The Return Journey Read online

  Annie opened her case in the small hotel bedroom where she would spend one night. She would hang up her dresses to make sure the creases fell out. She would have a bath and use all those nice lotions and bath oils so that they didn’t look brand new tomorrow. The key turned and she lifted the lid. There were no dresses and no shoes. Neither the two new nighties nor the very smart toilet bag with its unfamiliar Guerlain products were in the case. There were files and boxes and men’s shirts and men’s underpants and socks, and more files. Her heart gave several sharp sideways jumps, each one hurting her breastbone. It had happened as she always knew it would happen one day. She had got the wrong case. She looked in terror and there were her initials; somebody else called AG had taken her case. “Oh my God,” wept Annie Grant, “oh God, why did you let this happen to me? Why? I’m not that bad, God. I’m not hurting anyone else.” Her tears fell into the suitcase.

  Alan opened his case automatically. He would set his papers out on the large table and hang up his suits. Marie always packed perfectly; he had shown her how at an early stage. Poor Marie had once thought you just bundled things in any old how, but, he had explained reasonably, what was the point of her ironing all those shirts so beautifully if they weren’t to come out looking as immaculate as they went in? He looked at the top layer of the case in disbelief. Dresses, underwear—female underwear neatly folded. Shoes in plastic bags, a flashy-looking sponge bag with some goo from a chemist in it. God almighty, he had taken the wrong case. But he couldn’t have. It had his initials: A.G. He had been thinking that he must get better ones, these were a bit ordinary. God damn and blast it, why hadn’t he got them at the time? For a wild moment he wondered if this was some kind of joke of Marie’s; she had been very brooding recently and wanting to come on business trips with him. Could she have packed a case for herself? But that was nonsense; these weren’t Marie’s things, these belonged to a stranger. Shit, Alan Green said aloud to himself over and over again. What timing. What perfectly bloody timing to lose his case on this of all trips.

  It took Annie a tearful seventy minutes on the telephone and many efforts on the part of the airline and of the hotel to prevent her from going out to the airport before she realized that she would have to wait until the next morning. Soothing people in the hotel and in the airline said that it would certainly be returned the following day. She had only discovered an office address for Mr. Bloody Green, typed neatly and taped inside the lid of the case. An office long closed by now.

  Tomorrow, the voices said, as if that were any help. Tomorrow he would have arrived expecting her to be in fine form and to have her things with her. They were going to go for a week’s motoring holiday, the first time she was going to have him totally to herself. He was flying in from New York and would hire a car at Heathrow; he had told his boss the negotiations would take longer, he had told his wife…Who knew or cared what he had told his wife? But he would not be best pleased to spend the first day of their holiday in endless negotiations at the airport looking for her things. Was there no way she could find out where this idiot lived? If she phoned his home, even maybe his wife could tell her where he was staying. That was if his wife knew. If wives ever knew.

  It took Alan five minutes to find the right person, the person who told them that there was no right person at this time of night, but to explain the machinery of the morrow. Yes, fine for those who hadn’t arranged a breakfast meeting at seven-thirty A.M., before the shops were open, before he could get a clean shirt. And what was the point of a breakfast meeting without his papers? God rot this stupid woman with her cellophane bags and her tissue paper and her never-worn clothes. Her photograph album, for heaven’s sake, and pages and pages of notes, a play of some sort. Hard-to-decipher writing, page after bloody page of it. But there was one page where it revealed the address of Miss Prissy A. Grant, whoever she was, and he was sure she was a Miss, not a Mrs. A letter addressed to her had “Ms.” on it, but Alan had always noted that this was what single, not married, women called themselves. Unfortunately it had no address, or he could have sent for an Irish telephone directory and found her mother and father and got the hotel that their daughter was staying at. That’s if she had told them. Nutty kind of girls who carry photograph albums, unworn clothes, and plays written in small cramped writing probably told their families nothing.

  The man who ran the small hotel near Gloucester Road was upset for nice Miss Grant, who often came to spend a night before she went on her long trips to the Continent; she was a teacher, a very polite person always. He took her a pot of tea and some tomato sandwiches in her room. She cried and thanked him as if he had pulled her onto a life raft.

  “Look through his things. You might discover where he is staying,” he advised. Annie was doubtful. Still, as she ate the tomato sandwiches and drained the pot of tea she spread all the papers out on the small bed and read. She read of the plans that Mr. A. Green had been building up over the last two years. Plans which meant that by tomorrow he should be able to take over an agency for himself. If things went the way he hoped.

  Mr. A. Green would return to Dublin at the head of his own company. The arguments were so persuasive that the overseas client would be very foolish not to accept A. Green’s offer. There were photocopies of letters marked “For Your Eyes Only”…there were files with heavy underlining in thick felt pen, “Do not take to Office.” A great deal of the correspondence was organized so that it showed A. Green’s present employers, the people who were paying for this trip to London, in a very poor light. Annie sighed; she supposed that this was the world of business. At school you didn’t go plotting against the geography mistress or getting the headmaster to lose confidence in the art teacher. But it seemed a bit sneaky.

