by Angela Huth
David arrived punctually at nine fifteen.
‘My old thing.’ He pulled back the hair from my forehead and kissed me on the nose. ‘Sorry I haven’t been round before, but you know how it is. Anyway. You look marvellous, don’t you?’ He went to the drink tray and poured himself a brandy. He was used to doing this in our house. Jonathan never offered a drink to anyone he thought of as a working friend.
David was a heavy man, Scottish, reddish. The backs of his hands and the back of his neck were furry as mohair. Large pores splattered down his nose. I had often tried counting them while he and Jonathan sat for hours making plans for future success. To-night he wore a well-cut, dark-grey suit, but his solid thighs rounded out the knife creases in the trousers even when he was standing, and his thick ankles bulged over his suede shoes.
He lowered himself on to the sofa, squashing flat the cushion Edith Smith had hardly managed to indent.
‘Well, well, well. A lot of water’s passed, what, Clare?’ I remembered he once told Jonathan that the best way to put people at their ease was to ramble on in clichés for a while. This gave the uncomfortable person the chance to associate himself with you, the comforter, he explained. ‘Yes,’ he went on, swilling his brandy round in his-glass, ‘it’s tragic’when things like this happen. Especially to one’s friends. It puts everyone in such a confusion. Whose side should one take? Or shouldn’t one take sides? Should one just go on seeing both parties normally and never tell one you’ve seen the other? I don’t know.’ He looked distressed. I asked him if he had seen Jonathan.
‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact I have.’ Plainly he was relieved to be able to come to the point so soon. ‘I ran into him the other day. He was just off abroad.’
‘Oh?’
‘He didn’t tell me where to. I forgot to ask him, actually. I was in rather a hurry. We didn’t have much chance to talk.’ He squeezed a finger between his stiff collar and pulpy neck in some pain. ‘This damn boil came up last week. It’s still pretty tender. Anyway, Jonathan. The thing is, Clare, he looked pretty awful, I can tell you. Not at all his usual self. He’s obviously lost weight and he looked pretty unhealthy. Bloody miserable he was, in fact.’
‘Did he tell you everything?’
‘No, not all of it. But, well, you know how it is. We’re old friends. He can trust me. – I heard his side of the story.’
‘Naturally,’ I said. There was another pause while he sloshed his brandy about again. Then he finished it in one sudden gulp and stood up.
‘Now don’t be difficult,’ he said. ‘You know I’m only trying to help.’ His hands stirred shiftily in his trouser pockets. ‘I quite understand you don’t want to talk about it, but I don’t think you realise just how upset Jonathan is. Can’t you think it over, or write to him, or something? I’d hate to have a suicide on my hands.’
I laughed. ‘You’re being over-dramatic. And anyway you ought to know Jonathan well enough to know that he’s much too disorganised ever to commit suicide. – No, I couldn’t write to him. We agreed to have no form of communication for six months, and I’m not going to break the agreement.’
David fingered his boil with clumsy care. ‘Oh well, that seems to be that, then. I won’t interfere. But you must see I was just trying to help Jonathan.’
‘Quite,’ I said.
He shrugged his thick shoulders. ‘I’d better go,’ he said. ‘I promised to look in at a party. A client. I’m trying to think up a campaign for his fruit-flavoured custard powders. Why don’t you come?’
I don’t know why, but I said I would.
Chapter Two
In the taxi David told me his client had made a fortune out of children’s rabbit-fur slippers made in the shape of baby rabbits. With some of this money he had bought a huge, ugly house in Putney whose garden sloped down to the Thames.
It was a warm night and the rain had cleared the air of the heaviness of the afternoon. We walked down the front path between shining laurel bushes. The knocker on the high-waisted front door was a brass rabbit’s head. Above it, short-sighted pebble glass panes glinted with light irom a full moon. David was still having trouble with his boil. He kept running his finger round the inside of his collar and making the kind of peevish complaints that don’t inspire sympathy. Dark crescents of sweat, big as slices of melon, stained the sleeves of his coat.
