by Paul Magrs
And I wanted to tell her: I don’t want to be alone, Effie. Don’t go running off with him. Don’t leave me on my own.
Of course I couldn’t say those things.
‘He took me dancing,’ Effie said. Her face was glowing as she recalled her night out. ‘Dancing! Me! He made me put on a proper gown and he picked me up and he was as neat as a pin. He even wore an evening cape. Oh, Brenda, I never thought gentlemen still carried on like that. It was divine. I thought that world had gone. I thought I’d missed out! I’d assumed all my golden chances had passed me by . . .’
‘Hm,’ I said, laying out my bread to make a chip sandwich. ‘Where did he take you?’ I imagined that tall, dapper gent whisking Effie around on a sprung ballroom floor. Come Dancing kind of thing. She would have been out of her depth, I thought, with a stab of dismay. Surely she couldn’t dance. She was so awkward and frozen. He must have regretted it as he dragged her round the polished floor . . .
She beamed and bit her lower lip. ‘I’m afraid we were rather wicked and went somewhere quite racy. We went to the nightclub under the Miramar.’
‘What?’ My mouth fell open, mid-chew. ‘Surely not, Effie. You’ve always said you’d rather die than set a foot inside Sheila Manchu’s rancid den of vice.’
‘I know. And when Kristoff suggested, light-heartedly, that we retire there for some cocktails and a bop round the disco floor, I was appalled. I felt like I wanted to die. But, oh, I didn’t want to seem past it or stuck up. Not on our first date. And so . . . I allowed him to talk me into it. And we went. And do you know, Brenda? I had a marvellous time. It was eighties night.’
‘For the over-eighties?’
‘The music. It was ever so glamorous down there. A Honolulu-style cocktail bar. Plastic lobsters and nets on the walls. Very swish. It wasn’t a den of vice at all. I had to admit, Sheila has made it into a very distinctive niterie. She is a very convivial hostess, too. Such a mixture of clientele! And, Brenda, I danced all night long on the arm of the elegant Kristoff Alucard.’
‘Well,’ I said, embarrassed for her, ‘you dark horse.’ I smiled - it took some effort to stop that smile going sickly. I couldn’t bear the thought of my best friend being made a fool of. That man . . . Surely that was what he was doing. He was sending her up in front of his trendy friends at Sheila’s low joint. He had plied Effie with drinks, then got her up on some ghastly, lit-up dance-floor where she must have been dancing around like a madwoman. Jitterbugging and doing the Twist. Poor Effie. Even now, she showed no embarrassment or shame.
‘You don’t mind, do you, Brenda?’
That she was out all night, making an idiot of herself at nightspots with a man she hardly knew? ‘Of course not,’ I said.
‘He’s sweeping me off my feet. Though . . . he warned me. He won’t go too fast. He knows I’m a respectable lady. A pillar of society here. My life has been sedate, if not sedentary. He understands that, and he said, very sensitively, that he will endeavour not to turn my head. He will take it very gently . . .’
I felt I must have been wearing an expression of disgust. I am not prim, but there is something disconcerting about a candid outpouring from someone who is ordinarily more prim than yourself. I crunched up the last of my batter, and turned my thoughts to dessert.
‘And,’ Effie went on, ‘that was when he explained that he’s keen not to interfere with our friendship. He knows how we relish each other’s company. Two old spinsters together, doing our spinsterish things!’ She chuckled and I felt, instantly, as if she had slapped my face. The patronising bugger! Spinsterish things, indeed! And Effie was going along with it. Turning into one of those spineless, silly women, who change so absolutely when a bloke - just any old bloke - shows an interest in them. They turn themselves into whatever the bloke wants, and throw away their old life with everyone in it. A leaden, disappointed feeling stole over me.
‘This evening, for example,’ said Effie, ‘he was offering to take me to dinner somewhere swanky on the road to Scarborough. But then I mentioned we’d already pencilled in Cod Almighty. He backed off immediately. “I know how important your girls’ nights out are.” ’
Girls’ Nights Out! I knew for a fact that Effie hated that phrase. She thought it sounded retarded. She had said as much to me as she coolly regarded a hen-night party sprawling about in the road, all L-plates, tiaras and fairy wings.
