I had stopped on the spiral staircase, one foot on the first step. In the next moment I would, I think, have continued up—gone to join him, make a joke to Claire, and cut in—but in that moment a small middle-aged man with straggly gray hair and a pregnant-paunch under his camel V-neck started coming down, feet tumbling after each other in an erratic manner, so I had to jump quickly, back down into the garden, to get out of his way. I backed into a tub of marguerites to let him pass. But he didn’t. He lurched toward me, using his girth to block my escape. I said brightly, “I’m just on my way up.”
He swayed precariously, spilling red wine from his glass onto the York stone, and grabbed my arm to steady himself. “D’I know you?”
“No,” I said, maneuvering halfway around him. “You don’t.”
“S’ what’s a pretty girl like you doing on your own?”
“I’m not on my own,” I said, trying to sound upbeat and relaxed with his drunkeness, and trying not to sound stiff and sober and slightly censorious, which was how I was really feeling. “I’m on my way up to see my husband.”
“Waste of time: marriage,” he said, suddenly vicious, kicking a private wound. He let go of my arm then and the loss of security sent him reeling. He grabbed the wrought-iron banister. More wine slurped; this time onto my stilettos. That would jazz them up. He said, comically, “Ooopss.”
I said, caught now, “Have we perhaps had a drop too many?”
“You mean, am I drunk? Yes I am. I’m a cunt.”
He bent his head toward me. His face was all twisted. I could see the hairs lurking in his nostrils, the broken white ridges on the back of his purple tongue. I thought, for a moment, that he was going to kiss me, so I put my hands out and was about to push him off when a man came up behind me, put his arm on the drunk’s shoulder, and propelled him gently down the stairs. The newcomer said, “Language. There’re ladies present.”
The drunk said, “Fuck off.”
“Hey,” the newcomer said. “No need to be like that. Maybe you should be going? Shall I get you a cab?”
“I’sfine. Got the car.”
“Okey-dokey. I’ll just go and find our hostess, shall I?” The man straightened up and for the first time he looked at me. With a shock of recognition I saw who it was. It was the gardener from the crash. My gardener. Mel’s gardener. “Hello,” he said, squinting as if he couldn’t quite place me.
“Maggie,” I said. He looked blank. “The meter maid. From the crash,” I added.
His face relaxed. “Oh yeah.” He put out his hand—“Pete. Pete Russ.”
He had had a haircut since I’d last seen him and his head now looked like a recently sheared sheep, the curls surprised into tufts before they’d even begun to unfold, and he was smartly dressed in an ash gray linen suit, but he still looked out of place in this company, a footballer in his interview-best, a cat among the pigeons, a fox among the hens.
“I remember,” I said, taking it. “But what are you doing here?”
“I live here,” he said flatly.
“Oh, with Claire,” I said, suddenly understanding. Bad luck for Mel: he was taken.
“Claire, Claire, the moment I met you I swear,” droned my friend on the steps, his chin now sagging onto his chest.
“No, downstairs. The basement.” He gestured to a dingy barred window abutting the ground (b for basement). “With my partner. Look, I’d just better go and call matey here a cab. I’ll be back in a sec.”
He jumped over the man, leaped up the steps two at a time, and disappeared into Claire’s drawing room. I waited, crocheting my fingers in and out of the cast-iron railings, not sure whether to leave, wondering if I was supposed to be standing guard over the now almost comatose drunk at my feet. A minute or two later, though, Pete was back, this time with Claire. She said, “Ooh dear. What have we here? Oh shit, Cyril. Why do you always do this?” She turned to me and added, “I knew I shouldn’t have invited him. But he’s the chief sub on Features, and I dreaded to think what he’d do to my copy if I didn’t.” I made a face. “I’m joking,” she added. “I feel really sorry for him, actually. He’s always pissed.”
“Has he got far to get home?” I said.
“No, since his divorce the poor sod lives in Tooting.”
“A fate indeed,” I said.
She and Pete heaved him to the top of the steps, where they stood in conference for a while, and then Claire took Cyril, leaning against her, off into the house.
