The Spree

The old man--but when does old age begin?--the old man turned over in bed and, putting out his hand to rest on the crest of his wife's beautiful white rising hip and comforting bottom, hit the wall with his knuckles and woke up. More than once during the two years since she had died he had done this and knew that if old age vanished in the morning, it came on at night, filling the bedroom with people until, switching on the light, he saw it staring at him; then it stalked off and left him looking at the face of the clock. Three more hours before breakfast; the hunger of loss yawned under his ribs. Trying to make out the figures on the clock, he dropped off to sleep again and was walking up Regent Street seeing, on the other side of it, a very high-bred white dog, long in the legs and distinguished in its step, hurrying up to Oxford Circus, pausing at each street corner in doubt, looking up at each person as he passed and whimpering politely to him, "Me? Me? Me?" and going on when he did not answer. A valuable dog like that, lost! Someone will pick it up, lead it off, sell it to the hospital and doctors will cut it up! The old man woke up with (continued on page 282)The Spree(continued from page 161) a shout to stop the crime and then he saw daylight in the room and heard bare feet running past his room and the shouts of his three grandchildren and his daughter-in-law calling "Ssh! Don't wake Grandpa."

The old man got out of bed and stood looking indignantly at the mirror over the washbasin and at his empty gums. It was terrible to think, as he put his teeth in to cover the horror of his mouth, that 12 or 14 hours of this London daylight were stacked up meaninglessly waiting for him. He pulled himself together. As he washed, listening to the noises of the house, he made up a speech to say to his son, who must be downstairs by now.

"I am not saying I am ungrateful. But old and young are not meant to be together. You've got your life. I've got mine. The children are sweet--you're too sharp with them--but I can't stand the noise. I don't want to live at your expense. I want a place of my own. Where I can breathe. Like Frenchy." And as he said this, speaking into the towel and listening to the tap running, he could see and hear Frenchy, who was his dentist but who looked like a rascally prophet in his white coat and was 70 if he was a day, saying to him as he looked down into his mouth and as if he were actually tinkering with a property there:

"You ought to do what I've done. Get a house by the sea. It keeps you young."

Frenchy vanished, leaving him ten years younger. The old man got into his shirt and trousers and was carefully spreading and puffing up his sparse black-and-gray hair across his head when in came his daughter-in-law, accusing him--why did she accuse?

"Grandpa! You're up!"

She was like a soft Jersey cow with eyes too big and reproachful. She was bringing him tea, the dear sweet tiresome woman.

"Of course I'm up," he said.

One glance at the tea showed him it was not like the tea he used to make for his wife when she was alive, but had too much milk in it, always tepid, left standing somewhere. He held his hairbrush up and he suddenly said, asserting his right to live, to get out of the house, in air he could breathe:

"I'm going in to London to get my hair cut."

"Are you sure you'll be all right?"

"Why do you say that?" he said severely. "I've got several things I want to do."

And, when she had gone, he heard her say on the stairs:

"He's going to get his hair cut!"

And his son saying, "Not again!"

• • •

This business, this defiance of the haircut! It was not a mere scissoring and clipping of the hair, for the old man. It was a ceremonial of freedom; it had the whiff of orgy, the incitement of a ritual. As the years went by, leaving him in such a financial mess that he was now down to not much more than a pension, it signified a desire--but what desire? To be memorable in some streets of London or, at the least, as evocative as an incense. The desire would come to him, on summer days like this, when he walked in his son's suburban garden, to sniff and to pick a rose for his buttonhole; and then, already intoxicated, he marched out the garden gate on to the street and to the bus stop, upright and vigorous, carrying his weight well and pink in the face. The scents of the barbers had been creeping into his nostrils, his chest, even went down to his legs. To be clipped, oiled and perfumed was to be free.

So, on this decent July morning in the sun-shot and acid suburban mist, he stood in a short queue for the bus, and if anyone had spoken to him, he would gladly have said to put them in their place:

"Times have changed. Before I retired, when Kate was alive--though I must honestly say we often had words about it--I always took a cab."

The bus came and whooshed him down to Knightsbridge, to his temple--the most expensive of the big shops. There, reborn on miles of carpet, he paused and sauntered, sauntered and paused. He was inflamed by hall after hall of women's dresses and hats, by cosmetics and jewelry. Scores of women were there. Glad to be cooled off, he passed into the echoing hall of provisions. He saw the game, the salmon and the cheese. He ate them and moved on to lose 20 years in the men's clothing department, where, among ties and brilliant shirts and jackets, his stern yet bashful pink face woke up to the loot and his ears heard the voices of the rich, the grave chorus of male self-approval. He went to the end, where the oak stairs led down to the barbers; there, cool as clergy, they stood gossiping in their white coats. One came forward, seated him and dressed him up like a baby. And then--nothing happened. He was the only customer and the barber took a few steps back toward the group, saying:

"He wasn't at the staff meeting."

