Down in the City (23 page)

Mrs Demster hoped rather worriedly that she would be able to cope with her, and wished Rachel had not chosen this morning to fling herself out of the place looking so mysterious and dramatic. She could have amused Anabel perfectly.

‘It's terribly kind of you,' Laura was saying. ‘I wouldn't have bothered you on a Saturday morning and especially with Rae not here, but I've got some rather important business to talk over with a friend, and I felt I should have her out of the way.' She lowered her voice and glanced down at Anabel, hoping she had not heard.

‘I'm sure we'll get on very well,' Mrs Demster said, thinking as she spoke how charming Laura was. It was not surprising that Rachel had been so fond of her.

Her pale face unusually animated, she tried to keep Laura by talking about Rachel and Luigi: she tried to be charming, and her voice leapt and trilled, her hands waved. She saw failure coming and she tried a little harder, but the bubbling excitement drained slowly away. She was keeping Mrs Maitland when she wanted to go.

Disappointed, Pauline Demster knelt on the floor and played with Anabel for a few minutes before returning to the kitchen.

As she ran back upstairs Laura's eyes grew small and their lustre was extinguished. That she exercised her gifts at some cost to herself was a truth that she accepted, seeing her pain as a payment to the gods who had blessed her. The strain was hardest when, as had happened this morning, she used herself entirely against her will. With the middle-aged, the unsmart, the uncomplicated, the clever, or with those who surrendered to her too easily, she was quickly and profoundly bored; bored until she felt her chest wasted, powdery and sore with it; bored until she almost ceased to breathe. She could not forgive them. The core of glamorous heat in her was a sacred thing—its wastage or misuse a sin, not a payment. Minutes of her life were eaten every day by clayey mortals. She was preyed on. Sitting in a straight-backed chair by the window she lit a cigarette and noticed that the rain had stopped and the sky was clearing. Five minutes passed, and some ash fell on the thin silk of her skirt. She brushed it away with a slow abstracted movement. I'd want to know if it was Bill, she thought defensively, touching the wooden arm of her chair with superstitious dread. I'd want to know, she thought again, insisting.

Poor girl, I'm afraid she really loves him, she thought, and all at once her eyes were wet. This isn't the first time this has happened, she told herself. You've seen it often enough before. Better to know and do something about it, than have it come up months hence when it's gone on so long that nothing can help.

Drearily she repeated what she had said to Rachel. It still seemed true, but she was depressed by what she was about to do. Her responsive, sympathetic heart ached.

She finished her cigarette, rose, smoothed her skirt, looked out of the window, prodded the cushion back into shape, went to the kitchen where the percolator was bubbling and switched it off. There was a knock at the door while she was there, and when she called, Esther answered and came in.

In spite of acute apprehension over the words that she must inevitably say, Laura found that half an hour passed easily over coffee and cigarettes. They shuffled through a batch of new photographs of Anabel, and talked about possible designs for some dresses for her. Laura told about her latest party, and about a friend she had made. A married woman whose husband Bill had known for ages. Marvellous skin, and what hair, and teeth! Really, she was a dream, and the thing was she didn't know it. Just didn't notice how beautiful she was.

The room swam with rain-wet sunshine, and Esther, facing the windows, half-closed her eyes against it. Laura's voice went on and on, deep, mellow.

Esther thought about peaches. She would buy some. And what else? Cheese, gherkins, perhaps. It was so long since she and Stan had had meals together that she had almost forgotten how to shop and cook. But they would be out tonight, and out all day tomorrow, so she needn't worry much about food until Monday… But Laura had stopped speaking, so Esther focused her eyes on her again and smiled.

‘We're driving to the mountains for the day, tomorrow,' she began, feeling it was time for a contribution. ‘We don't—like—the South…' She stopped slowly, by degrees, braked, as it were, by the look on Laura's face.

‘Esther! I shouldn't have waited so long. I asked you down this morning for a particular reason. But I suppose when it came to the point I hardly knew how to go about it…'

Esther sat forward on the sofa and looked down at her hands, saw the sun glittering on the diamonds on her fingers. She looked back at Laura. ‘Oh? What is it?'

