Blind Date (16 page)

Then Hazel fell into sleep with a suddeness which was insulting, lying on the sofa like a plump puppy waiting to be stroked. The shaking had worn her out. Patsy covered her and then found herself padding around, smoking although it was not her habit but Hazel's, a stranger in her own home, looking for things to do to make herself exhausted enough to follow Hazel's example, and still not wanting to sleep for fear of waking up with the same, awful truth in front of her face.

There was a diesel engine outside. Throbbing. She could not look. Clean the kitchen. Already clean. Make coffee, no; eat, drink some more, Christ. Check the post.

The gas bill, the electric, the service charge, three postal offers full of cheats and lies and a buttermilk envelope. She opened it at the narrow end, as if trying to preserve it: the paper was welcoming to the touch; it seemed to stick to her fingers. It was the one element of hope in a day of destruction.

“Profile:
Michael Jacobi is not the the kind of man who has difficulties with women. He is highly presentable, with a good career record. He says he is looking for a woman who is serious about partnership, because those he has met so far never are. He believes that two people should know one another well before they even embark on a relationship. They should be friends first, lovers later. He wants to hold and protect.”

There was more. Patsy bit into the corner of the envelope and let her teeth sink into the paper, yumm, disregarding how it tasted foul, like a mouthful of glue. This was it. Out of all this carnage, promise with a capital P. Get a life. She was quite out of control, weepy and sleepy, the alcohol and shock working its own delayed response as she stumbled to bed and made her last resolution before sleep hit her.

I must, must, must, phone him tomorrow.

“L
ook,”
said the Owl, muttering into the phone, “I don't want to complain, but—”

“That's what I'm here for, my dear. To listen.”

“That girl, last Friday. She never turned up.”

There was a long silence.

“Can you come and see me?”

He knew he looked furtive. It was five o'clock now and still hot: a muggy heat which made food decay and milk turn sour in the carton. Desks were emptying in all directions; no-one would miss him. And yes, he was angry enough, having thought about it, to take a taxi from his premises to hers and go all the way up those stairs. He'd been miserable at the weekend and yesterday, thinking about it and only calling today, late, sick of the seesaw of emotions which interrupted his life. Why shouldn't he complain? It cost enough.

Girls
littered the route, lining the streets, not one of them blonde. The dim stairwell of Select Friends' premises seemed crowded. All four floors below were in the act of emptying their workaday occupants, minor officials, computer kids, strange creatures emerging from small rooms in a headlong rush home. Owl kept his head down and his feet plodding upward.

Once inside the sanctum, the heavy scent of flowers seemed familiar, as if he had been a visitor a dozen times instead of once, and he was calmer, immediately. From the half-open door to her office, there came the murmur of a voice on a phone. In the tiny foyer, a desk apparently occupied by a receptionist stood empty with a jacket over a chair, as it had before. He waited.

She was smiling, like a waiter, formal rather than sincere.

“Sorry to keep you waiting out there. My assistant's gone home, you see.” She shut the door behind them and sat heavily in her swivel chair. Owl had not noticed the furniture before; he also noticed now that she was older than he had first imagined. All the indignation he had planned faded as he watched her take off her spectacles and rub her eyes, like his favourite aunt. A copy of the late edition of the
Evening Standard
lay on her desk, open at the second page. He felt the way he did in the dentist, reluctant to describe his own symptoms, while she looked as if she might cry, which unnerved him more.

“Look, my dear, we might be in trouble.”

“Pardon?”

“You heard me,” she said wearily.

He felt chastened. His lack of confidence always made him react with a spasm of guilt at the merest hint of accusation, however obscure; he was always expecting something to be his fault, although the reference to “we” in this context, where he was the paying customer, puzzled him.

“Yes,
I heard, but I don't understand what you're talking about. I only phoned to say that my date didn't turn up on Friday night and I wondered if you'd heard from her, because if this is what I've got to expect from any girl you introduce, it all seems a bit of a waste of time.” The anger returned in force.

