‘What is it, then, Arnold? More autographed photos urgently requested by my sex-crazed fans?’ Gareth Trisall joked—or half joked—as he stepped quickly into the office of the Eels Supporters Club, his bent arms moving like powerful pistons. He had taken the stairs two at a time.
‘Well, yes, it’s something like that, Gareth,’ answered Edingly uneasily, getting up from the desk under the upper-floor window. ‘Never had a player whose picture was as much in demand as yours. As yours,’ he added in an oily tone.
‘Never had a player from the Rhondda Valley before either, so there’s your reason,’ Trisall offered lightly as he moved about the room, glancing at the framed pictures of past players. He generally found it difficult to stand still.
‘We got a fresh batch of prints in this morning. If you could sign three dozen to be going on with? They’re over here ready for you.’ Edingly stepped across to a table. ‘Didn’t want to hold you up, but as you said you were having a session with the physio …’
‘Sign a gross if you want. All good for the image.’ The Welshman looked at the time. ‘Seriously, I’m OK for ten minutes. Not being picked up till quarter past.’ His elbows were now making energetic circular movements as though he was in some way preparing for a take-off, not for writing his signature.
‘That’s a lovely young lady driving you today, if you don’t mind me saying so, Gareth.’
‘Ah, Sara, that is. Gorgeous, isn’t she?’ the Welshman replied as he pulled out the chair and seated himself at the table. ‘You could say worth losing your licence for, as well.’
The two had met briefly an hour before this as Trisall had been getting out of the Porsche at the players’ entrance to the south stand. Edingly had made it seem like a chance encounter, but he had checked earlier with the team’s physiotherapist and had known that the other man was coming in to the treatment room at five.
‘Very nice of you to come over,’ said Edingly, still in his most ingratiating tone, even though he deplored Trisall’s last sentiment, and the reason for his having lost his driving licence in the first place: Edingly was teetotal.
The older man’s fawning was understandable. There was no obligation for the players to help the financially independent Supporters Club in the way that Trisall was doing now. The Football Club had its own official shop open on match days to the general public on the ground floor of the south strand. All the profits from that went to central funds. In a sense the Supporters Club shop was competition, except it carried a much smaller selection of merchandise and only catered for its own members.
‘Well, I always believe in helping the official supporters,’ the player said condescendingly. ‘Not to mention the official supporters’ wives and daughters,’ he completed with a chuckle. He was well aware that his photograph was mostly requested by women. He continued to inscribe his name with painstaking and deliberate strokes of a ballpoint pen, pausing to admire each print in turn both before and after it had been embellished.
‘Must be a problem sometimes, being a football star like you are, Gareth. Idolized by the ladies. Must mean you’re subjected to unfair temptations. A lot of them too. Temptations,’ Edingly concluded in a pious tone.
Trisall looked up, wondering if he was being ribbed intentionally. It seemed from the expression, though, that the words had been in earnest. Of course, Edingly was known to be a Bible-thumper of the old school. Trisall’s grandfather had been the same, which is why the young man stopped himself in time from making a ribald reply.
‘Got to be strong-minded, Arnold, of course,’ he said self-righteously. It was true too, he mused to himself. It took expert timing and good planning to get the best out of the temptations on offer, especially if you wanted to avoid wasting any of them. Being greedy got you nowhere, except into a muddle.
‘Would Stan Bodworski have the same problem, you think?’ Edingly thrust both hands into his trouser pockets where they became frenetically active in jangling keys and loose change.
‘Stan? Well, he’s married for a start,’ said Trisall, surprised at the question. ‘Good Catholic too. Stays on the strait and narrow, I’d say. Like I will when I stop being a bachelor.’ There was no harm in wishful thinking, especially in front of a serious chapelgoer like Edingly.
‘That’s what I thought. About Stan, I mean. Wouldn’t cheat on his wife, would he?’
‘Oh no. Not a chance.’ The reply was guarded as well as firm because the Welshman wasn’t sure what the other was getting at.
