A Banquet of Consequences

by Elizabeth George

Dorothea took everything in, sighed with evident pleasure, and said to Barbara, “I know you’ve always wondered. I don’t like to say because of what people might think.”

  Barbara drew her eyebrows together. She hadn’t the first clue what Harriman meant.

  “This is how I dress myself,” Dorothea went on, with a gesture towards the dizzying number of clothing stalls that formed a colourful river spilling down the street in front of them. “Twelve pounds for a frock, Detective Sergeant. Twenty pounds for a suit. Thirteen pounds for a pair of shoes. Wear it for a season, then toss it because it’s probably falling apart anyway.”

  Barbara looked from the stalls to Dorothea. She shook her head. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “Not what you wear, Dee.”

  Dorothea said, “Of course there’s the occasional consignment piece. Well, there has to be, hasn’t there? It’s wise to have something decent and timeless now and then. But the rest is this. Cheaply made and cheaply sold but”—and here she held up a finger—“it’s utterly astonishing what a very good steam iron applied before wearing, the willingness to change out buttons, and the right accessories can do for a girl.”

  SPITALFIELDS

  LONDON

  Barbara hardly expected to enjoy herself with a crawl through what she quickly discovered was Petticoat Lane market. But Dorothea Harriman was having no interference from her in the quest for clothing. She repeated her need for a suitable frock for the following day’s garden party, and she added the fact that a Certain Young Banker was going to be present at this affair. She firmly intended to catch his eye, she announced. If the detective sergeant wished to stand by mutely and watch the proceedings, she could certainly do that. On the other hand, if the detective sergeant wanted to do some browsing, Dorothea was only too happy to recommend her favourite stall, where a Bangladeshi family of six supported themselves with knockoffs of garments worn by celebrities and the two or three sole fashionable members of the royal family. “I don’t know how they do it,” Dorothea explained, “but I reckon it’s with computer hacking. So if the right person wears it to a film opening or to Ascot or to visit the White House, they’ve got it here on sale within five days. It’s brilliant. Will you browse or will you be difficult?”

  “I’ll browse, I’ll browse,” Barbara told her. Dorothea’s expression telegraphed delight until Barbara added, “Over there,” and indicated the food stalls. At which point she sighed and said primly, “I refuse to believe you’re as hopeless as you wish me to think, Detective Sergeant Havers.”

  “Think it,” Barbara told her. She took herself off to explore the edible offerings in Goulston Street, which were many, varied, and begging for purchase.

  She was wandering along the pavement and digging into a second sumptuous offering from Tikka Express Indian Cuisine when she spied the display window of a shop that appeared to be directly up her alley. The place was called Death Kitty, the shop window exclusively given to tee-shirts. Sagging paper plate in hand, she went to inspect them. Alas, she thought as she approached. All of the tee-shirts were black and of a marginally obscene nature, which made them unsuitable for anything other than wearing to visit her mum whose current mental state would preclude her comprehension of the finer points of double entendre.

  Damn, blast, and oh well, Barbara thought airily. She was about to walk off when she spied a colourful poster mounted in the shop window as well. It was announcing the publication of a book and the local appearance of its author. Looking for Mr. Darcy: The Myth of Happily Ever After was the first. Clare Abbott was the second. She would be reading and speaking at Bishopsgate Institute; women were encouraged to attend; men were dared to accompany them.

  SPITALFIELDS

  LONDON

  Barbara made the decision to attend the reading at Bishopsgate Institute for two reasons, the first of which was a very late lunch with Dorothea at Spitalfields Market. There they tucked into specialty crepes at a small café with artsy tables topped with stainless steel and chairs that looked like stretched-out colanders. Delicately unfolding her paper napkin, Dorothea blithely launched into the kind of conversation that Barbara had managed to avoid having with another human being for her entire adult life.

