Life After Lunch

by Sarah Harrison

  His duties done, he leaned against various walls – I suppose they should have been referred to as bulkheads – moodily sinking Black Velvet and evincing enough smart boredom to ensure that people took him for someone they thought they recognized.

  Becca was with Griggs. Well, I say ‘with’, but she had too much pride to stay in close proximity to someone genuinely famous in this company. I caught up with her in the disco, dancing opposite an enraptured young record company executive in braces. When Becca danced, she got into it, attracting as she did so a good deal of attention, envious or lascivious according to gender. When she saw me she left the still-gyrating braces and came over.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be—’

  ‘Dominic, this is my mother. Mum, this is Dominic from HMV.’

  ‘Hallo.’

  ‘How do you do,’ said Dominic enthusiastically, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. ‘I won’t shake your hand in case we get glued together—’

  ‘Catch you later,’ said Becca, and steered me firmly out of the disco.

  Poor Dominic, he probably thought being introduced to me denoted tribal approval. Instead of which it was no more than the pretext for a swift get-out.

  ‘Where’s Griggs?’ I asked when it was safe to do so.

  ‘Search me,’ said Becca. It was just as well this was rhetorical, because she was wearing a sprayed-on white halter-neck dress which would have left even the most determined searcher with nowhere to go. The narrow skirt came to mid-calf, but there was a slit up the back which exposed most of her tanned legs and was within centimetres of showing why, in spite of the dress’s tightness, she had no visible pantyline. Her hair was in a Bardotesque chignon with a suggestion of bouffant on the top, and her shoes were no more than two thongs and a stiletto.

  ‘How are the children?’ I asked.

  ‘Having a great time, I should think,’ she said. ‘ They’ve gone to Karen’s for the night.’ Karen was a friend of hers in Smiley Meadows. She was kind, but her lifestyle redefined the term feckless. While I was reasonably sure that the fecklessness did not extend to actually leaving young children alone at night, I was equally sure Amos and Sinead would be shovelling down E-numbers in front of Terminator with the resident brood while Karen pursued her active social life elsewhere in the house.

  ‘I might give them a ring,’ I said, ‘and say goodnight.’

  ‘There’s no need to check up on them, you know.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to check up.’

  ‘Yes you were. You’re just like Verity, you don’t trust my friends.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I lied.

  ‘You have no idea how insulting that attitude is,’ went on Becca.

  ‘It’s not an attitude. And it’s not what I think.’

  ‘Verity certainly does. She even offered to give up her fix of ritual squalor and humiliation at the dosshouse so the kids wouldn’t have to go to Karen’s.’

  ‘She loves looking after them, that’s all,’ I explained.

  ‘I told her to sit on it,’ said Becca. Her body language suddenly altered in a subtle, instinctive way that made me glance over my shoulder. ‘Here’s Griggs.’

  ‘How you doing, babes?’

  Griggs put his arm round her waist and was introduced. As I asked a few token questions, based on Glyn’s assessment of Human Condition, I took in this latest conquest.

  There had been so many that I’d got quite practised at calculating the degree of Becca’s interest. Griggs was not as rugged as Nathan, nor as romantically handsome as Roberto, but there was a dapper, entertainer’s swagger about him, and a warm, knowing look in his eye that was attractive. In her spike heels Becca could’ve given him two inches, but he exuded a confidence that reminded me of Jimmy Mullaney all those years ago. His fair hair was very short, he wore a striped suit with a white T-shirt and plimsolls, and he had a minute gold stud in the side of his nose. I was sure that whatever appeared on the album notes, he was nearer thirty than twenty.

  ‘I tell you what, Becca’s mum,’ he said in reply to one of my dull stock questions, ‘I don’t give a tinker’s whether we make it or not. I’ll still be getting up and doing it on my zimmer frame.’

  ‘He means singing with the band,’ explained Becca.

  Griggs chuckled. ‘She’s got a filthy mind, your daughter,’ he observed, letting his palm slide down over Becca’s buttock. ‘ I like that in a woman.’

