The Collected Stories

and he loved her the more for that. He loved her simplicity in this matter, her desire to remain a virgin until her wedding. But since she repeatedly swore that she could marry no one else, their anticipating of their wedding- night did not matter. ‘Oh, God, I love you,’ she whispered, naked for the first time in the bathroom. ‘Oh, Norman, you’re so good to me.’

After that it became a regular thing. He would saunter from the hotel bar, across the huge entrance lounge, and take a lift to the second floor. Five minutes later she would follow, with a towel brought specially from Reading in her handbag. In the bathroom they always whispered, and would sit together in a warm bath after their love- making, still murmuring about the future, holding hands beneath the surface of the water. No one ever rapped on the door to ask what was going on in there. No one ever questioned them as they returned, separately, to the bar, with the towel they’d shared damping her compact and her handkerchief.

Years instead of months began to go by. On the juke-box in the Drummer Boy the voice of Elvis Presley was no longer heard. ‘Why she had to go I don’t know,’ sang the Beatles, ‘she didn’t say… I believe in yesterday.’ And Eleanor Rigby entered people’s lives, and Sergeant Pepper with her. The fantasies of secret agents, more fantastic than ever before, filled the screens of London’s cinemas. Carnaby Street, like a jolly trash-can, overflowed with noise and colour. And in the bathroom of the Great Western Royal Hotel the love affair of Norman Britt and Marie was touched with the same preposterousness. They ate sandwiches in the bathroom; they drank wine. He whispered to her of the faraway places he knew about but had never been to: the Bahamas, Brazil, Peru, Seville at Easter, the Greek islands, the Nile, Shiraz, Persepolis, the Rocky Mountains. They should have been saving their money, not spending it on gin and peppermintin the bar of the hotel and in the Drummer Boy. They should have been racking their brains to find a solution to the problem of Hilda, but it was nicer to pretend that one day they would walk together in Venice or Tuscany. It was all so different from the activities that began with Hilda’s bedroom appetites, and it was different from the coarseness that invariably surfaced when Mr Blackstaffe got going in the Drummer Boy on an evening when a Travel-Wide employee was being given a send-off. Mr Blackstaffe’s great joke on such occasions was that he liked to have sexual intercourse with his wife at night and that she preferred the conjunction in the mornings. He was always going on about how difficult it was in the mornings, what with the children liable to interrupt you, and he usually went into details about certain other, more intimate preferences of his wife’s. He had a powerful, waxy guffaw, which he brought regularly into play when he was engaged in this kind of conversation, allying it with a nudging motion of the elbow. Once his wife actually turned up in the Drummer Boy and Norman found it embarrassing even to look at her, knowing as he did so much about her private life. She was a stout middle-aged woman with decorated spectacles: her appearance, too, apparently belied much.

In the bathroom all such considerations, disliked equally by Norman Britt and Marie, were left behind. Romance ruled their brief sojourns, and love sanctified – or so they believed – the passion of their physical intimacy. Love excused their eccentricity, for only love could have found in them a willingness to engage in the deception of a hotel and the courage that went with it: that they believed most of all.

But afterwards, selling tickets to other people or putting Marie on her evening train, Norman sometimes felt depressed. And then gradually, as more time passed, the depression increased and intensified. ‘I’m so sad,’ he whispered in the bathroom once, ‘when I’m not with you. I don’t think I can stand it.’ She dried herself on the towel brought specially from Reading in her large red handbag. ‘You’ll have to tell her,’ she said, with an edge in her voice that hadn’t ever been there before. ‘I don’t want to leave having babies too late.’ She wasn’t twenty- eight any more; she was thirty-one. ‘I mean, it isn’t fair on me,’ she said.

He knew it wasn’t fair on her, but going over the whole thing yet again in Travel-Wide that afternoon he also knew that poverty would destroy them. He’d never earn much more than he earned now. The babies Marie wanted, and which he wanted too, would soak up what there was like blotting-paper; they’d probably have to look for council accommodation. It made him weary to think about it, it gave him a headache. But he knew she was right: they couldn’t go on for ever, living off a passing idyll, in the bathroom of a hotel. He even thought, quite seriously for a moment, of causing Hilda’s death.

Instead he told her the truth, one Thursday evening after she’d been watching The Avengers on television. He just told her he’d met someone, a girl called Marie, he said, whom he had fallen in love with and wished to marry. ‘I was hoping we could have a divorce,’ he said.

Hilda turned the sound on the television set down without in any way dimming the picture, which she continued to watch. Her face did not register the hatred he had imagined in it when he rejected her; nor did bitterness suddenly enter her eyes. Instead she shook her head at him, and poured herself some more V.P. She said:

‘You’ve gone barmy, Norman.’

‘You can think that if you like.’

‘Wherever’d you meet a girl, for God’s sake?’

‘At work. She’s there in Vincent Street. In a shop.’

‘And what’s she think of you, may I ask?’

‘She’s in love with me, Hilda.’

She laughed. She told him to pull the other one, adding that it had bells on it.

‘Hilda, I’m not making this up. I’m telling you the truth.’

She smiled into her V.P. She watched the screen for a moment, then she said:

‘And how long’s this charming stuff been going on, may I inquire?’

He didn’t want to say for years. Vaguely, he said it had been going on for just a while.

‘You’re out of your tiny, Norman. Just because you fancy some piece in a shop doesn’t mean you go getting hot under the collar. You’re no tomcat, you know, old boy.’

‘I didn’t say I was.’

‘You’re no sexual mechanic.’

‘Hilda –’

‘All chaps fancy things in shops: didn’t your mother tell you that? D’you think I haven’t fancied stuff myself, the chap who came to do the blinds, that randy little postman with his rugby songs?’

‘I’m telling you I want a divorce, Hilda.’

She laughed. She drank more V.P. wine. ‘You’re up a gum tree,’ she said, and laughed again.