The woman smiled, fluttering her Prussian-blue eyelids. ‘You remember me, don’t you, Mr Lewis? Betty Arnulfsen.’
I felt my own eyes dilate. ‘Why, of course,’ I said genially. ‘How are you, Betty? Do come in.’
‘Aw, all right, thank you. Thanks.’
‘Haven’t seen you for a long time.’ Not for several weeks, in fact. She’d turned up three more times to do our chores and then that had suddenly been that. Application to Mair Webster had produced an evasive answer — an extreme and, as I now saw it, suspicious rarity.
‘I was just passing by, see, so I thought I’d drop in and see how you was all getting along, like.’
‘Good. It’s very nice to see you again. Well, what have you been doing with yourself?’
It could have been more delicately put, for somebody, whether herself or not, had plainly been doing a good deal with Betty one way and another. As we stood confronted by the sitting-room fire I saw that her hair, which had been of a squaw-like sleekness, now looked like some kind of petrified black froth, and that her face was puffy underneath the yellowish coating of make-up. At the same time she’d altogether lost her hounded look: she seemed sure of herself, even full of fun. She wore a tight lilac costume with purple stripes on it and carried a long-handled umbrella that had elaborate designs on the plastic.
‘Aw, I been doing lots of things,’ she said in answer to my question. ‘Having a bit of a good time for a change. Soon got brassed off with that old cow Webster telling me what I must do and what I mustn’t do. I been keeping out of her way, going to live my own life for a change, see? I got a bit of money now. Here, have a fag.’
‘No, thanks, I don’t smoke.’
‘Go on, it’ll do you good, man.’
‘No, honestly, I never do.’
‘I can tell you’re one of the careful ones.’ She laughed quite a bit at this stroke, giving me a chance to notice the purplish inner portions of her lips where the lipstick had worn away or not reached. With a kind of indulgent contempt, she went on: ‘And how you been keeping? Still working down that old library?’
‘Oh, yes, I feel I ought to give them a hand occasionally.’
‘Don’t you get brassed off with it now and then?’
‘Yes, I do, but I keep going. Can’t afford to weaken.’
‘That’s the boy. Got to keep the dough coming in, haven’t you?’
‘Well, it helps, you know.’
‘What you pulling in down there? Never mind, don’t suppose you want to say. What you get up to after work?’
‘Nothing out of the ordinary.’
‘What you do, then, when you goes out for a night? Where do you go?’
‘Oh, just here and there. I sometimes have a few along at the corner, at the General Picton.’
‘I expect you got your own mates.’ Her cigarette had gone out and she relit it. She wasn’t really at home with it: smoking was something she was still in the process of taking up. After spitting out a shred of tobacco, she said: ‘Never go round the pubs in Ogmore Street, do you?’
‘Not as a rule, no.’
(Ogmore Street leads into the docks, and on these and associated grounds is usually steered well clear of during the hours of darkness by persons of refinement and discrimination.)
‘We gets up to some games down Ogmore Street. We haves the time of our bloody lives, we do.’
‘I bet you do.’
‘Yeah,’ she said with great conviction. ‘Jean gone out, have she?’
‘Just taken the kids for a breath of fresh air. I don’t suppose she’ll be long.’
‘Ah. They all right, the kids?’
‘Pretty fair. What are you up to yourself these days?’
She gave a great yell of laughter. ‘That’s a question, that is. What don’t I bloody get up to? What am I up to, eh? That’s a good one.’ Then her manner grew seriously informative. ‘I got in with the business girls now, see?’
‘Oh, really?’ A momentary vision of Betty drinking morning coffee at the Kardomah with a group of secretaries and shorthand typists was briefly presented to me, before being penetrated by her true meaning. ‘Er… good fun?’
‘It’s all right, you know. Got its points, like. See what I got here.’ She opened her handbag, a shiny plastic affair in a pink pastel shade, and, after I’d sat there wondering for a moment or two, drew out a roll of crumpled pound notes bound with an elastic band. ‘Take you a long time to pull in this much down the library, wouldn’t it?’
‘Oh, no doubt about that.’
‘We goes with the boys round the docks and the sailors when they comes off the ships. They’re the best. They wants a bit of fun and they don’t care what they pays for it. They got plenty of dough, see? They goes on the bloody binge down there. Lots of Norgies we gets. I like the Norgies.’
‘Oh, yes, your husband’s one, isn’t he?’
This second deviation from the path of true tact was as little heeded as the first. ‘That’s right. He’ve gone back to Norway now.’
‘For good?’
‘No, don’t think so. Father in trouble or something. Reckon he’ll fetch up again some time.’
‘How are the twins?’ The domestic note, once struck, might be a handy one to prolong. What was the time? Where was Jean? Would she bring her red-faced English oh-I-say-darling pal back with her? Why not?
‘They’re okay. I got someone looking after them okay. These Norgies are dead funny, though. Makes me die. The Welsh boys, now, they likes me with my vest on, don’t want it no other way, but the Norgies don’t care for that, they wants everything off, and they don’t like it outside, they always goes home with you for it. They likes to take their time, like. You know Joe Leyshon?’
‘I’ve heard of him. Used to be in the fight game, didn’t he?’
‘He runs a lot of the girls down Ogmore Street, but I won’t let him run me. He wants to run me, but I don’t like him. Some of his mates is dead funny, though. We broke into a shop the other night over Cwmharan way. Didn’t get anything much, few fags and things, but we had a laugh. Mad buggers, they are. We goes down the Albany mostly. You know the Albany? It’s all right. You ought to come down there one night and have a couple of drinks and a bit of fun. What about it? I’m going down there tonight.’
‘Well, I don’t want to come barging in…’
‘Go on, I’d show you around, you wouldn’t come to no harm, I promise you. They’re all right there, really. I’d see you had a good time. You could tell Jean you was out with your mates, see?’
‘It’s very kind of you, Betty, but honestly I don’t think I could. I’m pretty well fixed up here, you know what I mean, and so I don’t…’
‘I tell you one thing, John.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You’re afraid to go with me.’
So many factors amalgamated to put this beyond serious dispute that reply was difficult. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ I said after a moment, trying to ram jocoseness into tone and manner. ‘No, I wouldn’t say that at all.’
Betty evidently saw through this. She said: ‘You are. You’re afraid.’
‘It isn’t that exactly. It’s just that I try to stick to my wife as far as possible,’ I told her, certain that I sounded like some ferret-faced Christian lance-corporal in a barrack-room discussion.