The Love Department Read online

  As he dressed, Edward had a clearer picture of Wimbledon and its people than ever he had had before. He saw the wives of the men strike a patch of loneliness, as Lady Dolores had said they did, sitting down in the mornings to drink coffee and smoke a cigarette or two. Their children were growing up, or had grown up already; their husbands were absorbed. Edward saw cigarettes with touches of lipstick on them smouldering in an ashtray while the women talked or sat pensive. Were they like the women of the posters? he wondered; had those cigarettes been lit for them by the men before the men had disappeared?

  ‘What nonsense!’ said Edward, pulling up a sock. ‘I have come to grips with the poster people. At St Gregory’s I was hiding my neck in the sand.’

  Edward put his shoes on his feet and tied their laces. He watched Septimus Tuam come in among the women who were having morning coffee. The women were given fresh cigarettes, their cigarettes were lit in an expert way. ‘He’s wandering all over the hoardings,’ cried Edward, ‘with soldiers or sailors or what have you. He’s tired of selling margarine.’

  ‘Your breakfast, Mr Blakeston,’ called Edward’s landlady from the bottom of the house. ‘Hurry up, now.’

  ‘He’s going behind bars,’ said Edward to himself. ‘Wait and see it.’

  On the back seat of Eve’s Mini Minor the Bolsover children, a boy and a girl, argued quietly about cattle while their mother drove them to school. ‘Be good with Miss Fairy and Miss Crouch,’ said Eve as they left the car, and they promised that they would, protesting that they invariably were.

  Eve drove away, waving to other mothers in other motor-cars, who were smiling and seemed more joyful than she felt herself that morning. For no reason that she could fathom she recalled a period in the past, a couple of years ago now, when she had taken it into her head that James was having a love affair. On a morning such as this, having waved goodbye to her children and the mothers, she had been driving calmly along when suddenly the idea had come to her. She had stopped at once, beside a pastry shop which also served coffee, and had had some coffee, trying to think about the idea and trying to do so with a steady nerve. She sat at a small table and imagined James spending whole afternoons with a tall, thin girl, talking to her and making love. She saw them in a narrow room, with a low ceiling and a number of painted wood-carvings. The girl was wearing green and was taking most of it off. ‘May I make a telephone call?’ Eve had cried with urgency to the woman selling Danish pastries behind the counter, and the woman had replied that the place was not a call-box, but had led her nevertheless to a small office at the back of the shop. Eve was certain by now that he was having a love affair; she was certain that he had looked around and had discovered this girl in green clothes, or some different girl maybe, dressed in another colour, in some different kind of room. ‘What?’ said James on the other end of the line, and she had tried to explain.

  Eve smiled a little sadly as she remembered all that. Again and again, while speaking to James on the telephone, she had seen the tall girl in green. She had noticed that her hair was almost white, and she remembered thinking that that was the kind of girl who belonged out of doors. Her husband stood near the girl, a glass of Hennessy brandy in one hand and the bottle in the other, laughing loudly and saying that he had never in his life before seen green underclothes. At which the girl smiled. ‘Miss Brown is here,’ James said on the telephone. ‘She is standing by, waiting to take some letters.’ And Eve in her confused condition cried out in reply that the girl in green must be Miss Brown, which was absurd, as she afterwards recognized. In the small office of the pastry shop there were a desk, and a calendar with a mountain on it, and above the calendar, held in place by the same drawing pin, a British Legion poppy. The scene had engraved itself on Eve’s mind, and eccentric dreams had since, and regularly, taken place in that small office. She had entered it once to find James talking seriously to the tall girl in green, holding her hand, and on another occasion he had had his arms around the woman from behind the counter in the shop. Once she had been there herself, weeping into the telephone, and Mrs Hoop had walked in with a smile on her face and had shot her with a small revolver.

  In fact, she had replaced the receiver and had heard a voice beside her asking her what the matter was. ‘Whatever’s the trouble?’ said the woman from behind the counter. ‘You’ve had an upset in our office.’

  She had walked away, with pictures of her wedding hanging at angles all over her mind, and a new grief in her heart. ‘Her maidenhead’s all there,’ Mrs Harrap in her cups had whispered to James. ‘You’re taking a clean young creature to your bed, sir.’ With the cold tang of tears on her cheeks, Eve had remembered the heat of that day and the dinner they had eaten with excitement on the train in France.

