Selected Stories

An Evening Out

In the theatre bar they still talked, not hurrying over their drinks although an announcement had warned that the performance would begin in two minutes. There were more people in the bar than it could comfortably accommodate, crushed close against the bar itself and in the corners, some just beginning to make their way through the several doorways to the auditorium.

‘The performance will begin in one minute,’ the peremptory Tannoy voice reminded, and quite suddenly the bar was almost empty.

The barman was a character, gloomy-faced, skin and bone, bespectacled; lank like old string, he said himself. The barmaid was younger by quite a bit, and cheerfully plump.

‘Oh, look,’ she said. ‘That woman.’

One woman had not left with the others and showed no sign of doing so. She was in a corner, sitting at one of the few tables the bar provided. All around her, on the shelf that ran around the walls, on the seats of chairs, there were empty glasses. Her own was three-quarters full of gin and tonic.

‘Deaf, d’you think?’ the barman wondered and the barmaid remarked that the theatre was never a place for the hard of hearing, it stood to reason. It could be of course that a deaf-aid had been temporarily turned off and then forgotten.

The woman they spoke of was smartly dressed, two shades of green; a coat that was tweed on one side and waterproof on the other was draped over the other chair at her table. The remains of beauty strikingly lit her features, seeming to be there less casually, less incidentally, than beauty might have been earlier in her life. Touches of grey were allowed in her fair hair, adding a distinction that went with the other changes time had wrought.

‘Excuse me, madam,’ the barman said, ‘but the performance has begun.’

What a city London is! Jeffrey thought, staring up at the dark bronze features of Sir Henry Havelock beneath the sprinkling of pigeon droppings that lightened the soldier’s crown. The last of an April twilight was slipping away, the city at its best, as it also was – in Jeffrey’s view – when dawn was turning into day. In Trafalgar Square the traffic was clogged, a crawl of lumbering red buses and patient taxis, a cyclist now and again weaving through. People gathered at the crossing lights, seeming to lose something of themselves in each small multitude while obediently they waited to move forward when the signal came. Pigeons swooped above territory they claimed as theirs, and landed on it to waddle after tit-bits, or snapped at one another, flapping away together into the sky, still in dispute.

Jeffrey turned away from it all, from Sir Henry Havelock and the pigeons and the four great lions, the floodlights just turned on, illuminating the façade of the National Gallery. ‘Won’t do to keep her waiting,’ he murmured, causing two girls who were passing to snigger. He kept her waiting longer, for when he reached it he entered the Salisbury in St Martin’s Lane and ordered a Bell’s, and then called out that it had better be a double.

He needed it. Truth to tell, he needed a second but he shook away the thought, reprimanding himself: neither of them would get anywhere if he was tipsy. On the street again he searched the pockets of his mackintosh for the little plastic container that was rattling somewhere, and when he found it in his jacket he took two of his breath fresheners.

Evelyn drew back slightly from the barman’s elderly, untidy face, from cheeks that fell into hollows, false teeth. He said again that the performance had begun.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Actually, I’m waiting for someone.’

‘We could send your friend in if you liked to go on ahead. If you have your ticket. They’re sometimes not particular about a disturbance before a play’s got going.’

‘No, actually we’re just meeting here. We’re not going to the theatre.’ She read, behind heavily rimmed lenses, bewilderment in the man’s eyes. It was unusual, she read next, the thought flitting through his confusion. He settled for that, a conclusion reached.

‘You didn’t mind my asking? Only I said to my colleague where’s the need for both of them to be late if they have their tickets on them?’

‘It’s very kind of you.’

‘Thank you, madam.’

Near to where she sat he cleared the shelf of glasses, wiped it down with a damp grey cloth, moved on, expertly balancing the further glasses he collected. ‘Lady’s waiting for her friend,’ he said to the barmaid, who was washing up at a sink behind the bar. ‘They’re not attending the show tonight.’

Evelyn was aware of the glances from behind the bar. Speculation would come later, understandable when there was time to kill. For the moment she was no more than a woman on her own.

‘D’you think I could have another?’ she called out, suddenly deciding to. ‘When you have a minute?’

She speculated herself then, wondering about whoever was destined to walk in. Oh, Lord! she so often had thought when an unsuitable arrival had abruptly brought such wondering to an end. ‘Oh no,’ she had even murmured to herself, looking away in a futile pretence that she was expecting no one. Doggedly they had always come – the Lloyd’s bank manager, the choral-music enthusiast, the retired naval officer who turned out to be a cabin steward, the widowed professor who had apologized and gone away, the one who made up board games. Even before they spoke, their doggedness and their smiles appeared to cover a multitude of sins.

