Selected Stories

On the Streets

Arthurs ordered liver and peas and mashed potatoes in Strode Street. When it came, the liver didn’t taste good. A skin of fat was beginning to congeal on the surface of the gravy where the potato hadn’t soaked it up. The bright green peas were more or less all right.

He was a dark-haired man in his mid-fifties, with a widow’s peak and lean features that matched his spare frame, bony wrists protruding from frayed white cuffs. He wore a black suit, its black trousers being a requirement for a breakfast waiter beneath a trim white jacket.

‘You want a pot of tea with that?’ the elderly woman who had brought him his plate of liver enquired. She came back to his table to ask him that, her only customer at this time in the afternoon.

Arthurs said yes. The woman wasn’t a proper waitress; she didn’t have a uniform, just a flowered overall folded over, tight on her stomach. Nearly seventy she’d be, he estimated, a woman who should be sitting by a fire somewhere, the heat bringing out crimson rings on her legs. He could sense her exhaustion, and wondered if she’d talk about it, if a conversation might develop.

‘Finishing soon?’ he said when she brought the tea, speaking as if he knew her well, his tone suggesting that there’d been a past in their relationship, which there had not.

‘I go at three-thirty.’

‘Stop in tonight, will you?’

‘Eh?’ She looked at Arthurs with something like alarm in her tired eyes. Her hair was dyed yellowish, dewlaps of fat rolled over her neck. Widowed, he imagined.

‘Reckon I’ll stop in myself,’ he said. ‘Best if you’re feeling dull.’

The woman answered none of that. He wondered if he should follow her when she finished for the day. It was twenty past three now and he’d be ready to go himself by half past. He broke the Garibaldi biscuit she’d brought with the tea. Since childhood he had followed people on the streets, to find out where they lived, to make a note of the address and add a few details that would remind him of the person. The compulsion was still insistent sometimes, but he could tell it wasn’t going to be today.

‘There’s the television of course,’ he said, ‘if you’re feeling not up to much.’

‘No more’n rubbish these times,’ the woman said, allowing herself that single comment only.

‘Sends you to an early bed, does it?’

Again anxiety invaded the woman’s eyes. She passed the tip of her tongue over her lips and wiped away the coating of saliva it left. Silent, she stumped off.

A pound and a few pence the bill came to when she brought it, food cheaper here when the busy lunchtime hours had passed. He’d known it would be cheaper, Arthurs reminded himself.

Mr Warkely came in and said don’t start another batch or there’ll be a clog-up in the dispatch room. So Cheryl turned the machine off and saw Mr Warkely glancing at the clock and noting the time on his pad. Finishing a quarter of an hour early would naturally have to be taken into account at the end of the week.

The Warkelys’ business was in a small way, established three years ago in a basement, the retailing of scenic cards. Cheryl’s task was to work the machine that encased in strong plastic wrapping each selection of six, together with the one that displayed in miniature the scenes each pack contained. It was part-time work, two hours three days a week; there was also, mornings only, the Costcutter checkout, office cleaning evenings.

The Warkelys employed no one else: Mrs Warkely attended to the accounts, the addressing of labels, and all correspondence; Mr Warkely packed the packaged selections into cardboard boxes and drove a van with WPW Greetings Cards on it. What was called the dispatch room was where television was watched, with the Warkelys’ evening meal on two trays, evidence of their business stacked around the walls.

‘See you Thursday,’ Cheryl said before she went, and Mrs Warkely called out from somewhere and Mr Warkely grunted because his ballpoint was in his mouth. ‘Thanks,’ Cheryl said, which was what she always said when she left the basement. She didn’t know why she did, but somehow that expression of gratitude seemed to round off the couple of hours better than just saying goodbye.

She banged the door behind her and climbed the steps to the street, a thin, smallish woman, grey in her hair now, lines gathering around her eyes and lips. She had been pretty once and still retained more than a vestige of those looks at fifty-one. Shabby in a maroon coat that once she’d been delighted to own and now disliked, her high-heeled shoes uncomfortable, she hurried on the street. There was no reason to hurry. She knew there was not and yet she hurried, her way of walking it had become.

‘You getting on all right?’ The voice came from behind her, the question asked by the man she’d once been married to, whom she’d thought of since as the error in her life. Always the same question it was when he was suddenly there on the street. She turned around.

‘D’you want something?’ She spoke sharply and he walked away at once, her tone causing offence. She knew it was that because it had happened often before. She had never told him what her hours at the Warkelys’ were but he knew. He knew where her cleaning work was, he knew which Costcutter it was. Five months the marriage had lasted, before she packed her belongings and went, giving up a full-time position in a Woolworth’s, because she’d thought it better to move into another district.

