Collected Stories

Office Romances

‘Oh no, I couldn’t,’ Angela said in the outer office. ‘Really, Mr Spelle. Thank you, though.’

‘Don’t you drink then, Miss Hosford? Nary a drop at all?’ He laughed at his own way of putting it. He thought of winking at her as he laughed, but decided against it: girls like this were sometimes scared out of their wits by a wink.

‘No, it’s not that, Mr Spelle –’

‘It’s just that it’s a way of getting to know people. Everyone else’ll be down in the Arms, you know.’

Hearing that, she changed her mind and quite eagerly put the grey plastic cover on her Remington International. She’d refused his invitation to have a drink because she’d been flustered when he’d come into the outer office with his right hand poked out for her to shake, introducing himself as Gordon Spelle. He hadn’t said anything about the other people from the office being there: in a matter of seconds he’d made the whole thing sound romantic, a tête-à-tête with a total stranger. Any girl’s reaction would be to say she couldn’t.

‘Won’t be a moment, Mr Spelle,’ she said. She picked up her handbag from the floor beside her chair and walked with it from the office. Behind her, she heard the office silence broken by a soft whistling: Gordon Spelle essaying ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’.

Angela had started at C.S. & E. at half past nine that morning, having been interviewed a month ago by Miss Ivygale, her immediate employer. Miss Ivygale was a slender woman of fifty or thereabouts, her face meticulously made up. Her blue-grey hair was worked on daily by a hairdresser, a Mr Patric, whom twice that day she’d mentioned to Angela, deploring the fact that next March he was planning to leave the Elizabeth Salon. At C.S. & E. Miss Ivygale occupied an inner office that was more luxuriously appointed than the outer one where Angela sat with her filing cabinets and her Remington International. On the window-sill of the outer office Miss Ivygale’s last secretary, whom she referred to as Sue, had left a Busy Lizzie in a blue-glazed pot. There was a calendar that showed Saturdays and Sundays in red, presented by the Michelin Tyre Company.

In a small lavatory Angela examined her face in the mirror over the wash-basin. She sighed at her complexion. Her eyes had a bulgy look because of her contact lenses. The optician had said the bulgy look would go when the lids became used to the contact lenses, but as far as she was concerned it never had. ‘No, no, you’re imagining it, Miss Hosford,’ the optician had said when she’d gone back after a month to complain that the look was still there.

In the lavatory she touched one or two places on her cheeks with Pure Magic and powdered over it. She rubbed lipstick into her lips and then pressed a tissue between them. She ran a comb through her hair, which was fluffed up because she’d washed it the night before: it was her best feature, she considered, a pretty shade, soft and naturally curly.

‘I like your dress, Miss Hosford,’ he said when she returned to the outer office. ‘Fresh as a flower it looks.’ He laughed at his own description of the blue-and-white dress she was wearing. The blue parts were flowers of a kind, he supposed, a type of blue geranium they appeared to be, with blue leaves sprouting out of blue stems. Extraordinary, the tasteless stuff a girl like this would sometimes wear.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘We don’t bother much with surnames at C.S. & E.,’ he told her as they walked along a green-carpeted corridor to a lift. ‘All right to call you Angela, Miss Hosford?’

‘Oh, yes, of course.’

He closed the lift doors. He smiled at her. He was a tall, sleek man who had something the matter with his left eye, a kind of droop in the upper lid and a glazed look in the eye itself, a suggestion of blindness. Another oddness about him, she thought in the lift, was his rather old-fashioned suit. It was a pepper-coloured suit with a waistcoat, cut in an Edwardian style. His manners were old-fashioned too, and the way he spoke had a pedantic air to it that recalled the past: Edwardian again perhaps, she didn’t know. It seemed right that he had whistled ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ rather than a current pop song.

‘I suppose it’s your first job, Angela?’

‘Oh, heavens, no!’

‘I’d say you were twenty.’

‘Twenty-six, actually.’

He laughed. ‘I’m thirty-eight myself.’

They left the lift and walked together through the elegant reception area of C.S. & E. When she’d walked through it for her interview Angela had been reminded of the lounge of a large, new hotel: there were sofas and armchairs covered in white ersatz leather, and steel-framed reproductions of paintings by Paul Klee on rust-coloured walls, and magazines on steel-topped tables. When Angela had come for her interview, and again when she’d arrived at C.S. & E. that morning, there’d been a beautiful black-haired girl sitting at the large reception desk, which was upholstered here and there in the same ersatz leather as the sofas and the armchairs. But at this time of the evening, five to six, the beautiful black-haired girl was not there.

‘I’d really have said it was your first job,’ he said when they reached the street. He smiled at her. ‘Something about you.’

