Collected Stories

Lovers of Their Time

Looking back on it, it seemed to have to do with that particular decade in London. Could it have happened, he wondered, at any other time except the 1960s? That feeling was intensified, perhaps, because the whole thing had begun on New Year’s Day, 1963, long before that day became a bank holiday in England. ‘That’ll be two and nine,’ she’d said, smiling at him across her counter, handing him toothpaste and emery boards in a bag. ‘Colgate’s, remember,’ his wife had called out as he was leaving the flat. ‘The last stuff we had tasted awful.’

His name was Norman Britt. It said so on a small plastic name-plate in front of his position in the travel agency where he worked, Travel-Wide as it was called. Marie a badge on her light-blue shop-coat announced. His wife, who worked at home, assembling jewellery for a firm that paid her on a production basis, was called Hilda.

Green’s the Chemist’s and Travel-Wide were in Vincent Street, a street that was equidistant from Paddington Station and Edgware Road. The flat where Hilda worked all day was in Putney. Marie lived in Reading with her mother and her mother’s friend Mrs Druk, both of them widows. She caught the 8.05 every morning to Paddington and usually the 6.30 back.

He was forty in 1963, as Hilda was; Marie was twenty-eight. He was tall and thin, with a David Niven moustache. Hilda was thin also, her dark hair beginning to grey, her sharply featured face pale. Marie was well-covered, carefully made up, her hair dyed blonde. She smiled a lot, a slack, half-crooked smile that made her eyes screw up and twinkle; she exuded laziness and generosity. She and her friend Mavis went dancing a lot in Reading and had a sizeable collection of men friends. ‘Fellas’ they called them.

Buying things from her now and again in Green’s the Chemist’s Norman had come to the conclusion that she was of a tartish disposition, and imagined that if ever he sat with her over a drink in the nearby Drummer Boy the occasion could easily lead to a hug on the street afterwards. He imagined her coral-coloured lips, like two tiny sausages, only softer, pressed upon his moustache and his abbreviated mouth. He imagined the warmth of her hand in his. For all that, she was a little outside reality: she was there to desire, to glow erotically in the heady atmosphere of the Drummer Boy, to light cigarettes for in a fantasy.

‘Isn’t it cold?’ he said as she handed him the emery boards and the toothpaste.

‘Shocking,’ she agreed, and hesitated, clearly wanting to say something else. ‘You’re in that Travel-Wide,’ she added in the end. ‘Me and my friend want to go to Spain this year.’

‘It’s very popular. The Costa Brava?’

‘That’s right.’ She handed him threepence change. ‘In May.’

‘Not too hot on the Costa in May. If you need any help –’

‘Just the bookings.’

‘I’d be happy to make them for you. Look in any time. Britt the name is. I’m on the counter.’

‘If I may, Mr Britt. I could slip out maybe at four, or roundabout.’

‘Today, you mean?’

‘We want to fix it up.’

‘Naturally. I’ll keep an eye out for you.’

It was hard not to call her madam or miss, the way he’d normally do. He had heard himself saying that he’d be happy to make the bookings for her, knowing that that was business jargon, knowing that the unfussy voice he’d used was a business one also. Her friend was a man, he supposed, some snazzy tough in a car. ‘See you later then,’ he said, but already she was serving another customer, advising about lipstick refills.

She didn’t appear in Travel-Wide at four o’clock; she hadn’t come when the doors closed at five-thirty. He was aware of a sense of disappointment, combined with one of anticipation: for if she’d come at four, he reflected as he left the travel agency, their bit of business would be in the past rather than the future. She’d look in some other time and he’d just have to trust to luck that if he happened to be busy with another customer she’d be able to wait. There’d be a further occasion, when she called to collect the tickets themselves.

‘Ever so sorry,’ she said on the street, her voice coming from behind him. ‘Couldn’t get away, Mr Britt.’

He turned and smiled at her, feeling the movement of his moustache as he parted his lips. He knew only too well, he said. ‘Some other time then?’

‘Maybe tomorrow. Maybe lunchtime.’

‘I’m off myself from twelve to one. Look, you wouldn’t fancy a drink? I could advise you just as easily over a drink.’

‘Oh, you wouldn’t have the time. No, I mustn’t take advantage –’

‘You’re not at all. If you’ve got ten minutes?’

‘Well, it’s awfully good of you, Mr Britt. But I really feel I’m taking advantage, I really do.’

‘A New Year’s drink.’

He pushed open the doors of the saloon bar of the Drummer Boy, a place he didn’t often enter except for office drinks at Christmas or when someone leaving the agency was being given a send-off. Ron Stocks and Mr Blackstaffe were usually there in the evenings: he hoped they’d be there now to see him in the company of the girl from Green’s the Chemist’s. ‘What would you like?’ he asked her.