  Dorothea speared a slice of chicken-and-asparagus crepe, and she said to Barbara, “Detective Sergeant, let me be blunt and ask you something: When was the last time you had a truly decent bonk? I mean a grabbing-the-bedposts-and-howling session orchestrated by a bloke who knows what he’s about. This does, of course, eliminate any male who went to boarding school, but you know what I mean.” She chewed for a moment as Barbara attempted to ignore her by studying the mother and child at the next table who were engaged in a battle of wills over a miniature lorry that the child wished to plough across his plate of food. When Barbara didn’t reply, Dorothea said, “Do not make me drag the truth from you,” and tapped Barbara severely on the hand.

  Barbara turned back to her. “Never,” she said.

  “Never as in you’ll never answer me or never as in . . . you know.”

  “As in you know.”

  “Are you . . . You aren’t saying you’re a virgin, are you? Of course you’re not.” She cocked her head and examined Barbara, and a horrified expression upon her face indicated that a dawning thought had struck her. She said, “You are. Oh my God. No wonder. How stupid of me. When Detective Inspector Lynley mentioned—”

  “The inspector? Oh, that’s brilliant, Dee. You and DI Lynley are discussing my sex life?”

  “No, no, no. I mean, he’s worried about you. With your friends being gone to Pakistan. We’re all worried about you. And anyway, don’t let’s get off the subject.”

  “Dee, this is cringe-worthy. I reckon you know that because you’re not an idiot. So let’s cut to the chase. I have a busy life, so when it comes to sex, I just don’t have—”

  “Do not say what you’re about to say because no one on earth is too busy for sex,” Dorothea said. “Good Lord, Detective Sergeant, how long does it take? Ten minutes? Twenty? Thirty if you want a shower as well?” She looked thoughtful and added, “An hour, I suppose, if you require lengthy seduction. But the point is—”

  “The point is changing the subject,” Barbara told her. “Let’s talk about films. Or the telly. Or books. Or celebrities. Or absolutely any member of the royal family, with or without prominent front teeth. You choose. I’m easy.”

  “I have to ask, then. Do you want a man? Do you want a life beyond the Met?”

  “Cops leave ruined marriages in their wake,” Barbara pointed out. “Just look at our colleagues.” She picked up the menu and studied its possibilities. Another crepe or possibly a dozen sounded good at this point.

  But Dorothea plunged determinedly on. “Good heavens, I’m not talking about marriage. Am I married? Do I look married? Do I look like someone desperate to get married?”

  “To be honest? Yes. Aren’t you the bird who said not an hour ago that there’s some bloke you want to impress at a party?”

  “Well . . . yes, of course. That’s exactly what I said. But the point is: impress, date, bonk, whatever. And if that leads to something more at the end of the day, I’m on board with the idea. We all want marriage eventually.”

  “We do?”

  “Naturally. We’re only lying to ourselves if we say we don’t.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Am I supposed to believe that?”

  “Marriage isn’t for everyone, Dee.”

  “Stuff and nonsense and—”

  Barbara got up from the table to approach the ordering counter. “I’m having another crepe,” she told her.

  But when she returned to the table, she saw that her abrupt end to their conversation regarding her love life constituted only a pause in their minor conflict. The seat of her chair—so recently occupied by her substantial bum—now held a carrier bag. Barbara narrowed her eyes. Her gaze wen
t from the bag to Dorothea, who said, “I had to get it. I know it will suit you. You mustn’t protest, Detective Sergeant Havers.”

  “You said this wasn’t going to be an attempt to make me over, Dee.”

  “I know, I know. But when I saw these . . . and you did mention my own clothes today. I just wanted you to see that dressy casual isn’t . . . Look. It’s only trousers, a jacket, and a shirt. Just try them. The colour is going to be perfect, the jacket will hit you just where it needs to, the trousers—”

  “Stop. Please. All right. If I say I’ll try them, will you cease and desist?” And not waiting for an answer, Barbara pushed the bag onto the floor and dug her wallet from her shoulder bag. “What did you pay?”

  “Good heavens, no!” Dorothea protested. “This is entirely on me, Detective Sergeant.”