She had all her life been obsessively early for appointments, and waiting yet again she made a resolution: this time if it was no good there wouldn’t be a repetition. She’d just leave it; though of course a disappointment, it might be a relief.

Her drink came. The barman didn’t linger. She shook her head when he said he’d bring her change.

‘That’s very kind of you, madam.’

She smiled that away, and was still smiling when a man appeared in the open doorway. He was hesitant, looking about him as if the place were crowded and there were several women to choose from, his nervousness not disguised. When he came closer he nodded before he spoke.

‘Jeffrey,’ he said. ‘Evie?’

‘Well, Evelyn actually.’

‘Oh, I’m awfully sorry.’

His mackintosh was worn in places but wasn’t grubby. His high cheekbones stood out, the skin tight where they stretched it. He didn’t look at all well nourished. His dark hair, not a fleck of grey in it, was limp and she wondered if perhaps he was recovering from flu.

‘Would you like your drink topped up?’ he offered in a gentlemanly way. ‘Nuts? Crisps?’

‘No, I’m happy, thanks.’

He was fastidious, you could tell. Was there a certain vulnerability beneath that edgy manner? She always stipulated well-spoken and on that he could not be faulted. If he was recovering from even a cold, he’d naturally look peaky; no one could help that. He took off his mackintosh and a blue muffler, revealing a tweed jacket that almost matched the pale brown of his corduroy trousers.

‘My choice of rendezvous surprise you?’ he said.

‘Perhaps a little.’

It didn’t now that she had met him, for there was something about him that suggested he thought things out: theatre bars were empty places when a performance was on; there wouldn’t be the embarrassment of approaches made by either of them to the wrong person. He didn’t say that, but she knew. Belatedly he apologized for keeping her waiting.

‘It doesn’t matter in the least.’

‘You’re sure I can’t bring you another drink?’

‘No, really, thank you.’

‘Well, I’ll just get something for myself.’

At the bar Jeffrey asked about wine. ‘D’you have white? Dry?’

‘Indeed we do, sir.’ The barman reached behind him and lifted a bottle from an ice bucket. ‘Grinou,’ he said. ‘We like to keep it cool, being white.’

‘Grinou?’

‘It’s what the wine’s called, sir. La Combe de Grinou. The label’s a bit washed away, but that’s what it’s called. Very popular in here, the Grinou is.’

Jeffrey took against the man, the way he often did with people serving him. He guessed that the barmaid looked after the man in a middle-aged daughterly way, listening to his elderly woes and ailments, occasionally inviting him to a Christmas celebration. Her daytime work was selling curtain material, Jeffrey surmised; the man had long ago retired from the same department store. Something like that it would be, the theatre bar their real world.

‘All right, I’ll try a glass,’ he said.

They talked for a moment about the weather and then about the bar they were in, commenting on the destruction of its Georgian plasterwork, no more than a corner of the original ceiling remaining. From time to time applause or laughter reached them from the theatre’s auditorium. Gingerly in their conversation they moved on to more personal matters.

Forty-seven they’d said he was. Photographer they’d given as his profession on the personal details’ sheet, and she had thought of the photographers you saw on television, a scrum of them outside a celebrity’s house or pushing in at the scene of a crime. But on the phone the girl had been reassuring: a newspaper photographer wasn’t what was meant. ‘No, not at all like that,’ the girl had said. ‘Nor weddings neither.’ Distinguished in his field, the girl had said; there was a difference.

She tried to think of the names of great photographers and could remember only Cartier-Bresson, without a single image coming into her mind. She wondered about asking what kind of camera he liked best, but asked instead what kind of photographs he took.

‘Townscapes,’ he said. ‘Really only townscapes.’

She nodded confidently, as if she caught the significance of that, as if she appreciated the attraction of photographing towns.

‘Parts of Islington,’ he said. ‘Those little back streets in Hoxton. People don’t see what’s there.’

His lifetime’s project was to photograph London in all its idiosyncrasies. He mentioned places: Hungerford Bridge, Drummond Street, Worship Street, Brick Lane, Wellclose Square. He spoke of manhole covers and shadows thrown by television dishes, and rain on slated roofs.

‘How very interesting,’ she said.

