Constantine turned to me. ‘It seems to be a modern trend on these occasions for the women to look superb and the men to dress like football coaches.’ This reminded me of something, but before I could ask he went on: ‘Yes, I’ll take on your Under Fourteens with the greatest of pleasure. When will I have to start?’
‘Thank you so much!’ My mood positively soared. ‘That is marvellous, I’m sure you won’t regret it. And you won’t have to do anything before next season, obviously.’
‘But I feel I must do something,’ he said, with an enchanting air of earnest good intentions.
I just had to indulge him. ‘That’s no problem. There’s a seven-a-side tournament at the end of the month. If you were to come along to that I could introduce you to the others and you could see the boys play.’
‘That sounds fine.’
‘I’m afraid,’ I added, with assumed diffidence, ‘that managers are automatically on the committee.’
‘No problem, I’m an old hand at committees. Turn up, look keen, keep quiet.’
‘What’s this?’ asked Mike, tearing his gaze away from Bernice’s gaping judo jacket, ‘houses of ill repute?’
‘Committees,’ said Constantine, ‘and how to survive them.’
‘God, don’t mention committees,’ said Linda, whose law degree and fluent French had secured her a role in the ‘cabinet’ of a noted Eurocrat. ‘They’ve roped me in to be part of something called Euro-Encounter.’
‘Sounds like a malfunction of the waterworks, doesn’t it?’ said Mike supportively.
‘What is it exactly?’ asked Constantine.
‘That’s the forty-thousand-franc question. We’re going to meet quarterly in various one-horse places au continent, to bore each other sockless during the day and wreck our livers at night.’
‘Take no notice,’ said Mike, ‘ she loves it.’
‘I’m sure I should,’ said Bernice.
‘Yes,’ agreed Mike, ‘let’s talk about you …’
‘I must go and look at dinner,’ I said.
Constantine made to follow me. ‘Anything I can do?’
‘No, but do come along and talk if you want to.’
He followed me to the kitchen and studied my noticeboard—again—while I basted the meat, shook the salad dressing and put out the cucumber soup with trembling hands.
‘So how do you like Basset Parva?’ I asked, the sparkling conversationalist.
‘What, professionally or socially?’
‘Um … socially, I suppose.’
‘It’s fine. It’s a nice village and there’s a lot going on.’ So he’d noticed. ‘I could be out every night if I chose. But there’s some disadvantage to being an unmarried doctor in a small community.’
‘Oh, I’m sure! Of course, there must be!’ Conditioning and training made me eager to agree, to uphold the necessity for spotless integrity and moral probity even as I gasped at my own stupidity. Hadn’t I expressly invited this unmarried doctor in order to vamp him, to make him as mad with lust for me as I was for him? And yet here I was acting the champion of conventional morality. I hacked wildly at the baguette in an access of frustration, but he didn’t seem to notice.
‘That’s why it’s so nice to come over here,’ he said. ‘I feel less watched.’
‘Quite!’ I agreed. ‘Now I think I’m ready, I’ll go and tell the others.’
Bernice, Mike and Linda were standing gazing up at the row of my previous titles on the top shelf of the bookcase. From their expressions it was impossible to guess at their reactions to Castle of Dreams, The Flight from Love, Rose of Autumn et al, but as I entered Bernice greeted me with:
‘Ah, here she is. Superwoman. The Caped Hostess. All this and dinner too. We were just commenting on your general versatility and brilliance.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Dinner’s ready.’
During dinner I had the sensation of things getting out of hand. For a start, I was tight. When nervous I drank fast, and the effects were delayed and catastrophic. Mike and Linda had been oiled to begin with and were now so well lubricated they were like a couple of cakes of soap—you couldn’t grab hold of them. Crazily they slithered and swooped from one anecdote to the next, spilling salt, sending slivers of tomato and Spanish onion cascading to the ground to be sniffed and rejected by Fluffy, helping themselves to wine and periodically over-filling glasses and shouting ‘whoops’. Their mood was infectious. The tenor of the party became one of febrile hilarity. Bernice’s judo jacket sagged invitingly. Constantine’s expression became a lot less polite. I caught Bernice’s eye and treated her cleavage to a withering look. Obligingly she tweaked it, and it parted again.
