‘Really,’ said Veronica doubtfully, ‘that sounds absolutely . . .’
‘Disgusting,’ Juliette finished with a laugh.
‘It’s one of my mother’s recipes,’ said Rita, bewildered by her friends’ lack of gateau-enthusiasm, ‘we have it every time someone has a birthday . . .’
‘Talking of ex-husbands,’ said Juliette, who, having noticed a tremor in Rita’s lower lip, was anxious to draw the conversation away from the gateau, ‘Yours, Veronica, is in The Quiet Woman with mine. I could say you were equally brave . . .’
Veronica gave one of her head-back, open-mouthed, shimmering laughs.
‘Why on Earth should I be afraid of meeting Hugo?’
‘I’ve heard that he’ll be bringing his latest dolly bird with him.’
‘Has she got her parents’ permission?’ said Rita.
‘My dears,’ said Veronica, her voice still rich with laughter, ‘there is no person on Earth I could care less about meeting than that oafish, pot-bellied, strumpet-screwing lout of an ex-husband of mine, nor the latest sixth-form Lolita he’s bamboozled into bed.’
‘I think you should care,’ said Rita, ‘he needs taking down a peg or two, the way he treats women . . .’
Juliette caught the look that passed between Veronica and Rita, the intimate look of one-time adversaries now reconciled. The women who had once been rivals for the same man, and who now both despised him. Juliette felt momentarily envious. Was there a special closeness in friendships that form between former enemies?
‘I wouldn’t blame you Veronica,’ said Juliette, ‘if you wanted to attack him or anything. Do feel free, it’s my twenty-first after all.’
‘Do you think my tits show too much,’ said Rita whose top was a diaphanous, black satin blouse decorated with stars. It was tied at the back and kept in place by a single bow knot. The neckline was deep, the sleeves high and frilly.
‘If I was you I’d make sure I didn’t lift my elbows too high,’ said Veronica, peering in through the capacious sleeve.
‘And that knot looks a bit tempting,’ said Juliette, ‘I can just imagine someone pulling one of the strings as you walk past.’
‘Would it just undo?’
‘Yes,’ said Rita, who hadn’t considered the possibility before, ‘and if the knot undoes the whole top just collapses. I knew I should have put a bra on.’
‘Haven’t you got one on?’ said Veronica in wonder.
‘No,’ said Rita, proudly.
‘Very impressive, Rita. Neither have I, but you wouldn’t think I had, would you?’ She looked down at herself, then pulled her neckline forward and peeped in, giving a disappointed shrug.
‘How can you say that, Veronica,’ said Juliette, ‘you look like Mae West from here.’
‘Kind of you to say so, darling, kind of you to say so.’
‘I feel stupid being the only one wearing a bra. Shall I take it off?’
The others murmured negatives while Rita, suddenly self-conscious, began redoing the knot at the back of her blouse, double tying it, asking for safety pins, requesting that the other two tug at her redone knot to see if it would hold, then deciding that it was too tight and restricting her breathing. When finally the blouse seemed secure Juliette said ‘I’ll just go and see how my sausage goulash is doing,’ and skipped towards the kitchen.
‘I think I’ll get my Stilton mousse out of the fridge,’ said Veronica, following Juliette.
After some stirring of pots and adjusting of gas rings, the trio returned to the living room. Rita suggested it might be time to open a bottle of wine.
‘I suppose we could have some,’ said Veronica, ‘I hope everyone brings a bottle. Where did all these come from?’
‘Graham gets a discount at Angad’s,’ said Juliette, ‘him and Bill clubbed together and bought all this.’
‘Won’t last long,’ said Rita in a tone of grim prophecy, ‘not once Bill and that lot are back.’
‘They won’t get here for ages,’ said Juliette, selecting a bottle and applying a corkscrew, ‘they’ll be the last. We’ll have drunk it all by then . . .’
‘I’m not so sure, Juliette,’ said Veronica in a playful tone, ‘I think I see what’s going on here . . .’
‘What’s going on?’ The cork came out with a creak and a pop.
