An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [52]
‘Quite,’ said Meredith, and yawned.
Someone put a dance record on the gramophone and presently Desmond Fairchild and Dotty swayed together in a corner of the room. She had bought him a new trilby with the tiniest of blue feathers tucked into the band at the crown. He was clinging to her as though she was his mother, his head resting sleepily on her shoulder, buckling the brim of his hat. Often she glanced across the room to where O’Hara stood with his arm about Babs Osborne.
Bunny brought Meredith a plate of sandwiches; he waved them aside. Stella said she wasn’t hungry either. ‘I can’t eat when I’m with you,’ she told Meredith. ‘I’d be sick. It’s a compliment really.’
‘I’ve known better ones,’ he said. He seemed amused.
‘I don’t want anything to get in the way. Not sausage rolls or cheesy buiscuits or anything. I want to listen.’
‘I’m not sure I’ve got anything to say,’ he said, and closed his eyes, his foot jogging up and down in time to the beat of the dance band on the gramophone. She studied the reflections on the wall as the lights of the Golden Dragon flashed blue and pink across the street.
‘I knew it would be like this,’ she said. ‘I just knew.’ She wasn’t really talking to him; she thought he had dozed off.
He said, ‘This isn’t my room. I live at the back, overlooking the side of the church.’
‘My grandfather played the organ there,’ she told him. ‘When Clara Butt gave song recitals.’ She looked up and saw O’Hara staring at her over Babs Osborne’s heaving shoulders. ‘Miss Osborne is crying again,’ she said, and asked, aggrieved, ‘Why did you stop talking to me? Why didn’t you want me to take notes anymore?’
‘Oh, that,’ Meredith said, opening his eyes. ‘That was Rose, not me. You put the wind up her with that crucifix down your sock. She felt I was an undesirable influence, you coming from Methodist stock.’
She thought she had never seen anything so delicate as his left eyelid quivering above the green ball of his eye, nor anything so vivid as the scarlet spots spattering the bow of his tie. On the wall behind him there was a picture of a stag lowering its antlers on a rocky promontory beneath puffy clouds. She lost concentration for a moment and the stag slipped from its frame and glided along the picture rail.
‘Look,’ she heard him say, ‘I’m sorry if I’ve made you unhappy, but I’m not for you.’
‘Do you mean you think you’re too religious?’ she asked.
‘Something like that,’ he said, and she fell sideways onto his lap and shut her eyes against the whirling room, her cheek stuck to the little glass circle of the monocle balanced on his chest.
She woke in a strange room, facing a dressing-table with a scarf just like Geoffrey’s draped over the mirror. There was a tin ashtray on the bedside table and a framed photograph of two men in bathing costumes, linking arms on a pebbled beach. One of them was Meredith. She jumped up in a panic, terrified at being late home.
Meredith was still in the parlour, and Bunny. They were sitting on either side of a dying fire. Bunny said he would see her home.
‘I don’t need seeing,’ she said. ‘I’m perfectly capable of walking round the corner on my own.’ She was already moving towards the door. She didn’t say goodnight to Meredith. He had upset her although she couldn’t remember in what way.
She had never been out alone at such an hour. The trams had stopped running and the sodium lights burned in the empty streets. She fully expected the basement door to be bolted.
Bunny followed at a discreet distance. He had telephoned Uncle Vernon before midnight to explain that Rose Lipman had insisted on Stella being present at a small celebration given by the Board of Governors.