She knew what he meant. She was often taken to be younger than she was, it had something to do with being small: five foot one she was, with thin, small arms that she particularly disliked. And of course there was her complexion, which was a schoolgirl complexion in the real sense, since schoolgirls rather than adults tended to be bothered with pimples. ‘Attack them from inside, Miss Hosford,’ her doctor had advised. ‘Avoid all sweets and chocolate, avoid cakes and biscuits with your coffee. Lots of lemon juice, fresh fruit, salads.’ She ate lots of fruit and salads anyway, just in case she’d get fat, which would have been the last straw. She naturally never ate sweet things.

‘Horrid being new,’ he said. ‘Like your first day at school.’

The street, fashionably situated just off Grosvenor Square, was busy with people impatient to be home: it was a cold night in November, not a night for loitering. Girls in suede boots or platform shoes had turned up the collars of their coats. Some carried bundles of letters which had been signed too late to catch the afternoon dispatch boys. In the harsh artificial light their faces were pale, sometimes garish with make-up: the light drew the worst out of girls who were pretty, and killed the subtleties of carefully chosen lipstick and make-up shades. God alone knew, Angela said to herself, what it did to her. She sighed, experiencing the familiar feeling of her inferiority complex getting the upper hand.

‘Hullo, Gordon,’ a man in a black overcoat said to Gordon Spelle. The man had been walking behind them for some time, while Angela had been listening to Gordon Spelle going on about the first day he’d spent at school. Miserable beyond measure he’d been.

‘God, it’s chilly,’ the man said, dropping into step with them and smiling at Angela.

‘Angela Hosford,’ Gordon Spelle said. ‘She’s come to work for Pam Ivygale.’

‘Oh, Pam, dear Pam!’ the man said. He laughed in much the same way as Gordon Spelle was given to laughing, or so it seemed to Angela. His black overcoat had a little rim of black fur on its collar. His hair was black also. His face in the distorting street-light had a purple tinge, and Angela guessed that in normal circumstances it was a reddish face.

‘Tommy Blyth,’ Gordon Spelle said.

They entered a public house at the corner of a street. It was warm there, and crowded, and quite attractively noisy. Fairy lights were draped on a Christmas tree just inside the door because Christmas was less than six weeks away. Men like Tommy Blyth, in overcoats with furred collars and with reddish faces, were standing by a coal fire with glasses in their hands. One of them had his right arm round the waist of C.S. & E.’s black-haired receptionist.

‘What’s your poison, Angela?’ Gordon Spelle asked, and she said she’d like some sherry.

‘Dry?’

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter – well, medium, actually.’

He didn’t approach the bar but led her into a far corner and sat her down at a table. It was less crowded there and rather dimly lit. He said he wouldn’t be a minute.

People were standing at the bar, animatedly talking. Some of the men had taken off their overcoats. All of them were wearing suits, most of them grey or blue but a few of a more extravagant shade, like Gordon Spelle’s. Occasionally a particular man, older and stouter than his companions, laughed raucously, swaying backwards on his heels. On a bar-stool to this man’s right, in a red wool dress with a chiffon scarf at her throat, sat Miss Ivygale. The red wool coat that had been hanging just inside the outer office door all day hung on the arm of the raucous man: Miss Ivygale, Angela deduced, was intent on staying a while, or at least as long as the man was agreeable to looking after her coat for her. ‘You’ll find it friendly at C.S. & E.,’ Miss Ivygale had said. ‘A generous firm.’ Miss Ivygale looked as though she’d sat on her bar-stool every night for the past twenty-three years, which was the length of time she’d been at C.S. & E.

‘Alec Hemp,’ Gordon Spelle said, indicating the man who had Miss Ivygale’s coat on his arm.

The name occurred on C.S. & E.’s stationery: A. R. Hemp. It was there with other names, all of them in discrete italics, strung out along the bottom of the writing paper that had C.S. & E. and the address at the top: S. P. Bakewell, T. P. Cooke, N. N. E. Govier, A. R. Hemp I. D. Jackson, A. F. Norris, P. Onniman, the directors of the C.S. & E. board.

‘That’s been going on for years,’ Gordon Spelle said. He handed her her sherry and placed on the table in front of him a glass of gin and Britvic orange juice. His droopy eye had closed, as if tired. His other, all on its own, looked a little beady.

‘Sorry?’

‘Pam Ivygale and Alec Hemp.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s why she never married anyone else.’

‘I see.’

Miss Ivygale’s brisk manner in the office and her efficient probing when she’d interviewed Angela had given the impression that she lived entirely for her work. There was no hint of a private life about Miss Ivygale, and certainly no hint of any love affair beyond a love affair with C.S. & E.

‘Alec,’ Gordon Spelle said, ‘has a wife and four children in Brighton.’

