They sat silent. He said: ‘Sometimes I think this neighbourhood isn’t quite right.’
‘The neighbourhood? What’s wrong with it?’
‘Oh, nothing. Very good, in its way. Respectable. But you don’t seem to meet the people you should. This trip you are going to Zermatt. Your party. Young clerks, electricians and the like. One hopes for something better.’
She wondered what he would have said if he had seen her last night.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘You flushed suddenly.’
‘I expect it’s this temperature. But seriously, Dad, you must persuade Dr Spoor to let me go! I shall be O.K. After all, what’s a sore throat and a temperature? By the time I get to Zermatt I’ll be absolutely fine. It’ll be an absolute disaster if I don’t catch this flight!’
‘It will be a disaster if you catch an extra chill.’ He got up and rubbed his beard and looked at her. ‘We’ll see. Skiing, with all the exertion and getting hot and cold. But we’ll see. You may be much better tomorrow.’
To her fury she wasn’t better on Friday. Her temperature was 103 and Dr Spoor wouldn’t consider the idea of her getting out of bed. There were panic discussions with Hazel and last minute rearrangements. Saturday when it was too late the temperature came down with a bang and she crawled about the house waiting impatiently for Mr Friedel’s return. When he came he told her he had been able to get her an ordinary B.E.A. tourist night flight for the Monday. This cost more than the charter flight of the Friday, but he whispered that he would pay the difference if she promised not to tell Rachel.
Even then her troubles weren’t over, for the plane ran into fog and they were diverted to Zurich and reached Geneva four hours late, and she was afraid she might miss Tuesday’s skiing too. In the plane she sat next to a fat elderly gentleman who got in a panic because apparently he was afraid the plane was going to crash. In his agitation he talked away at her, and in her agitation she talked back at him. Not that their anxieties were the same, but when you have only one real annual holiday and three days of it have already been lost, utterly lost; and when, except for a week in the summer which is too short a time to make much use of, you don’t get another holiday for twelve months, then the fear of another day lost becomes almost as important as fear of a crash.
In the end she reached Zermatt in time for some skiing on the Tuesday, and Hazel and Chris greeted her as if there had never been a cross word between any of them, and anyway it had been snowing all Sunday and part of Monday, and the weather set fair from the Wednesday morning and she had a superb ten days and went on some of the upper slopes and learned to do an up-hill christie properly for the first time. The ski-prof took a fancy to her and gave her extra time on the slopes free of charge, and they ate and drank and she danced in the evenings, and it was all so good that she forgot England and only wrote three postcards the whole time she was there. It wasn’t really until the last full day that she began to think of the dreary routine of her ordinary life and her ordinary work again.
Then for a fraction of time a nasty little fear stirred, like a worm wriggling out of an apple. It was a fear that Little God might be waiting for her when she got home.
And of course he was not, and of course she settled back into her ordinary life as well as anyone can after a wonderful holiday.
But the holiday was too unsettling. Everything about her job, which was no better and no worse than many others, seemed dull and boring. The long hours of standing, the forced politeness to difficult elderly women buying expensive perfumes, mixing again with all the other girls who all seemed just the same as herself, young, vaguely happy, vaguely unhappy, alternately bored and excited, wanting a man but not any man, talking of clothes, make-up, money, clothes, boy friends, clothes; being one in a staff of fifteen hundred; the struggle every morning by bus and train and bus, the crowds, the hour’s journey; a cheap lunch in the canteen every day on the seventh floor; the struggle every night by bus and train and bus; home with its relative comfort and ease, its relative discomfort and shabbiness, narrowing, stifling in effect, like living in a cage. Money. Lack of money. Weekly pay packet with deductions. Money, clothes, daily travel. Money.
As soon as I’m twenty-one, she thought, I’ll have a showdown with Dad; this endless waste of time travelling. Even change my job: this one gives me backache with standing, I’m too tall. But what else? Right height for modelling but they want scarecrows. Can’t type so not secretarial work. Three ‘O’ levels, but in things like Art and Geography. As soon as I’m twenty-one I’ll move. But that’s thirteen months away.
