Selected Stories

On the train he fell asleep. He woke up less than a minute later, telling himself the lunchtime beer on top of the gin and tonic had brought that about. It didn’t mean there wasn’t someone else just because she’d said it and had said it to them too, just because she never lied. Everyone lied. Lies were at everyone’s disposal, waiting to be picked up when there was a use to put them to. That there was someone else made sense of everything, some younger man telling her what to do.

The train crept into Victoria and he sat there thinking about that until a West Indian cleaner told him he should be getting off now. He pressed his way through the crowds at the station, wondering about going to one of the bars but deciding not to. He changed his mind again on the way to the Underground, not wanting to be in the flat. It took an hour to walk to the Vine in Wystan Street, where they had often gone to on Sunday afternoons.

It was quiet, as he’d known it would be. Voices didn’t carry in the Vine and weren’t raised anyway; in couples or on their own, people were reading the Sunday papers. He’d brought her here when she was still at the night school, after a Sunday-afternoon class. ‘You saved me,’ she used to say, and he remembered her saying it here. At the night school, crouched like a schoolgirl at her desk, obedient, humble, her prettiness unnourished, her cleverness concealed, she’d been dismissive of herself. Trapped by her nature, he had thought, and less so when their friendship had begun, when they had walked away from the night school together through the empty, darkened streets, their conversation at first about the two languages she was learning, and later about everything. Sometimes they stopped at the Covent Garden coffee stall, each time knowing one another better. An only child, her growing up was stifled; net curtains genteelly kept out the world. There was, for him in marriage, the torment of not being wanted any more. She was ashamed of being ashamed, and he was left with jealousy and broken pride. Their intimacy saved him too.

There was an empty table in the alcove of the wine bar, one they’d sat at. Hair newly hennaed, black silk clinging to her curves, Margo – who owned the place – waved friendlily from behind the bar.

‘Chloë’s not well,’ he said when she came to take his order, her wrist chains rattling while she cleared away glasses and wiped the table’s surface.

‘Poor Chloë,’ she murmured, and recommended the white Beaune, her whispery voice always a surprise, since her appearance suggested noisiness.

‘She’ll be all right.’ He nodded, not knowing why he pretended. ‘Just a half,’ he said. ‘Since I’m on my own.’

Someone else brought it, a girl who hadn’t been in the bar before. Half-bottles of wine had a cheerless quality, he used to say, and he saw now what he had meant, the single glass, the stubby little bottle.

‘Thanks,’ he said, and the girl smiled back at him.

He sipped the chilled wine, glancing about at the men on their own. Any one of them might be waiting for her. That wasn’t impossible, although it would have been once. A young man of about her age, a silk scarf casually tucked into a blue shirt open at the neck, dark glasses pushed up on to his forehead, was reading a paperback with the same cover as the edition Prosper possessed himself, The Diary of a Country Priest.

He tried to remember if he had ever recommended that book to her. The Secret Agent he’d recommended, and Poe and Louis Auchincloss. She had never read Conrad before. She had never heard of Scott Fitzgerald, or Faulkner or Madox Ford.

The man had blond hair, quite long, but combed. A pullover, blue too, trailed over the back of his chair. His canvas shoes were blue.

He was the kind: Prosper hardly knew why he thought so, and yet the longer the thought was there the more natural it seemed that it should be. Had they noticed one another some other Sunday? Had he stared at her the way men sometimes do? When was it that a look had been exchanged?

He observed the man again, noted his glances in the direction of the door. A finger prodded the dark glasses further back, a bookmark was slipped between the pages of The Diary of a Country Priest, then taken out again. But no one came.

It was a green-and-black photograph on the book’s cover, the young priest standing on a chair, the woman holding candles in a basket. Had the book been taken from the shelves in the flat, to lend a frisson of excitement, a certain piquancy, to deception? Again the dark glasses were pushed up, the bookmark laid on the table. People began to go, returning their newspapers to the racks by the door.

Suddenly she would be there. She would not notice that he was there too, and when she did would look away. The first time at the Covent Garden coffee stall she said that all her life she’d never talked to anyone before.