For years now they had been going to Porter’s, in one of the little side streets off the Strand. They had their own particular table in the far corner of the upstairs room, cosily near the fire in winter, cooled in summer by a window at their backs, through which drifted soot and the remote bumble of traffic. Everything contemporary seemed remote at Porter’s. The whole place looked as though it had been soaked in Madeira – the rich brown walls crowded with signed photographs of Irving and Bancroft and Forbes-Robertson, the plush seats, the fly-spotted marble Muses forever turning their classic noses hopefully towards the door, as though expecting to see Ellen Terry come in. The waiters were all very old. They carried enormous napkins over their arms and produced the menu with a special flourish from the tails of their old-fashioned coats. The waiter who attended to the corner table looked as though he could have walked on as a senator in a Lyceum production of Julius Caesar. Leaning protectively over them, he would say in a hoarse, fruity voice, into which Madeira seemed to have seeped too, ‘The steak-and-kidney pudding is just as you like it today, Mr. Craven.’

Every Thursday evening, wet or fine, they would be dining in their corner under the bust of Mrs. Siddons, talking quietly, sometimes holding hands under the tablecloth. It was the evening when he was supposed to have a standing engagement to play bridge at his club. Sometimes he called for her at her flat; more often they arrived separately. Out of all their Thursdays she loved the foggy winter evenings best, when the taxi-driver growled, ‘Wot a night!’ as she fumbled in her purse for change, when she ran coughing up the stairs into the plushy warmth and light and their waiter greeted her with a ‘Good evening, Mrs Craven. Mr Craven’s waiting at your table. I’ll bring along your sherries right away.’

She would go over to their table, sit down, and slide her hand palm upwards along the sofa seat until his hand closed round it.

‘Good evening, Mrs Craven,’ he would say, and they would both laugh.

They always enjoyed the joke that the waiter supposed they were married. It went with the respectability of Porter’s that any nice couple who dined together continuously over a long period of time should be thought of as husband and wife.

‘We’re one in the sight of God and Mrs Siddons,’ he said, but although she laughed, it wasn’t a joke with her. She liked being called Mrs Craven. It gave her a warm feeling round the heart, because she could pretend for a moment that things were different and that he had no wife and three fine children who would be broken in bits by a divorce. He had long ago made her see the sense of this, and now she was careful never to make scenes or to sound the demanding note which he hated. Her value for him was to be always there, calm and understanding. ‘You smooth me out,’ he said sometimes. ‘You give me more peace than anyone in the world.’ She was a wonder-ful listener. She would sit watching him with a little smile while he told her all the details of his week. He often talked about the children. At her flat, standing in front of the mirror tying his tie, he would tell her proudly how clever eight-year-old Jennifer was, or how well Pete was coming on at school. On these occasions the little smile sometimes grew a trifle rigid on her lips.

They never went anywhere but Porter’s. In a queer sort of way, although he was known by name, he seemed to feel safe and anonymous there. ‘None of the people one knows comes here,’ he said, by which he meant none of the people his wife knew. More men than women ate at Porter’s. Very occasionally he was greeted by a business acquaintance, who would nod and call across the room, ‘How are you?’ Then he would call back heartily, ‘Fine! How are you?’ but he would be a little uncomfortable all through the meal. If she slid her hand towards his knee, he would pretend not to notice, and he would talk in a brisk, cheerful way which, at a distance, might look like the kind of manner one would use when dining with a female cousin up from the country or a secretary one had kept working late and taken along for some food out of sheer good nature.

Sometimes she felt that she would like to put on a low-cut gown and go somewhere where there were lights and dancing, where she could walk in proudly, with him following her without taking a swift, surreptitious look round the room first to see who was there. But she knew how worried he would look if she suggested it, how he would say, ‘Darling, I wish we could, but you know it’s impossible. Someone would be sure to spot us. We’ve got to be careful – haven’t we?’ By now she had learned exactly how to dress for their Thursday evenings. The clothes had to make her look beautiful for him, but they must be on the unadventurous side so that no one would cast an interested remembering glance from an opposite table. She often wore brown, and sometimes she had a funny feeling that she was invisible against the brown wall and the faded prints of the Prince of Denmark and the noblest Roman of them all.