  That did put an end to their discussion, and Barbara drove it out of her mind that evening by shoving the clothing under her day-bed when she returned home. She might have forgotten everything about the excursion to Spitalfields save for Radio 4, which she tuned into prior to beginning the chore of weekly knickers washing in the kitchen sink. She’d rigged up the drying line and she was dousing her under things with Fairy liquid when she heard the sonorous voice of the radio host say to his guest, “That’s all well and good, but you appear to be arguing against the natural order of things. So I must ask this: At what juncture does this all become either posturing for publicity’s sake or a case in point of she ‘doth protest too much’?”

  A woman’s harsh voice answered. She seemed to bark rather than to talk, saying, “Natural order of things? My good man, from the time of the troubadours, Western civilization has encouraged women to believe that ‘someday my prince will come,’ which is hardly natural and which more than anything has kept women subservient, uneducated, ill informed generally, and willing to do everything from binding their feet to having ribs removed in order to produce the waistlines of five-year-old girls so as to please men. We’re offered injections to keep our faces without wrinkles, garments as comfortable as being embraced by a boa constrictor to keep our flab in check, hair dyes to keep our flowing locks youthful, and the most uncomfortable footwear in history to facilitate very strange fantasies that have to do with ankle licking, toe sucking, and—depend upon it—schoolboy spanking.”

  The radio host chuckled, saying, “Yet women do go along with all this. No one forces them into it. They hand over their cash or their credit cards, all in the hope—”

  “This isn’t ‘hope.’ That’s just my point. This is rote behaviour designed to produce a result they’re schooled to believe they must have.”

  “We’re not talking about automatons, Ms. Abbott. Can’t it be argued that they’re willing participants in their own . . . Would you call it enslavement? Surely not.”

  “What choice do women have when they’re bombarded with images that mould their thinking from the time they can pick up a magazine or use a telly remote? Women are told from infancy that they are nothing if they don’t have a man, and they’re even less if they don’t have what is now ridiculously called a ‘baby bump’—God, where did that extremely stupid term come from?—within six months of capturing their man. And in order to end up with the requisite man and the requisite bump, they damn well better have perfect skin, white teeth, and eyelashes long enough, curled enough, and dark enough when they leave the house in the morning because God only knows their prince might be waiting on their doorstep with an armload of roses.”

  “Yet you yourself have been married twice. Couldn’t it be argued that the position you now take arises from bitterness at the failure of those marriages?”

  “Of course that could be argued,” the woman agreed. “It could also be argued that the position I take arises from having the veil lifted from my eyes after experiencing wifehood firsthand and coming to realise that wifehood and motherhood chosen blindly in order to fulfil someone else’s definition of a successful life or chosen without regard for other possibilities robs women of the very opportunities that have given men dominance over them from the Garden of Eden onward. My position is that women must be able to choose with their eyes wide open as to the consequences of their choices.”

  “Which are not, as you say, ‘happily ever after.’”

  “Believe me, the very first time Cinderella heard the prince emit an explosive fart, the entire idea of happily ever after got itself flushed directly down the loo.”

  The radio host laughed. “And perhaps that says it all. We’ve been speaking with longtime feminist icon Clare Abbott about her controversial new book, Looking for Mr. Darcy: The Myth of Happily Ever After. She’ll be appearing at Bishopsgate Institute tomorrow evening at half past seven. Get there early because I have a feeling there’s going to be a crowd.”

  24 JULY

  THE CITY

  LONDON

  India Elliott resumed using her maiden name eight months after she left her husband, which was two weeks after she accepted a second date with a man she’d met on her regular bus ride from the Wren Clinic at St. Dunstan’s Hill to her shabby little house in Camberwell. Prior to that, she’d been India Goldacre although she’d never much cared for the name and had only changed over to it because Charlie had insisted when they married. “You’re not actually married if you don’t change your name, darling” was how he’d put it, and only half in jest. “I mean, obviously you’re married but it’s like you’re hiding it from the world.” So she’d given in because when Charlie insisted on something, he never let up. And what, after all, did a little thing like a surname matter at the end of the day? It pleased Charlie for her to change it, and she wanted to please him.

