TWENTY-FIVE
By the time she arrived she was ready for a fight rather than the gentle unlocking of a familiar casket and a flirtatious peep within.
He was sitting peering at the menu, right in the middle of a huge room of full tables. A downlight threw a halo over his head, and glowed upon the pastel shades he wore. God, she thought, he’s even more The Boyfriend tonight. Well, she could hardly talk, now could she, given that she looked like a piece of tangerine peel on legs? She shrank from the expectation of the wince. Just say the word, she warned him, as she floated, head high, through the sea of quiet chic, and I’ll scream. Comforting thought.
When she arrived at the table he did two things. One was to stand up – a totally unexpected piece of gallantry – and the second was to say, ‘You look very nice.’ Without wincing once.
Surprised, defeated, confused and somewhat weary of it all, she burst into tears.
His face registered the thought that This Was A Tricky One. He knew he had said the right thing. Mrs Hennessy had reminded him about that. Compliments. Plenty of compliments. What she had not told him was what to do if the recipient of the compliment showed distress. He took refuge in safety and the only thing that came to mind and said. ‘Bad journey?’ As if getting stuck on the Marylebone Road were akin to a trip with the Ancient Mariner.
‘No,’ she said, ‘It was a very good journey.’
No Hiding Place. This made it awkward. He did not think she looked like a woman who had just undergone a good journey. He put his head on one side and tried to look enlightened. Happily the wine waiter hovered and Pamela stood up.
‘I’ll just go – urn –’ she said, eyes still streaming, and she floated off with the silk rippling all around her, a noticeable and noticed deviant in a sea of good taste.
He ordered champagne. This was instinct. He had the blue box with the silver bow nestling in the cloakroom and a taxi booked for eleven. This was not instinct but Mrs Hennessy. Between them, he thought, they ought to achieve the capture of one ex-wife.
In the Ladies, denoted on the door by a stencilled fifties woman in a pinny pouring gravy from a jug (Pam thought sourly that they may not have had liberation in those days but they looked a great deal happier baking their scones and welcoming home their pipe-smokers), she replenished her mascara. Why, she thought irritably, did he have to go and start being kind now? She took a few deep breaths, and marched out again.
‘Better?’ he said.
‘Time of the month,’ she said brightly, wondering where women would be without their hormones.
He kept the smile on his face. He had forgotten all that. Kirsty had been moody all the time, the prerogative of the young. Moody and passionate, it had to be said, but in the end it was an exhausting combination. At least Pam was cheerful most of the time. Well, now they were no longer married she had always seemed so.
‘Champagne,’ she said, pleased, if still a little dewy around the eyes, and she began to look around her. ‘You’ve done this really well,’ she said. ‘It suits the restraint.’
She meant it. He had adapted the cool functionalism of the original building perfectly. And the only obvious tribute to its past was a series of enlarged, grainy photographs showing rows of seated women in white coats and mob caps, overseen by assorted standing men in horn rimmed spectacles, white coats, their breast pockets bearing pens. She stared, fascinated by the women’s faces. The making of gravy powder was honourable industry in those days, it seemed, and if nothing else, it had prised the women out of their houses. But did they want to go? she mused. Did they really want to go? It could become very wearing, being a something outside of the home.
He tapped the side of his glass with hers playfully. ‘A bit austere perhaps,’ he said. ‘You would have brought a little more verve into the proceedings. I was thinking –’ he swallowed – ‘how nice it would have been if we had done it together.’
She looked at him. He smiled. ‘We’d have made a great team,’ he said, forgetting the fierce battles of the past and believing it momentarily.
He was not going to mention Brigham yet. He thought he would soften her up first.
‘I realize that much of what I have achieved has a coldness to it.’ He raised his glass to her. ‘You would have given it warmth.’
Behind his glasses his eyes looked quite dreamy and wet and just a little pink. What with thinking about her sisters in gravy, and the continuing kindness from Peter, she burst into tears again. His smile wavered. For a moment he wondered whether to telescope the proceedings and bring out the underwear. But he restrained himself. The very thought of that startling lacy satin tumbling over the pristine white tablecloths made him go cold. He stared very fixedly at the salt-cellar in case it might offer a solution. ‘Do you want to go home?’ he asked, a little tetchily.
‘Home? Home?’ she said, on a rising note. ‘Home?’
‘Pam, this is my client’s restaurant,’ he said crossly. ‘For God’s sake keep your voice down.’
‘Bugger the client,’ she said, sniffing.
That was better. And on this note, with Peter behaving more normally, she pulled herself together and settled down.
‘Sorry,’ she said, eventually. And she asked him to order for her, which she knew he would like to do. Then she leaned back in her chair and watched his familiar gestures – the pushing of the glasses up the nose, the playing with the ear-lobe, the stroking of the underside of his neck, all indicators that he was concentrating and taking the choosing of the food very seriously. Home? she thought again. Home? And had to swallow very hard. There was a limit – oh, didn’t she know it – to Peter’s patience.
