My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (33 page)

His name was Norman Britt. It said so on a small plastic name-plate in front of his position in the travel agency where he worked, Travel-Wide as it was called.
Marie
a badge on her light-blue shop-coat announced. His wife, who worked at home, assembling jewellery for a firm that paid her on a production basis, was called Hilda.

Green’s the Chemist’s and Travel-Wide were in Vincent Street, a street that was equidistant from Paddington Station and Edgware Road. The flat where Hilda worked all day was in Putney. Marie lived in Reading with her mother and her mother’s friend Mrs Druk, both of them widows. She caught the 8.05 every morning to Paddington and usually the 6.30 back.

He was forty in 1963, as Hilda was; Marie was twenty-eight. He was tall and thin, with a David Niven moustache. Hilda was thin also, her dark hair beginning to grey, her sharply featured face pale. Marie was well-covered, carefully made up, her hair dyed blonde. She smiled a lot, a slack, half-crooked smile that made her eyes screw up and twinkle; she exuded laziness and generosity. She and her friend Mavis went dancing a lot in Reading and had a sizeable collection of men friends. ‘Fellas’ they called them.

Buying things from her now and again in Green’s the Chemist’s Norman had come to the conclusion that she was of a tartish disposition, and imagined that if ever he sat with her over a drink in the nearby Drummer Boy the occasion could easily lead to a hug on the street afterwards. He imagined her coral-coloured lips, like two tiny sausages, only softer, pressed upon his moustache and his abbreviated mouth. He imagined the warmth of her hand in his. For all that, she was a little outside reality: she was there to desire, to glow erotically in the heady atmosphere of the Drummer Boy, to light cigarettes for in a fantasy.

‘Isn’t it cold?’ he said as she handed him the emery boards and the toothpaste.

‘Shocking,’ she agreed, and hesitated, clearly wanting to say something else. ‘You’re in that Travel-Wide,’ she added in the end. ‘Me and my friend want to go to Spain this year.’

‘It’s very popular. The Costa Brava?’

‘That’s right.’ She handed him threepence change. ‘In May.’

‘Not too hot on the Costa in May. If you need any help—’

‘Just the bookings.’

‘I’d be happy to make them for you. Look in any time. Britt the name is. I’m on the counter.’

‘If I may, Mr Britt. I could slip out maybe at four, or roundabout.’

‘Today, you mean?’

‘We want to fix it up.’

‘Naturally. I’ll keep an eye out for you.’

It was hard not to call her madam or miss, the way he’d normally do. He had heard himself saying that he’d be happy to make the bookings for her, knowing that that was business jargon, knowing that the unfussy voice he’d used was a business one also. Her friend was a man, he supposed, some snazzy tough in a car. ‘See you later then,’ he said, but already she was serving another customer, advising about lipstick refills.

She didn’t appear in Travel-Wide at four o’clock; she hadn’t come when the doors closed at five-thirty. He was aware of a sense of disappointment, combined with one of anticipation: for if she’d come at four, he reflected as he left the travel agency, their bit of business would be in the past rather than the future. She’d look in some other time and he’d just have to trust to luck that if he happened to be busy with another customer she’d be able to wait. There’d be a further occasion, when she called to collect the tickets themselves.

‘Ever so sorry,’ she said on the street, her voice coming from behind him. ‘Couldn’t get away, Mr Britt.’

He turned and smiled at her, feeling the movement of his moustache as he parted his lips. He knew only too well, he said. ‘Some other time then?’

‘Maybe tomorrow. Maybe lunchtime.’

‘I’m off myself from twelve to one. Look, you wouldn’t fancy a drink? I could advise you just as easily over a drink.’

‘Oh, you wouldn’t have the time. No, I mustn’t take advantage—’

‘You’re not at all. If you’ve got ten minutes?’

‘Well, it’s awfully good of you, Mr Britt. But I really feel I’m taking advantage, I really do.’

‘A New Year’s drink.’

He pushed open the doors of the saloon bar of the Drummer Boy, a place he didn’t often enter except for office drinks at Christmas or when someone leaving the agency was being given a send-off. Ron Stocks and Mr Blackstaffe were usually there in the evenings: he hoped they’d be there now to see him in the company of the girl from Green’s the Chemist’s. ‘What would you like?’ he asked her.

‘Gin and peppermint’s my poison, only honestly I should pay. No, let me ask you—’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it. We can sit over there, look.’

The Drummer Boy, so early in the evening, wasn’t full. By six o’clock the advertising executives from the firm of Dalton, Dure and Higgins, just round the corner, would have arrived, and the architects from Frine and Knight. Now there was only Mrs Gregan, old and alcoholic, known to everyone, and a man called Bert, with his poodle, Jimmy. It was disappointing that Ron Stocks and Mr Blackstaffe weren’t there.

‘You were here lunchtime Christmas Eve,’ she said.

‘Yes, I was.’ He paused, placing her gin and peppermint on a cardboard mat that advertised Guinness. ‘I saw you too.’

He drank some of his Double Diamond and carefully wiped the traces of foam from his moustache. He realized now that it would, of course, be quite impossible to give her a hug on the street outside. That had been just imagination, wishful thinking as his mother would have said. And yet he knew that when he arrived home twenty-five or so minutes late he would not tell Hilda that he’d been advising an assistant from Green’s the Chemist’s about a holiday on the Costa Brava. He wouldn’t even say he’d been in the Drummer Boy. He’d say Blackstaffe had kept everyone late, going through the new package that Eurotours were offering in Germany and Luxembourg this summer. Hilda wouldn’t in a million years suspect that he’d been sitting in a public house with a younger woman who was quite an eyeful. As a kind of joke, she quite regularly suggested that his sexual drive left something to be desired.

