The Temporary

Nine

When Mr Lancing was in the office the atmosphere was one of siege, and his community laboured towards the goal of his next disappearance with dedication. When he had gone, to a meeting or to lunch, his large desk remained his monument in the centre of the office, bedecked with the insignia of leadership. If the meeting was in the building, his suit jacket often stayed behind, hung on the shoulders of his high-backed chair as vigilant as a sentry, with his briefcase to heel on the floor beside it. During these periods his presence seemed more imminent and the office was guarded, its revolutions whispered beneath tapping fingers and shrilling telephones, while neat, resentful stacks of finished work automatically accrued on his desktop. If the meeting was elsewhere his exit was triumphant, with a car to be called and his briefcase prepared, and in the wake of it there rose the euphoria of actors after the performance of a play. His people would sit back in their chairs behind his retreating figure, flushed and smiling, and a celebratory coffee would be made.

Francine searched Mr Lancing’s diary, of which she was the caretaker, and found to her concern that he had no meetings at all that day. He had arrived at his desk earlier than usual, rolling up his sleeves, and his jacket decorated the back of his chair with an aspect of entrenchment. He was reading a report Francine had typed for him the day before, his forehead wrinkled with concentration.

‘What the hell is this?’ he shouted, apparently to no one in particular.

The telephone rang and Francine answered it.

‘Good morning, Mr Lancing’s office.’

‘That Gary?’

‘No, this is his secretary. May I ask who’s calling?’

‘Tell him it’s Buck.’

Francine pressed the button which put the line on hold.

‘Mr Lancing!’ she called loudly. Mr Lancing frequently failed to respond to his name, and Francine had concluded that he must be slightly deaf. He looked around, as if wondering where the noise had come from. ‘Mr Lancing, Buck’s on the line for you.’

‘Buck?’ he said. ‘Who’s Buck?’

Francine considered her options. She had already offended several of Mr Lancing’s close associates by returning to their line when he failed to recognize them and questioning them further before allowing them through. She had got to know most of them by now, but she couldn’t remember Buck having called before.

‘He’s American,’ she said hopefully.

Mr Lancing gave the matter some thought. Suddenly he grinned and bounced slightly in his chair with excitement.

‘It’s Buck!’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you just put him on?’

Francine did so, and moments later the telephone rang again.

‘Is that Sally?’ said another American voice, this time belonging to a woman.

‘I’m afraid Sally doesn’t work here at the moment,’ said Francine.

‘This is Sylvia,’ said the woman.

‘Oh, hello, Mrs Lancing,’ said Francine. She had spoken to Mr Lancing’s wife several times before and still occasionally had to explain Sally’s disappearance. ‘This is Francine.’

‘What a pretty name,’ said Sylvia vaguely. ‘Listen, is Gary there?’

‘He’s taking a call at the moment,’ said Francine. ‘Is there anything I can help you with?’

‘It’s our son’s birthday tomorrow, Francine,’ said Sylvia. ‘I was calling for some gift ideas. Is there anything you could suggest?’

‘Well — how old is he?’

‘I believe he’ll be eleven years old tomorrow, Francine,’ Sylvia sighed. ‘My little baby, all grown up.’

‘What about — what about a bicycle? No, I suppose he’s already got one.’

‘A bicycle?’ said Sylvia. ‘Gee, that’d be fun. I don’t know. You say he’s already got one?’

‘I thought he might, that’s all.’

‘I was actually thinking we could get him some stocks.’

‘Socks?’ said Francine.

‘No, stocks, you know, like stocks and shares. Maybe you could talk with Gary about that.’

‘All right,’ said Francine.

‘Thank you so much, Francine. Do you know when Sally’s coming back?’

‘I don’t know.’ Francine was beginning to tire of the conversation. ‘She’s ill.’

‘I bet you’re hoping she’ll get worse!’ said Sylvia. She shrieked with laughter.

When Mr Lancing had finished his conversation, Francine approached him about the matter of the present.

‘I thought a bicycle would be nice,’ she said, growing more attached to her own idea.

Mr Lancing looked pensive. His hair was unkempt, as though he had forgotten to brush it. He looked as if he were wearing a wig.

‘Which one is it?’ he said.

‘Which what? Oh, I see, the one who’s going to be eleven.’

‘And you want to buy him a bike?’

‘It was only an idea. Your wife thought he might like some stocks.’

‘Stocks?’ Mr Lancing’s face lit up. ‘That’s a great idea! He’ll love it, he can hang the certificates on his wall!’ He motioned with his hands, demonstrating their placement.

