A Bit on the Side by William Trevor Page B

smiled that away, and was still smiling when a man appeared in the open doorway. He was hesitant, looking about him as if the place were crowded and there were several women to choose from, his nervousness not disguised. When he came closer he nodded before he spoke.
    ‘Jeffrey,’ he said. ‘Evie?’
    ‘Well, Evelyn actually.’
    ‘Oh, I’m awfully sorry.’
    His mackintosh was worn in places but wasn’t grubby. His high cheekbones stood out, the skin tight where they stretched it. He didn’t look at all well nourished. His dark hair, not a fleck of grey in it, was limp and she wondered if perhaps he was recovering from flu.
    ‘Would you like your drink topped up?’ he offered in a gentlemanly way. ‘Nuts? Crisps?’
    ‘No, I’m happy, thanks.’
    He was fastidious, you could tell. Was there a certain vulnerability beneath that edgy manner? She always stipulated well-spoken and on that he could not be faulted. If he was recovering from even a cold, he’d naturally look peaky; no one could help that. He took off his mackintosh and a blue muffler, revealing a tweed jacket that almost matched the pale brown of his corduroy trousers.
    ‘My choice of rendezvous surprise you?’ he said.
    ‘Perhaps a little.’
    It didn’t now that she had met him, for there was something about him that suggested he thought things out: theatre bars were empty places when a performance was on; there wouldn’t be the embarrassment of approaches made by either of them to the wrong person. He didn’t say that, but she knew. Belatedly he apologized for keeping her waiting.
    ‘It doesn’t matter in the least.’
    ‘You’re sure I can’t bring you another drink?’
    ‘No, really, thank you.’
    ‘Well, I’ll just get something for myself.’
    *
    At the bar Jeffrey asked about wine. ‘D’you have white? Dry?’
    ‘Indeed we do, sir.’ The barman reached behind him and lifted a bottle from an ice bucket. ‘Grinou,’ he said. ‘We like to keep it cool, being white.’
    ‘Grinou?’
    ‘It’s what the wine’s called, sir. La Combe de Grinou. The label’s a bit washed away, but that’s what it’s called. Very popular in here, the Grinou is.’
    Jeffrey took against the man, the way he often did with people serving him. He guessed that the barmaid looked after the man in a middle-aged daughterly way, listening to his elderly woes and ailments, occasionally inviting him to a Christmas celebration. Her daytime work was selling curtain material, Jeffrey surmised; the man had long ago retired from the same department store. Something like that it would be, the theatre bar their real world.
    ‘All right, I’ll try a glass,’ he said.
    *
    They talked for a moment about the weather and then about the bar they were in, commenting on the destruction of its Georgian plasterwork, no more than a corner of the original ceiling remaining. From time to time applause or laughter reached them from the theatre’s auditorium. Gingerly in their conversation they moved on to more personal matters.
    Forty-seven they’d said he was. Photographer they’d given as his profession on the personal details’ sheet, and she had thought of the photographers you saw on television, a scrum of them outside a celebrity’s house or pushing in at the scene of a crime. But on the phone the girl had been reassuring: a newspaper photographer wasn’t what was meant. ‘No, not at all like that,’ the girl had said. ‘Nor weddings neither.’ Distinguished in his field, the girl had said; there was a difference.
    She tried to think of the names of great photographers and could remember only Cartier-Bresson, without a single image coming into her mind. She wondered about asking what kind of camera he liked best, but asked instead what kind of photographs he took.
    ‘Townscapes,’ he said. ‘Really only townscapes.’
    She nodded confidently, as if she caught the significance of that, as if she appreciated the attraction of photographing