Injury Time - Beryl Bainbridge [3]
He thought possibly it was the unsatisfactory briefness of his moments with Binny that explained his continuing desire to see her. God knows, she was rude enough to him, but then they spent so little time together that her insulting behaviour never had a chance to build up into anything sufficiently awful; she never actually hit him. She was too often interrupted by the children, who were either in and using the telephone, or out and telephoning in. They were always being flung out of pool-rooms or cafés, or held at railway stations for the non-payment of fares. Once the youngest child’s hamster started to die the moment Edward entered the house. Edward had been required to spoon brandy down the animal’s throat until it passed on. The sight of those delicate paws, tipped with pink, feebly scratching the air, reminded Edward of his own inner conflict. There were some doors that would never open. Binny was a wonderful mother, but she didn’t seem to realise he was a very busy man and his time was limited. They could never do anything until her ten-year-old had settled down for the night. They could usually start doing something at about five to eleven, and then they had to do it very quickly because Edward had to leave at quarter past eleven. He was always whispering frantically into Binny’s ear what he might do if only they had a whole evening together, and she grew quite pale and breathless and hugged him fearfully tightly in the hall, mostly when seeing him out. He loved her when she had difficulty in breathing. Just thinking about it made him feel disturbed.
Binny was telling him in a hectoring manner that she bet old Woodford, despite extreme poverty, had two cars and a mansion in the country.
He said bitterly, ‘I wish to God the Simpsons weren’t coming to dinner tonight. I wish we were on our own.’ In order to ensure a peaceful evening without undue excitement, for the first time in all the years he had known her the children were spending the night elsewhere.
‘I’m not calling it dinner,’ said Binny ominously.
‘Oh, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘No, I’m bloody well not.’
‘Well, what are you calling it?’ he asked uneasily.
Evidently she was worried about the food she was preparing. She had telephoned, most likely, to ask him if the menu she had decided upon was suitable, and that first insensitively expressed Hello of his had depressed her. He didn’t think she was a very good cook – not that she’d ever made him a meal – but he sensed that her attitude to food was rather casual. When he took her out to dinner quite normal things, like artichokes, annoyed her. She said they were a waste of time. He hadn’t actually spotted two plates in her kitchen with the same pattern round the rim. However, none of that counted at the moment. She could burn every morsel to be eaten and dispense entirely with knives and forks, if only the evening passed without repercussions. It was vital that nobody dropped in. He longed to ask Binny if she had taken precautions against such an event, but he knew her reply would be deliberately calculated to alarm. She would probably inform him she was hauling up the drawbridge any moment now but could he tell her anything about the little man on the corner in the mackintosh, the one with the binoculars and the camera. He hadn’t met Simpson’s wife before, but he was fairly certain there was no danger there. He gathered that Simpson’s wife had once studied Esperanto, and Simpson boasted that she regularly visited the local pub with a girlfriend. She was obviously pretty broadminded and not the sort to go round telling everyone he was carrying on with another woman. But what if