The old man tapped his finger irritably under his sheet. Barbers did not cut hair, it seemed. They went to staff meetings. One called back:

"Mr. Holderness seconded it." Who was Holderness?

"Where is Charles?" said the old man to call the barbers to order. Obsequiously, the man began that pretty music with his scissors.

"Charles?" said the barber.

"Yes. Charles. He shaved me for twenty years."

"He retired." Another emptiness, another cavern, opened inside the old man.

"Retired? He was a child!"

"All the old ones have retired." The barber had lost his priestly look. He looked sinful, even criminal, certainly hypocritical.

And although the old man's head was being washed with lotions and oils and there was a tickling freshness about the ears and his nostrils quickened, there was something uneasy about the experience. In days gone by, the place had been baronial; now it seemed not quite to gleam. One could not be a sultan among a miserable remnant of men who held staff meetings. When the old man left, the woman at the desk went on talking as she took his money and did not know his name. When he went upstairs, he paused to look back--no, the place was a palace of pleasure no longer. It was the place where--except for the staff--no one was known.

And that was what struck him when he stepped out the glancing swing doors of the shop, glad to be out in the July sun, that here he was cool, scented and lightheaded as a sultan, extraordinary in a way, sacred almost, ready for anything, but cut off from expectancy, unknown nowadays to anybody, free for nothing, liberty evaporating out of the tips of his shoes. He dissembled leisure. His walk became slower and gliding. For an hour, shop windows distracted him, new shops where old had been shocked him. But, he said, pulling himself together, I must not fall into that trap: Old people live in the past. And I am not old! Old I am not! So he stopped gliding and stepped out willfully, looking so stern and with mouth turned down, so corrupt and purposeful with success that he was unnoticeable. Who notices success?

It was always--he didn't like to admit it--so often like this on these days when he made the great stand for his haircut and the exquisite smell. He would set out with a vision, it declined into a rambling dream. He fell back, like a country hare on his habitual run, to the shops that had been his customers years ago, to see what they were selling and where he knew no one now: to a café that had changed its decor, where he ate a sandwich and drank a cup of coffee; but as the dream consoled, it dissolved into final melancholy. He with his appetite for everything, who could not pass a shop window, or an estate agent's, or a fine house without greed watering in his mouth, could buy nothing. He hadn't the cash.

There was always this moment when the bottom began to fall out of his haircut days. He denied that his legs were tired, but he did slow down. It would occur to him suddenly in Piccadilly that he knew no one now in the city. He had been a buyer and seller, not a man for friends: He knew buildings, lifts, offices, but not people. Expectancy was dead. There would be nothing for it but to return home. He would drag his way to the inevitable bus stop of defeat and stand, as so many Londoners did, with surrender on their faces. He delayed it as long as he could, stopping at a street corner or gazing at a passing girl and looking around with that dishonest look a dog has when he is pretending not to hear his master's whistle. There was only one straw to clutch at. There was nothing wrong with his teeth, but he could ring up his dentist. He could ring up Frenchy. He could ring him and say: "Frenchy? How's tricks?" Sportily, and (a man for smells) he could almost smell the starch in Frenchy's white coat, the keen, chemical, hygienic smell of his room. The old gentleman considered this and then went down a couple of disheartened side streets. In a short cul-de-sac, standing outside a urinal and a few doors from a dead-looking pub, there was a telephone box. An oldish, brown motor coach was parked empty at the curb by it, its doors closed, a small crowd waiting beside it. There was a man in the telephone box, but he came out in a temper, shouting something to the crowd. The old man went into the box. He had thought of something to say:

"Hullo, Frenchy! Where is that house you were going to find me, you old rascal?"

For Frenchy came up from the sea every day. It was true that Frenchy was a rascal, especially with the women, one after the other, but looking down into the old man's mouth and chipping at a tooth, he seemed to be looking into your soul.

The old man got out his coins. He was tired, but eagerness revived him as he dialed.

"Hullo, Frenchy," he said.

But the voice that replied was not Frenchy's. It was a child's. The child was calling out: "Mum. Mum."

The old man banged down the telephone and stared at the dial. His heart thumped. He had, he realized, dialed not Frenchy's number but the number of his old house, the one he had sold after Kate had died.

