That makes her laugh.
“Come on then, what about some big chords for the begining?”
He places his fingers on the keys, arms straight, and then presses them all down together, in the style of a maestro.
“Like this, I thought.”
“I think you are in B flat. That’s good.”
She writes down the chords, simply.
“I’ll play those a few times, maybe eight. Then it all gets twinkly. Like this.”
George puts his face down, very close to the keyboard and plays three consecutive notes in a quavering staccato.
This is beginning to sound like some sort of piece which might have been composed by Dadaists, thinks Roberta. She has visions of chairs scraping and people leaving. Not really, nobody would be so cruel, but she sees she needs to take this piece in hand.
“Are you going to think about a melody?”
“What?”
“You know, a tune. You could incorporate Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, or something.”
“Roberta, my dear.”
“Well, if it’s good enough for Mozart, it’s probably good enough for you.”
“This is a soundtrack. It’s BOUND to sound strange. It has to go alongside the action on the film. But maybe you’re right. Oh, I don’t know.”
He sniffs, looks straight ahead at the piano. Takes his hands away from the keys. His face is suddenly very red.
“I’ve got a brilliant idea,” says Roberta, who cannot bear tears from her pupils.
“What?” he says in a small choking voice.
“Why don’t you set it to Hanon? It’s completely neutral. You could set anything to Hanon. But it goes on and on, like a river. You know, you can have lots of action on the screen and dear old Hanon will just chug away in the background. And you can make some bits loud and some bits soft. Plus, it’s something you know how to play, which is always a help for nerves. And also, it sounds properly classical.”
“So my parents will like it.”
“Well, let’s just call that a serendipitous side effect.”
He starts to smile, rubs his hands together.
“And now, for the world premiere… ”
Roberta stands up. She’d like to give George, this strange little solitary boy, a hug. Or rumple his hair. She can’t do that. Instead she picks up Hanon.
“I’ll look at what we might choose and bring my suggestions back next week. Fortissimo, piano, forte.”
“Yes. The thing is, Roberta,” he says happily.
“What?”
“When everyone thinks I am practising, actually I will be preparing for my film score!”
Chapter Seventeen The Dinner Party
She had written the menu for the supper party out a week ago, after the guest list was settled. It was her turn to deliver the long-formatted procedure. Three courses, sometimes four with cheese. Chocolates. Champagne as the sharpener.
“Do you remember when we always had a G&T before dinner?” Patrick sometimes says, longingly. “Oh for the days of the aperitif. When fortified wine was seen as a treat.”
Nobody calls it dinner any more either. It’s a supper party, lavish but in casual clothing.
As if they are all going to watch the sun set from the terraces at the Petit Trianon, having bedded down the cattle.
As the guests sit around the table, still in that strict Fifties gender formation always described as Boy, Girl (unless there is a gay couple present), the hostess takes a deep breath. The starter is crucial, for it is the starter which shall indicate the style of the evening. The evening shall either be Showing Off supper, in which case the visitors will be humbled by a spectacular dish revelling in an unfamiliar cuisine, or its counterpart, Nursery supper, in which the host deliberately humbles herself with school dinner standards.
Both are acceptable, depending on the day of the week, weather, and whether a child has insisted on being present. Nobody likes children being there. Children at night are even more awkward than gay couples or someone with a gluten allergy. Gay couples are at least deeply fashionable, and can be very funny indeed. Allergies are annoying but are usually ironed out earlier. Children are just irritating.
“I think we will have squid, for starters,” says Jane.
Patrick eyes her from the bed. This event is simply an invented hurdle, an adult challenge for people who don’t have many challenges left. Unlike George, Patrick thinks, whose life is a stream of Grades and exams and achievements. Patrick considers his life to be a straight line of, well, living, interrupted occasionally by small hurdles such as holidays, the occasional illness, and dinner parties.