‘I see.’

‘Office romance.’ His droopy eye opened and gazed bleakly at her, contrasting oddly with the busyness of the other eye. He said it was disgraceful that all this should be so, that a woman should be messed up the way Mr Hemp for twenty-three years had messed up Miss Ivygale. Everyone knew, he said, that Alec Hemp had no intention of divorcing his wife: he was stringing Miss Ivygale along. ‘Mind you, though,’ he added, ‘she’s tricky.’

‘She seems very nice –’

‘Oh, Pam’s all right. Now, tell me all about yourself.’

Angela lived in a flat with two other girls, a ground-floor flat in what had once been a private house in Putney. She’d lived there for three years, and before that she’d lived in a similar flat in another part of Putney, and before that in a hostel. Every six or seven weeks she went home for the weekend, to her parents in Exeter, Number 4 Carhampton Road. When she’d qualified as a shorthand typist at the City Commercial College in Exeter the College had found her a position in the offices of a firm that manufactured laminates. Three years later, after some months’ discussion and argument with her parents, she’d moved to London, to the offices of a firm that imported and marketed German wine. From there, she’d moved to the firm called C.S. & E.

‘You can hear it in your voice,’ Gordon Spelle said. ‘Exeter and all that.’

She laughed. ‘I thought I’d lost it.’

‘It’s nice, a touch of the West Countries.’

The laminates firm had been a dull one, or at least a dull one for a girl to work in. But her parents hadn’t understood that. Her parents, whom she liked and respected very much, had been frightened by the idea of her going to London, where there was loose living, so other parents had told them, and drinking and drugs, and girls spending every penny they had on clothes and rarely eating a decent meal. The German-wine firm had turned out to be a dull place for a girl to work in too, or so at least it seemed after a few years. Often, though, while finding it dull, Angela had felt that it suited her. With her poor complexion and her bulging contact lenses and her small, thin arms, it was a place to crouch away in. Besides herself, two elderly women were employed in the office, and there was Mr Franklin and Mr Snyder, elderly also. Economy was practised in the office, the windows seemed always to be dusty, electric lightbulbs were of a low wattage. On the mornings when a new pimple cruelly erupted on her neck or one of her cheeks, Angela had hurried from bus to tube and was glad when she reached the dingy office of the wine firm and lost herself in its shadows. Then a girl in the flat introduced her to Pure Magic, so good at disguising imperfections of the skin. But although it did not, as in an advertisement, change Angela’s life and could do nothing at all for her thin arms, it did enough to draw her from the dinginess of the wine firm. A girl in the flat heard of the vacancy with Miss Ivygale at C.S. & E. and, not feeling like a change herself, persuaded Angela to apply for it. The shared opinion of the girls in the flat was that Angela needed drawing out. They liked her and were sorry for her: no joke at all, they often said to one another, to have an inferiority complex like Angela’s. The inferiority complex caused nerviness in her, one of them diagnosed, and the nerviness caused her bad complexion. In actual fact, her figure and her arms were perfectly all right, and her hair was really pretty the way it curled. Now that she’d at last stopped wearing spectacles she looked quite presentable, even if her eyes did tend to bulge a little.

‘Oh, you’ll like it at C.S. & E.,’ Gordon Spelle said. ‘It’s really friendly, you know. Sincerely so.’

He insisted on buying her another drink and while he was at the bar she wondered when, or if, she was going to meet the people he’d mentioned, the other employees of C.S. & E. Miss Ivygale had narrowed her eyes in her direction and then had looked away, as if she couldn’t quite place her. The black-haired receptionist had naturally not remembered her face when she’d come into the bar with the two men. The only person Gordon Spelle had so far introduced her to was the man called Tommy Blyth, who had joined the group around the fire and was holding the hand of a girl.

‘It’s the C.S. & E. pub,’ Gordon Spelle said when he returned with the drinks. ‘There isn’t a soul here who isn’t on the strength.’ He smiled at her, his bad eye twitching. ‘I like you, you know.’ She smiled back at him, not knowing how to reply. He picked up her left hand and briefly squeezed it.

‘Don’t trust that man, Angela,’ Miss Ivygale said, passing their table on her way to the Ladies. She stroked the back of Gordon Spelle’s neck. ‘Terrible man,’ she said.

Angela was pleased that Miss Ivygale had recognized her and had spoken to her. It occurred to her that her immediate employer was probably shortsighted and had seen no more than the outline of a familiar face when she’d peered across the bar at her.

‘Come on, have a drink with us,’ Miss Ivygale insisted on her way back from the Ladies.

