‘How interesting,’ Blossom said. ‘I must ask them about it. I don’t think I ever knew exactly where they came from.’
‘Who’s Sally Mottishead?’ Thomas said, getting down on his knees and inspecting the seating plan.
‘Oh, poor soul,’ Blossom said. ‘That’s the wife of a professor at the university. She threw herself into good works when her daughter committed suicide. That was very sad. Poor girl. The good works took Grandpa in somehow. I put her next to Alison, Trevor’s Alison. I’m sure they’ll find plenty of things to talk about. Global warming. And I’m putting all the little ones at their own table, look, all of Tresco and Daphne’s, so sweet, and Ada Browning’s granddaughter really wanted to come because she wanted to see a man who remembered the First World War, she said. She’s doing it for a project at school. So adorable. I just couldn’t bring myself to put her right.’
‘Well, that sounds enchanting,’ Thomas said. He had deliberately used an absurd word. His mother had not looked at him or even registered who he was. She was talking for the benefit of this man Omith, the richest man they knew. And Omith, barefoot, cross-legged, smiling as if from a stage to an audience of interns he would never meet, would just sign the cheque at the end of it.
She registered his sourness. ‘Oh, darling, it’ll be lovely. And, look, we’ve put you and Ellie here next to Omith’s brother Raja. He’s such fun, you’ll get on like a house on fire.’
‘Oh, good. You remembered Ellie.’
‘Well, of course, darling,’ Blossom said. ‘Of course we remembered Ellie. She came here for dinner. She said she couldn’t eat onions just as I was serving her some onion soup. Of course Ellie must come. There won’t be any onions, especially for her.’
‘Oh, look,’ Thomas said. ‘You’ve got a place for Gertrude. That’s Gertrude the tortoise, I suppose.’
‘Not really a place,’ Blossom said. ‘We thought we’d put her in a glass case and let her have a lovely meal with everyone else for once. She’s getting on, too, you know. She must be sixty. They go on for ever, tortoises. It’s been ages since I’ve had any involvement in a really lovely party, it really has been.’
‘And you’re going up, what, the night before? Do you want to pool cars?’ Omith said. ‘I’m sure we’ll all have spaces.’
‘Oh, I don’t think we want to put anyone under an obligation,’ Thomas said. ‘What about Uncle Leo? Is he expected? Have you left a space at the table for him?’
‘No,’ Blossom said shortly. ‘We’re not expecting Uncle Leo. And I don’t know what’s got into you, but since you’ve obviously arrived with the intention of being as unpleasant as possible, I’d be grateful if you would take it out again, whatever’s got into you.’
‘No trouble about the lifts,’ Omith said, getting up and putting his sandals on – Paul Smith, Thomas noted. ‘Just let me know if you change your mind. I’d better be off, Blossom. Lovely to see you.’ It was as if he were refusing to rise to any kind of challenge, merely smiling and performing his own friendliness, and in the end paying for everything. If Thomas had been Mummy, he would have sent the vulgar sod out to Oddbins with instructions to get some more bottles of Krug, no messing about. If they were going to have to put up with this lot, then they might as well take full advantage of their money. He prepared to go on being as unpleasant as he possibly could, whether this man Omith was there or not.
‘I really –’ Blossom said, when she came back in.
‘Mother, you really can’t ask people where they come from,’ Thomas said. ‘Just because they’re brown. It’s terribly rude.’
‘Nonsense,’ Blossom said. ‘Omith didn’t mind a bit. And if we’re going to talk about being rude –’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ Thomas said, talking very fast. ‘It’s poor Grandpa’s birthday and the people who are organizing it are the Asians next door. And they’re inviting everyone they know and everyone they’re related to, it looks like. Who is this Rekha? No idea. I just don’t understand what you think it’s going to be like for poor Grandpa.’