He doesn’t even count having sex as part of the continuum, because it is not. He remembers a period when Jane never wore anything to bed. She would just wriggle in beside him, slightly slippery, her skin briefly chilled from the air in the bedroom, but containing a deep watery heat from her bath. Then, of course, they would fuck. Nowadays however, she gets dressed for bed, pulling a long dress or pyjamas over her naked body. That’s it. As the material goes on, he sees the familiar soft contours disappear, breasts, belly, triangle, knees. It goes from chin to calf. There is no subsequent fucking.
This evening is no different. Chastely enrobed thus, Jane continues to discuss squid.
Which, as Patrick must acknowledge, is hardly an aphrodisiac.
“… spiked with chilli and served in kiwi fruit, on a bed of cous cous? It’s a dish from Tangiers. I read about it in the Observer last week. Looks like a nightmare to prepare, but if I do it the day before… ”
“What next?” asks Patrick lazily.
Jane has worked out the main course already. Lamb baked in individual tiny pumpkins. Followed by cheeses, specially delivered from somewhere in the middle of France, a place which Jane has heard is frightfully dull, but has amazing dairy. And then, as a deliberate nod to the nursery option, but with irony, a pavlova featuring Greek cherries and curdled Chantilly cream.
She sighs. The menu will take Jane a full three days to assemble and cost several hundred pounds in terms of raw ingredients, Champagne, wine, bottled water both fizzy and still, a range of cut flowers and a few downloaded tracks of something obscure and Seventies to waft around in the air.
The whole thing must be casual. Any artifice must be lightly draped across the night in an effect of naturalness. This is the style of supper parties on the Square, and Jane is the mistress of the oxymoron.
“Who’s coming again?” says Patrick.
“I have told you this before. Beth and James, you know, the couple from work. Tracey and Larry. You and me. And Jay and Harriet.”
He snorts, remembering the previous event at the Residents’ Association meeting.
“Have you reinforced the chairs?”
“Patrick!”
“It was bloody funny though. Seeing that chair completely knackered and Harriet on the floor.”
“Also I’ve done something rather brilliant.”
“Oh, yes?”
“I am installing Anya, that au pair of Tracey and Larry’s. I’m putting her in the kitchen to do the washing up. I’ve got her for a bargain price.”
Patrick raises his eyebrows by response. He knows Anya. He thinks she is rather beautiful, in a wild Slavonic way. He has never spoken to her. She is the sort of au pair he would never have trusted himself to hire, in the days before George’s school hours were so long there was no point in hiring anyone to look after him.
He turns over, away from his wife in bed and envisages Anya in the kitchen.
Two days later, the supper party is upon them.
As far as Anya is concerned, she is quite happy to be in the kitchen area of the knock-through for £10 an hour. She’d be happy to be anywhere for £10 an hour, frankly. She can hear the Seventies music upstairs, which she likes. She knows that at a key moment, the conversation and footsteps will move from the upstairs living room down to the basement dining ‘zone’.
The candlelit dining
table is prepared. Anya thinks it looks a bit like an altar; a high rectangle, swaddled in white linen and gleaming with silver, glass and flowers. She hears the guests clatter downstairs towards the dining table. Here we go, she thinks.
She considers heating up the cold, big plates ready for the main course. Certainly at home, her parents always liked hot plates for the meat dish.
Jane comes in suddenly, ready to carry out the squid and cous cous. Anya suggests that the main course plates be heated up. To her surprise this goes down very badly.
“Oh, no! Anya, not at all! Nobody has hot plates any more!” Jane cries.
“The whole point is that food must be served at room temperature.”
Anya apologises for the idea.
Jane’s face is rather flushed. She is wearing a pleated dress of silvery linen which has a high ruff at the collar. It has no sleeves, so it can show off her thin, long arms. The pleated skirt brushes the top of her knees. She is wearing sheer glossy tights and very high heels with a Mary Jane strap. Crystal earrings swing from her lobes. A small headband decorated with flowers goes around her hair.
She looks artfully decorated, almost in concert with the table.