The old gentleman backed out of the box and stared, tottering with horror, at it. His legs went weak, his breath had gone and sweat bubbled on his face. He steadied himself by the brick wall. He edged away from the bus and the crowd, not to be seen. He thought he was going to faint. He moved to a doorway. There was a loud laugh from the crowd as a young man with long black hair gave the back of the bus a kick. And then, suddenly, he and a few others rushed toward the old man, shouting and laughing.

"Excuse us," someone said and pushed him aside. He saw he was standing in the doorway of the pub.

"That's true," the old man murmured to himself. "Brandy is what I need."

And, at that, the rest of the little crowd pushed into him or past him. One of them was a young girl with fair hair who paused as her young man pulled her by the hand and said sweetly to the old man:

"After you."

There he was, being elbowed, traveling backward into the little bar. It was the small private bar of the pub and the old man found himself against the counter. The young people were stretching their arms across, him and calling out orders for drinks and shouting. He was wedged among them. The wild young man with the piratical look was on one side of him, the girl and her young man on the other side. The wild young man said to the others: "Wait a minute. What's yours, Dad?" The old man was bewildered.

"Brandy."

"Brandy," shouted the young man across the bar.

"That's right," said the girl to the old man, studying his face. "You have one. You ought to have got on the first bus."

"You'd have been halfway to bloody Brighton by now," said the wild young man. "The first bloody outing this firm's had in its whole bloody history and they bloody forgot the driver. Are you the driver?"

Someone called out: "No, he's not the driver."

"I had a shock," the old man began, but crowded against the bar, no one heard him.

"Drink it up, then," the girl said to him and, startled by her kindness, he drank. The brandy burned and in a minute fire went up into his head and his face lost its hard, bewildered look and it loosened into a smile. He heard their young voices flying about him. They were going to Brighton. No, the other side of Brighton. No, this side--well, bloody Hampton's mansion, estate, something. The new chairman--he'd thrown the place open. Bloody thrown it, laughed the wild man, to the works and the office and, as usual, "the works get the first bus." The young girl leaned down to smell the rose in the old man's buttonhole and said to her young man, "It's lovely. Smell it." His arm was round her waist and there were the two of them bowing to the rose.

"From your garden?" said the girl.

The old man heard himself, to his astonishment, tell a lie.

"I grew it," he said bashfully.

"We shan't bloody start for hours," someone said. "Drink up."

The old man looked at his watch: a tragic look. Soon they'd be gone. Someone said: "Which department are you in?"

"He's in the works," someone said.

"No, I've retired," said the old man, not to cause a fuss.

"Have another, Dad," said the young man. "My turn."

Three of them bent their heads to hear him say again, "I have retired," and one of them said:

"It was passed at the meeting. Anyone retired entitled to come."

"You've made a mistake," the old man began to explain to them. "I was just telephoning to my dentist."

"No," said one of the bending young men, turning to someone in the crowd. "That bastard Fowkes talked a lot of bull, but it passed."

"You're all right," the girl said to him kindly.

"He's all right," said another, handing the old man another drink.

If only they would stop shouting, the old man thought, I could explain.

"A mistake," he began again.

"It won't do you any harm," someone said. "Drink up."

Then someone shouted from the door. "He's here. The driver."

The girl pulled the old man by the arm and he found himself being hustled to the door.

"My glass," he said.

He was pushed, holding his half-empty glass, into the street. They rushed round and he stood there, glass in hand, trying to explain, trying to say goodbye, and then he followed them, still holding his glass, to explain. They shouted to him "Come on" and he politely followed to the door of the bus, where they were pushing to get in.

But at the door of the bus, everything changed. A woman wearing a flowered dress with a red belt, a woman as stout as himself, had a foot on the step of the bus and was trying to heave herself up, while people ahead of her blocked the door. She nearly fell.

The old man, all smiles and sadness, put on a dignified anger. He pushed his way toward her. He turned forbiddingly on the youngsters.

"Allow me, madam," he said and took the woman's cool, fat elbow and helped her up the step, putting his own foot on the lower one. Fatal. He was shoved up and himself pushed inside, the brandy spilling down his suit. He could not turn round. He was in, driven in deeply, to wait till the procession stopped. "I'm getting out," he said.

He flopped into the seat behind the woman.

"Young people are always in a rush," she turned to say to him.

The last to get in were the young couple.

"Break it up," said the driver.

They were slow, for they were enlaced and wanted to squeeze in united.

