Property prices were going up in and around the part of Powys Road at the top of the hill from Buckland Village. Further down towards the underground station, only a couple of hundred yards away, there stood a very serious-looking municipal block made of a material resembling petrified porridge. It trembled with various sorts of popular music for twenty hours out of the twenty-four and included within itself, as part of the ground floor of the very structure, a pub where football enthusiasts and others foregathered, chiefly though not exclusively on Saturday evenings. The houses in the rather attractive Victorian terrace opposite showed many a cardboarded-up ground-floor window and their little squares of front garden were mostly littered and overgrown. In the very far from quiet pub on that side, old-age pensioners in ones and twos sat on plump scarlet furniture among strange representations of rock stars, though nobody except those who actually went there knew who frequented, perhaps lived in, the derelict surgical-apparatus warehouse next door. But walk up to what was trying to call itself the Powys Trade Mart and you were in almost a different town, one with room for a garden shop, a health shop, a shop that sold nothing but wallpaper, a boot boutique, a pottery centre, a coffee shop where you could sit outside if you felt all right about having a mass of heavy traffic accelerate past you twice a minute from four yards off. Across the road were half a dozen more establishments with pale-painted fronts and, in one or two cases, abstruse names. Along the top of them new flats were going up.
The Café Cabana was situated rather towards the less desirable end of this development, that from which the noise of music from the hill was likely to become audible when the day’s traffic had died down and the wind was in the right direction. Not that that constituted any sort of factor to the café’s patrons except theoretically, in the intervals between its own tapes. Those patrons came mostly from the better parts of round about, office people, printers, shopkeepers at lunchtime including regulars like Mr Lalani from the pharmacy-cum-video-library next door, sometimes with a small circle of business colleagues. The evening trade was different. For one thing the Cabana was in the catchment area of a large bingo hall, mostly non-young women naturally but including two small obsessed men, probably widowers and ex-warrant-officers, and one large obsessed probable bachelor who had once quite frightened Desmond by claiming to have a winning system, not that he won on it. As a general clientele they were not what Desmond had hoped for and called for snowballs all round when somebody had had a good evening. But they turned up and they paid.
Desmond and a mate of his had got the premises off an unthrifty hi-fi dealer shortly before the upward trend started to take hold. The mate had not foreseen that trend and soon sold out to Desmond, who would obviously have kept his better advice to himself. It was in the middle of these dealings that Bunty, hardly the sort of person to fit into life at or around the Café Cabana, had finally moved out of their flat in nearby Lancaster Way. Not long after it had become more or less clear that this move was indeed final, Desmond had induced somebody called Philippa, who did the cooking at the café, to move in. After three or four months of the new arrangement he had found himself wishing now and then that she would move out again, but not hard enough or for long enough at a time to stir him into action. Philippa suited him in ways, or in one way at least, that Bunty did not, and then again she suited him not at all in ways that Bunty had. If, as he believed, he was cut out for the married state or something like it, why had he not done better in it so far? Working out what he really felt or intended about Bunty was too difficult, and about Philippa too boring, to absorb him for long. Most of the time he concentrated on running the café.
One of the troubles about doing that was that the place still had Philippa doing the cooking in it. When he first employed her he had thought her reasonably willing but rather slow to learn; now she seemed to him just slightly less willing, nothing to make a song and dance about, but had revealed herself beyond mistake as not in the business of learning at all. There was really not much for her to know and he had thought he had told her all of it in a couple of mornings, for instance the punters not liking moussaka (and no wonder) but liking shepherd’s pie with some canned tomatoes stirred in and just enough grated cheese on top to see, not forgetting a couple of slices of aubergine, and called moussaka, and no, no eggs and no, no bleeding garlic no matter what the bag in the Daily Express might say. In the same way duck-liver pâté à l’orange was not really that at all.