  I laughed, I hoped not nervously, and left them to the throb and flicker of the disco. It was entirely possible that on this occasion Becca had met her match.

  ‘Want to dance?’ mouthed Glyn as I circumnavigated the jazz band. I shook my head and pointed in the direction of the outer deck. He began to follow me, but a group of people swallowed him up.

  I went out into the mellow night and walked towards the stern where it was dark and I could watch the pale, spreading V of our wake on the water. On either side London slid twinkling by. In between, the inky quiet of the Thames wrapped around the boat like amniotic fluid. It calmed me to think that the river had flowed here according to its deep, slow rhythms for thousands of years. Beneath the babble of voices and music I felt its insistent and secretive presence.

  I leaned on the rail and simply let these reflections flow through my veins. I wondered, as Glyn came to stand beside me, if this was what Verity would have called a prayer.

  Chapter Eleven

  There were a lot of other women in Patrick’s life, but then I harboured no illusions about my importance in it. I had a wife and mother’s acquired humility, and the great British virtue of knowing one’s place. Glyn’s stable of nubile clients had made me philosophical about potential competition. It hardly seemed sporting to be squeamish when I was the one being unfaithful, and Patrick was single and fancy-free.

  Apart from Lili there were three or four other girl students who came regularly to Calcutta Road for tutorials. And there was Josie, the young woman who rented the basement flat while she wrote her thesis. She was one of those permanently depressed types who was often sitting at Patrick’s kitchen table clasping a coffee cup and chain-smoking. At least neither she nor the students evinced the slightest interest or curiosity in me. I might have been his cleaning lady for all the attention I received.

  Then there was a largely unseen coterie of colleagues, who rang up at funny times to unburden themselves. He never asked them to call back later, nor apologized for spending ages on the phone when I had to leave in an hour, and I didn’t like to remonstrate with him. It was during these phone calls that I tended to wash up, to tidy, to water plants and stack CDs – from force of cohabit, I suppose, and the ridiculous need to display tact when he was talking to someone else.

  One of the colleagues was called Jane. Another was Bridget. I perceived them as more of a threat than the youthful students. These would be mature women, nearer my own age, fearsomely clever and self-assured, with manes of pre-Raphaelite hair, strong classical profiles and no eye make-up. Tigers in the sack, of course. Bluestockings in suspenders. The novels of David Lodge had left me in no doubt that academics were second only to doctors and nurses in the rampant libido stakes.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ I said one scorching afternoon in July as Patrick padded back into the bedroom with two cans of 4X and a bag of barbecue beef crisps.

  ‘You’re about to.’ He dropped one of the icy cans on to the mattress next to me and I yelped. ‘Oops.’

  ‘What will you do when you’re old?’

  ‘Christ …’ Patrick fell heavily on to his side of the bed, leaned back on the bedhead and opened his can with a hiss. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Think.’

  ‘Crisp? What sort of question’s that, anyway?’

  ‘I’m serious. I wonder about single people.’

  He looked at me, munching. ‘Why?’

  ‘When you’re married there’s a pattern – you have children, and grandchildren, a stake in the future. Someone to be old
with.’

  ‘Horrific.’

  ‘No it’s not, it’s one of the comforts of marriage.’

  He tapped my arm with his finger. ‘One of the compensations, is what you’re trying to say.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what I’m trying to say,’ I protested. ‘Marriage is company. It’s a basic human need.’

  ‘So why are you here?’

  ‘You haven’t answered the question.’

  ‘Okay. When I’m old, I’ll do one of two things – move back into rooms in college and sink into a gouty and protected decline, or bugger off to an apartment in the South of France and do pretty much the same thing there.’

  ‘On your own.’

  ‘Ah – on my own when I want to be.’

  ‘But what if no one wants to be with you – when you want them to be? Old age can be querulous and smelly.’

