Lunching at Laura's

by Claire Rayner

  ‘The restaurant. Your dinner. The evening. Are you enjoying it?’

  ‘The wine waiter’s a bit slap-happy,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have to pour your own wine. And I’m a bit suspicious about the vegetables – frozen peas this time of the year – not quite the thing, is it? And the –’

  She caught his eye, amused and gleaming, and this time the pink became a flood of embarrassment that made her cheeks feel as though they were burning.

  ‘Oh, God, how awful! I’m so sorry, Philip. It’s lovely. I’m having a super time, the food is divine, the wine is superb, you’re a superb host and excellent company, and I do beg your pardon.’

  He laughed so loudly that other people in the restaurant turned and stared at him, but he wasn’t at all put out.

  ‘I do like you, Laura. You’re funny as well as nice. Of course you can criticise the place, even though I chose it. Dammit, you’re a professional. I wouldn’t be at all impressed if you were the sort of person who just bleated, “Yes sir, no sir, three bags full, sir.” Vigorous and intelligent opinions, that’s what I like.’

  ‘Then that’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’m not a lot of good at being polite. Mostly, I keep quiet. It’s safer than talking. I’ve talked my way into too much trouble in my time. It’s safer to bite your tongue.’

  He shook his head irritably and then leaned forwards and put his hand over hers. ‘That’s ridiculous, Laura. Why should you bite your tongue when you have something to say? I’d always rather be with people who took risks than people who play safe, and so never do any real living. Wouldn’t you?’

  She stared down at his hand on hers, amazed at the fact that she hadn’t snatched it away. This was all getting ridiculous, she told herself. Absolutely ridiculous. Here’s a married man, married to my own cousin at that, and I’m flirting with him. And liking it.

  For once, she left her hand where it was. Usually she pulled away quickly when he touched her, but not this time. ‘I’m not sure. People who take risks for themselves may be all very well. But so often they don’t just take them for themselves, do they?’ She looked at him now. ‘When you play dangerous games you could be hurting other people.’ She made her voice sound as deliberate as she could. ‘And I don’t think I’d be very comfortable doing that.’

  He seemed to pick up the message because, moving very casually, he took his hand away. ‘It depends. On the person who might be hurt and their behaviour. Some people deserve it.’

  She shook her head. ‘That’s not really the point. The fact that someone behaves – oh, I don’t know, in a way you don’t like, say. That doesn’t give you permission to hurt them, does it? You may not like what they do, but that doesn’t make them wrong. Just different from you.’

  ‘Don’t make judgements, you mean? Fair enough. But surely you must agree that sometimes you have to work out who is going to be hurt the most and who the least by a particular course of action, and then choose? In some situations, pain is inevitable, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose so. But in that case I reckon I’ve no right to – to satisfy myself at someone else’s expense. Not unless they know I’m doing it.’

  ‘That would make it better?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said and picked up her glass and began to drink, carefully not looking at him.

  These conversations, elliptical, apparently casual, yet laden with personal meaning, were becoming a feature of their evenings together, and she knew soon they would have to move away from them and start to be honest, talking about what was happening to them in direct language. But she shrank from being the one who pushed them to that stage; it was all too complicated, too difficult. Enough to enjoy the moment, surely? Couldn’t she be allowed to have just a little fun and not have to worry all the time about the effects of her fun, the way she did? And for a moment she felt maudlin tears begin to rise and thought – I’ve had too much wine. Careful.

  Across the table he leaned forwards, and offered her a small cigar, and she shook her head, amused and yet gratified. She didn’t smoke and never had, and he knew she didn’t, yet he was punctilious always about offering her one of his little cigars and she sat and watched him light it, giving it as much care as he would a Corona Corona, and let her mind slide back over the past six weeks.

  Only six weeks – it seemed so much longer since that afternoon when he had come to her empty little flat and settled himself into the sofa and talked so lightly and amusingly over the tea she had made for him and made the whole place light up with excitement. For the first time the flat had felt real to her, a true home and not just the place where she washed and slept and kept her clothes. She couldn’t remember a word of their conversation; only that they had talked at a great rate, she almost as much as he, and had laughed a great deal. It had all been so relaxed and comfortable that not until he had left, after making a plan to meet for dinner the next evening, ‘Because it is quite absurd that you can’t ever take an evening off – of course you can have more than just Mondays’ – that she had remembered with a small shock that he was Ilona’s husband.

  She had struggled with herself a good deal over that; to spend time with a married man seemed wrong, even in these enlightened modern times. It might be all right for other people to swan around, not caring whether people they liked had commitments to others or not, but that wasn’t her way at all, Laura had told herself fiercely over and over again as she had gone through the evening’s work at the restaurant. All the time as she welcomed her customers and talked platitudes with them and recommended dishes and kept Angie soothed in the kitchen and made up her ledgers, she had thought about the plan they had made.

