Celia picked her way round the edges, lowered herself onto the sofa and put her feet up. She was at ease in other people’s houses.
Sophie attempted diversion. ‘How did the lunch go?’
‘Ah, the lunch. The lunch was all right.’ Celia’s lunches were pleasant occasions. She was an excellent hostess who never cooked, a source of pride to herself and suspicion bordering on disbelief to other wives. ‘She told me,’ said Sophie’s neighbour, wide eyed, ‘she can’t even boil an egg!’
Sophie, her hands deep in offal, smiled. ‘Oh dear.’
Nancy Ogilvie’s head gave a quick sideways movement of concern. ‘I know.’
Celia yawned. ‘Dear old farts,’ she continued. ‘Average age a hundred and seven. All senile except the Featherstons, but sweet as nuts.’ She stirred slightly. Fifty, Celia had decided, was different from forty-nine. Her recent birthday had acted as a memento mori, a reminder of the inevitable way of all flesh. A reminder also of the bloody age gap. She was four years older than Harold, a fact of no concern to her except at birthdays. And yesterday’s lunch hadn’t helped. Even her superb legs seemed to be packing up, getting puffy at the ankles. ‘Oh shit,’ said Celia.
Sophie was now piecing pattern sections onto burnt orange, her hands were busy soothing wrinkles, aligning, getting it right.
Celia peered down at the orange stuff.
‘You haven’t said what it is?’
Sophie pinned around a curve. ‘I am making a cover for a lavatory seat.’
‘What?’
‘You heard.’
Rude as well as nuts. Celia stared at the crown of the head presented to her.
‘But those things are insane.’
‘I know.’
‘Well then?’
Sophie’s mind was ticking. You are a spoilt woman. You, you friendly twit, should be making this obscenity, not me. I am stuck with this idiocy because you are an idle slob and couldn’t make it anyway. And why should I? Except that the rest of us must pull together, must we not. Help out. Stand by our men, God help us all.
She stood up, tripped over the cord of the Singer, clutched the edge of the dining table and righted herself with dignity. The ferry’s wake was alive with gulls who usually have more sense. They follow fishing trawlers where the pickings are better, not the wide-bottomed resolute Kestrel which offers little return. Sophie stood straight. She looked magnificent.
‘He thought it would cheer the place up. For the friendly Asians. Asian.’ Her eyes turned again to the gulls. Wheeling, aerodynamically perfect, they can rob in mid-air.
Celia’s finger stabbed at the virulent orange. ‘Did he … Did the wretched man …? He asked you to make it?’
‘Yes. Your husband.’
‘You mean Harold asked you to construct this … thing?’
‘Who else did you think?’
‘Edward, of course. The Commodore.’ Celia swung her legs onto the floor. One suede toe touched the orange tide. She withdrew it quickly.
Sophie had not noticed before how large Celia’s face was. There was too much of it, too much left over round the edges. Her hand still held the old table where she fed her children good nourishing food, where she ironed, sewed and wrote to her husband William.
‘As if the Commodore would!’
Celia was now enjoying herself. She shook her friendly head. ‘Oh Soph,’ she said. ‘Oh Soph, darling.’
Sophie stared at her. Looked at her for some time and found her wanting. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. She stalked into the black-and-white skid-marked pseudo-marble hall, sat on the pseudo-oak chest, glanced at the small leather book marked Telephone and dialled.
‘Captain’s office,’ said Kate Calder.
‘Sophie Flynn speaking, Kate. Please may I speak to the Captain?’
‘The Captain, Mrs Flynn? Now?’
‘Yes please.’
‘Just one moment, please. I’ll try.’
‘Sophie, my dear.’ Reassuring, deep and sonorous, Harold Pickett’s voice flowed up the hill at her. ‘All well, I hope.’
Now you fool. Now.
‘I’m just ringing to say, Captain, that I won’t be able to make the toilet set for the downstairs cloakroom.’
Pause. ‘Oh dear,’ said the Captain of Philomel. The voice sharpened. ‘May I ask why not?’
‘I have decided,’ said Sophie, her eyes on the albatross chick for June on the calendar opposite, ‘that I don’t want to.’
