Bond Street Story (20 page)

By their very nature, card tables are unable to withstand such strains. They tend to sag if one player even so much as rests his chin upon his elbows. And Hetty's table was by no means a new one. One of the legs was secured by an extra hinge of adhesive tape already. And, in the result, the table offered no resistance at all. Mr. Bloot went straight through it. Cards, glasses, an ashtray full of cigarette-ends and cigar-butts, all went flying.

But Chick wasn't the only one in the little party to show himself resourceful. There was Sid as well. A bald, fat man, with a
wide, expressionless face, he too was experienced in emergencies. Without even getting up from his chair he reached over to the side-table and picked up the lamp that stood upon it. It was quite a small lamp with a pretty flowered shade. But the base was of pottery with a thick rim running all round the bottom. And Sid knew just how to take hold of the lamp—round the narrow fluted neck. That gave him the leverage he wanted. He brought the base down hard on to Mr. Bloot's head as it went past him.

“O.K., Hetty,” was all he said, and put the remains of the lamp back on to the side-table.

Of course, they all had a good laugh about it afterwards. And it was Hetty with that magnificent vitality of hers who led the laughter. It was an absolute scream, she said, thinking that they had been going to murder her, and Gus was a real darling to have come forward the way he did. There had never been anything like it in her life before. And she wouldn't have missed it for all the tea in China. It was as good as the movies. She went off into more peals of shrill nervous laughter at the memory of it.

Mr. Bloot laughed, too. Laughed more than he had ever laughed before. And louder. He was, in fact, rather surprised at himself for finding everything so funny. But that was probably because of the whisky that he had been given to revive him. Whatever it was, he saw the funny side of it. He fingered the bump on his skull. And laughed. He contemplated the ruins of the card table. And laughed again. He laughed at the ladies on Chick's braces. Sometimes he laughed simply because
everything
seemed funny. The only time he stopped laughing was when there was a ring at the bell. But it still wasn't Hutch—all Hetty's friends he had noticed had monosyllables instead of names. And that struck him as being funny, too.

The person at the door was the tenant of the flat beneath. And he was in a nasty sort of mood. Full of threats about writing to the landlord if this sort of thing went on. His wife had been alone at the time, he said, and he had come back to find her, head under the bedclothes, terrified. There had been screams and the noise of fighting. He had his wife's word for it. And now all this drunken laughter. If there was any more of it he would go round to the police station straightaway.

But Hetty handled him all right. She had a marvellous way with difficult customers. Then when Hetty returned, Mr. Bloot
started laughing again. Only this time it was about the tenant of the flat below.

The others left shortly after eleven. Con was the last to go. He was the one of whom Mr. Bloot had seen least. Quieter than the others, he seemed. And in a way, superior. He wore a shirt with a stiff collar, and suggested a counting-house clerk who had got himself into rather mixed company. Because there was no denying it, some of Hetty's friends seemed more than a little beneath her. But that, Mr. Bloot told himself, was only another aspect of this fascinating woman. It was her natural magnetism. And now all that mattered was that he was alone with her. He was still a little dizzy from the force of the blow and the effects of so much whisky. He had, in fact, forgotten why he had come.

But with her beside him, it all came back.

“Marry me, Hetty,” he said. “Please marry me.”

There was something in the tone of voice, in the very simplicity of his proposal, that Hetty found deeply moving. She had received plenty of the other kind. Bold. Hysterical. Sly. Drunken. Salacious. Overwhelming. But never anything so straightforward and direct as this. For some reason, it made her want to cry.

“D'you really want me all that much?” she asked.

And Mr. Bloot, too much overcome to answer, merely nodded.

“But you don't know anything about me,” she told him.

“Ah love you,” he said simply. “That's all Ah need to know.”

Hetty's heart gave a silly, girlish sort of bound as she heard the words. But it was no use pretending. She was not a girl. She was a mature, experienced woman of forty-five.

“I've been married before, you know,” she went on.

Mr. Bloot politely brushed the point aside.

“Ah'mer widower meself, m'dear,” he said with a slow, sad smile. “It's the same for both of us.”

