Life After Lunch

by Sarah Harrison

  ‘It’s really dark,’ Becca said as I opened the cans of beer which had been selected in preference to tea.

  ‘It’ll be fine when it’s up properly. And remember it’ll be the middle of the day.’

  She peered out. ‘It’s the colour.’

  ‘I quite like it.’

  ‘Do you?’ She sounded astonished.

  ‘Yes, it’s snug. Like a pub.’

  ‘Oh, it’s like a pub all right.’

  Josh came in for the beers. ‘That thing stinks,’ he declared unambiguously.

  ‘Let’s have a sniff.’ Becca went out and wrinkled her nose questingly. ‘Jesus, Nat – what have they been doing in this down at the Dog?’

  ‘Not hosing it down with Dettol, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Je-sus!’

  The dim interior of the tent did in fact have a dank, graveyard odour. I looked up at Glyn, who was perched on a stepladder where he’d been fastening the roof lacing.

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked anxiously.

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘It is a bit niffy.’

  ‘Nonsense. It’s cosy. Get everyone tanked and they won’t notice a thing.’

  Verity came down with the grandchidren, all sweetly powdered after their bath.

  ‘Say goodnight to Mummy,’ she instructed, ‘ she’s going out with Uncle Nat.’

  ‘’Night, sweeties!’ cried Becca at her most winsomely maternal, holding wide her arms.

  ‘Ugh!’ said Amos. ‘ It smells gross in here!’

  I thought of the Ionides’ lavish pavilion with its swags and bows, its orchids and chandeliers, and told myself that if it was sunny on Sunday we’d pull down the lean-to and brave the April weather no matter what.

  Glyn and I made love that night, for the first time in six weeks. We both just knew that we would, slipping into each other’s arms with a pleasant accustomedness and lack of urgency, and melding together. Sex with us was the expression and confirmation of our mutual fondness. We were not bonded by it, and its decreasing occurrence and importance in our lives was not a source of tension. It was as if we were returning, by gentle stages, whence we came. As we moved and murmured it was, like our first handshake more than twenty-five years earlier, impossible to tell where my body ended and his began. As we slipped apart, the clock of St Stephen’s College struck twelve, and Glyn kissed me.

  ‘Happy anniversary, Laura.’

  Afterwards we lay as we always did, facing in opposite directions but with our backs pressed together, a metaphor for the nature and solidity of our marriage.

  I was tired after a day of intensive party preparations, but I was also high, and couldn’t sleep. We lay in the dark in silence for a while and then Glyn said, ‘Twenty-five years is quite something, you know.’

  ‘It is,’ I agreed.

  ‘Cy was saying it’s a bit like running a marathon – if you can do five miles you can do ten, and if you can do ten you can do twenty. If you can do twenty you’re barmy or bloody-minded enough to manage the last five.’

  ‘So what point’s he making?’

  Glyn nudged my backside with his. ‘That if we’ve lasted this long we’re probably destined to stay the course. Till death us do part.’

  Funny how even then, in the calm and companionable small hours of our silver wedding, as we heard the pounding backbeat of Nathan’s van returning in the street outside, this remark seemed like tempting fate.

  The morning dawned bright and mild but a bit queasy, with showers forecast, so we rolled up the sides of the tent and retained the roof, from which we suspended some balloons not elegant ones, but a job-lot of children’s party balloons in primary colours, including several of the sausage-shaped ones which are hell to blow up and result in a dark, nipple-shaped protuberance at one end.

  The rain never happened, and no one mentioned the smell. Our party was a big success. The encounter which, with hindsight, was to bathe it in a lurid glow, didn’t happen till the later stages, and did not at the time seem all that untoward. When a person is sloshed and celebrating, everything is heightened, and it’s not until the hangover has bitten and receded, and the last bowls of leftovers have left the fridge, that the really meaningful incidents float to the surface and bob there, radiating ripples of uncertainty.