In the house a woman with an excess of teeth rushed at us with an unintelligible welcome. Client’s wife. She led us to a large room that had the slightly incongruous look of a much lived in place that has suddenly been stripped of its furniture.
‘Here they all are,’ she said, ‘I’m sure you know everyone.’
I knew no-one. David’s eyes shifted expertly through the crowd and he flicked a few confident smiles of recognition. It seemed that most of the chairs had been stacked away, and guests fought with the singlemindedness of people on a holiday train for those that were left. Those who stood pressed themselves against the walls for others to pass. Through the roar of voices no individual fragment of conversation could be heard. – People communicated with signs and grimaces so that, individually, each one looked innocent of contributing to the noise.
‘Splendid party,’ said David, automatically. He took my elbow and pushed me towards french windows that opened onto the garden. Our progress was stopped by a stringy young man smoking a Gauloise with the arrogant gestures of people who smoke French cigarettes. David introduced him as Roddy. Roddy put a sinewy arm round my waist.
‘Roddy’ll take care of you,’ said David, relieved.
‘Try the cauliflower dip,’ said Roddy.
We joined a group of lean young men all nibbling bits of raw cauliflower dipped in pink mayonnaise, and flicking ash from wherever it fell on their bodies as if they were performing some private ash-flicking ceremony. Somebody fetched me a drink. One of Roddy’s friends said something I couldn’t hear and they all laughed. I left them.
In the garden people flickered round a barbecue. Sophisticated hands, flaring with jewellery, stuck out in primitive gestures towards the fire, holding sausages and chops. A fat woman in a Spanish shawl, clutching a piece of raw meat, swayed towards the barbecue. When its heat touched her she crumpled slowly to the ground, dropping the meat and a black glass which broke up like soot on the crazy paving. Red wine flowed among the splinters and reached the bloody piece of steak. Nobody bothered with the fat woman. I looked round for help. ‘Leave her,’ someone said, and suddenly I didn’t care.
I went back to the house. I found a room where people helped themselves to food from a long trestle table. I wasn’t hungry. Should I go home? I sat down next to a girl with flat yellow hair. She was eating paella with sullen composure. She looked at me, unsmiling. I realised that by sitting next to her – there was no chair on her other side – I might be decreasing her chances of falling in with a passing man. But I had no energy to move.
In the old days, I had always longed for independence at parties. Jonathan, absurdly proud of me in a crowd, stuck by me all evening. He always found me the most comfortable place in the room to sit, and chose for me what he considered the best things to eat. He fetched me constant drinks. – The only time I could be on my own was while he scrabbled his way to the bar on my behalf. When I stood, he said: let’s dance. We always danced round the edges of the room. Jonathan didn’t like to be bumped. With him, I had no chance at parties. With Richard, there had been no parties. Except for one magnificent Naval Ball in Southampton before we were married. The tickets had cost three guineas each. I wore blue tulle. The whalebone bodice, puckered with more tulle, was moulded into two inhuman points that made no compromise with my breasts. We waltzed to Strauss most of the night, and Richard smiled cigar breath at me.
‘Food?’ asked yellow hair. ‘I’m Rose. Rose Maclaine. Paella’s good.’ I helped myself, for something to do, and sat down beside her again. ‘I’m waiting for this guy David Roberts. He said he’d meet me here. He said he could help me. He knows a
lot of influential people, he says. – I’m an actress, you know, in case you were wondering.’ American.
‘David Roberts is over there,’ I said. He was shuffling towards us with an untidiness of bearing familiar to me from the days when he and Jonathan spent long drinking evenings together. His thick lips climbed slipperily about his teeth and his eyes sprawled greedily over Rose Maclaine. They greeted each other with the sort of enthusiasm peculiar to two people who know they can benefit from one another, and fell into a private form of monosyllabic communication until another friend appeared to interrupt. A tall pale man with black curly hair and black glasses.
‘Not an affectation,’ said the man, ‘a misunderstanding.’ He pulled off the glasses. One eye was closed, swollen and blue.
