the room he came to her and took her coat off and then undid the buttons of her dress. He lifted her petticoat over her head and unhooked her peach-coloured corset and her brassiere.
‘Will you dance with me, Alice?’
She shook her head. Her clothes were sticking to her now. Her armpits were clammy.
‘Won’t you dance, dear?’
She said she’d rather not, not today. Her voice shivered and drily crackled. She’d just come to tell him about Poppy, she said again.
‘I’d like to be friends with you, Alice. Now that Poppy has –’
‘I have to go home, Grantly. I have to.’
‘Don’t go, darling.’
His hands had crossed the table again. They held her wrists; his teeth and his eyes flashed at her, though not in a smiling way. She shouldn’t have come, her own voice kept protesting in the depths of her mind, like an echo. It had all been different when there were three of them, all harmless flirtation, with Poppy giggling and pretending, just fun.
There was excitement in his face. He released her wrists, and again, beneath the table, she felt one of his legs against hers. He pushed his chair closer to the table, a hand moved on her thigh again.
‘No, no,’ she said.
‘I looked for you. I don’t know your other name, you know. I didn’t know Poppy’s either. I didn’t know where you lived. But I looked for you, Alice.’
He didn’t say how he’d looked for her, but repeated that he had, nodding emphatically.
‘I thought if I found you we’d maybe have a drink one night. I have records in my room I’d like you to hear, Alice. I’d like to have your opinion.’
‘I couldn’t go to your room –’
‘It would be just like sitting here, Alice. It would be quite all right.’
‘I couldn’t ever, Grantly.’
What would Beryl and Ron say if they could see her now, if they could hear the conversation she was having, and see his hand on her leg? She remembered them suddenly as children, Beryl on the greedy side yet refusing to eat fish in any shape or form, Ron having his nails painted with Nail-Gro because he bit them. She remembered the birth of Ron and how it had been touch and go because he’d weighed so little. She remembered the time Beryl scalded herself on the electric kettle and how Lenny had rung 999 because he said it would be the quickest way to get attention. She remembered the first night she’d been married to Lenny, taking her clothes off under a wrap her mother had given her because she’d always been shy about everything. All she had to do, she said to herself, was to stand up and go.
His hands weren’t touching her any more. He moved his body away from hers, and she looked at him and saw that the excitement had gone from his face. His eyes had a dead look. His mouth had a melancholy twist to it.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘I fancied you that first day, Alice. I always fancied you, Alice.’
He was speaking the truth to her and it was strange to think of it as the truth, even though she had known that in some purely physical way he desired her. It was different from being mad for a person, and yet she felt that his desiring her was just as strange as being mad for her. If he didn’t desire her she’d have been able to return to the dance-rooms, they’d have been able to sit here on the balcony, again and again, she telling him more about Poppy and he telling her more about himself, making one another laugh. Yet if he didn’t desire her he wouldn’t want to be bothered with any of that.
‘Can’t fancy black girls,’ he said, with his head turned well away from her. ‘White women, over sixty if it’s possible. Thirteen stone or so. That’s why I go to the dance-rooms.’ He turned to face her and gazed morosely at her eyes. ‘I’m queer that way,’ he said. ‘I’m a nasty kind of black man.’
She could feel sickness in her stomach, and the skin of her back, which had been so damp with sweat, was now cold. She picked up her handbag and held it awkwardly for a moment, not knowing what to say. ‘I must go,’ she said eventually, and her legs felt shaky when she stood on them.
He remained at the table, all his politeness gone. He looked bitter and angry and truculent. She thought he might insult her. She thought he might shout loudly at her in the dance-rooms, calling her names and abusing her. But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything at all to her. He sat there in the dim, tinted light, seeming to slump from one degree of disappointment to a deeper one. He looked crude and pathetic. He looked another person.
Again, as she stood there awkwardly, she thought about the room in Maida Vale, which she’d furnished with lilies and brightly coloured cloths. Again his grey hands undid her corset and her brassiere, and just for a moment it seemed that there wouldn’t have been much wrong in letting him admire her in whatever way he wanted to. It was something that would disgust people if they knew; Beryl and Ron would be disgusted, and Lenny and Albert naturally enough. Grantly Palmer would disgust them, and she herself, a grandmother, would disgust them for permitting his attentions. There was something wrong with Grantly Palmer, they’d all say: he was sick and dirty, as he even admitted himself. Yet there were always things wrong with people, things you didn’t much care for and even were disgusted by, like Beryl being greedy and Ron biting his nails, like the way Lenny would sometimes blow his nose without using a handkerchief or a tissue. Even Poppy hadn’t been perfect: on a bus it had sometimes been too much, her shrillness and her rushy ways, so clearly distasteful to other people sitting there.
Alice wanted to tell Grantly Palmer all that. Desperately she tried to form an argument in her mind, a conversation with herself that had as its elements the greediness of her daughter and her son’s bitten nails and her husband clearing the mucus from his nose at the sink, and she herself agreeing to be the object of perversion. But the elements would not connect, and she felt instinctively that she could not transform them into coherent argument. The elements spun dizzily in her mind, the sense she sought from them did not materialize.
‘Goodbye,’ she said, knowing he would not answer. He was ashamed of himself; he wanted her to go. ‘Goodbye,’ she said again. ‘Goodbye, Grantly.’
She moved away from him, forcing herself to think about the house in Paper Street, about entering it and