Pete came back down the steps. “Your partner?” I said, when he got to the bottom.
“My partner?” Pete had bent to inspect the pot of marguerites next to him. Some of the flowers had bent under Cyril’s weight and Pete snapped off the damaged stems with his fingers.
“You said you lived with your partner?”
“Oh yeah, I do.” He patted down the compost at the base of the plants, then stood up and brushed his hands on his trousers. “Lloyd.”
“Oh, as in Doug?” Maybe there was still hope.
“As in Doug?” Pete was frowning.
“Pete and Doug, I mean.”
“Yeah. That’s right. Yes. My business partner.” He was scanning the crowd. “I’m parched. Do you want to find a drink?”
I looked around me. I looked up into the sitting room. There was no sign of Claire or Jake now. I hesitated, then I said, “Yes, all right.”
We worked our way back through the throng. Pete walked ahead of me. There were wrinkles in the linen at the back of his knees. He moved with his arms at an angle to his body, hands out, as if his muscles got in the way of smart clothes. He stopped at a table with an abandoned tray of drinks on it at the far end of the garden. “There you go,” he said, handing me a glass. It was half full of red wine, but had a smudge of lipstick on the rim. “Get that inside you. You look as if you need it.”
“Do I?”
“You look a bit . . . tense.”
“Well, someone just thought I was a waitress and then I thought that poor man was going to be sick on me, but apart from that . . .”
“A waitress?” He laughed. There was a scar under one of his eyes and little dimples above each side of his mouth, as if someone had prodded him with a pen. “You mean you’re the hired help?”
“Like you,” I said. “Do you do Claire’s garden? It’s very nice.”
“I looked after it for her grandmother, yeah. Not recently. She was a nice lady. That was very sad.” He glanced down at the back of his hands.
“Her dying, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes, it was,” I said. There was a silence as we both contemplated the passing of Claire’s elderly relative. “Though, um . . .” I felt an inappropriate giggle rise in my throat. “Actually, I never met her.”
“Oh?” He started laughing. He nudged me with his elbow, and then nudged me again more roughly on purpose so that I spilled a tiny bit of my drink.
“Hey!” I said.
“Sorry.” He was grinning.
Then I remembered Lucinda and I told him about giving his number out to her and he said he’d already been in touch and it seemed like she had a lot of work for him. “Which,” he said, suddenly earnest, “I really appreciate. Thanks.” I told him I thought that it was the least I could do after our little prang and he laughed. And then he stared at me, and said, “And what would be the most?”
“What would be the most what?” I said.
The corners of his mouth were twitching. “What would be the most you could do?”
Was he flirting? Or was he one of those men who was so aware of the effect of his looks that he always behaved like this? Either way, my cheeks tingled. Afterward, I imagined myself saying coquettishly, “Well, what would you like me to do?” or enigmatically, “Less is more.” But, of course, at the time I said neither of those things. I said dumbly, “I don’t know.”
I felt suddenly awkward. A man pushed past me. I raised my glass out of the way, but he jogged my arm and sploshed the wine
onto my shirt. He apologized and I said it didn’t matter and after he’d gone I was able to turn to Pete again and say brightly, starting the conversation afresh, “So, no garden of your own, then?”
“No garden,” he said.
“But at least you have a nice view.”
“I have a nice view,” he said, looking deeply into my face.
It had been a long time since anyone had talked like that to me. Or had looked at me in that way. It was not how things were supposed to be conducted, but I felt a flicker of something inside.
Pete seemed to have stopped looking for conversation now that he had found a seam of his own to mine. I said, scrabbling about for safer ground, “Look, seriously, is your van all right?”
“It’s fine,” he said in mock-exasperation. “Let it rest, okay?” He put his hand out to stop me from jabbering on. It was covered in scratches, and there was dirt around the top of his fingers that looked as if it was ground in. Then he said, “Do you wanna dance?”
I thought about it for a moment and then I thought about Jake so I shook my head. “Actually I’d better go,” I said. I put my glass down and nodded my head a few times. “Got to find someone.” I rubbed my hands together and then did a sort of half clap. “So, um, bye then. Maybe we’ll bump into each other again.”