  ‘What nonsense!’ said James that evening. ‘You need a change.’ His face and his tone caused her to accept her unfounded allegations as nonsense indeed, and she had never again imagined that her husband was having a love affair, with tall girls in green or with any other kind of girls. The episode in the office of the pastry shop had been the end of something, but she wasn’t sure of what.

  Eve parked her car and consulted a strip of paper on which she had earlier written a number of grocery items. The sight of them caused her to recall the dinner party that James had so abandonedly arranged the evening before. She stepped on to the pavement, wondering what they were going to be like, these men who worried her husband so very considerably.

  Mrs Hoop, crouched on her haunches, filled an area of rag with Mansion polish and applied it to the parquet floor of the Bolsovers’ dining-room.

  This has once been his pyjamas, thought Mrs Hoop, referring to the rag, which bore still the faded marks of stripes. She laughed aloud, finding it amusing that she should be polishing a floor with part of a man’s night attire. ‘Ha, ha,’ chortled Mrs Hoop, reaching towards a corner in a manner that caused her heavy skirt to travel upwards on her rump. ‘Ha, ha,’ she laughed again, aware of the movement of her clothes, but not caring because no one was in the house to observe what the movement revealed.

  ‘Let’s see,’ said Mrs Hoop abruptly. She straightened up and sorted out her polishing cloth, anxious to detect the area of Mr Bolsover’s pyjamas from which the piece had been cut. She turned the cloth this way and that, peering closely at it for the marks of erstwhile hems or buttons, but in the end she came to no conclusion. In anger she rose and moved her substantial form towards the Bolsovers’ kitchen, intent upon an iced birthday cake from which, two days previously, she had already removed a heavy wedge.

  ‘I may not be back to lunch,’ Mrs Bolsover had remarked to Mrs Hoop. ‘But help yourself to tea and biscuits.’

  Jesus, Mrs Hoop had at once reflected, the cheek of it!

  She set a kettle on the gas stove, and went in search of the new Vogue and a glass of crème de menthe. There was no wireless set in the kitchen – why, she could not imagine – so she was obliged, as often she had been in the past, to turn on the receiver in the sitting-room and leave the doors open. The noise came on powerfully: a pleasant male voice relating a story about a dog called Worthington.

  ‘Well, here we are,’ observed Mrs Hoop aloud. She stretched on a padded bench that had been built into the wall and on which, every evening, the Bolsover children partook of their supper. Propped up on a single elbow, Mrs Hoop sipped tea and crème de menthe, listening to the radio story and turning the pages of the magazine. In a moment she walked again to the sideboard where James Bolsover kept his alcoholic drinks.

  Mrs Hoop had been in her time employed in an underground tube station. ‘I have seen all sorts,’ she was wont to remark. ‘I’ve seen the world go by.’ She often reflected upon the past, and particularly on her experiences at night, as she walked home after being on duty until midnight. ‘Hanging about in doorways,’ said Mrs Hoop, ‘clicking their teeth at you. “Want a fag, love?” they’d say, holding out a packet of Craven A, doing their clicking again. I never made a reply: I wouldn’t demea
n my mouth.’

  Mrs Hoop had several times related her experience to James Bolsover when she attended at the house in the evenings, for washing-up after a dinner party or for baby-sitting. She would seek him out and tell him a thing or two about working on the railways, and she found him always sympathetic and interested. He did not interrupt her by telling her that he had other things to do, nor did he abruptly walk away.

  Girls stared glassily at Mrs Hoop from the shiny pages. She did not care for them, their lips parted, garbed so absurdly, yet she could not help thinking about them, wondering what they were like to meet, what they would drink if taken to a public house. ‘Thin as a straw,’ she murmured, turning from a model who advertised some new, important girdle. She felt a prick of jealousy, remembering that she, too, had once been slender. Then she recalled the desire she nightly observed in the eyes of an old man she consorted with: old Beach had said he liked her as she was. Once he had managed to slide his hand beneath her cardigan, causing her to spill a glass of beer.

  Mrs Hoop closed the magazine and held it to her bosom. Her mind was on Beach, a fact that caused a sly expression to tug at the corners of her mouth. She did not object to the man; she did not object to his company or the gossip he carried to her, though she did not always welcome his exploring hand. When she had told him that in her girlhood she had weighed only seven stone he had at once replied that he would not have been interested. Old Beach had money; five hundred and seventy pounds. ‘You should make your will, old Beach,’ Mrs Hoop often advised him in the corner bar of the Hand and Plough.