‘Gin and peppermint’s my poison, only honestly I should pay. No, let me ask you –’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it. We can sit over there, look.’

The Drummer Boy, so early in the evening, wasn’t full. By six o’clock the advertising executives from the firm of Dalton, Dure and Higgins, just round the corner, would have arrived, and the architects from Frine and Knight. Now there was only Mrs Gregan, old and alcoholic, known to everyone, and a man called Bert, with his poodle, Jimmy. It was disappointing that Ron Stocks and Mr Blackstaffe weren’t there.

‘You were here lunchtime Christmas Eve,’ she said.

‘Yes, I was.’ He paused, placing her gin and peppermint on a cardboard mat that advertised Guinness. ‘I saw you too.’

He drank some of his Double Diamond and carefully wiped the traces of foam from his moustache. He realized now that it would, of course, be quite impossible to give her a hug on the street outside. That had been just imagination, wishful thinking as his mother would have said. And yet he knew that when he arrived home twenty-five or so minutes late he would not tell Hilda that he’d been advising an assistant from Green’s the Chemist’s about a holiday on the Costa Brava. He wouldn’t even say he’d been in the Drummer Boy. He’d say Blackstaffe had kept everyone late, going through the new package that Eurotours were offering in Germany and Luxembourg this summer. Hilda wouldn’t in a million years suspect that he’d been sitting in a public house with a younger woman who was quite an eyeful. As a kind of joke, she quite regularly suggested that his sexual drive left something to be desired.

‘We were thinking about the last two weeks in May,’ Marie said. ‘It’s when Mavis can get off too.’

‘Mavis?’

‘My friend, Mr Britt.’

Hilda was watching Z-Cars in the sitting-room, drinking V.P. wine. His stuff was in the oven, she told him. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

Sometimes she was out when he returned in the evenings. She went round to friends, a Mr and Mrs Fowler, with whom she drank V.P. and played bridge. On other occasions she went to the Club, which was a place with a licence, for card-players and billiard-players. She quite liked her social life, but always said beforehand when she’d be out and always made arrangements about leaving food in the oven. Often in the daytime she’d go and make jewellery with Violet Parkes, who also went in for this occupation; and often Violet Parkes spent the day with Hilda. The jewellery-making consisted for the most part of threading plastic beads on to a string or arranging plastic pieces in the settings provided. Hilda was quick at it and earned more than she would have if she went out every day, saving the fares for a start. She was better at it than Violet Parkes.

‘All right then?’ she said when he carried his tray of food into the sitting-room and sat down in front of the television set. ‘Want some V.P., eh?’

Her eyes continued to watch the figures on the screen as she spoke. He knew she’d prefer to be in the Fowlers’ house or at the Club, although now that they’d acquired a TV set the evenings passed easier when they were alone together.

‘No, thanks,’ he said in reply to her offer of wine and he began to eat something that appeared to be a rissole. There were two of them, round and brown in a tin-foil container that also contained gravy. He hoped she wasn’t going to be demanding in their bedroom. He eyed her, for sometimes he could tell.

‘Hi,’ she said, noticing the glance. ‘Feeling fruity, dear?’ She laughed and winked, her suggestive voice seeming odd as it issued from her thin, rather dried-up face. She was always saying things like that, for no reason that Norman could see, always talking about feeling fruity or saying she could see he was keen when he wasn’t in the least. Norman considered that she was unduly demanding and often wondered what it would be like to be married to someone who was not. Now and again, fatigued after the intensity of her love-making, he lay staring at the darkness, wondering if her bedroom appetites were related in some way to the fact that she was unable to bear children, if her abandon reflected a maternal frustration. Earlier in their married life she’d gone out every day to an office where she’d been a filing clerk; in the evenings they’d often gone to the cinema.

He lay that night, after she’d gone to sleep, listening to her heavy breathing, thinking of the girl in Green’s the Chemist’s. He went through the whole day in his mind, seeing himself leaving the flat in Putney, hearing Hilda calling out about the emery boards and the toothpaste, seeing himself reading the Daily Telegraph in the Tube. Slowly he went through the morning, deliciously anticipating the moment when she handed him his change. With her smile mistily hovering, he recalled the questions and demands of a number of the morning’s customers. ‘Fix us up Newcastle and back?’ a couple inquired. ‘Mid-week’s cheaper, is it?’ A man with a squashed-up face wanted a week in Holland for himself and his sister and his sister’s husband. A woman asked about Greece, another about cruises on the Nile, a third about the Scilly Isles. Then he placed the Closed sign in front of his position at the counter and went out to have lunch in Bette’s Sandwiches off the Edgware Road. ‘Packet of emery boards,’ he said again in Green’s the Chemist’s, ‘and a small Colgate’s.’ After that there was the conversation they’d had, and then the afternoon with her smile still mistily hovering, as in fact it had, and then her presence beside him in the Drummer Boy. Endlessly she lifted the glass of gin and peppermint to her lips, endlessly she smiled. When he slept he dreamed of her. They were walking in Hyde Park and her shoe fell off. ‘I could tell you were a deep one,’ she said, and the next thing was Hilda was having one of her early-morning appetites.

