CHAPTER 8
. . . Foul summer, foul city, foul everything. Sticky heatwave, thumping head, the whole place quite unbearable and everybody else under this sun a bloody fool. My blouse, which was ugly to start with, feels like toilet paper: I’m home again early because if you must know I couldn’t cope at work and no one needs me. I feel like that beggar who seems to be sitting by our roadside most evenings and I can see why he doesn’t move off. I hate him, both of us turning up and down the road with nothing to do. Did I say that? Course I’ve got plenty to do. Nor am I lonely or worried. I have a home to go to.
It’s only the cat being sick which has got to me, nothing else really. Poor thing. (Sebastian says I care more about animals than people.) Does Katherine put down strychnine or something in her garden, damn her? I can’t challenge them of course: our pussy goes into more back gardens than theirs. Maybe too much feline sex, ha ha, chance would be nice, I suppose, but not in this heat. I can’t remember the last time with Sebastian, only remember pushing him off.
Christ, I hate summer. Summer is claustrophobia, restlessness, boredom and constantly wishing to be somewhere else. Couldn’t help it, you know. The only event of the day was a card pushed through the door inviting us to David Allendale’s birthday party, some weeks hence, made me feel worse. Beauty incorporated, next door, a mere boy he is at forty, but the thought of nice David raised a smile all the way to my eyes. He’s the only thing I’ve liked in quite a while. So when I met him in the street, there didn’t seem anything wrong in letting him know, but of course I got it wrong. Whole conversation wrong-footed from the start. I’m not subtle: no small talk: Sebastian says I should have been a chap, but I never could flirt.
‘How’s tricks and isn’t it hot?’ I say. ‘Thanks for the invite to the birthday party, forty again, are we? I thought you were older than that, letting us know so far in advance.’ Men aren’t supposed to be sensitive about those kinds of things, but in retrospect, perhaps David was. ‘No, forty for the first time,’ he says, ‘and not for a little while yet. How are you, then? Where’s Seb?’ I must have looked a bit surprised at that, assuming everyone knows dear Sebastian acts like a lodger except for first thing in the morning when if he was paying rent, he would be seen taking liberties with the landlady and not much of that recently either. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘he’s in a meeting somewhere, often is up to eight or nine at night, jolly good thing actually.’ Don’t know why I said that really; sounded peevish, but he was looking right through me, not really listening at all. Where’s Katherine, I asked, wondering if he was going to tell me she was out back, putting down poison for our cat. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘she’s indoors getting a meal while himself and I take a little walk.’ I didn’t even see he had Jeremy with him in a pushchair, this godly parent, but it seemed as if he was suggesting I should be indoors doing the same as his wife. ‘Hallo, poppet,’ I said to the child, who scowled at me and tugged his father’s trousers. Even he didn’t want to know me.
‘I think they like it round with Mrs Harrison.’ My bright remark. ‘They seem very happy from what she tells me.’
‘Yes,’ he said, giving me an indifferent look and a forced smile, ‘yes I’m sure they are.’ Jeremy suddenly noticed the dog standing like a baked statue next to me, pulled towards her with a squeal of joy, then sneezed. David took his hand to stop him touching. For some reason, I found this terribly irritating. Frightful little patsy of a child, likely to grow up a real wimp. ‘They do seem to love the Harrison discipline,’ I purred; ‘she’s a natural with kids, our Mrs Harrison, but the only trouble is they have such a good time, they never want to go home.’ I hate people looking through me like that: he’d bloody well offended me, hadn’t even said I looked well or any of the usual courtesies I bloody well wanted and I wanted to needle him.
David frowned. ‘You would think,’ I went on, ‘. . . that the end of the world had come some days, Mr Harrison tells me. Something wrong in your house, David my dear, makes them so reluctant to go back into it? They never want to go home, do they? What do you do, beat them, ha, ha?’
Oh, very funny. His look was like a thundercloud passing over the sun: my little, gin-inspired barb had gone home, but how dare he keep his boy away from my dog. The dog was sniffing round the pushchair: this time David didn’t stop him.