  They were to go to the theatre and then have dinner (‘somewhere totally un-Hungarian!’ he had said gaily. ‘I’m not sure where yet, but I promise you not a hint of paprika, not a whisper of gulyas. It’s time you had some variety in your life. Culinary variety I mean. I bet you haven’t eaten any food but Angie’s for years!’) and she hadn’t been able to deny that she very much wanted to go with him. It would be lovely to see a play; it had been years since she had, years and years, because of the pressures of the restaurant, and as for eating in someone else’s establishment – the idea was breathtaking in its unusualness. But still she had struggled with her conscience, seeing Ilona’s forehead with those two sharp lines between the brows every time she closed her eyes.

  But even while the struggle was going on behind her smiling polite professional face she knew what the outcome would be. She would go. All right, so he was married. What had that got to do with anything? She wasn’t planning any sort of siren act. She wasn’t going to have an affair with him, for heaven’s sake! He was just a nice man who was comfortable to be with and who had taken pity on her solitary state and decided to give her some fun – that was all.

  But of course it wasn’t. That first evening out had been so delightful that it had seemed inevitable that it should be followed by others. She had managed to insist that they restricted their meetings to Mondays, when she was normally away from her work, and had refused to allow him to take her away from the restaurant at any other time, but that had been as far as her protests had gone. She had tried to talk about Ilona, and what she might feel about the fact that her husband was taking out her cousin, but he had brushed that aside, laughing at her a little.

  ‘My dear Laura, what sort of people do you think we are, for heaven’s sake? Suburban drears who live in each other’s pockets? You mustn’t let your view of how married people behave these days be governed by your memories of your parents! The old Hungarian ways aren’t the new ones. Ilona has interests and friends of her own, and so do I. To suggest otherwise would be to insult her, don’t you think?’

  She had capitulated at once, embarrassed to have displayed so much naivety; it was dreadful to have reached thirty-five and not to know more about how people behaved. If she’d ever thought about marriage at all – which she hadn’t – she would have assumed, she realised now, that indee
d modern married couples were like her parents had been. Her mother always subservient to her father’s control in public, however much she managed to run their private life behind the scenes, and, certainly, she had taken it for granted that the two of them were always together. Except, of course, when men’s affairs and interests demanded that Tibor should be free to spend an evening with his cronies, which he did often since that was what men did, and who would dream of arguing with that? Clearly, Laura told herself, she had a lot to learn, and so stifled her doubts about Ilona when she agreed to accept yet another Monday arrangement.

  But she couldn’t stifle her doubts about going any further than that. Inexperienced though she was, she was still able to realise that Philip found her more than just good company. He had a way of letting his hand linger on hers when he shook it, or on her arm when he walked beside her, that made her feel very odd indeed and it was obvious he felt the same way. But she made it as clear as she could that she would not, indeed, could not, have a full blown affair with a man who had a wife with whom he lived. Whether she would go further if that wife were living away from him was a thought she refused to entertain; all she knew was that now she had to be careful. Philip was getting more and more important to her, and that meant it was more and more essential to keep the barriers up between them. But, oddly, it was these very constraints that made their evenings together so memorable and so charged with excitement and feeling.

  They would meet at the Waldorf Hotel; he had wanted to collect her from her flat but she had felt obscurely that would somehow be wrong, more risky, and more cheating of Ilona. Quite why she had this idea she didn’t know; it was probably irrational, but she didn’t care. That was how she felt, so the Waldorf it was.

  They would sit in the big central lounge where bored waiters served large afternoon teas to large American tourists and an even more bored pianist tinkled pretty nineteen thirties and forties tunes on the piano, and talk and laugh and talk again, licking the cream from the cakes from their lips and protesting that they were eating far too much and it wasn’t healthy and then eating more.

  They would embark on elaborate guessing games about the people at the neighbouring tables, giving them names and places of origin and then listening in to their conversations shamelessly in order to check on how close they had come to the truth, Philip in particular going to such lengths to hear what was being said that he almost fell out of his chair sometimes, he tipped it back so far; and Laura would stifle her giggles and egg him on and enjoy herself more than she could remember ever doing.

  It was as though she were now able to do the silly things she should have done when she was sixteen, but never had, and to have found in Philip someone who would share the fun was more than she could ever have hoped for. He did outrageous things, smuggling spoons and forks out of the lounge by tucking them into his socks, and then solemnly presenting them to the mystified hall porter as he left, telling him he’d found them in the men’s lavatory; or writing passionate notes, pulsating with emotion and innuendo and arranging for them to be delivered by marking them for various room numbers and leaving them in the pigeon holes at the desk for unsuspecting guests to collect and explain to their amazed spouses. It was adolescent, it was silly, and it was wonderful.

  She found, too, that she had a greater taste for the theatre than she had ever known. She had seen plays in the past of course, when her brother Alex or her cousin Paul had had small parts, but that was rare, for both of them worked mostly in television, when they worked at all, but never had she been a regular theatre goer. Now, as Monday succeeded Monday, she became more and more knowledgeable about the shows he took her to, and enjoyed them more in consequence. Whether it was ‘Forty-Second Street’ at Drury Lane or ‘Me and My Girl’ at the Adelphi or something serious at the National Theatre over the river, she revelled in it.

