Injury Time - Beryl Bainbridge [9]
‘It seems,’ continued Simpson, ‘that X was carrying on with Z. Had been for quite some time. Met him at a masonic do last year. Upshot of it was, X wanted the wife to lend out our spare room for the afternoon.’
‘Good God,’ murmured Edward. Though he had lost track of X and Z and was totally foxed by Y, he did sympathise with their general predicament.
‘The wife handled it rather cleverly, I thought,’ said Simpson. ‘She said they could have the room but would they please wash the sheets out afterwards, or leave money on the table for laundering. And would they keep the window and the door open.’
‘The window?’ said Edward. He thought Simpson’s wife must have a peculiarly coarse sense of humour. Or possibly she was a voyeur.
‘Took all the romance out of it,’ cried Simpson with satisfaction. ‘Exposed it for what it was. Put the kibosh on it, no two ways about it.’
‘Goodness, yes,’ said Edward, though it seemed to him, once they had come to some agreement about being spied upon, a small enough price to pay for a whole afternoon of love.
He fought his way to the counter and ordered another two pints of beer and waited, pipe clamped in his mouth like a dummy, craning upwards to see his reflection in the mirror above the bar. He needed a hair cut; a pale forelock dangled over one eye. He would have gone to the barber’s days ago – he’d noticed a few raised eyebrows in the office – but Binny had once remarked she liked men with untidy heads. He thought his forelock made him look rather boyish. Binny referred to it sometimes as a fetlock. At others, when she’d taken a glass or two of wine, she called it his foreskin. He’d better watch Binny’s intake tonight – he didn’t feel Simpson’s wife would go for that kind of table talk. Always supposing she intended to be present. What on earth was he going to tell Binny if the Simpsons backed out at this late hour? She’d sounded so argumentative on the telephone, though at the end she’d said he was lovely. She did care for him. She gave him her love mostly without trying to bind him, without endangering his marriage. It was true there’d been a few unfortunate lapses, like the weekend she’d rung his house from some drinking club in Soho. He’d answered the phone himself, thank God, but it was frightfully tricky, standing in the hall in his pyjamas in the middle of the night trying to convey through references to tax returns that he loved her, fearful of Helen on the landing listening to every word. There had been too that incident when he couldn’t see Binny because he wanted to prune his roses, and she’d threatened to come round in the night and set fire to his garden. Later, a small corner of the lawn had been found mysteriously singed, but nothing had ever been proved. In the beginning he had fallen in love with her because she advised him they must live each day as if it was their last: bearing in mind that any moment the final whistle could blow, it was pointless to spoil the time they had left with the making of impossible demands. ‘You don’t want to leave your wife,’ she’d said. ‘And I don’t want you to.’ But as the months passed and she made various disparaging remarks about married men and their duplicity, it occurred to him that possibly this was precisely what she required of him. It made him very uncomfortable. He tried once to bring the subject into the open. ‘We could be jolly happy,’ he supposed. ‘We’d drink far too much and go to bed in the afternoon’ – Helen disapproved of the afternoon – ‘if we lived together.’ Glaring at him as though he’d uttered a racialistic remark and snapping her rather large white teeth, Binny had cried, ‘You must be mad. Stark raving mad.’
It was confusing for him. He obviously served some purpose