Life After Lunch

by Sarah Harrison

  ‘That’s our bash, remember.’

  ‘I know. I’ll go in by train and get changed somewhere.’

  ‘You should bring her along.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s on for socializing,’ I said. ‘She’s really cut up.’

  ‘Poor old Bunny,’ said Glyn. ‘Poor old George, already. Secrets are bad news all round.’

  ‘You’ll never believe who I met in Bartholomew Street this afternoon,’ said Verity when she got back an hour later. We were still out in the garden, telling ourselves we had things to do but that evenings like this were sufficiently rare to put off doing them.

  ‘Who?’ asked Glyn.

  ‘Jasper.’

  ‘Good old Sir Jasper, nice one,’ said Glyn. ‘You should have brought him back to supper.’

  ‘I did ask, but he was on his way to the station. He’s not at the Barbican any more, he’s working for Streetwise – the charity for the young homeless?’

  ‘Good for him,’ I said. I could just picture David and Anthea’s despair at this new development. ‘And is he happy in his work?’

  ‘Very,’ said Verity, looking pretty happy herself. ‘He thinks he’s found his vocation.’

  Glyn caught my eye. ‘ Tiggertiggertiggertiggertigger …’

  ‘Don’t be mean.’ Verity laughed. ‘I’m sure he has. I said I’d help in any way I could.’

  ‘For a small fee, perhaps?’ I suggested unworthily, and was rewarded by a wounded look from my daughter.

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘Of course it’s not,’ agreed Glyn, ‘the point is to amass celestial brownie points, isn’t it, Ver?’ He prodded her gently with his foot to show he was teasing. ‘So did he have any other news? Goings-on at the Ponderosa?’

  ‘Yes. He said Auntie Anthea’s finger was better, but would always be bent—’

  ‘All the better for summoning stablehands.’

  ‘And Emma’s coming over for the wedding in September,’ added Verity, trumping us both with a piece of real news.

  ‘So that’s when it is,’ I said. ‘How did Jasper know?’

  ‘He asked Steph if she’d organize some fundraising for Streetwise—’

  ‘And did she?’

  ‘She was too busy, but she said the invitations were going out soon.’

  ‘Any idea what sort of wedding it’s going to be?’ asked Glyn.

  ‘Jasper said it was at the church in Ferniehurst. Uncle David and Auntie Anthea are going to do the reception at their place, so Steph and Monty decided to keep everything local.’

  ‘And they don’t mind doing that?’ I asked, intrigued by the ramifications of this arrangement.

  Verity looked baffled. ‘ No, why should they? St. Botolph’s is gorgeous, and the Beeches’ house is perfect.’

  I rang my parents later that evening for confirmation. My father answered the phone tersely, having been dragged away from Inspector Morse.

  ‘Yes, it’s to be a gathering of the clans. Heaven knows what it will be costing David, but then he’s as rich as Croesus so I suppose it’s a mere bagatelle to him … mind if I pass you over to your mother?’

  ‘We’ve got ours already!’ said my mother. ‘Caro has gone into orbit, completely. I suppose having missed out on Ros and Brian with them being so far away, this is doubly important.’

  ‘Are they coming over?’

  ‘Oh yes, Nadine’s going to be a bridesmaid, and don’t mention it just yet but I understand Steph is going to ask Sinead as well.’

  ‘Brilliant! She’ll love that.’

  ‘I don’t know what they’ll be wearing, but whatever Steph’s shortcomings she has good taste in clothes, so I’m sure the dresses will be perfectly bearable, and I took the opportunity of reminding Caro that Becca wouldn’t be able to afford the cost involved, and she perfectly understood and promised to convey that much to Steph. I hope I wasn’t out of order?’

  ‘No, you did right.’ I looked forward to observing – from a safe distance – the negotiations between Steph and Becca on this subject.

  ‘I think it’s awfully good of David to lay all this on for them,’ said my mother. ‘Care’s quite overwhelmed.’

  ‘I was a bit surprised to hear about it,’ I agreed cautiously. ‘I shouldn’t have thought Steph was the sort to want to be under that sort of obligation. Or Monty, for that matter.’