‘I don’t know what it is about that chap,’ Marie confided to Mavis. ‘Something, though.’

‘Married, is he?’

‘Oh, he would be, chap like that.’

‘Now, you be careful, girl’

‘He has Sinatra’s eyes. That blue, you know.’

‘Now, Marie –’

‘I like an older fella. He’s got a nice moustache.’

‘So’s that fella in the International.’

‘Wet behind the ears. And my God, his dandruff!’

They left the train together and parted on the platform, Marie making for the Underground, Mavis hurrying for a bus. It was quite convenient, really, living in Reading and travelling to Paddington every day. It was only half an hour and chatting on the journey passed the time. They didn’t travel back together in the evenings because Mavis nearly always did an hour’s overtime. She was a computer programmer.

‘I talked to Mavis. It’s OK about the insurance,’ Marie said in Travel-Wide at half past eleven that morning, having slipped out when the shop seemed slack. There’d been some details about insurance which he’d raised the evening before. He always advised insurance, but he’d quite understood when she’d made the point that she’d better discuss the matter with her friend before committing herself to the extra expenditure.

‘So I’ll go ahead and book you,’ he said. ‘There’ll just be the deposit.’

Mavis wrote the cheque. She pushed the pink slip across the counter to him. ‘Payable to Travel-Wide.’

‘That’s quite correct.’ He glanced at it and wrote her a receipt. He said:

‘I looked out another brochure or two. I’d quite like to go through them with you. So you can explain what’s what to your friend.’

‘Oh, that’s very nice, Mr Britt. But I got to get back. I mean, I shouldn’t be out in the middle of the morning.’

‘Any chance of lunchtime?’

His suavity astounded him. He thought of Hilda, deftly working at her jewellery, stringing orange and yellow beads, listening to the Jimmy Young programme.

‘Lunchtime, Mr Britt?’

‘We’d maybe talk about the brochures.’

He fancied her, she said to herself. He was making a pass, talking about brochures and lunchtime. Well, she wasn’t disagreeable. She’d meant what she’d said to Mavis: she liked an older fella and she liked his moustache, so smooth it looked as if he put something on it. She liked the name Norman.

‘All right then,’ she said.

He couldn’t suggest Bette’s Sandwiches because you stood up at a shelf on the wall and ate the sandwiches off a cardboard plate.

‘We could go to the Drummer Boy,’ he suggested instead. ‘I’m off at twelve-fifteen.’

‘Say half past, Mr Britt.’

‘I’ll be there with the brochures.’

Again he thought of Hilda. He thought of her wiry, pasty limbs and the way she had of snorting. Sometimes when they were watching the television she’d suddenly want to sit on his knee. She’d get worse as she grew older; she’d get scrawnier; her hair, already coarse, would get dry and grey. He enjoyed the evenings when she went out to the Club or to her friends the Fowlers. And yet he wasn’t being fair because in very many ways she did her best. It was just that you didn’t always feel like having someone on your knee after a day’s work.

‘Same?’ he said in the Drummer Boy.

‘Yes please, Mr Britt.’ She’d meant to say that the drinks were definitely on her, after what he’d spent last night. But in her flurry she forgot. She picked up the brochures he’d left on the seat beside her. She pretended to read one, but all the time she was watching him as he stood by the bar. He smiled as he turned and came back with their drinks. He said something about it being a nice way to do business. He was drinking gin and peppermint himself.

‘I meant to pay for the drinks. I meant to say I would. I’m sorry, Mr Britt.’

‘Norman my name is.’ He surprised himself again by the ease with which he was managing the situation. They’d have their drinks and then he’d suggest some of the shepherd’s pie, or a ham-and-salad roll if she’d prefer it. He’d buy her another gin and peppermint to get her going. Eighteen years ago he used to buy Hilda further glasses of V.P. wine with the same thought in mind.

They finished with the brochures. She told him she lived in Reading; she talked about the town. She mentioned her mother and her mother’s friend Mrs Druk, who lived with them, and Mavis. She told him a lot about Mavis. No man was mentioned, no boyfriend or fiancé.

‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘I’m not hungry.’ She couldn’t have touched a thing. She just wanted to go on drinking gin with him. She wanted to get slightly squiffy, a thing she’d never done before in the middle of the day. She wanted to put her arm through his.

‘It’s been nice meeting you,’ he said.

‘A bit of luck.’

‘I think so too, Marie.’ He ran his forefinger between the bones on the back of her hand, so gently that it made her want to shiver. She didn’t take her hand away, and when she continued not to he took her hand in his.