She stood where he had left her, watching him in the distance until he turned a corner. ‘I don’t think you should have married me,’ she’d said, more or less what Daph, who shared her counter in Woolworth’s, had been remorselessly repeating ever since the marriage had taken place, not that she’d admitted to Daph that things weren’t right, not wanting to.

On the pavement she realized she was in the way of two elderly women who were trying to pass. ‘I’m sorry,’ she apologized and the women said it didn’t matter.

She walked on, more slowly than she’d been walking before. When they married she had moved upstairs to his two rooms, use of kitchen and bath, the rooms freshly painted by him in honour of the change in both their lives, old linoleum replaced by a carpet. The paint had still been fresh when she left, the carpet unstained; she’d never begun to call herself Mrs Arthurs.

Later that afternoon, although he was not a drinking man, Arthurs entered a public house. Like the café in which he had earlier had a meal, it was not familiar to him: he liked new places.

He took the beer he ordered to a corner of the almost empty saloon bar, where the fruit machines were at rest, the music speakers silent. There was a griminess about the place, a gloom that inadequate lighting did not dispel. At the bar, on barstools, two men morosely sat without communicating. A shirtsleeved barman turned the pages of the Star.

The dullness Arthurs had mentioned in the café possessed him entirely now, an infection it almost felt like, gathering and clinging to him, an unhealthy tepidness about it. He sipped the beer he’d ordered, wondering why he had come in here, wondering why he wasted money. Time was when he’d have gone to a racetrack, the dogs at Wimbledon or White City. In the crowd, with his mind on something else, he could have shaken off the mood. Or he might have rid himself of it by getting into conversation with a tart. Not that a tart had ever been much good, any more than the elderly waitress would have been. He closed his eyes, squeezing back disappointment at being asked if he wanted something when all he was doing was being friendly. They might have sat down somewhere, on a seat in a park, the flowerbeds just beginning to be colourful, birds floating on the water. She knew how it had been; she knew he’d gone there at last, today. In their brief encounter, she had guessed.

People began to come into the saloon bar, another lone man, couples. Arthurs watched them, picking out the ones he immediately disliked. He wondered about phoning up Mastyn’s and saying he wouldn’t be in in the morning. A stomach upset, he’d say. But the hours would hang heavy, because he’d wake anyway at twenty past five, being programmed to it. And there’d be nothing to replace the walk to the Underground, and the Underground itself, and walking the last bit to the hotel; and nothing to replace the three and a half hours in the dining-room until at half past ten he could hang up his white jacket and unhook his black bow tie. Since the hours of his employment at Mastyn’s had been reduced, his earnings solely as a breakfast waiter were not enough to live on, but he made up the shortage in other ways. Since childhood he had stolen.

There was a telephone across the bar from where he sat, half obscured by a curtain drawn back from the entrance to the Ladies. Noticing it, he was tempted again. But whoever answered at the Reception would grumble, would say leave it until the morning, see how he was then. The conversation would be unsatisfactory, any message he left for the dining-room probably forgotten, and blame attached to him when he didn’t turn up even though he’d done what was required of him. None of that was worth it.

Why had she spoken to him like that? Why had her voice gone harsh, asking him if he wanted something? He had never asked her for money, not once, yet the way she’d spoken you’d think he’d been for ever dropping hints. Music began, turned down low but noisy anyway because that was what it was, more a noise than anything else. The last couple who’d come in were noisy too, laughter that could have been kept quieter, both wearing dark glasses although there hadn’t been sunshine all day. What he’d wanted to say was maybe they could go to a café for a few minutes. No more than that, ten minutes of her time.

Arthurs stared into the beer he hadn’t drunk, at the scummy froth becoming nothing. The sympathy she could call upon was a depth in her, surprising in a woman who wasn’t clever. He had been aware of it the first day on the stairs, when they’d got into conversation because he happened to be passing by. ‘You like a cup of tea or something?’ she’d offered, her key already in the lock of the door; and he’d said tea, two sugars, when they were in her room. He told her about the lunchtime complaint in the dining-room of Mastyn’s because it was a natural thing to do; she said she’d wondered why he looked upset and then said anyone would be, a horrible thing to happen. He repeated the remarks that had been made, how he’d stood there having to listen, how the man had demanded the manager, how he’d said, ‘We apologize for troubling you’ when Mr Simoni came. Mr Simoni had held his hand out but they hadn’t taken it.

