The Likes of Us (57 page)

‘What do you reckon, then?' she asked as he turned.

She had on the maroon frock, but over it she was wearing his wife's fur cape that she must have gone into another compartment of the wardrobe to find. She seemed suddenly unsure how he would react to this.

‘Splendid,' Jordan said.

His stomach churned with a sudden desire to touch her. Looking away, he reached for a towel and dried his hands.

‘Course, I know you didn't mean this, but I couldn't resist just trying it on.' Her hands were stroking the fur in long soft movements.

‘Why not?' Jordan heard himself saying. Then, when he realised she did not understand: ‘Why shouldn't I have meant that as well?'

‘You can't,' she said, lifting her gaze to his. ‘It must be worth a small fortune.'

‘Not all that much,' Jordan said. ‘And so what?'

‘You can re-sell furs like this,' she said. ‘Don't shops take 'em back?'

‘I don't want to sell it.'

‘You can't give it to me, though. I couldn't take it.'

‘Why not? I bought it. Why shouldn't I give it to whom I like?'

‘You'll want it for a lady friend.'

‘I haven't got one.'

‘You will have. You'll want to get married again, some time. Won't you?' she said after a moment, all the time her fingers moving along the lie of the fur. ‘What is it, anyway?'

‘Blue fox, I think,' Jordan said. ‘Yes, blue fox.'

‘It's beautiful.'

‘Won't you let me give it to you?'

‘Hang on a tick,' she said on a slight laugh, ‘I'm just your cleaning woman. You don't hardly know me.

‘I don't want to embarrass you...'

‘You are, though.'

‘Sorry.'

‘I'll have to think about it.'

‘Was there anything else you fancied?'

‘I'll take this frock. There's one or two other things I like.'

‘Take anything you want,' Jordan said. ‘And think about the cape. It will still be there when you've made up your mind.'

She had taken off the cape and was standing with it over her arm, her free hand still moving in long strokes across the fur.

‘I ought to be going, before it gets dark.'

‘I've kept you late. I'll put it on your wages on Thursday.'

She laughed. ‘Nay, I reckon I've been paid enough.'

‘Would you like me to drive you home?'

‘You stop in and keep warm. How are you feeling now?'

Jordan put the back of his hand to his forehead. ‘I don't really know.'

‘You get a few whiskies inside you and have an early night. You'll likely feel better tomorrow.'

He sat for a long time at the kitchen table after she had gone, while the light faded in the sky beyond the garden. She had left in a casual, almost offhand manner which had taken him by surprise after the near-intimacy of their talk about the clothes. ‘I'll be off, then,' she had said, and before he could stir himself from the reverie in which he was peeling the maroon frock off her shoulders and freeing her breasts for the touch of his hands, the front door had closed behind her. He told himself that he had made her uneasy; that she lacked the social grace to handle the situation he had created. She would brood about its implications, wondering what his generosity implied, and – never crediting its spontaneity – from now on keep up her guard. Not that any of it really mattered, for they would not meet again unless he contrived it.

He asked himself if he could justify taking two more days off work so that he could be here when she came again, on Thursday. Could he risk scaring her off altogether by doing that? But he must, he told himself, build now on what had been started – on that curious apparently disinterested familiarity with which she had felt his temperature and sat on his bed; the way they had looked at his wife's clothes together; her coming down in the fur cape. Why had she done that if she had not coveted it and wanted to give him a chance to offer it to her?

At first he drank one cup of coffee after another, telling himself that if he did not move he could pretend that she was still in the house, moving about those empty rooms. Then he got up to fetch whisky and as he was coming back through the hall the telephone rang.

It was his secretary. He had not spoken to her earlier, but left a message in her absence. Now she asked how he was and if he thought he would be well enough to keep an appointment he had made for Thursday morning with the representatives of the unions.

Jordan's firm enjoyed good industrial relations, but increasingly sophisticated technology entailed keeping the unions sweetened. It was vital always that nothing should go by default.