During the syllabub the phone rang and I answered it.
‘Is Dr Ghikas there?’ asked a female voice, elderly and genteel.
‘Yes, he is. Who is that?’
The voice frosted over. ‘ I was given this number by the surgery.’
‘Just hang on—’ I put my hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Constantine, it’s for you.’
‘Thank you—sorry about this.’
‘Take it in the bedroom if you want to, top of the stairs and facing.’
I waited until I heard him lift the receiver, then put mine down and went back to the table.
‘Poor bugger,’ said Mike. ‘Who’d be a doctor, eh?’
‘I would,’ said Bernice. ‘You never see a doctor on a bike.’
‘Oh yes, but darling,’ protested Mike, ‘what a life. Ghastly surgeries full of snotty kids and haemorrhoids and thread worm—’
‘That’s the nurse,’ I corrected him. ‘ The nurse does thread worm.’
‘Glad you told me that!’ said Mike and we all laughed merrily.
‘But fancy being on call at the weekend like this,’ said Linda, in her best seriously-though tone. ‘Like running a shop.’
We pondered this simile, and then Bernice said: ‘He’s gorgeous, though.’
‘Oh yes,’ agreed Linda. ‘Tasty, tasty!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I blustered, in the overemphatic way of the woman with the bad conscience.
‘Never you mind, girl,’ said Mike, putting his arm round me. ‘Your secret is safe with us. A little field work, eh? A little research? And why the hell not!’
Constantine came back into the room and sat down in his place.
‘That was quick!’ observed Linda. ‘ Not terminal then?’
‘No. She quite often rings me up.’
‘Ah, hypochondriac is it …?’ asked Mike with the air of one versed in medical lore.
‘No,’ said Constantine, ‘just elderly and on her own.’
This cast something of a blight. But Mike Channing on the outside of three g and t’s and a bottle of Beaujolais would have been proof against an arctic blizzard.
‘There was a young lady of Parva,’ he declaimed, ‘who had an affair with her farver. She said, “Callow youth is so rough and uncouth, but Farver in Parva is suaver!’ ’’
We all laughed immoderately, especially Mike, who had tears coursing down his cheeks. Constantine laughed in a slightly stupefied way as if he couldn’t believe his eyes and ears. He had long since started covering his wine glass with his hand to preclude topping-up and I did hope the rest of us didn’t seem too disgusting.
‘How about a game?’ asked Mike. ‘Would anyone like to play a game?’
‘God, Mike, really …!’ said Linda, ‘I’m sure they don’t.’
‘I do!’ said Bernice predictably.
‘Good idea,’ agreed Constantine, more surprisingly.
Mike looked at me. ‘Harriet?’
I was overcome with a mild sense of hysteria. ‘Sure, sure, why not …?’
‘Attagirl!’
While I put on the kettle for coffee Mike herded his little flock back into the sitting room and began outlining the game.
As I stood there gazing into space and wondering where it would all lead, the back door opened and Damon came in.
�
�Perfect timing!’ I cried. ‘We’ve just finished and you can make the coffee. Four large spoonfuls in this jug, and don’t forget to bring a strainer, out of this drawer.’
‘Oh yeah. Right. Will do.’ He removed his jacket and hung it on the back of one of the chairs. In my well-refreshed state I felt almost maternal towards him but when I smiled benignly, as I thought—he shied away as though Count Dracula had treated him to a leer dripping with gore.
‘Where are your kids?’ he asked, as if to remind me of my respectable matronly status.
‘Out,’ I explained. ‘Thank you, Damon, this really is a great help.’
‘Sorlright, I got nothing on,’ was his reply.
Back in the sitting room, a short reprise from Mike gave me to understand that the game involved a man carrying a woman from point A to point B with various prescribed parts of her body touching the ground at all times.
‘But who’s the arbiter?’ asked Bernice. ‘I mean who says which parts?’
‘We all write down different parts on bits of paper and put them in a hat or a bin or something, and someone makes a selection before each go,’ said Mike. ‘It’s easy-peasy.’
‘What’s the object of the exercise?’ asked Constantine, the last rational voice on earth.
‘Just to do it!’ replied Linda. ‘Because It’s There.’
