out. She reminded herself that before she set off for work she must start the laundry, in the brand-new washing machine that was another little luxury the bountiful Silver Swan had brought to her.
Yes, a day like any other, so it seemed.
When the telephone rang it made her jump. Who would be calling at this early hour? She hurried into the hall. At first she could not make out who it was on the line. Hardiman, he said his name was. Did she know anyone called Hardiman? Then he said he was with the bank. Her mouth went dry, and she felt her heartbeat suddenly slow to a dull, effortful thumping, as if something was climbing up laboriously inside her. Dealing with the bank had been the part of the business that she secretly hated. Banks terrified her; she had never been in one before she was in her twenties. They were so big, with such high ceilings, and so many counters with so many people behind them, all wearing ties, or twinsets, while the men in the back, the managers or whatever they were, all wore pin-striped suits. She was frightened even by the smell, dry and papery, like the smell in the head nun's room at school. Hardiman was saying something about 'some matters,' and 'these figures,' and 'these checks signed by Mr. White.' He asked her to come in and see him. Somehow she managed to get her voice to work, and said she was very busy today, and would Monday do. There was a silence on the line then, a silence that was more alarming even than the man's voice, and then she heard him give a little cough-though she had never even met him she could see him, gray and precise, with dandruff on his collar, sitting at his desk with the phone in one hand and the knuckle of an index finger pressed to his pursed lips-and he said no, no, it would not keep till Monday, that it would be better if she came in right away. She tried to protest but he cut her off, and with a new sharpness. 'Really, Mrs. Hunt, I think it will be in all our interests for you to come in, now, and see if we can sort this out.'
When she put the phone down she had to run upstairs, into the bathroom, and sat on the lavatory with the pee gushing out of her, just gushing and gushing, she could not think how there could be so much of it inside her. When she touched her face it felt as dry as dead leaves-no, not leaves but ashes, yes, and her throat was so constricted she could hardly swallow, and her eyelids were burning and even her hair pained her, if that was possible. Despite all this, the fright and the panic and the helpless peeing, she was not surprised. This, she suddenly saw, this was what she had been waiting for all along, since that very first day in the pub on Baggot Street when she had sat at the bar listening to Leslie White telling the barman exactly how he wanted their hot whiskeys prepared-'Hot water, mind, not boiling, and no more than three cloves in each glass'-and she had been so excited to be in a pub in the middle of the afternoon drinking with this beautiful, silver-haired creature that she had been afraid she might fall off the stool in a swoon straight into his arms. For what had made it all so thrilling, in its horrible way, she realized now, was not the success of the salon or the money, not Leslie's playful talk or the intoxicating feel of his fingers on her skin, no, not even love, but the unacknowledged prospect of this, the telephone call at nine in the morning of an ordinary day, the call to announce that the catastrophe had come. That was strange.
The interview with Hardiman passed for her in a hot blur. She had been wrong about him: he was not the weedy, dry stick she had pictured but a big, white-haired, red-faced, worried man in a blue suit who leaned forward intently with his elbows on the desk and his huge, meaty hands clasped before him, telling her in a voice resonant with sadness how Leslie White had ruined the business. She did not understand, she could not take it in. It seemed that for every pound she had earned Leslie had spent two. He had used the salon as security to raise a mortgage with another bank, but that was spent, too. There were checks that had not been 'made good,' Hardiman said. She stared at him, slack-jawed, and he looked down at his hands and then back at her and sighed and said, 'Bounced, Mrs. Hunt. The checks bounced.' But where had the money gone, she asked, pleading for enlightenment, what had Leslie spent it on? Mr. Hardiman lifted his big, blue-clad shoulders and let them fall again, as if the weight of the world was on them. 'That's something the bank is not privy to, Mrs. Hunt,' he said, and when she went on gazing at him helplessly he blinked and frowned and said harshly, 'I mean, we don't know what he spent it on. Perhaps that's a question'-he checked himself, and softened his tone-'perhaps it's a question you should ask him, Mrs. Hunt.'