‘There’s your liver sausage, right?’ he would explain. ‘Two or three chicken livers if you must and some of the blood out of the bottom of the container. A Bovo cube in half a cup of water, a dob of gelatin to make it stand up and a teaspoon of blackcurrant jelly if you’re feeling energetic. Then on top of each ramekin an orange slice, a bay-leaf and not just an old bay-leaf but a Continental bay-leaf, in other words – wait … while … I … tell … you – a blanched bay-leaf dipped in oil and wiped so’s it’s shiny, and two peppercorns and a lot of parsley, all for looking at. That’s on top of each ramekin.
‘Just try and remember, darling, it’s no kindness to give ’em the real thing, they hate the real thing. What they like is getting what they’re used to and thinking they’re getting the real thing out of the appearance and whatever it’s called on the menu. And keep that bloody cat away from this lot unless you want to wind up clearing up after him.’
If Philippa listened half as hard as she talked she would have been all right. ‘You ought to be doing the food in the army. Or a prison. An oil-rig. Where it’s eat what’s there or go without.’
‘For your information I happen to know that the food on oil-rigs is gourmet standard, and I mean proper gourmet standard, not just half a bottle of Cyprus red poured into everything. It has to be to get the blokes there, because they can’t drink while they’re there. And yeah, in the army and prisons they call things by their right names.’
The salads were prepared behind the main kitchen on the old gutting-table, bolted to the floor, that went back far beyond the hi-fi era to that of a primeval fishmonger. Here a Jamaican girl of seventeen did rather better in her sphere than Philippa in hers, needing only occasional rather than continual bringings up to scratch. Simpler ones, too.
‘One thing we have a reasonably good supply of here, Sandra, is water. Another is time. But there is this third factor, persistence. Using enough water long enough on as it might be a lettuce-leaf to remove coal, iron filings, animal wastes and every other kind of shit. Then we can start thinking about cutting it up and putting it in a bowl.’
Sandra never said much to any of that. She was only putting in time at the Cabana till her sister-in-law got her into a job at the BBC, and in any case she had heard from Philippa that Desmond’s father had been a schoolmaster, as it was called in those days.
Now and then a wine rep tried his luck, not often making any impression. ‘You’re not going to undercut my house wines, so show me a bottle I can show,’ said Desmond for openers.
‘Everybody’s going mad about this one, last few cases at the old price. Aren’t you going to try it even?’
‘What, “a white wine with a hint of sweetness from the verdant foothills of Italy’s Apennine mountains”? What sort of way of going on’s that supposed to be?’
‘But it is a white wine with that from, you know, somewhere like that. What’s wrong with it? You’re always going on about them going for anything sweet.’
‘They don’t go for being told. You’d think the penny would have dropped by now. A full, fresh, fragrant, fruity, floral, flowery, flavoury one-of-those white wine with a touch of charm, elegance, you name it. Style. Now this I could take a couple of dozen of, at the introductory price, that is.’
‘We’re only supposed to—’
‘That very nice Burmese bloke down what’s he call it, the Bistro de Paris, he doesn’t know a blind thing about the wine trade. Well, you wouldn’t really expect it, would you? I happen to know he’s going out of his mind for a round, ripe, robust, reliable red, and lots of it. Isn’t it funny, I was going to give him a ring lunchtime anyway. Oh. Er, you know Philippa, don’t you?’
‘Telephone call for Mr Streatfield.’
‘Many thanks. Excuse me for a few moments. Oh, and while I remember, Clive, I wouldn’t make a big point out of that one’s bouquet next call you make. These southern-area wines, their nose takes a year or two to settle down. Big, yeah, but undisciplined.’
Philippa could get more expression into her face by leaving all expression out of it than anyone Desmond had met or could imagine. Her eyes did most of it, being wide-set and almost royal blue. In fact as far as somewhere about her top lip her face was really quite terrific from some angles, though it fell away rather in the lower part. She picked up again a bit lower down still. When he compared the way she looked with the way Bunty looked he had to admit that Philippa scored out, only she had none of the funny helpless look that had first attracted him to Bunty. If Philippa were ever to need helping it was hard to think of a department where money would not do the trick.
So as not to play her game with her now he asked in an extravagantly normal voice, ‘Did they say who was calling?’ She was moving away and ahead of him by then so in order to express her disapproval she had to do what she could with her bottom, which was not negligible.
