The door opened and there was a brief shaft of light from the lobby. Then he was beside me, breathless and excited. “I’ve got it,” he whispered. “It was terribly embarrassing. There was a girl behind the counter. I didn’t know what to call it. I finally said, ‘One of those things for not having babies. You know.’ She was cool as a cucumber. She asked me what quality. I said the best, of course. I almost thought she was going to ask ‘What size?’ ” He laughed and held me tight. I giggled feebly back. Better to “be a sport”! Better not to make a drama out of it! Nowadays nobody did. It would make it all so embarrassing, particularly for him.
His preliminary love-making was so perfunctory it almost made me cry. Then he pushed his chair to the back of the box and took off his coat and laid it down on the wooden floor. When he told me to, I lay down on it and he knelt beside me and pulled off my panties. He said to put my feet up against the front of the box and I did, and I was so cramped and uncomfortable that I said, “No, Derek! Please! Not here!” But then he was somehow on top of me in a dreadful clumsy embrace, and all my instinct was somehow to help him so that at least he would have pleasure from it and not be angry with me afterward.
And then the world fell in!
There was suddenly a great gush of yellow light, and a furious voice said from above and behind me, “What the hell do you think you’re doing in my cinema? Get up, you filthy little swine.”
I don’t know why I didn’t faint. Derek was standing, his face white as a sheet, clumsily buttoning up his trousers. I scrambled to my feet, banging against the wall of the box. I stood there, waiting to be killed, waiting to be shot dead.
The black silhouette in the doorway pointed at my bag on the floor with the white scrap of my pants beside it. “Pick those up.” I bent down quickly as if I had been hit, and clutched the pants into a ball in my hand to try and hide them. “Now get out!” He stood there, half blocking the entrance, while we shambled past him, broken people.
The manager banged the door of the box shut and got in front of us, thinking, I suppose, that we might make a run for it. Two or three people had seeped out of the back seats into the foyer. (The whole audience must have heard the manager’s voice. Had the seats below us heard the whole thing, the argument, the pause, then Derek’s instructions what to do? 1 shuddered.) The ticket woman had come out of her box, and one or two passers-by, who had been examining the program, gazed in from under the cheap colored lights over the entrance.
The manager was a plump, dark man with a tight suit and a flower in his buttonhole. His face was red with rage as he looked us up and down. “Filthy little brats!” He turned on me. “And I’ve seen you here before. You’re nothing better than a common prostitute. I’ve a damned good mind to call the police. Indecent exposure. Disturbing the peace.” He ran the heavy words easily off his tongue. He must have used them often before in his sleazy little house of private darkness. “Names, please.” He took a notebook out of his pocket and licked a stub of pencil. He was looking at Derek. Derek stammered, “Er, James Grant”—the film had starred Cary Grant. “Er, 24 Acacia Road, Nettlebed.” The manager looked up. “There aren’t any roads in Nettlebed. Only the Henley-Oxford road.” Derek said obstinately. “Yes, there are. At the back,” he added weakly. “Sort of lanes.” “And you?” He turned toward me suspiciously. My mouth was dry. I swallowed. “Miss Thompson, Audrey Thompson. 24″—I realized it was the same number that Derek had chosen, but I couldn’t think of another—”Thomas”— I almost said Thompson again!—”Road. London.” “District?” I didn’t know what he meant. I gaped hopelessly at him. “Postal district,” he said impatiently. I remembered Chelsea. “S.W.6,” I said weakly. The manager snapped his book shut. “All right. Get out of here, both of you.” He pointed out into the street. We edged nervously past him, and he followed us, still pointing. “And don’t ever come back to my establishment again! I know you both! You ever show up again, I’ll have the police on you!”