  ‘Come on, darling,’ said my mother, with one of those glints of steel which made her such good value, ‘anyone with half an eye can see he’s a born sponger. And rather weak, I think. You can see it all in his mouth. Anyway, David will do them proud and it’ll be a lovely wedding. I shall just sit back and enjoy it.’

  ‘Do you have any family?’ I asked Patrick a couple of days later, the day we got the invitation. ‘Any parents extant, or anything?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘ I do. I have a sister in Ireland.’

  I hoisted myself up on my elbow. ‘Tell me about her.’

  ‘Must I?’ He rolled his eyes.

  ‘I’m interested.’

  ‘She’s ten years older than me, and she’s a pharmacist in a chemist’s shop in Dublin. And she’s married to a bloke called Kevin. Which by the way is a good old Irish name and doesn’t have the associations it has here.’

  ‘Does she have children – are you an uncle?’

  ‘They’ve got thousands of them.’

  ‘Nice children?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s a contradiction in terms.’

  I was taken aback by this acerbic generalization. ‘You met my grandchildren – didn’t you like them?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Answer the question.’

  He turned his head on the pillow to look at me directly. ‘I had a good reason to make the effort.’

  I found myself trapped between a compliment and an attitude I found hard to like.

  The fact was, I didn’t like Patrick. I was addicted to him, but I didn’t like him. Whether love could accommodate the lack of this bread-and-butter feeling I didn’t know. You often heard, or read, people say that they loved certain of their relations, but found it hard to like them. I sometimes felt that way about my children. And yet it was the moments of real liking, no matter how rare, that made the whole experience worthwhile.

  It was true I’d been charmed by Patrick on our first meeting, and swept away by his flattering directness thereafter. But in a way that charm, that directness, were the very things that made me suspicious of him – and of myself – when we were not together. Sometimes when I was with him, while he was still inside me, my imagination would hurtle with sickening speed and clarity to Alderswick Avenue and I’d see my family, all innocent and unknowing – yes, even Becca – going about their business. They didn’t even think about whether they trusted me or not, they took it for granted – and they were right to do so.

  The ease with which I’d deceived everyone appalled me. I had never even had to tell an outright lie. Patrick’s name had been spoken freely in our house. And such was the loose weave of my relationship with Glyn that I had never yet had to justify an absence nor explain a call. Something perverse in me wanted to be a little less dispensable. A hint of suspicion, a gleam of jealousy, a whiff of unreasonable possessiveness, would not have gone amiss. But that, I supposed, was twenty-five years of marriage for you.

  Becca was at Alderswick Avenue, minus the children.

  ‘They’re at a party,’ she said in response to my enquiry. ‘What have you and Dad been saying to Liam?’

  ‘Nothing. Honestly,’ I added, as the dishonest do. ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t lie to me,’ said Becca. ‘He’s been round here, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. He called when I was out the other day, but only because he’d tried you and you were out. And then he came round and went upstairs to talk to Glyn. It was that time when your father had the flu—’

  ‘Where’s Dad now?’ asked Becca, glancing round. She was wearing white shorts and a bikini-top but her de
meanour suggested that she had about her sparsely clad person a .44 Colt, primed and loaded.

  ‘In London.’

  ‘Typical,’ she said, as though Glyn’s diary were expressly organized in order to thwart and evade her. ‘So what did he say?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue. He was feeling extremely ropey so I don’t suppose it was anything more than a friendly chat.’

  ‘Friendly chat?’ echoed Becca venomously. ‘I’m sorry but I really take exception to either of you having any kind of chats with Liam behind my back. Whatever Dad said it’s got Liam all stirred up. He was round asking me to marry him again last night.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said, ever hopeful. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said I thought he’d never ask and fell weeping into his arms! Mum!’ Her voice was shrill with a kind of hectic sarcasm. She flopped down abruptly on the bottom stair, further revealing a smooth, honeyed tan with no visible tidelines, the acquisition of which must have wrought havoc among her neighbours.

  Her hands were linked on the top of her head, her forearms covered her face. This wasn’t mere strutting and fretting, she was genuinely upset.

  I went to sit next to her, but there wasn’t quite room and she didn’t budge up. I was being shut out.

  ‘I’m sorry darling,’ I said.

  ‘It’s all right …’

  ‘Liam was obviously in a bit of a state, and you know Dad … he’s a sucker for a lame duck.’

