Life After Lunch

by Sarah Harrison

  I had intended Glyn, with his irregular work on the fringes of the pop world, to be my pretext for a little mild snook-cocking in the form of the register-office-andKing’s-Road-bistro option in town. But he confounded my assumptions.

  ‘Oh no, don’t let’s, everyone’s doing that,’ he said, adding disarmingly, ‘I’ve told everyone you’re a Home Counties toff, they’ll be terribly disappointed if we don’t have the whole works.’

  It was typical of Glyn to present his own preference as an indulgence of the preferences of others. But then the two usually coincided because he was an enthusiast who took on the colour of whatever group he was currently enthusiastic about. This puppyish desire to be taken in and approved of was one of his most endearing characteristics.

  My parents liked him, in my father’s case rather in spite of himself. He was both sceptical and admiring of Glyn’s chameleon quality. When Glyn told him he’d applied for what both men referred to as a ‘proper job’ (it was on a listings magazine), I remember my father saying, ‘What as? Primate of all England?’ As for my mother, she liked men, and the more they conformed to her picture of them as sweet boys, the more she liked them. But both parents had the sophistication of their generation, where much was acknowledged though little said, and I was prepared to bet that at the time of our marriage they understood him rather better than I did.

  So the full works it was. The dash of testosterone was not, I must tell you, in evidence on that occasion. I harbour no illusions about my looks. With my big bones, broad shoulders and large, emphatic features I’m no one’s idea of a beauty. With a bit of effort and a following wind I can be striking, but on my wedding day my mother’s genes must have been in the ascendancy, and I believe I came close to being pretty. I wore full-length white brocaded satin, empire line and trumpet sleeves, with my hair up and an elaborately coiffed hairpiece with white ribbons intertwined in its coils. Round my neck was a pale green velvet choker with my mother’s peridot brooch pinned to it, and I carried white roses. I was Elvira Madigan, and Patti Boyd, and Julie Christie in Far From the Madding Crowd …

  My mother wafted in as I was putting on the final coat of lip-gloss, and laid her hand on my shoulder as she looked at our combined reflections in the dressing-table mirror. She was nothing short of a fantasy Mother of the Bride in a broad-brimmed hat of pleated black silk with a single turquoise flower, and a dress and coat of floating silk organza in black and turquoise.

  ‘Darling, you look absolutely lovely,’ she said.

  ‘So do you.’

  ‘Thank you! You’re quite sure I don’t look like the cook on a day out …?’ I didn’t bother to reply to this, one of her rare, and quite involuntary, glints of snobbery. ‘I’m just going, so I’ll see you in church.’ She made a moue, careful of her lipstick, and I inclined a cheek, careful of mine.

  She straightened up and gave my shoulder a little pat with her silk glove. ‘He’s a nice man, Glyn. I want you both to be extremely happy.’ She ducked briefly to catch my eye in the mirror once more. ‘You be sure to be a good girl.’

  It’s awful to admit, but I was flattered by this piece of advice. Though I might not have been had I known how prescient it was.

  It was April, with the weather hovering between smiles and tears. Glyn wore a pale green suit with a white shirt, a green-and-white patterned bow-tie and a gardenia – we were winsomely colour-coordinated. Cy, who was then editor of the girls’ monthly magazine Hipster, wore a cream chalk-striped three-piece with zip-up canvas boots.

  My older brother David (grey morning dress, silk stock, gardenia), then no more than a gleam in the corporate eye of Dorling Toomey, was chief usher, and the three-year-old Jasper was page. Spawn of Satan though he seemed to me at the time, Jasper was small enough fry to be under his mother’s thumb. Anthea was always an absolute brick of a woman, scion of a dauntingly county family, who was still riding in three-day events at five months pregnant. She thought nothing of putting the maternal frighteners on her son, who in consequence looked uncharacteristically seraphic in green breeches, white hose, and a white ruffled shirt.