After that they had lunch together every day, always in the Drummer Boy. People saw them, Ron Stocks and Mr Blackstaffe from Travel-Wide, Mr Fineman, the pharmacist from Green’s the Chemist’s. Other people from the travel agency and from the chemist’s saw them walking about the streets, usually hand in hand. They would look together into the shop windows of Edgware Road, drawn particularly to an antique shop full of brass. In the evenings he would walk with her to Paddington Station and have a drink in one of the bars. They’d embrace on the platform, as other people did.

Mavis continued to disapprove; Marie’s mother and Mrs Druk remained ignorant of the affair. The holiday on the Costa Brava that May was not a success because all the time Marie kept wishing Norman Britt was with her. Occasionally, while Mavis read magazines on the beach, Marie wept and Mavis pretended not to notice. She was furious because Marie’s low spirits meant that it was impossible for them to get to know fellas. For months they’d been looking forward to the holiday and now, just because of a clerk in a travel agency, it was a flop. ‘I’m sorry, dear,’ Marie kept saying, trying to smile; but when they returned to London the friendship declined. ‘You’re making a fool of yourself,’ Mavis pronounced harshly, ‘and it’s dead boring having to hear about it.’ After that they ceased to travel together in the mornings.

The affair remained unconsummated. In the hour and a quarter allotted to each of them for lunch there was nowhere they might have gone to let their passion for one another run its course. Everywhere was public: Travel-Wide and the chemist’s shop, the Drummer Boy, the streets they walked. Neither could easily spend a night away from home. Her mother and Mrs Druk would guess that something untoward was in the air; Hilda, deprived of her bedroom mating, would no longer be nonchalant in front of the TV. It would all come out if they were rash, and they sensed some danger in that.

‘Oh, darling,’ she whispered one October evening at Paddington, huddling herself against him. It was foggy and cold. The fog was in her pale hair, tiny droplets that only he, being close to her, could see. People hurried through the lit-up station, weary faces anxious to be home.

‘I know,’ he said, feeling as inadequate as he always did at the station.

‘I lie awake and think of you,’ she whispered.

‘You’ve made me live,’ he whispered back.

‘And you me. Oh, God, and you me.’ She was gone before she finished speaking, swinging into the train as it moved away, her bulky red handbag the last thing he saw. It would be eighteen hours before they’d meet again.

He turned his back on her train and slowly made his way through the crowds, his reluctance to start the journey back to the flat in Putney seeming physical, like a pain, inside him. ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ a woman cried angrily at him, for he had been in her way and had moved in the same direction as she had in seeking to avoid her, causing a second collision. She dropped magazines on to the platform and he helped her to pick them up, vainly apologizing.

It was then, walking away from this woman, that he saw the sign. Hotel Entrance it said in red neon letters, beyond the station’s main bookstall. It was the back of the Great Western Royal, a short-cut to its comforts for train travellers at the end of their journey. If only, he thought, they could share a room there. If only for one single night they were granted the privilege of being man and wife. People passed through the swing-doors beneath the glowing red sign, people hurrying, with newspapers or suitcases. Without quite knowing why, he passed through the swing-doors himself.

He walked up two brief flights of steps, through another set of doors, and paused in the enormous hall of the Great Western Royal Hotel. Ahead of him, to the left, was the long, curved reception counter and, to the right, the porter’s desk. Small tables and armchairs were everywhere; it was carpeted underfoot. There were signs to lifts and to the bar and the restaurant. The stairway, gently rising to his left, was gracious, carpeted also.

They would sit for a moment in this hall, he imagined, as other people were sitting now, a few with drinks, others with pots of tea and plates half empty of assorted biscuits. He stood for a moment, watching these people, and then, as though he possessed a room in the hotel, he mounted the stairs, saying to himself that it must somehow be possible, that surely they could share a single night in the splendour of this place. There was a landing, made into a lounge, with armchairs and tables, as in the hall below. People conversed quietly; a foreign waiter, elderly and limping, collected silver-plated teapots; a Pekinese dog slept on a woman’s lap.

The floor above was different. It was a long, wide corridor with bedroom doors on either side of it. Other corridors, exactly similar, led off it. Chambermaids passed him with lowered eyes; someone gently laughed in a room marked Staff Only; a waiter wheeled a trolley containing covered dishes, and a bottle of wine wrapped in a napkin. Bathroom a sign said, and he looked in, just to see what a bathroom in the Great Western Royal Hotel would be like. ‘My God!’ he whispered, possessed immediately with the idea that was, for him, to make the decade of the 1960s different. Looking back on it, he was for ever after unable to recall the first moment he beheld the bathroom on the second floor without experiencing the shiver of pleasure he’d experienced at the time. Slowly he entered. He locked the door and slowly sat down on the edge of the bath. The place was huge, as the bath itself was, like somewhere in a palace. The walls were marble, white veined delicately with grey. Two monstrous brass taps, the biggest bath taps he’d ever in his life seen, seemed to know already that he and Marie would come to the bathroom. They seemed almost to wink an invitation to him, to tell him that the bathroom was a comfortable place and not often in use since private bathrooms were now attached to most of the bedrooms. Sitting in his mackintosh coat on the edge of the bath, he wondered what Hilda would say if she could see him now.

