Eva returned to the kitchen thinking of Thomas Adderley, who was to be one of her guests. To be sure, his thinking needed sorting out, but he was at least ‘somebody’ in this no-man’s-land. A person whose name held some cop among readers of the Observer. Earlier in the day she had toiled assiduously over her Chinese pork parcels which now lay bound and gagged in an unsuitable Pyrex roasting dish pocked with scorched meatglaze marks left by careless previous tenants. The chilled lentil soup stood in the fridge in a monstrous aluminium saucepan in which it would have been more fit to boil a week’s handkerchiefs. There were no decent pots in the flat. At home, Eva thought wistfully, as the doorbell rang, one had Le Creuset oven-to-tableware, which was the birthright of every superior cook.
Ali had met Thomas on the afternoon preceding the Bobrows’ dinner party when he came to call on Julie. The meeting was easier, more agreeable, more lacking in emotional intensity than either of them might have feared. Both had seemed to have lived through and beyond the episode in Paddington and no reference was made to it, even when Julie left them together at a garden table under the lemon trees and went to answer her telephone. Thomas took a nice but not overwhelming interest in Ali’s children, whose game of hop-scotch on the paving-stones caused him to remark upon continuity and innovation in children’s games. His wife was a nursery schoolteacher, he said, and he had thus become vicariously acquainted with a vast range of clapping rhymes over the years. Ali was glad to have him mention his wife to her in that easy way and wanted rather to meet her, but it was soon apparent to her that, while Thomas was a frequent visitor, frequent enough to be familiar with the placing of every household object which Julie had called upon him to fetch – like the deck-chairs and the daily papers, for example – Lorna Adderley was not. Then Julie returned across the lawn. ‘Thinking of our engagement tonight,’ she said, in her loud, exuberant voice, ‘are you aware, Thomas, that our mutual friend here was once married to Mervyn Bobrow? Married to him, my dear! Ali has a remarkable capacity for espousing men, admittedly, but marriage to him. Is that a state one could remotely envisage?’ Thomas merely smiled.
‘Not me,’ he said.
‘To be sure, you are the wrong sex,’ Julie said. ‘Though one has to admit that poor Mr B’s handbag lends an air of sexual ambiguity to the case. Tell us about being married to him, Ali, we are all ears.’
Ali groped for one of those masterfully noncommittal phrases which Noah had always used in reply to her early quizzings about his first marriage.
‘It was kind of long ago,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t signify.’
‘God knows,’ Julie said. ‘Among marriages you get all sorts. I propose, regarding tonight, that the four of us meet at the staff club and drink ourselves into a fit state for the occasion. Lorna will come, won’t she?’
‘Yes,’ Thomas said. ‘She’ll come.’
Mrs Adderley turned out to be a quiet, sweet-faced and plumpish woman; a fine-skinned blonde whose looks had early lost their bloom under the harshness of the southern sun. Her hair, which was drawn severely from her forehead, was fixed with a regiment of steel hair slides alongside the ears and her only concession to personal adornment consisted in a pencilling of thin, outdated arcs over her eyelids in place of absent eyebrows. She seemed to Ali the kind of woman whose competence and authority would come into their own among children rather than adults. Ali, who warmed to her, was made awkward, not by the fact of her being Thomas’s wife, but by the knowledge that Julie was undermining the woman. Not only was she supplying Thomas with sums of money vastly beyond the means of a nursery schoolteacher, but she was, right then, pushing her own combination of intellect and Parisian chic beyond discretion. It seemed to Ali a gross rudeness in her friend that she consumed the half-hour in the staff club bantering wittily with Lorna Adderley’s husband on the subject of an esoteric letter controversy currently raging in the Times Literary Supplement, and a lesser rudeness in Thomas himself that he allowed it to continue. It puzzled her. Noah, she felt sure, would never have let such a situation come about. But then, Noah was Noah. She knew him by now to be a better thing than Thomas. Thinking of Noah right then induced a sudden melancholy which transferred itself by association to Daniel. Poor Daniel, who had been so tearful at parting from her that evening; so loath to have her go out.