‘Poor Grandpa is thrilled someone else is paying for it,’ Blossom said, talking over Thomas. ‘Take it from me. And Omith and Raja are so sweet and kind, I just don’t know what you think you’re doing, being rude like that. Rekha is a simply charming lady, actually. What do you think Grandpa thinks? We see him once a year and I don’t know when the last time was you made the slightest effort, and he’d be all on his own if it weren’t for Sharif’s family. I really think they’re the best thing that ever happened to him. I can tell you, I wasn’t ever going to have poor Grandpa living in the carriage house.’
‘They go for three-quarters of a million, those carriage houses now,’ Thomas said. ‘We sold one last spring.’
‘Well, we’ll make jolly sure to hang on to it,’ Blossom said. ‘We’ve got absolutely nothing else, let’s face it. I don’t think you should expect to inherit anything very much. You could all get together and sell the Guercino. But I don’t suppose it really is a Guercino and I don’t suppose they ever appealed to very many people. We’ve got no plans to move but this house is part of our retirement plan. If we need to move to a semi in Wimbledon and live off the proceeds, so be it.’
‘Well,’ Thomas said. He wanted to say the very nastiest thing he could possibly say. ‘Let’s all very much hope that there isn’t another house-price crash, or anything. That would be really bad luck for you, wouldn’t it?’
‘Oh, do shut up, you beastly toad,’ his mother said. ‘You really are the bally limit.’
6.
For almost as long as Leo had been married to Rubilynn, he had made an event out of her birthday. It was, in fact, only at their wedding that he saw her carefully filling in her date of birth, and realized he did not know when her birthday was; did not know, either, the names of her parents or her place of birth. Every piece of information came from the point of her pen with trust and surprise, and a magical solidity. He had been right about Taiwan. But he had not known that it had been her birthday only four weeks before. He did not say anything. It occurred to him only as he watched his new wife write her details down that he had been running a terrible risk in marrying a foreigner who, investigation would quickly discover, he knew almost nothing about. After that he made a careful note of the date, and determined that he would make a big thing out of her birthday.
There had been some early failures, but what Rubilynn truly enjoyed were musicals with some dancing in them. Leo enjoyed them, too. A straight play with a star from Friends had been a smaller success, though Rubilynn had loved Friends, had clasped her hands together when Ross actually came on stage, only forty feet from their seats; a much-praised revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along (without dancing) had not, he thought, been a success at all. She was polite and subdued, gracious afterwards. She hadn’t loved it and, actually, neither had he. For a couple of years he had thought that a long-running resident of the West End would be a good bet, but those had not been a great success, either. Chicago had been going for ten years by the time he had presented it as Rubilynn’s great annual treat, and it was tired, the dancers now getting on, plump round the middle. After that he pulled himself together, and made a greater effort. He thought Imelda Staunton in Gypsy last year had been an immense success; it was so funny and touching, the songs were wonderful, you could enjoy the dancing and laugh a little at it too. It was one of the shows that Rubilynn had enjoyed the most, he thought. This year he was not sure: it might be Aladdin, a new Disney musical, which would be slick and undemanding and certainly enjoyable, or it might be the more adult choice of Funny Girl, which was happening at the same lovely theatre that Gypsy had been at. It was a hop and a jump from the Savoy Grill, where they had their supper beforehand. That was Rubilynn’s idea of a beautiful restaurant, and it was Leo’s idea, too. He had heard her, days afterwards, telling Sandy all about it, from the beautiful napkins you found folded on your table to the delicious tiny cups of coffee two hours later.
It was only once a year, after all, and the four hundred pounds the evening cost was, he thought, worth it. The evening was looked forward to and looked back on, and some of them were in the mind years later. He loved his wife.