Arthurs wondered for a moment if, that first day or later, he’d told her this too – that Mr Simoni’s outstretched hand had been ignored. He couldn’t remember saying it. A dotted bow-tie the man had been wearing, white dots on red, a chalk-striped shirt. The pepper had been ground over her risotto with a mutter that sounded insolent, the woman said. The coffee had been cold. ‘Well, there’ll certainly be no charge for the coffee,’ Mr Simoni’s immediate response was. Something special, this lunch should have been, the man said, and the woman called the lunch a misery before she threw her napkin down. They’d gone away, not knowing what they left behind. ‘Breakfasts only after this,’ Mr Simoni murmured while bowing and scraping to the people who’d gone silent at the other tables. ‘Take it or not.’ Beneath the thrown-down napkin there was a shopping list on a letter that had been half written and then abandoned, the shopping items pencilled on the space remaining. Dear Sirs, An electric fire I purchased from you is faulty had a jagged line drawn through it; there was a date in the same handwriting, and an address embossed in blue at the top of the single sheet.

Arthurs reached into an inside pocket and took from it this same writing paper, now folded to a quarter of its size. Frayed at the edges, it was dog-eared and soiled, one of the folds beginning to give way, and he didn’t open it out for fear of damaging it further: it was enough to hold it for a moment between thumb and forefinger, to know that it was what he knew it was, kept by him always. A year ago he’d gone into a Kall-Kwik and had had it photographed twice, nervous in case one day the original might, somehow, not be there: he did not trust, and never had, any time that was yet to come or what might happen in it. He knew the address by heart, even in his sleep, in dreams; but who could tell what might happen to memory? Not that it mattered now, of course.

He returned the folded paper to his pocket and stood up. Seven o’clock she finished in the offices, ten past she was out on the streets again. Five to six it was and he sat for a little longer, thinking about her. For a long time before the day she’d asked him into her room he’d seen her coming and going. They had passed often on the stairs of the house where his own two rooms were a flight above hers, cheaper than the other rooms because of their bad state of repair. He hadn’t known she was a widow, thinking her to be unmarried ever since she’d come to the house a year or so ago. A ticket man on the Underground apparently her husband had been.

He left his beer, pushing the glass away in case a sleeve caught it while he was putting his overcoat on. He buttoned the coat slowly – black like his suit – then crossed the saloon bar and stepped out into the darkening twilight. The folded paper was not something to keep, not any more, but even so he knew he could not destroy it. There was that, too, to tell her: that the shopping list would always be a memento.

Her encounter with her ex-husband had not particularly upset Cheryl: she was too used to his sudden appearances for that. As she emptied waste-paper baskets and gathered up plastic cups, uncoiled the long flex of her vacuum cleaner and began on the floors, she yet again blamed herself. She had been foolish. Lonely, she supposed, missing what death had taken from her, she had seen the man differently; it had felt natural, saying yes. Daph had been a witness in the register office, with a man they’d fetched in from the street. Afterwards they’d sat with Daph in the back bar of the Queen’s Regiment and when a few people from the house turned up later they’d gone in a crowd to Bruce’s Platter, above the Prudential Office. They’d kept calling her Mrs Arthurs, making a joke of it once the wine got going, but all that time he was very quiet until she heard him telling Daph about the lunchtime complaint, and every few minutes Daph – outspoken when she’d had a few too many – saying people like that didn’t deserve a life. ‘You hear that?’ he said afterwards. ‘What your friend remarked?’

At the time it had seemed ordinary enough that he should mention the complaint to someone else, that that terrible lunchtime should nag so, the wound of humiliation slow to heal. She had urged him to leave Mastyn’s Hotel, to find another post in a restaurant or another hotel, but for whatever reason he wouldn’t, stoically maintaining that being a lowly breakfast waiter was what he would remain now. She didn’t understand that, although she accepted that when you married someone you took on his baggage, and one day the healing would be complete.

But on the night of her second marriage the baggage she’d taken on was suddenly more complicated. When they returned from the celebrations in the Queen’s Regiment and Bruce’s Platter her husband of half a day didn’t want to go to bed. He said it was hardly worth it, since he had to get up soon after five. But it was not yet eleven when he said that.

Still vacuuming the office floors, Cheryl remembered the unflurried timbre of his voice when he offered this explanation, a matter-of-factness that, quite suddenly, made her feel cold. She remembered turning on the single bar of the electric fire she had brought upstairs from the room she no longer occupied. She remembered lying awake, wondering if the darkness of the bedroom would draw him to her, wondering if he was a man like that, not that she had ever heard of being like that before. But nothing happened except what was happening in her mind, the realization that she had made a mistake.

