Injury Time - Beryl Bainbridge [8]
The woman was now third in line at the cashier’s grill. Binny couldn’t see her face. She had short colourless hair, and grey stockings with a seam, and she carried a plastic shopping bag. At the counter, the fishmonger from Barretts, two fingers clumsy with sticking plaster, was stacking cellophane packets of small change into a hold-all. As he struggled with the zip of the canvas bag, the woman slipped from her place in the queue and joined the end of a third line of customers further along the counter. She looked directly at Binny. Many years ago, behind a wall and across the road from Binny’s house, there had stood a home for fallen girls. On Sundays, with heads grotesquely shaven to eliminate lice, the inmates formed in twos upon the pavement. In the bold eyes of the woman, Binny recalled instantly the glances of those other, indecent girls, bobbing beneath the branches of almond trees in bloom, swaying, with fragile necks exposed like stalks of flowers in a brutal crocodile to church. She blushed.
When she had cashed her cheque and was out in the street, she found that the noise and the cold no longer bothered her. Something had pleased her, raised her spirits, though what it was she couldn’t be sure. She bought the bread she needed and a carton of double cream. She swept in and out of shops and didn’t complain when various men jumped the queue and were served out of turn. She was able to smile quite charitably, after she had leapt to safety, at a youth on a bicycle who failed to run her down on the zebra crossing.
3
Edward met old Simpson for a drink in the Hare and Hounds. The place was filled with tired businessmen pepping themselves up before returning home.
‘I see no reason why you shouldn’t claim a certain proportion for entertainment,’ said Edward. ‘None at all. Providing you can produce the restaurant bills.’
‘Quite so,’ agreed Simpson.
‘But I don’t feel we can justifiably put forward your wife’s hairdressing expenses. Not for the golf club night and so forth. It’s not strictly business. See what I mean?’
‘Yes,’ said Simpson, disappointed.
‘I mean, it’s not as if she’s a hostess in a night club, for instance. Or a television personality.’
‘I may have misled you about the wife,’ Simpson said. ‘She’s not altogether sympatico to this evening.’
‘Good Lord,’ cried Edward, instantly alarmed. ‘I thought you said she was a woman of the world?’
‘She’s that of course,’ said Simpson. ‘But the way she sees it, it’s a bit not on.’
‘She will come, won’t she?’ asked Edward. He felt like hitting old Simpson between the eyes with his fist. All that rubbish he’d talked about it being a bit of a lark and what a terrific sport the old woman was.
‘The way she sees it,’ explained Simpson, ‘it’s definitely a bit tricky. How would you like it if Helen was meeting some fellow on the side and she asked me round to your house to meet him?”
It seemed to Edward a highly unlikely situation, knowing what Helen thought about Simpson and fellows in general, but he nodded his head and pretended Simpson had a point there.
‘Put it another way,’ Simpson went on. ‘What if my wife asked you and your lady friend to dinner behind my back? I trust you’d refuse.’
‘Need you ask?’ Edward said.
‘I don’t want you to run away with the idea that the wife’s narrow. She’s not, believe you me. I’ll tell you a little story. Keep it under your hat; I shouldn’t like it to go any further. She got a proposition from a mutual friend of ours well, wife of a friend of mine, as a matter of fact. Let’s call her X. X phoned the wife and said could she come round and talk to her—’
‘Whose wife?’ asked Edward.
‘Mine, of course,’ said Simpson. ‘It was absolutely vital that Y shouldn’t get to know—’
‘I don’t quite follow you,’ said Edward, mystified by Simpson’s alphabetical acquaintances. ‘Did your wife tell you she’d been propositioned?’
‘Don’t be dense,’ cried Simpson testily. ‘My wife wasn’t propositioned. X was.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Edward nodded.