“He’s in advertising,” Jean said.
I grimaced.
“Don’t be bitchy,” she said. “It’s not your thing, darling, it really isn’t.”
“It isn’t me who’s been bitchy,” I said. “Who is he anyway? He knows me but I’m damned if I know him.”
“You mean you don’t know him?” She seemed incredulous.
“If he comes from Warley I might have seen him about the place.”
“His name’s Kelstedge.”
“I’ve heard it somewhere before. A long time ago.”
“Hasn’t Susan ever talked about him?” There was a sly smile on her face.
“Come off it,” I said. “Tell me the truth. They say the husband’s the last one to know—”
She laughed. “Jeff? He hardly ever goes to Warley. No, he’s an old flame. Extinct, in fact.”
The memory was coming to the surface now. The clerk who’d been run out of town by my father-in-law. He looked as if he’d run away.
“I suppose he’s told you all about it,” I said.
“He never discusses it.”
“Susan doesn’t either,” I said. “It wasn’t anything – just calf love.” But she hadn’t seen it like that; those were my father-in-law’s words, spoken a long time ago, before I was married. And when my status hadn’t been very much different from Jeff Kelstedge’s. How had she seen it? When had she talked about it to me? If you live ten years with a woman not much is left unsaid. I could remember now the night when she’d screamed that Jack Wales was twice the man I was and she wished to God she’d married him. I could remember – it was as if the dragnet was bringing up old boots and rusty tins – the party at which she’d met Adam Loring, Warley’s own stage celebrity, fresh from an American tour, and had wondered, rather too loudly and vehemently, what it would have been like to have been married to him. But I couldn’t remember her mentioning Jeff Kelstedge. It seemed essential that I should; I stared at him scowling with concentration.
“Never mind him, darling,” Jean said. “He’s Jackie’s pal anyway, not mine. She’s the lame dog collector in this establishment.” She moved closer to me. “You haven’t told me how you like our flat.”
“It’s cosy,” I said.
“This room is the studio,” she said. “It’s the wrong shape and size, but if you call a room a studio you needn’t have much furniture. The studio couch and the suite are rather grand, but Mummy and Daddy gave me those. And Jackie and I did the distempering.” She looked at my empty glass. “Do you need another, Joe?”
“Presently,” I said. I had a feeling of being let down. Here I was at a party in a mews flat in London; and I didn’t feel any different. I was in a rather bare room with streakily distempered pink walls and an odd assortment of furniture, talking to a pretty girl who happened to be an actress; there was no more to it than that.