On River Road

by Chris Else

  ‘Right,’ Larry said. ‘Where’s the tucker?’

  ‘Hang on a minute. Calm down. Gaston’s still working his wizardry.’

  ‘Wizardry?’

  ‘Something special.’

  ‘What? I can’t have Civet de Lapin à Languedoc?’

  ‘Tonight it’s table d’hôte.’

  ‘But I always have Civet de Lapin à Languedoc.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Lisa said, joining in. ‘You didn’t have it the last time we were here.’

  ‘That can only have been because there were no lapins. Où sont les petits lapins?’

  ‘Gone to stewpots, every one,’ Lisa said.

  ‘Stewpots?’ Ward was lost already. They were always too quick for him and French, of course, was not his subject.

  ‘Stewpots are brothels, right?’ Colin said.

  ‘No. Strictly not.’ Larry with his serious tone. ‘A stew is a brothel. Comes from the fact that public baths used to be used for immoral purposes. A hot bath was a stew. As was a room heated with a fire.’

  ‘Like this one,’ Ward said.

  ‘Yes, indeed. We are dining in a stew.’

  ‘In a brothel?’ Colin asked.

  ‘Well, I don’t doubt that some people would say that Gaston lives off immoral earnings but …’

  ‘Please,’ Ward said. ‘There are ladies present.’

  Lisa caught his eye. He smiled at her but she didn’t really respond. Gave him a look he couldn’t read. Didn’t she like being called a lady?

  ‘Ladies — where?’ Larry looked about him, pretending curiosity.

  ‘No,’ Colin said. ‘That’s the whole point. Ladies don’t swear.’

  ‘You mean only men swear?’ Ward said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Colin said. ‘Like Matchett’s in High Street. Only menswear.’

  ‘Keep your filthy mondegreens to yourself,’ Larry told him.

  ‘What …’ But Colin never had a chance to finish whatever it was. There was the waiter, Brian, hovering next to Lisa with a plate, bending, offering.

  “Soup, Madame?’

  French onion soup with a crust of parmesan.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, leaning back a little so he could set it in front of her.

  ‘Monsieur?’ To Larry.

  ‘Yes, of course. Bring it on.’

  A waitress, too, someone Ward had never seen before. She had the rolls. Silver tongs from a basket.

  Larry bending over his bowl, sniffing. ‘Ah. Mouthwateringly good.’

  ‘Like Pavlov,’ Colin said.

  ‘Pavlov? That name rings a bell.’

  ‘The Salivation Army.’

  Lisa, of course, had forgotten, when she said Colin could sit there, what it would be like. She shouldn’t have forgotten. She had been in that situation enough times, trapped in the middle of them while they rattled on like schoolboys, cracking puns and trying to one-up each other. Except, of course, that Ward never one-upped anybody, just trundled after them like a big clumsy bear, occasionally making comments that the other two poked fun at and then looking all injured innocence. What? What did I say? He enjoyed it, she thought. He enjoyed being the butt of their jokes, their intellectual whipping boy. Well, he must do. He had been at it for long enough. It was strange because he owed them nothing. On the contrary, they owed him. But it didn’t seem to make a difference. He was the one who tagged along behind, deferring to them. Like she had done in the days when she was Mrs Wyte. Admiring them, listening to them talk, watching them show off. Laughing sometimes because they were funny. Sometimes.

  She glanced at Tom sitting there, diagonally opposite her. Lifting his spoon to his mouth, sipping soup, dabbing at his whiskers with his napkin. His eyes fixed on Maddy and Syl, who were talking. He liked that, listening to people. And he liked being surrounded by women. It was something she had taken a while to notice about him, the way he preferred women’s company to men’s.

  Maddy and Syl. And Heidi next to him. Heidi, too, was listening. Eating her soup. She put down her spoon, picked up a piece of roll and popped it in her mouth. Picked up the spoon again. In her left hand. That was odd, Lisa thought. Heidi wasn’t left-handed, was she? Caught her eye, then. As you do when you stare at someone. Heidi looked startled for a moment and then smiled at her, a little humourless grin. Her right hand came up and lifted the edge of the soup bowl, tilted it away from her. Maybe it was a thing Swiss people did, ate soup like that with hands the opposite way round. She had never noticed it before.