  My twin teenage cousins, Ros and Steph, were bridesmaids. They were about to take O-levels and were even stroppier than usual, what with not having done a stroke for the past five years, and having to fall in with what they perceived as my unreasonably draconian demands about dress. Aunt Caro was a less reliable ally than Anthea, being fairly daffy to begin with, long divorced, and worn down by many years of bootless struggle. It was left largely to me to police the twins. From the neck down I got them looking almost virginal (if I could do it, so could they), in pale green-and-white sprigged cotton with scoop necks and full sleeves. From the neck up they remained dolly-birds – pasty-lipped, sooty-eyed, and brain-dead. (It always struck me as odd that in the sixties, that period of emancipation and the Pill and opportunity for all, the prevailing female fashion simpered: Look at me, I’m an underage sex toy.) Their sculpted Cilia Black bobs, rising smoothly over a nest of backcombing at the back and falling into two lacquered points at the front, utterly failed to accommodate my wired alice bands of white flowers, which had to be jettisoned. The unobtrusive Bally pumps obediently purchased by Caro were also rejected at the last moment in favour of cloggy white patents which I only spotted as we foregathered outside the church porch for our entrance, when it was too late.

  ‘What a bevy of beauty,’ said my father, dapper in his morning dress, as I glared at Steph and Ros to show I’d noticed.

  My father wasn’t a handsome man, but he was an attractive one. He brought irony to bear on what in another man might have been grave disadvantages. Aware that others probably saw him as a dry stick, a number-cruncher who after a dull war had sat tight and risen effortlessly through the ranks of the Westminster, he simultaneously accepted and undermined this view with a frosty courtliness which, allied with a sharp, glancing wit, made him rather devastating. I had seen gorgeous women glued to my father’s side by the minutely raised eyebrow, the quizzically inclined groomed head, the finely judged murmured remark, the scholarly adjustment of gold spectacles with finger and thumb.

  My mother, a renowned beauty standing six foot-plus in her stilettos, had been with him since 1937 without a word of complaint or a moment’s discontent that anyone knew of. My father’s reference to the bevy of beauty was the comment not just of a quietly satisfied man, but of a connoisseur.

  We stood in the capricious spring breeze – my father and I and my mutinous train – waiting for the off. Inside the church the organ played the largo from Handel’s Water Music. Ros and Steph were like waxen images in their briskly billowing muslin. David hovered in the porch to receive signals. Anthea, in an elastically expanded blue suit (Emma) and a petalled toque, hovered over Jasper, occasionally removing the questing hand he thrust down the front of his breeches.

  ‘I’ve got a Mason Pearson in my bag, Jass,’ she told him, ‘ and if you do that again you’re going to feel it on your bottom.’

  ‘I’m frozen,’ complained Steph.

  ‘Stamp up and down,’ suggested Anthea abrasively. She had done bridesmaid duty almost annually in all weathers since the age of four and saw no reason why these two whingeing horrors should be pandered to.

  ‘What are we waiting for?’ Ros was querulous. ‘ I thought they were all waiting for us.’

  ‘Ah, but we all in our turn await the vicar,’ explained my father, ‘who only arrived a moment ago.’ This remark was edged with a certain caustic relish, since he regarded the clergy in general as not worthy of their calling and only imperfectly trained. It pleased him to say that he had yet to meet a vicar whom he would willingly have employed in his branch.

  A second later David advanced to the entrance of the porch with the long, creeping strides of a man being painfully discreet.

  ‘Flag’s gone up,’ he said. ‘ It’s all yours.’

  ‘Hold your horses,’ cried Anthea, ‘while we dash behind a tombstone!’

  A scattering
of rain fell as we waited, and the accompanying small drop in temperature made Jasper’s urine steam exuberantly as it hit the granite.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Anthea. ‘We’re ready for the off.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ muttered Steph, ‘I’ve got goose-pimples like the Andes.’

  ‘All right?’ enquired my father. I nodded, and we strode purposefully forward. I didn’t have even the smallest twinge of nerves or anxiety. But as we entered the porch, and I could smell the flowers, and the scent, hear the creak of the organ pedals and see the rows of faces turned sideways to greet us, something compelled me to look over my shoulder.

  And there, beyond my sulky handmaidens, I saw Susan sauntering up from the direction of the lychgate. She wore a black-and-white checked trouser-suit, a yellow polo-neck jumper, black patent shoes with a gold buckle, and a black butcher-boy cap pulled down jauntily over one ear. When she caught my eye she pointed, covered her eyes with her hand, and then waved both arms in the air and capered up and down like a mad baboon, her Mary Quant shoulder-bag flapping wildly in the wind.