“Not if I see you indicating,” he said very cheerily.
I turned my back on him and went up the spiral staircase and into the drawing room. I stood there for a bit, getting my breath back, stopping my head from spinning. That’s red wine on an empty stomach for you. I should find an angel or a devil—one or the other.
There were lots of people dancing now. Jake wasn’t one of them. He was leaning against a wall with a group of people having a whale of a time. Spouting with laughter.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said. “But I think we ought to be leaving. Baby-sitter . . .” I added. The people he was with smiled at me politely. Blankly. “Righty-ho,” he said, though, as I stood there like a teacher waiting for homework, it took a good ten minutes for him to extricate himself from what had clearly been a fascinating and side-splittingly amusing conversation about market positioning and it was a further twenty before, once he’d said good-bye to all the people who suddenly needed saying good-bye to, we were out on the street.
“That wasn’t so bad after all,” he said, balancing, one foot in front of the other, on the edge of the curb, arms bent from the elbow on each side, surfing an imaginary wave. He toppled and jumped across the pavement, twirling an arm across my shoulders. “I actually quite enjoyed myself.”
“So I can see,” I said, turning for a moment to look back at the house.
July: Wasps
Chapter 6
There was an old man who lived near us somewhere. I didn’t know where exactly but I would see him wobbling down the street in his paper bag-thin raincoat, one arm plastered to his chest in a dirty-edged bandage. He used to be out with an elderly woman, a worn face and a crooked body gaily clad in a Sunday best of years back, jaunty hat perched on her ashen hair. She had trouble walking and she’d lean on him, arms held stiffly at armchair angle, an old, old rose kept just about upright by a tired and ancient post. But you’d see her less and less and then not at all, and he began to look very alone as if walking the streets by memory rather than design.
You see a lot of people you recognize on the street when you walk about, pushing small children in a stroller. For a while, if you’ve just left a job, you keep seeing people you think you know from the office—oh there’s Pauline from Personnel, oh no it isn’t; hi, Larry, Larry from Design! oops sorry—as if so engraved are they on your internal landscape it takes a while for the blueprint to fade, for the visual nerves to stop twitching. But the real people, the people who are really there, when do you start smiling? When do you stop and say hello, or wave, somehow recognize the fact that their faces and gait are becoming as familiar as the cracks in the pavement?
I never did. I stared through most of them as if I’d never seen them before, or as if they’d never seen me. So there were faces that I knew and said hello to, but there were others that for some unfathomable reason I blanked. I’d done it at school too. There was my clan, the Claire Masterson clan, and we’d fall on each other in the morning as if we hadn’t been on the phone until 9:00 p.m. the night before, but there were other girls who wouldn’t even merit a smile. Perhaps it’s a tribal thing, a class thing, or a city thing, certainly none of those people ever smiled back, or perhaps, and this is something I thought about late at night, it was particular to me. My life was just fine thanks. I had just what I needed. And I didn’t need anything, or anybody, to muck it up.
But that all changed after Claire’s party. It rained all day Sunday and Monday—heavy gray skies above the common—and it was so cold in the house I almost put the heat on. But on Tuesday the sun came out. It felt hot on my face when I opened the back door, and before long the shine had been taken off the roofs across the street and the puddles on the pavement began to slip away.
“Right, we’re going out,” I told my offspring, gathering them up before they had time to protest. We set off down the street, the stroller back-heavy with its usual package of diapers, wipes, juice, emergency cookies, jackets. But there was a new lightness to my step. There were people out there you could meet. There were other lives to cross.
The private schools had broken up. In a couple of weeks the skateboarders would be ruling the streets; there would be teenage girls loitering at the corner. But for now the private school children had the place to themselves. Two little girls in pink fairy tiaras were trotting along ahead of me behind their mother, who had a Little Red Riding Hood wicker basket in one hand and a rolled-up rug in the other. I turned and smiled gaily as I passed. Outside the café, a man and a woman I’ve often stood behind in the post office sat making conversation with a son who looked as if he’d just been picked up from boarding school. He was wearing a gray uniform and looked hot. “Much homework?” said his father as I passed by.
