Life After Lunch

by Sarah Harrison

  ‘Do you come from a big family yourself?’ she once enquired, fixing me with a look of tortured puzzlement.

  ‘Only two. And this will only make three.’

  ‘I’m an only,’ she said.

  ‘I thought you had a sister.’

  ‘Oh, my sister the cow, I don’t count her.’

  ‘That’s cheating,’ I protested.

  ‘No it’s not.’ She inveighed happily against her sister for a while and having returned, via this scenic route, to the point, leaned forward and tapped me sharply on the forearm.

  ‘The thing is, when are you going to get some time to yourself?’

  ‘I have time to myself,’ I protested.

  ‘No you don’t!’

  ‘Yes I do.’

  ‘When, for instance?’

  ‘Now, for instance.’

  ‘Oh, well.’ Susan took out a Rothman’s King Size and held it questingly aloft until a lighter was magicked to her side. She took a drag. ‘Oh, well, if you’re going to pretend the odd hour’s browsing and sluicing with a girlfriend constitutes real freedom …’

  ‘It does,’ I insisted, adding spiritedly, ‘And so does the option to have six children if that’s what I want.’

  ‘God in heaven, don’t do it!’ she cried, with every appearance of genuine dismay. ‘You mustn’t! That’s not just reproducing, it’s reproducing in order to opt out of the rest of life!’

  ‘Rubbish.’ I laughed. ‘And anyway I’m not going to.’

  She looked sceptical. ‘Nothing would surprise me.’

  If all this makes her sound unfeeling, it shouldn’t. When Josh arrived, Susan came to visit me, bringing a cold-box with the ingredients for Black Velvet (‘I’ve read stout is good for nursing mothers but I won’t touch it without champagne’) and a gigantic gonk with a Zapata moustache which Josh kept in his room well beyond the age when I would have dreamed of commenting on it.

  After Josh I lost a baby, stillborn. Another little girl. Susan wrote me a letter full of such fiery feeling that it actually made a tiny difference where all else had failed. I have kept it. In the letter she managed what no one else had dared attempt – to speak of Isobel as a real, whole person.

  ‘I want us to have a wonderful, long lunch, and I want to know all about your youngest daughter [she wrote]. I want to know who she looked like, what she weighed, what colour her eyes were, and her hair (if any). I want to know what name you’ve given her, and all about the godawful funeral service. I wonder if I might be her godmother? I’d make a lousy godmother in real life and I don’t have any of the right credentials, but I know I’d be good at thinking about your lost little girl, and talking about her so that she stays in the family …’

  Susan’s words breached the dam and allowed me to cry. Even Glyn hadn’t been able to do that because he was as paralysed with grief and despair as I was. Six weeks later we did have lunch, and I did tell her about Isobel, and she listened, without a murmur, through two hours and three bottles of wine, and that time we both cried. Afterwards we went to Kensington Market – this was when Susan was still based in London – and she bought me a Victorian locket and arranged for it to be engraved with the names of all our children, including Isobel. A couple of weeks later I received, by special delivery, a white rose bush named ‘Isobel’ after our youngest daughter.

  If I ever needed proof that Susan was a true friend, that alone would have provided it. Maddening, egotistical and dictatorial though she often was, she had heart. And, more importantly, soul.

  Susan took the view that marriage – any marriage, but of course mine was the one she knew best – was by definition dull and stifling. But I believe that deep down she was ambivalent about it. The mere idea of being, as she put it, ‘banged up with the same man for thirty or forty years’ filled her with real horror, as did the interdependence, the responsibility, the compromise, the mild, necessary hypocrisy, and (Isobel notwithstanding) the kids. At the same time her scorn was tinged, I felt, with a slight anxiety that in the twilight of her years she might miss someone to drink cocoa with. I believe it was this anxiety that made her increasingly judgmental, and me endlessly forgiving. For despite living a life high on the post-Pill hog, Susan displayed the classic double standard of the child-free. No hint of irony coloured her ‘ don’t-do-as-I- do-do-as-I-say’ philosophy. She stood in her glass-house, Rothman’s King Size between her lips, large gin and Schweppes at her elbow, and lobbed boulders. When Becca shacked up with Roberto, a Brazilian dancer and the first of her boyfriends brave enough – or not sufficiently fluent in English – to invite her, Susan professed herself shocked to the core.

