Jeffrey turned to look and saw, several tables away, four smartly dressed people, one of the two women in a striped black and scarlet dress, the other with glasses, her pale blonde hair piled elaborately high. The men were darkly suited. Like people in an advertisement, he thought, an impression heightened by the greenery that was a background to their table. He knew the kind.
‘They’re friends of yours?’ he asked.
‘The woman in red and the man who’s smoking have the flat above mine.’
She’d sold some house or other, he heard; a family house, it then became clear. She’d sold it when her mother died and had bought instead the flat she spoke of, more suitable really for a person on her own. Pasmore the people she had suddenly recognized were called. She didn’t know them.
‘But they know you, eh?’
He felt quite genial; the diversion passed the time.
‘They’ve seen me,’ she said.
‘Coming and going, eh?’
‘That kind of thing.’
‘Coffee? Shall we have coffee?’
He signalled for a waiter. He would go when the wine was finished; usually he went then, slipping off to the Gents, then picking up his coat. Once there had been a complaint to the bureau about that but he’d said the woman had invited him to dinner – Belucci’s it was that time – and had become drunk before the evening finished, forgetting what the arrangement had been.
‘I’ll hold the fort,’ he said, ‘if you want to say hullo to your friends.’
She smiled and shook her head. He poured himself more wine. He calculated that there were four more glasses left in the bottle and he could tell she’d had enough. The coffee came and she poured it, still smiling at him in a way he found bewildering. He calculated the amount she’d had to drink: two gin and tonics he’d counted earlier, and now the wine, a good four glasses. ‘I wouldn’t even know the Pasmores’ name,’ she was saying, ‘except that it’s on their bell at the downstairs door.’
He moved the wine bottle in case she reached out for it. The pianist, silent for a while, struck up again, snatches from
‘It’s lovely here,’ she murmured, and Jeffrey would have sworn her eyes searched for his. He felt uneasy, his euphoria of a few moments ago slipping away; he hoped there wasn’t going to be trouble. In an effort to distract her mood, he said:
‘Personally, I shan’t be bothering the Bryanston Square Bureau again.’ She didn’t appear to hear, although that wasn’t surprising in the din that was coming from the piano.
‘I don’t suppose,’ she said, ‘you have a cigarette about you?’
Her smile, lavish now, had spread into all her features. She’d ticked
‘I used to once,’ she said. ‘When smoking was acceptable.’
She took a cigarette and he picked up a little box of matches with
‘How good that is!’ She blew out smoke, leaning forward as she spoke, cheeks flushed, threads of smoke drifting in the air. ‘I used to love a cigarette.’
She reached a hand out as if to seize one of his, but played instead with the salt-cellar, pushing it about. She was definitely tiddly. With her other hand she held her cigarette in the air, lightly between two fingers, as Bette Davis used to in her heyday.
‘It’s a pity you sold your car,’ he said, again seeking a distraction.
She didn’t answer that, but laughed, as if he’d been amusing, as if he’d said something totally different. She was hanging on his words, or so it must have seemed to the people who had recognized her, so intent was her scrutiny of his face. She’ll paw me, Jeffrey thought, before the evening’s out.
‘They’re gathering up their things,’ she said. ‘They’re going now.’
He didn’t turn around to see, but within a minute or so the people passed quite close. They smiled at her, at Jeffrey too. Mr Pasmore inclined his head; his wife gave a little wave with her fingers. They would gossip about this to the residents of the other flats if they considered it worthwhile to do so: the solitary woman in the flat below theirs had something going with a younger man. No emotion stirred in Jeffrey, neither sympathy nor pity, for he was not given to such feelings. A few drinks and a temptation succumbed to, since temptation wasn’t often there: the debris of all that was nothing much when the audience had gone, and it didn’t surprise him that it was simply left there, without a comment.
When a waiter came, apologetically to remind them that they were at a table in the no-smoking area, she stubbed her cigarette out. Her features settled into composure; the flush that had crept into her cheeks drained away. A silence gathered while this normality returned and it was she in the end who broke it, as calmly as if nothing untoward had occurred.