‘But you said you would.’
‘Yes. I have changed my mind.’
The voice was icy. ‘I see.’
He didn’t. He never would. She was unreliable and unworthy of a position of trust. Possibly difficult. A stroppy wife even. Sophie’s heart lifted. She had ditched the bribe of good opinion. She did not care. She was fizzing with excitement, her toes clenched.
‘So what do we do now?’
‘Celia’s here at the moment. I’ll put it all in a plastic bag plus the pattern and ask her to take it home to you. I’ll leave the pins in if you like.’
The voice rose, ‘Good God no! I’ll send somebody later.’
‘I can leave it in your letterbox.’
‘No, no, no.’
‘Thank you. Goodbye, Captain.’
‘Goodbye.’
Sophie replaced the receiver with care, smiled down at it, touched it again. Grey, shiny and reliable. A good thing. If Celia had not been marooned the other side of an orange sea of unmade toilet requisites in her living-cum-dining room Sophie would have hopped on one leg rejoicing. Hopped the length of the hall in celebration.
Celia was standing at the French doors onto the verandah. She turned with a sigh.
‘They’re hypnotic, aren’t they? I could watch them for hours.’
‘The gulls?’
‘Yes.’ Celia scratched her scalp with her second fingernail, the rest of her hand clamped rigid above. ‘Wouldn’t it be awful to be a bum seagull?’ she said.
‘What did the Commodore want?’ said Kit licking his knees. He liked the salt taste.
‘He was reminding me about the dinner tonight.’
‘Are you the Commodore’s lady for taking now Lieutenant Commander Banks is home again?’ asked Rebecca in passing, having brought in the washing like a good girl.
Sophie looked at her wise child.
‘He always has a lady for taking to things,’ explained Rebecca helpfully.
Kit stopped licking. ‘Is Lou babysitting?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
Lou (I can’t stand Louise) and her boyfriend Evan contributed to the wellbeing of Calliope Road. They were so handy. Evan, the more beautiful of the two, managed Choice Meats across the road. His striped apron, his low-slung scabbard for knives and steel became him. He was a large gentle man who dropped off Arnie McNally’s chop or sausages on his way home even though Choice Meats did not deliver.
Lou, an efficient hairdresser and a keen businesswoman, ran deeply incised rings round Evan and loved him dearly. She kept A Cut Ahead spotless. Her horizontal surfaces were uncluttered, she was lavish with towels and generous with sweep-ups. You never had to wade through the last cut’s leavings at Lou’s. Large photographs advertised haircare products. Eyelashes fanned below tangled ringlets, short cuts swung sideways, their image frozen till the fashion flopped. Beehives were in; not only a hairstyle but a way of life. Occasionally owners could be seen at traffic lights attempting a lift with both hands to let the air in. Others, like Lou’s, stayed rigid from week to week.
Lou’s lipstick was pale. Her hair was pink this week, last week electric blue. Before that apricot. ‘What does your mother think of all your different hair colours?’ asked Sophie. Lou’s eyes were puzzled behind their palisade of loaded lashes. ‘What’s it got to do with my Mum?’ she asked.
The front door was open. The Commodore walked in and stood watching in silence. Sophie was standing in front of the chest in a patchwork skirt and white shirt. Kit, one foot
either side of the telephone, fumbled with the catch at the back of her neck. Cultured pearls were a good buy in Japan (William). There was silence; Kit’s breathing was getting heavier.
‘May I help?’ said the Commodore.
‘No,’ said Kit. He jumped down, nuzzled his bullet head against Sophie’s stomach for a moment and ran down the hall. ‘See you,’ he waved.
The Gasworks straight was lined with pohutukawas and Norfolk pines in memory of men killed in World War II. Several of the trees were struggling; some had been replaced, leaving painful inconsistencies of height and size.
He glanced at her.
‘I like being here,’ she said.
‘Sophie.’ His left hand lay on her knee. The imprint of his hand remained on a patch of brown velvet as he changed gear. ‘Sophie,’ he said again.
‘Talk to me. Tell me what you’re thinking about.’
