In the theatre bar they still talked, not hurrying over their drinks although an announcement had warned that the performance would begin in two minutes. There were more people in the bar than it could comfortably accommodate, crushed close against the bar itself and in the corners, some just beginning to make their way through the several doorways to the auditorium.
‘The performance will begin in one minute,’ the peremptory Tannoy voice reminded, and quite suddenly the bar was almost empty.
The barman was a character, gloomy-faced, skin and bone, bespectacled; lank like old string, he said himself. The barmaid was younger by quite a bit, and cheerfully plump.
‘Oh, look,’ she said. ‘That woman.’
One woman had not left with the others and showed no sign of doing so. She was in a corner, sitting at one of the few tables the bar provided. All around her, on the shelf that ran around the walls, on the seats of chairs, there were empty glasses. Her own was three-quarters full of gin and tonic.
‘Deaf, d’you think?’ the barman wondered and the barmaid remarked that the theatre was never a place for the hard of hearing, it stood to reason. It could be of course that a deaf-aid had been temporarily turned off and then forgotten.
The woman they spoke of was smartly dressed, two shades of green; a coat that was tweed on one side and waterproof on the other was draped over the other chair at her table. The remains of beauty strikingly lit her features, seeming to be there less casually, less incidentally, than beauty might have been earlier in her life. Touches of grey were allowed in her fair hair, adding a distinction that went with the other changes time had wrought.
‘Excuse me, madam,’ the barman said, ‘but the performance has begun.’
What a city London is! Jeffrey thought, staring up at the dark bronze features of Sir Henry Havelock beneath the sprinkling of pigeon droppings that lightened the soldier’s crown. The last of an April twilight was slipping away, the city at its best, as it also was – in Jeffrey’s view – when dawn was turning into day. In Trafalgar Square the traffic was clogged, a crawl of lumbering red buses and patient taxis, a cyclist now and again weaving through. People gathered at the crossing lights, seeming to lose something of themselves in each small multitude while obediently they waited to move forward when the signal came. Pigeons swooped above territory they claimed as theirs, and landed on it to waddle after tit-bits, or snapped at one another, flapping away together into the sky, still in dispute.
Jeffrey turned away from it all, from Sir Henry Havelock and the pigeons and the four great lions, the floodlights just turned on, illuminating the façade of the National Gallery. ‘Won’t do to keep her waiting,’ he murmured, causing two girls who were passing to snigger. He kept her waiting longer, for when he reached it he entered the Salisbury in St Martin’s Lane and ordered a Bell’s, and then called out that it had better be a double.
He needed it. Truth to tell, he needed a second but he shook away the thought, reprimanding himself: neither of them would get anywhere if he was tipsy. On the street again he searched the pockets of his mackintosh for the little plastic container that was rattling somewhere, and when he found it in his jacket he took two of his breath fresheners.
Evelyn drew back slightly from the barman’s elderly, untidy face, from cheeks that fell into hollows, false teeth. He said again that the performance had begun.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Actually, I’m waiting for someone.’
‘We could send your friend in if you liked to go on ahead. If you have your ticket. They’re sometimes not particular about a disturbance before a play’s got going.’
‘No, actually we’re just meeting here. We’re not going to the theatre.’ She read, behind heavily rimmed lenses, bewilderment in the man’s eyes. It was unusual, she read next, the thought flitting through his confusion. He settled for that, a conclusion reached.
‘You didn’t mind my asking? Only I said to my colleague where’s the need for both of them to be late if they have their tickets on them?’
‘It’s very kind of you.’
‘Thank you, madam.’
Near to where she sat he cleared the shelf of glasses, wiped it down with a damp grey cloth, moved on, expertly balancing the further glasses he collected. ‘Lady’s waiting for her friend,’ he said to the barmaid, who was washing up at a sink behind the bar. ‘They’re not attending the show tonight.’
Evelyn was aware of the glances from behind the bar. Speculation would come later, understandable when there was time to kill. For the moment she was no more than a woman on her own.
‘D’you think I could have another?’ she called out, suddenly deciding to. ‘When you have a minute?’