Effie was grateful to join the everyday, normal world. That’s what it was. She would consent to anything. She was flattered and giddy . . . and relieved.
‘I wouldn’t want to get in your way,’ I said dully.
She reached across the table and patted my hand. We both stared down at my hands. My ill-matched hands. I hadn’t bothered plucking them for this evening. All of a sudden it was as if they had their own volition: they wanted to reach across the table and throttle the life out of the smug bitch.
It happens sometimes, with different body parts . . . It seems, off and on, that they have a life of their own, their own dreams and desires, which they send up to my brain to flash across the screen. Usually I have to squash them rather firmly. The impulse to choke Effie on the spot for her patronising betrayal took more effort than usual to resist.
‘I’ve told him all about you,’ she said, dabbing her thin lips with her napkin. ‘I talked for hours and he listened. He’s one of those men who really listen, you know. And he said he was intrigued. Really. He said you sound like an amazingly fascinating woman. “Astonishing,” he said. “It just goes to show. You look at some people and you think, Just ordinary. Average. Nothing fascinating there. Even some fantastically glamorous people,” he said. “You can think, Ho-hum, not fascinating at all. But others! Well, they can be nothing to look at on the outside. They can be downright odd-looking, at times. But on the inside they can be amazing. Astonishing!”’
I glared at her. ‘He must be a very deep person.’
‘Oh, he is, he is.’
I shook my head to clear it of an angry buzzing. Effie had cured herself of irony! How on earth had she managed that?
‘He says he thinks he loves me.’
After this outburst, Effie lowered her eyes. She was ashamed to meet mine. She had divulged too much.
‘He said that?’
‘When he dropped me off at my door. Proper gentleman. It was light by then. Nearly six a.m. And he said, “Effie, I know it’s too soon. I know it’s impossible. Or improbable. But I don’t care about that. I don’t care about convention. Neither of us is very conventional. And I want to speak my mind. I want to tell you what’s in my heart.” This is him talking. This is what he said to me, word for word. Well, you can imagine. My heart had just about stopped. I could hear the sea pounding in my ears. I thought I’d drop dead there and then.’
I pictured them: Effie with Bette Davis eyes and her cocktail frock all rucked and sweaty from bopping at the Miramar disco, and him all sophisticated and dashing. His eyes as dark as Bournville chocolate.
I looked at Effie and she was blubbing. Really! Seriously blubbing at the table. ‘No one,’ she said, clutching that napkin, ‘no one has ever said it to me. No one’s ever told me they love me. Not once. Never in the world.’
For the next few days I was plagued by the pair of them. They were everywhere, insanely happy and smug, clutching each other and swooning about the place. I know I should have been pleased for them, especially after some of the things Effie had told me in the fish restaurant. But as the days went by I felt resentful and cross. I think it was the patronising little wave they would both give when they saw me struggling home with shopping and they were on their way out, all dressed up. They started going to things like galleries and the theatre. ‘You don’t usually bother with stuff like that,’ I accused Effie, and she shushed me. Said something about having her horizons expanded.
Hm.
He was a handsome devil, I’ll say that. He seemed to grow more handsome with every passing day: that blue-black hair, greying sleekly at the t
emples, his skin so delicately pale. And his manners were exquisite. One day, when they had stopped me in the street, he held both my hands and patted them, staring deep into my eyes. ‘I would like to thank you for being such a wonderful friend to my beloved.’
Beloved, it was now! He was fast!
‘That’s all right,’ I said awkwardly. I was on my way to the launderette with a huge bag of dirty whatsits. I was furious because my machine had packed up that morning.
Effie was simpering in the background. ‘She has told me so much about your lives here,’ Kristoff said. His voice dropped lower. ‘So many interesting things.’
I shrugged. ‘There’s nothing very exciting about our lives. You’re the most exciting thing round here in ages.’
‘I beg to differ,’ he responded. ‘Effie has told me some incredible things.’