  Mrs Hoop devoted much of her time to the consideration of two topics of thought: her dislike of Eve Bolsover and Beach’s five hundred and seventy pounds. She felt less frustrated about the latter, because at least she had succeeded in interesting Beach in the drawing up of a will, but where Eve Bolsover was concerned Mrs Hoop found little to console her. The woman did not listen to her, she did not continue to murmur appreciatively and in horror over the men who had advanced on Mrs Hoop by night. ‘In big cars sometimes,’ Mrs Hoop would explain. ‘Two or three chaps together. They’d follow on for miles along the dark streets.’ But Mrs Bolsover said not a word, except perhaps that she had ordered a new supply of Ajax. Mrs Hoop had come to believe that her employer sneered at her because she was fifty years of age and her figure had gone a bit, because she was obliged to work for her living, her husband having died of a throat infection in 1955. She had told Eve Bolsover about that, how her husband had had to be cut up for a post-mortem, how it had cost her twenty-two shillings to have him brought back to her house afterwards, so that a funeral might take place in a civilized manner. ‘How dreadful, Mrs Hoop!’ Mrs Bolsover had said, and just as Mrs Hoop had been about to continue, to relate a fact or two about the funeral itself, Mrs Bolsover had considered it suitable to say, ‘How are we off for dusters these days?’

  In the Hand and Plough Mrs Hoop often held forth to Beach and the barman, Harold, about the nature of Mrs Bolsover. ‘She is a whore and a bitch,’ she reported, ‘and given up to ridiculous ways. She’s quite incapable for a man like that: there’s not a brain in her head.’ In the Bolsovers’ hall there was a suit of armour, discovered by James and Eve ten years ago, in a provincial antique shop. On the walls were small pieces of metal that James had collected and said were medieval gardening instruments. ‘The hall’s like a junk yard,’ said Mrs Hoop. ‘She’s soft in the head, I’ll tell you that.’

  It had once been the opinion of Beach that Mrs Hoop should cease to work for Mrs Bolsover since Mrs Bolsover was so ill-natured a person and her house, apparently, little better than a lunatic asylum. But Mrs Hoop replied to this that she stayed on for the sake of the two children, to whom, she claimed, she was devoted. In truth, Mrs Hoop’s dislike of Eve Bolsover was something of an essence in her life: it had developed and spread over seven years, and without it Mrs Hoop might have found herself at a loss. At night she lay in her bed and thought of Mrs Bolsover, seeing her dressed to go out and disliking every inch of the image. Often when she was kneeling on the floor, polishing the parquet, the feet and legs of Mrs Bolsover would pass nearby, feet stuck into high-heeled shoes, legs in nylon stockings. ‘I’ll smash her,’ Mrs Hoop would murmur to herself with venom when the legs had walked on. ‘I’ll tell her bloody fortune for her.’ In the Hand and Plough she had said that Mrs Bolsover was as ugly as sin, with varicose veins all over her body. That, she said, was a judgement.

  Mrs Hoop rinsed her tea-cup and set it to dry on a rack with a debris of sugar congealing within it. Music came on the wireless. She hummed in tune with it, flapping a duster over furniture and ornaments. ‘I’ve brought them kids up single-handed,’ she had proclaimed in the Hand and Plough. ‘She don’t give a damn.’

  Mrs Hoop paused by a wedding photograph of the Bolsovers, staring at it with displeasure. Overcome by sudden anger, she spat at it and watched the trickle of saliva course down the glass, blurring and distorting the face of the bride. She relaxed then, sighing with her eyes closed. She opened them after a moment and continued to flap her duster, in a happier frame of mind.

  As Mrs Hoop was concerned with the wife, so was Lake concerned with the husband.

  ‘I have nothing against Bolsover,’ Lake was saying to Miss Brown while Mrs Hoop was spitting on Eve Bolsover’s face in a photograph. ‘I wouldn’t like you to think me vicious in my attitude, Brownie. Bolsover, God knows, is a decent enough mortal: he’s always supported my demands for more salary.’

  Lake, in soft black boots with elastic let into the sides of them, stood staring through the window of Miss Brown’s office, while she sat silent before an enormous typewriter. Miss Brown, splendid in her passion, was endeavouring to convince herself that he was standing above her, stroking the nape of her neck with two of his fingers.

