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Buying things from her now and again in Green’s the Chemist ’s Norman had come to the conclusion that she was of a tartish disposition, and imagined that if ever he sat with her over a drink in the nearby Drummer Boy the occasion could easily lead to a hug on the street afterwards. He imagined her coral-coloured lips, like two tiny sausages, only softer, pressed upon his moustache and his abbreviated mouth. He imagined the warmth of her hand in his. For all that, she was a little outside reality: she was there to desire, to glow erotically in the heady atmosphere of the Drummer Boy, to light cigarettes for in a fantasy.
is this how men think?? lol
Again he thought of Hilda. He thought of her wiry, pasty limbs and the way she had of snorting. Sometimes when they were watching the television she ’d suddenly want to sit on his knee. She’d get worse as she grew older; she ’d get scrawnier; her hair, already coarse, would get dry and grey. He enjoyed the evenings when she went out to the Club or to her friends the Fowlers. And yet he wasn’t being fair because in very many ways she did her best. It was just that you didn’t always feel like having someone on your knee after a day’s work.
ouch
‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘I’m not hungry.’ She couldn’t have touched a thing. She just wanted to go on drinking gin with him. She wanted to get slightly squiffy, a thing she ’d never done before in the middle of the day.
She wanted to put her arm through his.
‘It ’s been nice meeting you,’ he said.
‘A bit of luck.’
‘I think so too, Marie.’ He ran his forefinger between the bones on the back of her hand, so gently that it made her want to shiver. She didn’t take her hand away, and when she continued not to he took her hand in his.
‘Oh, darling,’ she whispered one October evening at Paddington, huddling herself against him. It was foggy and cold. The fog was in her pale hair, tiny droplets that only he, being close to her, could see. People hurried through the lit-up station, weary faces anxious to be home.
‘I know,’ he said, feeling as inadequate as he always did at the station.
‘I lie awake and think of you,’ she whispered.
‘You’ve made me live,’ he whispered back.
‘And you me. Oh, God, and you me.’ She was gone before she finished speaking, swinging into the train as it moved away, her bulky red handbag the last thing he saw. It would be eighteen hours before they’d meet again.
feeling the dread in this
‘I want to marry you, Norman. I want us to be together. I don’t want just going to a bathroom in some hotel.’
‘I know; I want to marry you too. But we ’ve got to work it out. You know we’ve got to work it out, Marie—getting married.’
‘Yes, I know.’
It was a familiar topic of conversation between them. They took it for granted that one day, somehow, they would be married. They had talked about Hilda. He ’d described Hilda to her, he ’d drawn a picture in Marie ’s mind of Hilda bent over her jewellery-making in a Putney flat, or going out to drink V.P. with the Fowlers or at the Club. He hadn’t presented a flattering picture of his wife, and when Marie had quite timidly said that she didn’t much care for the sound of her he had agreed that naturally she wouldn’t. The only aspect of Hilda he didn’t touch upon was her bedroom appetite, night starvation as he privately dubbed it. He didn’t mention it because he guessed it might be upsetting.
STOP
Marie had said that she wanted to give him the children he had never had. She wanted to have children at once and she knew she could. He knew it too: having children was part of her, you’d only to look at her.
Yet that would mean she ’d have to give up her job, which she wanted to do when she married anyway, which in turn would mean that all three of them would have to subsist on his meagre salary. And not just all three, the children also.
It was a riddle that mocked him: he could find no answer, and yet he believed that the more he and Marie were together, the more they talked to one another and continued to be in love, the more chance there was of suddenly hitting upon a solution. Not that Marie always listened when he went on about it. She agreed they had to solve their problem, but now and again just pretended it wasn’t there. She liked to forget about the existence of Hilda. For an hour or so when she was with him she liked to assume that quite soon, in July or even June, they’d be married. He always brought her back to earth.