  ‘You’re actually going to just let her?’ she squeaked as we stool-perched in a tapas bar in Long Acre.

  ‘What else can we do? She’s nineteen.’

  ‘Yes, but at nineteen I was still a virgin!’

  I was sufficiently surprised myself not to be put off my stroke by the ripple of turning heads. ‘ You weren’t, were you?’

  ‘Believe it or not I was!’ Since she had already effectively caught the barman’s eye Susan gave him a speaking look and nudged our glasses forward. ‘I may have been a late developer but I’d never have dreamed of moving in with some foreigner, let alone telling my parents that was what I was doing!’

  I spoke in a determinedly lowered tone in an attempt to lower hers. ‘Isn’t that hypocrisy?’

  ‘It may well have been hypocrisy,’ she declared, not taking the hint, ‘but it kept me out of harm’s way!’

  ‘It’s all very different now,’ I said in what even I could tell was a battle-weary tone. ‘The whole culture is towards openness.’

  ‘Okay.’ Susan took delivery of our next round and settled into the argument with relish. ‘ Okay. But if everyone’s being so open, what I want to know is, why doesn’t Glyn go round there and bop this dago on the nose?’

  I flinched. Heads turned away to conceal smug smirks. Once again she was painting a picture of Glyn which lacked only tattoos and a pitbull to qualify as Hardest Man in Town.

  ‘It’s not his style,’ I said wetly.

  ‘Maybe that’s the problem.’ She drove me crackers in her psychoanalytical mode. ‘Maybe you should both of you be heavier parents.’

  It was characteristic of our relationship that I never paused to consider what qualified Susan to lecture me on how to raise children. ‘But Becca wants to be with Roberto,’ I said. ‘He makes her happy. He’s done nothing wrong—’

  ‘Except steal your daughter’s innocence.’

  ‘Oh,’ I laughed, ‘ that was given away with stamps years ago—’

  ‘QED,’ crowed Susan.

  Sometimes her subversion of the marital status quo took the form of these swingeing but grossly unfair indictments of our competence. Sometimes they were more subtle.

  ‘Of course,’ she would sigh, having described some particularly trying weekend when the demands of her social life had proved too exacting and she’d been reduced to lying alone on her bed with Kiri Sings Cole and a glass of iced coffee, ‘of course, you blissfully married ladies don’t have to worry about times like that, because there’s always someone there for you.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I’d mumble cautiously.

  ‘No, but come on, there is. When I feel bleak I have to dig deep and find the answer inside. When you feel bleak you have a shoulder to cry on.’

  ‘It depends what it’s about.’

  ‘Surely not,’ she’d scoff. ‘A partner for life is a partner for life. What’s marriage about if not being there for each other?’

  ‘That’s meant to be my line.’

  ‘But I don’t hear you saying it, Laura.’

  I forebore to tell her that I wouldn’t stoop to using such a hackneyed old cliché, because of course she knew it was a cliché and that’s why she’d used it herself.

  ‘What does Glyn do?’ she’d ask.

  ‘When?’

  ‘When he’s down. When he needs a friend. I bet
he comes straight to you.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ I conceded. It was impossible to convey the intricate weave of long-term marriage, its tacit conventions and assumptions, to someone who could not conceive of it.

  ‘Sometimes?’ She looked aghast.

  ‘It would depend what the problem was.’

  ‘There are times,’ she would say solemnly, ‘when I feel I know nothing about you, or about marriage.’

  She didn’t, of course, so all I could do was look humble and reflective.

  ‘I think,’ she went on with the utmost satisfaction, ‘that I must be an incurable old romantic. I could never tolerate being cooped up with one other person for years on end, but I always assumed that people who did derived endless emotional comfort from it.’

