She nodded.
'What about it?'
'Why did you say it?'
The man shrugged in what he trusted was a casual manner. 'No call for any great surprise, is there? I expect hundreds of fellers have told you the same, haven't they? It's not your fault. The Almighty just happened to fashion you wondrously fair-that's all. Why not accept it? It's just the same with me: I happen to be blessed with the most brilliant brain in Oxford. I can't help that either, can I?'
'You're not answering my question.'
'No? I thought-'
'When you said you found me attractive, it wasn't just what you said. It was-it was the way you said it.'
'Which was?'
'I don't know. Sort of-well sort of nice, somehow, and sort of sad at the same time.'
'You shouldn't say "sort of" all the time.'
'I was trying to tell you something that wasn't easy to put into words, that's all. But I'll shut up if you want me to.'
He shook his head slowly. 'I dunno. You see where honesty gets you? I tell you I find you attractive. You know why? Because it does me good to look at you, and to sit next to you like this. And shall I tell you something else? I reckon you're getting more attractive all the time. Must be the wine.' His glass was empty again and he reached over for a bottle.
'Trouble with most men is that "attractive" just means one thing, doesn't it? Slip in between the sheets. Ta very much! Cheerio!'
'Nothing much wrong with that, is there?'
'Of course there isn't! But there can be more to it all than that, can't there?'
'I dunno. I'm no expert on that sort of thing. Wish I were!'
'But you can like a woman for what she is, can't you-as well as what she looks like?' She turned her head towards him, the dark hair piled high on top, and her eyes shone with an almost fierce tenderness.
'Will you just tell me-?' He found himself swallowing hard in the middle of whatever he was going to say and he got no further. She had slipped her right hand under the table and he felt the long soft fingers slowly curling and entwining themselves with his own.
'Can you just pass that wine across a sec, old chap?' It was one of the older guests, red-faced, pot-bellied, and jovial. 'Sorry to barge in and all that, but a chap needs his booze, eh?'
Their hands had sprung guiltily apart and remained so, for the other guests were now returning to the tables to make their choice of dessert.
'Do you think we'd better mix in again?' he asked, without conviction. 'We shall be causing a bit of comment if we're not careful.'
'That worry you?'
The man appeared to give his earnest attention to this question for a good many seconds; and then his face relaxed into a boyish grin. 'Do you know,' he said, 'I don't give a bugger. Why the hell shouldn't we sit together all night? Just tell me that, my girl! It's what I want. And if it's what you-'
'Which it is-as you know! So why not stop pretending, and go and get me some of that gateau? And here!' She gulped down the rest of her wine. 'You can fill this up while you're at it-right to the top.'
After finishing their gateaux, and after twice refusing the offer of coffee, he asked her to tell him something about herself. And she told him.
She'd been born in Rochdale, had been a hardworking and clever girl at school, and had won a place at Lady Margaret Hall to read modern languages. With a good second-class honours degree behind her, she had left Oxford and worked as the (sole) foreign sales rep of a smallish publishing company at Croydon, a company started from scratch a few years previously by two bright and reasonably ambitious brothers and dealing with textbooks in English as a foreign language. Just before she'd joined the company an increasing number of contracts had been coming in from overseas, and the need for some more effective liaison with foreign customers was becoming ever more apparent. Hence the appointment. Pretty good job, and not bad money either-especially for someone without the slightest experience in business matters. It had involved a good deal of necessary (and occasionally unnecessary) travel with the elder of the two brothers (Charles, the senior partner), and she had stayed in the job for eight years, enjoying it enormously. Business had boomed, the payroll had increased from ten to over twenty, new premises were built, new machinery purchased; and during this time, amid rumours of expenses fiddles and tax avoidance, the workforce had witnessed the arrival of the inevitable Rolls Royce, first a black one, then a light blue one; and, for a favoured few, there was a spanking little beauty of a yacht moored somewhere up at Reading. Her own salary was each year-sometimes twice a year-increased, and when three years ago she had finally left the company she had amassed a nice little nest-egg of savings, certainly enough for her to envisage a reasonably affluent independence for several years to come. Why had she left? Difficult to say, really. Eight years was quite a long time, and even the most enjoyable job becomes a little less challenging, a little more-more familiar (was that the word?) as the years pass by, with colleagues seeming to grow more predictable and more… Oh! It didn't much matter what they grew! It was far simpler than that: she'd just wanted a change-that was all. So she'd had a change. At Oxford she'd read French and Italian, and through her work with the company she'd become comprehensively fluent in German. So? So she'd joined the staff of a very large (eighteen hundred!) comprehensive school in the east end of London-teaching German. The school was far rougher than she could have imagined. The boys were doubtless good enough at heart, but were blatantly and impertinently obscene, not infrequently (she suspected) exposing themselves on the back rows of their classes. But it was the girls who had been the real trouble, seeing in their new teacher a rival intruder, likely enough to snatch away the coveted affections of the boys and the male staff alike. The staff? Oh, some of them had tried things on a bit with her, especially the married ones; but they weren't a bad lot, really. They'd certainly been given a Herculean task in trying to cure, or at least to curb, the pervasive truancy, the mindless vandalism, and the sheer bloody-mindedness of those truculent adolescents to whom all notions of integrity, scholarship, or even the meanest of the middle-class virtues were equally foreign and repugnant. Well, she'd stuck it out for four terms; and looking back she wished she'd stuck it longer. The boys and girls in her own form had clubbed together generously to buy her an utterly hideous set of wine glasses; and those glasses were the most precious present she'd ever had! She'd cried when they made the presentation-all of them staying behind after final assembly, with one of the boys making a stupidly incompetent, facetious, wonderful little speech. Most of the girls had cried a bit, too, and even one or two of the inveterate exposers had been reduced to words of awkward farewell that were sad, and mildly grateful, and quite unbearably moving. Oh dear! Then? Well, she'd tried one or two other things and, finally-two years ago that is-she'd come back to Oxford, advertised for private pupils, got rather more offers than she could cope with, bought a small house-and well, there she was! There she was at the party.
She'd missed something out though-the man knew that. He remembered, albeit vaguely, how Mrs. Murdoch had introduced her to him; remembered clearly the third finger on her left hand as she'd wiped the inside of her wineglass. Had she missed out a few other facts as well? But he said nothing. Just sat there, half bemused and more than half besotted.
It was just after midnight. The Murdoch boys had gone to bed and several of the guests had already taken their leave. Most of those who remained were drinking their second or third cups of coffee, but no one came up to interrupt the oddly assorted pair who still sat amidst the wreckage of the trifles and the flans.