Life After Lunch

by Sarah Harrison

  ‘Elegant? Gracious? Whatever happened to knockout and drop dead?’

  I was awfully glad I wasn’t sitting in a restaurant with her. ‘They’re fine, but you forget I have to turn up with two grown-up daughters both of whom will look absolutely stunning and have youth on their side.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean you have to dress like a dowager duchess.’

  ‘I assure you I won’t.’

  ‘Hm.’ There was a brief pause during which I pictured Susan taking a draught of wine, or drawing on her cigarette. ‘ Perhaps I’d better come on this shopping trip with you.’ Her voice brightened. ‘You need saving from yourself. We could bash the plastic and then have lunch.’

  ‘I’ll probably wind up wearing something I’ve already got.’

  Susan sucked her teeth. ‘What about the men?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘What will they be wearing?’

  ‘I believe it’s morning dress.’

  ‘Nice, I approve.’

  ‘Glyn hates it. And Josh won’t wear it.’

  ‘You’ll have to whip them into line.’

  ‘Oh, Glyn’ll go along with it.’

  ‘If you ask me,’ said Susan, ‘going along with things is your husband’s speciality.’

  She’d touched a nerve, and I flinched. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘What it says.’

  ‘When I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it!’ I snapped, and heard her chuckle as I hung up. Verity was corning down the stairs.

  ‘Mum? What’s up?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  ‘Who was that you were giving stick to?’

  ‘A friend.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Verity. ‘ Of course. I’ll pray for her.’

  ‘By all means do.’ It was the best put-down for Susan at my disposal – to have her prayed for, whether she liked it or not.

  It was raining next day. We needed lights on in the house as we got up, and the headlamps on as we drove into London through a haze of oily spray thrown up by the lorries on the A1. The weather and the driving conditions made me tense, but not Glyn.

  ‘This is ghastly,’ I said, ‘we should have gone on the train.’

  ‘Nonsense. There’s no hurry. And it can’t last all day.’

  ‘I do hope not.’

  ‘No worries,’ said Glyn. It might have been his personal motto. ‘Why don’t we pull off somewhere,’ he suggested, ‘and have a coffee? With average luck it’ll have eased off a bit by the time we get back on the road.’

  ‘All right. If we’ve got time.’

  He glanced at me. ‘All the time in the world.’

  We came off at the Hertford turning and drove for about ten minutes before coming into a village. After cruising back and forth up the main drag we established that the choice was between a dismal-looking café and a hal-timbered hotel, the George, which proclaimed itself an old coaching inn with parking for patrons through the arch at the rear.

  ‘Lovely job,’ said Glyn.

  Considering it was August, the George was surprisingly quiet. I suppose its location only about twenty-five miles from London made it not so much a destination as an en route stop, and we had arrived during the mid-morning lull. A girl in a waistcoat and bow-tie stood behind the reception desk, and the clink of crockery and the drone of a hoover were faintly audible. A woman in a blue overall was polishing the tables in something called the Oak Room Bar.

  ‘Good morning, how may I help you?’ asked the receptionist.

  ‘We’d like to sit somewhere quiet and have some coffee.’

  ‘No problem at all sir,’ said the girl, dimpling. Glyn was an arresting sight in this – or indeed any – context this morning, dressed for work in a yellow shirt, brown and white brogues, white cotton trousers, and braces patterned with Sonic the Hedgehog.

  She showed us to the lounge, and our arrival was the cue for another functionary – the one wielding the hoover – to melt away.

  ‘If you’d like to make yourselves comfortable,’ said the receptionist, ‘I’ll send someone along to take your order.’

  ‘Just coffee for two,’ said Glyn. ‘And some Heritage bikkies if you’ve got them.’

  ‘Heritage …?’

  ‘Those big fat ones that pretend to be homemade?’

  ‘We’ll see what we can do.’

  She obviously wasn’t going to be treated as a waitress, because a moment later another girl came along and Glyn repeated his request.

  ‘Youth Opportunities heaven,’ he remarked. ‘Still, it’s rather nice.’

