OUTSIDE Toby’s door, I hesitated. People asleep are so vulnerable; I didn’t want to disturb him too suddenly. Holding the door handle, I savoured in advance the small luxury of waking him. I wondered if he would see at once that something had happened to make my need of him as great as his had been of me when he last saw me.
I turned the handle gently and opened the door. There was no one in the room.
The sense of disappointment was as sharp as a blow, painful out of all proportion, so much so that for a moment I was almost angry with him for not being there. I stood in the doorway, feeling quite dazed with loneliness, looking at the bed where he should have been lying.
Then I realized how absurd I was being. Obviously he’d gone out for cigarettes, or lunch – or perhaps – it was a sudden exciting hope – he was upstairs in John’s room, waiting for me there.
For the first time, a thought occurred to me. We had left John last night at the club, and I wondered with a quailing sensation when he had got home. It seemed incredible I hadn’t thought of that before – normally I was constantly aware of his proximity through the thin dividing wall.
I went upstairs uneasily and knocked on his door. Instead of opening it, he called out after a moment: ‘Who there?’ and when I answered, there was a long silence which alarmed me.
‘Go away,’ he said at last. He seemed to be standing just inside the door.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, sharply because of my nervous embarrassment. Then, as he didn’t answer, I said, ‘I want to ask you something.’
After another pause the door opened. Any doubts I had had were dispelled by the look of contemptuous hostility on his face. I felt myself turning hot and cold.
‘What you want?’ he growled like a hurt child.
‘What’s the matter?’
He turned his back on me and walked into the room. I followed, tentatively. I’d never been in there before; it was dark and stuffy and full of bloody, primitive colours. John pulled a chair forward with a violent, angry gesture and sat down on it facing away from me with his arms along its back.
I went up behind him and put my hand on his shoulder. I suppose I must have touched him many times before, but not consciously or deliberately. It seemed a rather difficult thing to do, somehow, which surprised me, as I hadn’t realized I still had some atavistic buried fear of him because he was black.
John twitched his great shoulders as if a wasp had landed on them.
‘Why you don’t go away,’ he muttered without looking round. His voice was muffled and I thought he was trembling.
Without touching him again, I said, ‘John, have I done something to offend you?’
He put his face down on his arms and his voice was muffled. ‘Yes, you done somethin’ to offend me. You done somethin’ offend any decent person.’
Well, there it was, you couldn’t ask for anything plainer than that. My armpits pricked with embarrassment. But I couldn’t leave it at that.
‘John, listen. What happens between two people only concerns them. If you hadn’t been next door here, you’d never have known.’
‘You think that make it all right – if no one know?’
‘But why should it upset you so much? Toby and I are the same two people we were yesterday – we’re still your friends –’
‘Not the same. I don’t know you from yesterday.’ He lifted his head, but still without looking at me; his huge hands were clenched into fists. ‘How you think I feel, lyin’ here listenin’? My friends. My friends.’ He was crying.
‘How do you think I feel, knowing you heard? But John, it’s not – a crime or anything. People …’ I faltered and stopped. I felt he wasn’t listening. I leaned over him and said in a different tone, ‘Do you know where Toby is?’
John shot me a look, and then looked away again. Without knowing why, I felt the advantage had suddenly shifted. He shrugged uneasily. ‘I don’ know. Maybe he downstairs in the basement.’
A dull presentiment of hurt came over me. ‘What do you mean – the basement?’
He turned to me slowly, and I saw his face, expressionless in its blackness, with his yellow eyes fixed on me coldly, like an animal’s. ‘With the other whores,’ he said distinctly.
I got out quickly. My own room was no good; it was too close. I thought I could feel his disgust penetrating the thin wall. I went downstairs into Toby’s room and locked the door. I was panting and trembling and icy cold. After a minute or two I was sick again. I felt no better after it. I sat numbly by the open window, with my legs pressed together, my arms hugging my sides and my hands gripping each other, to combat the sensation that I was going to shake myself to pieces. He said that without knowing, I thought. If he knew about the baby, what would he call me then?
