‘I wouldn’t call that ordinary,’ Colin said. ‘Having this madwoman up in the attic, biting people.’
‘Stabbing,’ Isabel said.
‘Stabbing, biting…though come to think of it, it happens all the time in the classes I teach.’
‘Well, there you are then,’ Mrs Wells said. ‘Miss Field, have you got an interesting experience?’
Colin turned in his chair, all attention. The Duke of Norfolk, he thought; not altogether inconsequentially, because it was the name of the pub to which he hoped to take Isabel Field.
The lounge of the public house was heaving with wet raincoats, smelling of damp fake-furs and warming plastic. Electric coals twinkled merrily; above the bar, coloured Christmas lights winked around the calendar, and a notice informed the public that spirits are served in measures of one-sixth of a gill. Colin read it avidly, and the notice which said he didn’t have to be mad to work here but it helped. It was half-past nine, filling up. Colin manoeuvred for a corner table, and read the beermat as he pulled out Isabel’s chair, thinking, nobody pulls out chairs in a pub, what do you think it is, the bloody Dorchester? He was very anxious about the impression he was making.
‘It’s the nearest,’ he said apologetically, ‘and it’s quite nice really, you never get any rowdy people.’
‘No horse-brasses. Good.’
‘Plastic beams are my bête noire. What will you have to drink?’
She hesitated. ‘Gin.’
‘Righto.’
Colin began to push his way to the bar. Singularly failing, as always, to catch the barmaid’s eye, he took time to look back at Isabel. Her eyes were cast down; perhaps she also read beermats. Her fingers were interlaced on the table in front of her in a formal pose, as if she were about to deliver a public statement. Patience on a monument, smiling at grief, Colin thought. This terrible habit of inappropriate quotation. How do you know she has a grief, perhaps she is just waiting for her drink, perhaps she doesn’t like to stare around her. Absolutely the worst you can do, he thought, is to fail. Isolated in his gaze, she gave the effect of a study, monochrome, perhaps the unnoticed frame on the back wall of an exhibition, or one of those grainy smudged photographs of Russian streets, a woman looking indistinctly for a moment into the lens of a strange culture. Her clothes were always beige or charcoal or grey, or a peculiarly soft dead green which he had never seen on anyone else. But then he had never looked.
He set the glass down in front of her, gin and orange.
‘Oh, no, no,’ she said quickly, ‘this wasn’t what I meant.’
Colin’s face creased with concern. ‘I’m sorry, was it gin and tonic you wanted, you didn’t—’
He began to get heavily to his feet. She arrested him with a quick flicking motion of her hand.
‘This will be fine.’ She picked up the glass and looked down into it, as if it contained a rare fish. ‘I’ve never had one of these before,’ she said.
She sipped the drink very quickly. She’s nervous, he thought, not as collected as she likes to appear, she’s a highly-strung young woman.
‘You have to ask for what you want,’ he said gently, as if instructing a child.
She smiled. ‘Yes, I know.’
There was a pause.
‘Sylvia always—Sylvia is my wife.’
‘I didn’t think you were married.’
‘No? I don’t look married?’
‘You look unkempt.’
‘She tries,’ Colin said dismally. ‘I’m just an untidy person. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I brought my wife into the conversation.’
‘There was no conversation for you to bring her into,’ Isabel said. ‘There seems to be one now.’
‘I suppose now that—well, you won’t want to…’
‘What?’
‘Have a drink.’
‘Because you are married?’
‘Yes.’
‘Drinking gin is not really the same as committing adultery. Though I daresay it sometimes precedes it. I don’t know. I have no experience.’ She took a sip from her glass, her eyes fixed on his face. ‘Would she mind?’
‘I don’t know,’ Colin said. He honestly did not. He wracked his brains, but could get no further. It must be very remote from Sylvia’s reckoning, that anyone would agree to have a drink with him. He wanted to say, why are you here, I am not good-looking, I have nothing you could possibly want.
‘There’s Mr Cartwright,’ Isabel said. ‘His ears stick out, don’t they? I hope they’re not all going to come in here. Mr Cartwright writes fairy stories.’
‘What? Oh, yes,’ Colin said. ‘I thought he wrote Humour in Uniform.’
‘And fairy stories. Didn’t you listen?’
‘No, I never listen.’
‘He showed me one last week. I suppose he thought I might be sympathetic’
Colin looked at her appraisingly. He would not have thought so, himself.
‘Do you find it, you know, valuable, this class?’ he asked her.
‘No.’
‘You don’t?’
‘It’s not much our sort of thing, is it?’
Then she did see, she did feel, that there was some bond between them; Colin put the back of his hand to his forehead, as if he expected to find it warm. ‘Then why do you come?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. Why do you?’
‘To get away from Sylvia.’ He hunched forward. It had taken such a long time to grasp, such a short time to say. ‘Last year I took Italian conversation and car maintenance and Poets of the First World War.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Isabel said.
‘You see some connection?’
‘No.’
‘You sounded as if you saw some connection. As if it were significant.’
‘There is no connection. That is what is significant.’
‘I am a schoolteacher,’ Colin said.
‘Ah, then the general information is of use to you.’
‘No, not really.’ He felt defeated. ‘I just do it, as I say, I want to get away from my wife.’
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘Nothing. She’s a nice woman.’
‘How many children have you got?’
‘Three. Suzanne, she’s eight, Alistair’s nearly six, Karen’s three.’
‘Are you going to have any more?’
‘Not if I can help it.’
‘I was watching you,’ she said. ‘In the classroom. Trying to analyse you. You seem so discontented.’
‘Do you like analysing people?’
‘It passes the time.’
‘Is that a main concern of yours?’
‘Well, not really,’ she said. ‘It passes itself, without our assistance. It has the knack.’
‘I’m in love with you,’ Colin said.
‘That’s