ironer as a representative of the whole male species. “Maybe I’d better bring some things to your house,” she said.
“Actually I’d prefer that. It means I can use my own iron; I’m used to it. It makes me uncomfortable to iron with other people’s irons. But please hurry, I really do need it. Desperately.”
“Yes, as soon as I can after work,” she said, trying both to reassure him and to sound, for the benefit of the office, as though she was making a dentist appointment. “About seven.” She realized as soon as she had hung up that this would mean postponing dinner with Peter yet again; but then she could see him any night. The other thing was an emergency.
By the time she had got matters straightened out with Peter she had felt as though she had been trying to unsnarl herself from all the telephone lines in the city. They were prehensile, they were like snakes, they had a way of coiling back on you and getting you all wrapped up.
A nurse was coming towards her, pushing a rubber-wheeled wagon loaded with trays of food. Although her mind was occupied with other things, Marian’s eyes registered the white shape and found it out of place. She stopped and looked around. Wherever else she was going it was not towards the main exit. She had been so involved in the threads of her own plans and reflections that she must have got off the elevator on the wrong floor. She was in a corridor exactly similar to the one she had just come from, except that all the room-doors were closed. She looked for a number: 273. Well, that was simple: she had got off a floor too soon.
She turned and walked back, trying to remember where the elevator was supposed to be; she seemed to recall having gone around several corners. The nurse had disappeared. Coming towards her now from the far end of the hallway was a figure, a man wearing a green smock, with a white mask over the lower part of his face. She was aware for the first time of the hospital smell, antiseptic, severe.
It must be one of the doctors. She could see now that he had a thin black thing, a stethoscope, around his neck. As he came nearer she looked at him more closely. In spite of the mask there was something familiar about him; it bothered her that she could not tell what it was. But he passed her, staring straight ahead, his eyes expressionless, and opened one of the doors to the right and went in. When he turned she could see that he had a bald spot on the back of his head.
“Well, nobody I know is going bald, at any rate,” she said to herself. She was relieved.
16
She remembered the way to his apartment perfectly, although she couldn’t recall either the number or the street name. She hadn’t been in that district for a long time, in fact ever since the day of the beer interviews. She took the right directions and turnings almost automatically, as though she was trailing somebody by an instinct that was connected not with sight or smell but with a vaguer sense that had to do with locations. But it wasn’t a complicated route: just across the baseball park, up the asphalt ramp and along a couple of blocks; though the way seemed longer now that she was walking in a darkness illuminated only by the dim street lamps rather than the former searing light of the sun. She walked quickly: already her legs were cold. The grass on the baseball park had been grey with frost.
The few times she had thought about the apartment, in idle moments at the office when she had had nothing but a blank sheet of paper in front of her or at other times when she was bending to pick some piece of clutter off the floor, she had never given it any specific place in the city. She had an image in her mind of the inside, the appearance of the rooms, but not of the building itself. Now it was disconcerting to have the street produce it, square and ordinary and anonymous, more or less exactly where it had been before.
She pushed the buzzer of Number Six and slipped through the inside glass door as soon as the mechanism started its chainsaw noise. Duncan opened the door partway. He stared at her suspiciously; in the semi-darkness his eyes gleamed behind his hair. He had a cigarette stub in his mouth, burning dangerously close to his lips.
“Got the stuff?” he asked.
Mutely she held towards him the small cloth bundle she had been carrying under her arm, and he stepped aside to let her come in.
“It’s not very much,” he said, undoing the clothes. There were only two white cotton blouses, recently washed, a pillowcase, and a few guest towels embroidered with flowers, donated by a great-aunt, that were wrinkled from lying underneath everything else on the linen shelf.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “it was really all I had.”
“Well, it’s better than nothing,” he said grudgingly. He turned and walked towards his bedroom.
Marian wasn’t certain whether she was supposed to follow him or whether he expected her to go away now that she had made the delivery. “Can I watch?” she asked, hoping he wouldn’t consider it an invasion of privacy. She didn’t feel like going back to her own apartment right away. There would be nothing to do and she had, after all, sacrificed an evening with Peter.
“Sure, if you want to; though there isn’t much to see.”
She made her way towards the hall. The living room had not been altered since her former visit, except that there were if possible more stray papers lying about. The three chairs were still in the same positions; a slab of board was leaning against an arm of the red plush one. Only one of the lamps, the one by the blue chair, was turned on. Marian inferred that both of the roommates were out.
Duncan’s room too was much the same as she remembered it. The ironing board was nearer the centre of the room and the chessmen had been set up in their two opposing rows; the black-and-white chequered board was resting now on top of a stack of books. On the bed were several freshly ironed white shirts on coathangers. Duncan hung them up in the closet before going over to plug in the iron. Marian took off her coat and sat down on the bed.
He threw his cigarette into one of the crowded ashtrays on the floor, waited for the iron to heat, testing it at intervals on the board, and then began to iron one of the blouses, with slow concentration and systematic attention to collar corners. Marian watched him silently; he obviously didn’t want to be interrupted. She found it strange to see someone else ironing her clothes.
Ainsley had given her a peculiar look when she had come out of her bedroom with her coat on and the bundle under her arm. “Where are you going with those?” she had asked. It was too small a lot for the laundromat.
“Oh, just out.”
“What’ll I say if Peter calls?”
“He won’t call. But just say I’m out.” She had plunged down the stairs then, not wishing to explain anything at all about Duncan or even to reveal his existence. She felt it might upset the balance of power. But Ainsley had no time at the moment for anything more than a tepid curiosity: she was too elated by the probable success of her own campaign, and also by what she had called “a stroke of luck.”
Marian had asked, when she had reached the apartment and had found Ainsley in the living room with a paperback on baby and child care, “Well, how did you get the poor thing out of here this morning?”
Ainsley laughed. “Great stroke of luck,” she said. “I was sure the old fossil down there would be lying in wait for us at the bottom of the stairs. I really didn’t know what I’d do. I was trying to think of some bluff, like saying he was the telephone man…”
“She tried to pin me down about it last night,” Marian interjected. “She knew perfectly well he was up there.”
“Well for some reason she actually went
“Ainsley, you’re immoral.”
“Why? He seemed to enjoy it. Though he was terribly apologetic and anxious this morning when we were out having breakfast, and then sort of soothing, as though he was trying to console me or something. Really it was embarrassing. And then, you know, as he got wider and wider awake and soberer and soberer, he couldn’t wait to