Edward Sand was a man who liked women. Their differences fascinated him, their multitudinous diversities. Their walks: the loping strides, the scuttles, the swing of buttocks all pleased him. And their hair, endlessly dissimilar and always interesting. Tied up in knots or falling free; permed to the bone or hanging, differences pleased him. He watched them. He also liked talking to them. He liked their quickness, their ability to leap from branch to branch and return to the original topic refreshed. Some, like Sophie, seemed genuinely interested in almost everything which was a bonus. He liked her very much.
‘I’ve just been rereading Cotton’s Geomorphology,’ he said dropping speed. The Gasworks straight was notorious for traffic cops. ‘Have you read it?’
‘No.’
‘Wonderful stuff. I never travel without it. Some day,’ he said, ‘we’ll camp on a homoclinal ridge.’
Her lips, he noticed from a brief glance, were shining. ‘Yes,’ she said.
The pretending has always been part of it. The willow cabin. The love nest. The cave in the mountains warm with skins.
‘Yes,’ she said again.
He was willing to talk, to discuss, to share. With women. With her.
‘Have you read Madame Bovary?’ he had asked her after a recent mess dinner. Sophie had not been at his table. She was a junior wife.
‘Yes.’
His eyes were kind. ‘Do read it again. It’s worth it.’
Madame Bovary at a mess dinner.
‘You don’t have to of course.’
‘No. No. I mean … it’s just.’ Her hand waved at the men in mess kit, their cummerbunds, their wives, the chat and the chat and death at the end. ‘It’s a mess dinner,’ she explained.
‘So?’
William appeared alongside. ‘Bandy did well, didn’t he, sir?’
‘Bandy? Oh yes, yes. All of them. Excellent.’ He paused. ‘Why do you imagine the RNZN band is wedded to “Lemon tree very pretty”, Sophie?’
Sophie snorted. ‘I don’t know.’
The Commodore moved away smiling.
‘Why do you always have to snort?’ said William.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I really don’t know.’
The Commodore had been rereading The Phaedo. Did Sophie agree with the critics who said that Socrates’ calm acceptance of his imminent death was because of his faith in the life hereafter?
‘I haven’t read it.’
‘I’ll leave it in your letterbox.’
She had found it there next morning in a plastic bag with two dead oleander petals left over from summer like the cat and the dog and the hats and the blowfly.
They were back with Socrates by the turn-off to the bridge.
‘Christians would say …’
He swung a startled glance at her. ‘Don’t say that!’
‘Why not?’
‘Be one if you must. But don’t …’ His shoulders twitched beneath pinstripe. ‘Soon you’ll be talking about devout believers.’
‘If I want to talk about devout believers,’ she said as the car slowed down for the tolls, ‘I will.’
He had a pleasant laugh. ‘Good on you.’
They soared over the bridge with the sense of wellbeing experienced by those who remember the queues for the car ferry. ‘I remember them,’ he said, ‘but Clarissa and I were in the UK when the bridge was built.’ His dead wife was English. Clarissa. You cannot say it without a slight hiss in the middle but in fact the only person Sophie had heard say the name until this moment had been herself. Clar-iss-a. She murmured it on occasion. Clar-iss-a.
The Featherstons’ house in Herne Bay was an old villa behind a high fence. The Renault made a sweeping crunch around the circular gravel drive and came to rest in front of a weatherbeaten black door with a ship’s bell alongside.
Captain Featherston opened the door. He was short and spare and bald. His legs jigged with the excitement of greeting them. He took Sophie’s hand briefly, a gentle English touching. ‘Welcome. Welcome. We have met? Yes. Yes. Of course. Come in. Come in.’
But it was the Commodore the Captain loved. Their hands clasped, the shining eyes blinked with joy, the soft-shoe shuffle increased in momentum. He almost skipped. ‘How good to see you, m’boy. How good to see you. Come in, come in, Lettie will be delighted.’