‘If I feel like I do now,' he told Mrs Perrins, ‘I'll be in at the usual time tomorrow.'

 

The first thing he noticed when he came into the house after work on Thursday was her envelope lying on the hall table. With her wages he had slipped in a note saying, ‘Do please think seriously about the coat.'

Wondering why she had not telephoned, it occurred to him that she probably did not know his office number. Perhaps she would ring this evening. Perhaps, on the other hand, she was ill and could not leave the house.

It came to him now how little he knew about her. He had never made a note of the address she had given him and his only clue to where she could be found was the name of the pub where she had said she was working. It took him a few minutes, while he poured himself a drink and began preparing his evening meal, to bring that to mind.

He looked it up in the yellow pages, then got out a street map of the city and its suburbs. He did not like to think of her being short of money over the weekend, nor of the possibility that she was too ill to get out to the shops.

There had been no call from her by mid-evening, when he got his car out again and drove across the city. The Royal Oak was a big, square, late Victorian pub with two floors of letting rooms above the tall windows of the public rooms on the ground floor. Its best days had obviously finished when commercial travellers abandoned the train for the motor car and no longer spent three or four nights in one place. Now its badly lighted and greasily carpeted bars served as a local for the occupants of the score of streets of three-storey redbrick terraces which climbed the hill beside the main road – and, Jordan thought, only the seediest of them. He detested everything about the place, from the smell of stale beer and the garish wallpaper to the few people he could see – the lads in motor bike gear round the pool table under the wall-mounted television set; the shabby, earnestly gesticulating men drinking in the passage by the back entrance; and the shirtsleeved landlord who put his cigarette on the rim of an already full ashtray before coming to serve him. Jordan wondered when trade here justified Mrs Nugent's wages. He ordered a Scotch and looked with distaste at the glass it came in.

‘Does Mrs Nugent work here?' he asked when the man brought his change.

‘Audrey?'

‘Yes. Is she on tonight?'

‘She should be, but she sent word she was poorly.'

‘Does she live nearby?'

‘Are you looking for her?'

‘I'm a friend of hers from when she worked at the Beehive.'

The landlord had taken in his clothes and now an expression Jordan couldn't read flickered briefly in his pale eyes.

‘She lives in Birtmore Street.'

‘Where's that?'

‘Second on your left going back towards town. I couldn't tell you what number. Happen the wife'd know.'

‘I'd be grateful if you'd ask her.'

‘You're sure you're not after her for something else?'

‘I don't follow you,' Jordan said. Perhaps the publican did not know that Mrs Nugent had another job. How did Jordan know what compartments she chose to divide her life into? He had told the man enough of his business.

‘Some folk round here, y'know,' the landlord said, ‘they're no better than they ought to be.'

‘I'm only enquiring about Mrs Nugent,' Jordan said. ‘I'm not interested in anybody else.'

Jordan sipped his whisky. The man nodded at the glass as he put it down. ‘Same again?'

Jordan looked. There was still some left. ‘Go on, then.'

The man went away, taking the glass, and spoke into a house phone.

‘She'll be down in a minute.'

‘There doesn't seem to be enough work for a barmaid,' Jordan said.

‘That's where you're wrong. We get the young 'uns in disco nights.'

‘Is that the kind of thing you enjoy yourself?'

‘Times is bad. You've got to move with 'em. When Audrey and the missus are on together, I get in the public bar and leave 'em to it.'

He went to serve a youth in a studded leather jacket whose head was shaved to the bone up to the crown, where the hair sprayed out in lacquered vermilion fronds. When a woman with wispy fair hair, wearing a yellow hand-knitted jumper with short puffed-out sleeves appeared, she spoke to the man, who nodded his head in Jordan's direction.

‘Audrey, was it, you was asking about?'

‘I'd be grateful if you'd give me her address.'

‘From the social security, are you?'

‘I'd have her address if I were, wouldn't I?'

