She had all her life been obsessively early for appointments, and waiting yet again she made a resolution: this time if it was no good there wouldn’t be a repetition. She’d just leave it; though of course a disappointment, it might be a relief.
Her drink came. The barman didn’t linger. She shook her head when he said he’d bring her change.
‘That’s very kind of you, madam.’
She smiled that away, and was still smiling when a man appeared in the open doorway. He was hesitant, looking about him as if the place were crowded and there were several women to choose from, his nervousness not disguised. When he came closer he nodded before he spoke.
‘Jeffrey,’ he said. ‘Evie?’
‘Well, Evelyn actually.’
‘Oh, I’m awfully sorry.’
His mackintosh was worn in places but wasn’t grubby. His high cheekbones stood out, the skin tight where they stretched it. He didn’t look at all well nourished. His dark hair, not a fleck of grey in it, was limp and she wondered if perhaps he was recovering from flu.
‘Would you like your drink topped up?’ he offered in a gentlemanly way. ‘Nuts? Crisps?’
‘No, I’m happy, thanks.’
He was fastidious, you could tell. Was there a certain vulnerability beneath that edgy manner? She always stipulated well-spoken and on that he could not be faulted. If he was recovering from even a cold, he’d naturally look peaky; no one could help that. He took off his mackintosh and a blue muffler, revealing a tweed jacket that almost matched the pale brown of his corduroy trousers.
‘My choice of rendezvous surprise you?’ he said.
‘Perhaps a little.’
It didn’t now that she had met him, for there was something about him that suggested he thought things out: theatre bars were empty places when a performance was on; there wouldn’t be the embarrassment of approaches made by either of them to the wrong person. He didn’t say that, but she knew. Belatedly he apologized for keeping her waiting.
‘It doesn’t matter in the least.’
‘You’re sure I can’t bring you another drink?’
‘No, really, thank you.’
‘Well, I’ll just get something for myself.’
*
At the bar Jeffrey asked about wine. ‘D’you have white? Dry?’
‘Indeed we do, sir.’ The barman reached behind him and lifted a bottle from an ice bucket. ‘Grinou,’ he said. ‘We like to keep it cool, being white.’
‘Grinou?’
‘It’s what the wine’s called, sir. La Combe de Grinou. The label’s a bit washed away, but that’s what it’s called. Very popular in here, the Grinou is.’
Jeffrey took against the man, the way he often did with people serving him. He guessed that the barmaid looked after the man in a middle-aged daughterly way, listening to his elderly woes and ailments, occasionally inviting him to a Christmas celebration. Her daytime work was selling curtain material, Jeffrey surmised; the man had long ago retired from the same department store. Something like that it would be, the theatre bar their real world.
‘All right, I’ll try a glass,’ he said.
*
They talked for a moment about the weather and then about the bar they were in, commenting on the destruction of its Georgian plasterwork, no more than a corner of the original ceiling remaining. From time to time applause or laughter reached them from the theatre’s auditorium. Gingerly in their conversation they moved on to more personal matters.
Forty-seven they’d said he was. Photographer they’d given as his profession on the personal details’ sheet, and she had thought of the photographers you saw on television, a scrum of them outside a celebrity’s house or pushing in at the scene of a crime. But on the phone the girl had been reassuring: a newspaper photographer wasn’t what was meant. ‘No, not at all like that,’ the girl had said. ‘Nor weddings neither.’ Distinguished in his field, the girl had said; there was a difference.
She tried to think of the names of great photographers and could remember only Cartier-Bresson, without a single image coming into her mind. She wondered about asking what kind of camera he liked best, but asked instead what kind of photographs he took.
‘Townscapes,’ he said. ‘Really only townscapes.’
She nodded confidently, as if she caught the significance of that, as if she appreciated the attraction of photographing towns.
‘Parts of Islington,’ he said. ‘Those little back streets in Hoxton. People don’t see what’s there.’
His lifetime’s project was to photograph London in all its idiosyncrasies. He mentioned places: Hungerford Bridge, Drummond Street, Worship Street, Brick Lane, Welldose Square. He spoke of manhole covers and shadows thrown by television dishes, and rain on slated roofs.
‘How very interesting,’ she said.
What she sought was companionship. Sometimes when she made her way to the Downs or the coast she experienced the weight of solitude; often in the cinema or the theatre she would have liked to turn to someone else to say what she’d thought of this interpretation or that. She had no particular desire to be treated to candle-lit dinners, which the bureau – the Bryanston Square Introduction Bureau – had at first assumed would be a priority; but she would not have rejected such attentions, provided they came from an agreeable source. Marriage did not come into it, but nor was it entirely ruled out.
People she knew were not aware that she was a client at the Bryanston Square Bureau, not that she was ashamed of it. There would perhaps have been some surprise, but easily she could have weathered that. What was more difficult to come to terms with, and always had been, was the uneasy sense that the truth seemed to matter less than it should, both in the agency itself and in the encounters it provided. As honestly as she knew how, she had completed the personal details’ sheet, carefully deliberating before she so much as marked, one way or the other, each little box, correctly recording her age, at present fifty-one; and when an encounter took place she was at pains not to allow mistaken impressions to go unchecked. But even so there was always that same uneasiness, the nagging awareness that falsity was natural in what she was engaged upon.
*
‘You drive?’ he asked.
He watched her nod, covering her surprise. It always took them aback, that question; he couldn’t think why. She seemed quite capable, he thought, and tried to remember what it said on the information he’d been sent. Had she been involved with a language school? Something like that came back to him and he mentioned it.
‘That was a while ago,’ she said.
She was alone now; and, as Jeffrey understood it, devoted some of her time to charity work; he deduced that there must be private means.
‘My mother died in nineteen ninety-seven,’ she said. ‘I looked after her during her last years. A full-time occupation.’
Jeffrey imagined a legacy after the mother’s death; the father, he presumed, had departed long before.
‘I’m afraid photography is something I don’t know much about,’ she said, and he shrugged, vaguely indicating that that was only to be expected. A tooth ached a bit, the same one as the other night and coming on as suddenly, the last one on the right, at the bottom.
‘You found it interesting,’ he said, ‘languages and that?’
She was more promising than the insurance woman, or the hospital sister they’d tried so hard to interest him in. He’d said no to both, but they’d pressed, the way they sometimes did. He’d been indifferent this time, but even so he’d agreed. While he prodded cautiously with his tongue he learnt that passing on a familiarity with foreign languages was, in fact, not a particularly interesting way of making a living. He wondered if the barman kept aspirin handy; more likely, though, the barmaid might have some; or the Gents might run to a dispenser.