Girl on the Landing

by Paul Torday

  ‘That’ll be the taxi,’ he said. ‘I must go. Say goodbye to Elizabeth for me, will you? I couldn’t find her either.’

  ‘What will we do?’ asked my mother. ‘What do you expect us to live on? How do you expect us to survive?’

  ‘Well,’ said my father, stubbing his cigarette out in an ashtray on the hall table, ‘you’ve got this perfectly nice house, which is your own property and unmortgaged. I dare say you can find a solicitor to talk to about extracting some alimony from me. Apart from that, I really don’t have any suggestions. You know I hate goodbyes. I’m going now.’

  He picked up his suitcases and walked out of the front door. My mother stood quite still and said not another word as he left. As I stood in the shadows at the top of the stairs, swallowing to try to get rid of a lump in my throat that had grown bigger and bigger as I listened to my parents talk, I knew that my life was about to change for ever.

  I never saw my father again after that day, although he did, now and then, remember my birthday and send me a card with small gifts of money. That was years ago, but I still remember with perfect clarity every second of that brief, scene. I didn’t want a marriage that was going to end the way my mother’s had. I wanted someone I could trust.

  I thought I sensed in Michael a determination to make our marriage work, and last, which meant more to me than any romantic declarations or passionate embraces. There had been very little of either. I felt - perhaps with very little concrete evidence - that Michael really loved me and that he just had more difficulty than most men in expressing his emotions. When he proposed to me it was with every appearance of sincerity, albeit in the tones of someone reading the weather forecast. The day after I had accepted, he took out his diary and tried to find a date for the wedding that was free from golfing, fishing, shooting or committee meetings at his club.

  Anyway, that was then and this is now. Since we came back from Ireland at the end of August, there has been something different about Michael. All the way from Fish-guard to London he hardly talked at all, except once, as we sat in a queue on the M4. It was dark, and a column of red brake lights stretched ahead of us into an infinite distance. Michael turned to me and said, ‘Lamia.’

  I heard it distinctly but I did not know what the word meant: I had never heard it before. It sounded like the Latin name for a plant, or some uncomfortable skin condition, or even a foreign country; there are so many new ones these days. His eyes were wide open and he was staring at me, or through me, in a way that made me feel uncomfortable. His face looked thinner somehow, as if he had lost weight. It was all planes and angles in the light from the dashboard. Then he turned away again to look at the road.

  ‘Lamia? What do you mean?’ I asked.

  Michael said nothing, just hunched over the steering wheel, tapping it with a forefinger as the car moved forward another six inches.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked again.

  He heard me and turned back.

  ‘What do you mean, what do I mean?’

  ‘You said a word, a foreign word. I wondered what it meant.’

  ‘I don’t recall saying anything,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure that you did.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Michael? Did you?’

  ‘Perhaps I was clearing my throat,’ he said. ‘I really don’t remember saying anything to you. Will that do? This damned traffic jam is beginning to drive me mad.’

  There was definitely something different about Michael that day.

  3

  Mr Patel’s Membership Application

  The morning after we got back from Ireland, Elizabeth was up early. I found her in the kitchen reading emails and text messages from her office on her mobile, which I had not allowed her to take to Ireland, because she would have spent the entire time taking calls. The previous night she had been too tired to do anything except crawl into bed.

  She was stalking up and down the kitchen with a mug of Nescafe’ in one hand and her mobile in the other, muttering to herself.

  ‘Everything all right?’ I asked, appearing in the doorway in my dressing gown and slippers.

  ‘No, everything is not all right,’ she said. ‘I go away for a few days and not one thing - not one single thing - that I asked to be done has happened. Celia will kill me. I probably won’t have a job by tonight.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ I said, pacifyingly. I had never actually spoken to Celia, Elizabeth’s editor and boss, but she appeared to be a strong-minded woman.

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ she said, turning on me. ‘You can wander into your blessed club at any time you like and have a long lunch and be home in time for tea. If I get away from the office before eight tonight, I shall be very lucky.’

  ‘Shall I book a table at the Italian?’ I asked.

  ‘If you want something to eat tonight, then yes. I won’t be doing any cooking.’

  She drained her mug of coffee, slammed it down on the sink, and left, banging the front door behind her.

  It wasn’t just the office. Our relationship had not been easy of late. Sometimes I wondered whether it had ever been easy; I wondered why Elizabeth had even married me in the first place. Because I’d asked her, I suppose. I knew why I had married Elizabeth. She was my chance. She was my one chance at happiness, normality, and all the things I wanted. If I was capable of love, I loved Elizabeth. But my version of love wasn’t always enough to keep her happy.

  I went back to my dressing room, and put on a dark grey suit, a pin-striped shirt and a dark blue tie, and then came back into the kitchen and made myself a slice of toast and a pot of coffee. While I bit into the toast and sipped the coffee, I read the front page of the Daily Telegraph; then I folded it and put it in my briefcase to finish later in my office at the club.

