Selected Stories

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.