The fact was, the basic big surprise was, last night he’d suddenly realized he wanted to marry her. As simple as that. He really, truthfully did. There was nothing he wanted more; in fact, everything else dwindled away compared to this large need imprisoned, bulky, in his ribcage. It must be love, love for the gentle sensible girl somewhere – dammit, where? – in this room.
Someone brushed past him; someone in a tweed jacket blocked his view; some unknown woman smiled at him, or through him, with glistening red lipstick. Faces, faces, all he could see were faces, every one of them a strange face and not one of them hers.
And the noise! Deafening. Where was she?
‘Hello.’ A voice at the level of his chest. ‘Would you like a sausage roll?’
‘Ah, Holly! Hello. Have you seen Claire anywhere by any chance?’
‘Not really. I can’t see much, everyone’s so tall. She might be out in the garden, though.’
He pushed through the bobbing heads. Outside were more people talking and drinking in the evening sunshine.
And there she was. He spotted her at once. Her head was on one side; she was listening to an elderly man, smiling and then, at something he said, breaking into laughter.
He hesitated. How dared he approach – especially now, with everything so changed by his discovery? So absolutely changed, his skin a different fit – how could it not show? She could see, surely.
She was listening to the man again. He looked at her in her new role, that of the desired wife. Again she broke into laughter, and he couldn’t bear to wait. He, Geoff, usually so controlled!
‘Claire!’ he managed to say, walking up. ‘Hello.’
‘Ah Geoff, how lovely to see you.’ She took his arm in a light, cocktail-party hold and turned him to face the man. ‘Geoff, do meet Uncle Tim.’
Oh, but he didn’t want Uncle Tim.
Laura was trapped with old Miss Price from next door. They were sitting on the verandah, and over the grizzled head she could see all the people standing around in the garden. Actually it was rather peaceful with Miss Price, because one didn’t have to make an effort.
‘… so I tried the green ones,’ Miss Price was saying, ‘and quite honestly they were the size of saucers. Never was anything so huge. Two whole glasses of water it took to get the wretched things down. Three after meals, and then the capsules with my glass of milk.’
‘And did they work?’ Laura asked, a quarter of her listening and three-quarters thinking of Mac arriving tomorrow and the amazing time they’d have in the house all alone. By the time her parents had got to their posh hotel he would be here. Here.
‘Did they work? My dear, you’ve no idea!’ Miss Price shook her head sorrowfully. ‘My tummy just acted and acted. Quite honestly, dear, I was scarcely out of the bathroom all day. But of course I pulled myself together this evening because it was such a special occasion and I just had to see my dear Laura and Claire again.’
‘Heavens, couldn’t you stop taking them if they make your, er, tummy act?’
‘Well, dear, I could stop, but –’
Laura stiffened. She clutched her glass. She stared out into the garden, she stared out through the people, her eyes glued on a figure standing near the gate. It was talking to her mother.
It couldn’t be. No, surely not. Not him!
Rosemary was enjoying herself. Many people had complimented her on her daughters and her decor, and though she knew they were just gushing she couldn’t stop feeling pleased. And then the food was disappearing fast; it pleased her to feed people; she’d missed that since her daughters had gone. She thought: I wish I’d made more of those little gherkin biscuits, though.
Rosemary hovered a moment and looked at the room; she moved out into the garden.
‘Ah! Colonel Ray.’ Such a dear, and such a nice-looking young man with him. His nephew, it must be, but how he’d grown! Just right for Laura.
So where was Laura? She scanned the faces for her. But her eyes came to rest on someone else who was standing over by the gate. A scruffy youth, it looked like, with a bag over its shoulder.
She turned to the colonel. ‘Marvellous to see you, but could you both excuse me just a moment? I’ve seen the man who’s supposed to be fixing our verandah light.’
She hurried over towards the figure. Yes, it must be. Even scruffier in close-up.
‘At last!’ she said when she was near him. ‘We thought you were never coming.’
‘Pardon?’ said Mac.
‘Well, I did ask you to come before five, you know. I rang up specially.’
‘Er.’
A long silence; Mac, glassy-eyed, looked at her. ‘Erm,’ he said at last. ‘Are you Mrs Jenkins?’