  ‘I know, I know …’ She looked up, with a slight toss of the head to indicate that she’d got a grip of herself once more. ‘It’s okay. I’m sorry, too. It’s just that Liam is such a loser. It’s the reason we broke up, he knows it as well as I do. We’d be poison for each other. He’s Sinead’s dad and nothing can alter that, but I don’t love him and the more he comes round making spaniel eyes and whimpering, the more I despise him. And I don’t want to despise him. I want to respect him, and have some sort of sensible relationship with him that works, for Sinead’s sake. Not all this useless moaning about a lost cause …’ Her eyes met mine. ‘Am I making the smallest bit of sense?’

  ‘Perfect sense.’ I wanted to hug her, but was afraid of spoiling things.

  ‘It’s such a waste of time and energy.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘And it’s not good for Sinead.’

  ‘No.’

  Becca got up. To my surprise she leaned forward and dropped a light kiss on my cheek.

  ‘I must go and pick up the kids,’ she said. ‘See you.’

  Bunny Ionides’ flat was luxurious in a way that happily did not inspire the smallest twinge of envy. It was on the first floor of a tall Regency house between Cavendish Square and Harley Street, with the sort of long windows that require a national debts-worth of curtaining, in this case ivory brocade looped back with thick gold ropes. The probable cost of those curtains alone was enough to make you think pious thoughts about Third World countries. For the rest it was like a top person’s furniture showroom, ail ormolu clocks, gilt scrolls and ebony elephants, and a forbidding cluster of stately armchairs with undented cushions.

  Bunny was over-made-up and wearing of all things a kaftan, with a strip of ruching beneath her embonpoint which made her look like a marquee on wheels.

  ‘I know I look awful,’ she said as she poured Waterford bucketfuls of g and t in the strangely echoing kitchen. ‘ It’s called carbo-loading for comfort. I suppose any shrink would say that I’m eating to make myself fat so I’ll be ugly enough to explain what’s happened to me.’

  ‘You don’t look awful,’ I said. ‘You look like someone who thinks they do.’

  She handed me my drink and plucked ruefully at the kaftan. ‘I spent a fortune on this. The trouble with clothes at this end of the size range is that there’s no difference in appearance between spending a fortune and raiding the Oxfam Shop.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said, following her billowing form into the drawing-room.

  ‘It’s ghastly,’ she said. ‘Like my life.’

  On a circular coffee table of engraved brass was set out the promised feast – lobster salad, artichoke hearts with hollandaise sauce, strawberries and cream, camembert, misty black grapes.

  ‘Lunch looks good though,’ I observed hungrily.

  Bunny collapsed into a chair with an expansive wave. ‘Dig in. The more you eat the less will be left for me. The tragedy is it goes down without touching the sides. I had three peanut butter sandwiches before you even got here.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll eat, you talk.’

  Poor Bunny, she needed no second bidding. For the next hour she talked a blue streak, cried a river, gulped down a second bucketful of gin and started on a bottle of wine, more or less without drawing breath.

  George had been purchasing sado-masochistic sex at an address in Lancaster Gate for the past several years. Bunny had found out in the most straightforward and prosaic way possible. It was one of those weeks when she was taking twenty-four hours at the flat to shop and see friends, and George was supposed to be visiting designers in Stockholm. She was driving along Clipstone Gardens on her way back from lunch in Kensington and had seen George coming out of the house. She’d stopped, cheerfully enough, to offer him a lift; his discomfiture was obvious; she asked what he was doing … and so it went.

  If I’d read the story in the papers under one of those ‘ Miss Whiplash’ headlines it might have struck me as pathetic and even a bit comical. ‘Rag Trade to Rough Trade’ or perhaps ‘Would You Buy Your Kids’ Clothes From This Man?’ But hearing it from Bunny, I was shocked. My own secret, hovering spectrally in the background, made me all too aware of the extent of Bunny’s betrayal, and of George’s frightful, obsessive risk-taking.

  ‘Do you feel it’s absolutely necessary to separate?’ I asked tentatively.

  ‘How can you even ask that?’ She mopped her face with a paper napkin. ‘He’s been lying to me for months – years!’