What she sought was companionship. Sometimes when she made her way to the Downs or the coast she experienced the weight of solitude; often in the cinema or the theatre she would have liked to turn to someone else to say what she’d thought of this interpretation or that. She had no particular desire to be treated to candle-lit dinners, which the bureau - the Bryanston Square Introduction Bureau – had at first assumed would be a priority; but she would not have rejected such attentions, provided they came from an agreeable source. Marriage did not come into it, but nor was it entirely ruled out.

People she knew were not aware that she was a client at the Bryanston Square Bureau, not that she was ashamed of it. There would perhaps have been some surprise, but easily she could have weathered that. What was more difficult to come to terms with, and always had been, was the uneasy sense that the truth seemed to matter less than it should, both in the agency itself and in the encounters it provided. As honestly as she knew how, she had completed the personal details’ sheet, carefully deliberating before she so much as marked, one way or the other, each little box, correctly recording her age, at present fifty-one; and when an encounter took place she was at pains not to allow mistaken impressions to go unchecked. But even so there was always that same uneasiness, the nagging awareness that falsity was natural in what she was engaged upon.

‘You drive?’ he asked.

He watched her nod, covering her surprise. It always took them aback, that question; he couldn’t think why. She seemed quite capable, he thought, and tried to remember what it said on the information he’d been sent. Had she been involved with a language school? Something like that came back to him and he mentioned it.

‘That was a while ago,’ she said.

She was alone now; and, as Jeffrey understood it, devoted some of her time to charity work; he deduced that there must be private means.

‘My mother died in nineteen ninety-seven,’ she said. ‘I looked after her during her last years. A full-time occupation.’

Jeffrey imagined a legacy after the mother’s death; the father, he presumed, had departed long before.

‘I’m afraid photography is something I don’t know much about,’ she said, and he shrugged, vaguely indicating that that was only to be expected. A tooth ached a bit, the same one as the other night and coming on as suddenly, the last one on the right, at the bottom.

‘You found it interesting,’ he said, ‘languages and that?’

She was more promising than the insurance woman, or the hospital sister they’d tried so hard to interest him in. He’d said no to both, but they’d pressed, the way they sometimes did. He’d been indifferent this time, but even so he’d agreed. While he prodded cautiously with his tongue he learnt that passing on a familiarity with foreign languages was, in fact, not a particularly interesting way of making a living. He wondered if the barman kept aspirin handy; more likely, though, the barmaid might have some; or the Gents might run to a dispenser.

‘Excuse me a sec,’ he said.

‘Oh yes, there’s something in the Gents,’ the old barman said when the barmaid had poked about in her handbag and had shaken her head. ‘Just inside the door, sir.’

But when Jeffrey put a pound in nothing came out. Too late he saw – scrawled on a length of perforated stamp paper and stuck too high to be noticed – Out of order. He swore hotly. If the woman hadn’t been there he’d have created a scene, demanding his pound back, even claiming he had put in two.

‘You have a car?’ he enquired quite bluntly when he returned to the theatre bar, because on the way back from the Gents it had occurred to him that she had only said she could drive. Driver? it enquired on the wretchedly long-winded personal data thing, but he always asked, just to be sure. He was modest in his expectations where the Bryanston Square Introduction Bureau was concerned. He sought no more than a car-owner who would transport him and his photographic equipment from one chosen area of London to another, someone who – as privately he put it to himself – would be drawn into his work. He imagined a quiet person, capable after instruction of unfolding and setting up a tripod, of using a simple light-meter, of making notes and keeping a record, who would enjoy becoming part of things. He imagined conversations that were all to do with the enterprise he had undertaken; nothing more was necessary. He naturally had not revealed any of these details on the Bryanston Square application form he had completed eighteen months ago, believing that it would be unwise to do so.

‘It’s just I wondered,’ he said in the theatre bar, ‘if you possessed a car?’

He watched her shaking her head. She’d had a car until a year ago, a Nissan. ‘I hardly ever used it,’ she explained. ‘I really didn’t.’

He didn’t let his crossness show, but disappointment felt like a weight within him. It wearied him, as disappointment had a way of doing. The nearest there’d ever been was the social worker with the beaten-up Ford Escort, or ages before that the club receptionist with the Mini. But neither had lasted long enough to be of any real help and both had turned unpleasant in the end. All that wasted effort, this time again; he might as well just walk away, he thought.

‘My turn to get us a drink,’ she said, taking a purse from her handbag and causing him to wonder if she had an aspirin in there too.

He didn’t ask. He’d thought as he set out that if yet again there was nothing doing there might at least be the consolation of dinner – which references to toothache could easily put the kibosh on. He wondered now about L’Etape. He’d often paused to examine the menu by the door.