And as he spoke the words he found himself wishing that Emmie had been there to hear. It would have made her feel better about things knowing that he still valued the state of marriage so highly. Emmie had always been a very conventional woman.

“Well, I suppose you might put it that way,” Hetty answered.

There was a pause.

“Then will you?” he asked.

“What's the hurry?” Hetty asked gently. “Why's my boy got to know tonight?”

She had linked her arm through his while she was speaking and had led him over to the couch. He felt himself enveloped and
wrapped up in a great billowy cocoon of feminine softness and fragrance. The old swoony feeling came over him again.

“Because Ah can't sleep,” he answered, in a low mumble like a man talking in his sleep. “Ah can't sleep. Ah've turned against me food. And Ah'm forgetting things. Ah've gone all to pieces because of you, Hetty. Ah can't go on like this. Ah'm not ...” He checked himself hurriedly. That was just the way things were with him nowadays. His mind kept playing tricks on him. He never knew what silly thing he was going to say next.

But Hetty was in no mood for noticing his sudden pause. She was lying there limply in his arms, her large dark eyes turned towards him.

“Have I really done all that to you?” she asked. “Perhaps I had better marry you. Just to make up for it.”

As she said it she stroked the side of his face with the back of her big white hand.

“You mean you will, Hetty?”

She dropped her eyes for a moment. There was a pause.

“I mean I will, Gus,” she said, at last. And, to her own surprise, she found herself adding: “I'll try to be a good wife to you.”

The sigh that went up from Mr. Bloot was so deep and long drawn out that for a moment Hetty feared that he had died there in her arms from sheer relief and happiness. But she need not have worried. Because a moment later he sat up again and pulled out his watch.

“Wot time does the last No. 18 go?” he asked.

But Hetty only pulled him down again, and kissed him.

“It's gone,” she said quietly.

 

Mr. Bloot's arrival at Rammell's next morning was the cause of much comment. For a start, he was late. But that wasn't Mr. Bloot's fault. The doctor was entirely to blame. It was not until twenty to nine when the doctor finally got busy in the surgery. He went to work with a needle and surgical catgut and finally fixed a large criss-cross of sticking plaster on top of the wound that Hetty's ornamental reading lamp had made. Then he told Mr. Bloot to come back again at the end of the week to have the stitches taken out.

The sticking plaster was a mistake. It lent a strangely school playground-like air to Mr. Bloot's appearance. But that was not all that was wrong about him. His collar was not clean. And his clothes had a crumpled, almost slept-in look. This in itself was remarkable. Because usually Mr. Bloot's linen and the crease in his trousers were both irreproachable. Even his eyes—usually pale, glassy and expressionless—were different, too. They were noticeably bloodshot. And he had shaved abominably. That was hardly Mr. Bloot's fault. Arriving at Artillery Mansions entirely unprepared for a night's stay, he had been forced to shave next morning with the best that Hetty could produce in the way of a razor. It was very small. Practically pygmy-size. Straight out of Hetty's week-end beauty case, in fact.

There were two schools of thought on the matter of Mr. Bloot's appearance. Young Mr. Burton (Household Enamel and Aluminium Ware) winked knowingly across at Mr. Rufford (Electric Cookers, Refrigerators and Washing-machines) and whispered something about nights on the tiles and a bit of stray. But that was characteristic of Mr. Burton. He was low by nature. He wore a gold wrist watch with an all-metal bracelet. Mr. Rufford, married, with three children and an invalid mother-in-law, was a different cast of man altogether. He simply didn't believe that the things that young Mr. Burton was always talking about ever went on at all. But he was careful to conceal that he didn't believe in them. So he winked back just as knowingly in Mr. Burton's direction and pulled the corners of his mouth down just as Mr. Burton had done. Miss Hambridge (Detergents and Stain Removers) took the opposite view. It was wonderful, she contended, that Mr. Bloot should have turned up at all after
his injury. But Miss Hambridge had always admired men. Not any one man in particular. Just men.

