Conrad Aiken: The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

There was a small green baize table in one corner of the private bar—an aspidistra plant stood on it (in a horribly ornate sham-majolica pot) and an empty glass ringed with the brown froth of stout. I removed the glass, and brought in its place two large ports.

“This is the kind of night,” I said, “when port tastes good. Even port from the wood. Any port in a storm.”

“Don’t you like port from the wood?”

“Not as a rule—it’s too sweet.”

“Oh, I like it sweet,” she said.

She took off her black gloves and lifted the glass to her lips.

“The port they have here is good,” she added. “I often come here. Whenever I go to that cinema, I come here afterward.”

“And do you go often to the cinema?” I asked.

“Oh, yes—three or four times a week.”

“You mean you go and see the same pictures over again?… How on earth do you stand it!”

She gave a little embarrassed laugh—the kind of laugh that must, when she was younger, have been accompanied by a blush—and looked down at the table, turning the stem of the glass between her fingers.

“I don’t go there for pleasure,” she said.

“Oh—I see.”

There was an awkward pause. I tasted my port.

“What’s the use pretending?” she then went on. “You can see what I am, and I’m not ashamed of it, either. You’ve got to live, somehow, and I suppose there are worse ways.”

I murmured that I supposed there were, but that it must have taken a great deal of courage. To this she demurred.

“Courage? Oh, no. Not now. At the beginning, yes, but not now. I’m a hardened old sinner.…”

II.

She unclasped the feather boa from her neck and flung it rather sharply into the empty chair beside her—like a gesture of defiance. At the same time she gave me a quick little grimace of a smile, which was intended to be arch. The corners of her mouth at once, however, drooped into their natural expression of gentle petulance; and I found myself smiling back at her a little too long. She then took a rougestick from her handbag and began touching her lips with it.

“Not that it does any good,” she said, looking up at my slyly. “The port will wash it off.… How old do you think I am?”

I guessed, as flatteringly as I could, after submitting her to a friendly inquisition of inspection; and she told me that she was fifty-three. On my expressing my disingenuous surprise, she added that she was married and had a boy of fifteen. I was impressed.

“Somehow, you don’t look like a mother,” I said.

“Don’t I?… I’m a good mother, just the same, if I do say it as shouldn’t.”

I asked her if her husband and boy lived with her. She said that the boy did, but not her husband. He had been a bad egg from the beginning. He was in the army—and it was when he was sent out to India that the trouble had started. His idea was that he would send for them after a while, but he had never done so. He wrote to her very seldom, and sent her very little money. She supposed he was having love affairs with “brown girls,” and spending it all on them. Anyway, she began to be hard up. And she didn’t know where he was.

“Of course, I may say it was a relief to both of us,” she said. “He was always drinking when he was home, and betting on the horses. It wasn’t much of a life.…” She gave her empty glass a little insinuating push toward me, with two fingers. “Get me another, will you—like a good boy?”

I took her glass and had it refilled at the bar. As I sat down again, I said something about the problem of “separation” in marriage—the way it leads to alienation. She looked at me cynically, or with a look that was intended to be cynical: but the narrowed lids, which were red at the edges, and the wandering blue eyes, failed to convey the desired effect. The attempt at a pose of refined cynicism was pathetic.

“Nothing of that,” she said. “I was as glad to be shut of him as he was to be shut of me. As a husband, he was a fair washout.”

“So now you and the boy live together,” I said. “I should think that would make complications.”

She shook her head, doubtfully; and then went into a kind of abstraction. She gazed over the table at the sawdust-sprinkled floor, sucking in her lower lip. The port was beginning to flush her faded cheeks, and to give her (I could see) that kind of bemused feeling of well-being in which one becomes totally indifferent to one’s surroundings. She was remembering something, and wondering whether she was too bored to talk about it. Perhaps, also, she was remembering how often before she had thus talked about her life to strangers. But what did it matter? It didn’t matter at all. It wasn’t of any consequence. You lived indifferently, and you talked about it indifferently. Either way, the thing was hopeless, but also rather amusing. You might as well talk as not.

She began talking again, therefore, with her eyes still oddly fixed. She talked as if I were an accident, a mere nonentity. The complications had existed, she said, only at the beginning—and then the boy was too young to know what it was all about. Nowadays, it was different. But there had been some funny things at the beginning. She gave a chuckle, and looked at me appraisingly—as if she wanted me to ask her what these funny things had been. I smiled, and she smiled back. We exchanged, as it were, an unspoken agreement about the excessively odd things that life will do. Life was, indeed, riotously funny. The idea brightened in her eyes, and she began to laugh.

“You’d never guess,” she said, “what started me off.”

I admitted the hopelessness of this. It occurred to me to begin improvising, extravagantly, on this theme, but I was afraid it would fall flat, or throw her off. So I merely shook my head and admitted it again.

“It was seeing all those West End tarts,” she said.

“What?”

She repeated the remark, paused, laughed, and then elaborated it. It was when she was feeling very blue, she said. No money coming from Mac—her husband—and no other way of getting any. It was costing more to live, too, with the boy growing up. Saving on gas and food didn’t do any good. She’d always been a bit of a fool—couldn’t even mend a frock properly—couldn’t fancy herself going into “the service.” But she had to do something. And one night, when she was wandering round in Piccadilly Circus, seeing all those West End tarts in their satin slippers, the idea had occurred to her. She had been in the habit, she said, of haunting Piccadilly Circus—she liked to see the crowds, and she had nothing else to do in the evening. She couldn’t go on reading the newspapers all day, could she? I admitted, cheerfully enough, that she couldn’t. So she took to haunting the region of Piccadilly Circus. And she was infuriated by seeing the West End tarts. They were having such a good time—they were so well-dressed—they always had somewhere to go and something to do. They went to the best restaurants, and rode in taxis. It was seeing all this that put the idea in her head.

“It came to me all of a sudden,” she said. “I just stood still and said to myself, why shouldn’t I be a West End tart?… And I couldn’t think of any reason why I shouldn’t.”

She put her head on one side, and looked at me distantly. The pause was rhetorical—she wanted me to appreciate the immensity of this decision. It had been astonishing—she seemed to say—but also it had been entirely natural. Nothing in the world could have been more natural. The only wonder was that she hadn’t thought of it before. Nothing (said the tilt of her head) could have been so obvious.…

“So that was that,” I said, with perhaps a trace of heartless flippancy.