“Vacation already!” I called. The parents tittered. The son scowled.
At the pharmacist, Mrs. Allardyce, my nemesis in a beige raincoat, was sitting on a chair waiting for her tablets. I braced myself in preparation for the tutting. She had once told me at the bus stop that I didn’t know my own luck. Like many older people who, in their own time, managed without disposable diapers or washing machines, she did not suffer The Bleat Generation gladly. I suppose there was less pressure on women of her age to be anything else. Or perhaps if you’ve lived through a war or directly in the aftermath of one, you have a different perspective. I mentioned this theory to Rachel once and Rachel said, “Well, yes, I suppose if you’d been through a worldwide conflagration, you’d have a rough idea what to expect with children,” and I laughed a lot. But then I realized she was serious.
Still, I usually tried to steer clear of Mrs. Allardyce. Not that day, though. That day I went up and said, “Hello, Mrs. Allardyce” and before long found myself offering to drive her to the hospital for her lung X ray.
“You’re a good girl,” she said, as I left. “But you still can’t control your kids.”
When we got home later, I felt quite pleased with myself as if I had begun a program to open up my own life. And then I decided to open up Mel’s for her by phoning the gardener. I put Dan to bed and Fergus in front of the television and then I dialed the number.
“Hello,” I said. “Is that Peat and Dug? Is that . . . Pete?”
The line was crackly, as if the person on the other end was entangled in the branches of a tree.
“Sorry?” shouted a voice at the other end. “Can’t hear you. Hold on.” There was more crackling, crashing. And then, “Sorry, I was entangled in the branches of a tree. What can I do for you?”
I said, “Oh sorry, sorry to have got you down. Er . . . it’s Maggie. Maggie Owen. You know, the . . . um.”
“Yes, I know,” he said. “Of course I know. How are you
?”
“Fine, thanks.”
“Good. Did you enjoy the party the other night?”
“Yes,” I lied. “Very much.”
There was a pause. I realized I was gripping the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger. My toes were curled. My eyes were closed. My mouth was twisted in something between a rictus and a grin.
“And?” he said. “What can I do for you?” I could hear voices in the background. A loud noise started up, sending zigzags down the line. “HOLD IT A MINUTE,” he yelled. The noise stopped.
I bit my lip. “Just wondered.” I said. “I mean I don’t know how busy you are, or whether you’ve got time or whether this isn’t the sort of thing you do, but um . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Well I just wondered whether you’d come and look at my garden.” I’d taken the phone to the back door and was looking out at my little loved patchwork of cherished plants and rampant weeds. The vinca major had really taken over this year. Next door’s cat had been sleeping in the choisya. Fergus had driven his trike into my lace-cap hydrangea and left it there. “It needs a bit of work and although I love doing it and I’m not the sort of person who . . . I just don’t have time at the moment what with one thing and um. . . .”
“Another?” he said.
“Exactly,” I said gratefully.
He sounded businesslike. “Fine,” he said. “Let me think. It’s a very busy time of year, but . . . Where do you live? Right . . . Um, tell you what. I’ll pop round on my way to a job tomorrow afternoon. Between two and three: is that okay with you?”
There, I thought, when I put the phone down, feeling all trembly and taking big restorative gulps from a glass of water: don’t say I’m not a good friend, Mel. See what lengths I’m prepared to go to for you. Then I rang Mel to tell her as much, and she agreed to slip round between appointments. “I think I’ll have a sicky tomorrow anyway,” she added. “I haven’t had one for a bit.” Mel was always having sickies, and she didn’t seem to suffer from the paroxysms of guilt that the rest of us feel. I think meeting so many sick, or malingering, people on a daily basis must distort your impression of how much time off the average person takes. “Oh, all doctors have sickies,” she said when I raised this. “It’s because we work so hard we need them. Plus, it’s kind of our medium.”
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