The old man waited for them to be seated and then stood up, glass in hand, as if offering a toast, as he moved forward to get out.

"Would you mind sitting down?" said the driver. He was counting the passengers and one, seeing the old man with the glass in his hand, said, "Cheers."

For the first time in his adult life, the old man indignantly obeyed an order. He sat down, was about to explain his glass, heard himself counted, got up. He was too late. The driver pulled a bar and slammed the door, spread his arms over the wheel and off they went, to a noise that bashed people's eyeballs.

At every change of the gears, as the bus gulped out of the narrow streets, a change took place in the old man. Shaken in the kidneys, he looked round in protest, put his glass out of sight on the floor and blushed. He was glad no one was sitting beside him, for his first idea was to scramble to the window and jump through it at the first traffic lights. The girl who had her arm round her young man looked round and smiled. Then, he too looked round at all these unknown people, belonging to a firm he had never heard of, going to a destination unknown to him, and he had the inflated sensations of an enormous human illegality. He had been kidnaped. He tipped back his hat and looked bounderish. The bus was hot and seemed to be frying in the packed traffic when it stopped at the traffic lights. People had to shout to be heard. Under cover of the general shouting, he too shouted to a couple of women across the gangway:

"Do we pass the Oval?"

The woman asked her friend, who asked the man in front, who asked the young couple. Blocks of offices went by in lumps. No one knew except someone who said, "Must do." The old man nodded. The moment the Oval cricket ground came into sight, he planned to go to the driver and tell him to let him off. So he kept his eyes open, thinking:

What a lark. What a thing to tell them at home. Guess what? Had a free ride. Cheek, my boy (he said to his son), that's what you need. Let me give you a bit of advice: You'll get nowhere without cheek.

His pink face beamed with shrewd frivolity as the bus groaned over the Thames, which had never looked so wide and sly. The young girl--restless like Kate she was--got out of her young man's arms and got him back into hers, in a tighter embrace. Three containers passed, the bus slacked, then choked forward so suddenly that the old man's head nearly hit the back of the head of the fat lady in front. He studied it and noticed the way the woman's thick hair, gold with gray in it, was darker as it came out of her neck like a growing plant and he thought, as he had often done, how much better a woman's head looks from behind, the face interferes with it in front. And then his own chin fell forward and he began a voluptuous journey down corridors. One more look at the power station, which had become several jumping power stations, giving higher and higher leaps in the air, and he was asleep.

A snore came from him. The talking woman across the gangway was annoyed by this soliloquizing noise, which seemed to offer a rival narrative; but others admired it for its steadiness, which peacefully mocked the unsteady recovery and spitting and fading energy of the bus and the desperation of the driver. Between their shouts at the driver, many glanced admiringly at the sleeper. He was swinging pleasurably in some private barbers' shop that swerved through space, sometimes in some airy corridor, at other times circling beneficently round a cricket match in which Frenchy, the umpire in his white linen coat, was offering him a plate of cold salmon, which his daughter-in-law was trying to stop him from eating, so that he was off the bus, striking his way home on foot at the tail of the longest funeral procession he had ever seen, going uphill for miles into fields that were getting greener and colder and emptier as snow came on and he sat down, plonk, out of breath, waking up to hear the weeping of the crowds, all weeping for him, and then, still waking, he saw himself outside the tall glass walls of a hospital. It must be a hospital, for inside two men in white could be clearly seen in a glass-enclosed room, one of them the driver, getting ready to carry him in on a stretcher. He gasped, now fully awake. There was absolute silence. The bus had stopped: It was empty; he was alone in it, except for the woman, who, thank God, was still sitting in front of him, the hair still growing from the back of her neck.

"Where----" he began. Then he saw that the hospital was, in fact, a garage. The passengers had got out, garage men were looking under the bonnet of the bus. The woman turned round. He saw a mild face, without make-up.

"We've broken down," she said.

How grateful he was for that mild face. He had thought he was dead.

"I've been asleep," he said. "Where are we?" He nearly said: Have we passed the Oval? but swallowed that silly question. "Quarter past three," he said. Meaning 30 miles out, stuck fast in derelict country at a crossroads, with a few villas sticking out in fields, eating into the grass among a few trees, with a hoarding on the far side of the highway saying blatantly, Mortgages, and the cars dashing by in flights like birds, 20 at a time, still weeping away westward into space.

The woman had turned to study him and when he got up, flustered, she said in a strict but lofty voice:

"Sit down."

He sat down.

"Don't move," she said. "I'm not going to move. They've made a mess of it. Let them put it right."

