Chapter Ten

That was Thursday. On Monday of the following week he met Anthea Moorhouse for the first time.

It was boredom that took him to the Victoria Dance Rooms. Until he received the promised cheque it was impossible for him to go abroad, and a strange inertia overcame him. He was reluctant to get in touch with his former employers. To do so, it seemed to him, would be somehow a betrayal of his plans for the future. And now he began to have doubts about that future itself and to ask whether he would really know any kind of happiness alone in a foreign country. The weather remained extremely fine. It was intolerably hot in his bedroom, yet he lacked the energy to move from the Cosmos. Ought he to get in touch with Crambo, say what he knew about Paddy Brannigan? Somehow he lacked the energy for that too.

On Saturday he spent the day at Roehampton Swimming Pool, on Sunday he went to Brighton. The newspapers had dropped the story, and he remained unrecognised. But life after Saturday and Sunday stretched before him, an endless ribbon on which something had to be written. It was to inscribe something on the ribbon, however trivial, that he went to the Victoria Dance Rooms.

They were down a side street, five minutes’ walk from the Cosmos. Two teddy boys lounged by the entrance. They wore long draped jackets and narrow trousers beneath which bright pink socks showed. As Hunter turned the corner of the street a long low car pulled up and two couples got out, young men and women in evening clothes. The teddy boys whistled appreciatively and said something as the couples went in. One of the young men, short, dark and sullen, turned back as if to speak to them, but the girl with him pulled him on. Hunter gave the boys a savage scowl as he passed.

Inside the hall was hot, crowded, dingy. At one end of it Billy Bell and his Boys, six of them, were playing. There was an MC wearing a dinner jacket. Almost all of the couples on the floor were young, and danced locked together. A few unattached girls – would they be hostesses? – sat in the corner chewing gum. The lighting was dim.

He sat out one dance, then moved towards the hostesses. He had hoped to pick up a friendly girl here, a girl with whom he could sit afterwards and talk for half an hour, but that seemed unlikely. One dance and I’ll go, he told himself. Then he noticed in the gloom a girl sitting by herself. He stopped and said, ‘Will you dance?’

She was, he saw now, one of the girls who had got out of the car.

‘That would be fun.’ Her voice was light and musical. ‘Roger’s gone off and left me alone in this den of vice.’

‘Is it a den of vice?’

‘Didn’t you know? That’s why we came along, thought it might be fun.’ When they were on the floor she nodded at a couple who swayed past them in a clinch. ‘You don’t expect me to dance like that?’

‘I don’t expect anything.’

For a moment her body pressed against him, breasts, stomach, thighs. Then she withdrew. ‘Why did you do that?’ he asked.

‘I wanted to see what it was like.’

‘And what was it like?’

‘Pretty much as I expected.’ She threw back her head as she laughed, so that he saw white teeth, pink throat, strong white neck. Her hair was black and long, her mouth well shaped, her head came above his shoulder. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘I was thinking that Roger’s foolish to leave you out of his sight.’

She laughed, and called across to what Hunter recognised as the other couple, ‘I’ve been picked up. Where’s Roger? He’ll be mad when he comes back.’

The other girl was an insipid blonde. ‘He went thataway.’

When they had moved apart from the others he said, ‘I’m not sure I like being talked about as if I weren’t there.’

‘Don’t be so sensitive. Oh, my God, Roger’s at it again. He really is a bore.’

Turning, he saw that the dark, sullen young man was standing in the entrance to the room and that the two teddy boys were with him. They were talking, it seemed, quietly and earnestly in low voices. ‘I don’t see anything wrong.’

‘You will. Roger’s a ju-jitsu expert. He loves trouble.’

As she spoke, one of the teddy boys reached into his hip pocket and came out with a knife. His hand with the knife in it moved upwards. In the same moment Roger took hold of him, quite lightly, by the arm. Then the teddy boy was on the floor, the knife rattled against the wall. Somebody screamed.

‘Showing off,’ the girl said. She sounded pleased.

The screams did not stop. They got louder, and suddenly he saw the reason. There were two, half a dozen, a dozen policemen in the doorway, now in the room, shouting something unintelligible. At the other end of the room Billy Bell and his Boys were also shouting. Hunter saw the drummer from the band open a door at the side of the stage.

‘Come on,’ he said to the girl, and she followed him. He pushed open the door and they found themselves in a little changing room. The drummer, a skinny blond boy with big spectacles, looked up. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

There was a small window, almost a skylight, high up in the wall. Hunter stood on a table under it, reached up and pushed. The window stuck at first, then opened so suddenly that he almost put his hand through it. Hunter levered himself up, squeezed through with difficulty, and saw that the drop was no more than a few feet. There was no policeman in sight. He looked back and down, and spoke to the girl. ‘After me. Not much of a drop. I’ll catch you.’

‘Come on, mate,’ the drummer called. ‘Haven’t got all day.’

He had a glimpse of the girl’s face below him, strained and earnest. Then he dropped, suffering nothing worse than a slight jarring sensation as he landed. He saw the girl above him, and held out his arms. He half caught her, but she landed awkwardly, and there was a splintering noise. She took his hand and they ran.

As they turned the corner into a narrow road he heard a police whistle. He saw that she was hobbling.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’ve snapped the heel off my shoe. I can’t run properly.’