He suggested it to Marie in the Drummer Boy. He led up to it slowly, describing the interior of the Great Western Royal Hotel and how he had wandered about it because he hadn’t wanted to go home. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I ended up in a bathroom.’

‘You mean the toilet, dear? Taken short –’

‘No, not the toilet. A bathroom on the second floor. Done out in marble, as a matter of fact.’

She replied that honestly he was a one, to go into a bathroom like that when he wasn’t even staying in the place! He said:

‘What I mean, Marie, it’s somewhere we could go.’

‘Go, dear?’

‘It’s empty half the time. Nearly all the time it must be. I mean, we could be there now. This minute if we wanted to.’

‘But we’re having our lunch, Norman.’

‘That’s what I mean. We could even be having it there.’

From the saloon bar’s juke-box a lugubrious voice pleaded for a hand to be held. Take my hand, sang Elvis Presley, take my whole life too. The advertising executives from Dalton, Dure and Higgins were loudly talking about their hopes of gaining the Canadian Pacific account. Less noisily the architects from Frine and Knight complained about local planning regulations.

‘In a bathroom, Norman? But we couldn’t just go into a bathroom.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, we couldn’t. I mean, we couldn’t.’

‘What I’m saying is we could.’

‘I want to marry you, Norman. I want us to be together. I don’t want just going to a bathroom in some hotel.’

‘I know; I want to marry you too. But we’ve got to work it out. You know we’ve got to work it out, Marie – getting married.’

‘Yes, I know.’

It was a familiar topic of conversation between them. They took it for granted that one day, somehow, they would be married. They had talked about Hilda. He’d described Hilda to her, he’d drawn a picture in Marie’s mind of Hilda bent over her jewellery-making in a Putney flat, or going out to drink V.P. with the Fowlers or at the Club. He hadn’t presented a flattering picture of his wife, and when Marie had quite timidly said that she didn’t much care for the sound of her he had agreed that naturally she wouldn’t. The only aspect of Hilda he didn’t touch upon was her bedroom appetite, night starvation as he privately dubbed it. He didn’t mention it because he guessed it might be upsetting.

What they had to work out where Hilda was concerned were the economics of the matter. He would never, at Travel-Wide or anywhere else, earn a great deal of money. Familiar with Hilda’s nature, he knew that as soon as a divorce was mooted she’d set out to claim as much alimony as she possibly could, which by law he would have to pay. She would state that she only made jewellery for pin-money and increasingly found it difficult to do so due to a developing tendency towards chilblains or arthritis, anything she could think of. She would hate him for rejecting her, for depriving her of a tame companion. Her own resentment at not being able to have children would somehow latch on to his unfaithfulness: she would see a pattern which wasn’t really there, bitterness would come into her eyes.

Marie had said that she wanted to give him the children he had never had. She wanted to have children at once and she knew she could. He knew it too: having children was part of her, you’d only to look at her. Yet that would mean she’d have to give up her job, which she wanted to do when she married anyway, which in turn would mean that all three of them would have to subsist on his meagre salary. And not just all three, the children also.

It was a riddle that mocked him: he could find no answer, and yet he believed that the more he and Marie were together, the more they talked to one another and continued to be in love, the more chance there was of suddenly hitting upon a solution. Not that Marie always listened when he went on about it. She agreed they had to solve their problem, but now and again just pretended it wasn’t there. She liked to forget about the existence of Hilda. For an hour or so when she was with him she liked to assume that quite soon, in July or even June, they’d be married. He always brought her back to earth.

‘Look, let’s just have a drink in the hotel,’ he urged. ‘Tonight, before the train. Instead of having one in the buffet.’

‘But it’s a hotel, Norman. I mean, it’s for people to stay in –’

‘Anyone can go into a hotel for a drink.’

That evening, after their drink in the hotel bar, he led her to the first-floor landing that was also a lounge. It was warm in the hotel. She said she’d like to sink down into one of the armchairs and fall asleep. He laughed at that; he didn’t suggest an excursion to the bathroom, sensing that he shouldn’t rush things. He saw her on to her train, abandoning her to her mother and Mrs Druk and Mavis. He knew that all during the journey she would be mulling over the splendours of the Great Western Royal.

