moments I dropped off to sleep. When I awoke the luminous dial of my watch indicated that I had been asleep for two hours. Two girls were tidying their faces at the dressing-table. They drew head-scarves with horses on them from their handbags and placed them about their heads. They spoke in a whisper and left the room. I lay there considering the events of the day and wondering how I was going to feel about them at breakfast. How one feels at breakfast about the preceding day has always seemed to be important to me.
A man with a glass in his hand entered the room and placed himself before the mirror on the dressing-table. He combed his hair and tightened his tie. Then he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it around his right forefinger. He inserted this into each ear, twisting his forefinger back and forth. He remarked to himself on the outcome of this operation, examining his handkerchief. I closed my eyes; when I opened them he was gone. I lit a cigarette and set off to the telephone again.
‘What is it?’ a voice said. It was the publishing man. I asked to speak to Lucy.
‘Hullo, Lucy.’
‘Oh, Mike, really –’
‘Lucy, that man’s there again.’
‘I know, Mike.’
‘It’s two o’clock in the morning.’
‘Two o’clock in the morning. I’m sorry, Mike.’ Her voice was so gentle that I said:
‘Stop trying not to hurt me.’
‘I think I’d better ring off.’
‘I’ll ring off, damn it.’
I stood by the telephone, considering, and feeling sick. I felt something between my fingers and looked down at the piece of paper with Nigel’s telephone number on it. I lifted the receiver and dialled it.
I waited almost a minute and then a woman’s voice said: ‘Yes? Who is that please?’
I think I said: ‘I want to know what’s going on.’
The woman said quickly: ‘Who is that speaking? You haf the wrong number.’
‘I do not,’ I retaliated briskly. ‘Please bring Nigel to the phone.’
‘Nigel is in the Chair. You are interrupting our meeting with this demand. There is much on the agenda. I cannot attend to you, sir.’
‘This is the Ministry of Pensions,’ I said, and I heard the woman breathing laboriously. Then she cut me off.
I walked back through the party and looked for the front door. I was thinking that everything had been more or less resolved. Margo’s grievance had had its airing; she felt the better for it, and all anyone had to do now was to ask Nigel what he was up to and press the point until a satisfactory answer was achieved. As for me, time would heal and time would cure. I knew it, and it was the worst thing of all. I didn’t want to be cured. I wanted the madness of my love for Lucy to go on lurching at me from dreams; to mock me from half-empty glasses; to leap at me unexpectedly. In time Lucy’s face would fade to a pin-point; in time I would see her on the street and greet her with casualness, and sit with her over coffee, quietly discussing the flow beneath the bridges since last we met. Today – not even that, for already it was tomorrow – would slide away like all the other days. Not a red-letter day. Not the day of my desperate bidding. Not the day on which the love of my life was snaffled away from me. I opened the front door and looked out into the night. It was cold and uncomforting. I liked it like that. I hated the moment, yet I loved it because in it I still loved Lucy. Deliberately I swung the door and shut away the darkness and drizzle. As I went back to the party the sadness of all the forgetting stung me. Even already, I thought, time is at work; time is ticking her away; time is destroying her, killing all there was between us. And with time on my side I would look back on the day without bitterness and without emotion. I would remember it only as a flash on the brittle surface of nothing, as a day that was rather funny, as the day we got drunk on cake.
One day Miss Smith asked James what a baby horse was called and James couldn’t remember. He blinked and shook his head. He knew, he explained, but he just couldn’t remember. Miss Smith said:
‘Well, well, James Machen doesn’t know what a baby horse is called.’
She said it loudly so that everyone in the classroom heard. James became very confused. He blinked and said:
‘Pony, Miss Smith?’
‘Pony! James Machen says a baby horse is a pony! Hands up everyone who knows what a baby horse is.’
All the right arms in the room, except James’s and Miss Smith’s, shot upwards. Miss Smith smiled at James.
‘Everyone knows,’ she said. ‘Everyone knows what a baby horse is called except James.’
James thought: I’ll run away. I’ll join the tinkers and live in a tent.
‘What’s a baby horse called?’ Miss Smith asked the class and the class shouted:
‘Foal, Miss Smith.’
‘A foal, James,’ Miss Smith repeated. ‘A baby horse is a foal, James dear.’
‘I knew, Miss Smith. I knew but –’
Miss Smith laughed and the class laughed, and afterwards nobody would play with James because he was so silly to think that a baby horse was a pony.
James was an optimist about Miss Smith. He thought it might be different when the class went on the summer picnic or sat tightly together at the Christmas party, eating cake and biscuits and having their mugs filled from big enamel jugs. But it never was different. James got left behind when everyone was racing across the fields at the