‘Joshua Heron, Clare Lyall.’ David introduced us, dragging his attention reluctantly from Rose Maclaine. ‘I expect you’ve heard of him.’ I hadn’t. David was drunker than I had imagined. ‘If you don’t mind being left with a man with a black eye,’ he slurred, ‘I’m going to take Rosie off for a dance.’
Joshua Heron and I were left together. I went on eating, spanning out the last few grains of rice on the plate. He sat down beside me and lit a cigarette. The rice came to an end. I had to look at him. He put my empty plate on the floor. I could see my reflection in his black glasses, a pinhead in a halo of pin-prick lights.
‘Strawberries?’ he asked.
‘No thanks.’ His right thumb was stained a deep nicotine, like the fingers of a heavy smoker, and the skin was charred and flaky. We remained in unawkward silence, like two people on a bus, while he smoked till there was only an inch of cigarette left. Then he crushed the burning end onto his burnt thumb. At once the tobacco split through the thin paper, dead.
‘Why did you do that?’
‘The first time you burn your thumb,’ he said, ‘it hurts. It hurts quite a lot and you get a blister. I was fourteen when I did it originally, for a dare, at school. They quite often dared me to do things they wouldn’t do themselves. This great bully called Buzzard, I remember, said he’d report me for smuggling cigarettes in if I didn’t do it.’ He smiled briefly. ‘It was pretty lousy of him, considering he was the one who smoked most of the cigarettes I smuggled.’
‘Why do you still do it?’
‘Because the blister cleared up and I tried again, privately, and it didn’t hurt so much. Then I tried again and again until it became almost painless. In the end I put every cigarette out that way and showed the trick quite casually to Buzzard and his friends. For a short time I was quite a hero.’
David and Rose were fumbling back towards us.
‘Let’s go,’ said Joshua quickly. He led me to the room where the music thumped loudly. We danced. Joshua’s body was hot and firm and jerked rhymically as an electric toy. Faces jumped about us at different heights as if sent up by a juggler from the floor. The throb of people dimmed and blurred. Music, rhythm, jogging bodies all flared into one sensation.
‘My head’s cracking.’ Joshua was speaking from a long way off. ‘Sorry. Must be something to do with this eye. Let’s get some air.’ In the garden the warm night was cool after the dancing-room. We came upon the heap of a woman I recognised as the one who had fallen by the barbecue. She sat slumped at the top of a flight of steps, a little apart from everyone else.
‘It’s Sally,’ said Joshua. ‘It usually happens later. We’d better see if she wants any help.’ We climbed the steps. He bent over her, gently shook her shoulders, and urged her to get up. Her head was in her hands, her hands were supported by her outspread knees. Joshua sat beside her on the step and signalled to me to sit the other side. Together we heaved at her shoulders and slowly she lifted her head. She appeared not to notice either of us, but stared ahead. Her eyes were clear green in a face that was red and swollen as that of a newly drowned woman washed up on a shore.
‘It’s all over,’ she muttered. ‘It’s all over.’ She spoke with deliberate precision. ‘Give me a moment to recover. Stay with me. It must not look as if I’m alone.’ Her head slumped back into her hands.
‘We’ll stay,’ said Joshua. Sally had trapped one of my hands in hers, and one of Joshua’s, so that our fingers met squashed beneath her chin.
‘It won’t take long.’ Joshua turned his black glasses to me. ‘She gets like this, but she comes round quickly.’ Her neck was exposed between us, dark with stiff private hairs that needed re-shaving. Beyond us, on the river, two swans dipped and recovered their heads from the flat black surface of the water without breaking it.
‘What did you do to-day?’ said Joshua.
‘Went to my first husband’s funeral.’
‘Oh?’ From the opposite bank of the river a mist crept down towards a couple of still, fat boats. I had pins and needles in my fingers. ‘She’s asleep.’ He moved his hand slightly. I could feel the flaky skin of his thumb. ‘Cremation?’
‘No.’
‘Wailing nuns?’ He seemed to be smiling.
‘He wasn’t Catholic.’ One of Sally’s open sandals slipped off a babyish foot and fell down the steps.
‘Have you ever been to a funeral on the Continent?’
‘No.’
