An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [48]
Keeley, of course, had long since departed. A biology student with a stutter now occupied the back room. He was lonely and broke and had already barged in for the loan of a cupful of Quaker oats.
Those first evenings O’Hara avoided going to the Oyster Bar. Grace Bird, whom he had worked with before and of whom he was fond, spent most nights up at the hospital knitting in the waiting-room while Dotty ministered to poor old Dickie St Ives, and although he respected Mary Deare as a performer – she was possibly the best Peter since Nina Boucicault – she had never been a chum. He rather took to Bunny, but it was obvious the stage-manager was a crony of Potter’s and it was advisable, this early on, to leave well alone. To be fair, Potter was behaving better than would have been expected – cold yet civil.
It was no hardship isolating himself. He had no wish for company nor wanted to be anywhere else than in that room with the paint-flecked table. He lay on the narrow bed and waited for the basement gate to bang in the windswept night, until he remembered it was no longer there.
Dotty had once gone out with a piece of string to stop its clanging. Dotty had pinned a photograph of Charles Laughton, torn from a movie magazine, on the wall above the fireplace. If he got up and peered closely enough he would still see the prick of that vanished drawing-pin in the plaster.
The girl behind the beauty-counter at Lewis’s had scrawled her name in pencil on the window frame. Then you won’t forget me, she had said. But he had, long before the condensation, dribbling, like Dotty’s tears, had smeared the name away.
Dotty had cried a lot. He had only to go for a spin with Freddie Reynalde or spend half an hour too long in the pub for her shoulders to slump and her eyes to fill. Once, she’d taken a hammer to the headlamp of his motorcycle. She’d done it because she cared. It was no good repressing her feelings. It struck him as convenient the way women placed such reliance on their emotions.
She’d offered to lend him the money to have the bike fixed, and when he accepted she said, ‘I’ve broken something precious, haven’t I?’ and knelt in the street among the bits of glass, looking up at him as if she understood it was more than a lamp she had smashed.
He forgave her, and then a week later he and Keeley came home from the Beaux Arts Club to find her sitting on the basement steps, smiling nice as pie. Fooled, he let her in, and she ran straight to his jazz records and whipping off her court shoe brought the heel down on his favourite Blossom Dearie.
This time it was because her feelings told her he didn’t love her. She dragged up that other business he’d been foolish enough to confide in her, that lost girl with the golden voice. No wonder she’d disappeared into the wide blue yonder. He was a monster. Why, in all the time she’d known him he had never said the words.
‘What words?’ he asked, and she said, ‘Exactly. You don’t begin to know what I mean.’ And then Keeley had nudged him and he’d found the words she wanted, and still it wasn’t enough – she called him a liar and wept even louder.
He’d thought he did love her, until she went on worrying at it, thrashing it to and fro, churning up feelings like a dog digging up a bone. By the time she was through he didn’t know what he felt.
He’d had no such doubts when embracing that model Keeley had brought home from the Art School. She had tufts of hair in her armpits like clumps of grass. A man couldn’t slide into the abyss when she was around.
He’d told Dotty she wouldn’t always feel so unhappy, that one day she’d look at him and his face would seem quite ordinary, and she’d flown at him, pummelling his chest with her fists, sobbing that the day would never come.
They were both young, of course, and neither of them knew what they were talking about. Keeley said girls were unreasonable because they weren’t any good at sport