William Trevor - A Bit on the Side

People began to come into the saloon bar, another lone man, couples. Arthurs watched them, picking out the ones he immediately disliked. He wondered about phoning up Mastyn’s and saying he wouldn’t be in in the morning. A stomach upset, he’d say. But the hours would hang heavy, because he’d wake anyway at twenty past five, being programmed to it. And there’d be nothing to replace the walk to the Underground, and the Underground itself, and walking the last bit to the hotel; and nothing to replace the three and a half hours in the dining-room until at half past ten he could hang up his white jacket and unhook his black bow tie. Since the hours of his employment at Mastyn’s had been reduced, his earnings solely as a breakfast waiter were not enough to live on, but he made up the shortage in other ways. Since childhood he had stolen.

There was a telephone across the bar from where he sat, half obscured by a curtain drawn back from the entrance to the Ladies. Noticing it, he was tempted again. But whoever answered at the Reception would grumble, would say leave it until the morning, see how he was then. The conversation would be unsatisfactory, any message he left for the dining-room probably forgotten, and blame attached to him when he didn’t turn up even though he’d done what was required of him. None of that was worth it.

Why had she spoken to him like that? Why had her voice gone harsh, asking him if he wanted something? He had never asked her for money, not once, yet the way she’d spoken you’d think he’d been for ever dropping hints. Music began, turned down low but noisy anyway because that was what it was, more a noise than anything else. The last couple who’d come in were noisy too, laughter that could have been kept quieter, both wearing dark glasses although there hadn’t been sunshine all day. What he’d wanted to say was maybe they could go to a café for a few minutes. No more than that, ten minutes of her time.

Arthurs stared into the beer he hadn’t drunk, at the scummy froth becoming nothing. The sympathy she could call upon was a depth in her, surprising in a woman who wasn’t clever. He had been aware of it the first day on the stairs, when they’d got into conversation because he happened to be passing by. ‘You like a cup of tea or something?’ she’d offered, her key already in the lock of the door; and he’d said tea, two sugars, when they were in her room. He told her about the lunchtime complaint in the dining-room of Mastyn’s because it was a natural thing to do; she said she’d wondered why he looked upset and then said anyone would be, a horrible thing to happen. He repeated the remarks that had been made, how he’d stood there having to listen, how the man had demanded the manager, how he’d said, ‘We apologize for troubling you’ when Mr Simoni came. Mr Simoni had held his hand out but they hadn’t taken it.

Arthurs wondered for a moment if, that first day or later, he’d told her this too – that Mr Simoni’s outstretched hand had been ignored. He couldn’t remember saying it. A dotted bow-tie the man had been wearing, white dots on red, a chalk-striped shirt. The pepper had been ground over her risotto with a mutter that sounded insolent, the woman said. The coffee had been cold. ‘Well, there’ll certainly be no charge for the coffee,’ Mr Simoni’s immediate response was. Something special, this lunch should have been, the man said, and the woman called the lunch a misery before she threw her napkin down. They’d gone away, not knowing what they left behind. ‘Breakfasts only after this,’ Mr Simoni murmured while bowing and scraping to the people who’d gone silent at the other tables. ‘Take it or not.’ Beneath the thrown-down napkin there was a shopping list on a letter that had been half written and then abandoned, the shopping items pencilled on the space remaining. Dear Sirs , An electric fire I purchased from you is faulty had a jagged line drawn through it; there was a date in the same handwriting, and an address embossed in blue at the top of the single sheet.

Arthurs reached into an inside pocket and took from it this same writing paper, now folded to a quarter of its size. Frayed at the edges, it was dog-eared and soiled, one of the folds beginning to give way, and he didn’t open it out for fear of damaging it further: it was enough to hold it for a moment between thumb and forefinger, to know that it was what he knew it was, kept by him always. A year ago he’d gone into a Kall-Kwik and had had it photographed twice, nervous in case one day the original might, somehow, not be there: he did not trust, and never had, any time that was yet to come or what might happen in it. He knew the address by heart, even in his sleep, in dreams; but who could tell what might happen to memory? Not that it mattered now, of course.

He returned the folded paper to his pocket and stood up. Seven o’clock she finished in the offices, ten past she was out on the streets again. Five to six it was and he sat for a little longer, thinking about her. For a long time before the day she’d asked him into her room he’d seen her coming and going. They had passed often on the stairs of the house where his own two rooms were a flight above hers, cheaper than the other rooms because of their bad state of repair. He hadn’t known she was a widow, thinking her to be unmarried ever since she’d come to the house a year or so ago. A ticket man on the Underground apparently her husband had been.

He left his beer, pushing the glass away in case a sleeve caught it while he was putting his overcoat on. He buttoned the coat slowly – black like his suit – then crossed the saloon bar and stepped out into the darkening twilight. The folded paper was not something to keep, not any more, but even so he knew he could not destroy it. There was that, too, to tell her: that the shopping list would always be a memento.

*

Her encounter with her ex-husband had not particularly upset Cheryl: she was too used to his sudden appearances for that. As she emptied waste-paper baskets and gathered up plastic cups, uncoiled the long flex of her vacuum cleaner and began on the floors, she yet again blamed herself. She had been foolish. Lonely, she supposed, missing what death had taken from her, she had seen the man differently; it had felt natural, saying yes. Daph had been a witness in the register office, with a man they’d fetched in from the street. Afterwards they’d sat with Daph in the back bar of the Queen’s Regiment and when a few people from the house turned up later they’d gone in a crowd to Brace’s Platter, above the Prudential Office. They’d kept calling her Mrs Arthurs, making a joke of it once the wine got going, but all that time he was very quiet until she heard him telling Daph about the lunchtime complaint, and every few minutes Daph – outspoken when she’d had a few too many – saying people like that didn’t deserve a life. ‘You hear that?’ he said afterwards. ‘What your friend remarked?’

At the time it had seemed ordinary enough that he should mention the complaint to someone else, that that terrible lunchtime should nag so, the wound of humiliation slow to heal. She had urged him to leave Mastyn’s Hotel, to find another post in a restaurant or another hotel, but for whatever reason he wouldn’t, stoically maintaining that being a lowly breakfast waiter was what he would remain now. She didn’t understand that, although she accepted that when you married someone you took on his baggage, and one day the healing would be complete.

But on the night of her second marriage the baggage she’d taken on was suddenly more complicated. When they returned from the celebrations in the Queen’s Regiment and Brace’s Platter her husband of half a day didn’t want to go to bed. He said it was hardly worth it, since he had to get up soon after five. But it was not yet eleven when he said that.