  Grouchers was a quarter of an hour’s walk from the flat, and as it was a dry morning I decided to risk leaving the umbrella at home. The streets and squares were bright with the luminous light of early autumn, the leaves in the small park I walked through just beginning to turn, the air warm and exhilarating without the stuffiness of a summer’s day in London. I walked at a leisurely pace down Baker Street, across Oxford Street and into the outskirts of Mayfair.

  Here was my place of work for a few months every year: a private members’ club called Grouchers, after its founder Emmanuel Groucher, a successful wine merchant who had lived near Oxford Street towards the end of the nineteenth century. The club was established in a town house, at the corner of a small mews, which was held on a long lease on very generous terms from the estate of a Duke of Rotherham who had once been a member. Grouchers did not have the political or social connections of some of the better-known clubs farther south, in and around St James’s Street. It aspired to be nothing more than a club where members could lunch or dine together, and escape for a few hours from their wives by playing bridge or backgammon. There were no bedrooms. There was a pretty dining room, a bar, a morning room, a couple of card rooms, and a vast marble space occupied by gentlemen’s lavatories equipped with mahogany and porcelain furnishings. There was a hall with a porter’s lodge, a cloakroom, an extensive wine cellar in the basement, and that was Grouchers.

  It suited me. I found its dignified spaces reassuring: the committee rooms lined with leather-bound volumes; the dining room with its oil paintings of racehorses or still lives featuring dead pheasants; the morning room where the only sound was the rustle of pages being turned as members considered their sporting bets for the day. I was comfortable with most of the other members too. No one ever asked a personal question; indeed, few questions were ever asked. Most conversation was in the form of grunted affirmations when another speaker execrated the latest remarks of some politician or other, or else the performance of the English cricket team. I appreciated the calm routines and predictability of life at Grouchers.

  When I joined the club - or, more truthfully, was pushed by Peter Robinson into taking out membership - it was like putting on a uniform
that said everything about me that anyone needed to know: I was simply a member of Grouchers. What I might have been before I joined, no one cared. I had passed the entrance requirements, and therefore I was one of them.

  The only qualification required to join Grouchers was the support of six members - which Peter Robinson organised without any need for effort on my part - and an understanding that the candidate was ‘a gentleman’. Emmanuel Groucher had once memorably defined the concept of what a gentleman was by saying: ‘Whatever it is, it’s not the sort of damned fellow who talks to everybody at breakfast.’ In fact it was impossible to get breakfast at Grouchers, so there was no practical way of carrying out this test on aspiring members. Nevertheless, the idea was understood at Grouchers, and most of its members barely talked at all, let alone during meals. Conversation in the dining room tended to focus on requests for the butter dish or the salt to be passed. In the bar, or in the gaming room, one was allowed to be more loquacious as long as it was within measure. No female, apart from Mrs Thornton and the waitresses that served us at lunch or dinner, had ever set foot in Grouchers.

  The members were mostly Londoners: solicitors, accountants, chartered surveyors, retired soldiers. They all dressed and behaved with the greatest degree of respectability. One never saw brown shoes being worn with a blue suit, or a loud tie. Most members erred on the side of sombre in their dress. Now, as I walked through the small squares and side streets that lay along my route to Grouchers, I was conscious of different feelings about the club. It no longer seemed, as it once had, a haven or refuge. I was conscious, for the first time, of a question forming itself in my mind: what was the point of Grouchers?

  When I arrived at the club James, the day porter, was in his lodge and he greeted me.

  ‘Morning, Mr Gascoigne. Did you win your game of golf in Ireland, sir?’

  ‘Lost it, I’m sorry to report, James.’

  James shook his head and smiled sadly, whether in commiseration or in despair at my obvious lack of technique, one could not say. I went down the corridor and through the door marked ‘Private’ that led to the offices. Here was a room occupied by Mr Verey-Jones, the club secretary, who dealt with every aspect of club life except one. I had worked with him now for several years and had no idea what his first name was or, indeed, if he had one.

  Verey-Jones employed the staff, and managed the wine cellar, and worked out the menus with the chef; stored the cigars and organised for the decorators to come in once a year to smarten the place up when we closed in August. He chaired the Club Rules Committee, a small group that was more enigmatic than the Druids. Every five or ten years the committee produced a minor amendment to the rule book, which was studied with the closest attention by all members when it was finally posted on the noticeboard.

  When Verey-Jones saw me come into the office, he stood up, brandishing a slip of paper.

  ‘Ah, Gascoigne. I think we’ve got it. I think we’ve finally got it.’

  He waved the slip of paper in front of me, looking as Neville Chamberlain must have looked when he got off the plane on his return from Berchtesgaden. I took the paper from him and studied it. It said:‘Bye Law no. 31: the words “members are requested not to have their mobile phones switched on and should not use them on the club premises” have been replaced by “members shall not use their mobile phones (or other electronic equipment) on the premises”’.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ I said, ‘very good.’