And then Laura was speaking ‘…in the block on the corner of Baker and Trident Streets…a woman, a Mrs Rogers, a barmaid…didn't see very much, but… thought you should know…hated to tell you, but…'

Listen to what she's saying, Esther told herself with frozen calm. Remember it and think about it later. The sentences filed themselves in her mind, but their content was so unexpected, so unlikely, and so quaintly put that she could listen almost indifferently. And Laura's expression was absurd.

She has seen Stan with one of those making-up women…she works for him, of course, but Laura doesn't know that. She might have seen him talking to ten different women…How surprised she would have been—ten girl friends!

She could have laughed, but somehow before the shape and sound reached her lips she changed her mind, and the fluttering inner giggles went cold. Fleeting depression was succeeded by an anger that left her weak.

That Laura should talk to
her
—tell her a story like this about Stan—talk to her about
him
—watch her face—wait to see her reaction to a story like this…

She was an imperial image, inscrutable. She lowered her eyelids. It was the first movement she had made: it was the only sign she gave that she had heard, and it touched Laura more than she could bear. Tears came to her eyes. She lifted her arms and shifted along the sofa.

‘Darling,' she said, ‘I didn't want…'

Evading the arms, Esther stood up. She cleared her throat for she wanted her voice to be steady, and it seemed a long time since she had spoken. Laura gazed up at her, curious and alarmed. The clear impersonality of the voice, when it came, frightened her.

‘I'm sure you thought you were doing what was right in telling me this, Laura. But I'm afraid you've made a mistake. I know Mrs Rogers. She is one of several women who do part-time work for my husband. He visits them all frequently. They often have to go to the factory with him to be shown how to assemble new work. I sometimes go with him.' She paused for a moment to get control of her breath; she was beginning to feel faint. ‘I heard nothing in your story to suggest…' She stopped on a note infinitely remote and snubbing.

Laura sat stunned. Later, she was to try feverishly to recall that other morning and the little scene, to try to remember why she had been so convinced that the pair were lovers. But nothing more specific came to her mind than the tones of the voices, the expressions, caught for an instant, the slight scuffle in the doorway that she had suspected but not seen: these things, and an intuition that had never before been mistaken.

But now she sat incapable of thought. ‘Oh, my God!' she said. ‘My God!'

At last she struggled up from the sofa and stood in front of Esther. She tried to speak but she blushed instead—a slow blush that started at her waist and swept hotly over her arms and face.

‘I don't know how to apologise to you, Esther. I can't apologise. I can only say that I saw what I told you—and I thought you should know about it. As God's my judge I meant it for the best. I really did.'

Esther's level gaze exposed her. She felt transparent. She seemed still to have to strain up to look at her. Even so, humiliated as she was, she smiled. She went across the room, still speaking, hands trembling as she searched in her bag for cigarettes.

‘You'll never know what an idiot I feel,' she confessed when she had at last lighted one. ‘I deserve to, of course. I realise that. I've learnt a lesson.' She sat on the arm of a chair and looked straight at Esther. ‘I don't know what you think of me. You probably won't believe me when I say I'm truly, sincerely, glad that I was wrong. I'm deeply relieved that it has ended like this, with me—poor old mug that I am—looking an ass, than the other way. Please…'

They looked at each other without speaking for a time, then Esther said neutrally, ‘Have you told anyone else about this?

It was impossible to lie to her. ‘Bill—Rachel.'

‘Bill and Rachel, I see.'

Laura got awkwardly to her feet. ‘Won't you have a drink? I'm sure you could do with one as much as I could?…I don't want you to go away hating me. Come and sit down and let's…Stay just a minute…' The right words would not come. Esther refused and they parted: Laura to lie outstretched on her bed, a forearm across her eyes; Esther, to return upstairs.

She had said it so spontaneously, lied so well. ‘I know Mrs Rogers.' But you don't, she said, falling limply into a chair, immediately standing up again. She pressed her hands together and took a few slow steps; she trod a small wavering circle. All normal speed of thought and action had dropped from her: the life-sustaining functions of her body seemed to work with sick, spasmodic rhythm.

