would say if she could see him now.
He suggested it to Marie in the Drummer Boy. He led up to it slowly, describing the interior of the Great Western Royal Hotel and how he had wandered about it because he hadn’t wanted to go home. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I ended up in a bathroom.’
‘You mean the toilet, dear? Taken short –’
‘No, not the toilet. A bathroom on the second floor. Done out in marble, as a matter of fact.’
She replied that honestly he was a one, to go into a bathroom like that when he wasn’t even staying in the place! He said:
‘What I mean, Marie, it’s somewhere we could go.’
‘Go, dear?’
‘It’s empty half the time. Nearly all the time it must be. I mean, we could be there now. This minute if we wanted to.’
‘But we’re having our lunch, Norman.’
‘That’s what I mean. We could even be having it there.’
From the saloon bar’s juke-box a lugubrious voice pleaded for a hand to be held.
‘In a bathroom, Norman? But we couldn’t just go into a bathroom.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, we couldn’t. I mean, we
‘What I’m saying is we could.’
‘I want to marry you, Norman. I want us to be together. I don’t want just going to a bathroom in some hotel.’
‘I know; I want to marry you too. But we’ve got to work it out. You know we’ve got to work it out, Marie – getting married.’
‘Yes, I know.’
It was a familiar topic of conversation between them. They took it for granted that one day, somehow, they would be married. They had talked about Hilda. He’d described Hilda to her, he’d drawn a picture in Marie’s mind of Hilda bent over her jewellery-making in a Putney flat, or going out to drink V.P. with the Fowlers or at the Club. He hadn’t presented a flattering picture of his wife, and when Marie had quite timidly said that she didn’t much care for the sound of her he had agreed that naturally she wouldn’t. The only aspect of Hilda he didn’t touch upon was her bedroom appetite, night starvation as he privately dubbed it. He didn’t mention it because he guessed it might be upsetting.
What they had to work out where Hilda was concerned were the economics of the matter. He would never, at Travel-Wide or anywhere else, earn a great deal of money. Familiar with Hilda’s nature, he knew that as soon as a divorce was mooted she’d set out to claim as much alimony as she possibly could, which by law he would have to pay. She would state that she only made jewellery for pin-money and increasingly found it difficult to do so due to a developing tendency towards chilblains or arthritis, anything she could think of. She would hate him for rejecting her, for depriving her of a tame companion. Her own resentment at not being able to have children would somehow latch on to his unfaithfulness: she would see a pattern which wasn’t really there, bitterness would come into her eyes.
Marie had said that she wanted to give him the children he had never had. She wanted to have children at once and she knew she could. He knew it too: having children was part of her, you’d only to look at her. Yet that would mean she’d have to give up her job, which she wanted to do when she married anyway, which in turn would mean that all three of them would have to subsist on his meagre salary. And not just all three, the children also.
It was a riddle that mocked him: he could find no answer, and yet he believed that the more he and Marie were together, the more they talked to one another and continued to be in love, the more chance there was of suddenly hitting upon a solution. Not that Marie always listened when he went on about it. She agreed they had to solve their problem, but now and again just pretended it wasn’t there. She liked to forget about the existence of Hilda. For an hour or so when she was with him she liked to assume that quite soon, in July or even June, they’d be married. He always brought her back to earth.
‘Look, let’s just have a drink in the hotel,’ he urged. ‘Tonight, before the train. Instead of having one in the buffet.’
‘But it’s a hotel, Norman. I mean, it’s for people to stay in –’
‘Anyone can go into a hotel for a drink.’
That evening, after their drink in the hotel bar, he led her to the first-floor landing that was also a lounge. It was warm in the hotel. She said she’d like to sink down into one of the armchairs and fall asleep. He laughed at that; he didn’t suggest an excursion to the bathroom, sensing that he shouldn’t rush things. He saw her on to her train, abandoning her to her mother and Mrs Druk and Mavis. He knew that all during the journey she would be mulling over the splendours of the Great Western Royal.
December came. It was no longer foggy, but the weather was colder, with an icy wind. Every evening, before her train, they had their drink in the hotel. ‘I’d love to show you that bathroom,’ he said once. ‘Just for fun.’ He hadn’t been pressing it in the least; it was the first time he’d mentioned the bathroom since he’d mentioned it originally. She giggled and said he was terrible. She said she’d miss her train if she went looking at bathrooms, but he said there’d easily be time. ‘Gosh!’ she whispered, standing in the doorway, looking in. He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her inside, fearful in case a chambermaid should see them loitering there. He locked the door and kissed her. In almost twelve months it was their first embrace in private.
They went to the bathroom during the lunch hour on New Year’s Day, and he felt it was right that they should celebrate in this way the anniversary of their first real meeting. His early impression of her, that she was of a tartish disposition, had long since been dispelled. Voluptuous she might, seem to the eye, but beneath that misleading surface she was prim and proper. It was odd that Hilda, who looked dried-up and wholly uninterested in the sensual life, should also belie her appearance. ‘I’ve never done it before,’ Marie confessed in the bathroom,