  ‘The use of the word “shall” is so much more prescriptive, I feel,’ said Verey-Jones. ‘It took us a long time to come up with the right word, but I feel it has been worth it.’

  ‘Yes, indeed it has,’ I said.

  Verey-Jones looked at me for a moment to see whether I might be a little more enthusiastic but when I said nothing further, he commented, ‘There’s post for you, Gascoigne. I hope you’re with us for a day or two, as there’s quite a backlog. Mrs Thornton has the letters for you.’

  Mrs Thornton was the secretary who did the typing and bookkeeping for the club and really, if anyone kept the place going, it was her. My role as membership secretary was a relatively new position, created to relieve Verey-Jones of his excess workload, about which he had been inclined to complain in recent years. I think I was of some help to him, in a minor way. We both knew that I didn’t need the money, which was a fairly small stipend. We also both knew that I had the confidence of the membership, an important point if one was to be entrusted with managing the process by which applicants for membership to the club were admitted - or were not admitted. So when I said to Verey-Jones, ‘I’m here for two or three days, but then I’ve got to go up to Scotland to check up on things there,’ I knew it would irritate him, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  He grunted, and withdrew behind his desk. I walked across the office and straightened a picture that was hanging slightly crooked, a drawing of Oxford Street in the 1890s featuring Emmanuel Groucher’s wine emporium. Mrs Thornton greeted me with a friendly smile and a cup of coffee, and then handed me a sheaf of post. I thanked her and started to go through the letters. About half came from the sons of members being put up by their fathers or uncles, and admission was almost automatic unless the family had a history of falling behind with subscription payments. There were a couple of names I did not know, but the members introducing them I did, and I felt confident they would not put forward anyone who would not fit in. There was one letter I put to one side: it was from a man I knew to be a recruitment consultant, and he wanted to introduce a colleague as a member. I imagined them turning the dining room into a place where they interviewed people; something that had to be stopped. I decided to have a word with Verey-Jones later, to see how we could knock the idea on its head. Then there was a letter whose handwriting I recognised immediately. It was from Peter Robinson, my barrister friend.

  ‘Dear Michael,’ it began, and ran on through a few lines about what an outstandingly good member his proposed candidate would be, and how he had found six members to support him. My eyes skipped over all this and came to rest on the candidate’s name. It was Vijay Patel.

  This gave me something to think about. On the one hand, if Peter Robinson was putting Mr Patel forward, then I could be sure that Mr Patel would be in every way an excellent future member of the club. Peter’s judgement was impeccable. On the other hand, if Grouchers had any defining characteristic it was as a refuge for prejudices of every sort that could not be aired in public. Indeed, it might be said that Grouchers was a fantasy world, where perfectly normal middle-aged, middle-class men were transformed for a few hours by a collective mania into behaving and speaking as if they were inhabiting some last outpost of the British Empire in the 1950s.

  I thought I ought to have a word with Peter about his candidate when he came in at lunchtime. Before then I had time to finish the rest of my post, dictate some letters to Mrs Thornton, and still have quarter of an hour to spend doing the Sudoku puzzles in the newspaper.

  During lunch I spotted Peter coming into the dining room and gave him a nod. When he had finished eating I came up behind him at the coffee urn. ‘Peter. How nice to see you. Can we have a quiet word?’

  Peter turned and smiled. He filled two cups of coffee, one for each of us, and then we repaired to a far corner of the morning room that was reserved by tradition for confidential conversations. We sat opposite each other in two huge armchairs covered in cracked brown leather.

  ‘It’s about Mr Patel, isn’t it?’ said Peter, as soon as we had sat down.

  ‘Yes, it is. Tell me a bit more about him.’

  Peter shrugged and said, ‘Not much to tell. He’s the son of a Ugandan Asian businessman who came here in the 1960s to get away from Idi Amin. Vijay’s an investment banker, very successful. He has beautiful manners. He is by far the best amateur spin bowler in our part of Hertfordshire. That’s how I know him.’

  Peter and Mary Robinson lived in Hertfordshire at weekends and Peter was mad about cricket. When I said n
othing, he went on, ‘And yes, he would be the first member of this club who didn’t have white skin.’

  ‘Some members might feel a little uncomfortable about your choice, Peter,’ I said gently. ‘You know it is my job to mention possible difficulties. The last thing we want is to have a member’s candidate blackballed. Especially a member as widely respected as you.’

  ‘That’s bollocks, Michael, and you know it,’ said Peter firmly. ‘Vijay is as English as any of us.’

  ‘That’s not how some members might see it, Peter,’ I replied. He smiled. Tall, thin and rather overfull of nervous energy, Peter was a leading light in a high-powered set of chambers specialising in human rights legislation. He enjoyed a fearsome reputation among judges and I could see why he was considered to be good at his job: the smile was intimidating. Peter was, I suppose, my closest friend: I had known him for over ten years.