‘Desmond? Harry here.’ This was not much of a surprise, nor were the excuses for not having got in touch before. Things were always preventing Harry from doing things. ‘Just an odd point I thought you ought to know about.’
It was hard to make out whether there was not much to tell or Harry was not telling much of it. One of the reasons it was hard was the eye-catching way Philippa was paying no attention to him from the part of the kitchen where the blender was, which was also the only part he could see and be seen from behind the bathroom-glass partition where what he called his office was. Nearly sure by the end of their conversation that he had fixed to see Harry later, he hung up and wandered across and watched her satisfying herself that the blender was clean or all there or something. He looked pretty ridiculous to himself not just walking straight back to the rep like a normal human being, but experience had taught him it was better to get it straight away than later. Or perhaps it was just the way he was made.
Any fool would have been ready for that. ‘Don’t tell me that bleeder’s sticking again.’
‘Oh no.’ She moved over to the stove with him following and then her looking again at him over her shoulder. ‘Something you wanted to tell me, was there?’
‘No. No, just no problems, are there?’
After asking him if there should be and what sort of problems and so on for a bit, she said, ‘Ahnkle Harrair quaite all raight, is hair?’
On their one brief meeting Harry had typically started trying to explain to Philippa his relationship to Desmond, but Desmond had had too much sense to. ‘Yeah, fine. I said I’d see him for a beer tonight early.’
‘Sahmthing the mattah with Buntair?’
‘He’ll be telling me that when he sees me, I should think. I don’t know.’
‘Am I invited to this exotic cocktail rendezvous?’
‘No.’
‘No, of course I’m far too common, aren’t I?’
‘That’s right, yeah.’ Quite recently he had found that it made very little difference if in the course of getting it from Philippa he handed some of it back. Just some of it.
‘I suppose it’ll be quite a small select gathering, will it, no brass bands or dancing girls or any of this?’
‘He didn’t say.’
‘Rathah a pitair reallair. Old Burlington Bertair Buntair in her topper might have enjoyed running her eyeglass over the chorus-line.’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’ Now, when the scene was on its last legs with him coming off a proper second best, he had to go and tell her, ‘And in future lay off those bloody authentic herbs if it’s all the same to you. Just the bouquet garni in the teabag, wave it around in the pot and take it out and forget it, okay?’
‘Always leave off while you’re losing,’ Desmond had several times been advised by his father, who despite having been a schoolmaster all his working life had known a thing or two. ‘Never have the last word on anything. If you let them have the last word, no matter what as long as it’s the last and a word, then they’re happy. Even if it’s “so what” or “I dare say” or “hark at him”. Even your mother. Well, I say happy.’
‘Funny way of showing it.’
‘Ready to let the whole thing go. Out of the goodness of their heart and don’t you forget it.’
Desmond put some of this to Harry when they met later in the King’s. ‘So I let her have her say over the tie, didn’t I?’
‘What, that tie? It looks perfectly reasonable to me from any point of view.’
‘Well, it would do. The way she sees it, Philippa, she reckons it’s an old-school tie or as good as. I’m supposed to think it looks like one or think you might think it was one, that’s if you follow her reasoning.’
‘I must say, even for a woman …’
‘Harry, you’ve had two wives. The other part of it is it’s a tie at all.’
‘What?’
‘A tie in the first place, don’t you know. The way she looks at it—’
‘Ah, now I’m beginning to disentangle the thread of her ratiocination. You’re wearing a tie so as to be suitably upper-class for this exclusive resort of West-End clubmen with its beeswaxed mahogany panelling and historic oil-paintings.’
‘Spot-on, Harry. Actually I mean precisely, old bean.’
‘Has she ever been in here?’
‘Oh yeah. For instance one time I brought her to meet Bunty. Went off all right too. Well, not too bad. Well, anyway. Yes, she’s seen it.’
‘And no doubt you’ve been known to wear a tie at other times?’
‘Like evenings at work if there’s anybody coming in.’
Harry nodded and sighed. Desmond looked at him and also sighed. Then Harry said, ‘Of course, you know I think old Brahms had it worked out as nicely as most.’