She had now twisted round and he saw her wide full face, as meaty as an obstinate country girl's, and with a smile that made her look as if she were evaporating.

"This is Hampton's doing," she said. "Anything to save money. I am going to tell him what I think of him when I see him. No one in charge. Not even the driver--listen to him. Treat you like cattle. They've got to send another bus. Don't you move until it comes."

Having said this, she was happy.

"When my husband was on the board, nothing like this happened. Do you know anyone here? I don't."

She studied his gray hair.

The old man clung for the moment to the fact that they were united in not knowing anybody. His secretiveness was coming back.

"I've retired," he said.

The woman leaned farther over the back of the seat and looked around the empty bus and then back at him as if she had captured him. Her full lips were the resting lips of a stout woman between meals.

"I must have seen you at the works with John," she said. "It was always a family in those days. Or were you in the office?"

I must get out of this, the old man was thinking and he sat forward, nearer to her, ready to get out once more. I must find out the name of this place, get a train or a bus or something, get back home.

But, since his wife had died, he had never been as near to a strange woman's face. It was a wide, ordinary, babylike face damp in the skin, with big blue eyes under fair, skimpy eyebrows, and she studied him as a soft, plump child would study--for no reason, beyond an assumption that he and she were together in this: They weren't such fools, at their ages, to get off the bus. But it was less the nearness of the face than her voice that kept him there.

It was a soft, high voice that seemed to blow away like a child's and was far too young for her, even sounded so purely truthful as to be false. It came out on deep breaths drawn up from soft but heavy breasts that looked as though they could kick up a hullabaloo, a voice that suggested that by some inner right she would say what suited her. It was the kind of voice that made the old man swell with a polite, immensely intimate desire to knock the nonsense out of her head.

"I can smell your rose from here," she said. "There are not many left who knew the firm in John's time. It was John's lifework."

He smiled complacently. He had his secret.

She paused and then the childish voice went suddenly higher. She was not simply addressing him. She was addressing a meeting.

"I told him that when he let Hampton flatter him, he'd be out in a year. I said to John, 'He's jealous. He's been jealous all the time.'"

The woman paused. Then her chin and her lips stuck out and her eyes that had looked so vague began to bulge and her voice went suddenly deep, rumbling with prophecy.

" 'He wants to kill you,' I said. You," said the woman to the old man, "must have seen it. And he did kill him. We went on a trip round the world, America, Japan," her voice sailed across countries. "That's where he died. If he thinks he can wipe out that by throwing his place open to the staff and getting me down there, he's wrong."

My God, she's as mad as Kate's sister used to get after her husband died, thought the old man. I'm sitting behind a madwoman.

"Dawson," she said and abruptly stood up as the old man rose, too. "Oh," she said in her high regal style, gazing away out the window of the bus. "I remember your name now. You had that row, that terrible row--oh, yes," she said eagerly, the conspirator. "You ring up Hampton. He'll listen to you. I've got the number here. You tell him there are twenty-seven of his employees stranded on the Brighton road."

The old man sighed. He gave up all idea of slipping out. When a woman orders you about, what do you do? He thought she looked rather fine standing there prophetically. The one thing to do in such cases is to be memorable. When is a man most memorable? When he says no.

"No, I wouldn't think of it," he said curtly. "Mr. Hampton and I are not on speaking terms."

"Why?" said the woman, distracted by curiosity.

"Mr. Hampton and I," he began and he looked very gravely at her for a long time. "I have never heard of him. Who is he? I'm not on the staff. I've never heard of the firm." And then, like a conjurer waving a handkerchief, he spread his face into a smile that had often got him an order in the old days. "I just got on the bus for the ride. Someone said, 'Brighton.' 'Day at the sea,' I said. 'Suits me.' "

The woman's face went the color of liver with rage and unbelief. One for the law, all the rage she had just been feeling about Hampton now switched to the old man. She was unbelieving.

"No one check?" she said, her voice throbbing. She was boiling up like the police.

The old gentleman just shook his head gently. "No one checked"--it was a definition of paradise. If he had wings, he would have spread them, taken to the air and flown round her three times, saying, "Not a soul! Not a soul!"

She was looking him up and down. He stood with a plump man's dignity, but what saved him in her eyes were his smart, well-cut clothes, his trim hair and the jaunty rose: He looked like an old rip, a racing man, probably a crook; at any rate, a bit of a rogue on the spree, yet innocent, too. She studied his shoes and he moved a foot and kicked the brandy glass and it rolled into the gangway, and he smiled slightly.