  ‘The thing is,’ continued Lake, ‘he’s not the man to be sitting on a board. He’s not going places, Brownie, as I am going places. He’s not all that interested.’

  In Miss Brown’s imagination the fingers ventured beneath the top of her red jersey. She stared through her spectacles, concentrating on the Q of her great typewriter, not saying a word.

  ‘It’s the way of the world,’ said Lake. ‘A young fellow like myself must make his way.’ Lake was fresh of face, with a longish nose and a prematurely bald head: at thirty-four he boasted but a lump of reddish hair above and around either ear. He wore a hat for journeying about outside, but had not been known to say that his early lack of hair caused him to feel older, or in any way annoyed. He smiled constantly, on all occasions, as though obliged by nature to express all emotion in this single effusive way.

  ‘I am a suitable person to go to the top,’ said Lake. ‘I am particularly well qualified for it. Who would deny that? There are few young fellows in London, Brownie, who are as endowed as I am. I have learnt every trick of the trade. As the saying goes, I know my onions.’ Lake laughed. Miss Brown imagined his fingers cool on her back, and felt them there, traversing it and tapping her shoulder-blades. He said, ‘My father used to remark that he saw me as Prime Minister of this country, but he was ambitious in the wrong direction. I am loyal to Church and State, Brownie, but beyond that I wouldn’t like to go. I shall make my packet: I am qualified to do that.’

  In his battle for advancement Lake was a saboteur. That very morning, noticing James Bolsover on his way to the board-room, he had sprinkled the back of his suit with a small handful of flour, carried to the office in a Colman’s mustard tin for that very purpose. ‘What on earth is the matter with your clothes?’ one of the eight bespectacled men had demanded, and all of them had surrounded James in a single movement, murmuring and brushing at him with their hands. They had smelt the powder to ascertain its nature, and James said that he must have leaned against something. The men had murmured further, frowning, puzzled that a man should come to a board meeting with powder on his suit.

  ‘I have cause for optimism,’ said Lake, speaking through a wide smile. �
�I have mapped the future out. Where are the difficulties?’

  Behind Miss Brown’s spectacles Miss Brown’s wide eyelids slipped over her eyes, blocking the Q of her typewriter from view. Her mouth was open, revealing the tips of her two front teeth and a fraction of her tongue. They spent their evenings and weekends together, and quite often Lake would fall asleep in Miss Brown’s bed-sitting-room, lying on her bed with his clothes on. Miss Brown felt that it was an unwritten thing between them that they would marry when Lake began to make his way, and she was worried only because Lake had so far not embraced her and had not yet held her hand in his. Miss Brown had written quietly to the women on magazines who were there to give advice on love, explaining this situation, but the replies she received, unanimous in their suggestion that she should seek love elsewhere, were harsh, she felt, and unhelpful. One woman had written to her repeatedly, begging her quite forcefully to persuade her friend to get in touch with the magazine’s medical correspondent, who was, the woman said, an excellent man.

  ‘I well remember my father saying it,’ said Lake. ‘ “Here we have a future Prime Minister,” he remarked to a friend of his, a Jack Finch who owned a milk business. “He’ll be hobnobbing with kings and queens,” my father said, “African blacks and the wild Australian. You’ll be proud you sat in this room with him, Jack. You mark my words.” I must have been about six at the time, Brownie, and I can hardly tell you the thrill it was to hear my father say those words. “Is that so?” said Jack Finch, and pulled hard on an old pipe of his, for he was a man who delighted in a smoke. “This young shaver,” said my father, “will surprise us all. You mark my words, Jack.” “It’s probably time the young shaver was in his bed,” said Jack Finch and we all three laughed uproariously, although I can’t quite remember why. I remember the occasion, though, the three of us laughing so good-humouredly and Jack Finch filling the room with smoke from his pipe. I remember the feeling of pride, Brownie, because my father had said that to Jack Finch; and when I climbed into my bed I was thinking of Jack Finch going home with his pipe, saying to himself that he was proud to have sat in that room in our house. And before I went to sleep that night I closed my eyes and I saw myself sitting down to a meal in the Royal Household. I remember it distinctly: Princess Margaret Rose was making quite a fuss because she wanted to sit down beside me. “Let’s share the chair,” I cried, and you know, Brownie, we did.’