‘Wine, this was.’ He handed her his glass and watched her crossing the empty space to the bar. She wasn’t badly dressed: no reason why she shouldn’t be up to L’Etape’s tariff.

She listened while he went through his cameras, giving the manufacturers’ names, and details about flash and exposure. Nine he had apparently, a few of them very old and better than any on the market now. His book about London had been commissioned and would run to almost a thousand pages.

‘Gosh!’ she murmured. Halfway through her third gin and tonic, she felt pleasantly warm, happy enough to be here, although she knew by now that none of this was any good. ‘Heavens, you’ll be busy!’ she said. His world was very different from hers, she added, knowing she must not go on about hers, that it would be tedious to mention all sorts of things. Why should anyone be interested in her rejection more than twenty years ago of someone she had loved? Why should anyone be interested in knowing that she had done so, it seemed now, for no good reason beyond the shadow of doubt there’d been? A stranger would not see the face that she still saw, or hear the voice she heard; or understand why, afterwards, she had wanted no one else; or hear what, afterwards, had seemed to be a truth – that doubt played tricks in love’s confusion. And who could expect a stranger to want to hear about the circumstances of a mother’s lingering illness and the mercy of her death in a suburban house? You put it all together and it made a life; you lived in its aftermath, but that, too, was best kept back. She smiled at her companion through these reflections, for there was no reason not to.

‘I was wondering about L’Etape,’ he said.

Imagining this to be another camera, she shook her head, and he said that L’Etape was a restaurant. It was difficult then, difficult to say that perhaps they should not begin something that could not be continued, which his manner suggested had been his conclusion also. They were not each other’s kind: what at first had seemed to be a possibility hadn’t seemed so after three-quarters of an hour, as so often was the way. So much was right: she would have liked to say so; she would have liked to say that she’d enjoyed their encounter and hoped he’d shared that with her. Her glass was nowhere near empty, nor was his; there was no hurry.

‘But then I’d best get back,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind.’

She wondered if in his life, too, there had been a mistake that threw a shadow, if that was why he was looking around for someone to fill a gap he had never become used to. She smiled in case her moment of curiosity showed, covering it safely over.

‘It was just a thought,’ he said. ‘L’Etape.’

The interval curtain came down at an emotional moment. There was applause, and then the first chattering voices reached the bar, which filled up quickly. The noise of broken conversation spread in the quiet it had disturbed, until the Tannoy announcement warned that three minutes only remained, then two, and one.

‘I’m afraid we shut up shop now,’ the elderly barman said and the plump barmaid hurried about, collecting the glasses and pushing the chairs against one wall so that the cleaners could get at the floor when they came in the morning. ‘Sorry about that,’ the barman apologized.

Jeffrey considered making a fuss, insisting on another drink, since the place after all was a public bar. He imagined waking up at two or three in the morning and finding himself depressed because of the way the evening had gone. He would remember then the stern features of Sir Henry Havelock in Trafalgar Square and the two girls giggling because he’d said something out loud. He would remember the Out of order sign in the Gents. She should have been more explicit about the driving on that bloody form instead of wasting his time.

He thought of picking up a glass and throwing it at the upside-down bottles behind the bar, someone’s leftover slice of lemon flying through the air, glass splintering into the ashtrays and the ice-bucket, all that extra for them to clear up afterwards. He thought of walking away without another word, leaving the woman to make her peace with the pair behind the bar. Ridiculous they were, ridiculous not to have an aspirin somewhere.

‘It was brilliant, your theatre-bar idea,’ she said as they passed through the foyer. The audience’s laughter reached them, a single ripple, quietening at once. The box office was closed, a board propped up against its ornate brass bars. Outside, the posters for the play they hadn’t seen wildly proclaimed its virtues.

‘Well,’ he said, though without finality; uncertain, as in other ways he had seemed to be.

Yet surely she hadn’t been mistaken; surely he must have known also, and as soon as she had. She imagined him with one of his many cameras, skulking about the little streets of Hoxton. There was no reason why a photographer shouldn’t have an artistic temperament, which would account for his nerviness or whatever it was.

‘I don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘you’d have an aspirin?’

He had a toothache. She searched her handbag, for she sometimes had paracetamol.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, still rummaging.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It’s bad?’

He said he would survive. ‘I’ll try the Gents in L’Etape. Sometimes there’s a vending machine in a Gents.’

