brought the crowds to Putney. Nice that Putney in the springtime, one Saturday in the year, was not forgotten.
Fitz would be on his train, she thought as she crossed Putney Bridge on her way to the Underground. The bridge was where Christie, who’d murdered so many prostitutes, had been arrested. He’d just had a meal in the Lacy Dining Rooms and perhaps he’d even been thinking of murdering another that very night when the plain clothes had scooped him up. He’d gone, apparently, without a word of protest.
‘My, you’re a romantic, Fitz!’ she’d said all those years ago, and really he hadn’t changed. Typical of him to want to make it a regular Thursday rendezvous. Typical to come up specially from the coast, catching a train and then another train back. During the war they’d been married for four years.
She sang for a moment, remembering that; and then wanting to forget it. His family had thought he was mad, you could see that immediately. He’d led her into a huge drawing-room in Warwickshire, with a grand piano in one corner, and his mother and sister had actually recoiled. ‘But for God’s sake, you can’t!’ she’d heard his sister’s shrill, unpleasant voice exclaiming in the middle of that same night. ‘You can’t marry a chorus girl!’ But he had married her; they’d had to stomach her in the end.
She’d been a sunflower on the stage of the Old Gaiety when he’d first picked her out; after that he’d come night after night. He’d said she had a flimsy quality and needed looking after. When they met again six months ago in Regent Street he’d said in just the same kind of way that she was far too thin. She’d seen him eyeing her hair, which had been light and fair and was a yellowish colour now, not as pretty as it had been. But he didn’t remark on it because he was the kind to remark only on the good things, saying instead she hadn’t changed a bit. He seemed boyishly delighted that she still laughed the way she always had, and often remarked that she still held the stem of a glass and her cigarette in her own particular way. ‘You’re cold,’ he’d said a week ago, reminding her of how he’d always gone on in the past about her not wearing enough clothes. He’d never understood that heavy things didn’t suit her.
In other ways he hadn’t changed, either. Still with a military bearing and hardly grey at all, he had a sunburnt look about the face, as always he’d had. He had not run to fat or slackness, and the sunburnt look extended over his forehead and beyond where his hair had receded. He was all of a piece, his careful suits, his soldier’s walk. He’d married someone else, but after twenty-three years she’d gone and died on him.
‘Good week?’ he inquired in the Trattoria San Michele. ‘What have you got up to, Nancy?’
She smiled and shrugged her skimpy shoulders. Nothing much, she didn’t say. There’d been a part she’d heard about and had hoped for, but she didn’t want to talk about that; it was a long time since she’d had a part.
‘The trout with almonds,’ he suggested. ‘Shall we both have that?’
She smiled again and nodded. She lived on alimony, not his but that of the man she had married last, the one called Simpson. She lit a cigarette; she liked to smoke at meals, sometimes between mouthfuls.
‘They’ve started that thing on the TV again,’ she said. ‘That
She didn’t know why she’d been unfaithful to him. She’d, thought he wouldn’t guess, but when he’d come back on his first leave he’d known at once. She’d promised it would never happen again, swearing it was due to the topsy-turviness of the war, the worry because he was in danger. Several leaves later, when the war was almost over, she promised again. ‘I couldn’t love anyone else, Fitz,’ she’d whimpered, meaning it, really and truly. But at the beginning of 1948 he divorced her.
She hated to remember that time, especially since he was here and being so nice to her. She wanted to pay him back and asked him if he remembered the theme from
Eventually she had gone to Canada with a man called Eddie Lush, whom later she had married. She had stayed there, and later in Philadelphia, for thirteen years, but when she returned to England two children who had been born, a boy and a girl, did not accompany her. They’d become more attached to Eddie Lush than to her, which had hurt her at the time, and there’d been accusations of neglect during the court case, which had been hurtful too. Once upon a time they’d written letters to her occasionally, but she wasn’t sure now what they were doing.
‘And “I’ll Be Around”. ’Member “I’ll Be Around”?’ She sang again, very softly. ‘No
He shook his head. The waiter brought their trout and Nancy smiled at him. The tedium that had just begun to creep into these Thursday lunches had evaporated as soon as she’d set eyes on the Trattoria’s new waiter six or so weeks ago. On Thursday evenings, in her corner of the Bayeux Lounge, his courtesy and his handsome face haunted her. Yes, he was a little sad, she often said to herself in the Bayeux Lounge. Was there even a hint of pain in those steady Latin eyes?
‘Oh, lovely-looking trout,’ she said, continuing to smile. ‘Thanks ever so, Cesare.’
The man she had been married to was saying something else, but she didn’t hear what it was. She remembered a chap like Cesare during the war, an airman from the base whom she’d longed to be taken out by, although in fact he’d never invited her.
‘What?’ she murmured, becoming aware that she’d been asked a question. But the question, now repeated, was only the familiar one, so often asked on Thursdays: did she intend to remain in her Putney flat, was she quite settled there? It was asked because once she’d said – she didn’t know why – that the flat was temporary, that her existence in Putney had a temporary feel to it. She couldn’t tell all the truth, she couldn’t – to Fitz of all people – reveal the hope that at long last old Mr Robin Right would come bob-bob-bobbing along. She believed in Mr R.R., always had, and for some reason she’d got it into her head that he might quite easily walk into the Bayeux Lounge of the Sceptre Hotel. In the evenings she watched television in her flat or in the Bayeux Lounge, sometimes feeling bored because she had no particular friend or confidante. But then she’d always had an inclination to feel a bit like that. Boredom was the devil in her, Laurie Henderson used to say.
‘Thanks ever so,’ she said again because Cesare had skilfully placed a little heap of peas beside the trout. Typical of her, of course, to go falling for a restaurant waiter: you set yourself out on a sensible course, all serious and determined, and the next thing was you were half in love with an unsuitable younger man. Not that she looked fifty-nine, of course, more like forty – even thirty-eight, as a chap in the Bayeux Lounge had said when she’d asked him to guess a month ago. Unfortunately the chap had definitely not been Mr R.R.
‘I just wondered,’ Fitz was saying.
She smiled and nodded. The waiter was aware of her attention, no doubt about it. There was a little wink she was gifted with, a slight little motion of the lids, nothing suggestive about it. ‘Makes me laugh, your wink,’ Eddie