I glared at her. There was no way of knowing what secrets she had offered up to him for the purpose of entertainment. People in love are so silly and selfish.
I hoisted up my jumbo bag of smalls and bade them farewell, but not before they’d trapped me with a dinner invite. At Effie’s! That was a turn-up. I’d never been invited even once before. As far as I knew, she never cooked - I’d looked in her fridge once: it was full of those eye masks you wear for migraines.
I accepted, knowing I couldn’t wriggle out of it. They were nauseating, but I didn’t want to hurt their feelings.
An hour later, slumped on a bench at the launderette, staring miserably at my suds and undies going round, I was wondering whether they had been to bed together. It was a startling, not wholly pleasant idea. Uncharitably, I wondered how Kristoff could bring himself to fancy Effie, him being such a perfect specimen and her such a scrawny mare. But sexual attraction is a funny old thing. Effie had a certain unaccustomed glow about her. She was enslaved by him, all right.
‘She’s smitten,’ Leena said, the following morning. She was laying out crates of fresh fruit and veg under the awning of her shop. ‘I saw her this morning. She was up with the larks, buying provisions. You’re going to dinner with them tonight, aren’t you?’ She straightened up, looked at me narrowly. ‘How will that be? It must be tough. He’s taking your best friend away.’
‘Hardly taking her away.’ I snatched up a box of masala tea, too savagely.
‘As good as. Nothing will be the same now. And who can blame Effie? He’s gorgeous! She’s made quite a catch there. Who can blame her if she runs off with him?’
‘Runs off with him? Is that what she said?’ I couldn’t bear the idea that she had told Leena more of her plans than she had me. She hadn’t told me anything at all. Now she was telling some shop girl that everything was going to change. But, still, I couldn’t see it. Effie was tethered to that house, its generations’ worth of belongings. She couldn’t just walk away from it. It didn’t matter whose influence she was under.
‘She never said anything about running off,’ Leena said softly. ‘But I wouldn’t be surprised. She’s knocking on. She can’t waste any more time. Seize the day, I say.’
I’d never noticed before but Leena says the most commonplace things. She hasn’t got an original thought in her head. I must have been grimacing at her, because then she said: ‘Poor you. You’ll be lost without your Effie, won’t you?’
I pulled myself out of it. ‘Hardly. Of course not. Friends come and go. Things change. That always happens. No, I’m very pleased that Effie has managed to snare herself a bloke.’
‘I can hear wedding bells,’ Leena confided. ‘Effie was hinting as much.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘Maybe that’s what this dinner’s for. To announce it. Maybe, as her best friend, you’re going to be the first to know!’
I was mollified by this idea. Being the first to know. It would be flattering. But it couldn’t be true, could it? Effie had once told me that the women in her family - that long line of aunties and witches - had never believed in the institution of marriage. It was Christian and anti-women, and they had never bothered with it. I had absorbed that information with interest. It was only afterwards that I wondered about the blokes. What did the women do with them, if they didn’t marry them? Chuck them away afterwards? Eat them, like the preying mantis does? And if so, had all of Effie’s family been born out of wedlock? Quite racy, that, in years gone by. But I had never enquired. The opportunity hadn’t arisen. Sometimes Effie was quite reluctant to talk about her unconventional aunties.
‘A wedding would be nice.’ Leena sighed. ‘I like a good wedding.’
I stared at her. It had never been more apparent: Leena was the most boring woman on the planet.
What is it about other people’s happiness that makes me feel uncharitable?
He had certainly made improvements to Effie’s place, I’ll say that for him.
The last time I had been round was on the night of the Manifest Yourself ! fiasco, and Effie’s home had been the usual dusty health hazard: dimly lit, junky and inhospitable. Now that Kristoff had his feet under the table, all of that was starting to change. He had encouraged Effie to put some of her nicer pieces - some figurines and glass lamps - on show, and to hide some of the nastier things. The light was soft and colourful. Throws and rugs were draped artfully here and there. Mr Alucard, it turned out, had an eye for décor.