‘The Brahms with the symphonies, is that?’
‘That’s the one. He went to the same tart once a week for twenty-five years or so, then switched to her daughter on the same arrangement for as much longer as he needed.’
‘M’m,’ said Desmond. He seemed unconvinced. ‘Where was this?’
‘Christ, I don’t know. Vienna, Berlin, Prague, one of those.’
‘Right. And it’d be, what, a hundred years ago?’
‘That sort of time. He smoked a lot of cigars too.’
‘M’m. Mind you, there’s always Liszt as well, isn’t there?’
‘Is there? According to what I remember he used to knock the birds off like ducks in a shooting-gallery, if that’s the phrase I’m looking for.’
‘Forget it. No, that’s right, yeah. Vicar, wasn’t he, Liszt?’
‘What? Well, yes, I suppose you could call him that, Abbé Liszt. Yes. What about it?’
Desmond shook his head and sighed again. ‘You know that Philippa, she thinks I went after Bunty and married her because she was posh.’
‘So I’ve gathered. I wouldn’t call her posh exactly.’
‘All right, a bit posh, you know what I mean, compared with Philippa. But I didn’t, did I?’
‘Well – I don’t think you did, not now. Not that I’d call it the biggest bloody atrocity in the world if there had been a touch of that to it once upon a time. Anyway, what of it? If you say you didn’t you didn’t. Simple as that.’
‘Well, no, Harry, er, that’s just it, it’s not as simple as that, that’s the whole problem. Sometimes I get to thinking, perhaps it was that without me knowing. Perhaps it’s still that and I can’t see it. Perhaps, perhaps there’s something in what Philippa says.’
‘Listen, sonny,’ said Harry, glaring and grating a little. ‘We do quite enough we know the reasons for without having to start worrying about what we do that we don’t know the reasons for, in other words when we do something for a reason we don’t know about it’s the same morally as not doing it for that reason. Shit, but you see what I mean.’
‘Yeah. Thanks.’
‘To put it more simply, you start thinking there’s something in what Philippa says and you’re fucked.’
‘Now you’re talking. Same again?’
‘All right. Bit early in the evening, isn’t it, to have got down to this kind of thing? Not that I’m objecting, my dear fellow. Perennial fount of interest.’
‘You and I don’t seem to get a lot in the way of later in the evening, do we? I’ll just get these in now before she comes.’
There was a gap at the counter in a loose knot of middle-aged men all wearing different types and colours of hat, which somehow emphasized the solitary look of each. You often got a completely different lot in after work from the midday crowd, people were always telling Desmond in pubs he happened to go into, but to him they all tended to fall into the same categories, like no-hopers, louts and often sheer kids, meaning young kids, also females who brought the kids into the place with them as one way of demolishing another bit of blokes’ territory, a more wholesale way than just coming in themselves. There was a kid, a fat little bugger in a sort of beret, lolling on a stool at the bar now, trying to kick his leg by accident. Of course when you got to Harry’s age you were out of the way of most of it. Not all of it, though.
The group of fellows in hats might have been more cronies of Kenneth the landlord, or more likely he just pointed his head their way when the mood took him to unburden himself. ‘Not that I’ve ever been one to mince my words,’ he said, thereby giving Desmond a faint sense of unreality. ‘In my experience it does nothing but harm. So – when I see a lime bitch, I tell her so. I say you’re a lime bitch. In my opinion half the trouble in this world comes from people not calling things by their right names. Two of a kind, they are. Which makes you what, I asked him,’ and here the landlord turned his matt-surface eyes on Desmond, ‘a lime bastard pure and simple; yes, sir.’
Desmond decided to give life best and take off while he could still speak. At least Philippa had not been there to miss the point but get the score. They took everything from how it looked and sounded, like dogs.
‘More deglin a mall,’ said one of the hatted men a moment later.
‘Ass not same much,’ added another, and a third said something about seem boh sides, so perhaps they really were cronies of some sort after all.