  Sometimes there were copies of letters his boss was shown pinned to those he had not been shown. It was masterly filing, and if you read the whole anthology, which up to now had presumably been for Alan Green’s eyes only, it made a convincing case. Annie decided that A. Green was a bastard and he deserved to have lost his case and his deal. She hoped he would never find either. But then how would she get back what was hers? And God almighty, suppose he had read her diary.

  Alan Green decided to hell with it, he couldn’t bear the flat taste of the soda. He opened a calorie-packed tonic water from his minibar and decided that he would do this thing methodically. Look on it as a business problem. Right. He had left his name with the airline, if she called. Of course she would call. Stupid girl, why had she not called already? Stupid A. Grant. She was probably in a wine bar with an equally stupid teacher talking about plays and how to write them in longhand at great length and maximum stupidity. What kind of play was it, anyway? He began to read it. He read of her romance…. It wasn’t a play, it was the real thing. This was a diary. It was more than a diary, it was a plan of campaign. It was dozens of different scenarios that could take place on this holiday.

  There was the scene where he said he couldn’t see her anymore, that his wife had given him an ultimatum. This creepy A. Grant had written out her lines for that one, several times over. Sometimes they were casual and see-if-I-care. Sometimes they were filled with passion, or threats: she would kill herself, let him wait. She had written the whole thing out as if it were a play, even with stage directions.

  Alan decided that A. Grant was a raving lunatic and that whoever the poor guy she was going to meet was, he deserved to be warned about her.

  He felt glad that she had lost this insane checklist of emotional dramas and how to play them; he was glad that all her finery had gone astray and that she would have to meet the guy as she was. He realized that she had probably done some kind of repair job and washed her tights and whatever just as he had washed the collar and cuffs of his shirt and the soles of his socks. Then he remembered with a lurch that she might have read his dossier on the company.

  Annie suddenly remembered she hadn’t told the man in the airport where she was staying. She had been too upset. Suppose Mr. Connivi
ng Green had rung in with his whereabouts; they wouldn’t have been able to contact her. She telephoned them again. Had Mr. Green called? He had. This was his number. He answered on the second ring. He would come right around with her case. No, please, gentleman’s privilege. Very simple mistake, must be a million AGs in the world. He’d come right away.

  He held the taxi. She was quite pretty, he saw to his surprise, soft and fluffy. He sort of remembered seeing her at London Airport and thinking that if she was in the taxi queue he might suggest they share. Remembering the revelations of her diary, he shuddered with relief at his escape. She was surprised to see that he looked so pleasant; she had expected him to look like a fox: sharp-featured, mean pointed little face. He looked normal and nice. She thought she remembered him on the plane up in executive class laughing with the air hostess.

  “I have your case here,” she said. “It’s a bit disarrayed, for want of a better word. I was hunting in it to see if I could find out where you were staying.”

  “Yours is a little disarrayed too.” He grinned. “But none of those nice garments you have fitted me, so they’re all safe and sound.”

  They grinned at each other almost affectionately.

  He looked at her for a moment. It was only eleven o’clock at night; in London that meant the evening was only starting. She was quite lovely in a round soft sort of way….

  She wished he didn’t have to go. Maybe if she said something about why not go and let’s have a bottle of wine to celebrate the found suitcases…

  She remembered how he had described his boss as bordering on senility and how he had given chapter and verse to prove that the boss was a heavy drinker.

  He remembered how she had proposed threatened suicide with attendant letters to some guy’s wife, his children and his colleagues.

  They shook hands, and at exactly the same moment they said to each other that they hadn’t read each other’s papers or anything, and at that moment they both knew that they had.

  MISS VOGEL’S VACATION

  Miss Vogel was surprised that she had never married. Not so much upset as surprised. When she was young everyone thought Victoria Vogel would surely be one of the first in the neighborhood to walk down an aisle.

  Fair-haired, soft and pretty, a great homemaker, she even made dresses for herself and her sisters and their friends, as well as baking delicious desserts for any event where good cooking was needed.

  The young Miss Vogel had an agreeable manner with everyone; no future mother-in-law would stand in her way, no family would object to the girl who worked pleasantly in her father’s bakery. She was much in demand to dance at the weddings of her many friends, and although she caught the bride’s bouquet on many occasions, it never led to a wedding of her own.

  Miss Vogel didn’t look back on her girlhood in New York as a lonely time; she hadn’t yearned always for a beau of her own. She always thought there was one around the next corner. She lived happily over the bakery and didn’t really notice the years go by.

  There were so many other things to think about. Like her mother’s illness. The others were all married by the time Miss Vogel’s mother took to her bed, so she did the nursing, which made sense because she lived at home.

  And when her mother died and her father became gloomy and lost interest in his work, she had to work all that much harder in the bakery to keep it going. There was a manager, of course, Tony Bari. They spent long hours together trying to see how the bills could be paid, the overheads reduced, and the whole enterprise made sound.

  Everyone thought one day they might marry.

  Miss Vogel didn’t really think they would, even though she would have been happy had their quick embraces led to a proposal.