It wasn't true, but it had been said. She didn't believe it; neither did Laura now, and yet she must have been sure. She must have seen more than Stan simply talking to a strange woman, or else why should she think…?

I'd have known, she thought with fierce pride. I'd have known if he'd had another woman.

But her mouth trembled and she covered it with her hands. She closed her eyes. She moved her hands over her ears and stood with her head bent.

Alight with panic, her eyes started open; her hands fell. Had she cried out? Surely not, and yet, if she refrained from screaming, from beating herself against the wall, how much more surprising.

Languidly she moved over to the mirror and stared at the blank-eyed face that turned itself from side to side as if to penetrate a veil of fog. She turned away and said in a small, dry whisper, ‘Because I know—I know he wouldn't do that to me.'

She saw the past weeks again as if they lay spread out on a page on her knee, and it seemed that all the sadness and trouble there had been inevitable. It was Stan and it had had to be. But it was over: they had passed that point. They were tired; they wanted one another, a smooth sea.

How can I wonder? How could I stand here if I really wondered? Because Stan's all…And only last night he said…only last night…

She gave a little moan and closed her eyes. She rocked slowly backwards and forwards in an effort to silence her thoughts, to hold off the eerie hollowness, the fear and occupation that swung behind her head like threatening madness.

Sinking to her knees, she crouched in the narrow space between wall and chair, as small as she could be, hiding from tongues and eyes, from Stan and herself, consoled by arms and legs, warm skin, all parts of herself.

Dinner and dancing at Zito's, and the sensuous music of the tango, beating sharply then drawing out, lengthening on a note of wailing sweetness. The tables were packed with the people who had been there that other night: the same youthful beauties blooming under concealed lighting, kept alive by air-conditioning, served by waiters who moved silently on ball-bearing feet.

Sometimes the closeness of the other dancers, the accidental touch of skin, the cold eye of a stranger, the artificial gaiety of acquaintances made her want to swoon with horror. The unreality of attitudes, values, setting, seemed suddenly revealed to her. She saw behind the wall of skin and bone that was each face to the animal that lived behind the eyes, to the cruel pathetic creature that lived alone from birth to death.

She would endure her knowledge, dance with it while Stan held her, and then look up to find him smiling at her with cheerful confidence, or grinning across the table at her for her lost expression, brown eyes narrowed with amusement. ‘What's up?' he would say quietly, still smiling, breathing with steady reassuring masculinity, making her fears recede.

This evening, while he kept his own glass full, he rarely touched it, but said, each time he lifted the bottle for Esther, ‘No, I'm okay. Still got some. Do you good though, pet. Loosen you up.'

Now he was asking, ‘What would you think about a trip to America next year—or maybe England? Huh?'

He looked at her bare tanned shoulders and arms, the sheer stiff black material of her dress, the diamonds swinging from her ears and shining on her hands, the red-painted mouth and the smooth red nails and he covered one of her hands with his, protectively. He felt extraordinarily sentimental: it was as if the old mixture of passion and reverence had been renewed at the source, strengthened.

But he made no loving speeches: he was not a man for speeches. He simply squeezed her arm and said, ‘Can't be a slave all my days, can I? Never see anything of you. It's time we did something like that, honey. Have some fun together, you know.' He spoke in the flat expressionless way he had, not always looking at her, not opening his mouth more than he could help, but Esther could tell that he was excited by this new idea, and wanted her enthusiasm. But, she thought, next year.

Her fingers slid round her glass as she answered him. She heard her voice, watched herself smile, and drank some wine. The music went on and on; the clockwork figures on the small floor whirled dizzily. A woman lurched as she came back to her table and the young man with her went white. They left soon afterwards, the woman trailing behind saying plaintively, ‘But Dickie, I don't
want
to go home. Dickie…Dickie! I don't
want
…'

It was late when Esther and Stan reached home. Unaccountably, the hours between departure and return had brought an alleviation of fear. Perhaps a decision she herself had taken early in the evening had helped; so had Stan's declaration of his plan to go abroad. And his unstrained attentiveness had served in a conclusive way to cement the holes in her trust, to confirm the rightness of her violent denial of Laura's story.