‘Marriage would be sacred to him? Sacred?’ Edingly repeated on a rising note, leaning forward, and balancing on his toes.
‘No doubt of that. None at all.’ There was no harm in giving a mate a clean bill. Anyway, Stan deserved it. Trisall applied himself to another signature—mouth open, pointed tongue protruding and assiduously matching the upward and downward strokes of the pen tip.
‘Would you think Mrs Bodworski is the same?’
Trisall stopped writing and looked up. ‘Yes. Don’t you then?’
The jangling in Edingly’s trouser pockets reached a sort of crescendo. ‘There’s a problem there, Gareth. Something I thought I ought to mention to you, like. You being Stan’s friend. Friend.’
Ian Crayborn responded to the first Lady Bims’s nervous wave by hurrying across the theatre restaurant to the corner table where she was sitting waiting for him. She was in a blue silk dress, a mink stole, and a state of growing, almost paralytic apprehension.
‘Sorry to be late, Joyce. The Guildford traffic’s appalling at this time of the evening,’ he explained, pressing her hand, hesitating before kissing her chastely on the cheek, then doing the same on the other cheek, but less chastely and even more clumsily. Tonight, he told himself, he really had to stop behaving like a celibate middle-aged clergyman engaged on good works, and be more the debonair widower accountant entertaining an unattached female client.
‘Oh, but you’re not late. Not really. I was early. There’s plenty of time before the play starts.’ She tumbled out the words breathlessly, anxious to prevent his feeling he was in the wrong, even though it was nearly half an hour after the time they had arranged to meet here in the ground-floor Harlequin Restaurant.
The last fifteen minutes she had spent in a state of acute uncertainty, concerned that their rendezvous might have been in Figaro’s, the theatre’s other restaurant upstairs, not knowing whether she should go up the two floors to look for him—and then possibly miss him in the process.
She was confused again now because she hadn’t expected him to greet her with kisses, even formal ones, which was why she had appeared to stiffen at the first, and failed to turn her face quickly enough for the second. She was upset with herself still for arriving before him, and ages earlier than she need have done. As it was, she had sat in the car in the car park for ten minutes before coming in, looking at her watch every twenty seconds, frisking the edges of her blonde-tinted hair, and checking the state of her eye shadow.
Of course she should have allowed for him to be late. He had driven fifteen miles in the rush hour, straight down from his office in Kingston-upon-Thames. She was sure now that he would have preferred to dine after the performance: it was she who had opted to eat first.
‘So long as I haven’t kept you waiting too long.’ He smiled, still standing beside her chair. ‘What a nice dress you’re wearing.’
‘Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.’ She overdid the expressions of gratitude because she simply wasn’t used to compliments. ‘I’m so sorry, I really should have insisted we had dinner afterwards,’ she went on, wallowing in her guilt. ‘Then there’d have been time to come to the house first.’ Immediately she wondered if she should have said that, whether he would take it as a forward sort of suggestion. She had met his wife who had died four years before: she had been a very proper person. Both sides of Joyce’s mouth twitched twice, involuntarily and in unison. ‘Except you’d be passing the Yvonne Arnaud to get to me, and that would be silly really … with the traffic,’ she finished more flustered than before, and with one hand going to her neck because there might be red patches gathering at the base of it. Joyce’s neck was rather plump, like the rest of her.
The Yvonne Arnaud was the name of the Guildford theatre, an angular, concrete building squashed on to a cramped site beside the River Wey at the bottom of the town. It was a regular showcase for new plays on pre-London runs. Joyce Bims, the divorced wife of Sir Ray Bims, lived in a cottage by herself in a village five miles to the south-east, along the Horsham road. This was her first genuine date with a man since her marriage had been dissolved nearly three years ago.
She had known Ian Crayborn since long before he had become her accountant after the divorce. He had been one of the accountants her ex-husband had used from the early days.
The divorce settlement had been a quite generous one. She had nothing to grumble about really, that’s if you didn’t count a continuing sense of utter rejection, and a total loss of confidence because your husband left you after twenty-eight years for a younger, more sophisticated, sexier woman.