  I stared down into my glass, uncomfortable with my role as devil’s advocate. ‘ But it’s not as if George is madly in love with someone else. What he’s been doing is really no more than a solitary vice. Something he had to do, and probably felt pretty bad about—’

  ‘Laura, Laura! How do you think I feel?’

  I was shamed. ‘ Pretty terrible.’

  ‘I don’t want him near me! I don’t mean sex – I mean within hailing distance! When I do see him it just reminds me that all this time I never really knew him at all.’

  I remembered my strange, altered face in Patrick’s mirror. ‘He’s still the same person he always was,’ I said. But if I was hoping to glean any crumbs of comfort for myself from Bunny I had come to the wrong place.

  ‘That’s it! You’ve put your finger on it. This has always been part of him, but I never had the least idea. He never tried to tell me or explain – never even hinted, never suggested in the smallest way – he just went off and got on with it and put all the checks and balances in place – ugh!’ She shuddered. ‘It’s the idea of all the thought and effort he put into it, into throwing me off the scent and making the arrangements – that’s what disgusts me.’

  ‘If he’d made that much effort he wouldn’t have got caught,’ I pointed out.

  She snorted. ‘And that’s supposed to make me feel better?’

  Bunny was feeling slightly better now, having got such a lot off her chest, but I was feeling notably worse. On grounds of what was polite and appropriate alone I could not confide my own situation to her, and even if I had, I realized that she would have perceived it not as a problem, but as an embarrassment of riches which it was clearly my responsibility to sort out.

  ‘I’ve always thought of you as very strong,’ I said. ‘ Both of you, but particularly you. Don’t you think if this ever got out, or was in the papers, that you’d feel you wanted to stick by George?’

  ‘If this ever got into the papers,’ said Bunny, flushed and strident, ‘it would be me that put it there!’

  The
session with Bunny cast a lurid light over that evening’s party. The high-octane networking of some two hundred ego-centrics dressed to kill and without a scruple to share between them was riot something I could even pretend to be part of. I contented myself with being a spectator.

  Cy and Glyn had pushed the boat out in more ways than one. The Duchess of Deptford floated down the Thames in the hazy early evening sun, moored near Greenwich in the afterglow and returned in the warm, twinkling night. A jazz band whose name I actually knew worked up a convivial lather on the upper deck. An inferno-like disco pulsated below. In the saloon between the two, beautiful young people, their smooth bare shoulders revealed by cutaway striped waistcoats, served champagne, Guinness and a breathtaking array of seafood, with ineffable haughty grace.

  Glyn was in his element and a pink bow-tie. He looked the happiest man in the room, on nothing more than orange juice and job satisfaction.

  ‘Where’s Bunny?’ he wanted to know as we snatched a quick domestic debriefing by the bar.

  ‘I didn’t invite her.’

  ‘Bad as that?’

  ‘Worse. She’s absolutely wretched and she’s put on about two stone.’

  ‘Holy cow. What about George, or aren’t you allowed to say in case I join in?’

  I glanced around cautiously. Glyn laughed at me. ‘No one here knows George, for goodness’ sake.’

  ‘You never know. He’s been indulging in a spot of s and m in Lancaster Gate for ages, apparently. Bunny caught him leaving the house when he should have been somewhere else.’

  ‘And that’s – pardon me – a hanging offence?’

  ‘It’s the lying, she says. Over such a long period.’

  ‘Yup.’ Glyn nodded. ‘Fair enough.’

  Cy bore down on us. ‘Laura – lovely. Glyn, can I drag you away from the lady wife to come and cheer up Talia?’ He referred to a New Age folk songstress from Leeds who was in the way of becoming a cult hit.

  ‘Off you go, both of you,’ I said. ‘I’m perfectly happy.’

  I wandered. Verity had not come – she was far happier among the soaks and derelicts of the night-shelter than with the floating attention-junkies here, though it was debatable who was more in need of Christian charity. Josh had been given a job handing out identity badges. He wore his striped waistcoat unbuttoned over a black T-shirt. His eyes glittered with scornful fascination behind his round glasses. He had an ambivalent attitude towards Glyn’s work: part of him felt a perfectly natural teenage interest in the sheen and shimmer of showbiz; another part had nothing but disdain for the airheads (he did not include his father) who allowed themselves to be dazzled by it. He could be terribly unforgiving.