One day soon after she got back the fat elderly man she had met on the plane came in to Evans’s and bought some perfume. He was wearing a check suit that emphasized his fatness, and she remembered the one he had on on the aeroplane was also a check but not quite so awful as this. He made a point of her serving him and was friendly.
A young man called Gerald Vaughan started calling her up, and she went out with him a few times. She had met him at a social in Hammersmith, which D. H. Evans sometimes gave in conjunction with Harrods. He worked at Harrods, but in spite of an impeccable appearance and the whitest cuffs in Knightsbridge he nourished a left-wing hatred of all things English and American, and after a while she found this tiring and unfruitful as the only topic of conversation. So she began to choke him off.
Two weeks passed, and a letter came for her addressed care of the store. Although the address was typewritten the letter inside was in ink. Under an address of 26 Cadogan Mews the letter said:
‘Dear Miss Friedel, I am taking a few friends to a performance of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet next Thursday at the Wigmore Hall. Knowing your interest in this instrument, I wonder whether you would care to join my party? The time is 7.45 for 8 o’clock at the Hall, and there would be supper afterwards.
Yours sincerely,
Wilfred Angell.’
So there you were: you never knew. She was amused, pleased in a way, a little flattered. However stuffy it might seem to some people, it was quite a compliment to be asked to join a party of Mr Angell’s obvious quality. Hazel, among others, had always called her a snob, but was it being a snob to like the best, to want the best, to enjoy mixing with well-educated people, people who had a thought beyond the next pay day or the next boy friend? Pearl had always liked taste and style and manners and breeding. Her father had encouraged her in her liking and had always coveted them for her.
Anyway, she had never heard the Mozart Quintet, and the thought of five clarinets playing together was dreamy. She wrote back accepting.
The week passed and the days were lengthening and she saw nothing of Gerald Vaughan; but one night she dreamed of Little God when he was some sort of golden idol sitting cross-legged in a temple and she had to burn incense to him.
She told her father of the invitation and rang her friend Pat Chailey, who had a flat, and Pat said yes delighted if you don’t mind sleeping on a Li-lo.
Thursday was late night in the store anyway, and she was able to change in the cloakroom in the basement, and since the shop almost backs on to Wigmore Street she walked there and got to the hall exactly on time.
He was there already and she had guessed right, no black tie. But thank heaven he wasn’t wearing the terrible check suit, and in blue he didn’t look so fat. He greeted her politely but distantly like someone welcoming you on behalf of someone else; his hand was hot; he said would she like to leave her coat and she said no thank you, and then he led the way in. Rather impressive the way he walked, as if he were used to being in charge of things. It was only as they were going down the aisle that he said: ‘Oh, by the way, Mr and Mrs Simon Portugal were prevented from coming at the last moment, so I’m afraid we are on our own.’
The concert was a fabulous success. After she had got over the disappointment of finding only one clarinet after all, she really got dug in to the music and completely forgot her host.
But in the second part of the concert, which was chiefly a piece by a man called Howells, the enchantment thinned and her brain came to and did a little homework.
She thought, supper after? Oh come, Pearl, don’t be too silly. It’s Little God you’ve got on the brain. This stout, elderly, well-to-do solicitor. Of course it would explain the sort of impression she’d made on him in the plane, but then … How old is he? Perhaps it’s being so fat that makes him look older. Not ancient actually, but old. Early fifties? Pearl hadn’t much idea about men, once they were out of their twenties. Good skin, healthy looking, plenty of brownish hair worn rather like Jo Grimond with only tips of grey at the ears. Quite personable in an elderly way. Rather impressive in the way her father was. But so fat. He nearly overflowed onto her chair. Like Godfrey in the Chelsea restaurant. But so unlike Godfrey. Thank heavens. This was a gentleman.