Squaring her shoulders, she takes the wide china plate and walks with a tiny spring in her step towards the table. Good, Patrick has done the placements. Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl.
“So, everyone. Squid and kiwi.” She pauses for the cries of acclaim around the table. Yes, tonight is going to be showy.
“Where does it come from?” she says, pleased to be asked. “Oh, somewhere in Morocco I think. Tangier? Casablanca? Yes, it’s quite novel but apparently the flavours ‘meld’ together. Well, according to the Observer, they do!”
She serves her friends, who sit waiting to be fed. Jay, she serves last, a small smile playing around her features. She’s not seen him since the dreary meeting in the park, but tonight is different. Tonight she is on show.
“Wine?” says Patrick, standing, grasping the crystal decanter, sloshing the light red liquid into the glasses.
“Apparently red is what must be drunk with this dish. According to the Observer.” He rolls his eyes theatrically. “Only reason we get a newspaper these days! Supper party tips!”
Everyone laughs.
Unseen, George tiptoes past the table, making his way towards the kitchen where Anya is sitting, reading.
“Hello Anya,” he says.
“Good evening George,” says Anya, who has a soft spot for him.
“Aren’t you meant to be in bed?”
“I suppose I’m ‘meant’ to have done a lot of things,” says George, quote marks hanging in the air. “I’m ‘meant’ to have played the piano, for one thing, to the guests tonight. But I ‘was not to be found’ at the right time. What’s this?” He pokes at the lamb in little pumpkin shells which is resting at room temperature.
“Don’t touch that! For God’s sake. Your mother will go crazy. Doesn’t she think you are meant to be in bed?”
George looks at her. “Do you mean, does she think I am in bed? Or does she mean to put me into bed? Or would she be glad to know I am in bed?”
Anya smiles at her small inquisitor.
“All of them. Take this,” giving him a chocolate truffle dusted with cinnamon. It and several others have been positioned on a beautiful Moroccan ‘heritage’ plate made by Berber herdsmen, which will be produced after the ironic pavolva. He tastes it gingerly. “Ugh. That is vile.”
“Alright, have this,” says Anya, giving him a HobNob.
“Yum. Can I have two?”
“Go on then. Now go to bed.”
He walks upstairs to the sitting room, and sits down quietly behind the sofa. George slips his Nintendo DS out of his pocket, and settles down for a long gaming session, munching his biscuits, discreetly out of vision. He slides the device onto mute.
Downstairs, Jane is watching her guests eat her food. As always, she is eating very little herself.
“This is amazing Jane,” says Tracey, waving her fork in the air. “Have you done it before?”
She smiles, pleased that someone has asked the right question. “No, actually, no. I haven’t. I like a challenge!”
“Gosh, you are brave,” says Tracey. “I would never do something new at a dinner party.”
Jane looks at Tracey. Still calls them dinner parties, how gauche.
Plus, she always has second helpings. It’s been years since Jane has allowed herself a second helping. She gave up second helpings as a New Year resolution about five years ago, and never looked back.
Jane has a fear of getting fat not dissimilar to a fear of getting cancer.
She studies Tracey. When did she last see her? Oh, yes. Before going off to meet that finance guy from the TV.
“So, I’ve been meaning to ask you, how did you get on with your meeting with the television finance guru?”
Jane hopes, fervently, that the meeting was cancelled, that the plan isn’t getting off the ground, that the project has been abandoned. She smiles kindly at Tracey.
Tracey looks at her blankly.
“Don’t you remember? I saw you in the morning when you were trotting off to meet him? You were all dressed up in your suit!”
There is something not quite sisterly about Jane, Tracey decides.
“Oh, yes, yes of course. Well, I was off for a meeting with Alan Makin.”
“Oh, Tracey, I’ve been meaning to ask you, how did it go?” says Harriet across the table. Harriet is wearing a very tight pink cashmere jumper which is stretched tightly over her breasts. It makes them appear rather like one of those security wrapped suitcases. She looks rather hot. She beams at Tracey.