The entrance hall was square and dark with panelling. Panelling was a problem to some in the early sixties. It was dark and confining when the wished-for look was air and space. It enclosed and closeted. It did not reflect light, it absorbed. And yet it was present only in solid well-built houses. To rip or leave? No such thought had entered Captain and Mrs Featherston’s minds. Age and declining health had brought them beyond such considerations, had brought them to the haven where if things dropped off they picked up the brass handle, the wooden finial, the broken pieces of an old plate and stowed them away, preferably in a small drawer in the piece of furniture from which they had fallen, and forgot all about them. Lionel and Lettie had long since ceased to hope for experts to repair. The rectangular room was covered with skittery old rugs with holes in them which crept about the floor or else lay supine, flat as a fawning gun dog at fault.
Beyond a table covered with papers, in front of an ashy fire the colour of dead roses, Mrs Featherston sat upright in a chair with arms. She also was delighted to see her dear boy and told him so several times, the slack underside of her upper arms wobbling as she reached to embrace his neck.
‘Ah, Mrs Flynn,’ she said eventually, extending a flaccid hand.
Her hair was white and thick, coiled about her head and secured with a single comb. It was well trained, there were no loose ends. Her ears were neat, finished with a tiny pleat of skin where they joined her face. Her hands also were beautiful, swollen at the knuckles but smooth and unmarked, their only ring a wide gold wedding band. Why bother to get the rest enlarged. It would have been different if Rose had lived.
Her pearls were large. These were not the product of oysters interfered with by man. These came from oysters in the wild; feral oysters, the pearls from which had been brought home to his bride by a sailor sixty years ago. Baroque gleaming things surrounded the neck which had more skin than necessary.
‘And what is your opinion, Mrs Flynn?’ said the Captain, placing his wife’s sherry glass on a small table beside her hand and sucking his finger.
Sophie had been too busy looking. ‘Sorry?’
‘These visits. Do you think there’s much point in them?’
‘I hope so, but I don’t know enough about what goes on at them.’
He nodded kindly. ‘How could you my dear? How could you?’
Mrs Featherston lifted her glass. Her eyes, the same colour as her Flor Fino, were watchful.
‘Edward was telling me Philomel’s about to be visited by a VIP from a friendly Asian power.’
‘And his consort,’ murmured Sophie. She had returned the orange towelling. The pins were her own.
The Captain was not interested in consorts. ‘Quite. But is there any point?’
Sophie bent forward. ‘For visitors or visited?’
‘For anyone?’
Sophie tried harder. ‘I saw a book in the library the other day. In the returns, about Windsor Castle. In one of the pictures they were getting ready for a State banquet for the State visit of the head of state of a friendly power. For thirteen hundred people.’
‘That’s slightly different,’ said the Captain, one navy canvas shoe tapping the wooden floor. The Captain had also given up on shoes. He had discovered canvas ones and was delighted with them though Lettie, he told Sophie later, was not so keen.
‘Only as regards scale, surely,’ said the Commodore.
‘The table is so wide,’ murmured Sophie, ‘that there is a footman in the middle polishing, as well as one each side. He kneels on a cushion with white things over his socks.’
‘Oh,’ said the Captain.
Mrs Featherston hauled herself upright on the wooden arms of her chair. The Commodore leaped to his feet. The Captain gave a mini-heave and subsided once more. Sophie did nothing. Normally she would have insisted on assisting but she did not know the drill (William).
She did nothing. The men talked.
Mrs Featherston reappeared after some time. ‘Come along,’ she said, her voice brisk with the slight edge of the sick-of-it cook. As she walked to the dining room her right hand touched pieces of furniture as she passed, checking the disposition of her aids.
She admired Sophie’s skirt. ‘I speak as an expert patchworker,’ she said. ‘Some day I shall show you my rag bag.’ Sophie thanked her.
They got on to World War II with the grapefruit; the blunders of strategy on land and sea, the problems of supply in the Western Desert. Was Wavell a scapegoat? Yes. No. And what about Montgomery? Military genius or charlatan with luck?
The Captain had retired from the navy in 1937 and rejoined when war broke out.
‘Offered my services to the Admiralty straight away,’ he explained to Sophie, ‘thought they’d say Good God, no. No room for deadbeats.’ He chortled with happiness. ‘Not a bit of it. Landed up on the Murmansk run. Commodore of a convoy for God’s sake.’ His eyes watered at the memory. ‘Great days. Cold though. Very, wasn’t it, boy?’
All the Nice Girls Page 6