‘Take them off. I live near here.’

She slipped off the shoes, and carried them in her hand. They turned left and right, with the police whistles still audible behind them, until he saw in front of them the dim blue sign that said Cosmos. He led the way into the gloomy entrance. The man at the desk barely glanced at him as he led the way up the stairs. Probably he was surprised that Hunter had not brought in a girl before this evening.

‘You keep a room in this place?’ she asked as they went up the stairs.

‘I live here.’

‘You live here.’ She did not speak again until he had opened the door of the room and she saw the mauve wallpaper, the stained ceiling, the pocked mirrors and the cracked washbasin. She looked at all these with eager eyes, and then spoke again. ‘Why, what fun.’

He said nothing. She sat down on the bed, and said delightedly, ‘It squeaks. Why, it’s just perfect. Are you a man on the run or something?’

‘No. Was the drummer caught?’

‘Yes. The police pulled him off the table. He struggled with them, but couldn’t get up. It wasn’t my fault.’

‘I didn’t say it was.’

‘Do you suppose Roger was caught too? Imagine Roger in court.’

‘Just imagine.’ He picked up her shoe and looked at it. The heel was snapped off clean. ‘I’ll call a taxi and put you in it.’

‘That would be dull. It’s been such an exciting evening so far. Real fun.’ She lay back on the bed and it squeaked again. ‘Real fun. Don’t spoil it.’

He knew that what he was about to do was wrong and dangerous, not morally, but wrong because for him it was somehow nothing to do with any possible future, but part of the chain of the past that he dragged round with him. But he approached the bed, gripped the bare shoulders above the purplish evening dress, bent his face down over hers. Her hands held him back with unexpected strength. Then she laughed.

‘Don’t look so surprised. You’ll spoil my dress.’ She stood up, and then in a minute she was out of it.

Afterwards they lay on the bed together. ‘There’s nobody here to introduce us,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to do it ourselves. My name’s Anthea Moorhouse. I expect you know my stepfather.’

Hunter was looking at the ceiling, but not seeing the crack in it. He felt peace and fulfilment, but something more and less than these, a release of tension, an absence of urgency that had been working in him ever since the evening of the fatal telecast. ‘Should I know him?’

‘Lord Moorhouse. Big shot industrialist. I’m the apple of his eye, even though I’ve got a rotten core as you might say. He adopted me legally, gave me his name.’

Hunter made a non-committal noise. He felt sleepy. When she spoke again she sounded a little annoyed. ‘I keep thinking I know your face. What’s your name?’

‘Bill Smith.’

‘Oh, come on.’

‘You can look in the register downstairs if you don’t believe me.’

‘Tell me. Tell me.’

‘Bill Smith,’ he repeated sleepily. She pinched him, then leant over him, put her arms round his neck.

‘I believe I was right, and you are a criminal. But you can tell me. I can keep a secret. Don’t you see, I wouldn’t mind, I’d like it even. Don’t you see?’

‘Bill Hunter.’ His defences, for the moment at least, were down. He was not inclined to doubt her, or to ask questions. ‘I don’t suppose that means anything more to you than your stepfather’s name does to me.’

‘No. Yes, it does, though.’ She sat up beside him, and he put up a hand to touch one of her small breasts. She pushed it away. ‘You’re the man on TV who asked a lot of questions he shouldn’t have done, had a row and resigned. And you killed somebody, that’s right?’

‘It was a long time ago.’ From his own inertia on the bed he lay and watched her face in profile, eager, passionate and determined. Later, perhaps, the nose would become beaky, the lips thin, the jaw jut too formidably, but at this moment she seemed to him exquisitely beautiful. It seemed to him that she was assessing something, making up her mind about something. Then she spoke.

‘But that’s terrific. To have slept with a man who’s killed someone, really killed someone I mean, not just in the war. There can’t be many girls who have done that.’ She saw the expression on his face. ‘Now you hate me. But I want to live, you see. I want to experience everything, do things people haven’t done before. Isn’t that important?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘To hold life and squeeze the last drop of experience out of it – like that.’ She made her small red-nailed fingers into a fist. ‘I don’t see what else matters.’ She swung her legs off the bed and, frowning fiercely, began to put on her clothes.

‘Who’s Roger?’

‘Roger Sennett. I’m sort of engaged to him, or at least that’s what my stepfather wants. He’s fun too, but I don’t know about him. I don’t know at all. I don’t think I want to get married anyway.’

‘You won’t tell Roger about the terrific fun you had this evening?’

She shook her head. Irony and sarcasm were wasted on her. ‘He wouldn’t understand. And anyway, do I want to repeat it? I don’t know.’

‘Have you ever considered that I might not want to?’ The question was a vain one, for he knew that he wanted nothing more.

‘But of course if you don’t want to see me, why should you?’ she said almost impatiently. She had her dress on and was doing her face now in front of the pocked glass. ‘I’ll just limp out and get a taxi. Don’t bother to come down.’

He took refuge in boorishness from his unreasonable disappointment. ‘I wasn’t bothering.’

‘Oh.’ In the considering look she gave him he felt her own disappointment, and was immediately slightly ashamed. ‘No, don’t bother. More romantic like this.’ She crossed to the bed, kissed him lightly on the cheek, and then moved with an exaggerated hobble to the door.