The waiter poured the wine in silence. He was not embarrassed, Mr Mileson noted; not even angry.
‘Bring coffee,’ Mrs da Tanka said.
‘Madam.’
‘How servile waiters are! How I hate servility, Mr Mileson! I could not marry a servile man. I could not marry that waiter, not for all the tea in China.’
‘I did not imagine you could. The waiter does not seem your sort.’
‘He is your sort. You like him, I think. Shall I leave you to converse with him?’
‘Really! What would I say to him? I know nothing about the waiter except what he is in a professional sense. I do not wish to know. It is not my habit to go about consorting with waiters after they have waited on me.’
‘I am not to know that. I am not to know what your sort is, or what your personal and private habits are. How could I know? We have only just met.’
‘You are clouding the issue.’
‘You are as pompous as da Tanka. Da Tanka would say issue and clouding.’
‘What your husband would say is no concern of mine.’
‘You are meant to be my lover, Mr Mileson. Can’t you act it a bit? My husband must concern you dearly. You must wish to tear him limb from limb. Do you wish it?’
‘I have never met the man. I know nothing of him.’
‘Well then, pretend. Pretend for the waiter’s sake. Say something violent in the waiter’s hearing. Break an oath. Blaspheme. Bang your fist on the table.’
‘I was not told I should have to behave like that. It is against my nature.’
‘What is your nature?’
‘I’m shy and self-effacing.’
‘You are an enemy to me. I don’t understand your sort. You have not got on in the world. You take on commissions like this. Where is your self-respect?’
‘Elsewhere in my character.’
‘You have no personality.’
‘That is a cliche. It means nothing.’
‘Sweet nothings for lovers, Mr Mileson! Remember that.’
They left the grill-room and mounted the stairs in silence. In their bedroom Mrs da Tanka unpacked a dressing-gown. ‘I shall undress in the bathroom. I shall be absent a matter often minutes.’
Mr Mileson slipped from his clothes into pyjamas. He brushed his teeth at the wash-basin, cleaned his nails and splashed a little water on his face. When Mrs da Tanka returned he was in bed.
To Mr Mileson she seemed a trifle bigger without her daytime clothes. He remembered corsets and other containing garments. He did not remark upon it.
Mrs da Tanka turned out the light and they lay without touching between the cold sheets of the double bed.
He would leave little behind, he thought. He would die and there would be the things in the room, rather a number of useless things with sentimental value only. Ornaments and ferns. Reproductions of paintings. A set of eggs, birds’ eggs he had collected as a boy. They would pile all the junk together and probably try to burn it. Then perhaps they would light a couple of those fumigating candles in the room, because people are insulting when other people die.
‘Why did you not get married?’ Mrs da Tanka said.
‘Because I do not greatly care for women.’ He said it, throwing caution to the winds, waiting for her attack.
‘Are you a homosexual?’
The word shocked him. ‘Of course I’m not.’
‘I only asked. They go in for this kind of thing.’
‘That does not make me one.’
‘I often thought Horace Spire was more that way than any other. For all the attention he paid to me.’
As a child she had lived in Shropshire. In those days she loved the country, though without knowing, or wishing to know, the names of flowers or plants or trees. People said she looked like Alice in Wonderland.
‘Have you ever been to Shropshire, Mr Mileson?’
‘No. I am very much a Londoner. I lived in the same house all my life. Now the house is no longer there. Flats replace it. I live in Swiss Cottage.’
‘I thought you might. I thought you might live in Swiss Cottage.’
‘Now and again I miss the garden. As a child I collected birds’ eggs on the common. I have kept them all these years.’
She had kept nothing. She cut the past off every so often, remembering it when she cared to, without the aid of physical evidence.
