He said, ‘Vanilla,’ and added a long while after, ‘Please.’
He ate the second ice with great deliberation, carefully licking the spoon as though he were removing fingerprints. Then we went hand in hand across the Common to Cedar Road like a father and son. Sarah and I are both childless, I thought. Wouldn’t there have been more sense in marrying and having children and living quietly together in a sweet and dull peace than in this furtive business of lust and jealousy and the reports of Parkis?
I rang the bell on the top floor of Cedar Road. I said to the boy, ‘Remember. You’re feeling ill.’
‘If they give me an ice…’ he began: Parkis had trained him to be prepared.
‘They won’t.’
I assumed it was Miss Smythe who opened the door -a middle-aged woman with the grey tired hair of charity-, bazaars. I said, ‘Does Mr Wilson live here?’
‘No. I’m afraid… ‘
‘You don’t happen to know if he’s in the flat below?’
‘There’s nobody called Wilson in this house.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘I’ve brought the boy all this way, and now he’s feeling ill… ‘
I dared not look at the boy, but from the way in which Miss Smythe gazed at him, I felt sure he was silently and efficiently carrying out his part: Mr Savage would have been proud to acknowledge him as a member of his team.
‘Do let him come in and sit down,’ Miss Smythe said.
‘It’s very kind of you.’
I wondered how often Sarah had passed through this door into the little cluttered hall. Here I was in the home of X. Presumably the brown soft hat on the hook belonged to him. The fingers of my successor - the fingers that touched Sarah - daily turned the handle of this door which opened now on the yellow flame of the gas-fire, pink-shaded lamps burning through the snow-grey afternoon, a waste of cretonne loose covers. ‘Can I fetch your little boy a glass of water?’
‘It’s very kind of you.’ I remembered I had said that before.
‘ Or some orange-squash.’
‘You mustn’t bother.’
‘Orange-squash,’ the boy said firmly: again the long pause and ‘please’ as she went through the door. Now we were alone I looked at him: he really did look ill, crouching back on the cretonne. If he had not winked at me, I would have wondered whether perhaps… Miss Smythe returned, carrying the orange-squash, and I said, ‘Say thank you, Arthur.’
‘Is his name Arthur?’
‘Arthur James,’ I said.
‘It’s quite an old-fashioned name.’
‘We’re an old-fashioned family. His mother was fond of Tennyson.’
‘She’s…?’
‘Yes,’ I said and she looked at the child with commiseration.
‘He must be a comfort to you.’
‘And an anxiety,’ I said. I began to feel shame: she was so unsuspicious, and what good was I doing here? I was no nearer meeting X, and would I be any happier for giving a face to the man upon the bed? I altered my tactics. I said, ‘I ought to introduce myself. My name is Bridges.’
‘And mine is Smythe.’
‘I have a strong feeling I have met you somewhere before.’
‘I don’t think so. I have a very good memory for faces.’
‘Perhaps I have seen you on the Common.’
‘I go there sometimes with my brother.’
‘Not by any chance a John Smythe?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘Richard. How is the little boy feeling?’
‘Worse,’ said Parkis’s son.
‘Do you think we ought to take his temperature?’
‘Can I have some more orange-squash?’
‘It can do no harm, can it?’ Miss Smythe wondered. ‘Poor child. Perhaps he has a fever.’
‘We’ve trespassed on you enough.’
‘My brother would never forgive me if I didn’t make you stay. He’s very fond of children.’
‘Is your brother in?’
‘I’m expecting him any moment.’
‘Home from work?’
‘Well, his working day is really Sunday.’
‘A clergyman?’ I asked with secret malice and received the puzzling answer, ‘Not exactly.’ A look of worry came down like a curtain between us and she retired behind it with her private troubles. As she got up the hall door opened and there was X. I had an impression, in the dusk of the hall, of a man with a handsome actor’s face - a face that looked at itself too often in mirrors, a taint of vulgarity, and I thought sadly and without satisfaction, I wish she had better taste. Then he came through into the light of the lamps. The gross livid spots which covered his left cheek were almost like marks of distinction - I had maligned him, he could have no satisfaction in looking at himself in any glass.
Miss Smythe said, ‘My brother Richard. Mr Bridges. Mr Bridges’s little boy is not feeling well. I asked them in.’
He shook hands with his eye on the boy: I noticed the dryness and heat of his hands. He said, ‘I’ve seen your boy before.’
‘On the Common?’
‘Perhaps.’
He was too powerful for the room: he didn’t go with the cretonne. Did his sister sit here, while they, in another room… or did they send her out on errands while they made love?
Well, I had seen the man; there wasn’t anything to stay for - except all the other questions that now were released by the sight of him - where had they met? Had she made the first move? What had she seen in him? How long, how often had they been lovers? There were words she had written that I knew by heart: ‘I have no need to write to you or talk to you… I know I am only beginning to love, but already I want to abandon everything, everybody but you,’ and I stared up at the raw spots on his cheek and thought, there is no safety anywhere: a humpback, a cripple - they all have the trigger that sets love off.
‘What was the real purpose of your coming?’ he suddenly broke into my thoughts. ‘I told Miss Smythe - a man called Wilson…’
‘I don’t remember your face, but I remember your son’s.’ He made a short frustrated gesture as though he wanted to touch the boy’s hand: his eyes had a kind of abstract tenderness. He said, ‘You don’t have to be afraid of me. I am used to people coming here. I assure you I only want to be of use.’
Miss Smythe explained, ‘People are often so shy.’ I couldn’t for the life of me think what it was all about.
‘I was just looking for a man called Wilson.’
‘You know that I know there’s no such man.’
‘If you would lend me a telephone directory I could check his address…’
‘Sit down again,’ he said and brooded gloomily over the boy.
‘I must be going. Arthur’s feeling better and Wilson…’ His ambiguity made me ill at ease.
‘You can go if you want to, of course, but can’t you leave the boy here - if only for half an hour? I want to talk to him.’ It occurred to me that he had recognized Parkis’s assistant and was going to cross-question him. I said, ‘Anything you want to ask him you can ask me.’
Every time he turned his unmarked cheek towards me my anger grew: every time I saw the ugly flawed cheek it died away and I couldn’t believe - any more than I could believe that lust existed here among the flowered cretonnes, with Miss Smythe getting tea. But despair can always produce an answer and despair asked me now: Would you so much rather it was love and not lust?
‘You and I are too old,’ he said. ‘But the schoolmasters and the priests - they’ve only just begun to corrupt him with their lies.’
‘I don’t know what the hell you mean,’ I said, and added quickly, ‘I’m sorry,’ to Miss Smythe.
‘There you are, you see,’ he said. ‘Hell, and if I angered you, as like as not you’d say My God.’
It seemed to me that I had shocked him: he might be a Nonconformist minister: Miss Smythe had said he worked on Sundays, but how horribly bizarre that a man like that should be Sarah’s lover. Suddenly it diminished her importance: her love affair became a joke: she herself might be used as a comic anecdote at my next dinner party. For a moment I was free of her. The boy said, ‘I feel sick. Can I have some more orangeade?’