Mr Collier laughed nervously and glared in a miserable attempt to be in and out simultaneously.
'I thought somebody breathed the word dinner,' Anne said. 'I'm hungry.'
'First come, first served,' Mr Davis-Cholmondeley said cheerily. 'Tell the girls I'll be seeing them. Where shall it be, Miss?'
'Anne.'
'That's fine,' Mr Davis-Cholmondeley said. 'I'm Willie.'
'I bet you know this town well,' Anne said. 'I'm new.' She came close to the floodlights and deliberately showed herself to him; she wanted to see whether he recognized her; but Mr Davis never looked at a face. He looked past you. His large square face didn't need to show its force by any eye-to-eye business. Its power lay in its existence at all; you couldn't help wondering, as you wondered with an outsize mastiff, how much sheer weight of food had daily to be consumed to keep him fit.
Mr Davis winked at Mr Collier, and said, 'Oh yes, I know this town. In a manner of speaking I made this town.' He said, 'There isn't much choice. There's the Grand or the Metropole. The Metropole's more intimate.'
'Let's go to the Metropole.'
'They have the best sundaes too in Nottwich.'
The street was no longer crowded, just the usual number of people looking in the windows, strolling home, going into the Imperial Cinema. Anne thought, where is Raven now? How can I find Raven?
'It's not worth taking a taxi,' Mr Davis said, 'the Metropole's only just round the corner. You'll like the Metropole,' he repeated. 'It's more intimate than the Grand,' but it wasn't the kind of hotel you associated with intimacy. It came in sight at once all along one side of the market place, as big as a railway station, of red and yellow stone with a clock-face in a pointed tower.
'Kind of Hotel de Ville, eh?' Mr Davis said. You could tell how proud he was of Nottwich.
There were sculptured figures in between every pair of windows; all the historic worthies of Nottwich stood in stiff neo-Gothic attitudes, from Robin Hood up to the Mayor of Nottwich in 1864. 'People come a long way to see this,' Mr Davis said.
'And the Grand? What's the Grand like?'
'Oh, the Grand,' Mr Davis said, 'the Grand's gaudy.'
He pushed her in ahead of him through the swing doors, and Anne saw how the porter recognized him. It wasn't going to be hard, she thought, to trace Mr Davis in Nottwich; but how to find Raven?
The restaurant had enough room for the passengers of a liner; the roof was supported on pillars painted in stripes of sage-green and gold. The curved ceiling was blue scattered with gold stars arranged in their proper constellations. 'It's one of the sights of Nottwich,' Mr Davis said. 'I always keep a table under Venus.' He laughed nervously, settling in his seat, and Anne noticed that they weren't under Venus at all but under Jupiter.
'You ought to be under the Great Bear,' she said.
'Ha, ha, that's good,' Mr Davis said. 'I must remember that.' He bent over the wine-list. 'I know you ladies always like a sweet wine.' He confessed, 'I've a sweet tooth myself.' He sat there studying the card, lost to everything; he wasn't interested in her; he seemed interested at that moment in nothing but a series of tastes, beginning with the lobster he had ordered. This was his chosen home: the huge stuffy palace of food; this was his idea of intimacy, one table set among two hundred tables.
Anne thought he had brought her there for a flirtation. She had imagined that it would be easy to get on terms with Mr Davis, even though the ritual a little scared her. Five years of provincial theatres had not made her adept at knowing how far she could go without arousing in the other more excitement than she could easily cope with. Her retreats were always sudden and dangerous. Over the lobster she thought of Mather, of security, of loving one man. Then she put out her knee and touched Mr Davis's. Mr Davis took no notice, cracking his way through a claw. He might just as well have been alone. It made her uneasy, to be so neglected. It didn't seem natural. She touched his knee again and said, 'Anything on your mind, Willie?'
The eyes he raised were like the lenses of a powerful microscope focused on an unmounted slide. He said, 'What's that? This lobster all right, eh?' He stared past her over the wide rather empty restaurant, all the tables decorated with holly and mistletoe. He called, 'Waiter, I want an evening paper,' and set to again at his claw. When the paper was brought he turned first of all to the financial page. He seemed satisfied; what he read there was as good as a lollipop.
Anne said, 'Would you excuse me a moment, Willie?' She took three coppers out of her bag and went to the ladies' lavatory. She stared at herself in the glass over the wash basin; there didn't seem to be anything wrong. She said to the old woman there, 'Do I look all right to you?'
The woman grinned. 'Perhaps he doesn't like so much lipstick.'
'Oh no,' Anne said, 'he's the lipstick type. A change from home. Hubbie on the razzle.' She said, 'Who is he? He calls himself Davis. He says he made this town.'
'Excuse me, dear, but your stocking's laddered.'
'It's not his doing, anyway. Who is he?'
'I've never heard of him, dear. Ask the porter.'
'I think I will.'
She went to the front door. 'That restaurant's so hot,' she said. 'I had to get a bit of air.' It was a peaceful moment for the porter of the Metropole. Nobody came in; nobody went out. He said, 'It's cold enough outside.' A man with one leg stood on the kerb and sold matches; the trams went by; little lighted homes full of smoke and talk and friendliness. A clock struck half-past eight and you could hear from one of the streets outside the square the shrill voices of children singing a tuneless carol. Anne said, 'Well, I must be getting back to Mr Davis.' She said, 'Who is Mr Davis?'
'He's got plenty,' the porter said.
'He says he made this town.'
'That's boasting,' the porter said. 'It's Midland Steel made this town. You'll see their offices in the Tanneries. But they're ruining the town now. They did employ fifty thousand. Now they don't have ten thousand. I was a doorkeeper there once myself. But they even cut down the doorkeepers.'
'It must have been cruel,' Anne said.
'It was worse for him,' the porter said, nodding through the door at the one-legged man. 'He had twenty years with them. Then he lost his leg and the court brought it in wilful negligence, so they didn't give him a tanner. They economized there too, you see. It was negligence, all right; he fell asleep. If you tried watching a machine do the same thing once every second for eight hours, you'd feel sleepy yourself.'
'But Mr Davis?'
'Oh, I don't know anything about Mr Davis. He may have something to do with the boot factory. Or he may be one of the directors of Wallace's. They've got money to burn.' A woman came through the door carrying a Pekinese; she wore a heavy fur coat. She asked: 'Has Mr Alfred Piker been in here?'
'No, ma'am.'
'There. It's just what his uncle was always doing. Disappearing.' She said, 'Keep hold of the dog,' and rolled away across the square.