  But she was a practical woman and realized that Tony Bari was very interested in money and had told her several times that any sensible man in business was looking for a rich wife. Miss Vogel knew she wasn’t in this category, and even though she did like his company, his big broad smile and the way his mustache tickled her cheek, she didn’t weep when he told her he had finally met a lady of property and invited her to his wedding.

  Not long after, Miss Vogel’s father went to the hospital, and it was known that he would not come out. Tony Bari bought the business. His new wife did not think it appropriate that Miss Vogel continue to work and live there, so, at the age of thirty, she was unemployed.

  People said Tony Bari had not paid enough, and indeed, after it had been divided between her sisters and brothers there was very little left.

  Miss Vogel had nowhere to live, she had no real qualifications to get a good job anywhere, but with her customary good humor she decided to wait until something turned up. Then she saw a position as a type of janitor or superintendent in a small, new apartment building. A lot of the residents were female, and they had specifically sought a woman super. Miss Vogel, with her calm, pleasant manner, seemed ideal, and she now had a two-room apartment, with an address in a fine part of town.

  Her friends were pleased for her.

  “You’ll meet very classy folk now,” they said.

  Miss Vogel didn’t mind whether they were classy or not, just as long as they were nice. And mainly they were.

  She became involved in all their lives. She walked the little yapping dog, unsuitably called Beauty, for Janet, the discontented widow in Number One.

  She baby-sat for the teenage daughter of Heather, who was a workaholic advertising supremo in Number Two. She took in the flowers and arranged them for Number Three, where Francesca the attractive mistress of two businessmen lived. Tactfully, Miss Vogel made sure these two gentlemen never coincided on a visit.

  She spent a lot of time in Number Four, where Marion sat and looked out the window, sad because her husband came home so rarely.

  There were many others in the building whose lives were familiar to Miss Vogel. Her sisters sometimes said these must be rich, spoiled people who lacked nothing in their lives, but Miss Vogel didn’t agree. As she sat in beautifully decorated apartments and drank coffee from a fine china cup or soda from cut-crystal glassware, Miss Vogel knew that unease and unhappiness didn’t fly out the window just because you had money. A lot of the people had even more worries than the Vogel family ever had. Sometimes she went past the old bakery where Tony Bari had built a big business with his wife’s money. It was now a delicacies shop, and people faxed in their orders for sandwiches, which were delivered to their offices. Imagine!

  There were three children. Miss Vogel watched them grow up. She would have liked to have met them properly and known them, to have been invited into the store where she, too, had lived as a child.

  But Tony Bari’s wife never seemed to want her around.

  Miss Vogel thought this was sad. She had always been welcoming and kind to the woman who had come to live there only because of her father’s dollars. But then, you couldn’t make people like you if they didn’t.

  Her days and nights were never empty or lonely, because of all the people in the apartments. Miss Vogel did not have what anyone would call a great life of her own, but she went through all theirs, their hopes and dreams for Thanksgiving and Christmas, who would come home, where they would be invited, what they would cook. Their diets for the new year, how many days a week working out at the gym, low-fat foods to be stocked in the freezer. Then she went through their new wardrobes for spring. None seemed to notice Miss Vogel didn’t buy spring clothes, plan to lose ten pounds every January, or discuss where she went for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

  She was a listening person, not a talking person.

  She was interested in their lives.

  Now it was time to talk about vacations.

  Janet was going to Arizona with her sister, so naturally there was the matter of Beauty, the bad-tempered little dog, Beauty didn’t like kennels, so perhaps Miss Vogel…

  Heather could take only a week and not one day more away from work, so she would fly to Los Angeles. This way, she could fit in one or
two meetings on the West Coast as well as take fourteen-year-old Heidi to Disneyland and Universal Studios, so it would be a fantastic holiday for the child. But there was simply no time to get her any vacation clothes. Could Miss Vogel manage…one Saturday morning possibly? Just a quick trip to the department store?

  Francesca was going to spend one week with one man and the other with the second man, but she had told each she was going to a health spa for the week she would not be with him. Would Miss Vogel mind very much taking the bus to this town two miles away, where the spa actually was, and mailing two postcards for her? You see, men were so possessive and so suspicious these days, and one didn’t want to do anything silly.

  Marion in Number Four was uncharacteristically cheerful because she and her husband were going to a quiet inn—he said he would like time to talk properly. That had to be good, Marion said, vacations were a time when people found new relationships if they had none or cemented an existing one that needed to be patched up.

  That was the wonderful thing about vacations, wasn’t it, Marion had said over and over.

  Miss Vogel didn’t know. She had never had a vacation. There had never been the opportunity, the money, or the time. And now, at fifty-three, there seemed little point in hoping she would find a new relationship, and there wasn’t an old one to cement.

  Tony Bari and his wife and children were going to Italy. Her sisters, brothers, and their families were going to a lake where they rented chalets every year. Nice for the cousins to get to know each other and keep in touch, they said.

  None of them ever thought it might be nice for Miss Vogel to get to know them all and keep in touch, too. But then, she would be out of place. An elderly aunt on her own.

  All the holidays seemed to come together. Miss Vogel would have a very empty building to look after. But she enthused about their trips, as she had enthused for so many years about everything they did.