  It was. I’m one of those people who find hotels erotic. Even in a small place like this there was a tension between the shared amenities down here and the honeycomb of rooms upstairs, with their locked doors and clean bedlinen, and their illusory sense of privacy. And then there was the quietness of everything – the thick carpets, the doors that swung to without a sound, and the invisibility of all the usual domestic nuts and bolts. In a hotel you were both on parade and offered intimacy.

  ‘Think of it,’ said Glyn, as though reading my mind. ‘ Nobody knows we’re here. Not a soul. And they couldn’t guess, either.’ He leaned towards me. ‘Shall we book in for an hour?’

  I fancied I caught something in his eye that was at odds with his teasing tone, but there was no time to answer before the waitress arrived with the coffee. I watched as Glyn thanked and paid her. I could see how she responded to him, and he wasn’t even trying. He liked his fellow man and woman. My husband wore his heart on his sleeve. He would be terribly easy to hurt.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘ I didn’t mean it. Shall I be mother?’

  As I watched him pour, and a watery sun began to filter through the hotel’s diamond-paned window, I experienced one of those small gear-shifts of mood which only when we were back in the car was I able to identify as disappointment.

  The Gondola, a cheerful, family-run Italian restaurant, was just off the Tottenham Court Road. Its charm for the Edelrats was that it had changed scarcely at all since the sixties. It was a tratt, plain and simple, with whitewashed walls, red lamps in arched niches, a tiled floor, gingham tablecloths and mandoline muzak. It was comforting to know that the breadsticks and giant peppergrinders were only an eyeblink away. I could remember my date with Glyn when I’d first eaten here. I’d worn skin-tight zip-sided pvc boots which stopped all circulation just below the knee and allowed one’s feet to go slowly numb in a bog of perspiration. It was my Patti Boyd phase, and my hair hung in flat, bleached curtains on either side of the false eyelashes which clung to each eyelid like twin flue-brushes. My skirt was a black hipster, barely twelve inches from belt to hem, and my black and white shirt was from Ginger Group, with big cuffs and a rounded collar. Only two tables away there was the pomaded star of a TV sleuth show, and we were fairly sure we could see Justin de Villeneuve in the corner, with a bird who wasn’t Twiggy.

  The place had survived because the food was good – hearty, homely, authentic Italian cooking using fresh ingredients and served in awesome quantities. And the cosy immutability of the decor was in danger of making it fashionable again. In the hardnosed nineties the Gondola had taken on a whimsical retro charm, and business, as the noise level indicated, was booming.

  There were five of us at the corner table – Bunny and I, plus Daffs, Lucilla and Mijou. Annette, apparently, would be along in half an hour. Bunny was positively febrile with the possibilities for a new life, and began addressing us on the subject almost at once.

  ‘I simply can’t believe how liberated I feel!’ she announced, bright-eyed, as we stared owlishly at her over our giant menus like a quartet of attentive choirboys. ‘Gloria Gaynor never sang a truer word – I will survive! It’s totally brilliant. And I’m heading for a size twelve.’

  ‘What are your plans. Bun?’ asked Lucilla, unfolding a pair of minute gold Dior half-specs with a brisk snap, like a Georgian courtesan unfurling a fan.

  ‘I’m going to go back
to college, do History of Art A-level, and buy some nifty little pad in Pimlico.’

  ‘That dates you,’ said Lucilla, putting on the glasses and gazing down her nose through them at the antipasti. ‘No one has a pad any more, and Pimlico has about as much cachet as Dorking.’

  ‘Well, wherever!’ went on Bunny, unabashed. ‘Didn’t Tony Armstrong-Jones come from Pimlico?’

  ‘I don’t know about ‘‘ come from’’,’ I said. ‘ But he was living there when it all started.’

  ‘And now I shall be living there when it all starts!’ It was nice to see Bunny on such an evident high, but also impossible not to suspect that it would all end in tears. We were well into the second bottle and the starters hadn’t even arrived.

  Mijou leaned forward to indicate the highly personal nature of what she was about to say – a pointless gesture in these circumstances, where there was unlikely to be a single remark that was not highly personal.

  ‘Daffs,’ she said, raising an eyebrow to the rest of us. ‘Why haven’t you brought Ruth? We all want to meet her, don’t we, girls?’

  We nodded and chorused agreement, but I thought I detected something wobbly around the edges in Daffs’s expression.

