A Bit on the Side

From the Selected Stories

‘Thanks, Nell,’ he said.

It wasn’t the divorce. He had weathered the tremors of the divorce, had admired – after the shock of hearing what so undramatically she had done – her calm resolve. He had let her brush away his nervousness, his alarm at first that this was a complication that, emotionally, might prove too much for them both.

Sipping his milky tea, he experienced a pang of desire, sharp as a splinter, an assault on his senses and his heart that made him want to go to her now, to clatter down the uncarpeted stairs and out into the fresh summer air, to take a taxi-cab, a thing he never did, to ask for her in the much smarter office building that was hers, and say when she stepped out of that life that of course they could not do without one another.

He shuffled through the papers that were his afternoon’s work. I note your comments regarding Section TMA (1970), he read, but whilst it is Revenue policy not to invoke the provisions of Section 88 unless there is substantial delay it is held that when the delay continues beyond the following April 5 these provisions are appropriate. Under all the circumstances, I propose to issue an estimated assessment which will make good an apparent loss of tab due to the Crown.

He scribbled out his protest and added it to the pile for typing. She was the stronger of the two, stoical, and being stoical was what he’d always loved. Deprived of what they had, she would manage better, even if the circumstances suggested that she wouldn’t.

He wasn’t in the Running Footman when she arrived. He usually was, and no matter what, she knew he’d come. When he did he bought her drinks, since this evening it was his turn. He carried them to where she kept a seat for him. Sherry it was for her, medium dry. His was the week’s red wine, from Poland. Muzak was playing, jazzy and sentimental.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said before he said anything else.

‘I’m happy, you know.’ She intended to say more. She’d thought all that out during the afternoon, her sentences comprosed and ready. But in his company she was aware that none of that was necessary: it was he, not she, who had to do the talking. He said, again, that she deserved much more; and repeated, too, that he was using up her life.

Then, for the forty minutes that were theirs, they spoke of love: as it had been for them, as it still was, of its confinement, necessarily so, its intensity too, its pain, its mockery it had so often felt like, how they had never wasted it by sitting in silence in the dark of a cinema, or sleeping through the handful of nights they’d spent together in her flat. They had not wasted it in lovers’ quarrels, or lovers’ argument. They did not waste it now, in what they said.

‘Why?’ she murmured when their drinks were almost finished, when the Running Footman was noisier than it had been before, other office workers happy that their day was done. ‘Please.’

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