They fell into step. It wasn’t why he’d suggested L’Etape, he said. ‘It’s just that I felt it would be nice,’ he said. ‘A regretful dinner.’

When they came to a corner, he pointed up a narrower, less crowded street than the one they’d walked along. ‘It’s there,’ he said. ‘That blue light.’

Feeling sorry for him, she changed her mind.

The hat-check girl brought paracetamol to their table, since there wasn’t a vending machine in the Gents. Jeffrey thanked her, indicating with a gesture that he would tip her later. At a white grand piano a pianist in a plum-coloured jacket reached out occasionally for a concoction in a tall lemonade glass, not ceasing to play his Scott Joplin medley. A young French waiter brought menus and rolls. He made a recommendation but his English was incomprehensible. Jeffrey asked him to repeat what he’d said, but it was hopeless. Typical, that was, Jeffrey thought, ordering lamb, with peas and polenta.

‘I’m sorry about your toothache,’ she said.

‘It’ll go.’

The place was not quite full. Several tables, too close to the piano, were still unoccupied. Someone applauded when the pianist began a showy variation of ‘Mountain Greenery’. He threw his head about as he played, blond hair flopping.

‘Shall I order the wine?’ Jeffrey offered. ‘D’you mind?’ He never said beforehand that he intended not to pay. Better just to let it happen, he always thought.

‘No, of course I don’t mind,’ she said.

‘That’s kind of you.’ He felt better than he had all evening, in spite of the nagging in his lower jaw and that, he knew, would lessen when the paracetamol got going. It was always much better when they said yes to a regretful dinner, when the disappointment began to slip away. ‘We’ll have the Lamothe Bergeron,’ he ordered. ‘The ’95.’

She was aware that a woman at a distant table, in a corner where there were potted plants, kept glancing at her. The woman was with two men and another woman. She seemed faintly familiar; so did one of the men.

‘Madame,’ the young waiter interrupted her efforts to place the couple, arriving with the escalope she’d ordered. ‘Bon appétit, madame.’

‘Thank you.’

She liked the restaurant, the thirties’ style, the pale blue lighting, the white grand piano, the aproned waiters. She liked her escalope when she tasted it, and the heavily buttered spinach, the little out-of-season new potatoes. She liked the wine.

‘Not bad, this place,’ her companion said. ‘What d’you think?’

‘It’s lovely.’

They talked more easily than they had in the theatre bar and it was the theatre bar they spoke about, since it was their common ground. Odd, they’d agreed, that old barman had been; odd, too, that ‘barmaid’ should still be a common expression, implying in this case someone much younger, the word hanging on from another age.

‘Oh, really . . .’ she began when a second bottle of wine was suggested, and then she thought why not? They talked about the Bryanston Square Bureau, which was common ground too.

‘They muddle things up,’ he said. ‘They muddle people up. They get them wrong, with all their little boxes and their questionnaires.’

‘Yes, perhaps they do.’

The woman who’d kept glancing across the restaurant was listening to one of the men, who appeared to be telling a story. There was laughter when he finished. The second man lit a cigarette.

‘Heavens!’ Evelyn exclaimed, although she hadn’t meant to.

Jeffrey turned to look and saw, several tables away, four smartly dressed people, one of the two women in a striped black and scarlet dress, the other with glasses, her pale blonde hair piled elaborately high. The men were darkly suited. Like people in an advertisement, he thought, an impression heightened by the greenery that was a background to their table. He knew the kind.

‘They’re friends of yours?’ he asked.

‘The woman in red and the man who’s smoking have the flat above mine.’

She’d sold some house or other, he heard; a family house, it then became clear. She’d sold it when her mother died and had bought instead the flat she spoke of, more suitable really for a person on her own. Pasmore the people she had suddenly recognized were called. She didn’t know them.

‘But they know you, eh?’

He felt quite genial; the diversion passed the time.

‘They’ve seen me,’ she said.

‘Coming and going, eh?’

‘That kind of thing.’

‘Coffee? Shall we have coffee?’

He signalled for a waiter. He would go when the wine was finished; usually he went then, slipping off to the Gents, then picking up his coat. Once there had been a complaint to the bureau about that but he’d said the woman had invited him to dinner – Belucci’s it was that time – and had become drunk before the evening finished, forgetting what the arrangement had been.

‘I’ll hold the fort,’ he said, ‘if you want to say hullo to your friends.’