When the war came, he got a commission in a mechanised regiment. Their Thursday evenings were interrupted, and when he got home on leave things were often difficult. There was a family dinner party, or the children were back from school. ‘You know how it is, darling,’ he would say ruefully on the telephone. But every now and then he sent her a telegram and came dashing up to London for a few hours. Porter’s still looked the same except that most of the men were in uniform, and the old waiter always saw to it that they got their usual table. ‘Good evening, Mrs Craven,’ he would say shambling forward when he saw her. ‘You’re expecting Mr Craven?… Ah, that’s fine. The pigeon casserole is just how he likes it today.’

They dined together just before he went to Libya. There were two men drinking port at the next table, one with white hair and beautiful, long hands who looked like a Galsworthy family lawyer, the other round and red.

‘Don’t think I’m being stupid and morbid,’ she said, ‘but supposing anything happens. I’ve been worrying about that. You might be wounded or ill and I wouldn’t know.’ She tried to laugh. ‘The War Office doesn’t have a service for sending telegrams to mistresses, does it?’

He frowned, because this sounded hysterical, and glanced sharply at the old men at the next table, who went right on drinking port and talking in their tired old voices.
‘ Darling,’ he said, ‘don’t start getting ideas like that into your head. If anything did happen – but it won’t – I’d get someone to let you know right away.’

She had a wild impulse to ask him how this would be possible when he would be lying broken and bloody, alone in the sand. With an effort, she remembered that he loved her because she was calm, because she was not the kind of woman to make scenes or let the tears run down her face in public.

‘I know you would,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about me. Remember, dearest, you don’t have to worry about me one little bit.’

‘Good night, Mrs Craven. Good night, Mr Craven,’ said the old waiter, hurrying after them as they went out.

A long time after he left, his letters began to arrive. They were not very satisfactory. He wrote in the same hearty style that he put on at Porter’s for the business acquaintances’ benefit, and she had the feeling he was worried the censor might turn out to be his wife’s second cousin. She worked hard at a war job and lost a lot of weight. The girl who washed her hair said, ‘My goodness, aren’t you getting grey!’ and she longed foolishly to be able to tell her about it and get her sympathy. There was no one to confide in; all these years she had been so careful that she had hardly mentioned his name to anyone else. She went out with other people, but she imagined that she wasn’t so amusing or attractive as she used to be and that they noticed it. She began to stay home most evenings, reading in bed or writing him long letters. Before he left, they had settled on various little code words which would give her an idea of where he was, so she was able to tell when he was up in the front lines or when he had gone back to Cairo for leave.

After a while his letters stopped, but she wasn’t seriously worried at first. She knew that the mails were often bad; there had been long gaps before. But this time hard fighting was going on in Libya, and she had a terrible premonition that something had happened. She found that she could hardly sleep at all, and when she came home in the evenings, her hand shook as she put the key in the door. She made herself take the letters out of the box and look through them very slowly. After-wards she would go into the living-room, sit down, and stare blankly out of the window at the barrage balloons glittering in the late sunlight.

One evening she came in after a hard day’s work, and as she stood getting the key out of her purse, she knew that there would be a letter or a cable waiting for her. She was so positive of it that she was tremulous with relief as she got the door open and stooped to the mailbox. There was nothing except a bill for a repair to the radio set. She stood, feeling cold and stupid, then she went swiftly to the living-room telephone and looked up a number in the book. As she dialled it and then listened to the bell buzzing, it seemed odd to her to think how many times he must have heard it ring through that unknown house.