I must have sat there for about half an hour or more. My brain was scarcely working at all. Odd words and phrases came up occasionally into my mind, like obscenities on a blank wall. Whore was the main one.
Suddenly I got up and went downstairs. I went out of the front door and down the area steps to the basement entrance. I don’t know what I thought I was doing. I had some dim idea that I should see what sort of creatures these whores were, so that I might find out what I was.
I knocked on the door. I had to wait a long time for an answer, and just before the door opened I nearly came sufficiently to my senses to run away, but sanity came too late.
‘Yes? What do you want?’
She wasn’t a young woman, by any means. She didn’t look much like my idea of a prostitute either, but that was because she hadn’t any make-up on. She had a longish, plain face with a straight nose and almost no eyebrows; she must have plucked them away in order to repaint them in higher up. Her hair was in rollers in the front, and had a dull reddish look like old rust. She was wearing an old woollen dressing-gown and smoking a cigarette.
I stood staring at her. She was a good twelve years older than me, but allowing for that, I’d seen myself look not much better some mornings in the last few months, my skin blotchy, my eyes shadowed and swollen, my lips pale and dry-looking, my hair lifeless and uncombed.
The woman was frowning at me. ‘I’ve seen you before,’ she said. ‘You came to see Doris about bed-bugs.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said.
She smiled. Her teeth were a better shape than mine, only tobacco-stained. ‘Old Doris!’ she said with a snort. ‘My God, she was fit to be skinned! Never seen her in such a state. Laugh! I nearly fell out of my chair. You know, you’ve got me to thank she didn’t chuck you out. I told her straight, the kid’s right, I said. You should’ve seen this place when we moved in.’ She gestured over her shoulder into the gloomy flat. ‘She’s a dirty old faggot, but she’s got a good heart when you know where to look for it.’ She took a long draw on her cigarette, looking at me curiously. ‘Want to come in for a minute?’
‘Thank you.’
I followed her in and she closed the door. There was a smell inside that made all my senses rear up like a horse that smells blood. It was dirt, and stale perfume, and something else. I breathed through my mouth, but I still got the feeling of it.
‘It’s all in a bit of a state, I’m afraid. We don’t get around to much cleaning.’
She led me into a bed-sitting-room. I was very surprised by how cosy it was. The colours all yelled at each other; most of the furniture was cheap and shabby and it was in a clutter of smelly untidiness, but the general effect was of a room somebody had made the best of according to their taste, and enjoyed living in. Like mine.
She scooped some underwear off a chair and said, ‘Sit down, dear. Sorry it’s such a mess. I don’t often have a woman’s eye over it; men don’t notice these things much.’ She spoke quite casually. ‘As a matter of fact, you got me up. Oh, it’s all right, I was awake anyway. I’m not sleeping too well just lately. Do you ever get that? Not being able to sleep? I’ve tried everything for it – nothing’s any good. Call themselves doctors! Like a cup of tea?’
I said I’d love a cup of tea, which was surprisingly true. ‘But don’t go to any trouble,’ I said.
‘No trouble, I’m just going to make some. Son’ll be wanting one when she wakes up – she’s the girl I share the flat with. Nice kid – Hungarian, she is. Come over with the refugees, right after the revolution. You hear about that?’ I nodded. ‘Well, you know how it is, things that don’t concern you, in the papers and that – you don’t always read ’em, do you? But with Son being here, talking about it once in a while when she gets a bit down, and don’t we all – well, I feel like it all happened last week, and what’s more as if I was in the middle of it. Fair makes your hair stand up, the way she tells it. Kids making their own bombs and chucking ’em into the tanks, getting theirselves blown up … those lousy Russians, sound worse than the Jerries, if you ask me. Not that I’ve got anything against them personally. But Son! You know, she’s sworn to me she wouldn’t have a Russian if he’ offered her a thousand quid. She says she can smell ’em. I sometimes think she half-hopes one’ll come up to her one night, just so she can spit in his eye.’
