normally in the room. At half past six Eleanor, still feeling happy but by now more in control of her limbs, slowly pushed herself from the sofa and stood up. The floor swayed less beneath her feet; the colours in the room, though vivid still, were less so than they had been. Mr Belhatchet was asleep.
Eleanor went to the lavatory and when she returned to the sitting-room she did not lie down on the sofa again. She stood instead in the centre of the room, gazing around it, at Mr Belhatchet with bare feet and a bare chest, asleep in his embroidered chair, at the designs of trouser-suits and the pictures of limbs and bones. ‘Mother,’ murmured Mr Belhatchet in his sleep, in a voice that was a whisper.
She left the flat, moving slowly and gently closing the door behind her. She descended the stairs and stepped out into Trilby Mews, into fresh early-morning air.
Police Constable Edwin Lloyd found Eleanor an hour later. She was lying on the pavement outside a betting-shop in Garrad Street, W.1. He saw the still body from a distance and hurried towards it, believing he had a death on his hands. ‘I fell down,’ Eleanor explained as he helped her to rise again. ‘I’m tired.’
‘Drugs,’ said Police Constable Lloyd in Garrad Street police station, and another officer, a desk sergeant, sighed. ‘Cup of tea, miss?’ Constable Lloyd offered. ‘Nice hot tea?’
A middle-aged policewoman searched Eleanor’s clothing in case there were further drugs on her person.
‘Pretty thing like you,’ the woman said. ‘Shame, dear.’
They brought her tea and Eleanor drank it, spilling some over her pale blue suit because her hands were shaking. Constable Lloyd, returning to his beat, paused by the door.
‘Will she be OK?’ he asked, and his two colleagues said that they considered she would be.
In the police station the colours were harsh and ugly, not at all like the colours there’d been in Mr Belhatchet’s flat. And the faces of the desk sergeant and the policewoman were unpleasant also: the pores of their skin were large, like the cells of a honeycomb. There was something the matter with their mouths and their hands, and the uniforms they wore, and the place they occupied. The wooden seat was uncomfortable, the pages of a book in front of the desk sergeant were torn and grubby, the air stank of stale cigarette smoke. The man and the woman were regarding her as skeletons might, their teeth bared at her, their fingers predatory, like animals’ claws. She hated their eyes. She couldn’t drink the tea they’d given her because it caused nausea in her stomach.
The noise in the room, a distant fuzziness, was her voice. It spoke of what her mind was full of: Mrs Belhatchet and her son in the garden he had described. Servants collected glasses that were broken and jagged; their hands had blood on them. Couples were found dead beneath trees. The garden was all as ugly as the room she was in now, as dirty and as unpleasant.
And then it was different. In the garden they came at her, Mr Logan of the night-school, Robert in his yellow sportscar, and all the others. The touch of their hands was hard, like metal; she moaned in distress at their nakedness. They laughed because of that, pressing her apart, grunting with the passion of beasts. Through blood she screamed, and the voices of the men said that her tortured face was ecstasy to them. They longed for her cries of pain. They longed to wrap her in the filth of their sweat.
Their voices ceased and she heard the fuzziness again, and then it ceased also.
‘Eh now,’ murmured the desk sergeant soothingly.
‘I can’t help it,’ she said, weeping. ‘I’m frightened of it, and disgusted. I can’t help it; I don’t know why I’m like this.’
‘Just drink your tea and stop quiet, dear,’ the policewoman suggested. ‘Best to stop quiet, dear.’
Eleanor shook her head and for a moment her vision was blurred. She closed her eyes and forgot where she was. She opened them and found that her vision had cleared: she saw that she was in a grimy police station with two ugly people. Tea was spilt over her suit and there were drops of tea on her shoes. Her office boss had given her a drug in orange juice: she had experienced certain dreams and fantasies and had conducted with him a formless conversation. She’d never be able to return to the offices of Sweetawear.
‘He floats away,’ she heard a voice crying out and realized that it was her own. ‘He lies there entranced, floating away from his fear and his disgust. “The truth’s in this room,” he says – when what he means is the opposite. Poor wretched thing!’
She wept and the policewoman went to her and tried to help her, but Eleanor struck at her, shrieking obscenities. ‘Everywhere there’s ugliness,’ she cried. ‘His mother loved him with a perverted passion. He floats away from that.’
Tears fell from her eyes, dripping on to her clothes and on to the floor by her feet. She wanted to be dead, she whispered, to float away for ever from the groping hands. She wanted to be dead, she said again.
They took her to a cell; she went with them quietly. She lay down and slept immediately, and the desk sergeant and the policewoman returned to their duties. ‘Worse than drink,’ the woman said. ‘The filth that comes out of them; worse than a navvy.’
‘She’s hooked, you know,’ the desk sergeant remarked. ‘She’s hooked on that floating business. That floating away.’
The policewoman sighed and nodded. They sounded like two of a kind, she commented: the girl and the chap she’d been with.
‘Kinkies,’ said the desk sergeant. ‘Extraordinary, people getting like that.’
‘Bloody disgraceful,’ said the policewoman.
‘Mulligatawny soup,’ Carruthers said in the dining-car. ‘Roast beef, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, mixed vegetables.’
‘And madam?’ murmured the waiter.
Miss Fanshawe said she’d have the same. The waiter thanked her. Carruthers said:
‘Miss Fanshawe’ll take a medium dry sherry. Pale ale for me, please.’
The waiter paused. He glanced at Miss Fanshawe, shaping his lips.
‘I’m sixteen and a half,’ Carruthers said. ‘Oh, and a bottle of Beaune. 1962.’