December came. It was no longer foggy, but the weather was colder, with an icy wind. Every evening, before her train, they had their drink in the hotel. ‘I’d love to show you that bathroom,’ he said once. ‘Just for fun.’ He hadn’t been pressing it in the least; it was the first time he’d mentioned the bathroom since he’d mentioned it originally. She giggled and said he was terrible. She said she’d miss her train if she went looking at bathrooms, but he said there’d easily be time. ‘Gosh!’ she whispered, standing in the doorway, looking in. He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her inside, fearful in case a chambermaid should see them loitering there. He locked the door and kissed her. In almost twelve months it was their first embrace in private.

They went to the bathroom during the lunch hour on New Year’s Day, and he felt it was right that they should celebrate in this way the anniversary of their first real meeting. His early impression of her, that she was of a tartish disposition, had long since been dispelled. Voluptuous she might, seem to the eye, but beneath that misleading surface she was prim and proper. It was odd that Hilda, who looked dried-up and wholly uninterested in the sensual life, should also belie her appearance. ‘I’ve never done it before,’ Marie confessed in the bathroom, and he loved her the more for that. He loved her simplicity in this matter, her desire to remain a virgin until her wedding. But since she repeatedly swore that she could marry no one else, their anticipating of their wedding-night did not matter. ‘Oh, God, I love you,’ she whispered, naked for the first time in the bathroom. ‘Oh, Norman, you’re so good to me.’

After that it became a regular thing. He would saunter from the hotel bar, across the huge entrance lounge, and take a lift to the second floor. Five minutes later she would follow, with a towel brought specially from Reading in her handbag. In the bathroom they always whispered, and would sit together in a warm bath after their love-making, still murmuring about the future, holding hands beneath the surface of the water. No one ever rapped on the door to ask what was going on in there. No one ever questioned them as they returned, separately, to the bar, with the towel they’d shared damping her compact and her handkerchief.

Years instead of months began to go by. On the juke-box in the Drummer Boy the voice of Elvis Presley was no longer heard. ‘Why she had to go I don’t know,’ sang the Beatles, ‘she didn’t say… I believe in yesterday.’ And Eleanor Rigby entered people’s lives, and Sergeant Pepper with her. The fantasies of secret agents, more fantastic than ever before, filled the screens of London’s cinemas. Carnaby Street, like a jolly trash-can, overflowed with noise and colour. And in the bathroom of the Great Western Royal Hotel the love affair of Norman Britt and Marie was touched with the same preposterousness. They ate sandwiches in the bathroom; they drank wine. He whispered to her of the faraway places he knew about but had never been to: the Bahamas, Brazil, Peru, Seville at Easter, the Greek islands, the Nile, Shiraz, Persepolis, the Rocky Mountains. They should have been saving their money, not spending it on gin and peppermintin the bar of the hotel and in the Drummer Boy. They should have been racking their brains to find a solution to the problem of Hilda, but it was nicer to pretend that one day they would walk together in Venice or Tuscany. It was all so different from the activities that began with Hilda’s bedroom appetites, and it was different from the coarseness that invariably surfaced when Mr Blackstaffe got going in the Drummer Boy on an evening when a Travel-Wide employee was being given a send-off. Mr Blackstaffe’s great joke on such occasions was that he liked to have sexual intercourse with his wife at night and that she preferred the conjunction in the mornings. He was always going on about how difficult it was in the mornings, what with the children liable to interrupt you, and he usually went into details about certain other, more intimate preferences of his wife’s. He had a powerful, waxy guffaw, which he brought regularly into play when he was engaged in this kind of conversation, allying it with a nudging motion of the elbow. Once his wife actually turned up in the Drummer Boy and Norman found it embarrassing even to look at her, knowing as he did so much about her private life. She was a stout middle-aged woman with decorated spectacles: her appearance, too, apparently belied much.

In the bathroom all such considerations, disliked equally by Norman Britt and Marie, were left behind. Romance ruled their brief sojourns, and love sanctified – or so they believed – the passion of their physical intimacy. Love excused their eccentricity, for only love could have found in them a willingness to engage in the deception of a hotel and the courage that went with it: that they believed most of all.

But afterwards, selling tickets to other people or putting Marie on her evening train, Norman sometimes felt depressed. And then gradually, as more time passed, the depression increased and intensified. ‘I’m so sad,’ he whispered in the bathroom once, ‘when I’m not with you. I don’t think I can stand it.’ She dried herself on the towel brought specially from Reading in her large red handbag. ‘You’ll have to tell her,’ she said, with an edge in her voice that hadn’t ever been there before. ‘I don’t want to leave having babies too late.’ She wasn’t twenty-eight any more; she was thirty-one. ‘I mean, it isn’t fair on me,’ she said.

He knew it wasn’t fair on her, but going over the whole thing yet again in Travel-Wide that afternoon he also knew that poverty would destroy them. He’d never earn much more than he earned now. The babies Marie wanted, and which he wanted too, would soak up what there was like blotting-paper; they’d probably have to look for council accommodation. It made him weary to think about it, it gave him a headache. But he knew she was right: they couldn’t go on for ever, living off a passing idyll, in the bathroom of a hotel. He even thought, quite seriously for a moment, of causing Hilda’s death.