‘Graham persuading you to use the flat, then buying in all this booze, what does it look like to you, Rita?’
‘What?’ said Rita, who hadn’t been following the conversation.
‘It looks to me like Graham, sweet old thing, is trying to engineer some sort of reconciliation.’
‘Me and Bill?’ said Juliette, almost with disgust, ‘No, not a chance. Anyway, Boris will be here soon. Perhaps Graham’s trying to do something for you?’
‘With Hugo? You must be joking.’
There was general laughter.
‘Oh what a summer that was. What a silly, sultry summer,’ said Veronica.
She meant the summer of the year before, the drought summer, during which the two marriages, hers and Juliette’s, had effectively ended.
Thinking about such things inevitably led Veronica to her next question.
‘I’m presuming Janus will not be here.’
‘I hope not,’ said Juliette.
‘Does he know about it?’
‘No.’ Juliette said this with immediate certainty. Over the years she had become skilled at keeping things secret from Janus, ‘Anyway, he’s on permanent nightshift at the hospital . . .’
‘Hospital?’
‘Didn’t you know? He’s got a job at the East Edmonton Hospital, where we were all born . . .’
‘I was born in Oxford, if you don’t mind,’ said Veronica.
‘He must have been there for about a year now . . .’
‘He’s not still living at home is he, not with your poor old mother and father?’
Juliette gave one of her despairing, eyes-to-heaven looks.
‘He is. Mum can’t bring herself to throw him out for some reason, you’d think after last summer – you heard what happened when they were on holiday?’
The two women nodded.
‘Mum says he’s turned over a new leaf since then, and he’s got this job at the hospital wheeling people around. He put himself on permanent nightshift, she says, so that he doesn’t have any opportunities to go out drinking. Mum says he’s got a girlfriend now, a nurse or something, though she’s never met her.’
‘So that’s why we never see him in the pub any more, I thought it was because he fell out with Bill.’
‘That as well. He doesn’t go out at all now, he sleeps all day at home, gets up in the evening, goes to work, comes home in the morning, goes to bed around midday, or early afternoon, and then wakes up to go to work at night, I think his shift starts at ten.’
‘Permanently?’
‘Permanently, for the last few months anyway.’
‘How can he stand it? I couldn’t stand it, could you Rita?’
‘No,’ said Rita.
‘At least it’s keeping him on the straight and narrow,’ said Juliette, ‘he only just escaped a spell in prison after that incident in Tewkesbury.’
‘Did the police never catch up with him?’
‘No. Luckily he’d given a false name at the camp site office – John Speke, mum said, and the police could never trace the motorbike, as far as they knew it was registered to a man in Cornwall who’d been dead for five years. We never did find out where that motorbike came from, or where it went for that matter.’
‘He has the luck of the devil, your brother, doesn’t he,’ said Veronica, ‘he just does what he wants and gets away with it . . .’
‘No one can get away with it for ever,’ said Rita, still the grim prophetess.
‘But if he really has turned over a new leaf . . .’ began Veronica.
‘And got a girlfriend,’ said Rita, ‘that would be a novelty . . .’
‘. . . things must be easier for y
our mum and dad,’ Veronica concluded.
‘It just worries me,’ said Juliette, ‘if he has to put himself on permanent nights to keep himself off the booze . . . it’s not the same thing as giving up drink is it? It’s more like building a dam to hold back a river. The water builds up and up behind the ramparts, then eventually it spills over. As for the girlfriend, I’ll believe it when I see it. More likely he’s off on one of his infatuations with someone who’s not interested in him. It’ll be Angelica all over again. And I’ve heard stories from people connected with the hospital, that he drinks on the job . . .’
‘No . . .’ came the amazed negatives from the two women.
‘. . . think what it must be like portering for a hospital through the night. There can’t be that much work. He spends hours sitting in the porters’ mess taking swigs of rum from his locker when no one’s looking. That’s what I’ve heard anyway. And I’m worried because now that he’s got a steady job, if he doesn’t get himself a place of his own now, he never will, and we’re all just waiting for his next drunken bust-up, whenever it comes, then it’ll be another night in the police cells, forgiven and forgotten the next day, and the cycle will start up all over again. Then they’ll have to evict him, but they won’t do it on their own, it’ll be down to me to push them through the courts and sort it out . . .’