Francine went to the ladies’ and stood behind the locked door in one of the cubicles. After a while she came out and looked at herself in the large mirror for a long time. When one of the other secretaries came in, she washed her hands and went back to the office. Mr Louche was cutting something from a magazine at his desk with a pair of scissors. He carried the severed page over to Mr Lancing and placed it in front of him.

‘What do you think?’ he said, beaming.

Francine was standing near by and she leaned over slightly so that she could see what it was. It was a full-page advertisement for underwear. A girl with dark hair lounged on a sofa clasped in small pieces of lace.

‘How about that?’ persisted Mr Louche. ‘Isn’t she something?’

‘She has a very kind face,’ agreed Mr Lancing, nodding. ‘She looks as though she’d be very nice.’

Mr Louche returned with the picture to his desk. Moments later Francine saw him sticking it to the wall behind him with a drawing pin. At one o’clock, Mr Lancing and Mr Louche put on their jackets and left the office for lunch.

‘Bye, girls,’ said Mr Louche from the doorway.

Francine left soon after them, trying to look as little as possible as if she were going on an expedition to the shops lest the others ask her to buy sandwiches for them. That had happened on her first day, when she had been eager to be pleasant and had asked if anyone wanted anything because she was going out. She had spent the entire lunch hour queuing in a sandwich shop with a list saying who wanted butter and mayonnaise and which of them liked salt and pepper. As she left the building and launched herself into the swarming pavement, she was met by the familiar volley of glances of which she had eventually tired in Kent; but the homage of London’s streets never failed to uplift her with the suggestion that here, at the centre of it all, she was still everything she had believed herself to be. At first she had sometimes felt fearful that the unexceptional landscape of her old town had been too flattering a foil, but now it seemed to her that people had never really looked at her there, that she had been out of scale and incomprehensible to them. For the first time, she was really being appreciated. The fact that this appreciation as yet took such an insubstantial form — a deep and searching look, sometimes an expression of brazen pleasure, occasionally even a comment — worried her only mildly, for she felt sure that time would see its maturation into something more useful. It was just a question of staying in the light long enough to be seen, of keeping herself above the surface; and although Francine had faith in her own buoyancy, lately she had seen glimpses of a subtle, unexplained terror, that if ever she disappeared from view, she would sink and sink with no one to save her.

Francine ate her sandwich at her desk. By the time she had finished, it was not yet half-past one, and she felt the day drag at her with its unsparing hours. A murmuring quietude had settled on the office after the excited swell of Mr Lancing’s departure. The other girls sat turning the pages of magazines. Lorraine was on the telephone at the desk next to Francine’s.

‘Really? Really?’ she said.

Francine had nothing to read. She wished she had bought a magazine when she was out. She thought of calling Janice, but when she considered it more closely could think of nothing to say. She found her eyes running automatically along the typed lines of a letter in front of her, which she had printed out for Mr Lancing before lunch and which now awaited his signature. Her mind emptied with the exercise and when next she looked at her watch she saw that five minutes had passed. Boredom did not usually trouble her, for her contemplations were large and continuous, and often seemed more real and colourful than her physical activities. The facility with which she found her thoughts could slip away, hurrying back to the subject of herself after the interruptions of circumstance, meant that generally she relished these vacant interludes, filling them with the enactment of things passed or to come, and even occasionally with vivid scenes featuring people she had invented and was unlikely ever to meet. Sometimes her absorption would develop into a state of trance, the crowds of her consciousness dispersed to permit higher meditations which, although they could be achieved more easily in front of a mirror, were still accessible merely through the memory of one.

On this occasion, however, as she tried to think of the meeting with Ralph scheduled for the evening ahead, she found that her mind would not pleasure her. There was something in their connection which made the contemplation of it hostile to her enjoyment, and when she touched on it, even wrapped in the deepest clouds of illusion, her thoughts came back to her punished as if an electric shock had repelled them. Dimly she knew that her telephone call, made at the end of that long Friday evening during which she had battled and lost against resolution, had been a mistake. Despite the warm contrivances of her imagination the horrible truth it had fleetingly revealed sent its chill through every passage along which Francine tried to approach their arrangement. She was unused to analysing the motivations of her admirers and the memory of Ralph’s resistance, the ultimate defeat of which had permitted her to inter it in the deepest tomb of the forgotten, began to struggle again with life. He had behaved oddly that evening at his flat, but the subsequent improvement in his affections had led her then, as it did again now, to suppose it the product of nerves, a facet of his shyness or perhaps even his intelligence — a mystery in which she had little interest except in thoughts of the more interesting consequences of its enslavement. In the end everything had happened as it always did, but in this case the greater difficulty of achieving what was recognizable left Francine with a certain reluctance to abandon the scene of her hard work. After all, she could have just turned around and gone home right at the beginning, there on the doorstep! The fact that finally he had done what was expected of him was her only place of refuge, but even there the suspicion that something was wrong tracked her down.

