My Life as a Man by Frederic Lindsay Page B

enough petrol,’ I said.
    ‘At the house, I sat trying to work out what I could say to Bernard that might make things right for you, so that you could get on with your life. And then you turned up with
Norman.’
    ‘Did you think of something?’
    That might have come out tough. It didn’t. I waited for her to find some magic wand of words that would wave it all away. Hope squeezed my stomach like a fist.
    ‘After what happened to your stepfather,’ she said, ‘I realise how stupid that was.’
    At a car park sign in a side street, she turned the wheel and went in. It was half empty, though it belonged to a large hotel that fronted the crowded pavements of Sauchiehall Street. I thought
there would have been more cars, but she told me the hotel had gone downmarket and wasn’t too fussy about the kind of guests it admitted.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Short-stay guests. Oh, couples for an afternoon.’
    I supposed that was something she might have heard her husband discuss.
    ‘If they’re looking for us,’ she said, ‘it’s better that the car’s out of sight.’
    ‘Is it all right to leave it here?’ I wondered. ‘Isn’t this for guests?’
    She chewed her lip. ‘We could get a room. We need somewhere to think what to do.’
    Whatever kind of hotel it was, I didn’t think we could walk in and ask for a room without luggage – I’d seen enough movies to know that. She told me to open the boot and sure
enough there were a couple of cases, a big one and a smaller. All I could think was that she must have packed them at her house, but I couldn’t find words to ask her about it. I carried them
in and stood back waiting while she went to the reception counter. All the time she spoke to him, the clerk tilted his head and looked past her at me from under his brows.
    ‘He didn’t think much of me,’ I told her.
    ‘Some of them think the sneer comes with the job,’ she said. ‘I should have asked for a suite.’
    ‘What’s a suite?’
    She sighed as if I’d annoyed her, and said she was surprised they’d let me in the door even of this place dressed the way I was. As I was about to follow the guy who’d appeared
from somewhere to carry the cases, she told me to wait for her. The two of them went into the lift and I watched the number above it change from 1 to 4. Avoiding the receptionist’s eye, I
wandered up and down until I couldn’t stand it any longer and perched on a chair with my back to the desk.
    Not long into an endless waiting time I convinced myself she wasn’t going to come back; but she did and we went shopping. I protested all the way, asking why it should suddenly be all
right to be out in the open among the crowds where anyone might see us, but she paid no attention. She led and I followed into Treron’s and C&A and Saxone’s.
    ‘I thought you didn’t have any money at all.’
    ‘There was some in the house.’
    ‘How much?’ Alarmed, my first thought was that she shouldn’t have taken anything. A strange thought, since it was her house, after all.
    ‘Not a lot,’ she said. ‘A handful of notes on Bernard’s dressing table. He might not even miss them.’
    I got a pair of shoes that slipped on as if they had been made for me, and because when I took off my sandshoes there were holes in my socks she bought a pack of them as well. I got two Egyptian
cotton shirts, put one on and carried the other in a bag, and trousers and a brown belt and two pullovers and a lightweight jacket with a hood to keep the rain off. And the funny thing was I felt
as if everyone in the shoe shop was staring at us, but as I got clothes and put them on it got easier so that when we walked back into the hotel it felt natural to be walking beside her.
    She led the way across the lobby past fat chairs, empty except for a couple having coffee, and pressed the button for a lift. When it came, we got in and before the doors could close a man
stepped in to join us. He was a squat man, just up to