  Lisa picked up her wine, sipped at it. Larry, on her right, was quiet for a moment, staring at his plate. She turned to him.

  ‘How did the sentencing go?’ she asked.

  He said nothing, took a big gulp of wine, but he held up three fingers. Three years.

  ‘Is that good?’ The thought of it appalled her. Polly Drafton locked away. But then, maybe gaol would be wonderful compared to life with her husband.

  ‘She’ll be out in eight months. She’s served ten already,’ Larry said.

  Lisa could not tell whether he was pleased by the result or not.

  ‘It doesn’t seem fair,’ she said.

  ‘Fair? No, my pet, it isn’t fucking fair.’ His stress on the obscenity was harsh and bitter. Bitter look in his eyes and flush of anger along his cheekbones, broken veins there in the reddened skin. She couldn’t remember when she had last seen Larry angry, or if she ever had. Not like this, at least. She wanted to reach out to him but she was afraid to. Too much rage there, all held in. But then, without warning, he laughed, throwing back his head and hooting at the ceiling.

  ‘Buttocks!’ he said, raising his glass to her and then to Ward.

  ‘Trees!’ Ward answered.

  ‘Bushes!’ Colin joining in.

  It was an old toast. The buttocks had something to do with ‘Bottoms Up!’ but she didn’t know about the rest. Maybe none of them knew any more. She clinked with them anyway, four glasses lifting, bright in the light. She wanted to say something more to Larry but he was turning away from her, leaning towards Ward. She was left with Colin.

  He caught her eye and gave an extra little lift of his glass in acknowledgement. ‘Nice,’ he said, meaning the wine.

  ‘Yes.’

  A moment when he might have said something more, something significant, but all that came was, ‘Did you find a present?’

  ‘Yes. In the antique shop.’ She glanced at Larry, making sure he wasn’t listening. ‘Got them a Royal Doulton plate. Dickens.’

  ‘Ah, good. I got them a breakfast set. Fitz and Floyd. Cost a fortune but …’ Shrugged like he had no option, did he? He had to mention money, of course.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘Everything all right? With you?’

  ‘Yes. Sure.’ The question surprised her, just a little. ‘And you?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Of course. Couldn’t be better.’ He blinked and then she noticed something odd. A little tremor under his right eye, flick, flick, flick. Like a small fly jumping in a spider web. He knew it was happening but he couldn’t stop it. Coughed instead, turned away. ‘So, Sylvia,’ he said loudly. ‘What’s it like to be married to this reprobate for twenty years?’

  A sudden silence.

  ‘Well …’ Sylvia answered, slowly, thinking of something. ‘They say marriage is a wonderful institution and, although I’m not sure I ever wanted to spend twenty years in an institution, being with Larry has certainly helped pass the time.’

  Laughter. A cheer. Larry raising his glass to her down the length of the table, grinning.

  ‘Response! Response!’ Colin said, beckoning to him.

  ‘All right. Marriage is property. Property is theft. Theft is a crime. In these days of zero tolerance, I think twenty years is a light sentence.’

  Another cheer. Or perhaps it was a groan.

  ‘Again! Again!’ Colin turning back to Sylvia.

  ‘Oh, well. I think the devotion of a faithful husband is a wonderful thing. It just seems a pity he gives it to his car.�
� And then. ‘No, no, no.’ Sylvia flapping her hands. ‘This is a silly game. I don’t mean that.’

  ‘Larry hates cars,’ Ward said. ‘Colin’s the one who loves his car.’

  ‘Right on,’ Colin agreed. ‘Looks great, goes fast and it doesn’t argue.’

  ‘Well, well.’ From Maddy, as if he had been provocative. ‘What do you think of that, Heidi?’

  ‘I think a man who loves his car makes a very good chauffeur.’

  ‘And the woman who loves her credit card makes a good slot machine,’ Colin cut back at her. Sarcastic suddenly.

  Lisa glanced at him, saw the anger in his face. What was going on? Heidi looking at him. Not a glare, exactly. She was too expressionless to glare. A chill look. She hates him, Lisa thought. Heidi’s gaze shifted to her plate, and Lisa felt a sudden rush of sympathy for Colin. Poor old Wyte, with another problem relationship. Another woman who wouldn’t mother him enough.

