Jimmy scowled and drew hard on the butt of his cigarette; he held it sheltered in the hollow of his hand, like, she thought, a corner boy. “I’m not the only one,” he muttered, looking down towards the lights of Dame Street.
“Not the only one what?” she demanded. “Not the only one that hates him because of the color of his skin?”
“It’s nothing to do with color,” he snapped.
She sighed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jimmy. And it’s late, I’ve got to go for my bus.”
He was giving her one of his pitying looks. “You never take notice of anything, do you?” he said. “You just sail on blithely as if everything was nice and comfy and uncomplicated.”
She felt like stamping her foot. “Tell me what you mean, Jimmy, or let me go. The last bus will be passing the gates of Trinity down there in ten minutes. And don’t light another cigarette, for Heaven’s sake!”
He put the cigarette, unlit, into the top pocket of his tweed jacket and pulled the wings of the plastic coat around him. Even in the dark she could see how blue his lips were from the cold. He does not take care of himself, she thought, he could get pleurisy, or TB, even. He seemed to her suddenly so small, and frail, and unhappy. She took him by the arm and drew him with her back into the shelter of the doorway of the pub.
“You knew Bella and him were having it off,” he said. “You knew that much, didn’t you?”
She said nothing; she would not give him the satisfaction of showing how pathetically little she did know. He was right, she did not care to see too deeply into other people’s business, into other people’s hearts. In that, at least, she was her father’s daughter.
“What if they were?” she said. “What about it?” “And did you know that April took him away from her?” She looked down, to avoid his fiercely glaring, slightly drunken eye. “No,” she said, surrendering, “no, I didn’t know that.”
“I thought you didn’t,” he said in a tone of sour satisfaction. “There’s an awful lot about April that you don’t know- an awful lot.”
She could hear from inside the pub the drunken students beginning to sing and the barmen shouting at them to stop, that the place would be raided if there was singing and they would all be arrested. It was the same every night, the fellows drunk and the girls wanting to go home, and then the place emptying, and fights in the street, and later on the fumbling in the back laneways and the front seats of motorcars. She was sick of this city, sick of it. Maybe Rose Crawford would offer to take her to America again. No place had ever seemed so far away as America seemed to her at that moment.
“And what about Isabel?” she asked. “Was she very upset?” “What do you think? Isabel and the Prince, what a combination! She saw herself as Desdemona, without the stabbing bit at the end. And then April crooked her finger and His Majesty was off, his tail feathers twitching. I’d say it’s a close thing as to which of them she hates the more, His Negritude or April the cruelest-”
She would not listen to any more of this and stepped past him out of the doorway of the pub and walked rapidly down to the traffic lights and ran along Dame Street to the bus stop. The bus was just about to pull away and she had to jump on and grasp the rail to keep from falling backwards, and the conductor swore at her. It was only when she went inside and sat down that she felt the tears on her face, and realized that she had been crying since she walked away from Jimmy, and she could not stop.
Now, today, it was raining again, hard, and there was a gale blowing, tearing through the streets and shaking the bare trees along the canal. Despite the weather she had decided to walk to work. It was easier to think when she was walking. She had tried opening her umbrella, but at once the wind had caught it and would have turned it inside out if she had not let it down straight away. Anyway, she did not mind the rain. Even such stormy mornings as this were a presage of spring, for her. She was thinking of America again, of the rain on Boston Common and the trees along Commonwealth Avenue thrashing in the wind; it was a way of trying not to think of April, of Isabel, of Patrick Ojukwu.
She could see from Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes’s smile, all dentures and treacly sweetness, that she was furious at her; not only was she late, but she was wet and bedraggled and her shoes were muddy from the towpaths.
“You really should be more careful, my dear,” Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes said in her steeliest voice. “You could catch your death walking in the rain like that.”
“The bus was delayed, and I thought it would be quicker if I walked.”
“And was it?”
“No, Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes. I’m sorry.”
The woman had stopped pretending to smile, and her face was puffing up, her cheeks and forehead all pink and shiny, in that awful way that it did when she was about to lose her temper. Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes’s anger fed on itself and could go on whipping itself up throughout a morning. Phoebe retreated to the back room and took off her wet coat and hung it on a chair and set it in front of the gas fire; at once it began to give off a strong smell of sheep. The soles of her stockings were soaked too, and she took them off, hoping her employer would not notice. At least the hood of her coat had kept her hair from getting wet; Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes would not have stood for wet hair in the shop.
The morning dragged. There were few customers, because of the weather. It would be nearly impossible to see in from the street, for the window was streaming with rain on the outside and was becoming steamed up on the inside. Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes, still in an angry sulk, kept to the cubbyhole she called her office, whence at intervals there issued long, trembling, put-upon sighs and faint, vexed mutterings. Phoebe tried not to watch the hands crawling over the face of the clock. She tried too not to think about her friends, her so-called friends, and all the things she was finding out she had not known about them. Was Jimmy telling the truth about April taking Patrick Ojukwu away from Isabel, and about Isabel hating the two of them for it? Because if he was, then Isabel had lied to her in the Shakespeare that night when she laughed at her for thinking April and Patrick were lovers. And Patrick, he would have been lying, too, in his flat that lunchtime when she asked him straight out about April and he denied that he was in love with her, or at least that he had been in love with her. Or had he denied it? She tried to remember what exactly he had said, how he had answered when she asked him, Do you love her? These lies, these pretenses, these coverings-up-she hated all that. It had started, for her, when Jimmy told her so casually about the key that April left under the stone, the key that April had never told her about. What was she to believe, what was she to take as the truth of anything anyone said to her? Had not everyone lied to her, from the very first moments of her life?
The pinging of the little brass bell over the door roused her from these bitter thoughts. Rose Crawford had come into the shop.
Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes was at once surprised, charmed, and suspicious. She had ignored the doorbell, thinking it was just some ordinary customer entering, but when she heard that languid American drawl, suggestive as it was of transatlantic gullibility and a Bergdorf Goodman bag bursting with dollars, she came hurrying out of her cubbyhole like a large, overpainted cuckoo popping out of its clock. Rich American visitors were only expected in the summertime, but here, in the depths of winter, was what was certainly an American, and obviously a rich one, at that. Rose wore a Burberry raincoat that showed no more than a few light raindrops on the shoulders- not only had the taxi man walked her to the door of the shop, he had escorted her there under his own umbrella- and beneath it what Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes’s practiced eye saw at once was a Chanel suit in light-pink wool.