She smiled and shook her head. He poured himself more wine. He calculated that there were four more glasses left in the bottle and he could tell she’d had enough. The coffee came and she poured it, still smiling at him in a way he found bewildering. He calculated the amount she’d had to drink: two gin and tonics he’d counted earlier, and now the wine, a good four glasses. ‘I wouldn’t even know the Pasmores’ name,’ she was saying, ‘except that it’s on their bell at the downstairs door.’

He moved the wine bottle in case she reached out for it. The pianist, silent for a while, struck up again, snatches from West Side Story.

‘It’s lovely here,’ she murmured, and Jeffrey would have sworn her eyes searched for his. He felt uneasy, his euphoria of a few moments ago slipping away; he hoped there wasn’t going to be trouble. In an effort to distract her mood, he said:

‘Personally, I shan’t be bothering the Bryanston Square Bureau again.’ She didn’t appear to hear, although that wasn’t surprising in the din that was coming from the piano.

‘I don’t suppose,’ she said, ‘you have a cigarette about you?’

Her smile, lavish now, had spread into all her features. She’d ticked Non-smoker on the information sheet, she said, but all that didn’t really matter any more. He pressed a thumbnail along the edge of the transparent cover of the Silk Cut packet he had bought in the Salisbury and held it out to her across the table.

‘I used to once,’ she said. ‘When smoking was acceptable.’

She took a cigarette and he picked up a little box of matches with L’Etape on it. He struck one for her, her fingers touching his. He lit a cigarette for himself.

‘How good that is!’ She blew out smoke, leaning forward as she spoke, cheeks flushed, threads of smoke drifting in the air. ‘I used to love a cigarette.’

She reached a hand out as if to seize one of his, but played instead with the salt-cellar, pushing it about. She was definitely tiddly. With her other hand she held her cigarette in the air, lightly between two fingers, as Bette Davis used to in her heyday.

‘It’s a pity you sold your car,’ he said, again seeking a distraction.

She didn’t answer that, but laughed, as if he’d been amusing, as if he’d said something totally different. She was hanging on his words, or so it must have seemed to the people who had recognized her, so intent was her scrutiny of his face. She’ll paw me, Jeffrey thought, before the evening’s out.

‘They’re gathering up their things,’ she said. ‘They’re going now.’

He didn’t turn around to see, but within a minute or so the people passed quite close. They smiled at her, at Jeffrey too. Mr Pasmore inclined his head; his wife gave a little wave with her fingers. They would gossip about this to the residents of the other flats if they considered it worthwhile to do so: the solitary woman in the flat below theirs had something going with a younger man. No emotion stirred in Jeffrey, neither sympathy nor pity, for he was not given to such feelings. A few drinks and a temptation succumbed to, since temptation wasn’t often there: the debris of all that was nothing much when the audience had gone, and it didn’t surprise him that it was simply left there, without a comment.

When a waiter came, apologetically to remind them that they were at a table in the no-smoking area, she stubbed her cigarette out. Her features settled into composure; the flush that had crept into her cheeks drained away. A silence gathered while this normality returned and it was she in the end who broke it, as calmly as if nothing untoward had occurred.

‘Why did you ask me twice if I possessed a car?’

‘I thought I had misunderstood.’

‘Why did it matter?’

‘Someone with a car would be useful to me in my work. My gear is heavy. I have no transport myself.’

He didn’t know why he said that; he never had before. In response her nod was casual, as if only politeness had inspired the question she’d asked. She nodded again when he said, not knowing why he said it either:

‘Might our dinner be your treat? I’m afraid I can’t pay.’

She reached across the table for the bill the waiter had brought him. In silence she wrote a cheque and asked him how much she should add on.

‘Oh, ten per cent or so.’

She took a pound from her purse, which Jeffrey knew was for the hat-check girl.

They walked together to an Underground station. The townscapes were a weekend thing, he said: he photographed cooked food to make a living. Hearing which tins of soup and vegetables his work appeared on, she wondered if he would add that his book of London would never be completed, much less published. He didn’t, but she had guessed it anyway.

‘Well, I go this way,’ he said when they had bought their tickets and were at the bottom of the escalators.

He’d told her about the photographs he was ashamed of because she didn’t matter; without resentment she realized that. And witnessing her excursion into foolishness, he had not mattered either.

‘Your toothache?’ she enquired and he said it had gone.

They did not shake hands or remark in any way upon the evening they’d spent together, but when they parted there was a modest surprise: that they’d made use of one another was a dignity compared with what should have been. That feeling was still there while they waited on two different platforms and while their trains arrived and drew away again. It lingered while they were carried through the flickering dark, as intimate as a pleasure shared.