And it must be admitted, the story that Mr. Bloot concocted was an unsatisfactory one. It was a window that had inflicted the wound. That much was constant. But he was his own worst enemy when he attempted to elaborate. In one version, he had been leaning out when the whole thing had come down on him. In another, it was he who had jerked up too suddenly. The window became sash and casement by turns. It was a front window. And a back window. It had occurred when he was going to bed. And again apparently when he was getting up. It had knocked him nearly unconscious. He had scarcely noticed it until he felt the blood running down.

Either it was the effect of the blow. Or it was the effect of trying to live up to an untruth. Whichever way it was, Mr. Bloot felt poorly. And at lunchtime he went out to buy some aspirins because his head was hurting. It was, indeed, a great tribute to his sense of responsibility that he should have taken the trouble to go outside at all. There was a perfectly good pharmaceutical section on the ground floor that sold aspirins by the hundredweight. But it would have savoured too much of weakness to be seen going there. Also, there would have been all that fiddling business about number and department. Because the assistant would be sure to think that Mr. Bloot was trying to get them at a staff discount.

Not that leaving the premises was entirely without its compensations. It meant that he could phone Tufnell 3246, and talk to Hetty. Even this was not easy, however. Because it was a call from her wholesalers that Hetty was expecting, and before Mr. Bloot could do more than ask if it was the number he had been accused of deliberately keeping back two thousand Players, the same number of Gold Flake, and what sounded to him like a whole lorry load of Top Score, Weights and Woodbines. That being so, there was nothing for it but to wait until she had finished. And then explain who he was. Hetty couldn't have been nicer about it. She told Mr. Bloot that he must have been teasing to allow her to go on like that. At the end of the call she even made kissing sounds into the mouthpiece of the receiver. But the whole incident left Mr. Bloot jangly and perturbed. He had not known that Hetty could get such an edge on to her voice. And her language! It was a revelation that such words were apparently part of the daily to-and-fro of the smoke trade.

And he was still as much in doubt as ever about his future. And hers. After last night, he assumed that they were going to get
married, straightaway within a matter of months. Even weeks possibly. But he still didn't know exactly when.

Somehow amid all that laughter he had never got round to asking her.

The only thing that saved Mr. Bloot was the problem of young Tony. If it hadn't been for him someone from management would have been bound to notice the sticking plaster. The shagginess.

As it was, Tony was absorbing the whole attention of Management. The office that he now occupied was second from the end on the corridor marked “MANAGEMENT PRIVATE”. There was a plain frosted-glass door. On one side of the door it was all bustle and strip-lighting and card-index cabinets. And on the other, the Management side, it was blue Wilton pile and mahogany panelling and small Doulton ash-trays.

More than once, Tony had applied his mind to the matter of the Management décor. If only the blue Wilton could have been ripped up and the mahogany panelling torn down, then there would be distinct possibilities. It had occurred to him that walls of blue mirrors with a ceiling of pale silver might prove rather attractive. Or daffodil yellow, with chromium doors. Or, no doors or inner walls at all. Just one wide-open living and breathing space. Anyhow, he intended sometime to have a real good go at re-doing it.

For the time being, however, there was nothing to do but lump it. Sit back. And be grateful that even in the office he still had the leisure to do a little serious thinking. Take to-day, for instance. Compared with his father who had been as hard at it as ever from about 8.55, Tony had not done very much so far. He wouldn't, in fact, have minded doing a bit more. Indeed, in a vague, indeterminate fashion, he would rather have like to have something to do. Either buying. Or selling. He didn't very much mind which. But the place was so confoundedly well organized already that he couldn't quite see how to butt in. Not that he really minded. So long as he didn't get in other people's way and remembered the names of the assistants and paid cash if he bought any cigarettes at the tobacco counter, everybody seemed pretty well content to let him lead his own life. He was still leading it when Miss Underbill came in.

She seemed whiter-faced and more tense than usual this morning. She was clutching her shorthand note-book to her bosom as though she expected someone at any moment to try and
snatch it from her. Three pencils, already sharpened, were fastened to the note-book in a kind of rubber band quiver. She looked harassed. And gloom-bearing.