‘How old is your little boy?’ Lorna said, with the impressive clairvoyance of a quiet, observant woman, but Julie was right then calling to them both from the hat stand where, with the help of Thomas, she was reaching for coats.
‘Quaff your gin, you two, and hurry up!’ she was saying. ‘The sooner we get there the sooner we can all go home again.’ On her way out, Julie, while illustrating a point with a flourish of the arm, caught her gold bracelet in Thomas’s coat button.
‘Oh my God!’ she said. ‘We have become inseparable.’ After a brief struggle she unfixed the bracelet from her wrist and strode with Ali towards her car, leaving the object dangling carelessly from Thomas’s coat front. ‘We’ll see you there,’ she said.
At the Bobrows’ apartment, things did not promise well. Eva did not like surprises and Ali’s appearance as Julie’s friend was naturally galling to her. While her past efforts to enlist the Glazers’ presence at her social functions had repeatedly met with failure, Ali had now appeared unexpectedly when she was least welcome. In the circumstances, Eva remained determinedly affronted. But Ali’s transgression was soon overshadowed by a greater transgression on the part of Eva’s husband, for Mervyn had not returned.
The meal began without him. It had to since the pork parcels could not wait for ever. Several of Eva’s brave conversational gambits rose and fell like failed souffles as his absence became both conspicuous and unnerving. Julie had lapsed into a disobliging silence as she sniffed out tomato ketchup in the soup with a cold, uncharitable talent for chemical analysis. The Norwegian, who had been invited to pair with her, appeared to be wholly occupied in admiring Ali’s pale, Quakerish physiognomy. Manfully Mrs Bobrow tried lifting the spirit with a condescending jibe against local cuisine.
‘I have dined out, since coming here, on more unimaginative roast-and-two-veg than ever before in my life,’ she said. ‘But where cooking is left to the servants, while the women play tennis and bridge, the culinary traditions are lost.’ While Lorna rose politely on cue to praise the food, Julie rose all too predictably to play devil’s advocate.
‘I have always had the greatest difficulty myself in telling Stork from Omo,’ she said with a wholehearted insincerity. ‘But then we grew up, us colonial hicks, on two standard puddings: bananas set in red jelly and baked custard. They were all the maid could make. Do you remember it, Ali? Dora’s curds and whey?’ It was at the conclusion of this provoking utterance that Mervyn entered at the wide French windows. One eye was torn at the corner and dramatically encircled with bluish smudges. The clutchbag dangled from his wrist. Eva emitted a cry but Mervyn fended her off, almost as though he did not know her. He stalked tiger-wise towards the table with a gleam of triumph in his amber, feline eyes. Lorna Adderley dabbed a little nervously at her mouth and laid her knife and fork neatly on her plate at twenty-past four. Mervyn came to a stop and struck an attitude. He began to speak, like a ventriloquist, in a voice not unlike Noel Coward’s.
‘Sorry I missed the party,’ he said. ‘I was propositioned in a bar. A rough sort of hang-out where a brace of muscle-bound white hearties mistook my sexual leanings. Naturally, I turned them down. “Be assured,” I said’ – and here his voice rose high and precious and his ‘r’s rolled like a Scotsman’s – ‘“the tattoos on your forearms repel me. I would rather offer my body to a team of Zulu shift-workers than to the likes of you. I plump for ‘brown’ not ‘brawn’. I have no taste for the Master Race.”’
He sat down then to await the company’s praise for this the latest of his daring forays into the nation’s lowlife, smelling the while of blood and sweat. Then he blinked twice and fixed his eyes on Ali.
‘Alison,
’ he said suspiciously. ‘What brings you to my table?’ A compromising memory of Ali’s accurate prediction regarding the clutchbag now rose to snuff his elation. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he demanded unpleasantly. ‘Eva! What the hell is this woman doing in my house?’ But Eva had gone for an icepack.