  My brother David and his wife Anthea arrived early, at about eleven, because Anthea wanted to know if there was anything she could do. She had brought two bowls of tiramisu and some garlic bread. David dropped her and the contributions at the door before public-spiritedly parking the Jag fifty metres up the road. He was a partner with international accountants Dorling Toomey, and absolutely rolling. Channings, their spread near Godalming (referred to chez Lewis as the Ponderosa) was surrounded by white-painted paddocks full of expensive horseflesh which my sister-in-law licked into shape for other, even richer people. One of her equine pupils, Morgan Misty III, was reputed to be a probable for the next Olympics, which didn’t surprise anyone, since it was hard to conceive of a living creature who would flout Anthea Beech, let alone when she had a whip in her hand. In late middle age she was still enviably taut and wiry, but she had the outdoor-woman’s leathery complexion and flyaway hair, and her chin was becoming fluffy. In riding gear she was a sculpted centaur: in her Windsmoor shirtwaister and velvet hairband, with a scattering of David’s dull but priceless diamonds, she was plain.

  ‘Thought these might come in handy,’ she said, putting the dishes and the bread on the kitchen table. ‘Now tell me what I can do.’

  ‘Well, I really don’t expect …’ I murmured.

  ‘I know, but here I am, so point me at something.’

  I pointed her at washing lettuce and polishing glasses.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ she asked, rotating a cloth inside a tumbler till it squeaked.

  ‘Oh, round about. Upstairs.’

  ‘I hope they’re putting their shoulders to the wheel.’

  ‘They’ve done a lot already,’ I replied. (Well, some of them had. Verity, who had made two spinach lasagnes and her special apple and raisin cobbler, was at church, Glyn was listening to Radio One in the bath, the grandchildren were in Josh’s room watching him get dressed – a welfare officer’s nightmare – and Becca and Nathan were still in bed.) ‘Do you fancy a drink?’

  She glanced at her watch. ‘Sun’s not over the yard-arm, and anyway I’m chauffeur, but I’ll have a coffee if there’s one on offer.’

  ‘Did someone mention a drink?’ asked David, coming in from parking the car. He kissed me and placed a large, flat, badly wrapped parcel on one of the kitchen chairs. ‘ Many happies, well done. Hope you like it.’

  ‘They’re hardly going to tell you if they don’t,’ said Anthea abrasively. ‘Open it, why don’t you, you don’t have to wait for Glyn.’

  I gave David a glass of red wine and began tugging at the parcel tape. I was actually quite pleased to be opening it without Glyn, since I had misgivings about what it might contain, and it’s always so much easier to deal with one’s own embarrassment without the added burden of someone else’s.

  It was an oil painting of a white – sorry, grey – horse. I really couldn’t have said whether it was good or bad, but the horse was discernibly a horse and the frame was gilt.

  ‘What a superb present!’ I cried, kissing them both warmly.

  ‘Steady on,’ said David, sitting down at the table. ‘No need to go overboard. We know you don’t give a monkey’s about horseflesh, but it’s actually worth a bit.’

  ‘The horse or the painting?’

  ‘Both, as it happens.’ He tweaked his trouser leg and placed his right ankle on his left knee, revealing a smooth stretch of wine-coloured silk sock.

  ‘You’re very naughty,’ I said, propping the picture up on the dresser. ‘You must have spent a fortune.’

  ‘We wanted to give you something you could flog if you wanted to,’ explained Anthea in her no-nonsense way.

  ‘Good heavens, we’d never dream of it!�
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  ‘Never say never,’ advised David. ‘Mind if I have a cigar?’

  ‘Of course she minds!’

  ‘Not at all.’ I liked to see my brother looking the part of a fat cat.

  ‘It’s your funeral,’ said Anthea. ‘By the way, do you recognize the nag?’

  I might have known there was a catch. ‘ No, should I? It’s not …’

  ‘It’s old Misty, God bless her, looking as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.’

  I was genuinely touched. ‘We’ll definitely never flog it,’ I promised.

  By twelve, I had admitted the caterer – a good-value lady from up the road – and set up the bar, and Anthea had redistributed such flowers as I’d bought and arranged so that they looked more.

  Glyn came down, wearing a yellow blazer and a yellow and red bow-tie – he believed in dressing up for parties. He was not in the least embarrassed by the portrait of Morgan Misty III.

  ‘Oh, I say!’ he exclaimed, holding it first at arm’s length and then close to, as if checking for forgery. ‘ That is just so smart. I really love that.’

