The old, tired thoughts began all over again. He couldn’t see himself clearly; he couldn’t see how his pattern was cut or what he was meant to do, or had ever been meant to do. He began to worry and he hated himself for it; because he didn’t want to worry, because the thoughts were forced upon him.
‘A pregnant woman,’ Ransome was going on, ‘will buy anything. Apples off a tree, old boy. Two days out and by God, you’ll
Powers nodded.
‘Two pints,’ Ransome said to the barmaid.
If he worked on the public transport he’d be a cog in a big machine, getting people to work in the morning, taking them home at night. Otherwise they’d have to walk. He’d seen them during a transport strike, walking from Regent Street to Wimbledon. You couldn’t do that more than once a week.
‘Will I be all right?’
‘Old boy?’
‘Will I fit the bill?’
‘Haven’t I said so? Haven’t I been plaguing you to come in for years? I mean what I say, old boy.’
It occurred to him that Ransome, far from being kind, was deliberately being cruel. Ransome was pointing the moral. They had walked out of the RAF together on the same day. They had gone their separate ways, he to teach learner drivers, Ransome to set up in business. And now Ransome was going to employ him. For years, all those Sunday mornings in the pub, Ransome’s persuasive talk had been designed to needle him. He had been Ransome’s superior in the RAF.
‘Drink to it.’
He raised his tankard to meet Ransome’s.
‘Get a nice new suit,’ suggested Ransome, smiling. ‘Spick and span, with a polish on the shoes. They’ll love you, old boy.’
He sat in the Austin, thinking about the last three hours. The pints of beer had darkened the hue of his face. He could feel them in his stomach, thick and comforting – a moat against Roche who was talking in his mind. He saw his flat mouth open and close, and the words lay between them, above Roche’s tidy desk, eaves droppings for the typing girl. So that was that: Powers must nod and understand, and go away and never return, must be forgotten by Roche, and by the typist whose breasts he had so much desired. Already he was a man of another trade, a good-hearted man who talked to the pregnant woman about what was to come, taking an interest and selling a requisite.
The sun was hot on his face as he sat in the Austin. His skin relaxed, that part of him happy in the heat. He closed his eyes and gave himself up to the tiny moment. The sun touched his hands on the steering wheel and warmed them too. Beer in his stomach, sun on his skin: he had felt such cosseting before. He had lain in bed, stretched and at peace, warmly covered. The warmth of his wife had welcomed him and given him another version of simple sensuality. Blearily, an awareness stirred in J. P. Powers. He did not think in so many words that the excuse for his life lay in moments like these: only in what he received, since he contributed nothing. He did not think it because it was absurd when it was put like that, clarified and clinical. The feeling hammered at his brain but no tendril stretched out to fashion it into thought. A cloud obscured the shaft of sunlight and the feeling evaporated, giving way to an afternoon depression. He switched on the ignition and drove the Austin for the last time, past Cave Crescent and Mortimer Road, out on to Putney Hill and into the stream of traffic.
Garbed in a crushed tweed suit, fingering the ragged end of a tie that might have already done a year’s service about his waist, Swann de Lisle uttered a convivial obscenity in the four hundred cubic feet of air they euphemistically called my office. I had not seen him for some years: he is the kind of person who is often, for no reason one can deduce, out of the country. In passing, one may assume that his lengthy absences are due in some way to the element of disaster that features so commandingly in his make-up.
I should have known when I saw him standing there that I must instantly be on my guard. In my prevailing condition of emotional delicacy I could not hope to cope with whatever entertainment Swann had in mind for me. For, to give him his due, Swann never came empty-handed. Swann was a great one for getting the best out of life; and he offered one, invariably, a generous part of his well-laid plans. This time, he explained, he was offering me an attractive afternoon. In turn, I explained that I did not feel like an attractive afternoon, that I was too busy to gild the hours in the manner he was suggesting. But Swann was sitting down, well entrenched; and in the end he talked me into it.
I wrote a note and put it on my typewriter:
‘Lucy?’
‘Hullo, Mike.’
‘How are you?’
‘Very well, Mike. How are you?’
‘Very well, too. Just thought I’d ring –’
‘Thank you, Mike.’
‘We must meet again soon.’
‘Yes, we must.’
‘I’d invite you to lunch only an old and valued friend has just transpired.’
‘That’s nice for you.’
‘Well, yes.’
‘Thanks for ringing, Mike.’
‘Goodbye, Lucy.’