‘Oh, it’s all right, Pam,’ Gordon Spelle said quickly, but Miss Ivygale stood there, waiting for them to get up and accompany her. ‘You watch your step, my boy,’ she said to Gordon Spelle as they all three made their way together. Gordon Spelle told her she was drunk.

‘This is my secretary, Alec,’ Miss Ivygale said at the bar. ‘Replacing Sue. Angela Hosford.’

Mr Hemp shook Angela’s hand. He had folded Miss Ivygale’s red coat and placed it on a bar-stool. He asked Angela what she was drinking and while she was murmuring that she wouldn’t have another one Gordon Spelle said a medium sherry and a gin and Britvic orange for himself. Gordon Spelle was looking cross, Angela noticed. His bad eye closed again. He was glaring at Miss Ivygale with the other one.

‘Cheers, Angela,’ Mr Hemp said. ‘Welcome to C.S. & E.’

‘Thank you, Mr Hemp.’

People were leaving the bar, waving or calling out goodnight to the group she was with. A man paused to say something to Mr Hemp and then stayed to have another drink. By the fire the receptionist and another girl listened while Tommy Blyth told them about car radios, advising which kind to buy if they ever had to.

‘I brought her in here to have a simple drink,’ Gordon Spelle was protesting to Miss Ivygale, unsuccessfully attempting to keep his voice low. ‘So’s the poor girl could meet a few people.’

Miss Ivygale looked at Angela and Angela smiled at her uneasily, embarrassed because they were talking about her. Miss Ivygale didn’t smile back, and it couldn’t have been that Miss Ivygale didn’t see her properly this time because the distance between them was less than a yard.

‘You watch your little step, my boy,’ Miss Ivygale warned again, and this time Gordon Spelle leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. ‘All right, my love?’ he said.

Miss Ivygale ordered Mr Hemp another Bell’s whisky and one for herself, reminding the barman that the measures they were drinking were double measures. ‘What’re you on, Dil?’ she asked the man who was talking to Mr Hemp. ‘No, no, must go,’ he said.

‘Bell’s I think he’s on,’ the barman said, pouring a third large whisky.

‘And a gin and Britvic for Gordon,’ Miss Ivygale said. ‘And a medium sherry.’

‘Oh, really,’ murmured Angela.

‘Nonsense,’ Miss Ivygale said.

In the lavatory Gordon Spelle swore as he urinated. Typical of bloody Pam Ivygale to go nosing in like that. He wouldn’t have brought the girl to the Arms at all if he’d thought Ivygale would be soaked to the gills, hurling abuse about like bloody snowballs. God alone knew what kind of a type the girl thought he was now. Girls like that had a way of thinking you a sexual maniac if you so much as took their arm to cross a street. There’d been one he’d known before who’d come from the same kind of area, Plymouth or Bristol or somewhere. Bigger girl actually, five foot ten she must have been, fattish. ‘Touch of the West Countries’, he’d said when she’d opened her mouth, the first time he’d used the expression. Tamar Dymond she’d been called, messy bloody creature.

Gordon Spelle combed his hair and then decided that his tie needed to be reknotted. He removed his pepper-coloured jacket and his waistcoat and took the tie off, cocking up the collar of his striped blue shirt in order to make the operation easier. His wife, Ruth, would probably be reading a story to the younger of their two children, since she generally did so at about seven o’clock. As he reknotted his tie, he imagined his wife sitting by the child’s bed reading a Topsy and Tim book.

‘Oh, say you’re going to Luton,’ Miss Ivygale said. ‘Tell her it’s all just cropped up in the last fifteen minutes.’

Mr Hemp shook his head. He pointed out that rather often recently he’d telephoned his wife at seven o’clock to say that what had cropped up in the last fifteen minutes was the fact that unexpectedly he had to go to Luton. Mr Hemp had moved away from the man called Dil, closer to Miss Ivygale. They were speaking privately, Mr Hemp in a lower voice than Miss Ivygale. The man called Dil was talking to another man.

Standing by herself and not being spoken to by anyone, Angela was feeling happy. It didn’t matter that no one was speaking to her, or paying her any other kind of attention. She felt warm and friendly, quite happy to be on her own while Gordon Spelle was in the Gents and Mr Hemp and Miss Ivygale talked to each other privately. She liked him, she thought as she stood there: she liked his old-fashioned manners and the way he’d whistled ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, and his sympathy over her being new. She smiled at him when he returned from the Gents. It was all much nicer than the German-wine firm, or the laminates firm.

‘Hullo,’ he said in a whisper, staring at her.

‘It was nice of you to bring me here,’ she said, whispering also.

‘Nice for me, too,’ said Gordon Spelle.