  Unsettled, I almost dragged my father up the aisle to meet my groom.

  After the wedding it was two years before we met Susan again. We were living in Willesden Green with Becca aged twenty months and Verity on the way. Glyn was working as a stringer on the diary column of the London listings magazine. Every week there was a distribution of whatever freebies had been sent to, and rejected by, the heads of department. On this particular occasion Glyn, at that time the lowest form of editorial life, had come home with two tickets for a film premiere. On the day I deprived Becca of a nap, laid in a supply of chocolate digestives and prevailed on the churchy lady from the flat upstairs to babysit.

  The film was the first foray into directing of a South African actor who had made it big in Hollywood by growing a natty moustache, taking elocution lessons and assuming quintessential Englishness. It was a dire comedy of the high seas called The Plimsoll Line (‘One woman on board is bad luck. Twelve’s a bonanza!’) and concerned the pranks, romps and escapades occasioned by the transportation of a troupe of chorus girls aboard a Royal Navy frigate. It was stupefyingly energetic and coy – the last gasp of those toothsomely smutty but naive British pictures that films like The Knack and Blow-Up saw off for ever. In the following weeks it died a lingering death at the box office, but on the night in question it was enjoying its hour in the sun. The ersatz Englishman had got his well-preserved chums and their popsies out in droves, and backing them up was the usual squad of dolly-birds, chancers, hairdressers, photographers and sportsmen. Never were so many heavy fringes, headbands, elephant loons, beaded waistcoats and false eyelashes worn by so many to so little purpose.

  I was no slouch myself. I wore a purple panne-velvet Biba shift with lilac suede platform-soled ankle boots. Though not new, it had been sufficiently ahead of its time when it was, to pass muster now. My five-month pregnancy was obvious enough to disguise my slight ongoing weight problem, and the dress had a halter neck with a plunging ‘ keyhole’ decolletage which displayed my hormonally enhanced cleavage to advantage. Glyn, now aware of the Terence Stamp comparison, wore a lilac suit and a tie-dyed silk handkerchief round his neck. God, but we were as cool as all-get-out.

  Or that’s what I thought until the after-show party. Glyn and I were standing near the buffet (we were not among the shining ones allotted places at tables in the ballroom) talking about how disappointing the stars looked in real life, when I heard a familiar rasping cry like the call of an exotic parrot in the jungle canopy. Or at least the tone was like that – the content mimicked the title of another undistinguished film about the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

  ‘Laura, Laura, Laura!’

  ‘Susan!’

  ‘How are you? Who’s this?’

  ‘This is my husband, Glyn. You came to our wedding.’

  ‘I did, yes, but we scarcely exchanged two words, and anyway I don’t expect these things to last.’ She hung on to Glyn’s hand for a moment, grinning excitedly. ‘Tell me, Glyn, do people tell you you look like Jess Conrad?’

  ‘Not usually,’ said Glyn bravely. Only I could tell quite how crestfallen he was, but fortunately there were other matters to draw our attention. One was Susan’s outfit, a backless-to-the-rear-cleavage palazzo-pants number in gold lame. The other was her companion, whom she now seized by the elbow and introduced.

  ‘And this is Jimmy Mullaney who is not, I’m happy to say, my husband.’

  ‘Hallo there,’ he said, giving us both a short, sharp tug of the hand.

  We were no longer cool. We were shamefully impressed. Jimmy Mullaney was the undisputed king of Formula One, three times world champion, twice back from the dead, with enough metal in his body to build a family saloon. Even in this company he was by far the most glamorous person in the room, trailing clouds of Grand Prix glory and standing about shoulder-high to Susan in her gold wedge heeled sandals.

  ‘Wasn’t that film the most unspeakable load of shite you’ve ever seen?’ said Susan loudly.

  ‘We thought so,’ agreed Glyn. ‘Thank God there’s plenty to drink.’

  Jimmy Mullaney swirled the contents of his glass as though it were medicine. ‘If you call this stuff drink.’