Joyce’s financial affairs didn’t need a lot of professional attention—it was only her income tax return that she really couldn’t manage herself. But Ian Crayborn kept an eye on her little investment portfolio as well. All her holdings were in blue chip companies. Ray Bims had made shares over to her as part of the settlement.
She loosened the stole a little, still not sure whether she should have worn it, whether her full-length mink wouldn’t have been better. She could keep the stole on, though, and arrange it so that it did more to disguise her fleshy shoulders. She had spent the afternoon in her bedroom trying on other outfits. The stole had gone well with the blue V-necked dress. She didn’t have all that many things in what she thought of as her classic collection of good clothes—nor really money that she could justify using to add to it. And there were so few places these days where you could wear real fur, not without risking insults from the animal rights people. The Queen wore furs still, of course, but she was always protected. Within reason, Joyce supported animal rights, only she was bitter about restraints on wearing fur. Her minks were a visible sign of the social status she used to enjoy—of the wealth she and her husband had built through sheer hard work, her hard work just as much as his. She needed all the props available to bolster her painfully diminished and never very strong sense of self-assurance.
‘Anyway, you can stop worrying about me, Joyce,’ said her companion after he had seated himself opposite her, and breaking in on the private perturbations exercising her mind. ‘We’re both here safely, and we’re going to enjoy ourselves. Have you got a drink? No?’ He snapped his fingers in the direction of a dreaming waitress. The woman came over to the table immediately. This pleased Joyce. She knew that Ian Crayborn wasn’t demonstrative by nature, but she did like a man to be quietly assertive—not bull at a gate aggressive like Ray, of course: God forbid.
Watching Ian across the table later, after they had got their drinks and were both studying the menu, she was thinking again that if he had come to the house for her, he’d have had to drive her home afterwards. She had realized that when he had first offered to collect her. She had turned down his suggestion because she had panicked, not knowing how she would handle things when he brought her back—whether she should ask him in for a drink, or a coffee, or even invite him to stay the night, and if that, on what basis. Her stomach gave a little tremble when she considered the last point again.
It was all very well for her twenty-six-year-old daughter Liza, her only child, to say she should be bolder in her relations with men, playing everything by ear. Liza was a physiotherapist who had been living with a bearded vet in Liverpool for the last eighteen months. Joyce failed to understand why they didn’t marry, but she understood even less why at forty-nine years of age she herself didn’t know how to promote an intimate, enduring relationship with an available, desirable man.
Ian Crayborn, shortish and square, was older than Joyce, but not much older. He wasn’t exactly handsome, or athletic, except she knew he played golf. Being a little overweight suited him, and if he had lost most of his hair, his expression was kind, and the heavily framed glasses added to his naturally benign and sage appearance. Of course, she couldn’t help comparing him with her ex-husband—much as she tried not to. The two were about the same age, but Ian looked older and perhaps a touch less lively. She was sure though that he was kinder and more cultured than Ray.
If only she knew how he felt about her. It was too easy for her to read more into tonight’s invitation than might have been intended. If he cared about her sexually (her stomach gave another little tremble at the thought), why had it taken him so long to do anything about it? Of course, he could have been too shy up to now, or there could have been someone else he was interested in … or … or tonight could just be a duty airing for a not very important client.
The last and desolating hypothesis prompted her involuntarily to push the stole even further off her half-naked shoulders in a desperate gesture of reckless abandon.
‘Really, we should have done this before,’ he said suddenly, beaming at her over the top of the menu. ‘My fault, of course. I so enjoy your company. But to tell you the truth, I suppose I’ve been shy about asking you.’
There was a fresh flutter inside her, but of hope this time, not foreboding, and in her breast not her stomach, or somewhere in between. It was what she had wanted him to say. ‘Oh, that’s silly,’ she replied. ‘No, not silly … I mean, I like you so much, Ian. And we’ve both …’ She swallowed without getting out the next word, feeling an uncontrollable blush rising to her cheeks.