Mr Hemp went away to telephone his wife. The telephone was behind Angela, in a little booth against the wall. The booth was shaped like a sedan chair, except that it didn’t have any shafts to carry it by. Angela had noticed it when she’d been sitting down with Gordon Spelle. She hadn’t known then that it contained a telephone and had wondered at the presence of a sedan chair in a bar. But several times since then people had entered it and each time a light had come on, revealing a telephone and a pile of directories.

‘Because they only told me ten minutes ago,’ Mr Hemp was saying. ‘Because the bloody fools couldn’t make their minds up, if you can call them minds.’

Gordon Spelle squeezed her hand and Angela squeezed back because it seemed a friendly thing to do. She felt sorry for him because he had only one good eye. It was the single defect in his handsome face. It gave him a tired look, and suggested suffering.

‘I wish you’d see it my way,’ Mr Hemp was saying crossly in the sedan chair. ‘God damn it, I don’t want to go to the bloody place.’

‘I really must go,’ Angela murmured, but Gordon Spelle continued to hold her hand. She didn’t want to go. ‘I really must,’ she said again.

In the Terrazza, where the waiters wore striped blue-and-white jerseys and looked like sailors at a regatta, Mr Hemp and Miss Ivygale were well known. So was Gordon Spelle. The striped waiters greeted them affectionately, and a man in a dark suit addressed all three of them by name. He bowed at Angela. ‘How d’you do?’ he said, handing her a menu.

‘Petto di pollo sorpresa,’ Gordon Spelle recommended. ‘Chicken with garlic in it.’

‘Garlic? Oh –’

‘He always has it,’ Miss Ivygale said, pointing with the menu at Gordon Spelle. ‘You’ll be all right, dear.’

‘What’re you having, darling?’ Mr Hemp asked Miss Ivygale. In the taxi on the way to the Terrazza he had sat with his arm around her and once, as though they were in private, he’d kissed her on the mouth, making quite a lot of noise about it. Angela had been embarrassed and so, she imagined, had Gordon Spelle.

‘Gamberone al spiedo,’ Miss Ivygale ordered.

‘Cheers,’ Mr Hemp said, lifting a glass of white wine into the air.

‘I think I’m a bit drunk,’ Angela said to Gordon Spelle and he wagged his head approvingly. Mr Hemp said he was a bit drunk himself, and Miss Ivygale said she was drunk, and Gordon Spelle pointed out that you only live once.

‘Welcome to C.S. & E.,’ Mr Hemp said, lifting his glass again.

The next morning, in the flat in Putney, Angela told her flatmates about the delicious food at the Terrazza and how she couldn’t really remember much else. There’d certainly been a conversation at the restaurant table, and in a taxi afterwards she remembered Gordon Spelle humming and then Gordon Spelle had kissed her. She seemed to remember him saying that he’d always wanted to be a dance-band leader, although she wasn’t sure if she’d got that right. There were other memories of Gordon Spelle in the taxi, which she didn’t relate to her flatmates. There’d been, abruptly, his cold hand on the flesh of one of her thighs, and her surprise that the hand could have got there without her noticing. At another point there’d been his cold hand on the flesh of her stomach. ‘Look, you’re not married or anything?’ she remembered herself saying in sudden alarm. She remembered the noise of Gordon Spelle’s breathing and his tongue penetrating her ear. ‘Married?’ he’d said at some other point, and had laughed.

Feeling unwell but not unhappy, Angela vividly recalled the face and clothes of Gordon Spelle. She recalled his hands, which tapered and were thin, and his sleek hair and droopy eye. She wondered how on earth she was going to face him after what had happened in the taxi, or how she was going to face Miss Ivygale because Miss Ivygale, she faintly remembered, had fallen against a table on their way out of the restaurant, upsetting plates of soup and a bottle of wine. When Angela had tried to help her to stand up again she’d used unpleasant language. Yet the dim memories didn’t worry Angela in any real way, not like her poor complexion sometimes worried her, or her contact lenses. Even though she was feeling unwell, she only wanted to smile that morning. She wanted to write a letter to her parents in Carhampton Road, Exeter, and tell them she’d made a marvellous decision when she’d decided to leave the German-wine business and go to C.S. & E. She should have done it years ago, she wanted to tell them, because everyone at C.S. & E. was so friendly and because you only lived once. She wanted to tell them about Gordon Spelle, who had said in the taxi that he thought he was falling in love with her, which was of course an exaggeration.