‘You can never work out kids’ preferences,’ he said. ‘Jeanetta screams before she sets out in the morning. Must be any kind of change she dislikes, there’s no telling. She just screams, full stop.’ The old ease of manner was returning, but I could sense he was angry. ‘Don’t know how Sebastian can stick working in the City, weather like this,’ he went on. ‘I certainly couldn’t. Where do they have all these early evening meetings then? In the pub, I should think.’
‘I don’t know.’ I shrugged, acting the ignorant little woman.
David’s smile was very lazy. ‘In the dim and distant days when I knew the City,’ he says, ‘before the City chucked me out, being in a meeting was a euphemism for everything. Late afternoon, evening meetings even more suspect for the married men. Not that any of that applies to Seb of course.’
Touché.
Jeremy started to cry, and we made our goodbyes, both cross with the other. So much for the flirting I had planned, but if I had put the wind up him, he’d certainly managed to do the same to me. Damn him: what was it he’d said about meetings? Hadn’t I seen him, wandering up the road with Monica Thing, that friend of theirs I met at their last party? Meetings aren’t fictions, at least mine aren’t. I felt I’d been given a rap on the knuckles and my knuckles ached to punch something, the way they do after a rap. Was there something I was missing with Sebastian, something he was trying to tell me?
I went back inside to check the brood: 7.45 and only Mark somnolent in front of his own TV, hopelessly tired after an early rising. Sparrow-fart start, buzzing he was at six this morning in his repossessed pyjamas. I ambled into the garden, found it had not grown any larger, so strode back through the house again, crashing down the steps in a straight line for the park. Looking for water for no particular reason except a dim and silly memory of some other lakeside where Sebastian and I had gone courting at a time only just inside the scale of my memory. In the days when the sight of my well-proportioned bosom poking out of a T-shirt was enough to render the average man incoherent, even my husband. Something ailed me at the time: I didn’t know what, but something; something terribly wrong with their house next door, and ours, but I’m never good on analysis: I just blunder on.
I adore the park, although the place is so unreal, cosmopolitan Hyde Park, lush Kensington Gardens. I’d cantered half the length of the Serpentine before I slowed down, transformed by that place into a quieter animal myself. There were weeping willows grazing the water by the first bridge beyond the fountains. Two old men sat near the Lido, looking like gnomes with folds of mahogany flesh hanging shamelessly over shorts, a tribute to their daily dip in the murky water. Further back, I passed inanimate Peter Pan, polished by the hands of children, watched another old man holding up his hand like a signal while he waited for the sparrows to clutch his knuckles and take out the offered crumb from between his thumb and first finger. I was mesmerized, stopped to look. ‘They like that,’ I said to the man stupidly. ‘Course they do’; his reply was scornful. ‘Everyone likes biscuits.’ How straightforward a place is the world for some, but amongst them I had nowhere to go. David had disconcerted me horribly.
But the breath was removed from my body by all I could see. I had to sit, watching the contrasts. First a beautiful blond boy feeding nuts to a squirrel through a railing, a boy like my own Mark, whom I have never, ever, brought to the park and I suddenly wondered why; then, by way of the opposite, an elderly crone sitting on the bank of the lake, so old you wondered how she could still be alive, with her nylons rolled down over fat and mottled ankles, her grey bra-strap looped over one elbow and her crotch displayed to the ducks. The ducks were in concert, such sounds, such squabblin
g, deep basso profundo honking, comic squawking, deafening yells, bursts of a terrible humanity in their raucous arguments. I watched the last of the rowing boats turning to shore, confused things creaking slowly for home while the haze seemed to thicken over the water.
Then, on a seat further down, where the lake disappeared beneath the tunnel of a bridge, sitting pathetically slumped, I saw Sebastian.
He was sitting in his shirt sleeves, this man who so rarely takes off a winter jacket, the slight red of his hair catching the last of the sun, pale forehead on fire with it. Sitting alone, staring fixedly at the ducks. Sebastian has always craved water, wanted a house by the sea, but I wouldn’t let him. From the other direction, beyond him, I saw a blonde girl walking away, couldn’t tell if she had walked from the same seat or if, in my squinting vision, I imagined she may have done so. I could see her, had I turned one second before, trailing her long hair across his broad shoulders, one hand now pushing golden strands behind her ears and adjusting her bag to her shoulder as she walked. She was very slim, like a reed, beige coloured in a short dress which fitted like a dream, walked as she walked, made for a shape like hers. Sebastian, in a meeting.