‘Have you met Juliette’s mum and dad, Veronica?’ said Rita.
‘Of course I have,’ said Veronica.
‘They’re lovely aren’t they?’
‘They’re on a spending spree at the moment,’ said Juliette, ‘dad’s just retired and been given a huge lump sum, and mum’s come into an inheritance from one of my uncles who died last year. I can’t remember how much – several thousand. Anyway, they’re rich for the first time in their lives, and every day they go out shopping. They bought their first ever fridge last week. They’re having a new bathroom put in, and the house is just full of new stuff. Mum bought a fur coat, jewellery, they’ve bought statues, expensive cookware, tools, furniture, books . . .’
The two women laughed, then the three were quiet for a few moments.
‘This wine tastes like grass,’ said Juliette, putting her nose in the glass, then holding the glass against the light of a candle.
‘It just tastes like wine to me,’ said Rita.
They both waited for Veronica’s opinion of the wine, since she claimed to be knowledgeable on the subject, but it didn’t come.
Then there came a wheezy rattling noise from the landing.
‘The door,’ said Juliette.
‘Guests,’ said Veronica, with a trace of disappointment in her voice.
‘I’ll answer it,’ said Rita, her voice full of eagerness to be helpful. She left the room.
Juliette experienced an unusual surge of nervousness as she listened for the voices, and stood up to refill her glass.
‘That’s two bottles gone already,’ she said after refilling Veronica’s glass.
‘I’ll probably slow down after this one,’ Veronica said, ‘I’m already feeling giggly,’ and she gave a giggle, as if to prove it.
‘I expect you to get more than giggly tonight Veronica.’
‘I don’t think it would be a good idea. I feel this urge coming on to fling myself at people . . .’
‘All the more reason’, said Juliette, applying the corkscrew to another bottle.
‘But there’s no point, there won’t be anyone worth flinging myself at, they’ll be either partnered already or they’ll be hopeless old drunks from The Quiet Woman and The Carpenters Arms, Bill and Hugo’s cronies, God what a dreary lot . . .’
‘You never know.’
Veronica shrugged, then knocked back the full glass of wine in her hand, holding it out to Juliette for a refill. They both chuckled.
It wasn’t unusual that the arrival of Boris in the room should have been so quiet – he was a quiet man, with the face of a blond, slightly thick-set Jesus and a mildness of manner that sometimes did work miracles in pacifying the volatile confrontations that sometimes erupted in the pubs where he drank. His dress sense and hairstyle was that of a beatnik or hippy, or more accurately something in between, a style he had developed in the mid 1960s, and had felt so comfortable with that he’d clung to it ever since – shoulder-length hair, a beard, emerald green woolly pullover, jeans, suede ankle boots, with no variation whatsoever. The stubborn sameness, the Belisha beacon repetitiveness of his dress sense was often remarked upon. He would answer that it meant a complete freedom from thinking about clothes. He had worn them to Rita’s birthday do at Chez Francoise and he had worn them to the Royal Opera House when he’d seen Don Giovanni with Juliette’s mum and dad. The only time he wore anything else was at work when he donned the green overalls of a GPO engineer (the same shade of green as his pullovers), to scale the telegraph poles, or descend the inspection pits of Windhover Hill’s telephone network.
‘Is it just you?’ said Juliette.
‘Aren’t I enough?’
‘Isn’t Boris good enough?’ sniggered Veronica.
‘I thought you’d be bringing people from The Red Lion.’
‘I’ve brought Scott,’ said Boris, turning and holding out a beckoning, stage-compere’s hand as Scott entered the room.
Scott was wearing a white suit over a pale blue roll-neck sweater. He had recently grown his hair almost to shoulder length, swept back so that it seemed to follow him around. In combination with his steel-rimmed glasses and square jaw-line it gave him a distinguished air. He could have been a visiting American academic, or film critic for the New York Times, rather than the dole office clerk he was, processing applicants for Supplementary Benefit at the Windhover Hill branch of the DHSS. In his spare time, however, he played a slightly out of tune clarinet with a trad jazz ensemble called The Blind Stompers at various pubs in the area.