  Everything had been perfect at first in their relationship, and everything had remained close to perfect for quite a while. But she knew now—these eight months after she’d walked out on him—that she’d been far too compliant in her marriage. And she had to admit that she’d been completely seduced by Charlie’s mother.

  The first time she’d been introduced to Caroline Goldacre, India had felt admired, embraced, and welcomed. On that day in Dorset, while Charlie had been appreciatively inspecting the transformation of the heating element used to fire his stepfather’s enormous bakery ovens, Caroline had declared to India confidentially over tea à deux how delighted she was that “Charlie’s found someone after all his dithering about with those piles of education he has.” Then, within four days of being introduced, Caroline had sent her a scarf she’d found in Swans Yard in Shaftesbury with a brief note declaring the gift “a little something for you with great admiration from Charlie’s mum.” The colours were perfect with India’s complexion, as if Caroline had made a study of her so that she would know what suited her best.

  “For lovely India” had been written next, on a card accompanying a silver bracelet that Caroline had found “in of all places, one of our charity shops! With much affection, from Charlie’s mum.” Then had followed a string of intriguing beads, a handbag, and a small piece of antique silver. Not all at once, of course. And not every day. Not even every week. But just dropped into the post now and then or sent back with Charlie when he went down to Shaftesbury as he regularly did to visit his mum and his stepdad.

  And then quietly one Sunday when she and Charlie had both gone down to Dorset for a midday meal, Caroline had said to her, “Thank you for humouring me, India. My entire life I’ve longed for a daughter—please don’t tell either of the boys—and it gives me a great deal of pleasure to buy you the occasional little thing when I happen to see it. But don’t feel you have to pretend to like everything! Something unsuitable? Just give it to a friend. I won’t be at all offended.”

  Caroline was so reasonable a woman, so chatty and filled with stories of her life “with my boys,” that India had relaxed her normal reserve, convinced that any caution she felt around Charlie’s mum was the product of years spent as the only child of career diploma
ts who early on had inculcated in their daughter the message that a life spent moving from pillar to post suggested that her best interests lay in placing her trust largely if not solely in her parents when advancing through a foreign culture.

  But Caroline Goldacre did not constitute a foreign culture, despite her Colombian birth. She’d lived since early childhood in England, and over time, India found herself charmed by her. So when she and Charlie married and Caroline asked her, “Please, would you call me Mum?” despite India’s having a mother who was alive and well and, frankly, the only person India truly wanted to call her mother, she had gone along.

  She’d told herself that it didn’t really matter. She had always called her own mother Mama, with the accent on the second syllable in the fashion of someone out of the more antique sections of the British upper classes, so it wasn’t as if the term Mum meant much to her. But it had meant a great deal to Caroline, and her evident pleasure the first time India had referred to her as Mum had caused Charlie’s face to glow with gratitude. He’d mouthed, “Thank you” when Caroline hadn’t been looking, and his blue eyes shone with a loving fullness.

  What they’d had together during the years of their marriage wasn’t a diamond-perfect thing, but India asked herself realistically what marriage was diamond perfect? She’d known from conversations with her own mother as well as with girlfriends that marriage meant compromise, as well as weathering sporadic storms with one’s life’s partner. But that was the point. One had a partner with whom one grew, and life without growth wasn’t life at all.

  She’d found it helped enormously that Charlie was a postgraduate student of psychology when they’d met, on an afternoon in the Wren Clinic with him on her acupuncture table and with her speaking in the gentle murmur she employed the first time she guided one of the thin needles into a nervous patient’s skull. Because of his education, he knew how people and their relationships ticked, and that knowledge grew over the years once he opened his practice. By the time they married, he was a busy psychotherapist with a set of skills that he used to help India and himself through the occasional bad time that came up. And if it bothered her that he sometimes employed a therapist’s technique when they were engaged in discussions that occasionally grew heated about this or that, she got past it because he always dropped it with a quick “Sorry, darling” when she pointed out to him that he was “doing it again.” When he did that—giving her that affable apology—it set them immediately to rights.