After it was over they walked to a restaurant farther down Wigmore Street. ‘Not the most fashionable,’ he said, ‘ but excellent food.’ She was disappointed. It was not as good a restaurant as the one Godfrey Vosper had taken her to. Mr Angell ate twice as much as she did in the same time, and although his table manners were good they were not genteel in the way she had been taught.
He was very nice to her, called her Miss Friedel all the time, treated her with respect; it was the sort of treatment she liked but seldom received. Yet she felt he was not personally as forthcoming as on the plane. She felt he was sounding her out, that he was wary all the time of being too friendly. Near the end of the meal he asked her if she played the clarinet much.
‘Oh, I don’t,’ she said. ‘I love it, but I haven’t got one. I’ve tried one a few times, that’s all. I love it. By the way, how did you know I was interested?’
‘You mentioned it on the aeroplane.’
‘Did I?’ She didn’t remember. ‘I did buy a recorder once but there wasn’t really time to practise and we live in a small house. I’ve a step-sister of five who goes to bed early.’
He puffed out his fat cheeks and spaced his legs. ‘A pity. I watched you at the concert. So absorbed.’
‘Oh, I’d love to play the clarinet. More almost than anything. But it’s too late now anyhow … Are you a musician, Mr Angell?’
‘Far from it.’ He helped himself hurriedly to the last two gris sticks before the waiter took them away. ‘I listen to music, as you see. The other arts are really my hobby. I collect furniture – antique furniture – and paintings.’ He crunched his gris stick with noisy concentration. ‘ You must see them sometime. On those I can speak with authority.’
They talked on. The bill came and he paid it and gave a five shilling tip. But he seemed well known in the place and she supposed it was all right. Somehow he got her talking about herself. It was not often a man, a cultured and quite charming man, asked her the sort of questions he asked her and listened with such flattering interest. He was clever in putting a question that needed a denial and then, as it were, an explanation of the denial. Perhaps it was his practice at the bar. Also the Algerian wine she had drunk had gone a little to her head.
She still did not quite believe that this distinguished old gentleman … ‘You must come and see my pictures sometime.’ She knew some men hadn’t got past it in their forties and fifties, but somehow he didn’t look the type. It crossed her mind that he might be thinking of her as a secretary.
At last he looked at his watch and said, dear me, I must be going, it’s been very pleasant, can I drop you somewhere? And she said, well, if it’s not out of your way, and he said, not at all, I’ve a car coming at eleven-thirty.
So she was driven to her friend’s Li-lo in style, though the car was stuffy and formal compared to the one Little God had borrowed or stolen. When they stopped he said: ‘ This has been an agreeable evening for me. Would you care to have dinner with me at my house next Friday at eight?’
She thought, so it is that, oh crikey, you never can tell, what do I say now? But before she could utter he added, ‘ There’ll be four others, so I don’t think they can all fail to turn up.’
She looked at him and there was a gleam in his eye for the first time. She laughed and said: ‘ Thank you, Mr Angell. I’d love to. And thank you for a fabulous evening.’
The next night she went to the pictures with Pat Chailey so was late back, and as there was no bus outside the station she walked. It was only twenty minutes and a beautiful moonlit night. When she got in her father had gone to bed but Rachel said: ‘There was a young man called for you about seven. I told him you wasn’t in.’
Pearl was cutting herself a sandwich and she wondered why Rachel could never be bothered to talk properly and how her father could let her go on without correcting her. ‘ What was his name?’
‘He didn’t give one and he wouldn’t say what he wanted.’
Pearl could make a pretty good guess. Gerald Vaughan was trying to persuade her to join him in some sit-down demonstration in front of the American Embassy. She sighed. She never seemed to get suitable young men who behaved normally. Either they were political agitators or they were sex maniacs or they went off and got tight in the middle of a dance—
‘What did he look like?’ she asked sharply.
‘Small. Thin. Flashily dressed but they all are now, in my day young men never flaunted themselves, not like peacocks. A scar over one eyebrow. A pity you was back so late, why don’t you go to the pictures in Croydon, it’s cheaper.’