  Dumb, Sylvia thought. Embarrassing. She should never have let herself be provoked. Not that the joke about the car was unfunny. Or, at least, it was not its lack of humour that embarrassed her. She just didn’t like those kind of cracks about marriage and relationships. They were so conventional, so stereotyped as a way of interacting. The laughter always seemed hollow, as if people were responding because they felt they had to, like the way they clapped at the end of a speech no matter how boring it might have been. And, anyway, she didn’t want to be making jokes. Jokes were not her thing It was as if someone had caught her in an act of secret mimicry, like pretending to be a ballet dancer in front of her bedroom mirror.

  She looked down the table at Larry, sitting as he always sat, hunched a little forward, his right hand curled around the stem of his glass, his head low, shrinking back into his shoulders so that, if you were sitting next to him, he had to look at you out of the corner of his eye. It gave him a sly, knowing expression. Like a chameleon, she thought, with a tongue that flicked out and caught you if you got too close. ‘Oh, by the way.’ It was Tom talking to her. She turned towards him.

  ‘The police asked those kids about Carla and the bullying.’

  ‘Oh?’ It took a second to understand what he was talking about.

  ‘It didn’t come to anything. No new information.’

  ‘That’s a pity.’

  ‘But thank the kids for me anyway. For the note.’

  ‘Note?’

  ‘Someone sent me a note about Merry Gibbitson. An anonymous note. I presumed it was Josie. Or James.’

  ‘Oh, God. I’m sorry about that.’ Except, Sylvia realised, she should probably be apologising to Lisa, not to Tom.

  ‘No. I was grateful.’

  And presumably he knew that Lisa had decided not to tell him? Shit, Sylvia thought. It’s like quicksand.

  ‘It must make you so angry,’ she said. ‘Having the person responsible go free.’

  ‘The killer.’ He was almost correcting her. Yes, she thought. Why not use that word?

  ‘I mean, to know that they might be still living here in Durry.’

  She was aware of Maddy on her right, leaning forward, listening.

  ‘Yes. Every time I see a white car. And there are quite a few. Every fifth car in town is white. It’s the most popular colour.’ He hesitated. His eyes shifted to Maddy. ‘I mean, you have a white car.’

  ‘Yes,’ Maddy said.

  ‘And there’s a good chance you were driving it that afternoon.’

  ‘No. I wasn’t actually.’ A hesitation. And then Maddy began to sound just a little wary. ‘I had to take Damien and three of his friends to cricket. There’s no way they would all have fitted in my car.’

  That was odd, Sylvia thought. It was always Ward who took the boys to sport. She glanced at Tom.

  ‘So,’ he shrugged. ‘Either way.’ As if it made no difference. Which it didn’t. Except all this talk of who was where doing what just raised a cloud of suspicion. That was the trouble with an unsolved crime. It generated speculation, stupid, nasty speculation, so that you even started to wonder about your friends.

  What did Tom feel about it? It was hard to tell. Sitting back in his chair, drinking his wine, an odd expression on his face, preoccupied. Then he was looking up towards her right, and she saw that Brian was standing there with the second course. Two plates for the ladies — Maddy and herself. Coming down in front of her, it was a little mound of vegetables, chopped and bound together in a dome by something yellow.

  ‘Ah,’ Maddy said. ‘This is one of Gaston’s specials. What’s it called, Brian?’

  ‘Goût du Soleil, Madame.’

  ‘Taste of the sun.’

  ‘Yes, Madame.’

  So, he thought. If Maddy didn’t use her car to take the boys to cricket, then she must have used Ward’s. Which meant that if Ward went out, he used Maddy’s car. But then, so what? It meant nothing. Except that he had begun to churn through all that stuff again: where people were, what they were doing on that particular Saturday afternoon. Merry Gibbitson had stirred it up. Still, that wasn’t Maddy’s fault. Not fair to give her the third degree. Not fair to bother people on a night when they were supposed to be having fun. And he was having fun himself, in a way. He supposed it was fun, although it might have been madness. What was going on under the table. His hand on Heidi’s thigh. Hers on his.