‘Of course I am.’ She looked at him with distaste. He looked so dirty and everyone else looked so clean. ‘Look, what you’d better do, I think, is just to fix it as quickly as possible without disturbing anyone. Really it is too bad that you had to come so late. I told you, you know.’
Mac fiddled with his bag. ‘Erm, I didn’t know you were, like, having a party.’ He gazed helplessly at the mass of faces and then at hers, puckered with irritation, in front of him.
‘But I told you! That’s why I needed it fixed before six. Honestly!’ She looked at him. Really he did look half dotty, his mouth hanging open like that. Quite stupid. ‘I suppose you don’t know where the light is.’ And his shoes! She’d just seen them; heaven help her carpet if he went into the drawing-room. ‘You’d better follow me. Come along.’
Ah, there was Laura. But why was she rushing up so breathlessly? Had something happened?
‘Hello!’ panted Laura. She looked from one to the other; several expressions passed over her face. ‘Have you introduced yourselves?’
Rosemary froze. There was a silence, a very long one.
At last she whispered: ‘What did you say, darling?’
‘This is Mac,’ said Laura brightly, over-brightly. ‘A friend of mine from Bristol.’
Rosemary stared at him, speechless. Then she laughed. It was the only thing she could do. ‘Good heavens!’ she cried, extending her hand, ‘I’m dreadfully sorry. How absolutely idiotic of me! I had no idea.’
Mac started chuckling. It was his sort of situation, this.
‘Who on earth did you think he was?’ asked Laura.
‘The electrician, actually. I think it was that canvas bag that did it.’ No wonder he’d looked gormless, poor thing. ‘Do come along, Mac, and have a drink.’
‘Yeah, I’d like that.’ Mac hitched up his jeans and followed her. Laura walked behind, her mind busy. And when her mother had left them on the verandah she sat down beside him.
‘Gosh, Mac!’ she hissed. ‘This is a turn-up! Why on earth didn’t you wait until tomorrow when I told you they’d all be gone?’
‘I forgot,’ said Mac. Then he leant towards her. ‘Hello, my sonner.’ Before she could flinch (all those people!) he’d given her a big kiss. ‘I’ve really missed you.’
Her confusion melted away. She gazed at him. He’d missed her! He’d actually said he’d missed her.
She watched him as he reached over to the table, poured a bowlful of nuts into his palm, threw back his head and swallowed them in a gulp. So relaxed he looked, but underneath it all he needed her. He’d said so.
Mac munched for a moment, gazing with interest at the decidedly kitsch fountain in the middle of the goldfish pond. ‘So this is Harrow,’ he said. ‘Your nest.’ He looked at the pond. ‘Your spawning-ground.’
‘That’s right. Comfy Harrow.’
By and large she’d been enjoying this party more than she’d expected. But now he was here everything had changed. He showed it up somehow with his insouciance, the way he’d swallowed the peanuts as if he’d been starving for weeks, the way he was now yanking up his socks with their great gaping holes. He was so real compared with everybody else. They were both so burningly real, sitting here side by side. Everybody else looked suddenly cardboardy.
She must get Claire to meet him. Claire was the only one who wouldn’t seem cardboardy. Where was she?
Claire hadn’t noticed the Mac episode. There were so many people, so many faces from the past. And of course there was Geoff. He wasn’t beside her at the moment; instead he was walking around with a bottle, refilling glasses. She didn’t have to see where he was; as he moved about she could feel him with some sixth sense. And funnily enough his helping like this made him closer, more of an ally, than if he’d been standing right beside her.
And those snatched glances! Glances over people’s heads, glances when she was going into a room and he was coming out … so rich, those glances were. They confused her.
At the moment she was talking to Mrs Varley, a figure from her childhood. She hadn’t seen her for years. All she remembered of her was an extraordinary laugh at dinner parties. In those days she and Laura, chilly in their nighties, had leant over the banisters for hours and listened to the noises that wafted upstairs. Mrs Varley’s laugh had been the best; a bray that ended, abruptly, with a snort.