  ‘Oh well …’ she said. She blushed absolutely scarlet, something to which she’d always been a martyr. ‘Never mind.’

  I was pleased when Lucilla said, ‘I don’t blame her for not coming. Honestly, we are the worst bunch of superannuated schoolgirls – if I were Ruth I’d pay a king’s ransom to stay away from people like us.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Mijou, loudly backed up by Bunny. ‘We’re concerned and interested friends.’

  ‘How are you, Daffs, anyway?’ I asked.

  Daffs turned if anything an even deeper shade of red. ‘A bit embattled at the mo, actually.’

  ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Not really.’ She had our attention now, and unlike Bunny was deeply uncomfortable with it. ‘But nothing to worry about.’

  ‘And what about Ruth?’ asked Lucilla. ‘Because we do all feel as if we know her.’

  ‘Oh, she’s fine. And we’re absolutely grand. It’s nothing time won’t take care of, I’m sure.’

  ‘You know,’ said Mijou, ‘not for nothing is that a tired old cliché. I never believed it when other people said that to me, but it is true. You do reach a point where you can think about certain events and people without crying. When things are at their worst it seems impossible, but it sort of creeps up on you and one day you realize you’re on the mend.’ Good old Mijou.

  ‘My mother said that after Daddy died,’ agreed Lucilla, lighting up without asking, another generation indicator. ‘She said she suddenly found she could bear to sweep up all the good memories and collect them together to look at. In fact she actually wanted to.’

  From being boorishly intrusive we had suddenly become the very soul of supportive discretion, asking no more questions, proposing a few humble remedies, drawing the emotional fire. Daffs smiled redly, bright-eyed with unexpressed feeling.

  I made my own offering. ‘When I lost Isobel I thought I’d die of misery. But now it makes me happy to think about her. She’s one of the family, as far as we’re concerned. I’m sad she’s not with us, but it isn’t agony any more. It doesn’t hurt at all.’

  My friends listened respectfully. ‘I can’t imagine,’ said Bunny, ‘how awful it must be to lose a child. I mean, I’ve never had children, but it’s so wrong – such a violation of the natural order.’

  We all agreed on that. Mijou poured more wine. ‘ Something I’ve read about from time to time is that when you lose a child you eventually become grateful that they never had to grow up – that you remember them always young, and full of hope and promise, not ageing and souring like everyone else. But I don’t know,’ she glanced at me, ‘I don’t know about you, Laura, but I feel that Jacob is somehow older than everyone else. I consult him about things. As if dying young has made him wiser and fairer.’

  ‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘I do that. Isobel never lived at all, really, but she’s a source of comfort.’

  We sat quietly for a second. I did hope that no one, in a fit of embarrassment, would say something like ‘Gosh, what a cheery conversation!’ But no one did. There was a tranquillity in our silence which was moving, and a kindly grace in our pooling of our sufferings on Daffs’s behalf.

  ‘Madam – something for you ladies.’ The proprietor, Gino, appeared with a bottle of champagne in a bucket.

  Bunny looked at it doubtfully. ‘I didn’t order any – or not yet.’

  ‘It is a present,’ said Gino. ‘ Would you like me to pour some now? There is a second bottle.’

  ‘Yes please!’ said Lucilla. ‘It’s the real McCoy! I think we should guzzle it instantly, no questions asked, before it dematerializes.’

  Gino brought a clutch of champagne flutes, held in one hand like a bunch of flowers, and poured with a dexterously naff flourish.

  ‘To unknown benefactors everywhere,’ suggested Mijou, raising her glass.

  ‘A present from who?’ I asked. ‘ Who, Gino?’

  Bunny’s face was screwed up into a comical expression of dread. ‘God, I do hope it’s not George hazarding some bizarre attempt at reconciliation. I really couldn’t bear it.’

  ‘The lady’s name was Miss Upchurch,’ said Gino. ‘She said it came with her best wishes, and you were to—’ he cleared his throat to indicate quotation – ‘let your hair down and talk dirty.’

  With an insinuating tact he lowered his eyes and withdrew amidst our burst of uneasy laughter. For the others were uneasy, there was no doubt about that.