Oddly enough, since I cannot see why, I was more distressed to consider him sitting there alone than I was to contemplate the prospect of that possible companion. A man sitting by himself and watching ducks is one without purpose, a creature without a home, all dignity lost except for the kind of pathos peculiar to a lonely child. So I got up and walked down the path, my sandalled feet scraping in the hurry with the thong over one toe suddenly sore, my heart in my feet, pounding discomfort. But when I came near, coughing my own familiar cough as a signal for him to compose himself, he remained as immobile as that statue of Peter Pan which promises such movement while remaining still. When I asked him, what time is it, please, I heard a voice removed from the body of this man on the bench; a man with a coarse face, reddish hair, a headless patrician, a stomach more often assaulted by beer and less by exercise than that of my own spouse. A coarser version, not my Sebastian ever, a heavy, disgusting, grimy at the edges stranger was all, with a suit so cheap the creases shone like his skin shone, paler eyes looking through me with complete indifference as he consulted a watch of astonishing vulgarity. I thanked, I began to mumble, I shuffled on, so dizzy with relief I almost fell, feeling an utter and complete fool. Sebastians on benches, looking at ducks, wouldn’t be seen dead, would he, never. And my own reflection in the water, dusty, faded, plump, with all those duncoloured, frayed clothes, more in common with the crone without knickers I had seen with her rolled-down nylons than the woman whose bosom was the talk of Oxford and the hazard of another lakeside. Christ, I needed a drink, badly.
I should not have moved, of course: should have stayed inside my own study with a calculator rather than go out into the world where nothing is predictable at all. I should not have spoken to David. I went home, holding on to my own wrists, embracing myself with my arms across my untidy chest for reassurance. I kept on forgetting that it had not been Sebastian on the bench, not him at all, but another of similar build and different persona, not my own man, oh no, not him, but the turmoil his image caused was unforgivable; for the way I was walking with those stupid tears cutting lines in the back of my eyes, it may as well have been him. Nor need it have been Katherine Allendale I had seen walking away from the man who was not my husband, but her image was as firmly stuck, wedged like a dart. That slim beige dress tiptoeing into the distance, at home with the splendours of the park, beckoning men like some sort of shy goddess. If she were the siren on the rocks, I wanted her covered in oil slick.
No Sebastian at home. A meeting with Japanese clients, he had said. I wanted to talk, even to Mrs Harrison, but old habits die hard. My life, you understand, my rational thoughts, were in the grip of some kind of paranoia. Which is why I went into his study via the garden, a circuitous route to say the least, but for reasons I cannot be bothered to explain and certainly cannot rationalize, I wanted to see from the opposite way up exactly what he could see from his infrequently used eyrie of the garden next door, but it was darkening by then. I could see no more than an orb of light from the playroom end of their kitchen, a dimmer light upstairs in David’s studio, no sound but the gurgling of a drain, strange, urban music.
My husband’s study was dusty and bare. On his desk was an address book containing particulars of people I had never known. There were dead flowers in a vase by the window, and a wasp buzzing and crawling round the perimeter of one pane, dozy but angry, literally dying to be free. I tried to kill it, but I was tired and it would not die. In the back wall mirror, I caught sight of myself, flapping at the wasp, trapping the wings in the Indian silk scarf from round my neck, pinning it against the pane but unable to press hard enough to hear that little crunch which would have signalled disablement, they are so slow to perish. In the end, I opened the window and dropped out the scarf, hoping the insect was inside. Both of them fluttered down to the garden, the scarf a flag of no known nation, floating slowly. I felt so unutterably hopeless, so incompetent, so fat, so inept, slumped on the sill, watching nothing, crying like a baby.
‘Whassa matter, Mummy, wotcha doing, whassa matter?’
‘You’re supposed to be asleep, child . . . I thought you were asleep!’
‘Well, I’m not,’ Mark said logically enough, standing there in the door of the study, rubbing his eyes, looking like a little blind hedgehog, quite unsure what to do with all the paws. ‘I’m not asleep. Whotcha doin’?’