She wasn’t laughing now, she was talking. ‘You know, Claire, I’m simply consumed with admiration! You being a teacher. And in such a frightful area. Doesn’t everyone get – well, knifed in the cloakroom in schools like that?’
At her own facetiousness Mrs Varley exploded, the same bray-and-snort that flicked Claire back in time. In fact, when she was a child Mrs Varley had been little more than a fascinating noise buried in an otherwise blank adult. But now she was grown up she, Claire, was noticing other things; the way for instance that Mrs Varley’s hand fluttered nervously to her mouth, and the way that an unexpectedly kind smile followed the bray-and-snort. The way, in fact, that she was filling out around her laugh.
This was happening to everyone tonight. Odd to stand here, gin-and-tonic in hand, and see how all the old familiar adults were filling out. Years ago they’d just been towering shapes, each characterized by something – an intriguingly hairy mole, a funny laugh. And they’d been so easily divided, too. She’d known by a sort of scent which ones would and which ones wouldn’t help her with her Meccano.
Holly, wandering round with her tray of sausage rolls, looking up at faces – did Holly still see them like this? Mrs Varley left and Claire stood for a moment, longing for enough time to talk to everyone, all these half-remembered faces of her childhood. Faces in the drawing-room, faces on the verandah …
Who was that? Laura on the verandah sitting huddled with somebody who, Claire knew instinctively by the way they were leaning together, must be the celebrated Mac. She didn’t recognize him and he looked marvellously out of place, so it must be Mac.
But what was he doing here? How intriguing! She must investigate.
‘Extraordinary things, cocktail parties,’ Laura was saying. ‘Stick a bunch of people in a room, wind them up and buzz, whirr, they’re off. Gabble gabble. Just look at them. They’ve all got that fixed stare; nobody’s listening to anybody else.’
Mac gazed into the garden whose twilit trees were becoming pleasantly blurred after his third glass of wine. ‘Mmmm.’ He stretched out his legs.
But Laura was feeling uncomfortable. Mac must be sneering at it, surely. After all, what could be more sneerable than this bunch, so comfortably suburban and so comfortably middle-aged? She had nothing to say to them when she was little and she certainly had nothing to say to them now. Not now Mac was here.
‘Just look at them,’ she said, focusing on Geoff who looked so bland and polite chatting to someone in the garden. ‘Nothing’s really happening to that lot at all. Nothing’s real.’ Compared to me and Mac, that is.
But things were happening. Things were real – unbearably real for Geoff. He paused and looked up through the trees. Though the garden was darkening, the sky remained radiant with a flame-like sunset. It caught at his throat. It looked just like, well, streaky bacon.
Fancy thinking of comparisons! But probably he’d got it from a book. He knew he was the least imaginative person in the world. It was just that tonight he was noticing things; everything had grace. Not just the obvious things like the lovely fountain in the pool and all the flowers, but things he didn’t usually bother much with, like the branches of the trees and the colour of the sky. It was something to do with Claire being so very near him and yet so far. Even the people, these strangers, even they were enveloped in a kind of glamour. It was as if they were all here especially for Claire and himself, especially for this tremendously important moment in his life. Everything, down to the last biscuit on the plate he was holding, seemed significant somehow. If only he could express himself better.
He could see Claire. She was walking over to the verandah where, as far as he could make out, Laura was sitting down with somebody. He must go over and talk to her. About anything – it hardly mattered.
He drained his glass, murmured some excuse probably rather abruptly to the man beside him, and launched himself into the crowd.
‘Hello, Geoff,’ said Laura. ‘This is Mac. We’re just discussing,’ she lowered her voice, ‘how to smuggle him away.’
‘Ah,’ said Geoff. How very confusing. ‘Why?’
‘Because he’s coming for the weekend while Mummy and Daddy are away. But they don’t know he is. And if he spends tonight here – well, it would make him too apparent. I’d have to explain him.’
‘Ah,’ said Geoff again. He ought to say something, but what? So difficult to concentrate with Claire so close beside him. ‘Well …’ He looked at Mac who was blowing a succession of smoke rings, grey and quivering, into the darkness. ‘Why doesn’t he go to a nearby hotel?’
