Walking unhurriedly, and pausing to watch a tricky shot, I took my beer across to table number four. One of the players, a man in the favoured costume of dark trousers, loose-collared white shirt and unbuttoned waistcoat, moved the scoreboard pointer and watched me with expressionless eyes as I opened the door marked ‘Staff’ and went inside.
There was a smell of soap and disinfectant. It was a small storeroom with a window through which the snooker hall could be seen if you pulled aside the dirty net curtain. On the other side of the room there was another window, a larger one that looked down upon Tower Bridge Road. From the street below there came the sound of cars slurping through the slush.
‘Bernard.’ It was a woman’s voice. ‘I thought you weren’t going to come.’
I sat down on the bench before I recognized her in the dim light. ‘Cindy!’ I said. ‘Good God, Cindy!’
‘You’d forgotten I existed.’
‘Of course I hadn’t.’ I’d only forgotten that Cindy Prettyman’s full name was Lucinda, and that she might have reverted to her maiden name. ‘Can I get you a drink?’
She held up her glass. ‘It’s tonic water. I’m not drinking these days.’
‘I just didn’t expect you here,’ I said. I looked through the net curtain at the tables.
‘Why not?’
‘Yes, why not?’ I said and laughed briefly. ‘When I think how many times Jim made me swear I was giving up the game for ever.’ In the old days, when Jim Prettyman was working alongside me, he taught me to play snooker. He played an exhibition class game, and his wife Cindy was something of an expert too.
Cindy was older than Jim by a year or two. Her father was a steel worker in Scunthorpe: a socialist of the old school. She’d got a scholarship to Reading University. She said she’d never had any ambition but for a career in the Civil Service since her schooldays. I don’t know if it was true but it went down well at the Selection Board. She wanted Treasury but got Foreign Office, and eventually got Jim Prettyman who went there too. Then Jim came over to work in the Department and I saw a lot of him. We used to come here, me, Fiona, Jim and Cindy, after work on Fridays. We’d play snooker to decide who would buy dinner at Enzo’s, a little Italian restaurant in Old Kent Road. Invariably it was me. It was a joke really; my way of repaying him for the lesson. And I was the eldest and making more money. Then the Prettymans moved out of town to Edgware. Jim got a rise and bought a full-size table of his own, and then we stopped coming to Big Henty’s. And Jim invited us over to his place for Sunday lunch, and a game, sometimes. But it was never the same after that.
‘Do you still play?’ she asked.
‘It’s been years. And you?’
‘Not since Jim went.’
‘I’m sorry about what happened, Cindy.’
‘Jim and me. Yes, I wanted to talk to you about that. You saw him on Friday.’
‘Yes, how do you know?’
‘Charlene. I’ve been talking to her a lot lately.’
‘Charlene?’
‘Charlene Birkett. The tall girl we used to let our upstairs flat to … in Edgware. Now she’s Jim’s secretary.’
‘I saw her. I didn’t recognize her. I thought she was American.’ So that’s why she’d smiled at me: I thought it was my animal magnetism.
‘Yes,’ said Cindy, ‘she went to New York and couldn’t get a job until Jim fixed up for her to work for him. There was never anything between them,’ she added hurriedly. ‘Charlene’s a sweet girl. They say she’s really blossomed since living there and wearing contact lenses.’
‘I remember her,’ I said. I did remember her; a stooped, mousy girl with glasses and frizzy hair, quite unlike the shapely Amazon I’d seen in Jim’s office. ‘Yes, she’s changed a lot.’
‘People do change when they live in America.’
‘But you didn’t want to go?’
‘America? My dad would have died.’ You could hear the northern accent now. ‘I didn’t want to change.’ Then she said, solemnly, ‘Oh, doesn’t that sound awful? I didn’t mean that exactly.’
‘People go there and they get richer,’ I said. ‘That’s what the real change is.’
‘Jim got the divorce in Mexico,’ she said. ‘Someone told me that it’s not really legal. A friend of mine: she works in the American embassy. She said Mexican marriages and divorces aren’t legal here. Is that true, Bernard?’
‘I don’t imagine that the Mexican ambassador is living in sin, if that’s what you mean.’
‘But how do I stand, Bernard? He married this other woman. I mean, how do I stand now?’
‘Didn’t you talk to him about it?’ My eyes had become accustomed to the darkness now and I could see her better. She hadn’t changed much, she was the same tiny bundle of brains and nervous energy. She was short with a full figure but had never been plump. She was attractive in an austere way with dark hair that she kept short so it would be no trouble to her. But her nose was reddened as if she had a cold and her eyes were watery.
‘He asked me to go with him.’ She was proud of that and she wanted me to know.
‘I know he did. He told everyone that you would change your mind.’
‘No. I had my job!’ she said, her voice rising as if to repeat the arguments they’d had about it.
‘It’s a difficult decision,’ I said to calm her. In the silence there was a sudden loud throbbing noise close by. She jumped almost out of her skin. Then she realized that it was the freezer cabinet in the corner and she smiled.
‘Perhaps I should have done. It would have been better I suppose.’
‘It’s too late now, Cindy,’ I said hurriedly before she started to go weepy on me.
‘I know; I know; I know.’ She got a handkerchief from her pocket but rolled it up and gripped it tight in her red-knuckled hand as if resolving not to sob.
‘Perhaps you should see a lawyer,’ I said.
‘What do they know?’ she said contemptuously. ‘I’ve seen three lawyers. They pass you on one from the other like a parcel, and by the time I was finished paying out all the fees I knew that some law books say one thing and other law books say different.’
‘The lawyers can quote from the law books until they are blue in the face,’ I said. ‘But eventually people have to sort out the solutions with each other. Going to lawyers is just an expensive way of putting off what you’re going to have to do anyway.’
‘Is that what you really think, Bernard?’
‘More or less,’ I said. ‘Buying a house, making a will, getting divorced. Providing you know what you want, you don’t need a lawyer for any of that.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What’s more important than getting married, and you don’t go to a lawyer to do that.’
‘In foreign countries you do,’ I told her. ‘Couples don’t get married without signing a marriage contract. They never have this sort of problem that you have. They decide