The bread saw slipped on the loaf and just missed Pearl’s thumb. She sucked the end of her thumb just as if it had been cut.
‘What did he want?’
‘I told you, he came to the door and just asked and I said you was out. Big car. Big green car with a big back window. Too showy for me.’
‘Did he say anything else?’
‘Yes, he says he will come back later tonight. But I shouldn’t suppose he will come you are so late now.’
Pearl looked at her watch. It was ridiculous. Her fingers were fumbling as if they did not belong to her. She concentrated. It was 11.15.
She thought of her walk from the station in the moonlit darkness. Of course it was street lit all the way, but being oldish property it was not lit too well. There had been no one in Sevenoaks Avenue when she came into it except the usual parked cars, no green monster with its God at the wheel.
She took a bite at the sandwich but the relish had gone. ‘I’m tired, I think I’ll take these to bed. If the – if this man comes again, could you just tell him I’m in bed and asleep?’
Rachel said: ‘The washing machine is good but it does not iron, the hours I stand over this board. So you know him?’
‘Oh, yes, I went out with him a couple of times. But he’s not my type.’
‘Now I think perhaps not, he is not your type. So I send him away, eh?’
‘Yes, please.’
Rachel said: ‘ Just because you’re not my daughter don’t mean I don’t feel a responsibility. Your father’d think I was to blame if you got into any trouble.’
‘Well, you can stop worrying. I’m not in any trouble.’
‘Your father is a great one for respectability. You know that. Maybe because he was not born in England is what makes him that way. He has lived in this house twenty-two years and everyone in the avenue respects him. It’s Good morning, Mr Friedel. Good night, Mr Friedel. And both the boys going to the grammar school. So have a care for his sake as well as for your own.’
Pearl said: ‘When have I given him the least worry? When?’
‘No. No.’ Rachel nodded, and a tinted curl fell over her forehead. ‘You’ve always been a right thinking girl. But lately you’ve been more secret, not saying where you’re going or where you’ve been. Your father has remarked this. And you’re pretty looking, even though you’re big – that puts easy trouble in a girl’s way. Pass me those socks.’
Pearl’s bedroom was over the front, and before she put on the light she drew the curtains across and looked through a slit. The
avenue was silent and empty. Then she saw a figure running. Her heart began to thump. But the figure went past, and she stared up and down again, trying to see if anyone were skulking beside one of the parked cars.
But there was nothing, and he did not come. And he didn’t show up at all during the week-end.
She had to be at the shop by a quarter to nine, which meant leaving home at seven-thirty every morning to catch the bus for the 7.55 train. Everything looked different by Monday.
Yet she was half prepared when he took the seat next to her in the train.
The trouble is that being prepared doesn’t really take away the shock, because you’re not really prepared for the event, you’re only waiting for it to happen.
It was one of those open-plan carriages where you sit two aside facing two other people, with a middle corridor. He must have been very close behind her because there was the usual rush when the train came in, and in no time people were standing. So she couldn’t very well get up and move away, and they sat there not speaking until the train lumbered out. Two men opposite, business types, unfolded their papers in a cramped space. She opened her bag and took out a paperback novel and began to read.
‘You wasn’t in last night,’ he said.
Black sweater and black gaberdine trousers, plum-coloured shirt, yellow tie. It was a month since she had seen him, and he was at once different from what she remembered and exactly the same. Less terrifying, more ordinary, more utterly, utterly commonplace; a little chauffeur, a professional boxer on the lower rungs, bad voice, uneducated, cheap. How she could ever even have looked at him. Or been afraid of him. But the same handsome profile, the same dark darting eyes, clear olive skin, rich mane of hair, vivid vitality, bursting egoistic vitality, overflowing vitality, rippling muscles, hard and searching hands, rapier like, quick, living, obscene. She pressed the paperback to open it wider at the page.
He said: ‘Have a snorting holiday? Good skiing? I been busy. That’s why I’ve not been round before.’