“We went to hear the amazing Makin the week before,” says Harriet to the assembled table, “and Tracey caught his eye. What was he like?”
“Good. It was quite interesting actually.”
“Tracey’s going to be a television star,” says Larry. He nods across the table to his wife. “Tell them about it.”
Jane looks at Tracey very intently.
“Oh, it’s nothing really. He is doing a financial overhaul on me, for the programme, but it probably won’t come to much, if anything at all.”
“Really? You’re going to be on television?”
She is so very disappointed about this, but she covers it up beautifully.
“Wow. Well done you! Sounds like it’s quite a big deal. When’s it going to be on?”
“Oh, that’s nice of you, Jane, but really, it’s not a big deal. Actually, he’s really sweet.”
“He is? What, Alan Makin?”
“Yes.”
“Sweet? Really?”
“Yes, honestly. Once he gets away from all the celeb stuff. He has an office… I think he works very hard.”
“Oh, that’s disappointing,” says Jane. “I was hoping to hear he had a life of razzle dazzle.”
“Well, he does have an iguana in a case in his office.”
“No!”
“Honestly, he does. It eats crickets all day.”
“Tell them about the deal you’ve struck, darling.”
“Oh, Larry, please. It’s meant to be very hush hush.”
“Yeah yeah. This IS hush hush.”
Jane looks more intently than ever at Tracey. Her eyes are like those of a little beady robin.
“Well, er, since Larry has put me totally in it, thanks sweetie, the thing is that I’m doing a bit of, how shall I put it, counselling for Alan. He’s giving me financial advice, and I am giving him time to chat. That’s what he needs, he says. Me time.”
“That’s not all,” says Larry jovially. “He’s paying her for it!”
There is a silence around the dinner table. The Seventies music plays on quietly. A distant rattle from the kitchen is the only indication of human life there.
Jane’s eyes are so bright they look like they might self-immolate. Tracey looks down at her plate. She can’t help smiling.
“What, payin
g you? Actual cash?”
“Mm. Yes. Think so.”
“That IS astonishing.”
“Why?” pipes up Larry. “Tracey does have a qualification in counselling, actually.”
“Well, Tracey, you are a dark horse.”
Jane doesn’t much care for dark horses. She likes people to reveal who they are and what they are doing up front, so she can assess them, quickly, against herself and her achievements.
“So, how many times a week are you seeing him?”
“Oh, we haven’t really arranged it yet,” says Tracey.
There is a pause.
“Did I tell you that our son got into Burlington?” says her friend from the City suddenly.
The focus wheels and the conversation changes, like a dance movement, to talk about prep schools. Alan Makin, his iguana, his money and his arrangement with Tracey are forgotten in the grateful desire from everyone to discuss something about which they each hold a reasonably similar opinion, namely schooling, which is shaded only by whether they individually feel that Latin is considered obligatory, or not.
Jane walks into the kitchen to collect the lamb and pumpkin.
“All ready here,” says Anya, giving her the dish on a tray.
Suddenly, she finds the evening a bit less glittering than before. She’s not sure why. It’s the combination of Tracey being noticed by a television star, and earning money from it. That was annoying. First, she wins the Lottery. Now, she’s going to be on television. How did someone who has never actually achieved anything, certainly not in the way that Jane has done, manage to be so lucky, she wonders crossly. Also there is the phenomenon of her husband, Larry, backing her up so comprehensively. Patrick is never so loyal, she thinks. It eats at her stomach. The smell of the food is actually somewhat nauseating.
She returns to the table with the tray, coolly acknowledging the cries of appreciation it provokes. She glances at Jay through the steam rising from the dish. He smiles at her. She looks down at the food she has produced, demure.
She hopes he will acknowledge her earrings, the flowers in her hair, the ruffles around her neck, her slim, slim arms. She looks up at him again. He is still looking at her. She knows he finds her beautiful and she’s glad she has invited him.
The Square Page 13