She drank half a cup of Nescafè and caught a 37 bus. Sitting beside an Indian on the lower deck, she thought about Gordon Spelle. On the tube to Earl’s Court she thought of him again, and on the Piccadilly line between Earl’s Court and Green Park she went on thinking about him. When she closed her eyes, as she once or twice did, she seemed to be with him in some anonymous place, stroking his face and comforting him because of his bad eye. She walked from the tube station, past the Rootes’ Group car showrooms and Thos Cook’s in Berkeley Street, along Lansdowne Row with its pet shops and card shop and coffee shops, past the Gresham Arms, the C.S. & E. pub. It was a cold morning, but the cold air was pleasant. Pigeons waddled on the pavements, cars drew up at parking-meters. Fresh-faced and shaven, the men of the night before hurried to their offices. She wouldn’t have recognized Tommy Blyth, she thought, or the man called Dil, or even Mr Hemp. Girls in suede boots hurried, also looking different in the morning light. She was being silly, she said to herself in Carlos Place: he probably said that to dozens of girls.

In Angela’s life there had been a few other men. At the age of twelve she had been attracted by a youth who worked in a newsagent’s. She’d liked him because he’d always been ready to chat to her and smile at her, two or three years older he’d been. At fourteen she’d developed a passion for an American actor called Don Ameche whom she’d seen in an old film on television. For several weeks she’d carried with her the memory of his face and had lain in bed at night imagining a life with him in a cliff-top house she’d invented, in California. She’d seen herself and Don Ameche running into the sea together, as he had run with an actress in the film. She’d seen them eating breakfast together, out in the open, on a sunny morning. But Don Ameche, she’d suddenly realized, was sixty or seventy now.

When Angela had first come to London a man who’d briefly been employed in the German-wine business used occasionally to invite her to have a cup of coffee with him at the end of the day, just as Gordon Spelle had invited her to have a drink. But being with this man wasn’t like being with Gordon Spelle: the man was a shabby person who was employed in some lowly capacity, who seemed to Angela, after the third time they’d had coffee together, to be mentally deficient. One Monday morning he didn’t turn up for work, and was never heard of again.

There’d been another man, more briefly, in Angela’s life, a young man called Ted Apwell whom she’d met at a Saturday-night party given by a friend of one of her flatmates. She and Ted Apwell had paired off when the party, more or less at an end, had become uninhibited. At half past three in the morning she’d allowed herself to be driven home by Ted Apwell, knowing that it was to his home rather than hers they were going. He’d taken her clothes off and in a half-hearted, inebriated way had put an end to her virginity, on a hearth-rug in front of a gas-fire. He’d driven her on to her flat, promising – too often, she realized afterwards – that he’d telephone her on Monday. She’d found him hard to forget at first, not because she’d developed any great fondness for him but because of his nakedness and her own on the hearth-rug, the first time all that had happened. There hadn’t, so far, been a second time.

Miss Ivygale did not come in that morning. Angela sat alone in the outer office, with nothing to do because there were no letters to type. A tea-lady arrived at a quarter past ten and poured milky coffee on to two lumps of sugar in a cup she’d earlier placed on Angela’s desk. ‘Pam not in this morning?’ she said, and Angela said no, Miss Ivygale wasn’t.

At ten past twelve Gordon Spelle entered the outer office. ‘Red roses,’ he lilted, ‘for a blue lady. Oh, Mr Florist, please…’ He laughed, standing by the door. He closed the door and crossed to her desk and kissed her. If anyone had asked her in that moment she’d have said that her inferiority complex was a thing of the past. She felt pretty when Gordon Spelle kissed her, not knowing what everyone else knew, that Gordon Spelle was notorious.

They had lunch in a place called the Coffee Bean, more modest than the Terrazza. Gordon Spelle told her about his childhood, which had not been happy. He told her about coming to C.S. & E. nine years ago, and about his earlier ambition to be a dance-band leader. ‘Look,’ he said when they’d drunk a carafe of Sicilian wine. ‘I want to tell you, Angela: I’m actually married.’

She felt a coldness in her stomach, as though ice had somehow become lodged there. The coldness began to hurt her, like indigestion. All the warmth of her body had moved into her face and neck. She hated the flush that had come to her face and neck because she knew it made her look awful.

‘Married?’ she said.

He’d only laughed last night in the taxi, she remembered: he hadn’t actually said he wasn’t married, not that she could swear to it. He’d laughed and given the impression that married was the last thing he was, so that she’d woken up that morning with the firmly established thought that Gordon Spelle, a bachelor, had said he loved her and had embraced her with more passion than she’d ever permitted in another man or youth. In the moments of waking she’d even been aware of thinking that one day she and Gordon Spelle might be married, and had imagined her parents in their best clothes, her father awkward, giving her away. It was all amazing; incredible that Gordon Spelle should have picked her out when all around him, in C.S. & E. and in the other offices, there were beautiful girls.

‘I didn’t dare tell you,’ he said. ‘I tried to, Angela: All last night I tried to, but I couldn’t. In case you’d go away.’