  ‘Take no notice,’ said Susan. ‘He thinks champagne is for spraying over people when you’ve notched up another few points in the championship.’

  We laughed, but he only smiled coolly and asked, ‘So how do you two know each other?’

  ‘We were at school together!’ cried Susan.

  ‘Laura doesn’t look old enough,’ he remarked with mischievous gallantry.

  ‘Oh, she’s centuries younger than me,’ explained Susan generously. ‘We once completely ballsed-up an egg-and-spoon race together.’

  ‘Did you?’ asked Glyn.

  Susan reached across and laid her hand on his forearm. ‘You must let me buy you a drink some time and I’ll tell you all about it.’

  ‘It was the house relay actually,’ I said.

  Jimmy raised his eyebrows. ‘Such recall … it must have been a formative experience.’

  ‘It was all too boring for words,’ declared Susan, ‘and best consigned to the dustbin of history like this dog film.’

  She spoke as always con brio and it was impossible not to notice this remark being registered on several faces in the surrounding crush.

  ‘Why don’t you come and join us at our table,’ she went on, ‘so we can talk properly?’

  ‘We’re not allocated table places,’ said Glyn thinly. ‘ I’m working.’

  ‘No! You’re an actor – no, you’re in films – no, no, no, don’t tell me, you’re a photographer—’

  ‘I’m a journalist,’ explained Glyn.

  Jimmy raised an eyebrow. ‘I hope everything I say isn’t going to be used in evidence against me.’

  ‘Christ, no. A five-line précis in the listings is all that will be required of me in return for this sumptuous evening’s entertainment.’ I was proud of my husband’s selflessness, for this chance encounter must have seemed like the portals of preferment.

  Jimmy looked relieved. Susan beckoned vigorously. ‘Come on, there’s a no-show at our table!’

  We followed. Glyn had long since forgiven the Jess Conrad blunder and looked happy and thrilled. He was more than a bit star-struck and loved to feel he was at the centre of things. I wondered if there would be an embarrassing scene with the muscular flunkey at the doorway of the ballroom, but I was to witness the power of true fame. Jimmy simply walked through without a word and the flunkey was too polite even to glance at the rest of us.

  There were eight gilt chairs round each table, and the other couple were dancing when we got there. Dinner was over, but champagne on ice was on a stand by Jimmy’s chair and he poured us all a glass and motioned for more. Emboldened by the high life, Glyn said, ‘Isn’t he a short arse, that star?’

  I turned hot and cold, but Susan screeched with laughter a
nd put her arm across Jimmy’s shoulders. ‘ Hear that? You’ve got competition.’

  Jimmy submitted to Susan’s squeeze with the relaxed good grace of a man who, although only five foot two in his shoes, knew he was the absolute embodiment of fearless machismo.

  Glyn blundered on. ‘ No, but it’s different with film stars. You expect them to be larger than life, and when they’re not it’s a disappointment somehow.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said Jimmy. ‘I like someone to look up to.’

  ‘So you see he’s extremely content!’ said Susan. We laughed.

  A little later, in the glass, marble and quilted-leather wastes of the ladies’ powder room, I said to her, ‘He’s really lovely, where did you meet him?’

  ‘At a drinks party given by a friend of mine who has the knack of bringing interesting people together,’ said Susan, with no trace of false modesty. ‘And yes, he is a little darling, isn’t he? I must say I thought any racing driver, let alone a dwarf one, was bound to be an arrogant pig, but he really isn’t.’ She cast me a sidelong glance as she finished retouching her lipstick. ‘He knows what he likes though.’

  ‘Does he?’ I remained in neutral, awaiting a flow of salacious confidences to discuss later in bed.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Susan smacked her lips. ‘He spotted your Glyn across a crowded room.’

  It took only a split second for the implication of this to hit me, with all the messy impact of a kitchen cupboard collapsing. As the door of the powder room swung shut behind me, Susan’s rusty squeaks of laughter rang in my ears.

  After the churchy lady had returned to her flat we lay in bed with Becca slumbering between us (she had an uncanny understanding of when conjugal rights might be imminent, and interposed herself accordingly). I drank tea and Glyn smoked a joint. I knew he was flattered.