As she slid her vacuum cleaner into corners and under desks, all that was there again, as often it was when, on the streets, her ex-husband once more attempted to enter her life. A man who was hurt was what he’d seemed to be during the time they had been getting to know one another. She’d told him about times in her childhood, about her marriage, and the shock of widowhood; he’d spoken of the censure he’d always felt himself subjected to, culminating in the lunchtime complaint he’d taken so hard. Small rebukes, reproof, blame in its different forms affected him – she was sure – more than ever was intended: from the first she had known that, when each new shade of his accumulated pain was revealed to her. Then, too, she had believed that the pain would ease, as it seemed to when she was with him. But even before she packed her things to go, Daph said, ‘Your guy’s doolally.’

Cheryl turned the cleaner off and wound the flex back into place. She straightened the chairs she had had to move out of the way, finishing one office at a time and closing the door of each behind her. She took her coat and scarf from the hooks in the passage and carried downstairs the black plastic bag in which she’d collected the waste-paper. She re-set the night alarm. She banged the door behind her and began to walk away.

‘They ignored Mr Simoni,’ he said in the empty dark. ‘Mr Simoni tried to shake hands with them but he needn’t have bothered.’

She looked at him with nothing in her eyes. There was no flicker that they were man and wife, as if she had forgotten. She had been everything to him; she could have sensed it from the way he’d been with her. When they’d gone for a walk together, the second time they had, she’d put a hand on his arm. A Sunday that had been, a cold afternoon and she’d been wearing gloves, red and blue. Just a touch of pressure from her fingers, no more than that, nothing forward, but he’d felt the understanding there was. A waiter could tell you how people were, he had explained to her another time. She hadn’t known it; she hadn’t known how you could feel insulted, the amount people left beside a plate. Not that a breakfast waiter got anything at all.

‘I don’t want to stand here listening to you,’ she said, and then she said he should see someone; she said she had asked him to leave her alone.

‘It’s just I wondered if I’d ever told you that, how Mr Simoni held out his hand.’

‘Please leave me alone,’ she said, walking on.

Every plea she made was a repetition, already stale before she made it, and sounding weary when she did. She had lost touch with Daph when she’d moved to another district but Daph had made her promise to go to the police if she became frightened.

‘You could tell she was the kind of woman who complained,’ he said. He’d put the coffee ready for her to pour out, but when he walked away she called after him that it was cold. You didn’t expect there’d be a waiter with soiled cuffs in this dining-room, she said when Mr Simoni came.

Cheryl tried not to see when he rooted in a pocket for his wallet. It was worst of all, the grubby paper taken from his wallet and carefully unfolded, its tattered edges and the blue letters of the address offered to her as a gift might be. Dear Sirs, I believe an electric fire I purchased . . . In the dark she couldn’t see but she knew the words were there, as the shopping list had been there too, before its pencilled items had all but disappeared.

‘Please leave me alone,’ she said.

Walking with her, he said the café by the launderette was always open, people waiting there for their washing to be ready. ‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘Never less than quiet, that café.’

She could tell from his movements beside her that the paper was being folded again and then returned to the right compartment of his wallet. His wallet was small, black, its plastic coating worn away in places.

‘It’s hardly out of your way,’ he said.

They were alone on the street; they had been since she’d heard his voice behind her saying that the people who’d complained had ignored Mr Simoni’s wish to shake hands with them. He always spoke first from behind her on a street, his footsteps silent.

‘I thought I might run into you today,’ he said. ‘She’ll want to know about this morning, I thought.’

He mentioned tea and she said she didn’t want tea at this hour. And then she thought that in a café she could raise her voice, drawing attention to his harassing of her. But she didn’t want to go to a café with him. When she’d found things he’d stolen he’d said nothing, not even shaking his head. When she’d packed her belongings he’d been silent too, as if expecting nothing better, humiliation self-inflicted now.

‘Straight after I’d done at the hotel I went out there,’ he said. ‘This morning.’

He told her about the hotel people who’d had breakfast, a slack morning, being a Monday. He remembered the orders; he always could afterwards, even on a busy day, a waiter’s skill, he called it. He told her about the bus he’d taken, out through Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith and then the green of trees and grass beginning when Castelnau was left behind. Someone called out for the Red Rover and the driver shouted back that the Red Rover had gone years ago. There was a traffic hold-up at Upper Richmond Road and he got off and walked a bit. He’d been out there before, he said: Priory Lane, then left by a letter-box. A dozen times, he said, he’d checked it out.

