I thought how much Susan would have disliked Annette. She’d got no time at all for people who didn’t make the best of themselves. Obesity on this scale would have incurred her most withering displeasure.
Quite suddenly Daffs came back to life. I could see her gathering her forces for a determined sally.
‘Annette,’ she said, ‘ you could probably give me some advice.’
‘It’s what I do for a living, love. I’d be very surprised if I couldn’t. On the other hand I can’t vouch for its quality, since I’m off duty and drinking.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Daffs looked around, ‘this is rude, I know, but can I monopolize Annette for a mo? I don’t mean to be antisocial, but—’
‘No buts,’ said Lucilla, ‘we know when we ‘re being asked to talk amongst ourselves.’
‘Not at all, it’s not that, but I don’t want to impose my ramblings on absolutely everyone …’
‘Daffs!’ Bunny was imperious in her role as the quintessential great survivor. ‘ Witter not! Dump on Annette while you can, for goodness’ sake. You should look on us as a support group.’
‘The Inaugural Meeting of the Certain Age Encounter Group, South Eastern Chapter,’ enlarged Mijou. ‘You unburden yourself, we’ll talk heavy shopping.’
I turned dutifully in Bunny’s direction as she opened the batting with a description of her recent visit to an image consultant.
‘Apparently I’m a rectangle,’ she said. ‘Which means I should favour long, lean jackets and skirts that brush the top of the knee.’
‘Count yourself lucky.’ Lucilla gave a dry little laugh. ‘I went to one of those in Cheltenham a couple of years ago and she told me I was a classic British pear. I thought to myself what the dickens am I doing, forking out over a hundred quid to be insulted by this very ordinary little woman in ski-pants.’
‘Ski-pants,’ echoed Mijou in awed tones. ‘Oh, wow.’
‘Did yours come to your place afterwards?’ enquired Bunny. ‘To assess your wardrobe?’
Lucilla shook her head. ‘You’re joking. If I need my morale destroying I’ve got a brace of large sons who’ll do it any time for free.’
‘Mine came round,’ said Bunny, her enthusiasm for the venture undented by Lucilla’s less happy experience. ‘She came round a couple of days later and went through my stuff with a fine tooth-comb. When she’d finished, no kidding, there was a pile that high – you couldn’t see my bed at all.’
‘Pile of what?’ asked Mijou.
‘Clothes I didn’t need. That weren’t right for me.’
‘And you believed her?’ Mijou was incredulous.
Lucilla scoffed. ‘She’ll be on a backhander from somewhere, you may be bound. Where did she recommend you replace all these unsuitable garments?’
‘Nowhere!’ Bunny sounded aggrieved. ‘ She’d brought along a few bits and pieces from her own collection—’
‘You don’t say.’
‘Only belts and scarves and things like that. And she made the most brilliant suggestions about how to put together my own things in a different way, all of which, oh ye of little faith, I’m tremendously pleased with.’
Lucilla looked over her glasses at Bunny. ‘Of course you are. She’s given you a sartorial placebo, and you’re as happy as Larry with it.’
Bunny bridled. ‘I’m not that daft. She spoke a lot of good sense.’
Mijou looked across at me. ‘ You’re very quiet, Laura. Have you ever been to one of these gurus?’
‘No. But it sounds fun.’
‘Good old Laura. Always diplomatic,’ said Lucilla.
‘I wasn’t being diplomatic – I’d love someone to come along and chuck out half of the stuff in my wardrobe. Do you remember what Matron used to say about the benefits of a ‘‘Jolly good clear-out’’?’
Lucilla rolled her eyes. ‘Do I ever. She was obsessed with bowels, that woman. It was years before I was able to resist the urge to put a tick in my diary to mark every motion successfully passed.’
‘School casts a long shadow,’ I agreed. ‘After all, those were our formative years we spent there.’
‘Are we all hopelessly warped and stunted?’ mused Mijou. ‘ I often think about it.’
‘Warped and stunted?’ Bunny, outraged, waved a glass over her cooling fritto misto mare. ‘Look at us! A more self-aware, upstanding, emotionally mature bunch of women it would be hard to imagine!’
Lucilla inclined her head to mine. ‘That’s what I love about our Bun – her charming diffidence.’
Mijou laughed, and raised her glass. ‘Here’s to you. Bunny. You should undergo violent changes more often – they obviously do you the world of good.’
‘I tell you what,’ said Lucilla with the reasonable, down-to-earth air of someone mounting a hobbyhorse, ‘ we may laugh now, but I reckon the Rat-house did us a power of good. If I had girls I’d send them there.’
‘You wouldn’t, would you?’ I asked, genuinely atonished.
‘For sure. I believe in boarding, and I believe in singlesex schools. And I believe in some sort of consistent moral tone.’
‘Consistent with what?’