She pushed the open copy of the London paper towards him. In the corner, Owl saw the blurred snapshot of a smiling face half obscured by hair which the camera had rendered a shocking white. “Young woman murdered at home … Angela Collier, advertising executive, battered to death.”

“Your date,” Mrs. Smythe said, briskly.

The print blurred in front of his eyes. He had not seen the newspaper. Photographs were deliberately excluded from the agency's arrangements. (Can't have people being prejudiced by looks, dear, can we?) There had only been Angela's pleasing, hesitant voice on the phone and the profile he had carried in his pocket and the curiosity which had filled his waking dreams. He believed, all the same, that this was his Angela. The page dropped from his fingers.

“I told you, I didn't meet her,” he whispered. “She didn't turn up. I was five minutes late. She wasn't there.”

Mrs. Smythe nodded. “I knew it must be something like that. Don't worry, dear, I believe you. Even if others might not.”

One hand moved to the pearls round her neck, while the other dabbed at her eyes. She opened a drawer in her desk and took out a bottle of sherry and two glasses, poured liberally, suddenly more businesslike. He hated sherry, but the gesture of solidarity appealled.

“I believe
you,” she continued in a normal, if slightly hostile tone from which any sadness had disappeared, “because she phoned me in the afternoon, a bit nervous, you know, seemed to be a bit hazy about the place and the time. I do like to be on hand for the nervous ones.” She pushed the sherry glass towards him, an ornate thing with a red-coloured stem, and the association of redness and blood made him shudder.

“And I also believe you because of the newspaper,” she added, talking by now as if the conversation was entirely normal, stabbing one ringed finger towards the printed words on the floor on his side of the desk.

“
It
said,” she continued, speaking of the
Standard
as if it were the oracle, “that a security guard taking the air outside Charing Cross saw her waiting. Then she met someone she seemed to know and got in a taxi with him. ‘A good-looking man with thick hair,' he said, and that, dear, is hardly a description which could be applied to you.”

Alarmed as he was, Owl registered the insult.

“And I believe you most of all,” Mrs. Smythe finished, “because no one, I mean, no man who belongs to this agency could do any such thing! Harm a hair on any girl's head, for that matter! The idea! So it can't have been you. I simply don't deal with people like that.”

Part of him wanted to laugh since her fervent announcement seemed to refer to persons who spat on carpets or swore, rather than murdered, but her belief was reassuringly absolute. Aunty would not tolerate a homicidal maniac, handsome though he may be. For the first time in his life, he felt his own lack of height and looks might be an advantage.

“So what
do we do?” he asked. The sherry spilled over his fingers: he imagined the horror of explaining to the police, large men all, how he had hung around the Embankment like a fool, how he had gone to an introduction agency in the first place. Explaining at work that he was wanted for questioning, laughing off the presence of his picture in the paper and people saying, no smoke without fire when a man helps with enquiries, especially a little, bouncy man with specs and tears in his eyes, one who feared the revulsion and suspicion of women. For one silent and treacherous moment, he felt nothing but anger against Angela Collier and nothing but terrible fear for himself.

“Can't do anything for poor Angela,” Mrs. Smythe announced after a pause. “But she and the
Evening Standard
could ruin this agency. So we do nothing.”

Again, the “we.” This time he did not notice.

“Nothing?”

“Absolutely nothing. I'm not suggesting lies, only silence.”

“Won't the police come and see you?” he asked stupidly. Mrs. Smythe sighed, her sherry glass empty. She spoke to him as she might have done to a slow-learning child.

“Why? They won't, unless Angela left your profile and our prospectus lying around waiting to be found by prying eyes, and I did advise her against doing that, like I did you, don't you remember? Always tear up what you might not want other people to see. It's no-one else's business, is it?”

He remembered. It had been part of that confidentiality he had craved and she had created so well. Keep your private life secret, dear, I would; no point exposing yourself to be misunderstood.