Ali saw the wheel turn painfully before her. ‘Sit worthy friends: – my lord is often thus. Feed and regard him not.’ Mervyn had reverted to playing Supertramp, only this time, mercifully, it was someone else’s problem. Eva’s problem. She was not obliged to stay and watch as the show evolved. In her mind she was Noah all those years ago on the night he had proposed marriage to her, standing sanely and squarely in her living room with Angie’s gin bottle in his hand.
‘Weep all you like,’ he had said. ‘Weep and let it fester. It’s all you can do.’ It had shocked her a little at the time but Noah – precisely because he had not presumed to save the world – had so successfully managed to save her. She could let the thing fester and walk away from it. It was, as Noah would have said, ‘No problem.’
‘We ought to go,’ she said. ‘Julie – the babysitter. And I have some telephone calls to make. I would like to telephone my husband.’ Julie got readily to her feet.
‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘We really have to go.’ The Norwegian expert in police repression pressed them earnestly to stay, but Eva, clutching the ice-bag, looked tired, grateful and relieved. Behind them they heard her begin to gather up the plates. Julie’s bracelet was left forgotten in the hallway, where it hung from the buttons of Thomas’s coat. As she swung her car in the drive, making a wide arc of light from her headlamps which for a moment blazed gloriously in the azalea hedge, Julie heaved a sigh.
‘Say, wasn’t the grub something else?’ she said. ‘I believe that I have left one of my molars behind in the sweetmeats.’
Daniel Glazer did not trust the babysitter. He had never before had a brown babysitter with a funny accent and a funny beret, whose status in the house seemed somehow perplexingly marginal. She was not comfortable there. Mrs Gaitskell had always been a believer in ebullient bedtime romping as a prelude to sleep, but this person had not presumed upon any physical closeness. She had not even presumed upon the upholstered living-room furniture, but had taken a small hard kitchen chair from the back veranda and had brought it through into the white man’s region for the evening where she sat uneasily with her head bent over a scarlet rectangle of knitting. Daniel could not be sure whether the faint clicks he heard emanated from her throat or from her needles. There was no way of being absolutely sure that she wasn’t the wolf-lady like the babysitter in the story they had had at nursery school.
Daniel tried hard to stay awake until his mother got back but he did not succeed. Yet he slept fitfully. He woke shivering to find he had thrown off his covers and that the winter night was unexpectedly chilly, given the previous warmth of the day. He was startled to remember that he had left his precious soldiers on the back lawn that afternoon where he had been playing at shooting the pink ballerinas.
Ali, having thought once to dilute Daniel’s relentlessly stereotypical male war-play, had tried valiantly to buy him some plastic womenfolk along with his plastic soldier men, but the toy industry had been against her and the pink ballerinas were all she had been able to find. Naturally, the ballerinas, in their unarmed, saccharine pinkness, had not quite met the case, but had nonetheless proved useful to Daniel in his fantasy-play during which they were often to be found prostrated in various attitudes of devastation at the base of the kitchen table or under the climbing frame, while the soldiers stood in triumphant rows upon the summits, with their guns poised. To Ali’s mild chagrin, Noah had always found this pattern of play not only highly amusing but also reassuring, since he felt that it proved Daniel to be making a wonderfully normal job of adjusting to a slightly crackpot mother who had been eccentric enough to have bought him the ballerinas in the first place.
Daniel wrapped himself in his bed quilt, pushed his feet into his training shoes and tip-toed into the living room. The babysitter had dropped off in the chair. The knitting dangled near the floor, and her beret had pushed itself askew on her head in sleep. Daniel struggled with the key to the back door. It turned with a startling, tell-tale squeak which caused a moment’s irregularity in the sleeping black woman’s breathing. Then all was well. A cricket shrilling in the hedge fell silent as he touched the grass. Above him Daniel saw that the stars were marvellously, giddily bright. The soldiers lay illumined in a square of light which fell from the kitchen window on to the grass. Beside them lay the box, throwing its shadow before it in a dark, elongated parallelogram. Daniel ran to them over the grass with a beating heart and knelt to gather them up. It was then he saw and heard the cat.