‘What have you brought?’
‘Brought?’
‘I didn’t see any bottles in your hands.’
‘That’s because there weren’t any in them.’
‘I like those pretty candles,’ said Scott, grinning, ‘They’re really . . .’ he searched for the word, ‘. . . twinkly.’
The doorbell rattled again. Rita went to answer it.
‘Were we meant to bring anything?’
‘I’m just worried there won’t be enough drink.’
‘Christ those candles look bloody good,’ said Scott, ‘they knock me out. This is fantastic. Christ! . . .’ (he’d just noticed the bas-relief of the First World War soldier on the far wall) ‘this place is just spectacular.’ He gave Juliette a kiss on the cheek.
Rita re-entered the room with a new guest. It was a solitary woman, in her late forties. Her dark hair was bunched up as though she’d been lying on it. She was wearing jeans so loose they seemed about to fall down, a too large blue shirt clumsily buttoned.
She explained that she was from next door (‘above the butchers’’) and that she was looking for her husband, though she failed to explain why she thought he might be here.
‘Have a drink darling,’ said Scott, offering her a glass. She took it eagerly and spoke with a smoker’s deep rasp.
‘You’re a saint. I’d sooner have you for my husband, darling, than that old sod I married . . .’
As she spoke her story kept changing. She was not looking for her husband, she was trying to escape her husband. Then she said she’d come to the party by mistake, thinking she was in her own flat (‘it’s almost identical’), and that her husband was at home, ‘Straight through that bloody wall, darling.’
After two glasses of wine the woman, already drunk, slipped into incoherence and was ignored thereafter, a situation she seemed at ease with.
‘I saw your brother in The Red Lion,’ said Boris.
‘Janus?’
‘No, the little one. Julian.’
‘Julian was in The Red Lion?’
‘And he was with three grotesques.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. Schoolfriends, I suppose.’
‘Did you speak to him?’
‘Didn’t get a chance, they were thrown out for being under age. I got the impression they were trying to get themselves drunk enough for a party, which shouldn’t take them long.’
‘Why didn’t you go over and rescue them?’ said Veronica, ‘the poor little angels. You just abandoned them when you could have used your influence to save them.’
‘They’re not so little, unfortunately,’ said Juliette, genuinely perturbed by the fact of being outgrown by a much younger sibling.
‘Have you ever met Julian?’
‘Of course I have,’ said Veronica. ‘Such a sweet little pixie, a little leprechaun with curly hair and freckles and knobbly little knees, such a sweet little pixie . . .’
‘Not quite how I’d describe him,’ said Boris.
‘With a lovely little gap in his teeth . . .’
‘When did you meet him?’
‘At Juliette’s wedding.’
‘That was five years ago. He would have been ten.’
‘Well he can’t have changed all that much.’
‘Veronica, you’ve spent too long working in primary schools. You actually think children stop growing at the age of ten, when they leave your school, don’t you.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Because they change even more rapidly in the years immediately afterwards . . .’
‘I know, but I don’t believe Julian can have changed as much as you think.’
By now the doorbell was ringing every few minutes and the flat slowly filling with guests – Ryan and Ewan, two regulars from The Carpenters Arms, Mimi, fashion student at Ponders’ End Polytechnic, Callan and Rick, members of the Socialist Workers Party, Tipi, a tarot card reader from the Lee Valley, Bernadette and Geraldine, old schoolfriends of Juliette’s . . . There were many people Juliette didn’t recognize, or recognized only as faces that usually bobbed around in the background at The Quiet Woman or The Carpenters Arms. Juliette slowly gathered from overhearing the conversations of these people, that many had come to the party on the strength of a rumour that there was to be a confrontation between Bill and Boris, on the one hand, and Veronica and Hugo on the other. Some, it seemed, had even been press-ganged by Bill and Hugo as support should any such confrontation erupt.
I’ll Go To Bed At Noon Page 29