When a child’s voice, high, and carefully a little overloud, answered, she was slightly taken aback.

She said, ‘Is this Mrs Craven’s house?’ The child’s voice said, ‘Yes. This is Jennifer. Do you want Mummy? . . . I’ll get her.’

After a pause she heard footsteps on a hardwood floor, and then a new voice said,

‘Hello? Yes?’

She had thought out what to say, and she made her voice crisp and friendly.

‘Good evening, Mrs Craven,’ she said. ‘I do want to apologise for troubling you like this. You won’t know my name, but I’m an old friend of Mr Craven’s, and I’ve only just heard that he’s in Libya. I thought I’d like to ring up and see if you’ve had good news of him.’

‘Why, that’s nice of you,’ Mrs Craven said pleasantly. ‘To tell you the truth, I’ve heard nothing very recently, but I try not to worry. He’ll cable me when he has a minute. Judging by the papers, I shouldn’t think any of them have a minute.’

‘No, I don’t suppose they have,’ she said. She could hear the little girl calling out, as if to a dog. She knew that there were two dogs, and that there was French Empire furniture in the room, and on the mantelpiece stood a little Chinese figure in white porcelain with a scroll in its hand. She had helped choose it one Christmas. Mrs Craven sounded calm and unfussed. She could picture her standing at the telephone, smiling slightly, secure in the middle of her own familiar things, maybe watching the child abstractedly out of the corner of her eye while she dealt courteously with this well-meaning stranger.

The pleasant voice said, ‘Luckily, I’m tremendously busy myself. That helps to keep one’s mind off things, doesn’t it? I’m so sorry, I don’t think I quite caught the name.’
She mumbled a name that might have been anything and added lightly, ‘Just someone Mr Craven used to know a long while ago. Goodbye, Mrs Craven, and thanks so much. I hope you hear good news very soon.’

She hung up the receiver and sat for a long time without moving. Then she began to weep bitterly. The tears poured down her face, and she rocked her body backward and forward. ‘I can’t go on,’ she sobbed, as though he were there in the room with her. ‘I can’t, can’t go on. You’ll have to break them up – I don’t care. I just can’t go on this way any longer.’ She thought of his wife sitting in their home on the other side of town, and the contrast seemed too bitter to bear. All those years of Thursday evenings seemed like a pathetic game of make-believe – two children playing at house-keeping in a playhouse with three walls. After a while she grew quieter. She sat thinking of him, wondering whether, wherever he was, he would have had a sense of something breaking sharply in two, coming apart with a hum, like a snapped wire. Already she could feel the relaxed tension, as though whatever had been holding her taut all these years had suddenly gone limp.

Tomorrow she would write and tell him, but not now. She couldn’t remember when she had felt so tired. She went into the bathroom to bathe her face, and then came back and began taking off her dress. There was a brooch pinned at the neck, and she undid it and stood looking at it for a moment. It was a discreetly beautiful thing of dark, old garnets – diamonds, he had pointed out, were too likely to cause comment, and didn’t suit her, either. She put down the brooch and finished undressing. Maybe, she thought, she would wait until after tomorrow to write to him, for she had a feeling that tomorrow there would be a letter from him. She was sure of it. She could see it lying in the mailbox, addressed in that small, neat, familiar hand. If it wasn’t there tomorrow, it would be there the next day. She would go to Porter’s for dinner, sit at their table, and read it over and over. ‘Good news from Mr Craven, Mrs Craven?’ the old waiter would say as he leaned protectively over her. ‘Ah, that’s fine, that’s fine.’

She began to smile, but suddenly she closed her eyes for a minute. She had had a queer sensation of falling, of the room slipping away and of herself falling, falling, as one does in a dream, without being able to stop and without wondering or caring what lies at the bottom.

First published in The New Yorker on 5 December 1942, republished in Good Evening, Mrs Craven: the Wartime stories of Molllie Panter-Downes, Persephone Books No. 8.

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