Instead he told her the truth, one Thursday evening after she’d been watching The Avengers on television. He just told her he’d met someone, a girl called Marie, he said, whom he had fallen in love with and wished to marry. ‘I was hoping we could have a divorce,’ he said.

Hilda turned the sound on the television set down without in any way dimming the picture, which she continued to watch. Her face did not register the hatred he had imagined in it when he rejected her; nor did bitterness suddenly enter her eyes. Instead she shook her head at him, and poured herself some more V.P. She said:

‘You’ve gone barmy, Norman.’

‘You can think that if you like.’

‘Wherever’d you meet a girl, for God’s sake?’

‘At work. She’s there in Vincent Street. In a shop.’

‘And what’s she think of you, may I ask?’

‘She’s in love with me, Hilda.’

She laughed. She told him to pull the other one, adding that it had bells on it.

‘Hilda, I’m not making this up. I’m telling you the truth.’

She smiled into her V.P. She watched the screen for a moment, then she said:

‘And how long’s this charming stuff been going on, may I inquire?’

He didn’t want to say for years. Vaguely, he said it had been going on for just a while.

‘You’re out of your tiny, Norman. Just because you fancy some piece in a shop doesn’t mean you go getting hot under the collar. You’re no tomcat, you know, old boy.’

‘I didn’t say I was.’

‘You’re no sexual mechanic.’

‘Hilda –’

‘All chaps fancy things in shops: didn’t your mother tell you that? D’you think I haven’t fancied stuff myself, the chap who came to do the blinds, that randy little postman with his rugby songs?’

‘I’m telling you I want a divorce, Hilda.’

She laughed. She drank more V.P. wine. ‘You’re up a gum tree,’ she said, and laughed again.

‘Hildas –’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ All of a sudden she was angry, but more, he felt, because he was going on, not because of what he was actually demanding. She thought him ridiculous and said so. And then she added all the things he’d thought himself: that people like them didn’t get divorces, that unless his girlfriend was well-heeled the whole thing would be a sheer bloody nonsense, with bloody solicitors the only ones to benefit. ‘They’ll send you to the cleaners, your bloody solicitors will,’ she loudly pointed out, anger still trembling in her voice. ‘You’d be paying them back for years.’

‘I don’t care,’ he began, although he did. ‘I don’t care about anything except–’

‘Of course you do, you damn fool.’

‘Hilda –’

‘Look, get over her. Take her into a park after dark or something. It’ll make no odds to you and me.’

She turned the sound on the television up and quite quickly finished the V.P. wine. Afterwards, in their bedroom, she turned to him with an excitement that was greater than usual. ‘God, that switched me on,’ she whispered in the darkness, gripping him with her limbs. ‘The stuff we were talking about, that girl.’ When she’d finished her love-making she said, ‘I had it with that postman, you know. Swear to God. In the kitchen. And since we’re on the subject, Fowler looks in here the odd time.’

He lay beside her in silence, not knowing whether or not to believe what she was saying. It seemed at first that she was keeping her end up because he’d mentioned Marie, but then he wasn’t so sure. ‘We had a foursome once,’ she said, ‘the Fowlers and me and a chap that used to be in the Club.’

She began to stroke his face with her fingers, the way he hated. She always seemed to think that if she stroked his face it would excite him. She said, ‘Tell me more about this piece you fancy.’

He told her to keep her quiet and to make her stop stroking his face. It didn’t seem to matter now if he told her how long it had been going on, not since she’d made her revelations about Fowler and the postman. He even enjoyed telling her, about the New Year’s Day when he’d bought the emery boards and the Colgate’s, and how he’d got to know Marie because she and Mavis were booking a holiday on the Costa Brava.

‘But you’ve never actually?’

‘Yes, we have.’

‘For God’s sake where? Doorways or something? In the park?’

‘We go to a hotel.’

‘You old devil!’

‘Listen, Hilda –’

‘For God’s sake go on, love. Tell me about it.’

He told her about the bathroom and she kept asking him questions, making him tell her details, asking him to describe Marie to her. Dawn was breaking when they finished talking.

‘Forget about the divorce stuff,’ she said quite casually at breakfast. ‘I wouldn’t want to hear no more of that. I wouldn’t want you ruined for my sake, dear.’

He didn’t want to see Marie that day, although he had to because it was arranged. In any case she knew he’d been going to tell his wife the night before; she’d want to hear the outcome.

‘Well?’ she said in the Drummer Boy.

He shrugged. He shook his head. He said:

‘I told her.’

‘And what’d she say, Norman? What’d Hilda say?’

‘She said I was barmy to be talking about divorce. She said what I said to you: that we wouldn’t manage with the alimony.’