"You've got a nerve," she said, her smile spreading.

"Sick of sitting at home," he said. Weighing her up--not so much her character but her body--he said: "I've been living with my daughter-in-law since my wife died."

He burst out with confidence, for he saw he had almost conquered her.

"Young and old don't mix. Brighton would suit me. I thought I would have a look round for a house."

Her eyes were still busily going over him.

"You're a spark," she said, still staring. Then she saw the glass and bent down to pick it up. As she straightened, she leaned on the back of the seat and laughed out loud.

"You just got on. Oh, dear," she laughed loudly, helplessly. "Serves Hampton right. Sit down," she said. He sat down. She sat down on the seat opposite. He was astonished and even shy to see his peculiar case appreciated and his peculiarity grew in his mind from a joke to a poem, from a poem to a dogma.

"I meant to get off at the Oval, but I dropped off to sleep." He laughed.

"Going to see the cricket?" she said.

"No," he said. "Home--I mean, my son's place." The whole thing began to appear lovely to him. He felt as she laughed at him, as she still held the glass, twiddling it by the stem, that he was remarkable.

"Years ago I did it once before," he said, multiplying his marvels. "When my wife was alive. I got a late train from London, went to sleep and woke up in Bath. I did. I really did. Stayed at the Royal. Saw a customer next day. He was so surprised to see me he gave me an order worth three hundred pounds. My wife didn't believe me."

"Well, can you blame her?" the woman said.

The driver walked in from the office of the garage and put his head into the bus and called out:

"They're sending a new bus. Be here four o'clock."

The old man turned. "By the way, I'm getting off," he shouted to the driver.

"Aren't you going on?" said the woman. "I thought you said you were having a trip to the sea."

She wanted him to stay.

• • •

"To be frank," said the old man, "these youngsters--we'd been having a drink, they meant no harm--pushed me on when I was giving you a hand. I was in the pub. I had a bit of a shock. I did something foolish. Painful, really."

"What was that?" she said.

"Well," said the old man, swanking in his embarrassment and going very red. "I went to this telephone box, you know, where the bus started from, to ring up my dentist--Frenchy. I sometimes ring him up, but I got through to the wrong number. You know what I did? I rang the number of my old house, when Kate--when my wife--was alive. Some girl answered, maybe a boy, I don't know. It gave me a turn, doing a thing like that. I thought my mind had gone."

"Well, the number would have changed."

"I thought, I really did think, for a second, it was my wife."

The traffic on the main road sobbed or whistled as they talked. Containers, private cars, police cars, breakdown vans, cars with boats on their roofs--all sobbing their hearts out in a panic to get somewhere else.

"When did your wife die?" said the woman. "Just recently?"

"Two years ago," he said.

"It was grief. That is what it was--grief," she said gravely and looked away from him into the sky outside and to the derelict bit of country.

That voice of hers, by turns childish, silly, passing to the higher notes of the exalted and belligerent widow--all that talk of partners killing each other!--had become, as his wife's used to do after some tantrum, simply plain.

Grief. Yes, it was. He blinked away the threat of tears before her understanding. In these two years he seemed, because of his loneliness, to be dragging an increasing load of unsaid things behind him, things he had no one to tell. With his son and his daughter-in-law and their young friends, he sat with his mouth open ready to speak, but he could never get a word in. The words simply fell back down his throat. He had a load of what people call boring things that he could not say: He had loved his wife; she had bored him; it had become a bond. What he needed was not friends, for since so many friends had died he had become a stranger: He needed another stranger. Perhaps like this woman, whose face was as blank as his was, time having worn all expression from it. Because of that she looked now, if not as old as he was, full of life you could see, but had joined his lonely race, and had lost the look of going nowhere. He lowered his eyes and became shy. Grief--what was it? A craving. Yet not for a face or even a voice or even for love, but for a body. But dressed. Say, in a flowered dress.

To get his mind off a thought so bold, he uttered one of the boring things, a sort of sample of what he would have said to his wife.

"Silly thing. Last night I had a dream about a dog," he began, to test her out as a stranger to whom you could say any damn silly thing. A friend would never listen to "damn silly things."

The woman repeated, going back to what she had already said, as women do:

"Remembering the telephone number--it was grief." And then went off at a tangent, roughly. "Don't mention dreams to me. Last week down at the bungalow I saw my husband walk across the sitting room clean through the electric fire and the mirror over the mantelpiece and stand on the other side of it, not looking at me, but saying something to me that I couldn't hear--asking for a box of matches, I expect."

