• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 582 0

What else could he say when he’d been so critical of the sleeping woman, lying there on the couch with the crotch of her knickers showing through her tights? Besides, if he was going to have lunch with his mistress tomorrow he wanted to appear fairly fresh and virile. He didn’t approve of the word ‘mistress’ but Freeman had used it first. ‘I’m just telephoning my mistress,’ he’d say, or, ‘I’m seeing my mistress tonight.’ Once, in the pub, he’d admitted that Binny had slapped his face for using the word. She said only people like Edward VII could invest it with meaning. Unless he was prepared to set her up in a house in the park and send her children to Eton, he should shut up. Actually, thought Simpson, old Freeman appeared to get more of a look in than most. He himself, apart from some heavy petting in his car, had only managed to persuade Marcia to lie down on one occasion. Who the devil was the man who’d answered her phone?

Muriel asked Binny where she had put the fur wrap. ‘I should like to make her more comfortable,’ she said, gesturing at Alma, who was now lying on her back with her mouth open.

Simpson raged. He said the coat was too damned expensive to act as a blanket.

The women looked at him pityingly.

Edward, thinking that fetching the wrap would hasten their departure, directed Muriel upstairs. He didn’t offer to accompany her because he didn’t want to leave Simpson alone with Binny, and he couldn’t go for it himself, seeing there were no curtains at the window and he might be spotted from the street.

In the room above, Muriel was careful not to come into contact with any of the furniture. She was scandalised at the presence of a ping-pong table, whose surface was ringed with the indentures of vanished cups of tea, in a room of such beautiful proportions. It was simply unbelievable. She scrutinised the pictures on the walls. There were various photographs of the same three children from infancy to adolescence. The chubby toddlers smiled, the lean teenagers scowled. There was a wedding portrait of a young Binny in a three-quarter-length dress and a small round hat rimmed with flowers. She was linking arms with a bearded man. Underneath someone had scrawled in pencil ‘Our Dad, Our Hero’. He didn’t look like a person who could ever have business commitments. Next to the happy couple hung two framed pictures, cut from magazines, of different men lying in black pools of blood, dying of assassination. There were a lot of books on shelves grey with dust.

Muriel thought it a shame to live in such squalor. No wonder the children didn’t appear to be in the house; at a certain age children became very conscious of their surroundings. She could scarcely see out of the unwashed windows – there were pigeon droppings spattered on the glass. Across the road, parked outside the block of flats, waited a police car. It had stopped raining.

She took her fur downstairs and laid it over the hips of Binny’s sad friend. Alma was gently snoring.

‘There’s a car outside,’ Muriel said. ‘With two policemen in it. Do you think it’s anything to do with her?’

Binny jumped up from the table and went to the window. She began to tug at the bar that kept the shutters in place.

‘Don’t open them,’ cried Edward. ‘Don’t encourage them.’

‘It’s hardly likely,’ Simpson said, ‘that they’d follow her to the door. I didn’t believe a word of that harrassment nonsense.’

‘You don’t know Alma,’ Binny said darkly. ‘She probably called them every name under the sun. She got deported, you realise, from the South of France.’

She sat down again at the table, pleased that she’d alarmed Edward. He was itching to leave – she’d seen him look twice at his watch in the last five minutes.

They began to talk about France and holidays in general. Edward tried to say as little as possible. Any mention of the two weeks he’d spent with his family in Malta last year would doubtless inflame Binny. It might conjure up visions of his wife lying on the sand, limbs shimmering with ambre solaire – of love in the afternoon. In actual fact, most times they’d travelled abroad