She was wandering about the room, pulling the covers up on the bed and tidying up half-heartedly, waiting for the kettle on the gas-ring to boil. While she chatted I could feel the hard knots inside me untying themselves, the way tensed muscles relax in a warm bath.
‘I used to tease her about it,’ she went on. ‘ “Meet any Russians today?” I’d ask her. But she didn’t like it. Can’t blame her, really. There’s some things you just can’t see the joke in. Like, with me, it’s –’ She stopped. ‘Gawd, listen to me, going on! Oh good, there’s the kettle.’ She got the things out of a cupboard crammed full of everything, and made the tea, rambling on as she did it. ‘You probably came about something, and here I never even asked what it is! It’s having someone to talk to, I’m not used to it. Like Son, she’s a good girl, but she doesn’t understand English too well, even now. Speaks it okay, but doesn’t understand it. Hungarian’s a funny language – sounds like a mouthful of peanuts. Listen to this.’ She stood with the teapot in her hand and recited carefully: ‘Ha-yoke-lesteck-cop-toke-chock. Know what that means? “If you’re a good boy, I’ll give you a kiss.” Isn’t that a scream? Son taught it to me, in case I ever got a Hungarian. I never have, though. Bet it doesn’t mean that at all, bet it’s something terrible, like calling an Indian a son of a pig. How do you like yours, weak or strong?’ When she’d poured the tea she said she must go out soon – ‘It gets dark so early this time of year’ – and started to potter about the room getting dressed. I noticed that she was very modest in front of me, going through mild contortions putting on her undies beneath her dressing-gown, and once when it fell off, revealing her shabbily but quite decently clad in a mauve rayon slip, she snatched it up with a quick ‘Sorry dear’.
Sitting in front of a small baby-frilled dressing-table to put on her make-up – a fascinating procedure – she remembered again to ask what I’d come for. As I wasn’t very clear about it myself, it was naturally difficult to think what to tell her; but I managed to falter something unconvincing about borrowing something. She laughed.
‘Don’t give me that!’ she said kindly. ‘You’d have asked at the door if it had been that. Come on, tell the truth’ and shame the devil – what are you, one of these writers? Or an actress, going to play a prossie or something, is that it? I’ve met your sort before.’ But she didn’t seem at all angry, just amused.
‘I’m sorry –’ I began awkwardly,
‘Chuck it, ducky, I don’t mind, why should I? Just seems a bit silly, that’s all. I mean, how can you really know what it’s like without trying it? Still, it’s nothing to me. What do you want to know?’
‘How did you start?’ I asked, fiery with embarrassment, and yet intensely curious at the same time.
‘I thought you’d ask that first. They all do. Believe me, starting’s the easy part – it’s keeping going that’s hard. Still – how did I start? Well, it was in the war. Younger than you I was then, but no chicken. Let’s see. First of all there was an American. I thought a lot of him. He was killed somewhere or other.’ She was applying her eyeshadow, thick and purple on the tip of her little finger, and gave me a quick sideways look in the glass. ‘Oh don’t get the wrong idea – I wasn’t driven on to the streets through grief, or nothing like that. Tell you the truth, there was two or three others after the first one went overseas, before I knew about him being dead. I suppose the truth was, in those days anyway, I just plain liked it. Seems funny to think of that now.’
‘You don’t like it any more?’
‘What, f—ing? Doesn’t mean a thing, ducks, one way or the other. Lumme, you’d go mad if it did. Have another cup?’
I had another cup and watched her take the rollers out of her hair and comb it carefully into a high, curly pompadour. She was turning into a tart before my eyes.
‘Have you never wanted to be married?’ I asked.