The cat was a stray. Unusually for a female, it was ginger. It was very small and thin, but for its great swollen belly which swung like panniers on either side of its ribcage. It ran to Daniel eagerly for comfort, emitting occasional jerky little cries. Under its tail the animal’s small distended vulva was edged with blood. Though Daniel had no idea of it, the cat was experiencing a modest feline version of that discomfort accompanying the birth of a footling breach. Daniel stroked its head between the ears. He let the bed quilt drop and he followed its lead to a narrow chink at the back of a small brick shed alongside the swimming pool which the animal had chosen for its nest. Daniel crouched at the chink between wall and hedge for a good twenty minutes, his childish, predatory stalking having taught him unusual patience. It was too dark for him to see anything. He could hear that the cat, after one squeak louder than all the rest, had begun to purr. There was a wetness about it and a funny smell.
Daniel remembered that in his hand-luggage his mother had allowed him to pack, from his jungle survival kit, a much-favoured item which, under the influence of his father’s transatlantic idiom, he still knew as ‘a flash light’. He ran back across the grass, passing the abandoned soldiers on his way. Inside the house the black woman slept on. The only danger, with his brief scuffle in the sports bag, lay in the possibility that Hattie would wake, who shared the room with him, but that danger seemed happily to pass. He returned to the shed by the swimming pool where to his amazement he saw that the cat was already suckling two dampish, rat-like babies with flattened ears and hairless paws. She appeared at the same time to be chewing up a dark, gory little parcel attached to an equally gory rope between her hind legs. Daniel squatted beside the chink, keeping a respectful distance. He felt a sense of wonder and privilege – as one of the Magi – to witness such a birth under the vivid southern stars. He had no urge to interfere; only to watch. He was glad that Hattie was not there, who would have been making a lot of noise and itching to dress the kittens in Sacha doll clothes like the cats in Beatrix Potter. He knew that the mother cat was hungry because she was so thin and he knew that she would be thirsty. She needed milk.
He returned to the house where he found that, while all the crockery had been put away in high-up cupboards which he could not reach, there was an open shelf of funny things within his grasp. The explanation for this shelf was that Mummy’s friend Julie Horowitz was so rich that she could afford to waste her money on china that she didn’t like. Daniel liked all of it. There was a teapot shaped like a camel designed to spew tea out of its mouth, and several rather lecherous-looking toby jugs. A couple of mugs said things in pointy gold writing that Daniel could not read, but the nicest thing of all was the jampot house which Mummy had fallen upon earlier in the day with recognition and delight. It was just like one the Zulu maid had had when she was a child, she said, and she’d always wanted one the same. It looked like a thatched English cottage with its lid made into the roof. Daniel took off the roof to use as a saucer. Then he took from the fridge a litre bottle of milk and went back with his equipment to the cat. There were now three suckling kittens and the gory parcel had vanished. Daniel filled the roof of the jampot house with milk and held it out to the mother cat. She lapped g
reedily, stippling his hand with cold, white droplets of milk from her tongue.
Then suddenly Hattie was there, coming up behind him.
‘What are you doing?’ she said. ‘I’ve been watching you for ages from the window.’ Daniel gasped. In haste he switched off the torch.
‘Nothing,’ he said, realising suddenly how cold he was. ‘It’s nothing.’ He stood up and faced her, holding his arms guiltily across the narrow corridor to bar her vision.
‘Show me!’ Hattie said. ‘Show me or I’ll tell about you being near the swimming pool.’ Daniel began to cry.
‘Show me!’ Hattie said. She shouldered him from the access and took the torch from his hand. In the scuffle, Daniel knocked over the milk which ran eagerly into the dry, red earth below the hedge.
‘It’s kittens!’ Hattie said with real delight. ‘Oh, Dan, aren’t they lovely!’ The kittens by now had dried out into a presentable, striated fluffiness, one orange and two grey.
‘It’s a secret,’ Daniel said. ‘Please don’t tell the grown-ups.’
‘No,’ Hattie said. ‘Of course not. The ginger one can be mine. Yours can be the two grey ones.’
‘But they don’t belong to us,’ Daniel said. ‘They just sort of belong to themselves, Hattie.’
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