‘Killing a wasp.’
‘Ugh. Well, that’s nothing to cry about. Can I have a biscuit?’ The adult composure, the matter of factness, is really rather marvellous: I looked at him as I might have done a stranger. ‘And some milk,’ he added. ‘Don’t cry Mummy.’ He shivered with great exaggeration. ‘Cold in here anyway. Wasps is horrible, I think, anyway. You can have a drink if I have a biscuit. Two biscuits?’
‘Everyone likes biscuits,’ I said, remembering the old man in the park. ‘No they don’t, not all of the time, but I do,’ he said, pulling up his pyjamas which were spreading like a fan around his feet. ‘Biscuits are all right really. Very all right. Are you coming downstairs now?’
I let him lead me, moving our disappointing vantage point from the death of the wasp and the uncomfortable barrenness of father’s study, went downstairs and looked out of another window facing the road. ‘I often look,’ Mark explained to me. ‘Mark, that’s naughty. Mustn’t be Nosy Parker . . .’ ‘Why not?’ he asked, the logicality foremost, knowing I could not answer. ‘Everyone likes to look all the time.’ ‘Some of the time,’ I corrected. ‘Shh,’ he said, ‘look, there’s that man.’ We watched the vagrant I had seen in the street before, shuffling up the road out of sight. ‘I tried to talk to him,’ Mark told me, ‘but he can’t.’
‘Mustn’t talk to strangers, sweetheart.’
‘Why not?’
‘They sometimes bite.’
‘Mummy, why were you crying?’
‘I wasn’t,’ I lied. I was slightly affected by the vision of the vagrant moving off down the street, a displaced person alone at night, up to mischief.
‘All right,’ Mark said, looking at me with totally unselfconscious curiosity, willing to believe what he wanted to hear. ‘But you should ask me next time. I’ll sort out the wasps for you, honestly.’
Enough, I said, enough, enough, enough. You may have three biscuits for that.
CHAPTER 9
The high summer social calendar was a blessing to some.
‘Tum ti tum tum . . . Tra la lari lee . . .’
Mrs Sophie Allendale was babysitting and as ruler of the mansion found her sudden elevation perfectly heavenly. So much so, mid-pirouette, the idea crossed her mind to pick up the phone and invite round the posse of Hampstead widows who were both distressed and genteel enough to qualify for her own social circle. Until she remembered how either David or Katherine had been overheard to refer to these cronie
s as Granny’s coven. Who had spoken this description was a matter Granny had forgotten, but she believed the culprit was Katherine, and in memory of the words, which she imagined she could hear in Katherine’s voice, did not phone. Which was a pity since she was certain she could have prevailed upon the coven to descend in entirety, twittering with curiosity to see herself play hostess with David’s alcohol supply. She could have summonsed her grandchildren for display by way of extra aperitif; then given her guests a guided tour provided the poor old dears, none of whom boasted a surviving relative as comfortable as her own, could manage the stairs. The plan was stillborn because Sophie had been quite unable to find the kind of foods she required to complement the drink. Smoked oysters, home-made cheese straws and small pieces of anchovy toast, things she would have served as a girl, would have done nicely except she was not sure of the etiquette of serving anchovy toast at any other time than tea. To hell with the details: they would have fetched up by the charabanc load for coffee and biscuits never mind vermouth and gin, but she could not find sufficient supplies of the former either. The whole kitchen seemed to have undergone yet more comprehensive alterations since her last visit, forgotten after a couple of phone calls, and most of the food cupboards were now locked; Granny proofed, she thought with irritation, until she remembered the locks were more towards burglary prevention with herself only as an afterthought; David’s calculation, such a clever son. Granny’s own delicious meal was laid out delicately, salad and half-bottle of wine in the fridge, dear, plus access to a limited number of biscuits in a china barrel. She had already eaten half the meal, skipping round the dining table in the process, moving the plate from one end to the other to try herself out in various seats, saving the wine for later but making some progress with the very dry sherry although not exactly to her sweet taste. The nibbling progress was interrupted by a visit to the garden and a long conversation with the flowers.
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