But had he moved in? That was what I wanted to know. Effie had all these rooms in a prime location. Maybe it was her property the old devil was after. I wasn’t clear about where exactly he lived. Effie had given me a vague further-up-the-town answer, wafting her hand, when I’d asked. There was something suspicious about that, I thought.
Still, I couldn’t complain about their hospitality. Effie’s home had never been welcoming before but now it was glowing with warmth and life. There was a delicious scent of slowly roasting lamb, basted in honey. They had dragged out an old gramophone and a tottering stack of 78s. Ancient, crackling jazz-age ditties accompanied the evening, making us - certainly me - gayer than I really felt.
I had dug out a rather smart jacket and skirt, with boxy shoulders and brass buttons. It had a nautical air and I hoped it didn’t seem too old-fashioned. Effie surprised me by wearing an Indian-print kaftan with a turban. It was not her usual kind of thing, but it suited her, the way she went floating about. She’d been more adventurous with her eye makeup, too. There was something languid and sensual about her. As she brought out the veg in her best china bowls, I was watching her closely.
Kristoff Alucard was in Edwardian evening dress. He carried it off very well so it didn’t look frou-frou and overdone, even the ruffles down his skirt front and at his cuffs. The ensemble took me right back to that heady era. I was in London then and Kristoff might have been one of the dashing gents I knew in those days in Russell Square and . . . I frowned, fingering my wine glass. Could it be true? Had I seen him back then? All that time ago?
But my memory’s patchy. There’s so much of it, that’s the thing. People and faces, names and adventures. They collapse into one. They concertina down and I can never be quite sure. Human beings weren’t designed for a lifespan like mine.
Or, perhaps, Alucard’s.
Effie brought in the roast, a spitting hunk of meat, aromatic and delicious. Her man friend was sharpening the carving knife with an expert flourish.
Oh, Effie, I thought, I hope you’re not getting yourself into trouble here. I really hope he isn’t what I’m starting to suspect . . .
Soon my qualms vanished because the food was so good and there was quite a bit of booze. Wine came out with every course and Kristoff proved to be quite the expert. He was the type to watch you closely as you sipped the drink he had described and poured for you. Everything had to be done properly. The wine had to breathe, all that malarkey. ‘Oh, it’ll breathe on the way down!’ I had laughed, but he was serious. There were ways of going about things. The correct way to behave. The wine was alive: it needed respect. It had to breathe. He scrutinised my face as I sipped it. I felt I was b
eing poisoned. He was waiting for me to pass out. We drank and drank and drank. I was astonished to see Effie letting herself go so gladly, so easily. She kicked off her new shoes, and Alucard massaged her feet under the table. Her turban was at a rakish angle, and gave her an abandoned, Bohemian air.
What had he done to change her so much?
‘I feel privileged,’ I said, during a golden lull, much later on. ‘It’s a real privilege to be invited here, to share in your happiness like this . . .’
During the evening I had changed my mind. Now I felt happy and included. There were no hard feelings and not a hint of jealousy. I was delighted for them.
They beamed at me. Alucard changed the record. More jazz. Later years. Smokier, darker, less hectic music. Sexier, too.
‘Thank you, Brenda.’ Effie smiled at the head of her long dining-table and raised her crystal glass to me over the debris of the meal. Queen of all she surveyed. ‘A toast to you, Brenda. My very best friend in all my life.’
Moments later, I had to hasten to the bathroom, but I left the dining room complacent and cheery. We were having a lovely time. Everything was going to be fine.
Wines and spirits don’t do me any good. I should know that by now. My constitution is . . . well, unconstitutional, I suppose you might say. I had to dash those last few yards of the dark corridor to the loo.
There were gilt-framed portraits of Effie’s female forebears all the way down that hall. What a forbidding, pursed-mouthed bunch. As I rushed past them, I felt they were glaring at me, trying to tell me something. They were burning to reach out and warn me . . . of what? You lot are dead and gone, I thought, as I hovered over the toilet bowl, waiting for the worst to happen. You all had your chance. You lived your lives. You spent them in solitude and necromancy, or whatever it was you got up to here. Nasty business. Now, though, you have to leave Effie to have her own fun, make her own mistakes . . .