I ordered another pot of tea and sat watching the two of them till they, and the harassed Miss Megley, got up to leave. Charles led the way out, limping tragically, like a man with one leg several, inches shorter than the other. He didn’t look over at me. Miss Megley went next, then Esme, who waved to me. I waved back, half getting up from my chair. It was a strangely emotional moment for me.
Less than a minute later, Esme came back into the tearoom, dragging Charles behind her by the sleeve of his reefer. “Charles would like to kiss you goodbye,” she said.
I immediately put down my cup, and said that was very nice, but was she sure?
“Yes,” she said, a trifle grimly. She let go Charles’ sleeve and gave him a rather vigorous push in my direction. He came forward, his face livid, and gave me a loud, wet smacker just below the right ear. Following this ordeal, he started to make a beeline for the door and a less sentimental way of life, but I caught the half belt at the back of his reefer, held on to it, and asked him, “What did one wall say to the other wall?”
His face lit up. “Meet you at the corner!” he shrieked, and raced out of the room, possibly in hysterics.
Esme was standing with crossed ankles again. “You’re quite sure you won’t forget to write that story for me?” she asked. “It doesn’t have to be exclusively for me. It can—”
I said there was absolutely no chance that I’d forget. I told her that I’d never written a story for anybody, but that it seemed like exactly the right time to get down to it.
She nodded. “Make it extremely squalid and moving,” she suggested. “Are you at all acquainted with squalor?”
I said not exactly but that I was getting better acquainted with it, in one form or another, all the time, and that I’d do my best to come up to her specifications. We shook hands.
“Isn’t it a pity that we didn’t meet under less extenuating circumstances?”