London Transports by Maeve Binchy Page B

cheerfully. “Meeting some bird more likely. You won’t find any doctors in Harley Street today. You’d better keep an eye on your old man, my darling, he’s with some blonde.”
    He smiled a big cockney grin, full of quickness and good humour. He liked most people he met, this boy did. He didn’t particularly fancy her probably, he was like this with old dears of a hundred and with fellows as well.
    “It’s possible,” she said. “Quite possible.”
    The red-haired boy looked alarmed. She must look as if she were going mad again; he must be regretting his little pleasantry.
    “He’d be mad if he was,” he said. “Lovely woman like you, no blonde could be any better. No, he’d need his head examined he would, if he told you he was going to a doctor and went off to hold hands in a park with a blonde.”
    His face had a kind of transparency about it. It was watery somehow, with pale eyes set far apart from each other. It was a very simple face. It wouldn’t disguise things, and look differently to the way it was feeling. It wasn’t the kind of face that could smile and tell you that its health needed a checkup if it wasn’t true. That face could never become troubled and talk about its marriage having been a sad sort of thing, better not spoken of, if in fact his wife was pregnant and he was planning to try and get the marriage revved up again.
    “Are you married?” she asked him.
    “No, darling, never met a lady that was worthy of me,” he said.
    “Neither am I,” she said.
    She didn’t care what he thought. She tried not to look at the flicker of puzzlement and irritation that came over his white, transparent face. It was because of his face that she had decided to tell him the truth, even though it would have been better in the short encounter between them if she hadn’t.
    She got up, folded the stool together, and placed it very precisely beside the railings.
    “I really do feel a lot better, thank you. I might come back and buy something from you later on,” she said.
    “You do that, my darling,” he said, relieved that she was going. She felt that even here she had stayed too long, talked too much, revealed a dependence. Was she ever going to be able to stop?
    There was an opening into the park and she walked in. The grass was yellowish, there hadn’t been any rain for a long time. A series of glorious days probably. She looked at the people. No delegates to the conference, nobody from back home had arrived yet; there was no danger of being seen by anyone. And even though he was careful about his health, it was funny that he hadn’t said anything about the checkup before. And why had they got a “Mr. and Mrs.” card with the fruit and flowers? He must have said all along that he was bringing his wife with him. And the room had already had a double bed in it, before he had planned for her to accompany him. And what kind of fool did he think she was to believe he was having an executive checkup all bloody day? Or did he care what she thought? Was it just a case of it being more comfortable to have an undemanding fool of a woman who paid her own way and wasn’t any extra trouble than not to have one, or to leave her at home sulking?
    She strolled around idly, noticing that everyone in the park seemed to be with other people. There were groups of girls, and there were families, and there were a lot of pregnant women walking with that proud waddle they develop, hands folded oddly over the bulk in front, managing to look frail as well as huge, so that husbands had protective arms around shoulders.
    And she wondered, did he have his real wife in London for the week-end, and was he in fact going to go back to her, and was it she who was pregnant or someone else? Maggie would say anything to get her nice friend Lisa out of this thing. Or did he have some other girl, who also had to be fobbed off with lies and hurried telephone calls? She knew how real his excuses could sound. She wondered whether