A Private View (17 page)

‘I’ll ring,’ he said, kissing her.

‘Yes, do, dear.’ She hesitated. ‘I enjoyed meeting that Mrs Lydiard,’ she said. ‘And that friend of yours.’

He was startled. ‘Katy Gibb? She’s no particular friend of mine. In fact she’s not a friend at all. She’s staying in the flat opposite. She’ll be gone soon, I dare say.’

A very slight look of reserve crossed Louise’s face and vanished. ‘I found her rather tiresome,’ she said.

‘Oh, she is.’ But once again he was weakened by a sense of pity.

When they were gone, in a flurry of scarves and instructions, he washed up the cups, then put the book away. He did not open it; he felt sure that he would find a sticky thumb print on one of the pages. He would look for another copy, not only for Stuart but for himself, a private copy, to be kept safe, far from depredations. He ascribed to the book feelings which it could not possess, which were in fact his own. He telephoned the shop in Sackville Street, gave his
instructions, and asked them to find him another copy. ‘As soon as you can,’ he said. ‘I’m not worried about the price.’

He left the door on the latch and went down to thank Hipwood for getting Louise’s taxi. A favour of this sort always necessitated a brief conversation: it was Hipwood’s due. They discussed Christmas. ‘I shall probably be away,’ said Bland. ‘But I’ll let you know in good time. And of course I’ll see you before I go.’ This meant that an offering of a pecuniary nature would be handed over. Hipwood was on his dignity. ‘And of course I’ll keep an eye on things, sir. Nothing much gets past me, you know.’

‘We are all in your debt, Mr Hipwood,’ said Bland, as he always did on these occasions.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Hipwood gravely.

He reached his door without mishap, but as he was about to close it the door of the Dunlops’ flat opened to reveal Katy Gibb, dressed in jeans and a red sweater, her feet bare.

‘Hallo, hallo,’ he said, his voice breezy. Once again the actual sight of her affected him with prickly exasperation. ‘How are you today?’

She ignored this and remained leaning in the doorway. After a few seconds she unwound herself, a sensuous movement, he noted, and one which showed off her figure to its best advantage.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me in?’ she said.

‘Well, I am rather busy,’ he countered, his heart sinking. ‘I’ve got some rather important letters to write.’ All his excuses sounded false to him, as indeed they were.

‘I would have come across earlier,’ she said. ‘Only I saw that friend of yours going in.’

‘Your friend’ would have been more polite, he thought,
and then remembered that Louise had used the same words. To each antagonist the other had become ‘that friend of yours’. On the other hand, why refer to her at all? And why had she seen Louise entering his flat? Did she spend her entire life watching and waiting? Why could she not go out like other people? He doubted whether she had voluntarily left the flat since the day of her arrival. Yet she did not have the pallor that characterised those kept at home through illness or disability. She looked healthy, her cheeks flushed, although he noticed a small sore blooming at the corner of her mouth that had not been there before.

‘Are you eating properly?’ he said sharply.

‘Oh, I don’t eat much in the daytime. Most people eat too much anyway.’

‘What
are
you eating?’

‘There’s masses of tins. Stuff in the freezer. Don’t worry, I won’t starve.’

‘Don’t you think that’s a little irresponsible? Those tins belong to the Dunlops.’

‘You are funny, George. If those people came to my door I’d let them have everything I possessed. That’s what friends are for. But perhaps I’m just like that. If the Dunlops want to visit me they can take what they like. I won’t start counting.’

‘And you think they might visit you? In California? You’d better come in, by the way.’

‘Sure.’

‘But I thought you wanted to stay here? And start your business.’ It was abundantly clear that neither of them believed any longer in this hypothetical business, but he thought it only polite to pretend that he took her seriously. Besides, he was interested. It was like a detective story, or a
novel by Henry James. Fate had brought this enigma to his door, and he could not easily dismiss it. In any event, he reminded himself, he had nothing better to do.

‘I want to talk to you about that,’ she said, installing herself in the armchair so recently vacated by Louise. ‘I need some advice. A man’s advice. Someone who knows the business world.’

‘I don’t know anything about the business world,’ he said. ‘I was in personnel.’

‘Oh, PR.’

‘Not exactly.’ He was deeply annoyed. ‘I was responsible for hundreds of people, and not only in their working lives but sometimes out of working hours as well. I arranged their appointment, or their transfer, or their medical retirement, or their disability allowance, whatever was necessary. I’ve worked closely with people throughout my career.’