  ‘Good,’ said David, smiling benignly upon Glyn whom he regarded as a kind of jolly mascot, not to be taken too seriously. ‘By the way, you know Emma’s in Cape Town at the moment, so she won’t be here.’ He referred to their plain and bumptious daughter, who had been on the way at our wedding, and who now fronted for a company who ran balloon safaris in the Kruger National Park.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ said Glyn, adding with backhanded gallantry, ‘we only asked you so we could see Emma.’

  Anthea allowed this to pass and said to me, ‘ Jass is coming under separate cover, and picking up your parents on the way, so that Peter can have a drink.’

  ‘That’s kind of him,’ I said. Jasper at twenty-eight had turned into an exceptionally nice young man, though a slight disappointment to his parents. His lack of academic achievement wasn’t a problem – Anthea in particular would have been both startled and disconcerted if he had excelled in the classroom – but lack of drive was quite another thing. Jasper had no ambition, and following a series of aborted further education courses, in photography, media studies and performing arts (all about as comprehensible as Sanskrit to David and Anthea) and a brace of paternally instigated apprenticeships in the city, he was happily selling theatre tickets at the Barbican and living in a sagging mixed let in a bedraggled terrace in Hounslow. However, even I had to admit that none of this had succeeded in altogether removing the Etonian gloss from his manner, which was poised and personable. Unlike his sister he had plenty to be vain about, with long eyelashes and a winning smile, but his charm was the greater for being self-deprecating – a legacy, perhaps, from years of failing to meet parental expectation.

  Both Emma and Jasper were unattached, and I sensed a very slight irritation in David and Anthea that Glyn and I had, in our unorthodox and thoroughly undeserving way, beaten them to grandparenthood. They also (according to Glyn, in whom David had confided at a Pimm’s party at the Ponderosa) feared that Jasper might be gay. Personally I thought these fears were groundless. Jass was not gay, but cautious. He was in no hurry to embark on another potential failure, and who could blame him?

  ‘I told him to get them here by twelve-thirty,’ said David, looking at his watch, ‘so that they can be comfortably disposed before the rabble arrives.’

  ‘What rabble is that?’ asked Glyn.

  ‘We know your friends,’ replied David, and the two of them laughed, each awfully happy that he wasn’t the other.

  Verity had returned from All Saints, meeting as she did so Nathan, departing stealthily to man his post amidst the lunchtime frenzy at the Dog and Duck. She came into the kitchen, her flowing green Oxfam dress enlivened by an AIDS-awareness ribbon. Her silvery-brown hair, too pretty to be called mouse, was very long and very straight, and she held it back with her hands as she kissed her uncle and aunt. ‘Hallo, Uncle David … Auntie Anthea … Jesus saves.’

  They mumbled sheepishly. In their village near Godalming David was chair of the Friends of St Botolph’s, Anthea organized the flower rota, and the Ponderosa was the venue for the annual church fete – but Verity’s brand of unabashed spirituality made them horribly embarrassed.

  Verity was unaware of this. She bestowed the same greeting on me and on her father, and then exclaimed, ‘What a sweet horse, is that a present?’

  ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ I said.

  She looked at me. ‘ Mum, you haven’t changed.’

  I thought she was complimenting me on my youthful appearance, till I looked down at myself and saw the XXL grey rugger shirt and baggy ski-pants that I’d been wearing with only a brief break since 7 a.m. the day before.

  ‘Oh God!’

  ‘Our fault for talking to her,’ said Anthea, adding, ‘not that you don’t look perfectly okay anyway.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ agreed Glyn. ‘ Come as you are.’

  I met Josh coming down from his eyrie on the top floor. He had obviously spent hours deciding, with the help of Sinead and Amos, what was the right note for a seventeen-year-old genius to strike at a zimmerfest. Unsurprisingly he and his advisers had come down in favour of black, the only colour Josh ever wore. The sole relief was some discreet white lettering on the left breast of his T-shirt. A closer inspection revealed the legend: DONT GET SHAFTED, GET LAID.

  ‘David and Anthea are down there,’ I warned.

  ‘All right!’ he intoned, ‘Let’s party!’ And cantered down the stairs.

  Sinead and Amos were still in Josh’s room, watching the Jurassic Park video which to my certain knowledge was already overdue to the tune of five pounds.

