Standing by herself and not being spoken to by anyone, Angela was feeling happy. It didn’t matter that no one was speaking to her, or paying her any other kind of attention. She felt warm and friendly, quite happy to be on her own while Gordon Spelle was in the Gents and Mr Hemp and Miss Ivygale talked to each other privately. She liked him, she thought as she stood there: she liked his old-fashioned manners and the way he’d whistled ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, and his sympathy over her being new. She smiled at him when he returned from the Gents. It was all much nicer than the German-wine firm, or the laminates firm.
‘Hullo,’ he said in a whisper, staring at her.
‘It was nice of you to bring me here,’ she said, whispering also.
‘Nice for me, too,’ said Gordon Spelle.
Mr Hemp went away to telephone his wife. The telephone was behind Angela, in a little booth against the wall. The booth was shaped like a sedan chair, except that it didn’t have any shafts to carry it by. Angela had noticed it when she’d been sitting down with Gordon Spelle. She hadn’t known then that it contained a telephone and had wondered at the presence of a sedan chair in a bar. But several times since then people had entered it and each time a light had come on, revealing a telephone and a pile of directories.
‘Because they only told me ten minutes ago,’ Mr Hemp was saying. ‘Because the bloody fools couldn’t make their minds up, if you can call them minds.’
Gordon Spelle squeezed her hand and Angela squeezed back because it seemed a friendly thing to do. She felt sorry for him because he had only one good eye. It was the single defect in his handsome face. It gave him a tired look, and suggested suffering.
‘I wish you’d see it my way,’ Mr Hemp was saying crossly in the sedan chair. ‘God damn it, I don’t
‘I really must go,’ Angela murmured, but Gordon Spelle continued to hold her hand. She didn’t want to go. ‘I really must,’ she said again.
In the Terrazza, where the waiters wore striped blue-and- white jerseys and looked like sailors at a regatta, Mr Hemp and Miss Ivygale were well known. So was Gordon Spelle. The striped waiters greeted them affectionately, and a man in a dark suit addressed all three of them by name. He bowed at Angela. ‘How d’you do?’ he said, handing her a menu.
‘Garlic? Oh –’
‘He always has it,’ Miss Ivygale said, pointing with the menu at Gordon Spelle. ‘You’ll be all right, dear.’
‘What’re you having, darling?’ Mr Hemp asked Miss Ivygale. In the taxi on the way to the Terrazza he had sat with his arm around her and once, as though they were in private, he’d kissed her on the mouth, making quite a lot of noise about it. Angela had been embarrassed and so, she imagined, had Gordon Spelle.
‘Cheers,’ Mr Hemp said, lifting a glass of white wine into the air.
‘I think I’m a bit drunk,’ Angela said to Gordon Spelle and he wagged his head approvingly. Mr Hemp said he was a bit drunk himself, and Miss Ivygale said she was drunk, and Gordon Spelle pointed out that you only live once.
‘Welcome to C.S. & E.,’ Mr Hemp said, lifting his glass again.
The next morning, in the flat in Putney, Angela told her flatmates about the delicious food at the Terrazza and how she couldn’t really remember much else. There’d certainly been a conversation at the restaurant table, and in a taxi afterwards she remembered Gordon Spelle humming and then Gordon Spelle had kissed her. She seemed to remember him saying that he’d always wanted to be a dance-band leader, although she wasn’t sure if she’d got that right. There were other memories of Gordon Spelle in the taxi, which she didn’t relate to her flatmates. There’d been, abruptly, his cold hand on the flesh of one of her thighs, and her surprise that the hand could have got there without her noticing. At another point there’d been his cold hand on the flesh of her stomach. ‘Look, you’re not married or anything?’ she remembered herself saying in sudden alarm. She remembered the noise of Gordon Spelle’s breathing and his tongue penetrating her ear. ‘Married?’ he’d said at some other point, and had laughed.
Feeling unwell but not unhappy, Angela vividly recalled the face and clothes of Gordon Spelle. She recalled his hands, which tapered and were thin, and his sleek hair and droopy eye. She wondered how on earth she was going to face him after what had happened in the taxi, or how she was going to face Miss Ivygale because Miss Ivygale, she faintly remembered, had fallen against a table on their way out of the restaurant, upsetting plates of soup and a bottle of wine. When Angela had tried to help her to stand up again she’d used unpleasant language. Yet the dim memories didn’t worry Angela in any real way, not like her poor complexion sometimes worried her, or her contact lenses. Even though she was feeling unwell, she only wanted to smile that morning. She wanted to write a letter to her parents in Carhampton Road, Exeter, and tell them she’d made a marvellous decision when she’d decided to leave the German-wine business and go to C.S. & E. She should have done it years ago, she wanted to tell them, because everyone at C.S. & E. was so friendly and because you only lived once. She wanted to tell them about Gordon Spelle, who had said in the taxi that he thought he was falling in love with her, which was of course an exaggeration.
She drank half a cup of Nescafe and caught a 37 bus. Sitting beside an Indian on the lower deck, she thought about Gordon Spelle. On the tube to Earl’s Court she thought of him again, and on the Piccadilly line between Earl’s Court and Green Park she went on thinking about him. When she closed her eyes, as she once or twice did, she seemed to be with him in some anonymous place, stroking his face and comforting him because of his bad eye. She walked from the tube station, past the Rootes’ Group car showrooms and Thos Cook’s in Berkeley Street, along Lansdowne Row with its pet shops and card shop and coffee shops, past the Gresham Arms, the C.S. & E. pub. It was a cold morning, but the cold air was pleasant. Pigeons waddled on the pavements, cars drew up at parking-meters. Fresh-faced and shaven, the men of the night before hurried to their offices. She wouldn’t have recognized Tommy Blyth, she thought, or the man called Dil, or even Mr Hemp. Girls in suede boots hurried, also looking different in the morning light. She was being silly, she said to herself in Carlos Place: he probably said that to dozens of girls.
In Angela’s life there had been a few other men. At the age of twelve she had been attracted by a youth who worked in a newsagent’s. She’d liked him because he’d always been ready to chat to her and smile at her, two or three years older he’d been. At fourteen she’d developed a passion for an American actor called Don Ameche whom she’d seen in an old film on television. For several weeks she’d carried with her the memory of his face and had lain in bed at night imagining a life with him in a cliff-top house she’d invented, in California. She’d seen herself and Don Ameche running into the sea together, as he had run with an actress in the film. She’d seen them eating breakfast together, out in the open, on a sunny morning. But Don Ameche, she’d suddenly realized, was sixty or seventy now.