  And then of course there were their dinners; he went to a great deal of trouble to find new places for her and new taste experiences. They had eaten sushi in a Japanese restaurant which she had noted interesting but lacking in substance, and Italian, which she felt was inferior to her beloved Hungarian but had some useful features, and Greek which she adored and Indian which she didn’t. Altogether he was educating her in ways she now knew she should have been long ago; to be a restaurateur and to be so busy about your own establishment that you never paid any attention to others – silly in the extreme. There were ideas to be gathered, new methods of business to be learned by watching others. So watch she did.

  But mostly she concentrated on Philip. As the weeks went on she found him more and more amusing, more and more easy to be with. She would have found it difficult to tell others what it was he said that made her laugh so much. Often she knew the jokes would have been banal if they had been repeated and that the conversations that reduced her to tears of mirth were downright silly, but it wasn’t the content of his speech that delighted her so much. It wasn’t even his manner of talking. It was a combination of those and something else besides which she couldn’t define.

  She would lie awake at night sometimes, trying to do just that, to itemise what it was about him that made her behave so foolishly. For she felt foolish, gloriously foolish. She would whistle tunelessly in a soft happy hiss as she worked, and smile at her guests and chatter to them in a much more animated way than she usually did, and it had been noticed. There were some who asked her if she had been on holiday, to look so well, and others who commented on how much her new hairstyle suited her (she hadn’t changed it at all, of course) and one prescient man who said jovially, ‘You look as though you’re in love!’ who made her blush so furiously she had had to make an excuse to go out to the kitchen till she cooled down. If that wasn’t foolishness what else could it be?

  Because of course I’m not in love, she would say to herself, staring up at the dark ceiling of her bedroom. Of course I’m not. It’s just that I was bored, had got into a dreary rut, and Philip has pulled me out of it. I’m having fun and it’s that that makes me look different. It’s nothing to do with the way Philip is. Not really.

  But tonight, she was finding it difficult to believe that. It had been an even better evening than usual; they had gone further afield, for a start, than they generally did, to a jazz concert at the Barbican, and he had chosen a restaurant that was deep in the City, well off her usual Soho track, and from the start there had been an extra tension between them.

  She had sat beside him in the dimness of the big concert hall, very aware of the pressure of his thigh against hers. The seats were different here, long and benchlike and though roomy it was possible to sit very close to one’s neighbour and he had chosen to do just that. The fact that they were listening to music rather than concentrating on a play meant that she couldn’t take her mind away from him. For the whole of the two hours she had been constantly aware of him, of his touch, his smell, his nearness, in a way that had been at first exciting, then alarming and eventually deeply disturbing. She wanted more than this closeness; quite what, she didn’t want to think about, but she definitely knew she wanted.

  And then, over dinner, the repeat of one of those circular conversations in which she repeated her refusal to please herself at Ilona’s expense and he tried to suggest that it would do no harm, an argument which she was beginning to want to believe, had unsettled her even more. She sat now staring at her wine glass and literally biting her tongue to stop herself from blurting out the words that were pushing against her tightly closed lips. I want to tell him I like him a lot. I want to tell him I want to go to bed with him. God damn it all. I want, I want – I want –

  ‘Laura,’ he said and then, as she remained with her head down, said again, ‘Laura?’ and now she looked up.

  ‘It’s time we talked more, don’t you think?’ he said. ‘It really is getting very difficult, all this politeness. There are things I need to say to you, and I want to be reassured that if I say them and you don’t like them we can stay friends. What do you say? To talk
or not to talk?’

  That was when she stopped biting her tongue.

  13

  The door had been propped open with a chair, so that the floor could dry more quickly. It had been scrubbed clean of the old polish, and the men from the contractors had gone to spend an hour at the Dog and Duck before coming back to put down a new skin of fresh polish, leaving the tables and chairs piled high in the sunshine on the old cobbles outside. Angie had seized the opportunity to give the plants hanging against the window one of his special goings over and each leaf glittered with drops of water in the brightness of the May sunlight. And Laura, her ledgers complete and the orders from the markets not yet arrived to be checked off with Angie, had time to relax for a moment.

  She stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb and enjoying the smell of the day; dust from the Yard, daffodils from the window boxes outside the upstairs windows, the faintly disinfectant overtones of the stuff used to clean the floor and the aromatic paprika and onion smells drifting along from the kitchen. She breathed it in, deeply, and relished its familiarity.

  The small side door that led directly into the kitchen and which they were rarely able to use – Angie objected strenuously to the way the occasional passer-by peered in – was open so that the kitchen boys could bring out the bins and carry them to the end of the Yard for the dustmen to collect. Everything looked fresh and clean and new in the brightness and Laura pursed her lips and whistled softly, deeply content with being Laura. It was a good way to feel.

  She let her mind slide away to last night, the first time that Philip had stayed over at the flat. Up to now, their lovemaking had been punctuated by the need for Philip to get back to Harrow but last night had been their own. Ilona herself had arranged it for them, all unwittingly, going off to a health farm for a couple of days, and though Laura had demurred at first, all her old conscience pangs rearing up like frightened horses to threaten her, the prospect of having so much uninterrupted time had been more than she could resist.