“People do tease so,” she murmured now. “They tease about the most important, hurtful things, don't they? I don't think ridicule gets any easier, does it? It isn't fair.”

Yes, they
did tease.

“You and I have so much to lose, dear. Can't have all those other, lovely girls on my books running for cover before you've met them, can we?”

H
e emerged, blinking into the daylight, with another profile in his hand, conscious that he had been given it as a kind of reward. He read it, going down the road, into the heat of the traffic, from which, post rush hour, all the girls had disappeared, except for those hooked on the arms of other men, happy, talking. He noticed no generation except his own.

“Hazel is thirty. She has a good job with a major company and never seems to meet men, because all her contemporaries at work are women. She says of herself that she is neither fashionable nor trendy, but she's in good nick, sense of humour in fine order. She wants to be loved, cared for and fascinated in return for same. Excellent homemaker …”

The Owl thought of his friends, and out of them all, he wanted to talk to Joe.

J
oe was in the courtyard. He had just been stung by a wasp: he was holding a bunch of flowers and throwing stones at the window because the ever eccentric bell wouldn't work. He heard a stone land. The phone bleeped. He danced round it. Shut up! Shut UP!

There he was, a giant dancer, with clumsy, uncoordinated steps. The cat observed him from the shadows, both of them a little demented.

“Who is it?”

“Joe?”
The Owl's voice sounded close to tears. “Joe, I've got to talk to someone …”

“You OK, mate?”

“Not really … I dunno …” The Owl was a man of few words.

“Look,” said Joe. “Don't get upset by anything. Life's too short. Can it wait a day?”

There was a pause and a sigh. “I suppose so.” Reception was bad as Joe moved closer to the door.

“Phone again tomorrow, then?”

“What?”

“Tomorrow!” Joe bellowed.

“What are you doing now?” Owl asked. “Why do you sound so funny?”

Joe had the distinct sensation that he was missing something important, but then he was trying to do something important. Anything else would wait.

“What do you think I'm doing? I'm trying to get a female to answer her door.”

The feral cat was sliding round his legs. He was the only human being she ever approached. Why me? Why the hell
me?

The sound of laughter disturbed him. The door had opened while he hissed into the telephone and gently kicked away the cat; the phone had become confused with the flowers and he almost dropped them both.

“I thought it might be you,” Elisabeth said. “What do you want?”

“I want to come in. I'm sick of standing outside. I want to come in.”

She smiled her crooked smile. The light was fading. She had not had this instinct to laugh at the antics of a fellow human being in a long time. Apart from a small boy who gathered pebbles, and that was not the same.

“Well,
you'd better do that,” she said. “And stop shouting.”

T
hey were all shouting at her without ever opening their mouths. Caroline Smythe survived her journey home with ill grace. She had perfected the knack of everyone on the crowded Underground, and then on the crowded train from Victoria to Clapham Junction, although she gave up smiling on the bus. There was no point, because they all seemed little and old like herself. On the tube, she had found that if she fixed one of the youngish ones with a smile, straight into the eyes, and looked them up and down, or if she simply wore a vacant, tremulous grin, she made them nervous enough to give up a seat. Then she could watch. Sometimes she slipped one of the agency cards into a coat pocket, but only in winter.

The journey was easier in summer, warmer and smellier certainly, but less encumbered by clothes. Her cotton heads showing a fringe in front and curls behind, itched. She could scan the faces and the bodies and work out which of the girls would suit her son, rejecting them within seconds of choosing. She would search ungloved hands for rings, necks and ears for nice pieces of jewellery, let her critical eye judge the state of their hair and their skin, then shake her head and move on to the next. It was crazy to make this journey in the rush hours when she could adjust her hours to suit herself, but she did, often. On days when she was tired, like today, they all came to look so similar.

On the bus, they all looked the same anyway, small or larger humps of people clutching supermarket bags, as if glamour was banned. It was the same when she trudged up her street, near, but oh so far from the trendier regions. It could have been anywhere, and every time she entered the house it seemed smaller.