  ‘I’ll shoot myself,’ he announced, and then, when I scoffed: ‘No, I mean it. As a free and independent agent I shall retain that privilege, you see. And no one will be able to say how selfish it was of me.’

  ‘Would you ever think about going to live with your sister?’

  Patrick covered his eyes with his hand, his shoulders bouncing with exaggerated mirth. ‘Not even if she’d have me.’

  ‘But she’s your kin.’

  ‘I don’t share your view of the mystical potency of blood ties.’

  On the local news that evening there was an item about the Heritage Minister visiting the region to open a school for the performing arts. She was entertained by a squad of all-singing, all-dancing moppets dressed in buttercup yellow with frilled socks, white patent mary-janes and hair-bunches with huge yellow butterfly bows. They were cute enough to make your teeth jump.

  ‘Thank heaven for little girls,’ I said caustically. ‘I blame the mothers.’

  ‘Get away,’ protested Glyn. ‘They’re rather sweet.’

  I looked at him, and saw that he wasn’t joking. His gaze, fixed on the screen, was soft.

  ‘But they’re all the same,’ I complained. ‘All mass-produced and ersatz like jelly babies.’

  ‘To blame them for that is to miss the point. They’re meant to be the same, they’re a chorus line. Under each of those dresses beats the heart of a trouper.’

  ‘Glyn – you’d have died if Becca or Verity had been like that.’

  Glyn put out his hand and touched my knee, without looking at me. ‘No, love – you’d have died.’

  The next day at the CAB I saw a schoolgirl mother with her infant daughter and her grandmother, a woman of about sixty who had acted in loco parentis for some years while her own daughter, the girl’s mother, went out to work. I felt I was seeing all that was good and bad about modern society. The great-grandmother was forty years married, she told me, the working granny was amicably divorced with a caring boyfriend, the schoolgirl’s partner – a nice enough lad but not a long-term prospect – was retaking GCSEs at college. The women formed an elaborate pattern of connections, separations and support systems.

  The girl and her grandmother wanted all the information they could get on help for single parents. It was obvious they bore the baby’s father no ill-will and the whole exchange was conducted in a spirit of cheerful practicality.

  ‘Cause she’s the apple of our eye, aren’t you, sweetheart?’

  I gazed at the baby. Though only four months old she had on one of those headbands with a bow attached. She was rather stout and the effect was like a Christmas pudding. It was clear she wanted for nothing. Feeling rather crabby, I had consciously to remind myself that my own daughter was raising two children at least partly on the state and that the welfare system was there to be used.

  ‘You’re quite right to come to us,’ I said to the girl, ‘ it won’t be easy on your own.’

  ‘But she’s not on her own, is she?’ replied Great-Granny feistily. ‘She’s got us.’

  This encounter and its implications reverberated in my head for the rest of the day. That afternoon the urge to communicate was strong upon me. I began by writing to Bunny.

  ‘Dearest Bunny,’ I wrote. Thank you so much for that wonderful lunch, and for confiding in me. I can’t tell you how sad I am about what’s happened to you and George. If I say I hope you’ll think again it’s not because I can’t understand how you feel – you must be devastated – but because I honestly believe George cares about you and probably couldn’t help himself.’

  I tore that one up. Couldn’t help himself? What was I saying? George Ionides was a millionaire international businessman whose funds and lifestyle could have afforded complete, watertight discretion. Instead of which he’d chosen to court disaster with a suicidally risky and squalid deception right on his London doorstep. There could be no excuses. I substituted a different line.

  ‘Don’t for goodness’ sake go on punishing yourself for all this. You have every right to feel miserable and betrayed, but your best defence is to get out and live your life. Don’t let George run it from a distance. I hate to say this, but here goes – buy some clothes in a size smaller and lose the weight. You owe it to yourself. Whatever George got up to, it’s his problem, not yours. It’s no good trying to make some kind of perverted sense of it now, with hindsight. You have nothing to be ashamed of – quite the opposite. You’re a glamorous, funny, sexy woman that any man would be proud to be seen with. George must have been potty to endanger his marriage with you, and people will think the less of him for it.’

