Bond Street Story (11 page)

As it was, he looked like being in the Underground all night. There was the rush-hour at Bond Street to begin with. Then, at Tottenham Court Road, London Transport simply turned against him. First one Edgware train, and then another. By the time he had shoved his way into the train marked Barnet—and there was no old-world courtesy about him by now: he was barging and elbowing with the rest—the clock showed ten to six.

And when he got there it was all just as he had feared. The other half of Hetty's shop, the laundry collection office, was still open. Inside they were doing something with hampers. But on Hetty's side, the shutters were already down. It might have been Bank holiday, they looked so closed. Mr. Bloot just stood there staring at them, his chest heaving. And then, even though he knew that it was useless, he started ringing at the bell.

It was when he had rung it for the second time that he thought he heard some sort of movement inside. A noise too faint to be identified. But he could not be sure. There was too much clatter from the traffic for him to be sure of anything.

Nevertheless, a strange feeling came over him. Something told him that Hetty was still there. Still there, only not opening the door. And a sudden panic took possession of him. Perhaps something was the matter. Perhaps she had gone back for a moment after locking up and had fainted. Perhaps at this moment she was lying there in pain and had been trying to make him hear, vainly struggling to attract attention ...

So he did a desperate thing. Forsaking all appearances, he went down on one knee and put his mouth up against the letterbox in the middle of the roller-shutter.

“Yur there Hetty?” he asked. “Yur all raht? I's me, Gussie, Ah've come to see you. Ah'm sorry Ah'm so late.”

He must have shouted rather louder than he realized. Because when he got up again, he saw that people were looking at him. Two children on the pavement had stopped incredulous, fascinated at the sight of a large man kneeling at a letter-box and apologizing into it. The reception clerk at the laundry came round to her half of the doorway to see what was going on. But Mr. Bloot took no notice of any of them. What was happening behind the roller-shutter was far too momentous for that. For the noises were quite definite by now. Quick, busy little noises. The sound of boxes being dragged along and then shoved away somewhere. He even recognized the scraping, tinny sound as
the curtain that cut off the back part of the shop was pulled along the rail on its brass curtain rings. Then he heard footsteps. Unmistakable, approaching footsteps. And the next moment there was the sound of a bolt being drawn back and the roller-shutter shot upwards. Hetty stood there.

She was flushed. And breathing rather hard, he noticed. But alive. My word, yes, alive. Alive as no other woman he had ever known was alive. At the mere sight of her he wanted to rush into her arms.

But, at first sight, Hetty Florence didn't seem to be any too pleased to see him.

“Well, I must say, you are a one,” she told him. “Coming here at this time of night, and scaring me like that.”

Mr. Bloot looked down at his feet for a moment.

“I didn't mean to,” he said quietly. “I ... I only wanted to see you.”

It was the fact that he was so humble, so contrite, that softened her. There didn't seem any point in going on being angry with him.

“Oh, well, you'd better come inside to say it,” she said.

As she was speaking, she caught sight of the two children and the laundry reception clerk.

“And hurry up, do,” she told him. “You're just making an exhibition of yourself.”

As Mr. Bloot stepped inside, she banged the shutter down again. He then realized that he was boxed up in the tiny shop with her. Their two bodies were practically touching.

“Well,” she said.

“It's nothing important ...”

“Isn't it?”

“Not reely. Ah just thought ...”

He broke off, unable to continue. He felt confused. Foolish. Ashamed. But he need not have worried. If only he had been looking at Hetty instead of down at his feet again, he would have seen that she was holding out her arms to him.

“Kiss me,” she said quietly.

And this was Mr. Bloot's undoing. He had not kissed seriously for over twenty years. There were two decades of passion to be released. He went straight for her lips. And he was surprised to find how soft and moist they were. When he finally released them nearly fifteen seconds later he uttered a deep, long, drawn-out “Aaah!”

The extraordinary thing, too, was that apparently Hetty felt just the same way about the kiss. Because instead of putting up her
hands to protect herself she actually drew him forward towards her.

“Do that again,” she said.

