Selected Stories

‘Tea?’ he offered.

She shook her head. ‘No, not tonight, dear.’

He didn’t leave the room, telling her instead about his visit to the public house. He had drunk half a pint of cider and watched the other drinkers. Two girls were crawling all over a man with a moustache, a man who was much older than they were. The girls were drunk, shrill when they laughed or spoke. The red, white-spotted skirt of one of them had ridden up so far that Gilbert could see her panties. Blue the panties were.

‘Funny, that,’ Gilbert said. ‘The way she didn’t mind.’

On the front of the Evening Standard she could see a half-page photograph of Carol Dickson, not a particularly pretty girl, her mouth clenched tight in a grin, bright blonde hair. She might have guessed he’d bring in the

Evening Standard; she would have if she’d thought about it. ‘You’re an imaginative woman,’ one of the experts she’d pleaded with had stated, fingering papers on his desk. ‘Better, really, to be down to earth in a case like this.’

In the public house an old man had bothered him, he said. ‘Busy tonight,’ the old man had remarked.

Gilbert had agreed, moving slightly so that he could watch the girls, but the old man was still in his way.

‘Fag, dear?’ the old man offered, holding out a packet of Benson & Hedges.

She could always guess, Rosalie sometimes thought: what would happen next, how he wouldn’t refer to the girl on the front of the Evening Standard, how the panic would softly gather inside her and harden without warning into a knot, how the dryness in her mouth would make speech difficult.

‘Afterwards I flagged down a police car,’ Gilbert said. ‘“That old poufta’s out again tonight,” I told them. Well, I had to.’

He’d noticed the police car crawling along, he said, so he drew in in front of it and made a hand signal. ‘I told them he’d still be there if they went along immediately. They wrote down what he’d said to me, tone of voice and everything. When I put it to them they agreed an obscene way of talking is against the law. Quite nice they were. I thought I’d better report it, I explained to them, in case the next time it was some young boy. They said quite right. They’ll have him on their books now. Even if they decide not to take him in tonight they’ll have him on their books. They can give a man like that a warning or they can take him in if there are charges preferred. I’d always be ready to prefer charges because of the harm that could be done to an innocent boy. I said that. I said this was the eighth or ninth time he’d addressed me in that tone of voice. They quite agreed that people should be allowed to have a drink in peace.’

‘You didn’t go out again last night, did you, dear?’

‘Last night? It was tonight the poufta -’

‘No, I meant last night. You were back quite early, weren’t you?’

Headachy for no particular reason, she’d gone to bed after supper. But she’d heard him coming in, no later than a quarter-past nine, certainly no later than half-past. She’d fallen asleep about ten; she thought she remembered the sound of the television just before she dropped off.

‘The Big Sleep last night,’ he said. ‘But you can’t re-set a thing like that in England. It doesn’t make sense. A girl in the Kall Kwik was saying it was great, but I said I thought it was pathetic. I said it didn’t make any sense, interfering with an original like that. Silly of them to go interfering, I said.’

‘Yes.’

‘West Indian the girl was.’

Rosalie smiled and nodded.

‘Funny, saying it was great. Funny kind of view.’

‘Perhaps she didn’t know there’d been an original.’

‘I said. I explained about it. But she just kept saying it was great. They’re like that, the West Indian girls.’

Sometimes, when he went on talking, she felt like the shadow of a person who was not there. Ordinary-sounding statements he made exhausted her. Was it a deliberate act, that tonight he’d had a conversation with the police? Was it all part of being daring, of challenging the world that would take his rights from him? Often it seemed to her that his purposeless life was full of purpose.

‘I’ll make us tea,’ he said. ‘Really cold it is tonight.’

‘Not tea for me, dear.’

‘Chap in the Kall Kwik was saying the anti-freeze on his wind-screen froze. If you can believe him, of course. Whopper Toms they call him. Says he likes the taste of paper. Eats paper bags, cardboard, anything like that. If you can believe him. Means no harm, though.’

‘No, I’m sure he doesn’t.’

‘Congenital. Pity, really. I mean, I’ve seen him chewing, always chewing he is. It’s just that it could be gum. Could be a toffee, come to that.’