He ordered jugged hare for her. That was odd, because it was exactly the kind of comfort food she wanted. Familiarity sometimes had its compensations. He chose lemon sole, but was not above leaning over and dipping a corner of his bread into her plate, which was a friendly thing to do. And then, in a strange kind of reversal of Judas, he sucked the bread end thoughtfully and said, in the voice of one who wished he did not have to, ‘I feel I have not been much help.’
Baldly, that was it. Mrs Hennessy had put it in a more flowery way, but that, in essence, was the message. Partly he agreed, and partly he did not. But he went along with it anyway. He leaned forward. ‘I want to try. So, tell me – how are you?’
And Pam, ready for a bit of sympathy, said, ‘Well, I’m not completely sure – it’s all been quite difficult in a way. . .’
Not as difficult as it’s been for me, he wanted to say, feeling his knee twinge as he shifted in his chair. But no, no – he must not do that – even if what he really thought was that it would make much more sense at this juncture to cut the crap and get on with it, despite what his ex-mother-in-law and the other old bat said about wooing. Just to say, ‘You’re on your own, I’m on my own, neither of us is getting any younger and we like quite a few of the same things. How about it?’ But the voice of Mrs Hennessy was so fierce that he did not dare. Instead he looked warmly non-committal and gave a grunt. Suddenly he felt all at sea. Kirsty used to throw things. Which was fine. All he had to do was duck. This, now – he shifted in his chair again and tried to think of something to say – this . . .
‘The thing is –’ she began. And then she looked up at him. He did not appear encouraging of intimacies. His eyes had gone a bit peculiar and he held up his hand as if to admonish her for speaking, pointing to the empty champagne bottle in the cooler. Nevertheless, she thought, he did ask. But before she could unburden herself further, he said, ‘Shall we stick with that or how about a nice red burgundy for your game?’
Pam nodded impatiently and said, ‘Burgundy,’ flatly. To which he nodded, pleased, and said, ‘Good, good.’ She had a passing thought that he was ordering red wine – not part of the usual landscape of his considerations and some kind of breakthrough – but she let it go. And waited.
He grabbed the subject of burgundy wholeheartedly until the waiter arrived, and then, while he went away to produce the order, Peter waxed even more lyrical on the subject of the service here, which was, he pointed out, excellent. Listen to me, she thought. But she did not say it aloud as she would once have done. ‘Lovely,’ she said. Because she rather wanted to give this a chance to work. Somewhere, buried in Peter, was the man she once loved. It would be nice to find him again. She guessed he must be thinking approximately the same about her.
The waiter returned to show him the bottle. Feeling the air between them grow heavier by the minute, and himself grow heavier by the minute also, he pounced on the bottle and gazed at it fondly until the waiter became quite irritated and Peter was forced to conclude it should be opened.
He then began to talk shop. Pamela, realizing that to return to the personal was not likely to make the evening go with a swing, began to talk shop back. Peter then wrested his eyes away from the cow-moulded cornicing and relaxed again. Safe harbour.
Oddly enough, she decided that she did not mind. She knew him well enough. Once she would have been at the peel-me-off-the-ceiling stage by now, but – well, All Passion Spent was true, she supposed. She would enjoy the evening on his terms. At least he was paying. And at least with Peter she did not have to make an effort. They were what they were to each other, utterly familiar, despite his strange sortie into pastel shades and meat juice and talk about the feminizing of design. And, of course, between them they had a son. At which thought she very nearly made a dash for the smiling lady with the jug and pinny again, and would have done had she not thought the other diners might think her in the early stages of incontinence.
After half a bottle of champagne and a third of a bottle of good red wine, she decided that she had quite enjoyed herself. Daniel and Christmas had not been raised. A few safe reminiscences – it was enough. She had attempted the odd little bit of flirtation. ‘I like your glasses,’ she said, lifting them off his nose. ‘Very sexy.’ She was about to try them on herself when he grabbed them, put them back, and went very pink.
‘Nothing wrong with being sexy,’ she said sweetly, ‘even at our age.’ And then added, daring to be roguish, ‘You look cute when you screw up your eyes like that. . . Dangerous.’ She raised an eyebrow and smiled.
It did not seem to get her very far. He immediately called for the bill.
They departed cheerfully. Peter was glad to be into stage two of the evening and hurried her along. Pamela felt good about it all. Easy. Relaxed. Nothing to hide.
In the taxi she leaned against him and said, ‘Do you remember my father’s speech at our wedding?’
He stared at her, panicking. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Do you remember the piece of poetry he quoted?’
‘Remind me,’ he said, panicking even more. He had a vague notion of the quotation being highly unsuitable. And he was not altogether sure where his arm should be.
She was about to say that she knew perfectly well he could not remember it at all, when he held her arm by the elbow, which felt nice after the absence of any intimacy for so long. Even elbows have sensual possibilities in the right mood.
He then said, ‘What I remember very clearly about our wedding is how lovely you looked.’
Her eyes pricked again. She forgot to pursue the Catullus.