But this time, the strain, the tension, was too much for him. The kiss was all right. Even better than the first one. It was more full blooded. He felt her gasp beneath it. But his elbow had become caught on the little bracket that supported one of the shelves. There was a sharp ripping sound. Dummy packets of Craven ‘A' and Gold Flake came raining down all over them. And worse. On the shelf as well there had been a stand holding fancy cigarette holders. Mr. Bloot tried hard to recover himself. As he did so, he heard beneath his feet the crunch of broken vulcanite, the grating of shattered imitation amber.

But he was past caring. His head was now on Hetty's bosom and he could even feel her heart-beats.

It was Hetty who spoke first.

“What d'you have to come and do this here for?” she asked. “What's wrong with my flat?”

 

There are some days that are sour and malignant from the early morning cup of tea onwards. Not necessarily wet days. Or very cold ones. Or days on which a major disaster, a calamity, occurs. Merely separate and isolatable chunks of existence in which the whole process of life suddenly presents itself as subtly hostile and sinister. Days when the Furies have moved in overnight.

Mr. Rammell's day, for instance. His digestion was even worse than usual. The first symptoms—a kind of mild sea-sickness—began to show up before his car had got even as far as Hyde Park Corner. He reached out instinctively for the bottle of dyspepsia tablets that he kept in one of the side pockets. And he was still chewing away like a G.I. by the time they reached Bond Street.

Then, when he got there, he found that there was no Miss Underhill. Only a telephone message to say that she was suffering from—of all things—a bilious attack. It was astonishing. To all appearances Miss Underhill had the innards of a goat. Indeed, before now, Mr. Rammell had frequently marvelled at her. Most busy secretaries, he knew, are inclined to be nibblers. But Miss Underhill was in a class by herself. She was in the habit of producing mysterious little pieces of milk chocolate out of her handbag almost as she sat down in the morning. While Mr. Rammell was sipping away at his hot water with a slice of lemon, Miss Underhill, surrounded by files and memoranda pads, would be busy lapping up a cupful of thick, creamy-looking breakfast cocoa.

It was certainly a master stroke on the part of the Furies, this bilious attack of Miss Underhill's. Because Mr. Rammell relied on Miss Underhill. Couldn't do a thing without her. He had tried hard enough. With that dark, intense verse-drama student, Miss Winter, for example. But it hadn't worked. In sheer self-defence he had been forced to transfer Miss Winter and her gloom-tidings to another department. But her successor, Miss Lipscombe, was about as bad. In some respects, even worse. Alert, clear-cut and eager looking like a young Wren Commandant, and with hair cut very short to denote sexless and almost inhuman efficiency, she proved on closer acquaintance to be as nervous and jumpy as
a kitten. A kitten, moreover, with a touch of the evil sprite and mad fairy thrown in. She sprang new surprises on him at five-minute intervals. She produced wrong documents by the basketful, and whisked away from under his nose the papers with which he was dealing, sending them down to Registry marked “Urgent”. It was like having a poltergeist about the place. And that was not all. She cut him off abruptly in the middle of important telephone conversations. She heard imaginary bells and voices. She would come darting into the room all sparkle and freshness to know if he wanted her. And then, when she was needed, she would disappear as completely as if she had handed in her resignation. She had, too, like Miss Winter's, a highly developed sense of the dramatic. She could register the emotions—alarm, panic, remorse, consternation, bewilderment and the rest of them—simply by standing there in front of him, and saying nothing. It was all done by a quick intake of breath and clever use of the hands. R.A.D.A. would have given Miss Lipscombe a gold medal at any time. And whenever Mr. Rammell saw the neat white shirt waist start heaving, he knew that out there in the mystery of the outer office something else that she hadn't told him about was going wrong as she stood there. Some message, dimly remembered for a passing moment, had passed clean out of her mind again for ever. Some urgent outgoing call had been remorselessly suppressed at source.

If she had come romping into the office blowing a tin trumpet and banging on a toy drum she could scarcely have got him jumpier. By 10.30 a.m. it was obvious that it was Mr. Rammell versus Miss Lipscombe, with Mr. Rammell hopelessly on the losing side.