‘Too expensive,’ said Laura.
‘A friend’s house?’
‘Don’t have any. Not real friends. Not round here.’
‘Hmm.’
They all looked at Mac as if he were some stray puppy that had suddenly landed on the doorstep. Appealing, but a problem. The smoke rings – expert ones, they were all admiring them – shivered and dissolved. No one had any ideas.
‘I say,’ said Geoff suddenly. ‘It’s dark out here. What’s happened to the light?’
‘Bust,’ said Laura.
Geoff didn’t like things not working. He climbed on to his chair and fiddled with the bulb socket. Suddenly they were flooded with light.
‘Well done!’ Claire was smiling at him as he stepped down and dusted his trousers. ‘We can think much better in the light.’
She looked at him. He got things done, did Geoff. She liked that. She glanced at his capable hands and then at his face, which was smiling at her.
Now that they were illuminated Laura felt uneasy. People could see them; she must think quickly. ‘Tell you what!’ She turned to Mac. ‘It’s very warm tonight. Why don’t you go down the road to the Rec – I mean the park – nip over the wall and wait for me in the shelter there? It’s not far.’
Mac considered this. ‘You mean, doss down there? Well, why not? Just snitch a bottle of the old –’ he lifted his wine glass, ‘to keep me company.’
Laura got up. Funny how she didn’t want him to stay in the house while her parents were there. He could, quite easily. She could act as if he were an acquaintance; they could make up the spare bed. It was just that she didn’t want to bring the two halves of her life together. Simpler to wait until her parents had left.
They dispatched Mac out of the side gate and watched him as he ambled quite happily down the road, a bottle of Dan’s 1969 Côtes du Rhone under his arm. The darkness swallowed him up.
‘He seems nice,’ said Claire after a pause. ‘Nice and gentle.’
‘Oh he is!’ cried Laura, willing her to say more. But she didn’t.
As they returned to the house Geoff, emboldened by being in on the sisterly secret, linked his fingers through Claire’s. In front of Laura and everything. Claire flashed him a smile – an encouraging one, he thought.
The guests were thinning out when they got back. Soon the room was emptying and
the hall echoing with goodbyes. Geoff and the sisters started clearing up.
A hush fell on the hall and Mrs Jenkins returned. Geoff helped her stack some glasses on a tray.
‘Whatever happened to that strange young man?’ she asked Laura over her shoulder.
‘Oh,’ Laura’s voice was casual, ‘he just dropped in.’
‘How odd.’ Geoff and Claire exchanged looks over Mrs Jenkins’s head. He felt quite giggly – he, Geoff, usually so ungiggly.
Suddenly Mrs Jenkins stopped. ‘Goodness, who on earth got the verandah light working?’
Geoff looked modest.
‘Geoff did,’ said Claire.
Mrs Jenkins turned to him. ‘How very clever of you! My husband couldn’t get it to work at all. Whatever would we have done without you tonight!’ She went on: ‘You’re staying to supper, aren’t you? You must. You’ve been such a help.’
Geoff gladly accepted. Tonight his wooing was being done, as it were, at long distance. But it was easier like that. Scintillating conversation, he knew quite well, wasn’t his forte. How much easier to fix the light and get Claire to smile at him for that. Much easier.
Thoroughly into his role, he was enjoying clearing the drawing-room when he couldn’t help but hear hissing whispers from the direction of the kitchen. In no way did he linger as he passed the door, but angry whispers are so much more penetrating than their whisperers think them to be.
Mrs Jenkins’s voice: ‘Honestly, Laura, it really was a bit much! Mrs Wilson so wanted to talk to you. Marion’s planning to go to university, you know, and Mrs Wilson was so keen to get your views on Bristol.’
‘Well, I gave her them, didn’t I?’
‘Hardly! A few curt words and then you turned back to your odd friend. Really, at least you could’ve been polite. I felt so ashamed.’
‘I was polite, but Mrs Wilson was such a drag. Everyone was. They either bored me to tears with their stomach pills or else they spent their whole time throwing up their arms and screaming “How charming! I’m sure psychology must be fascinating!”’
You Must Be Sisters Page 15