  I did occasionally try to explain to her about Glyn and me but her inattention never allowed me to get into my stride. Her method of stopping me was simple – she conceded defeat with the blase good humour of a woman to whom the battle itself is already of no consequence.

  ‘I know, I know, I know,’ she would say, tapping my wrist to indicate ‘ time’ as she refilled my glass. ‘Laura, you don’t have to tell me all this, honestly. I know you Lewises have an absolutely solid marriage. I talk about it to my friends. I do! You are a legend in your own lunchtime. Please, not another word. It’s very naughty of me to tease you the way I do, when what I really want to do is tell you all about my exquisite Nicole Farhi shift …’

  Susan looked enviably good in Nicole Farhi. She was the same height as me – around five feet ten – but was always a good stone lighter. I put this down partly to luck and heredity, and partly to the fact that as a single woman she didn’t have to have a kitchen permanently stocked with calorific foods. I knew I could keep the family on a completely healthy diet at relatively low cost, but that presupposed that I wanted to cook every day. There were days – to be honest they may even have constituted a majority – when I would rather have bungee-jumped than turn on the stove. That meant that the family were in the habit of conducting fridge and cupboard raids and foraging for themselves. For this to be possible you have to maintain a solid base of fats, sugar and carbohydrates. When the kids were at junior school I took the view that if there was bread, cereal and baked beans in the house no one would starve, no matter what my state of mind. No. 23 Alderswick Avenue was comfort-food heaven.

  Susan’s fridge contained bags of vegetables and salad, cartons of live yoghurt, occasional packets of smoked salmon and skinless chicken breasts, dry white wine and tonic water. Her cupboards held herbs, spices, Gordon’s gin, pasta, wild rice, coffee beans, extra-virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Ask for a strong cuppa and a fig roll chez Susan and you’d be disappointed.

  So she was bound to be thinner than me. Also, she was a completely different build. People imagine that tall people are automatically leggy. I am not. I’m broad-shouldered and long-bodied, with a tendency to be pear-shaped. My legs are not awful, but they stop at my bottom, not my armpits. I have squarish hands and feet which are small for my height. In other words, I’m a tall endomorph. Susan was a classic ectomorph, slim and rangey, with long limbs, elegant tapering hands and feet, and a swan-like neck. She had wilfully curly dark hair, short-sighted, slightly protuberant brown eyes, and a beaky, vivacious face. Her pronounced nose and chin, and extremely well-cared-for teeth gave her smile its devilish quality. Like me she was not a beauty, but her basic equipment was of the sort that takes much less effort and expense to bring up to scratch, and since she was in a position to spare neither she was generally well ahead on points. On what might be termed the minus side she was rather flat-chested, and wore glasses. But the former actually added to her Hepburnesque air, and she employed the latter with such style that it made you feel like dashing out and buying a pair or two so as not to be left out. I made the mistake of asking her once why she didn’t use contact lenses.

  ‘Why should I?’ she retorted.

  ‘I wasn’t implying that you should … It’s just that most people these days do.’

  She removed her specs and leaned forward, poking one of the arms at me. ‘Exactly.’

  Every time a coconut.

  It must be said that Susan was generous about the way I looked, and free with compliments. She frankly admired my bust, my thick, straight hair and my easy-tanning skin, but allowed that she had better legs. She almost always began our meetings with ‘You do look nice’ or something like it, and she was honest about what suited me and what didn’t. She was always right, as well. There was never any attempt to flannel me into wearing something grotesque, or inappropriate, or both, in order to benefit from the comparison. And as any woman knows, that is no common thing in a friendship, and of no small value, either.

  She delighted in what she considered to be our complementary good looks. ‘Take a look round, Laura,’ she would stage-whisper gleefully, grabbing my hand, ‘and tell me honestly if we’re not the smartest broads in this whole goddamn restaurant …’

  When Susan talked like that, she was irresistible.

  She was less approving about my involvement with the Citizens Advice Bureau, which she considered ghastly beyond belief.

  ‘How on earth can you stand it, all those deadbeats, day after day?’

  ‘They’re not deadbeats.’