Peter felt it had gone well. He knew what he was going to say when they got there; he had prepared the speech quite carefully, with his ex-mother-in-law’s advice. Eileen, it seemed, had been in some kind of counselling business and knew a thing or two about these things. Her advice had been to pep himself up a bit; and he felt that he had. And now, here they were. He felt very confident.
As the taxi drew up outside the house, and Pamela was still protesting that he did not need to escort her all the way home, he hopped out, paid the fare, opened her gate and asked if he could come in for a cup of coffee. Even to him this sounded lame. But he could hardly split hairs and ask if she had anything herbal. He would just have to have those night-time pulse rates and accept them as part of the sacrifice.
‘Of course,’ she said, thinking nothing of it and getting out her keys while he lounged against the wall. She fumbled a bit, so he took her bag from her in what he thought was a debonair and proprietorial fashion and threw it over his shoulder. He was quite unselfconscious about using shoulder bags, calling them sensible things and even designing a couple for himself. He was so talented, thought Pamela. It was nice to be with a man who was so much his own person.
The door was opened. Pamela prepared to enter. Peter then went extremely peculiar.
From his casual leaning position he suddenly shot bolt upright, slapped his head and said, ‘Oh, fuck,’ twice. Loud enough, she thought, for Peaches to hear and conclude that she and her friends never said anything else. He then said, ‘Fuck,’ for the third time, jumped up and down, ran back up the path, leapt over the gate, showing a facility for hurdling she had never known he possessed, immediately got hooked on the post and bounced back against the gate by the dangling of her bag straps, yelled, dragged the bag off his shoulder and threw it at her, shouted ‘Fuck’ once more, with feeling, and ran off down the road calling, ‘Hi, hi. . .’
Must be the drink, she thought, astonished, and tottered to the end of the path, retrieved her bag, and watched him run up the road and appear to rugby tackle the departing taxi with a Tarzan-like cry.
The taxi seemed unperturbed by this and accelerated, as, clinging to the door handle, did Peter. There was an exchange of unpleasantness before it finally stopped and she saw Peter give a little dignified shake and open the passenger door to take something out. He then came running back with it, arms outstretched, as if he were doing the relay. She opened the gate in case he hurdled and missed this time, and he thrust a box into her arms, saying, both puffed and irritated, ‘For you.’ He then went limp and gasped for breath. He bent his leg and rubbed at his knee. ‘Fuck,’ he said again.
‘Do you mind?’ said Pam. Even Daniel’s friends had been circumspect about language on the front porch.
In the house she peered into the wrappings, puzzled. ‘Is it an early Christmas present?’ she asked. ‘For me?’
He shook his head.
‘For Danny?’
He gasped that it was not. ‘Oh, go on,’ he said, abandoning Mrs Hennessy’s suggestion of seductive subtlety.
‘Just as well it is not for Danny,’ she said sharply, off on her emotional high horse at last, ‘because Danny will not be coming home for Christmas.’
She delivered this very dramatically and paused for effect.
Peter stared at her, almost enraged.
‘Open it,’ he said, much more commandingly than he might have had he not just done the Olympic sprint.
She went into the kitchen and switched on the kettle. Peter danced around her nervously. ‘Open it,’ he said.
‘I only just found out today,’ she said. ‘Oh, yes – Daniel Pryor cannot come to London for Christmas with his mother because he wants to spend the whole time in bed in Liverpool with a tit of a girl having peculiar sex.’ The wine was not helping restraint.
The tension was not helping Peter.
He indicated the discarded box with an impatient bash and creased the lid. ‘For you,’ he said.
‘He’s definitely staying in Liverpool. Christmas and no Danny. Can’t quite believe it, really. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ She looked up at him with welling eyes.
Not more tears, he thought. He picked up the battered box and shoved it at her. ‘For God’s sake open it,’ he practically bellowed. And then something registered. He paused. Lowered his voice. ‘Peculiar sex?’ he said, with interest.
Better not go into that, she thought, so she opened the box instead.
While she untied the bow in a slow, methodical, smoothing process that nearly drove him berserk again, he began to think. And he had a sudden, wonderful inspiration. The speech he had prepared with the help of his ex-mother-in-law faded away. Here was an altogether better opportunity. While Pamela gazed in silent astonishment and attempted to regain her eyeballs at the layers of tissue and the satin and lace, Peter lowered his voice and said, in the most persuasive tone he could manage, ‘Then why don’t you fly out and spend Christmas in Dublin with me?’
Pamela, holding up an extraordinary confection of satin and lace, the nature of whose application was unclear, looked up at him with wide, astonished eyes. ‘What?’ she found herself saying. ‘Fly out on an aeroplane?’
Peter was not going to be diverted. And he was proud of himself for not saying, No – on a bloody donkey. Instead he just smiled, gave himself a great big red tick and ten Brownie points and said, ‘We can go on a magic carpet if you like.’ And his fingers, slightly squeamishly, it was true, touched the filmy satin very hesitantly, while behind him the electric kettle gave a long, low whistle, like a bawdy cherub, to indicate that steam was very definitely up.