‘Harry keeping well, is he?’ the landlord asked Desmond in the course of serving him, and proceeded, ‘I don’t know how he does it with all that on his back, I really don’t.’
‘All what on his back?’
Perhaps encouraged now by his first clear sight of the controversial tie and its shirt and jacket, Kenneth leaned gradually and confidentially forward, then, seeming to glimpse or recall something of importance overlooked, straightened up again and moved off, his right hand raised as if in farewell or benediction but actually, as Desmond saw when he turned away with the drinks, to reach out to replace a newly empty bottle of Southern Comfort that hung inverted as one of a row in front of his crowded shelves.
Nothing more onerous had happened to Harry in the meantime than that Bunty had joined him, as planned but a few minutes ahead of time. Desmond tried not to notice her starting to struggle up from the little round table, remembering not to and resettling herself. At the same time she reached out and over and gave him a kiss that muffed everything except a dab on the ear and a flash of a smile.
‘I’m sorry I’m early,’ she started at once, ‘I was telling—’
‘No you’re not,’ said Harry. ‘You’re spot-on to the second.’
‘It’s because I—’
‘It doesn’t matter. Nobody minds. Now you’re having a glass of white wine. No you’re not, you’re having a Campari soda, I remember. Typist’s drink. However. Don’t move from here.’
When Harry had squeezed and pushed out they told each other enthusiastically how marvellous he was, marvellous both considering and anyway. She was wearing a not very successful kind of informal nurse’s rig and clearly found the collar about a quarter of an inch too high for her, and Desmond tried to remember if he ever noticed things like that about other girls. It crossed his mind that it might do her good to take up smoking – no, give her something to do, but then she would always be finding more things to apologize for about it.
‘Of course, he’s very fond of you, you know,’ he said, trying not to make this sound like a good or any other sort of Harry’s marvellousnesses.
‘Well, he took me on, didn’t he, when he—’
‘No, I mean he’s concerned about you, he worries about you.’
‘There’s no need to worry about me.’
‘Well, no, all right, maybe not, not at this moment, but it didn’t look like that the other day, did it for instance?’
‘You mean those silly label things Popsy was supposed to have been going to go round sticking on all the furniture that belonged to her? But that was all just a stupid misunderstanding, she was in a bad mood and didn’t really realize what she was saying, I explained all that. I’m sorry you were upset but there was absolutely no need.’
Desmond started gearing himself up to protest that he had not been upset, that it would not have mattered if he had been, that the question was neither here nor there, and if he had ever got that far might have tried to tell her that Popsy’s buying of the identity stickers, described to him by Harry, witnessed to something more than any kind of mood, and how would it be if everyone carried on like that, and look at the mischief that might have been done all round, and catch him opening his bleeding trap in future. ‘Oh that’s good, I’m glad to hear it,’ he said. He remembered as a boy reading in an encyclopedia where it had said that for every word in the Bible a million other words had been written on the subject – on that of the Bible as a whole or in some part, presumably, rather than on each successive word of its text. A tough one to shoot down, had been an early thought of his on the point, followed not so many years later by a supplementary to the effect that in the human or material sphere the nearest comparable disparity was between the number of words that women said and the number that would have to have been said about what they had said in order to produce a full or clear or straight account of any matter. But he had not expected to find that statistic in any book at all. ‘Just a fuss about nothing,’ he said.
She caught a bit there, but only said, ‘Is this, us getting together, was it both your ideas, I mean yours and Harry’s?’
‘Well, Harry rang me—’
‘Of course it doesn’t make any difference really, I only just wondered whether perhaps one of you had some special reason for getting me along, some particular thing you wanted to ask me or tell me.’ And if anybody had, it was not going to be about anything like her winning the ten days for two in the three-star hotel in Tenerife or even the 98-piece set of handcrafted Georgian hallmarked silverware in display cases. Not old Bunty. She knew that much.
‘No, just Harry was thinking it was a long time since he’d seen you and if I was free and you were free we could the three of us have a couple here and perhaps slip over the road later for a bite at Odile’s or …’
‘No, I’m sorry Dezzie darling, such a lovely idea but I’m terribly sorry but I simply can’t, in fact I can only stay a few minutes, just, just for the one drink and then off.’
