as she had imagined it, a small, luxuriously furnished apartment with green blinds half drawn against the glare of the evening sun. The sitting-room was full of small pieces of Victorian furniture and there was a large sofa in purple velvet, fashionably buttoned. The walls were covered with framed pictures, but in the green gloom Eleanor couldn’t see what any of them were of.
‘Want loo?’ suggested Mr Belhatchet, leading her down a short passage, the walls of which also bore framed pictures that couldn’t be properly seen. ‘’Nother drink,’ he said, opening the lavatory door and ushering her into it. She said she’d better not have another drink, not really if she was to keep a clear head. She laughed while she spoke, realizing that her head was far from clear already. ‘Fix you one,’ said Mr Belhatchet, closing the door on her.
The lavatory had a telephone in a nook in the wall and the seat was covered in brown-and-white fur. There were framed picture postcards on the walls, seaside cards with suggestive messages. They didn’t seem the kind of thing that should be so expensively framed, Eleanor considered, and was surprised to see them there, especially in such numbers. One or two, she noticed, were in German.
‘Same ’gain,’ said Mr Belhatchet in the sitting-room. ‘Sit yourself, Ellie.’
She couldn’t see the designs he’d spoken of: she’d imagined they’d be spread all over the place, propped up on chairs, even on the walls, because that was the way he liked to surround himself with designs when he was making a selection in the office. She couldn’t even see a pile anywhere, but she put this down to the gloom that pervaded the sitting-room. It surprised her, though, that he’d addressed her as Ellie, which he’d never done before. Nobody, in fact, had ever called her Ellie before.
‘Know Nick’s?’ asked Mr Belhatchet. ‘Nick’s Diner? Okayie?’
He smiled at her, blowing out Greek cigarette smoke.
‘What about the designs?’ she asked, smiling at him also.
‘Eat first,’ he said, and he picked up a green telephone and dialled a number. ‘Belhatchet,’ he said. ‘Andy. Table two, nine-thirty. All righty?’
She said it was very kind of him to invite her to dinner, thinking that it couldn’t be more than half past seven and that for almost two hours apparently they were going to sit in Trilby Mews drinking gin and tonic. She hoped it was going to be all right.
Besides Mr Logan, many men – most of them much younger than Mr Logan – had taken Eleanor out. One, called Robert, had repeatedly driven her in his yellow sportscar to a country club on the London–Guildford road called The Spurs. At half past three one morning he’d suggested that they should walk in the wood behind the country club: Eleanor had declined. Earlier that evening he’d said he loved her, but he never even telephoned her again, not after she declined to walk in the woods with him.
Other men spoke of love to her also. They kissed her and pressed themselves against her. Occasionally she felt the warm tip of a tongue exploring one of her ears and she was naturally obliged to wriggle away from it, hastily putting on lipstick as a sign that the interlude was over. She was beautiful, they said, men she met at the night-school or men employed in Sweetawear or Lisney and Company or Dress-U. But when she resisted their ultimate advances they didn’t again say she was beautiful; more often than not they didn’t say anything further to her at all. She’d explained a few times that she didn’t want to anticipate marriage because she believed that marriage was special. But when it came to the point, although stating that they loved her, not one of them proposed marriage to her. Not that any of them had ever been right, which was something she felt most strongly after they’d made their ultimate advances.
‘Use grass?’ inquired Mr Belhatchet and for a moment, because of his economical manner of speech, she didn’t know what he was talking about: use grass for what? she wondered, and shook her head.
‘Mind?’ asked Mr Belhatchet, breaking open a fresh cigarette and poking what looked like another kind of tobacco among the leaves that were already there. He fiddled around for some time, adding and taking away, and then placed the untidy-looking cigarette between his lips. She asked again about the designs, but he didn’t seem to hear her.
Eleanor didn’t enjoy the next two hours, sipping at her drink while Mr Belhatchet smoked and drank and asked her a series of economically framed questions about herself. Later, while they waited for a taxi, he said he felt marvellous. He put his arm round her shoulders and told her that the first day he saw her he’d thought she was fabulous.
‘Fabulous,’ he said in Nick’s Diner, referring to a bowl of
‘Well, of course, Mr Belhatchet.’
‘Andy. What like ’bout me?’
‘Well –’
‘Ha, ha, ha,’ said Mr Belhatchet, hitting the table with the palm of his left hand. He was smiling so much now that the smile seemed to Eleanor to be unnatural. Nevertheless, she tried to keep smiling herself. None of the girls at Sweetawear had ever told her that there was anything the matter with Mr Belhatchet. She’d never thought herself that there might be something the matter with him: apart from his mode of speech he’d always seemed totally normal. His mother had set him up in Sweetawear, people said, occasionally adding that he’d certainly made a go of it.
‘Fabulous,’ said Mr Belhatchet when a waiter served them with fillet steak encased in pastry.
They drank a red wine that she liked the taste of. She said, making conversation, that it was a lovely restaurant, and when he didn’t reply she said it was the best restaurant she’d ever been in.
‘Fabulous,’ said Mr Belhatchet.
At eleven o’clock she suggested that perhaps they should return to Trilby Mews to examine the designs. She knew, even while she spoke, that she shouldn’t be going anywhere that night with Mr Belhatchet. She knew that if he was anyone else she’d have smiled and said she must go home now because she had to get up in the morning. But Mr Belhatchet, being her office boss, was different. It was all going to be much harder with Mr Belhatchet.
‘Age you now, Ellie?’ he asked in the taxi, and she told him she’d become twenty-seven the previous Tuesday, while he’d been in Rome.