‘We were thinking about the last two weeks in May,’ Marie said. ‘It’s when Mavis can get off too.’

‘Mavis?’

‘My friend, Mr Britt.’

Hilda was watching
Z-Cars
in the sitting-room, drinking V.P. wine. His stuff was in the oven, she told him. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

Sometimes she was out when he returned in the evenings. She went round to friends, a Mr and Mrs Fowler, with whom she drank V.P. and played bridge. On other occasions she went to the Club, which was a place with a licence, for card-players and billiard-players. She quite liked her social life, but always said beforehand when she’d be out and always made arrangements about leaving food in the oven. Often in the daytime she’d go and make jewellery with Violet Parkes, who also went in for this occupation; and often Violet Parkes spent the day with Hilda. The jewellery-making consisted for the most part of threading plastic beads on to a string or arranging plastic pieces in the settings provided. Hilda was quick at it and earned more than she would have if she went out every day, saving the fares for a start. She was better at it than Violet Parkes.

‘All right then?’ she said when he carried his tray of food into the sitting-room and sat down in front of the television set. ‘Want some V.P., eh?’

Her eyes continued to watch the figures on the screen as she spoke. He knew she’d prefer to be in the Fowlers’ house or at the Club, although now that they’d acquired a TV set the evenings passed easier when they were alone together.

‘No, thanks,’ he said in reply to her offer of wine and he began to eat something that appeared to be a rissole. There were two of them, round and brown in a tin-foil container that also contained gravy. He hoped she wasn’t going to be demanding in their bedroom. He eyed her, for sometimes he could tell.

‘Hi,’ she said, noticing the glance. ‘Feeling fruity, dear?’ She laughed and winked, her suggestive voice seeming odd as it issued from her thin, rather dried-up face. She was always saying things like that, for no reason that Norman could see, always talking about feeling fruity or saying she could see he was keen when he wasn’t in the least. Norman considered that she was unduly demanding and often wondered what it would be like to be married to someone who was not. Now and again, fatigued after the intensity of her love-making, he lay staring at the darkness, wondering if her bedroom appetites were related in some way to the fact that she was unable to bear children, if her abandon reflected a maternal frustration. Earlier in their married life she’d gone out every day to an office where she’d been a filing clerk; in the evenings they’d often gone to the cinema.

He lay that night, after she’d gone to sleep, listening to her heavy breathing, thinking of the girl in Green’s the Chemist’s. He went through the whole day in his mind, seeing himself leaving the flat in Putney, hearing Hilda calling out about the emery boards and the toothpaste, seeing himself reading the
Daily Telegraph
in the Tube. Slowly he went through the morning, deliciously anticipating the moment when she handed him his change. With her smile mistily hovering, he recalled the questions and demands of a number of the morning’s customers. ‘Fix us up Newcastle and back?’ a couple inquired. ‘Midweek’s cheaper, is it?’ A man with a squashed-up face wanted a week in Holland for himself and his sister and his sister’s husband. A woman asked about Greece, another about cruises on the Nile, a third about the Scilly Isles. Then he placed the Closed sign in front of his position at the counter and went out to have lunch in Bette’s Sandwiches off the Edgware Road. ‘Packet of emery boards,’ he said again in Green’s the Chemist’s, ‘and a small Colgate’s.’ After that there was the conversation they’d had, and then the afternoon with her smile still mistily hovering, as in fact it had, and then her presence beside him in the Drummer Boy. Endlessly she lifted the glass of gin and peppermint to her lips, endlessly she smiled. When he slept he dreamed of her. They were walking in Hyde Park and her shoe fell off. ‘I could tell you were a deep one,’ she said, and the next thing was Hilda was having one of her early-morning appetites.

‘I don’t know what it is about that chap,’ Marie confided to Mavis. ‘Something, though.’

‘Married, is he?’

‘Oh, he would be, chap like that.’

‘Now, you be careful, girl.’

‘He has Sinatra’s eyes. That blue, you know.’

‘Now, Marie—’

‘I like an older fella. He’s got a nice moustache.’

‘So’s that fella in the International.’

‘Wet behind the ears. And my God, his dandruff!’

They left the train together and parted on the platform, Marie making for the Underground, Mavis hurrying for a bus. It was quite convenient, really, living in Reading and travelling to Paddington every day. It was only half an hour and chatting on the journey passed the time. They didn’t travel back together in the evenings because Mavis nearly always did an hour’s overtime. She was a computer programmer.

‘I talked to Mavis. It’s OK about the insurance,’ Marie said in Travel-Wide at half past eleven that morning, having slipped out when the shop seemed slack. There’d been some details about insurance which he’d raised the evening before. He always advised insurance, but he’d quite understood when she’d made the point that she’d better discuss the matter with her friend before committing herself to the extra expenditure.

‘So I’ll go ahead and book you,’ he said. ‘There’ll just be the deposit.’

Mavis wrote the cheque. She pushed the pink slip across the counter to him. ‘Payable to Travel-Wide.’

‘That’s quite correct.’ He glanced at it and wrote her a receipt. He said:

‘I looked out another brochure or two. I’d quite like to go through them with you. So you can explain what’s what to your friend.’

‘Oh, that’s very nice, Mr Britt. But I got to get back. I mean, I shouldn’t be out in the middle of the morning.’

‘Any chance of lunchtime?’

His suavity astounded him. He thought of Hilda, deftly working at her jewellery, stringing orange and yellow beads, listening to the Jimmy Young programme.

‘Lunchtime, Mr Britt?’