‘But you said you were going to be—’
‘That’s why I had to pop in early like this, just to say hallo.’
‘Harry’s going to be very disappointed,’ said Desmond, wondering as he said it why it sounded so untrue. ‘It means a lot to him, keeping up with how you are, knowing you’re getting on okay, all that.’
‘Oh, all that. But all that’s always the same, there’s never anything to report about all that. What have you got there, can I have a sip? I don’t mind – anything. Listen darling, before Harry comes back, he’s a dear man, and I’m fond of him, and I think he’s fond of me, but I don’t think he really wants to hear, not really, what I’m doing or how I lead my life or anything really about me, how I actually spend my time. You know, get through the day.’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake, he’s always on at me asking—’
‘Please shut up darling just for two seconds – he’d hate to be told about my life because it’s all to do with her. That’s right. It’s no good, Dezzie.’
He noticed on the wall behind her the tinted cinema still, showing a helmeted gladiator with a short sword ready to plunge into the throat of his fallen opponent, while in the background an emperor in purple toga and laurel crown dramatically lowered his thumb. Desmond said rather mechanically, ‘Nobody’s going to ask you anything or talk about anything you don’t want to talk about.’
‘And what’s Harry going to talk about, what are you going to tell me, look what an interesting time the rest of the world’s having, you know, where the real people are, doing what people are supposed to do, getting married and having families and the young mums getting together, and taking the kids to school and all going on holiday, and all the couples in the pub and everywhere, and shouldn’t I be trying to take things seriously for a change and behaving like a grown-up woman instead of, well, instead of not. Being reasonable.’
‘There’s your conscience talking now, I suppose you realize.’
‘Oh, God knows I’ve got plenty on my conscience but nothing to do with that, not ways of living your life or anything. All people.’
‘Harry would never hint at the least suspicion of what you were saying. The whole thing’s your imagination, that part. Nothing but you reading into it.’
‘Every word he says brings up the whole issue whether he means it to or not, he can’t help it. Yes, it probably is me as well, and I can’t help it either. Well, every word that’s more than like reading out of the newspaper. Like my mother.’
‘Like me too, I dare say.’
As they spoke the last couple of phrases two people got up and left and another two or three squirmed themselves some distance round the luxurious powder-blue banquette, so that Desmond was able to move over beside Bunty and be something more like alone with her, even in the noisy pub. He half rested his arm against hers and at once felt as if they had just exchanged many more in number and far more intimate and affectionate words than they had in fact. If she felt the same she failed to respond, not moving herself away but speaking in an immediately harder tone.
‘Of course one wouldn’t expect Harry to give more than a selection of whatever he’d call it, ordinary life, normal life. Nothing about the wives left to bring up the kids on their own, or the girl-friends dropped like a hot potato after ten years with a couple of thousand quid because the chap’s decided it’s his duty to keep his marriage together after all. Or all the careers given up or forgotten about or just … laughed away. He’s not going to go into any of that, not a man like Harry.’
Desmond had never heard Bunty talk like this before, in style or sense. ‘Have I said something?’ he asked, as the first one he happened to think of out of the four that also included his not having said something, his having done something and his not having done something.
‘Saying something won’t make any difference.’
Routine stuff now, though still not her brand. To his instantaneous regret he said, ‘Now you sound like Popsy talking, at least—’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake can’t it ever be me talking! You’re all the same, nobody can ever think of anything for themselves, it’s always got to have come from someone else. We do just occasionally have an idea of our own, you know. Can’t you see …’
Her voice stopped with as complete a break as if a hand had been clapped over her mouth, or more realistically as if she had caught sight of Harry returning belatedly to their corner as he now was. He had just had time to say something not intended to be momentous about slow service when Popsy appeared in her turn, soon enough to effect briefly the larger illusion that the two might have been hob-nobbing at the bar for the last couple of minutes.