  It had started almost as soon as they sat down, the glance she gave him, full of the knowledge of Wednesday afternoon. Then, after ten minutes or so of just sitting there, ignoring each other, listening to the others start in with the usual routine, their knees touched. Was it her who made the move or him? He didn’t know, but somehow the touch became a press and the press persisted. God, he had thought. Do I want this? The thought of Laura Kerrington and the put-down she gave him, the lust that turned sour in his belly, left him nauseous and disgusted.

  But then he felt something more, a faint brush of Heidi’s fingers, tingling stroke of the tips along the top of his leg. It was quick and gone, a tiny offer. So he reached out under the table and put his hand on her thigh, the fabric of her trousers, slipped his fingers over to the inner surface, moved them back into the warmer place. Heat through the fabric. She closed her legs but his hand slipped away with the movement so she opened them again. Sitting there while Larry and Colin rattled on about brothels and Maddy talked to Sylvia about some sub-committee they were both on. Until the soup arrived. He couldn’t keep touching her then, so he took his hand back but kept his leg there, next to hers, sometimes pressing just a little harder, sometimes relaxing.

  And then he felt her fingers, creeping. Brushing on the outside of his leg, wriggling over his hip and stretching, reaching for him. He began to stir. Just for a moment, he shifted in his seat, turning a little towards Larry’s end of the table as if he were desperately keen to hear the conversation there. It gave her a bit more room. Her fingers found his cock beneath the cloth and squeezed. He wanted more but good sense prevailed. At least, he took it to be good sense. It might just have been cowardice.

  So back to sitting up straight. For a little while she kept touching him, fingers on his leg, as she ate her soup with her left hand, but then she withdrew and there was nothing but the press of knees.

  That was the problem with desire. It kept on dragging you forward. You couldn’t stop, because if you did you wouldn’t realise the potential. Stopping was hopelessness and disappointment. Yet, in the end, you had to stop because the last act finished of its own accord. It could not go on for ever. So you never got what you wanted, because what you wanted was impossible: the woman in the dream, the perfect merging of the mind and body, death of the self so that you wouldn’t feel the pain any more.

  But that was bullshit. There was no merging. These were real people he was fucking around with. They had their own agendas. All those complications. God, Astra was bad enough. Laura Kerrington would have been worse. But Heidi? It was almost as if he were trying, more and more, to push his life to the limit. What bigger challenge could he
pose than having an affair with his partner’s ex-husband’s partner? And it would happen. It would have happened on Wednesday, if he hadn’t run off to go and try to talk to Merry Gibbitson. The hands under the table proved it.

  He looked across at Colin, listened to his bravado as he egged Sylvia and Larry on, trying to engineer a confrontation. He felt Heidi freeze when Maddy dragged her into it and the strange stillness in her as Colin got back at her with his crack about the slot machine. And he couldn’t tell which it was, the risk or the need to comfort her, but he reached out for her once again under the table, and this time when he touched her thigh she put her hand over his and squeezed it.

  Colin caught a movement at the corner of his eye. Tom getting up from the table, putting his napkin there beside his plate. Off for a piss. Off to wave his dick around. Heidi oblivious, staring at Maddy. Still as a stone. Oh, fuck it, Colin thought.

  Washing his hands, staring at his face in the mirror above the basin. Staring back. The face is real, the body real. A solid thing like the wood-panelled wall, the cork-tiled floor. Yet it wasn’t the solid things that mattered but the feelings. The madness.

  He cupped his palms and held them under the cold tap, scooped water up and into his face. Chill of it, a shock on his skin, dribble in his beard. Again. The water worming its way through the hair on his chin and the underside of his jaw, down his collar.

  You have to stop it, he told himself. You have to cease to be this way. Especially with them. With Laura and Heidi. But saying ‘especially’ meant that it was perhaps not so bad with other people. Astra, say. Who might be pregnant. Jesus, in some ways that was the worst of all. The worst possibility, the most irresponsible. I don’t care, part of him said. The words were there, formed, in his head. What sort of voice had uttered them? Something self-destructive. Or maybe not. Maybe it was the voice of his true self.

  He pulled a couple of paper towels from the holder, wiped his face and his hands, threw the crumpled mess into the basket on the floor beside the basin. Turned to go. The panel door with the low knob, white china. He switched the lock, turned the knob. Opened.