They turned a corner and she could see the lit-up window of the launderette. She remembered the café he was talking about then, a little further along with a 7-Up sign in the window.

‘I’ve something to get washed,’ he said.

She didn’t go into the launderette with him. While he was there she could have hurried on, past the café, to where the buses ran. Any bus would have done, even one going in the wrong direction. But in the café, where an elderly man and two women on their own were the only customers, she carried from the counter a pot of tea and two glass cups and saucers, and went back for milk.

She waited then, blankly staring at the tea she’d poured, taking the first sip, tasting nothing. No thoughts disturbed her. She did not feel she was in a café, only that she was alone, anywhere it could have been; and then her thoughts began again. She had been drawn to him; that reminder echoed, hardly anything else made sense.

She watched him coming in, the door slipping closed behind him. He looked about, knowing she would be there, knowing she wouldn’t have disappeared.

On the table he laid out what he had taken from the pockets of his jacket before he’d put it into a washing machine: keys, his wallet, a ballpoint. He had thought she would ask about his jacket, where it was, why he wasn’t wearing it, but she didn’t. He stirred the tea she’d poured for him. It didn’t matter that she didn’t ask; his overcoat was open, she could see the jacket wasn’t there.

‘Three hours ago he’ll have found her,’ he said. ‘A quarter past seven every evening he gets back to that house.’

Cheryl stared at a cigarette burn on the table’s surface while he told her. He had rung the bell, he said, and the woman hadn’t recognized him when she opened the door. He’d said he’d come to read the meter, not saying which one. The gas man had been, no longer than a week ago, the woman had said, and he’d apologized for not having his badge on display. He’d pulled aside his overcoat to show the electricity badge on his left lapel. The woman hadn’t closed the door when he walked into the hall. A good ten minutes it was open before his hands were free to close it.

‘I blame myself,’ he said, ‘for being stupid like that.’ He added that he didn’t blame himself for anything else; he had stood there, not blaming himself, remembering the woman saying that his cuffs were grimy, complaining that the coffee was cold. He had stood there, hearing her voice, and the telephone rang on a small table near the hallstand. When it stopped he went to wash his hands in the downstairs lavatory, where coats and the man’s hats and a cap hung on hooks. In the hall he draped a tissue over the Yale latch before he turned it; and afterwards dropped the scrunched-up tissue into a waste-bin on a lamp post.

Cheryl didn’t say anything; she never did. She watched while his overcoat was buttoned again after she’d seen he wasn’t wearing his jacket. A dribble of blood from the woman’s mouth had got on to his sleeve, he said, the kind of thing that was discernible beneath a microscope, easy to overlook.

Once he’d shown her a bruise he’d acquired on a finger while he was committing his crime, another time he’d shown her the tissue he had draped over the Yale, forgotten in his pocket all day. Once he’d said the second post had come while he was there, brown envelopes mostly, clattering through the letter-box. While the woman was on the floor there’d been the postman’s whistling and his footsteps going away.

‘I didn’t take a bus,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want that, sitting on a bus. The first food I had afterwards was liver and peas.’

The last time it had been a packet of crisps; another time, a chicken burger. Still silent, Cheryl listened while his voice continued, while he explained that ever since this morning he’d felt she was his only friend, ever since he’d washed his hands, with the man’s coats on coat-hangers and the scented soap on its own special little porcelain shelf. A cat had jumped on to the windowsill outside and begun to mew, as if it knew what had occurred. He had thought of opening the back door to let it in, so that it would be in the hall when the man returned, and its bloody footsteps all over the house.

She had never told Daph that it wasn’t fear she experienced when she was with him, that it wasn’t even disquiet. She had never said she knew there was cunning in his parade of what hadn’t happened, yet that it hardly seemed like cunning, so little did he ask of her. She had never said she knew it was her nature that had drawn her to go for walks with him and to accept his reticent embrace, that her pity was his nourishment. She had never wanted to talk to Daph about him. The Warkelys didn’t know he existed.

He lifted the glass cup to his lips. She still did not speak. It was not necessary to speak, only to remain a little longer, the silence an element in being with him. He did not follow her when she walked away.

He would finish his tea and pour another cup: on the streets again she imagined that. In the launderette he would open the door of a machine and release his sodden jacket from where it clung to the drum. He would spread out the sleeves and pull the material back into shape before he began his journey to the rooms where so briefly they had lived together. He would not, tonight, be offended by the glare of neon beneath which she now walked herself. Nor by the cars that loitered in their search for what the night had to offer. Nor by the voices of the couples pressed close to one another as they went by. Her tears, tonight, allowed him peace.