They sat in silence. Eventually Marie said:

‘Then can’t you leave her? Can’t you just not go back? We could get a flat somewhere. We could put off kiddies, darling. Just walk out, couldn’t you?’

‘They’d find us. They’d make me pay.’

‘We could try it. If I keep on working you could pay what they want.’

‘It’ll never pan out, Marie.’

‘Oh, darling, just walk away from her.’

Which is what, to Hilda’s astonishment, he did. One evening when she was at the Club he packed his clothes and went to two rooms in Kilburn that he and Marie had found. He didn’t tell Hilda where he was going. He just left a note to say he wouldn’t be back.

They lived as man and wife in Kilburn, sharing a lavatory and a bathroom with fifteen other people. In time he received a court summons, and in court was informed that he had behaved meanly and despicably to the woman he’d married. He agreed to pay regular maintenance.

The two rooms in Kilburn were dirty and uncomfortable, and life in them was rather different from the life they had known together in the Drummer Boy and the Great Western Royal Hotel. They planned to find somewhere better, but at a reasonable price that wasn’t easy to find. A certain melancholy descended on them, for although they were together they seemed as far away as ever from their own small house, their children and their ordinary contentment.

‘We could go to Reading,’ Marie suggested.

‘Reading?’

‘To my mum’s.’

‘But your mum’s nearly disowned you. Your mum’s livid, you said yourself she was.’

‘People come round.’

She was right. One Sunday afternoon they made the journey to Reading to have tea with Marie’s mother and her friend Mrs Druk. Neither of these women addressed Norman, and once when he and Marie were in the kitchen he heard Mrs Druk saying it disgusted her, that he was old enough to be Marie’s father. ‘Don’t think much of him,’ Marie’s mother replied. ‘Pipsqueak really.’

Nevertheless, Marie’s mother had missed her daughter’s contribution to the household finances and before they returned to London that evening it was arranged that Norman and Marie should move in within a month, on the firm understanding that the very second it was feasible their marriage would take place. ‘He’s a boarder, mind,’ Marie’s mother warned. ‘Nothing but a boarder in this house.’ There were neighbours, Mrs Druk added, to be thought of.

Reading was worse than the two rooms in Kilburn. Marie’s mother continued to make disparaging remarks about Norman, about the way he left the lavatory, or the thump of his feet on the stair-carpet, or his fingermarks around the light-switches. Marie would deny these accusations and then there’d be a row, with Mrs Druk joining in because she loved a row, and Marie’s mother weeping and then Marie weeping. Norman had been to see a solicitor about divorcing Hilda, quoting her unfaithfulness with a postman and with Fowler. ‘You have your evidence, Mr Britt?’ the solicitor inquired, and pursed his lips when Norman said he hadn’t.

He knew it was all going to be too difficult. He knew his instinct had been right: he shouldn’t have told Hilda, he shouldn’t have just walked out. The whole thing had always been unfair on Marie; it had to be when a girl got mixed up with a married man. ‘Should think of things like that,’ her mother had a way of saying loudly when he was passing an open door. ‘Selfish type he is,’ Mrs Druk would loudly add.

Marie argued when he said none of it was going to work. But she wasn’t as broken-hearted as she might have been a year or so ago, for the strain had told on Marie too, especially the strain in Reading. She naturally wept when Norman said they’d been defeated, and so for a moment did he. He asked for a transfer to another branch of Travel-Wide and was sent to Ealing, far away from the Great Western Royal Hotel.

Eighteen months later Marie married a man in a brewery. Hilda, hearing on some grapevine that Norman was on his own, wrote to him and suggested that bygones should be allowed to be bygones. Lonely in a bed-sitting-room in Ealing, he agreed to talk the situation over with her and after that he agreed to return to their flat. ‘No hard feelings,’ Hilda said, ‘and no deception: there’s been a chap from the Club in here, the Woolworth’s manager.’ No hard feelings, he agreed.

For Norman Britt, as the decade of the 1960s passed, it trailed behind it the marvels of his love affair with Marie. Hilda’s scorn when he had confessed had not devalued them, nor had the two dirty rooms in Kilburn, nor the equally unpleasant experience in Reading. Their walk to the Great Western Royal, the drinks they could not afford in the hotel bar, their studied nonchalance as they made their way separately upstairs, seemed to Norman to be a fantasy that had miraculously become real. The second-floor bathroom belonged in it perfectly, the bathroom full of whispers and caressing, where the faraway places of his daily work acquired a hint of magic when he spoke of them to a girl as voluptuous as any of James Bond’s. Sometimes on the Tube he would close his eyes and with the greatest pleasure that remained to him he would recall the delicately veined marble and the great brass taps, and the bath that was big enough for two. And now and again he heard what appeared to be the strum of distant music, and the voices of the Beatles celebrating a bathroom love, as they had celebrated Eleanor Rigby and other people of that time.