She walked out into the summer morning feeling as if she were the sole survivor of a huge and yet entirely soundless disaster. The sunlight had a sharp, yellowish cast and hurt her eyes. A coal merchant's cart went past, the black-faced coalman standing up on the board with the reins in one hand and his whip in the other and the big horse's nostrils flaring and its lips turned inside out and foam flying back from them. A bus blared, a newsboy shouted. The world seemed a new place, one that she had never seen before, only cunningly got up to look like the old, familiar one. She stepped into a phone box and fumbled in her bag for coppers. She had none. She went to a newsagent's and bought a newspaper, but the change was in silver and she had to ask for pennies, and the newsagent scowled at her and said something under his breath but gave her the coins anyway. She telephoned the salon, but there was no reply. She had not expected Leslie to be there, of course, but there was a tiny comfort in dialing the familiar numbers, and hearing the phone ring in the empty room. Then, before she knew what she was doing, she called his home. Home. The word stuck in her heart like a splinter of steel. His home. His wife. His other life; his real life.
Kate White answered. The English accent was a surprise, though it should not have been. It seemed so strange to her now that they had never met, she and Leslie's wife. At first she could not speak. She stared through the grimy panes of the phone box at the street, the passing cars and buses sliding sinuously through the flaws in the glass.
'Hello,' Kate said. 'Who is this?' Bossy; in charge; used to being obeyed, to her word being hopped to.
'Is Leslie there?' she asked, and sounded to herself like a little girl, a schoolgirl afraid of the nuns, afraid of the priest in the confession box, afraid of Margy Rock the school bully, afraid of her father. There was a silence. She knew Kate knew who she was.
'No,' Kate said at last, coldly, 'my husband is not here.' She asked again: 'Who is this?'
She could not bring herself to say her name. 'I'm his partner,' she said. 'I mean, I work with him, at the Silver Swan.'
At that Kate snickered. 'Do you, now?' she said.
Another silence followed.
'I need to talk to him,' she said, 'urgently. It's about the business. I've been to the bank. The manager spoke to me. It's all…' What could she say? How could she describe it? The thing was so vast, so terrible, so hopeless, and so shaming.
'In trouble again, is he?' Kate said, with a sort of trill in her voice, a mixture of bitterness and angry amusement. 'That doesn't surprise me. Does it surprise you? Yes, I should think it would. You haven't as much experience of him as I have, whatever you might think. Well, I hope he doesn't imagine I'm going to bail him out again.' She paused. 'You're in this together, you know, you and him. As far as I'm concerned, you can sink or swim.
When she got home she decided, although she was not hungry-she thought she might never be hungry again-that she must eat something, to keep her strength up. She made a ham sandwich, but had got only half of it down when she had to scamper to the bathroom and throw it back up. She sat on the side of the bath, shivering, and a cold sweat sprang out on her forehead. The nausea passed and she went downstairs again and got out the vacuum cleaner and vacuumed the carpet in the parlor, pushing the brush back and forth violently, like a sailor on punishment duty swabbing a deck. It had never struck her before that it was not possible to get anything completely clean. No matter how long or how hard she worked at this carpet there would be things that would cling stubbornly in the nap, hairs and bits of lint and tiny crumbs of food, and mites, millions and millions of mites-she pictured them, a moving mass of living creatures so small they would be invisible even if she were to kneel and put her face down until her nose was right in among the fibers.
She remembered the bottle of whiskey that someone had given them for Christmas. It had never been opened. She had put it on the top shelf in the airing cupboard, along with the mousetraps and the caustic soda and the old black rubber gas mask left over from when the war was on and everybody expected the Germans to invade. She turned off the vacuum cleaner and left it there in the middle of the floor, for the mites to crawl over, if they wanted.
The whiskey seemed to her to have a brownish tinge. Did whiskey go