Tonight he was upstairs, sitting in front of the old computer, thinking about love. He was on the verge of buying two tickets for Funny Girl for the evening of Rubilynn’s birthday, which happened to be a Saturday. The website had warned him that it would hold the tickets for thirty minutes; now it was informing him that the period would expire in two minutes. He did nothing. It was possible that Rubilynn had had her own views about whether she should marry him; views based not on practicality and sense, which had prevailed, but on her own feelings and her assessment of his. He had thought it was a good idea to marry a kind, rational person so that he could improve her life, and to bring home to his own sense of self what it was that he had to fulfil penance for. But it was Rubilynn who had paid the cost, in the end, for his determination to pay compensation for his father’s marriage. She deserved a marriage where her husband did not have to tell himself all the time that he loved her. The truth was that now, after fourteen years, his love had become a comfortable thing that inhabited the space reiteration had made for it, like a dog treading down its spot in the grass, night after night; her love, however, was what it had always been, a degree of esteem, respect, and an understanding of what the alternatives might be. He reminded himself that he loved his wife and that, after all, marriage was not something that took place in a silvered hall, swift with art-deco figures, as an actress filled her lungs and sang about the passion she was paid to simulate.
Sometimes, not often, it came to him that he had been married before and he had had a son whom he had gazed over as he gazed now at Sandy. It had not been the same. It appeared to him that he had been drunk, most of that time, and sex-crazed. That was certainly over. The last time he had had sex with a woman who was not his wife was at a time before he had met the woman who was now his wife. Somewhere in this large world there was that son, too, who had a brother he knew nothing about.
The time was over. He would have to log in again and see if the same tickets were available. Downstairs the goodwill created by the dinner as family was warmly subsiding. They had liked the roast chicken and the very elegant salad of mango and halloumi and pea shoots that he had got out of Nigel Slater in the Observer at the weekend; Sandy had said that he liked it, it made his teeth squeak, but really what he had liked best was the effort of elegant arrangement on the plate and the chic of having a ‘starter’ at home; he was an exquisite, solemn child who could spend hours arranging his possessions to his visual satisfaction, who would have gone to school in a bow-tie if they had let him, his brilliant shiny sweet-smelling hair always just so. Most of all Rubilynn had been thrilled by what she must have known was coming, a little dish of stinky tofu that he had been to Gerrard Street to buy. They had never quite agreed on the right place to eat stinky tofu in a meal, and seemed to have settled on a sort of plate of cheese. That, and a macaroon in three surprising flavours for Sandy and a fourth (coffee and black pepper) for Rubilynn, to make a gesture towards something sweet and final. The lovely dinner as family he had promised. There was no reason for anyone to think that he was anything but a good, responsible husband and father, who would never lose contact with his child and never tell his wife as she was dying that he wanted to divorce her.
Instead of reopening the ticket website, Leo opened his email account. He quickly typed in Aisha Sharifullah’s address. He had looked it up earlier – she hadn’t given it to him. He knew that the address was an office address, that whatever he wrote would be read by an assistant and perhaps not read by Aisha at all. He wrote to what he had, [email protected].
Dear Aisha,
It was lovely to see you a few days ago. I feel that we did not have enough time for me to say what I meant to say to you.
He wrote, ‘I don’t want to leave our encounter incomplete’, and then rolled back, deleting it. He didn’t think she would know what he meant, and the statement was vague and confused, the product of him not quite knowing what he wanted to say. He went on:
I made a mistake twenty-five years ago. I think if I was replying to the letter you wrote me then, I would now write something very different. I would very much like to meet again.
He signed himself ‘Leo (Spinster)’, although his address was [email protected] and there could be no confusion. Before he logged out, he changed the password on his email account. He went downstairs, forgetting about what he had done. Sandy had been allowed to sit up and have dinner with them, a special treat to make him feel grown-up, and he had managed beautifully, not spilling a drop of gravy down his clean white shirt, nibbling his passion fruit and chilli macaroon in tiny, neat, crumbless bites. Now it was time for bed. ‘You’ve been busy,’ Rubilynn said, but her eyes were shining. She thought he had been arranging her birthday treat all this while. He smiled, the good father and husband, and picked his child up. He put him into his pyjamas, tucked him up, then read to him from chapter six of The Wizard of Oz, a book they had read together at least five times, which made Sandy’s eyes widen every time they got to the Cowardly Lion. He was scared of the Cowardly Lion, more than the wicked witch or the flying monkeys, even though he knew and remembered there was nothing to be scared of in the lion’s roar. The first time Leo had read the book was last year, to Sandy. He himself had only ever seen the old film. He had enjoyed the book as much as Sandy had. He didn’t remember ever having read a story to his other son. That had been a mistake, surely. They reached the end of the chapter and Sandy lay down and shut his eyes. Leo left the night light on, a shadow-pattern of giraffes and elephants circling his son’s little bedroom, and went downstairs. His wife had switched the television on, and was watching a programme about home improvements. She turned her face to him with a large, grateful smile. If Aisha wrote back in the way he had invited her to, he would leave Rubilynn and leave Sandy, and that would be the end of things.
