Grotesque encounter · 4 min read · Set in Fenchurch Street ·
"How Do You Do, Again"
At the Works Club on Fenchurch Street a man nobody ever remembers is introduced, several times in one evening, to the one person he ought to have known.
The Works Club keeps its Christmas room lit with the sodium bulbs, and the mulled wine arrives in the navy kettle that has done the tea since before the Misprint. Desmond Pyke had been coming eleven years. Nobody has ever disliked him in his hearing or, he suspects, out of it; his difficulty has always run the other way. Names slide off him. He is introduced twice to the same person at every function in the city, he has been asked *and you are?* by his own department twice, once by a chair that was half his. He made his peace with it young. He carries it like a soft case. He did not carry it into the party on Fenchurch Street expecting to put it down.
He came in out of the rain, shook his coat on the stair, and was met at the card table by Mayhew from Estimates, who said, "Desmond, have you met —" and named somebody Desmond lost before the "have". the room bending slightly toward the meeting the way rooms do.
Ten minutes later, by the kettle, Wren from Estimates said, "Desmond, have you met —," and again the name went past him like a bus. Handshake. The same hand, he would note afterwards. The same cardigan with the collar of a shirt just showing under it, out of date in the way that is never unkind. Down the hand, at the root of the thumb, a fresh blue biro print: the figure 5.
He was introduced a third time by the caterer's girl, working the door with a tray, and a fourth time near the coat rail by a man whose face Desmond has never once been able to hold in memory for a full minute.
At the fifth, he did not take the hand.
Not rudeness. Something arrived in him and interrupted the procedure. He put his own hand out but slowly, and looked at it, the way you look at a form that has come back to you marked. Then he looked at the woman, at the smile that was already up and steady, at the notebook she carried closed against her hip, ruled like a register, names and ticks, a number at the head of a page that began with a 4.
"I think," Desmond Pyke said, and hears himself say it now whenever he is late for anything or early for anything, "I'm supposed to know you."
"It's kind of you to say so," the woman said. She did not say his name. "You've the look of someone who does know people."
"You know mine?" he said.
For the first time all evening the smile did not change, which somehow was a change in it. "Everyone's is known to me," she said. "Yours longer than most. You're a hard one to be introduced to, Mr. Pyke. The same man at each meeting, though. I like consistencies."
He asked her plain out who she was. She gave her name. It went off him inside the word, the way water leaves a slate. He asked for the spelling. She gave it, twice, and he took out his pencil and wrote it on the back of a drinks ticket, and he read it three times aloud, and it left him before he got the pencil back in his pocket. The ticket stayed in his pocket a fortnight. It is in a drawer now, in the flat on Tern Street, in an envelope marked in the hand of a man who does not remember writing on it.
She took his non-understanding graciously, as kindness taken. Then Mayhew came back with two glasses, and Desmond had the rest of that thought interrupted the way all his introductions are interrupted, and by the time he found her again she was at the tray with the caterer's girl, hand out, saying how do you do, first time, best foot.
And the evening finished as parties do. Last songs, the kettle dry. She left somewhere in the middle of the singing and it cannot have been noticed, because nobody noticed it.
Desmond Pyke walked home down the wet of Fenchurch Street with the mulled wind in his ears, and he did a sum he has never been able to make tally. Five introductions, six seconds of remembering each — the hand, the voice, the notebook — then gone, except the arithmetic and one fact he does not actually recall learning: that the notebook was, at its top line, already holding forty-odd thousand meetings, and that every one of those ticks, made permanent, was made about somebody who had forgotten her within the minute.
He told the Works Club morning committee about it the following Wednesday. The committee laughed at the party, in the correct places. When he came to the description of her — grey cardigan, out-of-date collar, biro on the hand — the treasurer went quiet and said, slowly, that he had a feeling there was a woman like that at his own firm's do, and that he could swear he'd been introduced to her, and that he could not, on the forthcoming inspection of his own memory, be certain of a single feature.
"You've met her," Desmond said.
"No," said the treasurer, in the tone of a man closing a ledger, "I'd have remembered."