i get the dilemma but also i hate him for being a coward
Years instead of months began to go by. On the juke-box in the Drummer Boy the voice of Elvis Presley was no longer heard. ‘Why she had to go I don’t know,’ sang the Beatles, ‘ she didn’t say . . . I believe in yesterday.’ And Eleanor Rigby entered people ’s lives, and Sergeant Pepper Lovers of Their Time with her. The fantasies of secret agents, more fantastic than ever before, filled the screens of London’s cinemas. Carnaby Street, like a jolly trashcan, overflowed with noise and colour. And in the bathroom of the Great Western Royal Hotel the love affair of Norman Britt and Marie was touched with the same preposterousness. They ate sandwiches in the bathroom; they drank wine. He whispered to her of the faraway places he knew about but had never been to: the Bahamas, Brazil, Peru, Seville at Easter, the Greek islands, the Nile, Shiraz, Persepolis, the Rocky Mountains. They should have been saving their money, not spending it on gin and peppermint in the bar of the hotel and in the Drummer Boy. They should have been racking their brains to find a solution to the problem of Hilda, but it was nicer to pretend that one day they would walk together in Venice or Tuscany. [...]
noooooo
In the bathroom all such considerations, disliked equally by Norman Britt and Marie, were left behind. Romance ruled their brief sojourns, and love sanctified—or so they believed—the passion of their physical intimacy. Love excused their eccentricity, for only love could have found in them a willingness to engage in the deception of a hotel and the courage that went with it: that they believed most of all.
But afterwards, selling tickets to other people or putting Marie on her evening train, Norman sometimes felt depressed. And then gradually, as more time passed, the depression increased and intensified. ‘I’m so sad,’ he whispered in the bathroom once, ‘when I’m not with you. I don’t think I can stand it.’ She dried herself on the towel brought specially from Reading in her large red handbag. ‘You’ll have to tell her,’ she said, with an edge in her voice that hadn’t ever been there before. ‘I don’t want to leave having babies too late.’ She wasn’t twenty-eight any more; she was thirty-one. ‘I mean, it isn’t fair on me,’ she said.
He knew it wasn’t fair on her, but going over the whole thing yet again in Travel-Wide that afternoon he also knew that poverty would destroy them. He ’d never earn much more than he earned now. The babies Marie wanted, and which he wanted too, would soak up what there was like blotting-paper; they’d probably have to look for council accommodation. It made him weary to think about it, it gave him a headache. But he knew she was right: they couldn’t go on for ever, living off a passing idyll, in the bathroom of a hotel. He even thought, quite seriously for a moment, of causing Hilda’s death.
nooooo
Oh, for God ’s sake!’ All of a sudden she was angry, but more, he felt, because he was going on, not because of what he was actually demanding. She thought him ridiculous and said so. And then she added all the things he ’d thought himself: that people like them didn’t get divorces, that unless his girlfriend was well-heeled the whole thing would be a sheer bloody nonsense, with bloody solicitors the only ones to benefit.
‘They’ll send you to the cleaners, your bloody solicitors will,’ she loudly pointed out, anger still trembling in her voice. ‘You’d be paying them back for years.’
‘I don’t care,’ he began, although he did. ‘I don’t care about anything except—’
‘Of course you do, you damn fool.’
‘Hilda—’
‘Look, get over her. Take her into a park after dark or something. It ’ll make no odds to you and me.’
ack
‘Oh, darling, just walk away from her.’
Which is what, to Hilda’s astonishment, he did. One evening when she was at the Club he packed his clothes and went to two rooms in Kilburn that he and Marie had found. He didn’t tell Hilda where he was going. He just left a note to say he wouldn’t be back.
They lived as man and wife in Kilburn, sharing a lavatory and a bathroom with fifteen other people. In time he received a court summons, and in court was informed that he had behaved meanly and despicably to the woman he ’d married. He agreed to pay regular maintenance.
The two rooms in Kilburn were dirty and uncomfortable, and life in them was rather different from the life they had known together in the Drummer Boy and the Great Western Royal Hotel. They planned to find somewhere better, but at a reasonable price that wasn’t easy to find. A certain melancholy descended on them, for although they were together they seemed as far away as ever from their own small house, their children and their ordinary contentment.
nooooooo