‘Excuse
me
,’ she said. ‘You forget I know a bit about people too. I’ve been working with an expert. With
the
expert, you might say. But I suppose you’re not quite in touch any longer.’

She arranged herself in her chair, her right ankle supported on her left knee, her plump crotch closely outlined by what appeared to be a newish pair of jeans, unlike the ones in which she had presented herself on the day of her arrival. These were clean, and much tighter. Sharon’s again, he supposed, but this now seemed to be taken for granted.

‘Young people like you wouldn’t understand how I gave my life to that company, and was glad to! I suppose you find it strange that I turned up every morning at the same place and did my job for more years than you’ve probably spent in this world. Could you do that?’

‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘I’m more the creative type.’

‘So there’s no point in trying to make you see how satisfying it is to stick at one thing, to
work
at it, rather than go around looking for favours.’ This seemed to him unnecessarily severe. He hurried on, hoping that she had not taken offence. He seemed to have summoned up, rather against his will, an idyllic picture of a lost paradise, in which he saw himself eternally walking to the office on a sunny morning, his briefcase in one hand, his neatly rolled umbrella in the other. How he had enjoyed these gentlemanly appointments! And when he arrived, always on time, his secretary was ready for him with a cup of coffee and his opened letters. He had obeyed the rules, had used no stationery for his own correspondence, had made no unnecessary telephone calls. There must still be some of his own headed paper in the top drawer of that big desk which he had relinquished so mournfully. It would be used for scrap, of course. By somebody else, his successor, whom he thought might do the job well, but not as meticulously, as painstakingly, as he had done it for thirty years. Thirty years! He had been a model employee, and he was not ashamed of the fact, although he had few extravagant skills to show for it. Life now seemed to be infinitely more complex than life in the office.

But how to explain to this chit of a girl, with her nonsensical talk, the charm of a regular job, and a job of some responsibility, interviewing nervous young men (but they had become more brash as time went on), explaining retirement entitlements to men as old as himself, with whom he deeply sympathised, and whom he treated more gently than the hearty sweating young applicants. And the incidental charms had not been negligible, saying to this one go, and he goeth,
sending that one to do the photocopying … And always the sterling friendship of Putnam in the background, Putnam who viewed the whole thing with a more ironic eye, including his own assiduity, but who never confessed, in an unguarded moment, that he considered the whole enterprise faintly ridiculous. That was a mark of respect, he knew. Putnam, for whatever reason, had respected him. That was what had made their friendship so precious.

But was it ridiculous, he thought? Or rather, was I ridiculous? It hardly mattered when Putnam was there. The contrast between then and now, between matters of some concern and this ridiculous, this truly ridiculous, conversation, was almost too painful for him. Briefly, he shut his eyes.

‘I feel sorry for your generation, really,’ said Katy Gibb. ‘The war must have ruined your chances.’

‘I was a child in the war,’ he said stiffly. ‘It is not exactly a burning memory. Besides, I didn’t live in London then. Reading was pretty quiet.’

‘Well, of course, I wasn’t born,’ she said, spreading out her hands in a pretty gesture.

‘I feel sorry for you, then. You missed the sixties. You just inherited the fall-out, without having any of the fun.’

He remembered himself and Louise, marvelling at the pageant of the King’s Road in those far-off days—and they too were sunny in his memory. He remembered nothing of the politics of the time, only those sunny Saturday afternoons, spent strolling at their ease, until it was time to go home and probably to bed. Then Kennedy had been shot, and shortly after she had married, a late marriage, when he had had in the back of his mind the idea that the danger was
past, that she would not now leave him, but that there was no need to marry her himself. People did not get married in the sixties: he had thought that this suited them both. But Louise was more practical. Sauntering through the crowds on sunny weekend afternoons had not satisfied her as it had satisfied him. She had found this man, this Denis Arnold, and she had imperturbably decided to marry him, although he was deeply unattractive and not even very pleasant. But he was a doctor, albeit recently retired, and perhaps a little innocent snobbery had entered the calculation. She was tired of working: she wanted a child. Bland had known this, but had not known how great was her need. His ignorance was genuine: afterwards he had reasoned that most men were the same, shying away fastidiously from a woman’s needs and functions. He had been desolate, bewildered, when she had removed herself; he had also been on his dignity. He had not got in touch with her until he heard of her husband’s death. He had paid his visit of condolence, had seen the child, whom he could never have accepted as one of his own. That had been a significant reaction. It was at first pity which led him to telephone her, and shortly afterwards the Sunday calls had become a matter of routine. Now when they met there might have been no intervening marriage, nothing to spoil their almost childlike friendship. It had become a sort of marriage in its own right.

