A bitterly sobbing woman runs in past him. He looks out into the corridor, sees nobody else, closes the door.
Returning to the main room he stands watching the woman and thoughtfully rubbing his chin. She crouches on an easy chair, handbag on lap, sobbing into handkerchief. She is bony and fortyish with wild black hair flowing over the shoulders of her fur coat, a long black skirt and histrionic earrings. The sobs lessen. He tiptoes to the coffee table, lifts and places it softly near her right elbow, selects an apple and sits on a chaise-longue facing her. Cautiously he bites the apple. Her sobbing stops. She removes mirror from handbag and blots off tears, taking care not to damage make-up. He says softly, “I’m glad you came. Eat something. It sometimes helps.”
She says hoarsely, “You are always so sweet to me, Alan.”
She restores mirror and hanky to handbag, tears a wing from the chicken, bites, swallows and says, “Half an hour ago I threw out Arnold. He did not want to go. I had to call the police. He was drunk and violent. He cracked my tortoise, Alan.”
“You were right to call the police.”
“He was sweet to begin with — just like you. And then he went bad on me. Eventually they all go bad on me — except you.”
She bites and swallows more chicken.
Then looks around and says, “Are you expecting someone?”
He smiles sadly, says, “Expecting someone? I only wish I was.”
“But this food! … And the room. You did not always keep it so spick and span.”
“I do nowadays. I’ve become a real old woman since you left me, Vlasta, hoovering the carpet, dusting the clock — I’ve even grown cranky about food. I don’t eat regular meals any longer. I keep plates of fruit and cold chicken beside me and have a nibble whenever I feel like it.”
“How odd! But have you no little girlfriend? No mistress?”
With a harsh laugh Alan throws the apple core into a brass coal-scuttle he uses as a waste basket and says, “None! None! I know plenty of women. I’ve invited some of them up here, and they’ve come. A few stayed the night. But (I don’t know why) they all bored me. After you they were all so insipid.”
“I knew it!” cries Vlasta exultantly, “Yes I knew it! When I left you I told myself, You are destroying this man. You have taught him all he knows and now that you leave him his confidence will vanish also. In fact you are castrating him! But I had to do it. You were sweet but… oh so deadly dull. No imagination. And so I had to leave.”
“It was agony,” he assures her.
“I knew. I was sorry for you but I needed excitement. I will take my coat off, this room is far too warm, how can you bear it?”
She stands and flings her chicken bone into the scuttle. But Alan has risen first. Slipping behind her he helps remove the coat murmuring, “Perhaps you’ll remove more before you leave.”
“What a fool you are Alan — you still know nothing about women. It was four years ago, not last week we ceased to be lovers. I came here for peace, not erotic excitement. In the last three hours I have had more excitement than many of the bourgeoisie experience in a lifetime.”
“Sorry!” murmurs Alan, and carries coat to bed. He lays it there then sits on bedfoot, right elbow on knee, right hand supporting chin like Rodin’s Thinker.
“I am a dreadful woman, I destroy men!” says Vlasta, yawning and stretching her arms, “Arnold kept shouting that while the policemen dragged him away.”
“Please sit beside me. I’m very lonely.”
She sits beside him saying, “Think of Mick McTeague, old before his time and drinking like a fish.”
“He was a sixty-year-old alcoholic when you first met him.”
“He’s worse now. Last week I saw Angus pushing his baby in a pram in the park, a slave to a woman too foolish to understand him.”
“He seems perfectly happy to me,” says Alan, looking at her, “We play snooker sometimes.” She laughs aloud at his naivety.
“Oh Alan have you forgotten everything I taught you? Beneath the calmest of lives all sorts of dreadful things are happening: spiritual rapes, murders, incests, tortures, suicides. And the calmer the surface the worse what is hidden beneath.”
Her perfume fills his nostrils, her body is an inch away, with real excitement he declares, “I love the way you turn life into an adventure, an exciting, idiotic adventure.”
“IDIOTIC?” she cries, glaring.
“No no no no!” he explains hastily, “That was a slip of the tongue, a device by which my conventional bourgeois hypocricy attempted to defend itself.”
“Hm!” she says, only slightly placated, “I see you remember some of the things I taught you.”
She sits beside him again, yawns and says, “Ahoo I am very tired. It is exhausting work, explaining life to thick policemen.”
She lies back on the bed with her face upward and eyes closed.
A minute passes in silence. He stealthily pulls off his shoes, lies beside her and unfastens the top button of her blouse. Without opening her eyes she says in a small voice, “I told you I was in no mood.”
“Sorry.”
He sighs and resumes the Rodin’s Thinker pose. After a while she says lazily, “I love you for being so easily discouraged.”
He looks hopefully round. Her eyes are open, she is smiling, then laughing and sitting up and embracing him.
“Oh Alan, I can refuse you nothing! You are like an ugly old comfortable sofa I must always fall back upon.”
“Always at your service!” he assures her. They stand, he pulls off his sweater, she starts removing her blouse and a bell chimes.
The doorbell chimes. He stands as if paralysed and whispers, “Fuck.”
She cries, “You WERE expecting someone!”
“No. Nonsense. Ignore it. Please speak more quietly Vlasta!”
The bell chimes.
“Do you tell me you do not know who is there?”
“I swear it.”
“Then go to the door and send them away,” cries Vlasta, rapidly fastening her blouse, “Or I will!” The bell chimes. She strides to the lobby, he dodges before her and stands with his back to the front door hissing, “Be sensible Vlasta.”
“Open that door or I will scream!”
Through clenched teeth he mutters, “Listen! This might be, just might be, a young woman I greatly admire and respect. She must not be upset, you hear? She must not be upset!”
The bell chimes. Vlasta smiles coolly, folds her arms, says, “So open the door.”
He does. A stout man wearing a raincoat and trilby hat stands outside. He says, “Scottish Power. Can I read your meter sir?”
“Yes,” says Alan. He opens a cupboard (Vlasta has strolled back to the main room) and the man directs a torch beam on the dials of a squat black box.
“Sorry I’m late Alan,” says a small pretty girl of perhaps eighteen who strolls in.
“Hullo,” says Alan. She goes into the big room and Alan hears her say brightly, “Hullo — my name is Lillian Piper.”
He hears Vlasta say, “You are one of his students of course.”
“Yes!”
“What a coward he is.”
“In Australia,” says the stout man writing figures on a pad, “All meters have dials which can be read from outside the main door. I wish we had that system here sir.”
“Yes. Goodbye,” says Alan shutting the stout man out. Then he sighs and joins the ladies.