His coolness on the telephone could, after all, have been nothing but a habitual return to restraint, a sort of tic out of which it might take some time to train him. She examined their conversation warily in the light of this new theory. He had been polite, but there had been something weary in his voice when she had announced herself, a tone disconcertingly similar to that deployed by her mother only a few hours earlier. Afterwards she had alternately comforted and upbraided herself with the memory of his reserve, one minute assured that his manner was merely the proof of his being a different ‘type’, the next horrifyingly tempted to believe that, even so, one or two of the same rules must apply, and that if he’d wanted to see her he would have asked. Truth laboured over this point, fatigued but resilient. Try as she might to camouflage the fact that she herself had suggested they meet, the material of fabrication was simply not there. Not thinking about that particular aspect of things at all had proved her only escape, but she felt its haunting presence.

She switched on her computer and stared at the awakening screen. Her thoughts had made this long journey several times over the past few days, and as often as not arrived at defiance. As she began to type another letter for Mr Lancing, she resorted to the secondary pleasure of thinking how cool she would be with Ralph, how obvious it would be that she didn’t care about him, and, in a triumph of regained authority, how she might not even turn up at all.

‘That’s a bit keen,’ said Lorraine, putting down the telephone.

‘I’ve got to leave early,’ said Francine.

‘Up to something special tonight, then?’

‘I’m meeting my boyfriend,’ said Francine, an enjoyable feeling of satisfaction warming her limbs as she said the words. ‘He’s taking me out.’

‘Really?’ said Lorraine.

*

It had been milder that day, and even though darkness had fallen Francine found that she could walk with her coat unbuttoned. If she walked briskly enough, it flew behind her in a manner she interpreted as romantic, and the intermittent revelation of her legs by its flapping drew the inquisitive glances of Camden High Street.

The anxiety which had moored in her stomach all day suddenly began to churn her juices as it propelled itself in circles of apprehension. She felt uneasy with the desires that had brought her here, a shady, duplicitous tribe of impulses with whom she did not normally do business. The street was crowded, and clashing waves of frenetic music burst from the noisy, brightly lit façades of open shops as she walked by. Several people had stopped at the window of an electrical shop and were gazing dumbly at the silent, animated screens of televisions. She pushed past them, depleted by the imperviousness with which they blocked her way. The thought of Ralph waiting for her, far from strengthening her against the vicissitudes of her journey, left her only with the unpleasant suspicion that her arrival was not urgently required. She drooped slightly and summoned again the possibility of going home, leaving him to sit there alone, punished by thoughts of her. The idea fortified her with enthusiasm and she quickened her pace. A man was approaching her along the street and she could tell from the intent angle of his face that he was trying to fix her eyes with his own. She met his glance and was surprised to find it irritating, filled with suggestion, with promises of whose emptiness she was suddenly assured. It occurred to her that these men who looked at her, these hungry strangers, were taking things from her without giving anything in return. She wondered why they should be permitted to visit her face so freely and then move on, as if it were but the distraction of a moment.

She reached a turning and stopped as a glowing lava of cars erupted from the traffic lights and flowed hotly across her path. Crossing it seconds later she recognized ahead the bar in which they had arranged to meet and she found herself hurrying towards it. She was late, a genuine ten minutes appropriated by a long wait for the Tube. She felt momentarily comforted by the sudden reality of time, the forceful packing of it after a day of empty, ghost-like hours which had haunted her one by one, each with its own ghastly tincture. Ralph had protested at meeting her in Camden, saying that he ought to come to West Hampstead, but to Francine the idea had sounded too much like a favour, a kind visit after which he could walk away free. She wanted him embroiled in scenes of himself from which he could not escape.

