be choosers.’
‘I would not like to offend you, General.’
‘Good boy, Jock. In any case I am not offended. I enjoy a chat.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Not at all. But now I must be on my way. Consider your problem closely: you may discover some simple solution. There are uncharted regions in the human mind.’
‘Sir?’
‘You are a good fellow, Jock. We old soldiers must stick together.’
‘Ha, ha,’ said Jock, taking the remark as a joke, since he was in the first place a young man still, and had never been in the army.
‘Well, cheerio then.’
‘Cheerio, sir.’
How extraordinary, thought the General, that the man should feel like that: guilty about daytime cinema attendance. As Mrs Hinch would have it, it takes all sorts.
The thought of Mrs Hinch depressed the General further and drove him straight to a telephone booth. He often telephoned his cottage at this time of day as a check on her time-keeping. She was due to remain at work for a further hour, but generally the telephone rang unanswered. Today he got the engaged signal. As he boarded his bus, he wondered how much it was costing him.
The General peeped around the edge of the newspaper at the woman who shared his table. She was a thin, middle-aged person with a face like a faded photograph. Her hair was inadequately dyed a shade of brown, her face touched briefly with lipstick and powder. She wore a cream- coloured blouse and a small string of green beads which the General assumed, correctly, to be jade. Her skirt, which the General could not see, was of fine tweed.
‘How thoughtless of me,’ said the General. ‘I have picked up your paper. It was on the chair and I did it quite automatically. I am so sorry.’
He knew the newspaper was not hers. No one places a newspaper on the other chair at a cafe table when the other chair is so well out of reach. Unless, that is, one wishes to reserve the place, which the lady, since she made no protest at his occupying it, was clearly not interested in doing. He made the pretence of offering the paper across the tea-table, leaning forward and sideways to catch a glimpse of her legs.
‘Oh but,’ said the lady, ‘it is not my newspaper at all.’
Beautiful legs. Really beautiful legs. Shimmering in silk or nylon, with fine firm knees and intoxicating calves.
‘Are you sure? In that case it must have been left by the last people, I was reading the stars. I am to have an indecisive afternoon.’ She belongs to the upper classes, General Suffolk said to himself; the upper classes are still well-bred in the leg.
The lady tinkled with laughter. I am away, the General thought. ‘When is your birthday?’ he asked daringly. ‘And I will tell you what to expect for the rest of today.’
‘Oh, I’m Libra, I think.’
‘It is a good moment for fresh associations,’ lied the General, pretending to read from the paper. ‘A new regime is on its way.’
‘You can’t believe a thing they say.’
‘Fighting words,’ said the General, and they laughed and changed the subject of conversation.
In the interval at the cinema, when the lights had gone up and the girls with ice-cream began their sales stroll, the General had seen, two or three rows from the screen, the fat unhealthy figure of his friend Basil. The youth was accompanied by a girl, and it distressed General Suffolk that Basil should have made so feeble an excuse when earlier he had proposed an excursion to a fete. The explanation that Basil wished to indulge in carnal pleasures in the gloom of a picture house would naturally have touched the General’s sympathy. Basil was an untrustworthy lad. It was odd, the General reflected, that some people are like that: so addicted to the lie that to avoid one, when the truth is in order, seems almost a sin.
‘General Suffolk,’ explained the General. ‘Retired, of course.’
‘We live in Bradoak,’ said the lady. ‘My name actually is Mrs Hope-Kingley.’
‘Retired?’
‘Ha, ha. Though in a way it’s true. My husband is not alive now.’
‘Ah,’ said the General, delighted. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I am quite over it, thank you. It is all of fifteen years since last I saw him. We had been divorced some time before his death.’
‘Divorce and death, divorce and death. You hear it all the time. May I be personal now and say I am surprised you did not remarry?’
‘Oh, General Suffolk, Mr Right never came along!’
‘
‘Ha, ha.’ And to her own surprise, Mrs Hope-Kingley proceeded to reveal to this elderly stranger the story of her marriage.
As he listened, General Suffolk considered how best to play his cards. It was a situation he had found himself in many times before, but as always the game must vary in detail. He felt mentally a little tired as he thought about it; and the fear that, in this, as in almost everything else, age had taken too great a toll struck at him with familiar