In the morning, there was already an email in response:
Dear Leo,
It was sweet of you to write to me. Veronica, my assistant, saw it and forwarded it – she thought, from its tone, that you were probably expecting a personal response from me. As I’m in Osaka and between meetings, I’m responding straight away. I would give you my private email address to write to in future, except that – well, I’m just not going to.
It’s sweet of you, too, to think that I might want to reverse years of experience and say things that I probably didn’t mean very seriously at the time, twenty-five years ago. You see, Leo, I laid myself out in all my girlish ardency for you and, in return, you gave me a very grown-up lecture, saying, in effect, ‘Grow a skin.’ Well, I have grown a skin; I think I know what human beings are like, a little bit more. The world I went into, I saw things that you never want to see, heard stories of the ways people can treat each other and still think well of themselves. It hasn’t been good for that girlish ardency. Do I mean ardour? I think I do. I think I’m thinking of skin cream when I write ‘ardency’.
So thank you, but I am going to decline your kind offer, whatever the offer was. I’m sure in a week’s time, you are going to regret having made the offer, whatever the offer was. You would regret it whether you abandoned your wife and your little boy and ran off with me for a week of passion in the Seychelles, or if, as seems likely, you stay with them, having been turned down by the girl you used to know, who is now a hardened old bag of fifty. So best not. You see, as I said when we talked, we immigrants, we never again trust people, not one hundred per cent. They are always going to hold the knife to your throat, to insist that you say that you’re best friends for ever. We are always going to be hard to love. Our sense of timing is not all it might be.
Yours as always
Aisha
PS You see, you aren’t going to your father’s one hundredth birthday. That might have something to do with it,
too.
PPS Veronica will see this too. She sees everything, in fact.
PPPS You should come to Osaka. The food – it’s amazing.
7.
On the afternoon before her father’s one hundredth birthday, Lavinia Housman was standing in what seemed like a howling gale, begging her son to get back into the car. It was not a howling gale: it was the steady flow of hundreds, perhaps by now thousands, of cars hurtling past, inches away, at top speed. Perhaps Russell could not hear her.
In the car her husband, Jeremy, sat in the front passenger seat. He stared forward. He would not get out. Lavinia shouted and pleaded. All the time in her head was the conviction she had never got far from since the day Russell had been born that he was not as good as other children. Not less virtuous, just not as good, like the bunch of grapes nobody would pick off the shelf if they were given the choice. She had seen him emerge and be handed to her and instantly she’d had the feeling of dread she’d always had when forced to meet a stranger. She knew it was her duty not to give this belief the slightest public airing. But she looked at other children and they had all seemed much better at it than Russell ever would be. He was like the children in the Royal Family that nobody has ever heard of, as if taken to one side, defectiveness tacitly admitted.
Now he looked as green as a grape himself. He had, indeed, been about to be sick; that was why they had pulled over, at his announcement. It had been a mistake to let him get out. The traffic was terrifyingly close, and Russell had a bad sense of where his body was at the best of times. The fumes must be making him feel worse. It would have been better to have sat in the back with the windows open.
‘Darling,’ Lavinia shouted. ‘Please get back in the car. It isn’t safe here.’
‘I’m not getting in the car,’ Russell shouted. The skirts of his long leather coat flapped like a great black bird in the wind of a passing lorry, a foot from him. ‘I feel sick. I hate you.’
The Friendly Ones Page 57