He supposed that this invasion of his thoughts by the past was one of the symptoms of ageing. There had been the incident of this morning, the memory of his mother, so vivid, so uncomfortable. Otherwise, he thought, age had spared him most of its indignities. He tired easily, but he could always rest. That was one of the blessings, he supposed:
age bestowing the time to rest, along with the aching bones and the suddenly drooping eyelids. He found that talk tired him more than activity: this morning’s walk, for example, had merely left him with a rather pleasant desire to sit and listen to some music, whereas this girl’s presence irritated him to the point of madness. In fact he could hardly bear to pay her any attention, seated as she was in that immodest manner in Louise’s chair, and apparently prepared to stay until she judged that he had listened with due care to her propositions.

‘I know nothing about business,’ he said shortly. This was not quite true; he knew how organisations worked, but thought that this knowledge was hardly relevant to the matter in hand. ‘And I doubt if you know much either.’

‘I don’t,’ she replied. ‘But that’s exactly what I’m looking for, don’t you see? After all, I’m the potential, aren’t I? I’d be the investment. It’s sponsorship I need. I’ll supply the expertise. Don’t you worry about that!’

‘And what expertise would that be?’

‘Anything you care to mention! Aromatherapy. Aerobics …’

‘My dear girl, we are in the middle of a recession. You can’t honestly believe that this is going to catch on …’

‘Of course it is! Health is very big news! How many people do you know with a personal fitness trainer?’

‘Not one,’ he said.

‘Well, I know six or seven,’ she finished triumphantly. ‘All friends of mine, all young people, men as well as women.’

‘You mean they pay good money to be exercised, when they could just as easily go for a brisk walk on their own? For free?’

‘I’m afraid you just don’t understand the modern ethos, George. One gets at the mind through the body.’

‘I dare say little has changed in that respect.’

‘Yes, but now there’s much more stress,’ she persisted. ‘These days you have to call in the experts if you want to keep out of the hands of the doctors, and all those filthy drugs they pump into you.’

‘Actually, doctors don’t do that.’

‘Oh, come on, George. Everyone knows what harm modern medicine can do.’

‘I never heard of any. But this is a silly argument. What you want to do, if I can get this clear, is educate the mind through the body. Or shouldn’t it be the other way round?’

‘They work in harmony, of course,’ she said pityingly, as if dealing with a lesser intelligence. ‘That’s what I want to do, yes.’

‘Well, I can’t understand why you need my advice.’

‘I need premises,’ she said. ‘I need a place where people can come. Well situated, of course. A flat would be ideal. How much would one like this cost?’

‘More than you could afford. More than I could afford now. You surely weren’t thinking …? No, I’m sure you weren’t. In any case what money I have is all tied up.’ This was relatively true. ‘I believe there are certain government schemes, training schemes, and so on. There may even be grants. Although I doubt if you’d be considered a high priority.’

Indeed, never had she seemed a lower priority than she did now. Her face had fallen. She had not been excessively friendly when she presented herself after Louise’s departure: the mere fact of Louise had activated her reserve of anger. He was ashamed to note that he felt quite frightened of her.
She was all blind will, it seemed, and not particularly discerning. Her needs were taken to be obvious: she implied that she had no time to waste on pleasantries or even on preliminaries. Like all those who look to others to fulfil their requirements, however absurd, however outrageous, she was disproportionately annoyed when such help was not forthcoming. And she possessed several useful techniques, including a drawling distaste for anyone who disappointed her, and an ability to take offence at an unsuspecting criticism. Those who were lured into thinking that she was at home with the truth could find themselves excommunicated from her presence by virtue of an unpopular opinion. Friendship could turn to enmity, and no doubt already had; he wondered, for example, whether she and Sharon Dunlop were currently on speaking terms. It appeared to be up to him (or down to him, as she would no doubt say) to sort this out, just as it appeared to be his business to extract some grain of truth from her increasingly blithe remarks.