And, as the day wore on, it became equally obvious that it was Mr. Rammell versus quite a lot of other people as well. A correspondence with the Board of Trade about carpets had produced the worst possible effect. In the result, some blasted Inspector from Whitehall was calling on the chief buyer that very afternoon to satisfy himself that all the other export-reject clauses were being properly administered. Then one of the Unions had discovered a technical breach in their agreement, and unless the Industrial Relations Officer got down to some pretty heart-to-heart discussions with the Organizing Secretary it looked as if all Rammell's vans would be off the streets by the following Monday. Two large consignments of American shoes had been held up by the Customs for a week already, and the way things were going they looked like remaining in bond for ever. By
sheer mishandling at the Bond Street end, Rammell's had just lost a small but highly profitable contract with one of the better girls' schools. The licence for rebuilding the soft-furnishing section, the part that had been hit by an incendiary in '42 had just been turned down for the eleventh time ...

By the time Bond Street had closed down for the night, Mr. Rammell was a jumpy and exhausted man.

“Give up smoking,” he told himself. “It's ridiculous. Simply killing myself. No digestion left. Sheer madness to go on with it. Can't imagine why I ever started. Wish Tony didn't. Cut it right out ...”

On and off, Mr. Rammell had been giving up smoking for the last twenty-five years. He had become an expert. He knew when he really meant to give it up—this was one of those occasions—and when he was merely telling himself that he meant to do so. He knew, too, about all the proprietary devices that help. The mouthwashes that make tobacco in all forms taste horrible. The injections. The little sugar-coated pills. He had even during some of his serious bouts of non-smoking tried playing at smoking instead—puffing away at imitation cigarettes. Things made of coltsfoot and herbs and dried dandelion. Little bundles of mixed weeds that reduced the inside of the mouth to a furnace and left the whole room smelling like autumn.

Even so, from sheer force of habit he found himself with a lighted cigarette between his fingers as soon as he was inside the car. This annoyed him. He promptly stamped it out again. Then he told himself that it was not cigarettes that were the trouble, Cigarettes were nothing. Mere paper. Not so cigars. They were as dangerous as sticks of dynamite, those big Havanas of his. The sensible thing was to go on smoking cigarettes—in moderation of course—and cut out the cigars entirely. But that would be a pity. Because the pleasure of cigar smoking was something quite apart from all other smoking. Cigars belonged to the very highest order of things. As sex began to wane, the taste for a good cigar grew keener. Cigars were the one thing in life that had got better as a man grew older. Whereas he hadn't so much as properly tasted a cigarette for years. Just gone on smoking them one after another—forty a day—two hundred and eighty a week—and getting nothing for them in return.

But there was no point in being silly about it, in administering a shock to the system by giving up smoking altogether. Far more sensible to cut down on them gently. Thirty-five one day, thirty the next, twenty-five the day after, and so on. Stabilize the thing at ten or fifteen. Ten cigarettes a day had never harmed anyone.
Satisfied that he was doing the right thing, Mr. Rammell brought out his case again and lit the first of the new ten ...

It was over a drink at his club that it occurred to Mr. Rammell that perhaps he ought to cut out drinking, too. Spirits particularly. No gin. No whisky. And easy on the sherry. Give his tummy time to settle down again. Then, when he was feeling really fit, he could start taking a little wine with his meals once more. Only the lighter wines at that. Stick to hock and claret. Leave the burgundies and the brandies alone for the time being.

By now practically a non-smoker and total abstainer, Mr. Rammell got into the car to go home. But the undeniable fact was that after a couple of whiskies he felt better already. Easier and freer all over. And it would clearly be absurd for any man to deny himself the very medicine that so obviously was good for him. He began to see things more clearly, get them into their proper perspective.

“It isn't smoking and it isn't drinking,” he told himself. “It's over-work that's doing it. Too much of it. For too long. What I need is a holiday. Get right away from it all. Go somewhere quiet with Eleanor so that I can relax ...”

As he said it, however, he realized how ridiculous it was. With a wife like Mrs. Rammell, there was no possible chance of relaxing. Mrs. Rammell was anti-relaxation. Ever since he had married her she had been growing steadily more tense and energetic. Talking louder and faster all the time. Sitting on more and more committees. Having nervous headaches. Being treated by more and more specialists. Rushing about from one party to another. Filling the house with hangers-on and acquaintances that he didn't even know by name. Fulfilling her own nervous and exhausting destiny.