‘They’re quite impressive. The nearest foreigners get to any sort of controlled pageantry. The fiestas and parades are pretty vulgar, but the funerals are good. Dignified. I had a landlady once in Rome who was the only genuine funeral fan I’ve ever met. It was nothing to do with morbid curiosity. She just had this talent for hearing about forthcoming funerals, and off she would go, follow the procession the whole way and come back crying.’
Sally gave a great sigh and her whole body shuddered. Joshua suggested we should try to get her back to the house. We heaved and struggled with her. Finally, with a solid assurance for one so drunk, she stood up. We supported her to a chair on the terrace and left her.
Back in the house people were at half mast, sawn down from their original height. The music was slow and sleazy. Three or four couples were dancing almost without moving, swaying like statues loosely soldered to their base. We danced, clutching at each other with the sadness of two people who are very tired.
Then the client’s wife, noisy in taffeta and with lipstick on her teeth, switched on the lights. She said, what about another drink? The other couples took no notice and someone switched the light off again. Through the semidarkness Joshua and I followed her. We sat on gold chairs, the three of us, round a table. It was suddenly cold. A chewed leg of turkey lay in the ashtray and red wine stained the table cloth. Through the windows the night sky was thinning out, leaving a white mist below. A waiter with a busy face uncorked a bottle of champagne. We drank.
‘Here’s to,’ said the client’s wife.
It was funny, that Sellotape on the coffin.
It was funny, David thinking Jonathan would commit suicide.
By now Jonathan would have bought a new typewriter. He might even have found a suitable Roman attic. How funny. Everything was funny. I began to laugh.
‘Joke?’ asked Joshua, but I didn’t answer.
We must have sat there a long time. I ate salted nuts from a cut-glass bowl. I wiped my fingers on the table-cloth when the client’s wife wasn’t looking. She said Putney was a good neighbourhood to live in. You got the people and the river, she said.
It was daylight when we left. The windscreen of Joshua’s car was misted up. I played noughts and crosses on it while he unlocked the door. The engine made a dreadful noise in the quiet early morning. We couldn’t speak. Joshua dropped me at the door.
‘Your hair’s a better colour in daylight,’ he said.
In the kitchen the sun was pale on the green Formica surfaces, the fiddly plants and the Provençal china. I started to make breakfast.
Chapter Three
Later that morning I began to look for Joshua. I looked for him in the telephone book and in an old diary of David’s that he had left behind a year ago. I looked for him for three days. I bought bundle
s of newspapers and magazines and scanned them all, in case he was a writer. I read bill-boards outside every theatre, in case he was an actor. I looked for him in the summer crowds at the Serpentine and the Albert Memorial: I wandered by rows of meters looking for his car. But I did not find him.
On the fourth day I went to two cinemas, abandoning the search. When I left the second film, it was evening. A stifling heat rose from the crowded screeching streets: I was stiff from sitting, but full of energy. I walked through Green Park, a bank of deadened noise beside the gush and roar of Piccadilly, and through Hyde Park, trembling with old, stale heat and dust. My eyes were sore from straining to look at every man I passed. As I turned the corner to my own street, still full of energy, I began to run – in case the telephone was ringing, in case there was a letter.
There was a postcard. It lay picture up on the front door-mat – the Changing of the Guard in colour. I snatched it up and ran to the green light of the kitchen to read it. The writing was thin, unfamiliar, and the message sloped sharply upwards.
I came to tea but you were not there, it said. I will come again. Tours sincerely, Ethel Fox. (Mrs Henry Fox.)
The telephone began to ring. I let it ring two, three, four times while slowly I walked to the sitting-room.
‘Hello?’
‘Clare? It’s David. I just thought I’d call you up. I spent the weekend in Rome – with, you can guess who.’
‘No?’
‘Rose Maclaine.’
‘Oh.’
‘Guess who I ran into in Harry’s Bar?’
‘I can’t.’
‘Jonathan.’
‘Oh.’
‘He’s got himself set up very nicely in Rome. He took me to his flat near the Piazza di Spagna. It’s got a marvellous view. And he’s got a huge new electric typewriter.’