‘Well, not quite, darling,’ said Mike. ‘ It will be over a set course and against the clock.’
‘I see,’ said Constantine.
‘Rightie-ho then!’ cried Bernice. ‘ What are we waiting for? Give me a pencil and paper, someone.’
I fetched both from the study and we all scribbled busily. Linda touched Constantine on the arm. ‘Be careful, won’t you, doctor,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to end the evening with a prolapse.’
‘Heaven forfend,’ he murmured, deep in thought.
When we’d finished writing Bernice screwed up the bits of paper and put them in a vase, while Mike rummaged through George’s tapes and put on Francis Albert.
‘Songs for Swinging Naughty Bits,’ he announced.
‘There’s a fly in this ointment,’ observed Bernice. ‘We’re not an even number.’
‘I could take two,’ offered Constantine gamely, holding his glass of Perrier like a badge of office.
At this moment Damon came in with the coffee tray. Bernice rose from her chair with the suggestion of a lurch, and more than a suggestion of the swinging naughty bits to which Mike had but lately referred.
‘Put the tray down, Damon,’ she ordered. ‘You shall go to the ball.’ It was evidence of how drunk I was that beyond a slight peck of mild surprise I accepted this solution with equanimity.
‘Could you lift me, Damon?’ asked Bernice reflectively, looking him up and down. He was by three or four inches and twenty pounds the smallest person in the room, and not in rude health.
He eyed her back. ‘ Doubt it. I could try.’
Bernice waved a dismissive, imperious hand. For fuck’s sake,’ she said, ‘it’s nineteen eighty-four. I’ll carry him.’
‘Sure, fine, right, okay,’ said Mike, impatient with the delay. ‘Now who’s going first?’
‘You’re the expert, you go first,’ I said. ‘ You and Linda.’
‘May I know where I am to be carried?’ asked Linda.
‘I hereby declare this fireplace point A and the front door point B,’ said Mike. ‘Any queries?’
‘That’s hellishly difficult,’ complained Linda, taking off her shoes. ‘We’re all going to get wedged in this doorway.’
‘That, petal, is where the skill comes in. The course is there and back, against the clock. Okey-dokey, allons-y!’ He thrust his hand into the vase and brought it out clutching a bit of paper.
‘It says here, left elbow.’ He held the paper up for the rest of us to see. Then he scrutinised his wife, like a removal man assessing an awkward piece of furniture—a harp, a grand piano, a large and elaborate desk—and finally rushed her, in one movement turning her upside down with her head on the sofa, and wrapping her ankles round his neck. This manoeuvre afforded the rest of us an uninterrupted view of Linda’s underwear, which consisted of plain white pants and flesh-coloured tights with a sturdily reinforced gusset. It must have occurred to us all simultaneously that if this evening Linda were to be struck down by the number 6 to Basset Regis she would have nothing whatever of which to be ashamed.
We also noted that Linda’s legs were good right up to the top, were free of cellulite and broken veins, and had recently been subjected to the bikini wax which is the stamp of the well-organised woman.
I glanced at the others. Bernice, thank God, was reorganising her jacket to withstand the rigours of the game; Damon was tying his shoelaces; and Constantine was looking on with complete detachment over his glass of water. Linda’s crotch, it appeared, held no interest for him. I dare say he saw too many in the course of his work.
To be fair to Linda, as Mike hoisted her about, hauling on her right arm and bending her left like a piston, elbow first, to the ground, she exhibited the most admirable British sangfroid, such as enabled many a spunky Victorian lady to travel through uncharted mountain wastes ‘with Mule and Notebook’.
‘All right down there?’ asked Mike.
‘As well as can be expected.’
‘Ready, timer?’ Constantine nodded, waving his left wrist. ‘We’re off!’ They moved off soixant-neufing it down the hall (Mike having negotiated the narrow doorway with consummate skill) like some elaborate monster from the mists of mythology.
We fell about. We all thought each other so perfectly splendid, so amusing and attractive (this with the possible exception of Damon) that it would have taken a disaster of cataclysmic proportions to shake our convivial mood. That disaster was coming, we could not know how soon, but for now, like the sun-kissed hedonists of that long Edwardian summer, we continued to laugh like drains.