  I finished off the letter with an open invitation to Bunny to come and see us whenever she could. The irony of handing out all this spirited advice was not lost on me. When I finished writing my face was hot, and not only with a power surge.

  I rang Becca who, rather to my surprise, was in, and in a sunny mood.

  ‘Hallo, darling. Just thought I’d call.’

  ‘I heard from Steph this morning – about the bridesmaids’ dresses.’

  ‘What are they like?’

  ‘Nice, by the sound of it. Rose-red taffeta with cream sashes and stockings. Sinead’s going to look a star.’

  ‘She will.’ I took advantage of the benign climate to ask: ‘ How are they both?’

  ‘Blooming. They had a whale of a time at Karen’s, her new bloke’s a magician.’

  ‘What fun.’ I was only too delighted to have my fears proved groundless. ‘I liked Griggs, by the way.’

  For a moment I thought I might have made a remark too far – I didn’t want to blight a promising relationship with the canker of parental approval – but Becca simply sidestepped the comment.

  ‘Yeah, he’s okay. That reminds me, can the kids come over on Saturday night after next? Roberto’s company are at the Corn Exchange.’

  My head spun. ‘Will he be seeing Amos?’

  ‘Naturally, Mum. He’s taking him to the funfair on Sunday.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll enjoy that.’

  ‘I’ve got it all under control,’ said Becca. ‘By the way, is Verity there?’

  ‘Not at the moment. Do you want to leave a message?’

  ‘No …’ There was a pause. ‘I was bitchy to her the other night. She brings out the beast in me sometimes. I wish she’d get a life.’

  Josh came in as I was putting the phone down. ‘Anyone called?’

  ‘That was Becca.’

  ‘I mean for me.’

  ‘No.’ I added lightly: ‘Were you expecting someone?’

  ‘Not really.’

  I tested the water. ‘Becca’s worried, about Verity. She thinks she should get a life, as she puts it.’

  ‘She’s got one.’ Josh’s voice retreated into the kitchen. ‘With her God stuff.’ The fridge door opened and closed and he reappeared, drinking orange juice from the carton. ‘I mean, come on, she’s never here.’

  ‘No, but I think Becca means—’

  ‘We all know what Becca means. She ought to butt out for five minutes. Not everyone wants to be shagging everything that moves,’ said Josh with some force.<
br />
  ‘That’s a little extreme.’

  ‘Well, for Christ’s sake!’ Josh wiped his mouth on the unbuttoned cuff of his shirt. ‘If you want my opinion, I think Ver makes Becca feel uncomfortable, bigtime.’

  This exchange made me feel uncomfortable. I had always assumed the role of ex officio lightning conductor. Glyn was good at saying things like, ‘Let them be, they’re adults now, they don’t have to get on all the time, it’s not our problem,’ or even, as the storm raged round us, ‘ Isn’t it interesting?’ But I still clung to some notional ideal of harmony and mutual understanding which it was my job to cultivate. Things had been a lot easier, I reflected, in my parents’ day, when everyone had left home and its environs at eighteen or nineteen and only returned sporadically thereafter. People bemoaned the demise of the extended family, but in Alderswick Avenue it was alive and well and giving us gyp.

  About two hours into the strawberry lunch, Richard took me on a tour of what he and Simon called the grounds, though in fact the two acres surrounding Gracewell constituted no more than a very large and elegant garden.

  We left the terrace and lawn beneath the leaded bay windows and strolled down the path between the herbaceous borders, and through the Elizabethan knot garden to the mere. The mere did not belong to Gracewell, but where it lapped the bank there was a small wooden boathouse and jetty built by the previous occupants. Muscovy ducks, moorhens and occasional seasonal geese glided and sculled over the still, black water. Simon and Richard had replaced the windows in the boathouse, covered the floor with polished oak and a Moroccan dhurri, put in some bentwood chairs and a folding table and created a little waterside haven for themselves.