Felicity goes on staring at him in astonishment. Then she takes his hand.
“Poor love!” she says. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I forgot.”
“You must be exhausted. Go and lie down. I’ll bring you an aspirin and whisky.”
“I can’t lie down!” cries Howard. “I can’t even sit down!”
He jumps up and begins to walk up and down the terrace. Felicity watches him with her eyebrows raised in an expression of tender, slightly comical concern.
“I’m sorry,” he says, running his hand desperately through his hair. “I didn’t mean to shout. It’s not your fault. I don’t know where I am with this girl, that’s the trouble. One moment she’s kissing me, and the next she’s telling me she can’t see me till next week. One day I’m walking with her beside the river, and I’ve got my arm round her shoulders, and she’s put her arm round my waist, and we laugh at everything, and stop every few yards to kiss, and I think, This is fantastic! It can’t go on like this! And it doesn’t, because she suddenly rushes off, and I have to run after her, shouting about when am I going to see her again, and jumping out of people’s way into the gutter.”
Felicity laughs.
“You’ll just have to be firm with her,” she says. “Sweep her off her feet.”
“I keep sweeping her off her feet,” he complains. “But then she keeps getting back on them again.”
“You always dealt with me quite effectively.”
“But I knew where I was with you!” he says irritably. “You’re a completely different sort of person!”
She sits in silence, smiling to herself. He leans over the rail of the terrace, moodily banging his knuckles against the bricks.
“Sorry,” he says finally. “But you must see I’m a bit on edge. It’s no good making fatuous suggestions…. It would be better if you concentrated on sewing some buttons on my shirts. Half my shirts have got buttons missing now! How can I go out and pursue a love-affair wearing a shirt with no buttons on it! What on earth is she going to think? No wonder I’m not getting anywhere when I have to spend half my time holding my tie in place to cover the gap! I get no support, that’s the trouble. I have to do every damned thing for myself. Other men’s wives try to help them a little. They take pride in their husband’s success….“
She comes over and puts her arm round his shoulders protectively.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he says. “I’m obviously trying to have a row with you. Oh God — can’t I even have a row with you now? What am I supposed to do — have rows with my friends? Or bottle all my aggression up and let it turn into high blood pressure? Aren’t I to have any pleasure in life at all?”
She strokes his hair.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “You’re thinking this is all rather comical, aren’t you?”
“A bit,” she says gently.
“Funny that I can always tell what you’re thinking, isn’t it? I can read you like a book — some book I’ve read six times already. That’s one of the things I like about her. I never have the slightest idea what she’s thinking. I never know what she’s going to do next. It’s such a relief! It gives me some slight interest in life.”
She kisses his ear. He sighs.
“Why are you behaving so aggressively?” he demands. “Why are you making a scene like this? You’re not… you’re not jealous, are you? You must realize that I’ve got it all worked out in my head so that this doesn’t have any bearing on you at all.”
“I assumed you’d got it worked out somehow,” she murmurs.
“Of course I have. I’ve got a clear understanding inside my head that this business is taking place before I ever met you.”
She picks up his hand and kisses the knuckles.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’m not jealous.”
“Yes, you are,” he replies. “I know when you’re jealous. Don’t deceive yourself. God, no wonder I’m driven to go out and have affairs! Jealous scenes every time I come home….”
She rubs his knuckles silently, gazing at the lights below them.
“You are jealous,” he says, looking at her closely. “Aren’t you? Or aren ’t you? You aren’t, are you? You don’t care a damn! It doesn’t matter tuppence to you whether I go off and have affairs with other people or not …!”
Later, in bed, she puts her head on his shoulder and in a very small voice apologizes. The whole scene was her fault, she sees that now. He puts his arms round her, and insists that he was partly to blame as well. His generosity moves them both. Meltingly they eat at each other, like two carnivorous ice-creams.
So when he sees Rose staring at him with her dark, serious eyes among the crowd on the staircases in the interval (this is at a concert) he doesn’t hesitate for a moment, but goes straight up to her.
“Excuse me,” he says, “but do you know if they’re going to play the violin concerto with the original cadenzas?”
“What?” says Rose, frowning.
“Would you like some coffee?” asks Howard. He has just noticed they are serving coffee on the next floor up.
“I’m looking for someone,” says Rose.
“I feel like a coffee myself.”
“Don’t they always play Mozart’s cadenzas?”
“You could look for them while you’re drinking the coffee.”
She looks round desperately, tugging at her hair.
“I’ll come with you while you have your coffee,” she says.
They walk upstairs to the coffee counter. Howard is so pleased with himself he feels he can say anything.
“Didn’t I do that well?” he cries. “Has anyone ever come up to you and introduced himself like that?”
~ ~ ~
Howard meets Phil Schaffer in various pubs, down there in the sea of lights — Phil knows the city intimately already — and they walk round for hours, talking and yawning and doing joky things. They go to amusement arcades, and start a poetry magazine, and buy pornographic books, and release long streamers of lavatory paper from the top of the Pan-Am building to see whose will be carried farther by the wind as it falls. Phil makes every dark doorway seem an entrance to a sinister underworld, every advertisement and book title a revelation of the absurd. Their regular promenading grounds are the streets that abound with dirty bookshops and prostitutes and Chinese restaurants. They are both nineteen at the time, and if there’s anything in the world that’s sweeter than being nineteen when you’re thirty-seven, it’s being nineteen in a street full of whores and dirty bookshops and Chinese restaurants.
As they go about the city they search for God. They know he won’t be in any of the obvious places — that wouldn’t be his style at all. He won’t have his name on the door. He’ll be ex-directory, lurking behind some apparently innocent front, like the head of an intelligence agency.
One day they find him. They are looking through the directory board in the foyer of the RCA building, reading aloud to each other all the names of firms they find ridiculous (“How about this? Cock o’ the North Erection Company.” “What?” “Sorry — Construction Company. Hey, what goes on in this one, though? Toplady and Partners!” “Disgusting!”) when they discover a firm on the sixteenth floor called Geo. Dewey (Optical) Ltd. Phil whistles, and looks at Howard with raised eyebrows.