‘No-o-o! Well –’ she hesitated. ‘Perhaps I did once. But after a few years of this, you can’t really see any attraction in it, except the security, of course. Fancy promising to love, honour and obey – some man. That’s what’d stick in my throat.’ She picked up her eyebrow pencil and looked at me shrewdly. ‘Now you’re going to ask if I hate all men. Well, I don’t. You can’t hate what you don’t respect. I’m sorry for them – I don’t suppose you believe that, but it’s true. Even the queer ones, the ones that want a bit off the other side of the cake, well, you can’t help but be sorry for ’em. And some you can only laugh at – only you mustn’t let ’em see it, of course. They expect you to take ’em seriously, no matter how pitiful they are – in fact, the more pitiful they are, the more their wives at home probably laugh at ’em, the more they expect you to behave as if they was some Eastern potentate or something. That’s really what they pay you for, those sort, and if you do your job right, off they go looking six inches taller. How they can fool themselves you mean it, when you tell ’em they’re wonderful, I don’t know, but there you are. Men can always fool themselves, that’s what they’re best at. It’s a pity they can’t make a living at it then they’d all be millionaires and prices’d be better.’
Her eyebrows were on now, thin grotesque parodies above the purple lids. There was a long narrow mirror by the window and she went over to it and examined herself, full-length but in sections.
‘You probably think my life’s some kind of tragedy, but I’ll tell you – one of the hardest parts of it’s keeping a straight face. I mean, if you’re not enjoying it yourself, you can’t help but think how funny men are when they’re doing it. Puffing and blowing, their bottoms stuck in the air – well, I mean, it’s funny – like, undignified.’ She started going through her bag, making sure she had everything, like a woman going out for an ordinary evening. ‘Girl I knew – Holy Roman she was, Irish – she used to say God thought it up as a joke, and when he found people taking it serious instead of laughing, he was so put out he made it a sin. Ever so religious she was, though, underneath. Used to cry her eyes out sometimes when she’d had a few, and say she’d be in purgatory for about a million years. Can’t be worse than this, I’d tell her to cheer her up, but she said oh yes it can. Fancy believing in a God like that!’
She snapped her bag shut and groped under the bed for her shoes. They were light beige with high heels. ‘Do you like these?’ she asked. ‘They’ re Italian–ever so smart. Soft, too. I spend a lot on shoes; it’s worth it when you’re on your feet so much.’ She slipped them on. I noticed she had slightly knotted veins in her calves. ‘That’s another nasty thing about this job – all the standing about. What I’d like is just a few regulars, that’d come by appointment, like, so I could stay at home. I’d keep the place a bit tidier, too. Had a nice place once, you know – in the West End. That was when I just had the one fellow. He was a real gent. You should have seen the place I had then – carpets and pictures, lovely it was, I kept it a treat. I could’ve had the Queen Mum to tea there and not been ashamed. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.’ She had a quick look round the room and shoved a few things out of sight in the glory-hole cupboard. ‘Look at the time!’ she said. ‘I wonder what’s happened to Son – still, better not wake her, she worked till all hours last night, she deserves a bit of a lay-in. You don’t mind if I throw you out now, do you, dear? I’m ever so sorry, but you know how it is.’
I followed the clack of her high heels down the dark corridor to the front door. The smell wasn’t half so bad now, because I was following a newly-laid trail of fresh scent. I felt quite calm again, as divorced from my own immediate problems as if I were coming out after seeing a particularly absorbing film. Standing outside in the gloom of the area she said, quite naturally, ‘You go ahead, dear, and I’ll follow you after a minute or two. You don’t want to be seen with me.’ And before I could protest, she went on: ‘I hope you found out all you wanted to know. I’m apt to chatter on about nothing, and I must say it was nice to have someone to talk to, like I said.’
‘I’ve enjoyed meeting you,’ I said.
She looked at me for a moment, measuringly, as if wondering whether I meant it. ‘Have you?’ she said at last, curiously. Then, briskly: ‘What a lousy night! I hate this bloody mist, it gets into everything and makes your hair straight.’ It was the first time she’d sworn, except the one perfectly correct use of a word more generally used in any but its proper context. My language was considerably worse than hers.
‘Good-bye,’ I said, and shook hands with her. I went up the stone steps into the street, and let myself into the house. I didn’t quite close the door, and after a few moments I could hear her footsteps walking briskly past. Looking after her, I saw her reach up and tuck a strand of hair into place before the dark mist swallowed her up. I suddenly remembered her name was Jane.