  ‘Come on, they must be or they wouldn’t be there in the first place.’

  ‘They’re just people who need answers to questions. They’re all sorts.’

  ‘There you are then,’ she said. ‘‘‘All sorts’’ means deadbeats. And for nothing! I tell you, Laura, you’re the last outpost of noblesse oblige.’

  Susan most emphatically did not deal with deadbeats, and her income reflected the superior nature of her clientele. Her initial line of business was interior design, which developed into estate agency, which in turn developed into ‘Ideal Homes’ – something rather more exclusive. ‘ We are the personal services of the real estate world,’ she was fond of saying, without a hint of irony. She and Simon thought of themselves as matchmakers, bringing particular customers and particular properties together, even occasionally persuading people to part with the house they were living in because someone else wanted it more, and anyway they could (through her good offices) find something better. Many of their clients were foreign – overseas businessmen looking for something for a couple of years, or American rock stars in search of a moated grange with attitude – and all were loaded. The business was not only profitable but served as a highly selective dating agency for Susan, who was not squeamish about forming liaisons with the customers. Simon lived an elegant pink-economy lifestyle with his older partner Richard, a one-time heartthrob of the British cinema, first in Fulham and subsequently in the village of Mutchfield, ten miles from our town.

  Susan and Simon were an unholy alliance, always abuzz with scurrilous gossip, and alight with a deliriously elitist self-satisfaction which was based on a simple premise: they had life sussed and the rest of the world did not. Simon was a handsome, soigné man, and he and Susan took great delight in ‘letting people think they were a couple’. They seemed unaware that this conceit was predicated on the assumption that people a) watched their every move and b) cared whether they were or not. But it did no one any harm and they derived a lot of innocent pleasure from it.

  It was well into their personal services phase that Simon and Richard decided to move out of London, and acquired Gracewell, the small but perfect sixteenth-century manor house in Mutchfield. Having rubbished this development up hill and down dale at the time, it didn’t take Susan long to reach the conclusion that she, too, needed a more tranquil setting from which to operate, and that anyway much of what was quintessentially English and stylish was these days to be found outside (but within easy reach of) London. Her change of heart did not extend to the sort of rural grandeeism aspired to by Simon and Richard, but she exchanged her flat in Lancaster Gate for a larger one overlooking the river in Litherbridge. Had it been not for
the fact that Simon had taken this step first, I might almost have suspected her of wanting to be nearer me.

  But of course that was ridiculous.

  Chapter Five

  A week after the party I got back from the Bureau at lunchtime to a calm, empty house. Glyn was having a London day. Verity was filling boxes for war-torn Central Europe in Tesco’s car park, Josh was at college and Becca and the kids had not dropped in. There were no messages on the answerphone and nothing protruding from the fax in Glyn’s office. Our cards and flowers still decorated the mantelpiece and bookshelves. Verity had washed up, cleaned the kitchen floor and hoovered. Morgan Misty hung in the hall, lending it a spurious grandness. I rather wished that someone – Susan, perhaps, or my mother – would call in unexpectedly at Alderswick Avenue and be pleasantly surprised. I had a little wander in order to pleasantly surprise myself. I should have known the household gods don’t like a person to get complacent …

  The house was big – one of those tall, shambling semidetached places which seems to be holding itself up by leaning against its neighbour. It had a basement and an attic, and three floors in between, and the kitchen was a rather unlovely back extension. We’d selected it for its capacity, and originally had great plans for the proper deployment of the space. Glyn’s office, for instance, would occupy the attic, where he would be insulated from the noise of the household. This did not allow for the fact that Glyn did not wish to be insulated from anything. He lasted only a week at the top of the house, during which time he made such frequent forays into ‘the real world’ as he called it that it became obvious he’d have to move. He opted for what must at some time have been the dining-room, off the hall to the right of the front door. Here he could answer the doorbell, earwig on the comings and goings and keep the street under observation. When it came to work Glyn wanted the very opposite of an ivory tower. Deprived of the buzz of new bands he had to have the next best thing, which was us.