  ‘She should have come along,’ said Bunny. ‘I never thought to ask her.’

  ‘I did,’ I said. ‘She couldn’t make it.’

  ‘Of course, you see quite a bit of her, don’t you? I’d forgotten that. How is she these days?’

  ‘Fine.’ It was rather hard to explain how Susan was, to anyone, let alone to this group of people who thought they knew her a little but in fact knew her even less than that. You needed to have firsthand experience of Susan, and that’s all there was to it.

  ‘Still single?’ asked Daffs, glad, I daresay, to turn the spotlight on to someone else.

  ‘Congenitally,’ I replied.

  ‘And doing incredibly well for herself, I bet,’ said Lucilla rather thinly, but with good manners to the fore. ‘I was never a particular buddy of hers – she was a year or two above us, wasn’t she? – but I do remember that she stood out from the crowd.’

  The others all agreed that this was so and sipped their Veuve Clicquot with slightly baffled appreciation. I didn’t mind about their gratitude, I wanted them to like Susan.

  ‘This is absolutely typical of her,’ I said. ‘She loves the grand gesture.’

  ‘As which of us does not?’ responded Bunny. ‘It’s a heck of a lot jollier to give than to receive.’

  I decided to give up on acting as Susan’s agent. Once again her friendship was the tip of the wedge sipped between me and the rest of my life. I was left in a kind of no-man’s-land, my closeness with her separating me a little from my other Mends. She was tweaking my strings from a distance just as she had in the spring at our silver wedding: the perfect gift, well chosen and graciously sent, placed her presence among us while not actually requiring her to muss her gloves with the spadework of social intercourse.

  Over the antipasti we kept the conversation fairly general – the practicalities of Bunny’s move to higher education, the problems Mijou faced (and successfully concealed for eight hours a day) as a bewildered technophobe in a state-of-the-art legal office, Lucilla’s youngest’s failure to thrive at boarding school and whether the local comprehensive was even to be contemplated … her financial coup at the most recent of a summer-long string of cut-throat antiques fairs … Throughout it all Daffs remained pink, and quiet.

  As the main course arrived, so did Annette. She was even bigger than I remembered. I co
uld see now why the others had arranged it so that the spare seat awaiting her was at the end of the table – she simply would not have fitted elsewhere. Like all massively overweight people she looked painfully hot. The bare flesh of her biceps shuddered and swung as she dumped her pilot’s case on the floor and aligned the centre of her gigantic beam with the pathetically small wickerwork disc which was the chair seat.

  ‘Sorry, everyone, slapped wrist, I got locked into an argument with one of my more poisonous superiors,’ she puffed. Her face was blotchy and her rather thin hair was greasy with sweat.

  ‘Who won?’ asked Mijou as I poured bubbly.

  ‘You have to ask?’ replied Annette with an almost coquettish smile. I understood the absolute accuracy of the phrase ‘wedded to her work’. For some reason that I was not at all proud of, her diligence and dedication depressed me. Sitting next to Annette I could smell her, not because she was dirty, but because there was three times as much of her and her bodily juices – perspiration, saliva, vaginal secretions, earwax. It was like being next door to a vast vat where the ingredients for women bubbled and seethed.

  We all offered to wait on the main course while she had her starter, but she absolutely forbade it and ordered marinara and olive bread, which was a relief. If she’d asked for watercress salad and a glass of mineral water I think we’d have died of embarrassment and the need to conceal it from each other.

  ‘The champagne is a present from Susan,’ explained Bunny to Annette. ‘With orders to us all to talk dirty.’

  ‘Really?’ said Annette, tweaking involuntarily at the folds of material beneath her armpits. ‘I’m on for that. How far have you got?’

  ‘Not very,’ said Mijou, ‘but then we haven’t had long.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Annette, slurping in a stringy mouthful of squid. ‘I’m here now.’ She munched juicily. ‘ Sorry, Susan who?’

  ‘Upchurch,’ said Lucilla. ‘Do you remember her? She arrived late in one of those post-closure clearing operations. She was only there for two years. And she was older than us.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean a thing to me, isn’t that awful?’ said Annette, ‘and here I am knocking back her drink like nobody’s business. But here’s to Susan anyway. God bless her and all who sail in her.’