'

‘Yes, very much . . . Though I haven't seen much of him.'

‘Some don't, you know—like him, I mean. It's that golden boy air he has about him. That look of being the
Rupert Brooke
de nos jours.
That air of playing gentlemanly cricket on the green, taking crumpets at the vicarage, with croquet afterwards in the dusk, that feeling that there must be some elderly novelist somewhere sighing after him and writing him passionate little notes. I always have that feeling about Simon, don't you?'

Gavin left a moment's silence.

‘Well, no—I hadn't thought of him quite like that.'

‘Sorry. Was I being too ridiculously fanciful? Well, certainly one thing we never would have predicted for him would be that he would end up owning and running a restaurant, even one as special as the Old Watermill. Awfully useful for Anne-Marie, anyway, if he supplies her with recipes. I'm glad she's seeing a lot of him. She probably gives him some kind of stable base. I think that's what he needed during all this racketing around he used to do.'

‘Well, er—we'll hope so.'

‘Yes, it
is
difficult to think of Anne-Marie as a stable base, isn't it?' said Derek, with a light-hearted laugh. ‘But I think you may well find that that's how it works itself out, with those two.'

He looked guilelessly into Gavin Hobhouse's face with its faint, bewildered frown.

Derek was gratified that the next time he and Gavin talked, it was Gavin who made the approach. They were at one of these launching parties for something financial, an early-evening affair to which Gavin had brought Anne-Marie. Derek and his ex-wife kissed and exchanged inanities, and then went their separate ways. Normally Derek would have downed a couple of drinks and then made off, for these were not the sort of functions that anyone but an incurable soak would stay at for long. But almost from the beginning he felt that Gavin's eyes were on him, whatever their respective positions in the room, and whoever they were talking to. Before long he made an excuse to the incredibly boring City type with whom he had been making
incredibly boring conversation, and went over to the table of incredibly boring light refreshments. He was helping himself to a triangle of bread with cream cheese and chopped ham on top when a shadow across the light made him realize that Gavin was at his elbow.