She saw him as soon as she arrived, sitting at a table in the corner with a newspaper. The bar was not crowded and her entrance was unimpeded, but as she swept past tables, glad again of her dramatic coat, and felt faces turn gratifyingly towards her, she was disappointed to notice that Ralph himself did not look up to observe her finely judged approach. The interlude somewhat restored her possession of herself, however, and as she sat down opposite him the sudden calming of her fractious uncertainties allowed her to manufacture a radiant smile.

‘Francine,’ said Ralph, looking up from his paper.

Francine was satisfied to see a look of surprise flit across his face, and knew that he had forgotten how beautiful she was. She was glad they had arranged to meet in a bar. The almost tangible force of public opinion around her — people were still looking round, she could see them from the corner of her eye! — seemed to offer some security against the disaffections solitude might have admitted.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said softly, forbidding the triumph which surged in her thoughts from exiting importunately through her mouth. She considered advancing the reason for her delay and then decided against it.

‘Don’t worry, I was enjoying catching up with the papers. What would you like to drink?’

Francine felt a mild chill of disappointment that he should have found her absence so productive. She noticed that he was wearing the same clothes as he had done the last time she had seen him, and could not decide what it meant.

‘Oh, I’ll have red wine,’ she said. As Ralph looked around for a waiter, she glanced at his glass and saw that he was drinking beer. ‘So what have you been doing lately?’ she said.

‘What?’ He craned his neck and flapped his hand ineffectually. ‘Oh, ignore me then, you idiot.’

Francine turned her head and immediately caught the waiter’s eye, drawing him with a smile to their table. She was relieved by the distraction. Her attempt at conversation had given her an odd sensation of nakedness.

‘You’re good at that,’ said Ralph once the waiter had disappeared. A slight grimness about his mouth kept the remark short of a compliment. ‘I can never get them to see me.’

Francine’s thoughts were alarmingly empty. She wished that she had rehearsed a topic, or, now that she knew Ralph read them, at least looked at a newspaper over lunch.

‘So what have you been doing lately?’ she said again.

‘Me? Oh, not much.’ He looked better than he had before, and when he met her eyes she felt a tug of attraction. ‘I haven’t done any reading for ages, so I mostly just caught up on things I’d been meaning to finish. Oh yes, and I went to see that exhibition at the Hayward.’

‘Really?’ said Francine, who had been unaware of ‘that’ exhibition but resolved to visit it as soon as possible. ‘Did you enjoy it?’

‘Well, it was all right, but a bit thin, didn’t you think?’

‘Oh, I haven’t had time to go yet. I’m going over the weekend.’

She glanced at Ralph and caught the shadow of a strange smile on his lips. It gave her the idea that he might be thinking things about her which conspired against the impression she was attempting to make, and she grew diffident from the injury, looking down at her hands in silence until the waiter came with her drink.

‘What about you?’ said Ralph in a more kindly tone. ‘How was your weekend?’

‘Oh, exhausting. I went out every night.’ She remembered her telephone call to Ralph on Friday evening. ‘Except Friday, of course. I never go out on Fridays.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, I like to have an evening to myself, just to relax, you know. I read a lot,’ she added.

‘But why Friday? Why not Sunday or Monday?’

‘I don’t know.’ Francine was growing uncomfortable with his line of questioning. She remembered the night they had first met, a Friday night. ‘Anyway, I do go out on Friday if there’s a party or something.’

Ralph looked perplexed.

‘So what sort of things do you read?’

‘Magazines mostly,’ said Francine. ‘They’re not just about fashion — they have really interesting articles as well.’

Ralph’s eyes brightened and she felt satisfied that she was beginning to understand him.

‘And what about books?’ he said. ‘Do you read books?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Francine named one or two of her favoured authors, those in whose thickly gathered pages she had found the best confirmation of her own ideas about how the world worked. Ralph didn’t appear to have heard of them. ‘Perhaps I’ve got the names wrong,’ she said, giggling for his benefit. ‘I’m not very good at remembering names. Normally they get passed around the office so you don’t get to keep them for very long.’

‘I see,’ said Ralph. ‘Would you like another drink?’

‘Thanks,’ said Francine. The red wine had flushed her cheeks and she felt her spirits begin to rise. Ralph had been drinking slowly, but now he drained his glass with conviction and set it firmly on the table.

‘I think I’ll join you,’ he said. ‘We might as well get a bottle.’