‘Both been left alone?’ he completed for her.
‘That’s right,’ she whispered.
The hopes for expanding the magic moment were very nearly destroyed by the return of the waitress who demanded, through a heavy cold: ‘Are you rethy to orther dither?’
‘Not yet. Later.’ Crayborn waved the girl away without taking his eyes off Joyce. ‘I wasn’t sure. About your being lonely too, I mean. I’ve always imagined you must have lots of friends.’
‘I have. Most of them married. They only do things in twos. Or multiples of twos,’ she continued with feeling, her confidence improving. It was marvellous to find herself talking to a kindred spirit.
He nodded. ‘That applies to my friends as well, I’m afraid.’
‘But it’s so different for a man. I mean, you can, well, take the initiative. With … with the opposite … sex.’
‘I’m not very good at taking the initiative. Not in that way. Well, as you can see.’ Both his hands lifted in despair, before coming together again on top of the menu. ‘God knows how long it’s taken me to ask you out.’ He leaned forward, screwing up his face. ‘The other thing is, I’ve always felt you were too used to the high-flying life. With Ray. I’m a bit er … low level by comparison.’
‘But you’re much nicer.’ It was a very intimate compliment for her to have paid him, and she was surprised not to feel more embarrassed about it afterwards. ‘Have you heard, Ray’s in trouble?’ she added, in a sterner and concerned tone.
‘Yes, I talked to him on the phone yesterday. On business.’ He hadn’t intended to raise the subject of Ray Bims’s trouble himself.
‘I didn’t think you worked for him any more.’
‘I don’t. Not very much. He doesn’t retain the firm. Not since he sold Bims DIY really. But I look after the accountancy work for the Eels. I’m on the Eels board, of course. Ray arranged that. When he bought the club.’
‘So do you think it’s true? The terrible things they’re saying about him in the paper?’
He shrugged. ‘Let’s hope not. We’ll have to wait and see. I only talked to him about the Eels. I didn’t mention anything else, and he didn’t either.’
‘Well, if he’s in a real mess, I hope the second Lady Bims is loyal and supportive. Not just a pretty face. Not just a fair weather wife,’ Joyce ended pointedly, her acerbic and quickened delivery leaving no doubt where her own opinion lay.
‘I know which of you I’d rather have by me in a storm, Joyce. And your face is prettier too,’ he responded gallantly.
‘Flatterer,’ she said, blushing again and wanting to believe him.
‘I mean it.’ His hand reached across the table to squeeze hers. ‘Have another sherry.’
‘I’d love one, but I shouldn’t. I’m driving, remember?’
‘How silly for both of us to hold back on the booze,’ he countered. ‘Tell you what, why don’t you leave your car here for the night? Isn’t there a bus you could get in tomorrow to collect it? Then I could drive you home after the show.’ He was still holding her hand, more tightly than before.
‘Yes, there is a bus,’ she said, putting her other hand over his—rather awkwardly. ‘What a good idea. But won’t that make it very late for you?’
His eyes held hers. ‘I don’t care if I don’t get home till morning.’
‘Oh, well, in that case, why not …’ her own gaze lowered, ‘why not spend the night. I’ve a spare bedroom,’ she added quickly, making herself look up again.
‘Wouldn’t it be a lot of trouble? Having me?’
Her well-developed cleavage heaved charmingly. ‘Oh, no trouble at all. I’d feel so much better if you stayed. Really I would.’
The waitress had reappeared. ‘Are you rethy yet?’ she asked urgently, and with effort.
‘I think so,’ said Ian Crayborn, removing his hand gently from across the table.
‘Oh yes,’ said Joyce with a genuine enthusiasm unrelated to the mere prospect of food. The tip of her tongue ran back and forth across her upper lip. Her eyes were now meeting his unblinkingly. ‘I’m ready if you are, Ian,’ she said, thinking of her daughter’s advice, and consciously playing things by ear.