  ‘Come on, you two,’ I called from halfway up the second flight, ‘switch that off, the party’s about to start.’

  Sinead came out and looked down at me. ‘Are you going to get dressed up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I come and watch?’

  ‘That’d be nice.’

  Sinead came with me and sat on the bed, trying on necklaces and pulling out the hairs on her forearm with eyebrow tweezers, while I changed. Becca had ensured that her daughter looked sweet in a faded, old-fashioned smocked dress with kicker boots. Like her mother, she was a hard act to compete with. In the end I followed Josh’s what-the-heck example and put on a red Jeff Banks dress, expensive in its day, now amenable with use and mellowed by many convivial occasions. To show that the old dress was a choice and not a necessity, I added one of my rare follies, a pair of Dolce e Gabbana black suede ‘fuck me’ stilettos, with ankle straps and a single diamante stud on the back of the left heel. I finished things off with Glyn’s anniversary earrings, a couple of big twists of solid silver like Walnut Whips. I fancied that this combination, particularly of a Sunday lunchtime, would be enough to confuse the most sceptical guest.

  Putting on my make-up in the full-length mirror, with Sinead standing in front of me putting on hers, I thought of Susan and fancied I could hear her voice saying, ‘Very nice, Mrs Lewis, almost like a single woman.’ I wondered if this time she’d defy all precedent and turn up, and whether it would be a good thing if she did. On the one hand, there was no one more fun, or whose company in the right circumstances I relished more: on the other, there was no one whose particular perspective on twenty-five years of blameless, uninterrupted marriage might more surely curdle my pleasure in the occasion.

  I finished the make-up and stood back, sucking in my stomach and tightening my calf muscles. ‘How do I look?’

  Sinead, copying, held out her arms, lipstick still in one hand. ‘How do I look?’

  ‘You look gorgeous,’ I said, knowing how this game worked. ‘The belle of the ball.’

  ‘You look gorgeous,’ responded Sinead obligingly. ‘Belluva ball.’

  I relieved her of Desert Dawn and put the top back on. ‘Shall we go down?’

  ‘Yes!’

  Without prompting, she put up her hand to take mine. Glowing with a
sense of privilege, I led her out on to the landing, where we met Becca and Amos, his mother having succeeded where I had not in prising him away from t.rex, velocoraptor and co.

  Becca, night on the tiles notwithstanding, presented her usual bella figura, in skin-tight black jeans and an emerald-green silk shirt tied at the waist. Her hair was piled up in a wickedly artless Bardotesque topknot, from which a few blonde tendrils escaped, and her Nubian-queen face, with its haughtily upthrust jaw, full, sculpted mouth and slanting cheekbones, was made up with model-girl brilliance. Earrings like cascades of golden coins jingled almost to her shoulders. My two daughters were alike in a way which displayed their differences. If Verity was the moon – pale, modest and serene – then Becca was the sun. Amos, with his father Roberto’s coppery colouring, seemed to have been burnished by his mother’s glow, and Sinead, unlike her father Liam, was like a plump little peach ripened in her heat. Perhaps because today I knew I was also looking good, I was bowled over by the beauty of my family.

  Becca picked up Sinead. ‘What a babe!’

  ‘Sorry about the lipstick,’ I said.

  ‘Why? She looks a real star.’

  My eyes stung. Becca was no one’s idea of the perfect mother, but there were some things she did divinely right. Putting Sinead down, she threw me a look. ‘Not so dusty,’ she said.

  By one-thirty the party had achieved its own momentum. The decibel-count had reached that level which denotes lift-off, the body language was devil-may-care and the atmosphere heady with smoke, alcohol fumes and people getting loose as the proverbial goose. The proceedings had reached the point where I wondered why I had worried even for a split second about the smelly tent. The food – Verity’s and Anthea’s contributions aside – was Indian in orientation, and going down a treat with not too many shards of bhaji and samosa being trodden into the carpet. The music – well. I had overlooked music, but we had been infiltrated by a couple of Josh’s friends who had assumed responsibility for saving us from ourselves with the latest sounds. Even the realization that in this crush no one would notice my diamond-studded shoes could not spoil my mood.