They left the Coffee Bean and walked about Grosvenor Square in bitter November sunshine. Men were tidying the flowerbeds. The people who had hurried from their offices last night and had hurried into them this morning, and out of them for lunch, were hurrying back to them again.

‘I’m in love with you, Angela,’ he said, and again she felt it was incredible. She might be dreaming, she thought, but knew she was not.

They walked hand in hand, and she suddenly remembered Mr Hemp telephoning in the sedan chair, cross and untruthful with his wife. She imagined Gordon Spelle’s wife and saw her as a hard-faced woman who was particular about her house, who didn’t let him smoke in certain rooms, who’d somehow prevented him from becoming a dance-band leader. She seemed to be older than Gordon Spelle, with hair that was quite grey and a face that Angela remembered from a book her father used to read her as a child, the face of a farmyard rat.

‘She’s a bit of an invalid, actually,’ Gordon Spelle said. ‘She isn’t well most of the time and she’s a ball of nerves anyway. She couldn’t stand a separation, Angela, or anything like that: I wouldn’t want to mislead you, Angela, like Alec Hemp –’

‘Oh, Gordon.’

He looked away from her and with his face still averted he said he wasn’t much of a person. It was all wrong, being in love with her like this, with a wife and children at home. He would never want her to go on waiting for him, as Pam Ivygale had waited for twenty-three years.

‘Oh, love,’ she said.

The ice had gone from her stomach, and her face had cooled again. He put his arms around her, one hand on her hair, the other pressing her body into his. He whispered, but she couldn’t hear what he said and the words didn’t seem important. The hurrying people glanced at them, surprised to witness a leisurely embrace, in daylight, on a path in Grosvenor Square.

‘Oh, love,’ she said again.

The cold had brought out the defects on her face: beneath heavily applied make-up he noticed that the skin was pimply and pitted. Affected by the cold also, her eyes were red-rimmed. She reminded him of Gwyneth Birkett, a girl who’d been at C.S. & E. three years ago.

They returned to the office. He released her hand and took her arm instead. He’d see her at half past five, he said in the lift. He kissed her in the lift because there was no one else in it. His mouth was moist and open. No one ever before had kissed her like he did, as though far more than kisses were involved, as though his whole being was passionate for hers. ‘I love you terribly,’ he said.

All afternoon, with no real work to do, she thought about it, continuing to be amazed. It was a mystery, a gorgeous mystery that became more gorgeous the more she surveyed the facts. The facts were gorgeous themselves: nicer, she considered, than any of the other facts of her life. In prettily coloured clothes the girls of C.S. & E. walked the green-carpeted corridors from office to office, their fingernails gleaming, their skins like porcelain, apparently without pores. In their suede boots or their platform shoes they queued for lunchtime tables in the Coffee Bean, or stood at five past six in the warm bar of the Gresham Arms. Their faces were nicer than her face, their bodies more lissom, their legs and arms more suavely elegant. Yet she had been chosen.

She leafed through files, acquainting herself further with the affairs of Miss Ivygale’s office. She examined without interest the carbon copies of letters in buff-coloured folders. The faint, blurred type made no sense to her and the letters themselves seemed as unimportant as the flimsy paper they were duplicated on. In a daydream that was delicious his tapering hands again caressed her. ‘I love you terribly, too,’ she said.

At four o’clock Miss Ivygale arrived. She’d been working all day in her flat, she said, making notes for the letters she now wished to dictate. Her manner was businesslike, she didn’t mention the evening before. ‘Dear Sir,’ she said. ‘Further to yours of the 29th…’

Angela made shorthand notes and then typed Miss Ivygale’s letters. He did not love his wife; he had hinted that he did not love his wife; no one surely could kiss you like that, no one could put his arms around you in the broad daylight in Grosvenor Square, and still love a wife somewhere. She imagined being in a room with him, a room with an electric fire built into the wall, and two chintz-covered armchairs and a sofa covered in the same material, with pictures they had chosen together, and ornaments on the mantelpiece. ‘No, I don’t love her,’ his voice said. ‘Marry me, Angela,’ his voice said.

‘No, no, that’s really badly done,’ Miss Ivygale said. ‘Type it again, please.’

You couldn’t blame Miss Ivygale. Naturally Miss Ivygale was cross, having just had her share of Mr Hemp, one night out of so many empty ones. She smiled at Miss Ivygale when she handed her the retyped letter. Feeling generous and euphoric, she wanted to tell Miss Ivygale that she was still attractive at fifty, but naturally she could not do that.

‘See they catch the post,’ Miss Ivygale sourly ordered, handing her back the letters she’d signed.

‘Yes, yes, of course, Miss Ivygale –’

‘You’ll need to hurry up.’