"Imagination," said the old man, sternly correcting her. He had no desire to hear of her dead husband's antics, but he did feel that warm, already possessive desire to knock sense into her. It was a delightful feeling.

"It wasn't imagination," she said, squaring up to him. "I packed my things and went to London at once. I couldn't stand it. I drove into Brighton, left the car at the station and went up to London for a few days. That is why, when I heard about Hampton's party at the office, I took this bus. Saved the train fare," she grinned. "I told Hampton I was coming to the party, but I'm not. I'm picking up the car at Brighton and going home to the bungalow. It's only seven miles away."

She waited to see if he would laugh at their being in the same boat. He did not and that impressed her, but she sulked. Her husband would not have laughed, either.

"I dread going back," she said sulkily.

"I sold my place," he said. "I know the feeling."

"You were right," said the woman. "That's what I ought to do. Sell the place. I'd get a good price, too. I'm not exactly looking forward to going back there this evening. It's very isolated--but the cat's there."

He said nothing. Earnestly, she said: "You've got your son and daughter-in-law waiting for you," giving him a pat on the knee. "Someone to talk to. You're lucky."

The driver put his head in the door and said:

"All out. The other bus is here."

"That's us," said the woman.

The crowd outside was indeed getting into the new bus. The old man followed her out and looked back at the empty seats with regret. At the door he stepped past her and handed her out. She was stout but landed light as a feather. The wild young man and his friends were shouting, full of new beer, bottles in their pockets. The others trooped in.

"Goodbye," said the old man, doing his memorable turn.

"You're not going?" said the woman. And then she said, quietly, looking round secretively, "I won't say anything. You can't give up now. You're worried about your daughter-in-law, I know," she said.

The old man resented that. "That doesn't worry me," he said.

"You ought to think of them," she said. "You ought to."

There was a shout of vulgar laughter from the wild young man and his friends. They had seen the two young lovers a long way off walking slowly, with all time to themselves, toward the bus. They had been off on their own.

"Worn yourselves out up in the fields," bawled the wild young man and he got the driver to sound the horn on the wheel insistently at them.

"You can ring from my place," said the woman.

The old man put on his air of being offended.

"You might buy my house," she tempted.

The two lovers arrived and everyone laughed. The girl--so like his wife when she was young--smiled at him.

"No. I can get the train back from Brighton," the old man said.

"Get in," called the driver.

The old man assembled 70 years of dignity. He did this because dignity seemed to make him invisible. He gave a lift to the woman's elbow, he followed her, he looked for a seat and when she made room for him beside her, invisibly he sat there. She laughed hungrily, showing all her teeth. He gave a very wide sudden smile. The busload chattered and some began to sing and shout and the young couple, getting into their clinch again, slept. The bus shook off the last of the towny places, whipped through short villages, passed pubs with animal names, The Fox, The Red Lion, The Dog and Duck, The Greyhound and one with a new sign, The Dragon. It tunneled under miles of trees, breathed afresh in scampering fields and 30 miles of greenery, public and private: until, slowly, the bald hills near the sea came up and, under them, distant seams of chalk. Farther and farther the bus went and the bald hills grew taller and nearer.

The woman gazed disapprovingly at the young couple and was about to say something to the old man when, suddenly, at the sight of his spry profile, she began to think--in exquisite panic--of criminals. A man like this was just the kind, outwardly respectable, who would go down to Hampton's garden party to case the place--as she had read--pass as a member of the staff, steal jewelry or plan a huge burglary. Or come to her house and bash her. The people who lived only a mile and a half from where she lived had had burglars when they were away: Someone had been watching the house. They believed it was someone who had heard the house was for sale and had called. Beside her front door, behind a bush, she kept an iron bar. She always picked it up before she got her key out--in case. She saw herself now suddenly hitting out with it passionately, so that her heart raced, then, having bashed the old man, she calmed down; or, rather, she sailed into one of her exalted moods. She was wearing a heavy silver ring with a large brown stone in it, a stone that looked violet in some lights, and she said in her most genteel, faraway voice:

"When I was in India, an Indian prince gave this ring to me, when my husband died. It's very rare. It's one of those rings they wear for protection. He loved my husband. He gave it to me. They believe in magic."

She took it off and gave it to the old man.

"I always wear it. The people down the road were burgled."

The old man looked at the ring. It was very ugly and he gave it back to her.

What fools women are, he thought and felt a huge excess of strength; but aloud he said:

"Very nice." And, not to be outdone, he said: "My wife died in the Azores."