The Channings, as befitted the experts, completed their circuit in a nippy thirty-two seconds, without mishap, Linda regained the vertical with more dignity than she had a right to, her well-cut coiffure falling back into place at once and her colour returning to normal in less than a minute.
‘Thirty-two seconds to beat!’ cried Mike. ‘Right, Bernice, you ready?’
‘Sir!’
‘You?’ Mike looked at Damon.
‘Guess so.’ I had to admire Damon’s calm—his ‘cool’ I suppose he would have called it—and could only suppose it masked a kind of inertia panic. The situation in which he found himself was so totally foreign to him that his stunted verbal and facial vocabulary had not the wherewithal to express an appropriate reaction.
Mike drew a piece of paper from the vase. In the declamatory tones of a fairground barker he called out: ‘Buttocks! Buttocks are trumps!’
‘Buttocks, schmuttocks,’ said Bernice airily. ‘Sit down, Damon.’
Damon sat.
‘Take your shoes off,’ Bernice instructed, ‘and lock your ankles round my upper thighs. Then we clasp wrists and ankles and Bob’s your uncle!’
Damon had no uncle Bob. He was a hopelessly inept pupil. Perhaps his ghastly assumed phlegm had meant suppressing his powers of rational thought—never all that great—as well. Also, as his work for me had indicated, he was assiduous but cack-handed. It took a full three minutes for Bernice to get a grip on him, and he on the situation, and they subsequently failed to complete the course.
Bernice and Damon locked together looked like one of the unlikelier illustrations from the Karma Sutra. His day-glo socks sprouting from beneath her ample bottom, her black belt tickling his ever-reddening nose, encapsulated exactly what is meant by the term culture clash. His peg was square and her hole round, and even had there been the remotest possibility of the one coming into contact with the other, no conjunction would have been possible.
‘Let me get you a drink, Damon,’ I said, as he staggered stiffly in from the hall, where Bernice had summarily dumped him.
; He croaked something affirmative and I fetched him a can of Pils from the fridge. He sat on the sofa, staring glazedly in front of him, nursing the can on his chest and taking occasional gulps from it. I didn’t like the look of him. It was hard to imagine what it was like for a culturally deprived seventeen-year-old of limited experience to be carried upside down by a woman of Bernice’s build and background at a dinner party of his employer’s.
‘Our turn, I believe,’ said Constantine. He placed his hand on my shoulder and left it there. In any man not so patently a gentleman it would have been a frankly flirtatious gesture. I wondered if I felt hot and sweaty through the purple silk.
Mike put his hand in the vase and drew out a bit of paper.
‘It’s a real bugger!’ he cried. ‘Right knee!’
‘Perhaps,’ I said sportingly, ‘I’d better take my tights off.’
‘I know,’ said Constantine. ‘ You put your left foot in my trouser pocket.’
‘Steady on,’ intervened Mike. ‘ Not allowed. All perks must be incidental. Feet in pockets are out.’
Bernice and Linda cackled with laughter. Damon sank still lower on the sofa, the can of Pils almost obscuring his face.
‘Very well,’ said Constantine. ‘Back to the drawing board.’
In the end we solved the problem by these means: Constantine laced his fingers behind my back, and I draped my left leg over his arm; I bent my right leg so that the knee brushed the ground, and he grabbed my foot with his fingers and held it up. I had not been in such acute discomfort since I’d played Long John Silver at boarding school, but I was heedless of it. Anaesthetised by lust I dangled there, my face bobbing not six inches from Constantine’s fly, his tantalising scent in my nostrils, the pre-shrunk denim which covered his narrow hips brushed from time to time my fiery cheek.
‘Ready?’ asked Mike. ‘Then go!’
With the cheers of the onlookers ringing in our ears we set off. It was a kind of torture by proximity. The more exhausted we both became, the tighter I had to clasp Constantine’s belt at the back, and the more firmly my face was pressed against him. It would have taken only the slightest reciprocal pressure, the merest twitch, the smallest suggestion of engorgement, and I should have cast caution and sportsmanship to the winds and wrestled my partner to the ground. But as we bumped and dragged along the hall like a murderer and his victim no one would have guessed at these salacious fantasies.
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