She took the letters to the dispatch-room in the basement and when she returned to the outer office she found that Miss Ivygale had already left the inner one. She put the grey plastic cover on her Remington International and went to the lavatory to put Pure Magic on her face. ‘I wonder, who’s kissing her now,’ Gordon Spelle was murmuring when she entered the outer office again. ‘I wonder who’s showing her how.’

He put his arms around her. His tongue crept between her teeth, his hands caressed the outline of her buttocks. He led her into Miss Ivygale’s office, an arm around her waist, his lips damply on her right ear. He was whispering something about Miss Ivygale having left for the Gresham Arms and about having to lock the door because the cleaners would be coming round. She heard the door being locked. The light went out and the office was dark except for the glow of the street lamps coming through two uncurtained windows. His mouth was working on hers again, his fingers undid the zip at the side of her skirt. She closed her eyes, saturated by the gorgeousness of the mystery.

Take it easy, he said to himself when he had her on the floor, remembering the way Gwyneth Birkett had suddenly shouted out, in discomfort apparently although at the time he’d assumed it to be pleasure. A Nigerian cleaner had come knocking at the door when she’d shouted out the third or fourth time. ‘Oh, God, I love you,’ he whispered to Angela Hosford.

She had vodka and lime in the Gresham Arms because she felt she needed pulling together and one of the girls in the flat had said that vodka was great for that. It had been very painful on the floor of Miss Ivygale’s office, and not even momentarily pleasurable, not once. It had been less painful the other time, with Ted Apwell on the hearth-rug. She wished it didn’t always have to be on a floor, but even so it didn’t matter – nor did the pain, nor the apprehension about doing it in Miss Ivygale’s office. All the time he’d kept saying he loved her, and as often as she could manage it she’d said she loved him too.

‘Must go,’ he said now with sudden, awful abruptness. He buttoned the jacket of his pepper-coloured suit. He kissed her on the lips, in full view of everyone in the Gresham Arms. She wanted to go with him but felt she shouldn’t because the drink he’d just bought her was scarcely touched. He’d drunk his own gin and Britvic in a couple of gulps.

‘Sorry for being so grumpy,’ Miss Ivygale said.

The Gresham Arms was warm and noisy, but somehow not the same at all. The men who’d been there last night were there again: Tommy Blyth and the man called Dil and all the other men – and the black-haired receptionist and all the other girls. Mr Hemp was not. Mr Hemp was hurrying back to his wife, and so was Gordon Spelle.

‘What’re you drinking?’ Miss Ivygale asked her.

‘Oh no, no. I haven’t even started this one, thanks.’

But Miss Ivygale, whose own glass required refilling, insisted. ‘Sit down, why don’t you?’ Miss Ivygale suggested indicating the bar-stool next to hers. ‘Take off your coat. It’s like a furnace in here.’

Slowly Angela took off her coat. She sat beside her immediate employer, still feeling painful and in other ways aware of what had occurred on Miss Ivygale’s office floor. They drank together and in time they both became a little drunk. Angela felt sorry for Miss Ivygale then, and Miss Ivygale felt sorry for Angela, but neither of them said so. And in the end, when Angela asked Miss Ivygale why it was that Gordon Spelle had picked her out, Miss Ivygale replied that it was because Gordon Spelle loved her. What else could she say? Miss Ivygale asked herself. How could she say that everyone knew that Gordon Spelle chose girls who were unattractive because he believed such girls, deprived of sex for long periods at a time, were an easier bet? Gordon Spelle was notorious, but Miss Ivygale naturally couldn’t say it, any more than she’d been able to say it to Gwyneth Birkett or Tamar Dymorid or Sue, or any of the others.

‘Oh, it’s beautiful!’ Angela cried suddenly, having drunk a little more. She was referring, not to her own situation, but to the fact that Miss Ivygale had wasted half a lifetime on a hopeless love. Feeling happy herself, she wanted Miss Ivygale to feel happy also.

Miss Ivygale did not say anything in reply. She was fifty and Angela was twenty-six: that made a difference where knowing what was beautiful was concerned. The thing about Gordon Spelle was that with the worst possible motives he performed an act of charity for the girls who were his victims. He gave them self-esteem, and memories to fall back on – for the truth was too devious for those closest to it to guess, and too cruel for other people ever to reveal to them. The victims of Gordon Spelle left C.S. & E. in the end because they believed the passion of his love for them put him under a strain, he being married to a wife who was ill. As soon as each had gone he looked around for someone else.

‘And beautiful for you too, my dear,’ Miss Ivygale murmured, thinking that in a way it was, compared with what she had herself. She’d been aware for twenty-three years of being used by the man she loved: self-esteem and memories were better than knowing that, no matter how falsely they came.

‘Let’s have two for the road,’ murmured Miss Ivygale, and ordered further drinks.