She took a deep breath. The bus had broken through the hills and now cliffs of red houses had built up on either side and the city trees and gardens grew thicker and richer. The sunlight seemed to splash down in waves between them and over them. She grasped his arm.

"I can smell the sea already!" she said. "What are you going to tell your daughter-in-law when you ring up? I told the driver to stop at the station."

"Tell them?" said the old man. A brilliant idea occurred to him.

"I'll tell them I just dropped in on the Canary Islands," he said.

The woman let go of his arm and, after one glance, choked with laughter.

"Why not?" he said, grinning. "They ask too many questions. 'Where have you been?' 'What are you doing?' Or I might say Boulogne. Why not?"

"Well, it's nearer," she said. "But you must explain."

The wild young man suddenly shouted:

"Where's he taking us now?" as the bus turned off the main road.

"He's dropping us at the station," the woman called out, bossing them. And, indeed, speeding no more, grunting down side streets, the bus made for the station and stopped at the entrance to the station yard.

"Here we are," she said. "I'll get my car." She pulled him by the sleeve to the door and he helped her out.

They stood on the pavement, surprised to see the houses and shops of the city stand still, every window looking at them. Brusquely, cutting them off, the bus drove away downhill and left them to watch it out of sight. The old man blinked, staring at the last of the bus and the woman's face, aged.

It was the moment to be memorable, but he was so taken aback by her heavy look that he said:

"You ought to have stayed on, gone to the party."

"No," she said, shaking brightness onto her face. "I'll get my car. It was just seeing one's life drive off. Don't you feel that sometimes?"

"No," he said. "Not mine. Theirs." And he straightened up, looked at his watch and then down the long hill. He put out his hand. "I'm going to have a look at the sea."

And, indeed, in a pale-blue wall on this July day, the sea showed between the houses. Or the sky. Hard to tell which.

She said: "Wait for me to get my car. I'll drive you down. I tell you what--I'll get my car. We'll drive to my house and have a cup of tea or a drink and you can telephone from there and I'll bring you back in for your train."

He still hesitated.

"I dreaded that journey. You made me laugh," she said.

• • •

And that is what they did. He admired her managing arms and knees as she drove out of the city into the confusing lanes.

"It's nice of you to come. I get nervous going back," she said as they turned into the drive of one of the ugliest bungalows he had ever seen, on top of the downs close to a couple of ragged firs torn and bent by the wind. A cat raced them to the door. She showed him the iron bar she kept behind the bush by the door. A few miles away, between a dip in the downs, was the pale-blue sea again, shaped like her lower lip.

There were her brass Indian objects on the wall of the sitting room and on the mantelpiece and, leaning against the mirror he had walked through, was the photograph of her husband. Pull down a few walls, reface the front, move out the furniture, that's what you'd have to do, he thought, when she went off to another room and came back with the tea tray, wearing a white dress with red poppies on it.

"Now telephone," she said. "I'll get the number." But she did not give him the instrument until she heard a child answer it. That killed her last suspicion.

"I want twenty-one thousand pounds for the house," she said grandly after he had spoken to his daughter-in-law.

The sum was so preposterous that it seemed to explode in his head and made him spill his tea in his saucer.

"If I decide to sell," she said, noticing his shock.

"If anyone offers you that," he said dryly, "I advise you to jump at it."

They regarded each other with disappointment.

"I'll show you the garden. My husband worked hard in it," she said. "Are you a gardener?"

"Not any longer," he said as he followed her sulking across the lawn. She was sulking, too. A thin film of cloud came over the late-afternoon sky.

"Well, if you're interested, let me know," she said. "I'll drive you to the station."

And she did, taking him the long way round the coast road, and there, indeed, was the sea, the real sea, all of it, spread out like the skirt of some sly and lazy old landlady with children playing all along the fringes on the beaches. He liked being with the woman in the car, but he was sad his day was ending.

"I feel better," she said. "I think I'll go to Hampton's, after all," she said, watching him. "I feel like a spree."

But he did not rise. Twenty-one thousand! The ideas women have! At the station he shook hands and she said:

"Next time you come to Brighton ..." and she touched his rose with her finger. The rose was drooping. He got on the train.

• • •

"Who is this ladyfriend who keeps ringing you up from Brighton?" his daughter-in-law said in her lowing voice, several times in the following weeks. Always questions.

"A couple I met at Frenchy's," he said on the spur of the moment.

"You didn't say you'd seen Frenchy. How is he?" his son said.

"Didn't I?" said the old man. "I might go down to see them next week. But I don't know. Frenchy's heard of a house."

But the old man knew that what he needed was not a house.