‘Hildas –’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ All of a sudden she was angry, but more, he felt, because he was going on, not because of what he was actually demanding. She thought him ridiculous and said so. And then she added all the things he’d thought himself: that people like them didn’t get divorces, that unless his girlfriend was well-heeled the whole thing would be a sheer bloody nonsense, with bloody solicitors the only ones to benefit. ‘They’ll send you to the cleaners, your bloody solicitors will,’ she loudly pointed out, anger still trembling in her voice. ‘You’d be paying them back for years.’
‘I don’t care,’ he began, although he did. ‘I don’t care about anything except–’
‘Of course you do, you damn fool.’
‘Hilda –’
‘Look, get over her. Take her into a park after dark or something. It’ll make no odds to you and me.’
She turned the sound on the television up and quite quickly finished the V.P. wine. Afterwards, in their bedroom, she turned to him with an excitement that was greater than usual. ‘God, that switched me on,’ she whispered in the darkness, gripping him with her limbs. ‘The stuff we were talking about, that girl.’ When she’d finished her love-making she said, ‘I had it with that postman, you know. Swear to God. In the kitchen. And since we’re on the subject, Fowler looks in here the odd time.’
He lay beside her in silence, not knowing whether or not to believe what she was saying. It seemed at first that she was keeping her end up because he’d mentioned Marie, but then he wasn’t so sure. ‘We had a foursome once,’ she said, ‘the Fowlers and me and a chap that used to be in the Club.’
She began to stroke his face with her fingers, the way he hated. She always seemed to think that if she stroked his face it would excite him. She said, ‘Tell me more about this piece you fancy.’
He told her to keep her quiet and to make her stop stroking his face. It didn’t seem to matter now if he told her how long it had been going on, not since she’d made her revelations about Fowler and the postman. He even enjoyed telling her, about the New Year’s Day when he’d bought the emery boards and the Colgate’s, and how he’d got to know Marie because she and Mavis were booking a holiday on the Costa Brava.
‘But you’ve never actually?’
‘Yes, we have.’
‘For God’s sake where? Doorways or something? In the park?’
‘We go to a hotel.’
‘You old devil!’
‘Listen, Hilda –’
‘For God’s sake go on, love. Tell me about it.’
He told her about the bathroom and she kept asking him questions, making him tell her details, asking him to describe Marie to her. Dawn was breaking when they finished talking.
‘Forget about the divorce stuff,’ she said quite casually at breakfast. ‘I wouldn’t want to hear no more of that. I wouldn’t want you ruined for my sake, dear.’
He didn’t want to see Marie that day, although he had to because it was arranged. In any case she knew he’d been going to tell his wife the night before; she’d want to hear the outcome.
‘Well?’ she said in the Drummer Boy.
He shrugged. He shook his head. He said:
‘I told her.’
‘And what’d she say, Norman? What’d Hilda say?’
‘She said I was barmy to be talking about divorce. She said what I said to you: that we wouldn’t manage with the alimony.’
They sat in silence. Eventually Marie said:
‘Then can’t you leave her? Can’t you just not go back? We could get a flat somewhere. We could put off kiddies, darling. Just walk out, couldn’t you?’
‘They’d find us. They’d make me pay.’
‘We could try it. If I keep on working you could pay what they want.’
‘It’ll never pan out, Marie.’
‘Oh, darling, just walk away from her.’
Which is what, to Hilda’s astonishment, he did. One evening when she was at the Club he packed his clothes and went to two rooms in Kilburn that he and Marie had found. He didn’t tell Hilda where he was going. He just left a note to say he wouldn’t be back.
They lived as man and wife in Kilburn, sharing a lavatory and a bathroom with fifteen other people. In time he received a court summons, and in court was informed that he had behaved meanly and despicably to the woman he’d married. He agreed to pay regular maintenance.
The two rooms in Kilburn were dirty and uncomfortable, and life in them was rather different from the life they had known together in the Drummer Boy and the Great Western Royal Hotel. They planned to find somewhere better, but at a reasonable price that wasn’t easy to find. A certain melancholy descended on them, for although they were together they seemed as far away as ever from their own small house, their children and their ordinary contentment.
‘We could go to Reading,’ Marie suggested.
‘Reading?’