‘Does she know you're coming?'

‘I thought I'd see her here.'

‘You would have in the normal way, but she's poorly.'

‘So your husband says. He says she lives in Birtmore Street. What number is it?'

‘Twenty-seven.' She looked at him as though regretting the ready answer.

Jordan left the premises wondering if everyone who frequented them had things to hide. It depressed him to think of Audrey Nugent spending her evenings there, and depressed him yet more to reflect that she had probably more in common with that place and its clientele than she had with the Beehive, and even more so than with him himself.

He sat in his car for several minutes before starting the engine and considered the wisdom of what he'd set out to do. Would she welcome his visit or think he was prying? He did not, he admitted now, seriously think she was in need of the money – not in urgent need, or she would have taken steps to get it. Now that he knew her address, he could put it in the post. Yet if he turned back now he would only castigate himself for his indecisiveness. ‘Be honest,' he said out loud. ‘Own up. You've come because you want to see her.'

He drove in second gear back along the main road and turned up the hill when his headlights picked out the cracked nameplate on a garden wall. Some of the houses had been fitted with incongruous new doors and windows. Others showed neglect in broken gates and leggy, overgrown privet hiding the small squares of soil that passed for front gardens. One such was number twenty-seven, which Jordan found when he had traversed the length of
the street and kerb-crawled halfway down again. A dormer window had been let into the roof of this house and a dim light showed through the frosted-glass upper panels of the front door.

The money was in his pocket, still sealed in the envelope he had left for her with her name on it. All he need do was slip it through the letterbox. Then, he thought, she might, in that occasional direct way of hers, rebuke him later. ‘Why didn't you knock? What were you scared of? Coming all that way and going away without knocking and having a word.'

He got out of the car and approached the house, still undecided. He was standing there with the envelope in his hand when a shape loomed up between the source of the light and the door, and the door was suddenly flung open wide before him. A man coming out at speed stopped in his tracks as Jordan stepped back to avoid being shouldered aside.

‘Are you looking for somebody?'

‘I believe Mrs Nugent lives here.'

The man grunted, his glance raking Jordan in a quick appraisal. ‘Number three, first floor back.' He half turned and bawled up the stairs. ‘Audrey! Bloke to see you,' then plunged out past Jordan, leaving him facing an empty hallway, with an image of a strongly built man in his middle thirties, with close dark curly hair, a dark polo-neck sweater and a tweed jacket which Jordan, for some reason, was convinced had been handed on or picked up second hand.

He stepped into the hall and closed the door as a woman's voice called from above. ‘Who is it?' He hesitated to call back and began to mount the stairs, hearing as he went up the creak of boards on the landing. ‘Are you still there, Harry?' the voice asked. The woman's head and shoulders appeared over the rail and as she saw Jordan's shape she said sharply, her voice rising, ‘Who are you? What d'you want?'

‘It's all right, Mrs Nugent. It's only me – Mr Jordan.'

She straightened up and stepped back as he reached the landing and light fell on him from the open door of the room behind her.

‘What the heck are you doing here?'

Her question was almost insolent in its phrasing and abruptness. He would have reprimanded anyone at the works who spoke to him like that. But she was on her home ground: he was the intruder, and he had startled her.

‘I'm sorry,' Jordan said. ‘I came to bring your money and ask if you're all right.'

‘Oh, that could have waited.'

‘And when there was no word...'

She had backed into the doorway of her room and was standing with a hand on either jamb, as though denying him entrance, or – it suddenly struck him – looking, in the creased, floor-length plum-coloured housecoat, its neck cut in a deep V to a high, tight, elasticated waist which clung to her ribcage under her breasts, like a still from a Hollywood film noir of the 1940s.

‘You took a bit of finding,' Jordan said, and wondered at his exaggeration. Perhaps it was all of a piece with his new image of her as the femme fatale of a Fritz Lang movie.

‘How's that?'

‘I had to enquire at the pub.'