She was wearing an ungathered greyish dress suitable for a stage production designed to suggest some unlocated limbo about the time of the Dark Ages. Taking from his unresisting hand the glass Harry had been carrying, she said, ‘Ah, a Campari soda if I mistake not – a sadly underrated concoction,’ and drank the top half of its contents in a single swallow. ‘Now I’m well enough aware that a lot of you men rather look down on it, in fact I once heard a well-known male science-fiction writer describe it as an innocuous fucking drink, but let me say this to you – try one when you’re putting your feet up after a hot Saturday morning’s shopping and twenty minutes’ standing on the 23, preferably in a tall glass with not too much ice and an orange-slice – and you’ll find it really coming into its own.’ She raised the forefinger of her free hand. ‘Not that it’s not got a lot to be said for it at other times. Like now.’ Having drained the glass she put it down on the small table near her, ‘Well, it’s been fun, but now we really must be going. Harry. Desmond.’ Popsy nodded to them one after the other in German-American fashion and stood courteously aside to let Bunty depart first.
Almost at the last moment, and for almost the only time since Popsy’s arrival, Bunty’s glance met Desmond’s. She looked troubled, upset, any of those that any thickhead could have seen and named – not taken by surprise, though. And accusing. He could not make that out at all. The people round about noticed something had happened rather than the event itself, not so much the stroke as the leave. But not for long either way.
‘Would you like to start?’ he said.
‘What about Christ on a bicycle? I think this is where we move to the bar, don’t you?’
‘Sorry about that,’ said Desmond when they had done so.
‘You’d do as well to save your breath for apologizing for the weather, but thanks most awfully just the same. What do you want to do, after the next couple, that is? Not go home? Go home?’
‘Yeah, but not for a bit. I’ve got the feeling me and Philippa are due for a trial separation. Ninety-nine years would come out about right. You know, like a lease. How much of that bloody fandango do you reckon was prearranged?’
‘Well, there again you might as well ask me to simultaneously pinpoint the position and measure the speed of a subatomic particle, but yes, most of it.’
‘I was hoping you’d say the sheer speed and ruthlessness of it took poor old Bunty properly by surprise. Or even that …’
‘Come on, you can tell me.’
‘All right, that she wasn’t actually absolutely dead certain, not like a certainty, er, that Popsy would come popping in out of the blue, just it was on the cards, and then when … No.’
‘How old are you, Desmond?’
‘Thirty.’
‘Well, there we are, then. She’s a woman, you see. Which is a proud and yet a wretched thing.’
‘Some bleeding quotation, beyond a doubt.’
‘Of course wretched was a much stronger word in those days. Base, contemptible.’
‘And what days would those have been, Professor?’
‘Whenever they were is the answer to that. And if you mean do I think Bunty went along hook, line and bloody sinker with all that stuff, no I don’t. But not all willy-bloody-nilly either.’
‘I took a bit of anti-man crap off her just before.’
‘That was her radar picking up a blip from the homing Popsy. Now I take it we are having another here.’
‘Being like that must mean they’ve got a bit of man in them, right?’ asked Desmond later.
‘I don’t know about right. But yes, in the sense of you might as well go on.’
‘Well then, why doesn’t that make them that bit more reasonable? Or less unreasonable?’
‘Well, just off the cuff, it gives them more to go on about and so to be unreasonable about. And, still off the cuff, it’s more queer they’ve got in them than man in the normal sense.’
‘But hang on a minute, that ought to make them fancy blokes.’
Harry made no reply to this, perhaps finding any beyond him, but a couple of minutes afterwards he was saying, ‘I suppose you wouldn’t happen to know what they get up to, would you?’
‘Actually I’ve never asked.’
‘No, I meant in general, you know, when a pair of them get together, what they actually …’
‘I’m afraid I’ve no idea, no more than anybody else.’
‘I just thought you might have happened to hear something from someone in the way one does.’
‘No.’
‘But I mean after all you must admit it’s an interesting point on intrinsic grounds.’
‘Maybe to some.’
‘Sorry. No I really am very sorry, Desmond, that was thoroughly tactless and vulgar of me.’
After another minute or so of talk, Desmond said, ‘I’ll get her back.’
Harry made no reply to that either.