Watching him, she caught an expression on his face for which she was unable to find an explanation. It was as if he had forgotten she was there, and looking at him she had a sense of glancing through a window at something she shouldn’t see, something private. Seconds later he caught her eye and the expression disappeared hastily, as though he were embarrassed. She had sat many times at tables such as this, the face opposite her but a mirror in which her successes, her charms, every flicker of her loveliness were clearly reflected. Ralph’s face was unkind to her image, and Francine was unnerved by her suspicion that behind his barred eyes whole worlds turned, lives of thought were born and flourished, and that at the centre of its operations was a presence before whom she was powerless. She shrank slightly from this unpleasant notion of his complexity, and then returned with redoubled boldness, determined to conquer it.

‘Have you had many girlfriends?’

The force of her own words surprised her and she saw that their penetration had been considerable. His eyes widened at the question and he drank fiercely from his glass. She wondered why she hadn’t enquired of history before for clues which might make him clearer to her. Generally she wasn’t interested in what people had done before they met her, but Ralph didn’t talk about himself as much as other men.

She watched him drain his glass and swallow. She was only sipping at her own wine now, remembering the lethargy and the strange feeling of desperation which had been the residue of their last evening together, and with her restraint had come a sense of advantage as Ralph mechanically sank the bottle’s level.

‘Not many,’ he said. His eyes met hers. They were unfathomable now, two dark little wells into which suddenly she was afraid to look. He poured more wine into his glass and it gushed dangerously towards the rim. ‘There was a girl called Belinda who I knew at university. We were together for a year or so. I suppose she was my only real girlfriend.’

The mention of Belinda — what a ridiculous name! — and university drove Francine back into silence. She disliked the inference made by this twin assault that she was not the star of his experiences. Normally on such occasions, the present moment was firmly declared the climax of all that had gone before, but Ralph appeared to have said his piece and it seemed unlikely that any comforting codas would be added. This talk of ‘real’ girlfriends was unsettling. Belinda’s isolation, the very thing Francine would have imagined left her a clear field, made her seem all at once mountainous.

‘I suppose you’ve had a lot of men,’ said Ralph.

‘Oh, not really,’ Francine hurriedly replied. She found his comment peculiarly insinuating, and attempted to defuse it with protestations of innocence. ‘All the men I meet are so — so shallow. I mean, they only really want one thing, and once they’ve got it — well—’ She looked down at her hands. ‘It’s harder for girls, you know.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Ralph, who appeared not to be listening.

*

Outside it had grown colder and a whip of wind stung Francine’s legs as they turned into the High Street. She wished that Ralph would put his arm around her as a signal of protection against the night and the lonely waste-cluttered pavement, beside which demon-eyed cars roared too close, illuminating phantoms of litter leaping in the wind. People waited at a forest of bus stops, their faces ghoulish and grey. Someone was shouting on the other side of the street, a man walking slowly alone, his bearded face turned to the brown sky.

‘I’ll walk you to the Tube station,’ said Ralph. ‘It’s on my way,’ he added, although she had not objected to his inconveniencing.

He had drunk most of the wine in the end, and Francine had waited while his eyes grew liquid and bright and his face dismissed its guard for some unruly outbreak of interest, but now he seemed withdrawn and composed. His unrelenting manner as he marched her to the station fuelled her dread of the imminent solitude of the Tube, the precarious walk home, the emptiness of return as she unlocked the door. She wished fiercely that things were going differently, but the sound of her desires had never been more faint. They were apparently to have no effect on what was actually going to happen. The situation was, she had to admit, out of her control. She wondered, walking silently beside him, how he had escaped her. What was wrong with him? If only he would do something, make some acknowledgement of those qualities others had always found exceptional, it would have been easier for her defiantly to take her leave of him intact. His indifference was compelling, bound her in inaction, and she feared most of all the thoughts that would visit her once she was released from it.

Just then a smartly dressed man passed them on the pavement. He pinioned her with a searching look and then moved his glance to Ralph, smiling his approval quite openly before he walked on, leaving an ether of expense and the sound of tapping footsteps behind him. As if automatically, Ralph’s arm moved up and placed itself across Francine’s shoulders. The warm flood of her satisfaction filled recesses parched with anxiety. They drew level with the Tube station and stopped.

‘Would you like to come back?’ said Ralph, as if the idea had only just occurred to him.

‘If you like.’

Francine looked at his face and saw nothing there. His features were absolutely still, and in the draining, neon-lit darkness he looked unnervingly like a photograph. To her surprise he suddenly leaned forward and hugged her, his body stiff and awkward against hers. His mouth was pressed against her ear.

‘What do you want from me?’ he whispered.

She pretended she hadn’t heard, and soon they were walking in silence towards the Lock.