‘Christian values,’ said Lucilla. I liked Lucilla a lot, she was sharp and funny and staunch and one hadn’t the least doubt that she would be excellent to have around in a crisis. But her attitude to Our Lord and his values was not one Verity would have recognized. She personified the theory that the Anglican Church was the Tory Party at prayer.
‘No, no, no, it was education according to the Old Testament,’ said Bunny. ‘Judgment passed and summary retribution handed out. Do you remember what happened to Margot when she ran away that time? She was shut in a practising-room for thirty-six hours til her parents came to take her away. And our parents connived at all this.’
‘I don’t think they had the foggiest idea,’ I said. ‘I never told them anything. And it was fairly enlightened by the standards of the day.’
‘Compared to where I came from,’ said Mijou, ‘it was paradise.’
The conversation drifted towards the less contentious areas of Middle Eastern politics and human rights, and I allowed my conversational radar to focus on the exchange taking place at my end of the table. With Daffs opposite and Annette to my right, I was ideally placed to grasp the tenor of Daffs’s disclosures without appearing nosey.
‘… afraid he’ll simply never be able to come to terms with it,’ she was saying.
‘It’s going to take him a long time,’ agreed Annette. ‘But he will, take my word for it. Remember he’s only what, twenty-one? That’s no age. He’s only a kid.’ So it was Timmy, doing agricultural economics at Cirencester, who was the problem.
‘Julia’s handling it so much better,’ said Daffs, ‘although she’s two years younger. I’ve been able to talk to her about it.’
‘Girls are more mature, period,’ said Annette, who was not, as far as I could see, coming up with anything the rest of us couldn’t have said. ‘You’ll have to be patient with your son. He’s going to have to go through all the stages, and he can’t be rushed. He will come through, but only if he’s allowed to find his own way. It goes against the grain, I know, but you’ll have to stand back and take the flak for the time being.’
‘It’s awfully hard,’ said Daffs tremulously. ‘Timmy and I have always been close. It was Julia I used to have the bust-ups with.’
Annette mopped vigorously at her plate with a heel of ciabatta. ‘But that’s perfectly logical, don’t you see? He was close to the old you, and now he’s lost her. It’s a bereavement.’ We were well into shrink-rap now.
‘But I haven’t changed!’ protested Daffs. ‘ That’s the problem. Apart from being happier, I’m exactly the same as I ever was!’
‘Being happier is a big change,’ said Annette. ‘ It’s a kind of betrayal. You’re saying that your old life, with your husband and children, wasn’t enough to make you happy. What do you think your Timmy makes of that?’
I could se
e there was a kernel of truth in this argument, but its stem and unpalatable logic had brought Daffs once more to the point of tears. Unwise though it is for an eavesdropper to betray an interest, I was prompted to blurt out, ‘Don’t you think some of it is just embarrassment?’
They both looked at me, Daffs with an urgent need for reassurance, Annette more sharply.
‘What?’
‘Embarrassment. My Josh likes to think he’s politically correct but he would simply die if I started shacking up with another woman.’ Annette glared unblinkingly. I even seemed to have attracted some interest from the other end. I addressed Daffs. ‘Timmy needs to get used to it, that’s all.’
‘It’s a bit more than embarrassment, Laura,’ said Annette in an understanding way. ‘This young man has lost the mother he thought he had.’
‘I bet it’s not that so much as what his mates will say if they find out his mum is gay.’
‘You’re absolutely right,’ said Daffs, looking brighter. ‘He’s at a farming college. It’s not exactly the most liberated seat of learning in the world. He must live in dread of someone finding out.’
‘Why not enlist your daughter’s help – Julia?’ suggested Annette. ‘She’ll be able to demystify it for him.’
‘They’ve always fought like nobody’s business.’ Daffs sounded doubtful. ‘As teenagers, if you said pass the sugar they turned it into World War Three.’
‘In that case you’re doing them a favour,’ said Annette. ‘Discussing you will be a very bonding experience.’
Based on my own experience this, at least, sounded true. Bunny leaned forward down the table.
‘Are you sorted? Annette, have you come up with all kinds of wise saws and modern instances?’
‘She has,’ said Daffs, on fire again with all the attention she was getting. ‘And Laura. It’s been a real help. I’m sorry to be such a pain.’
‘How’s Gordon in all this?’ asked Lucilla, a bit tactlessly, but going on to redeem herself somewhat by not waiting for an answer. ‘If Huggers were in that position I know he’d go completely to pieces.’
The giant menus reappeared. ‘Anyone for afters?’ asked Bunny. ‘Because I am.’
Bunny, Daffs and Annette ordered puddings, coffees for us all and – rashly – a third bottle of the Widow, on the basis that we couldn’t possibly stop there, and anything less good would be a let-down. We were all a bit smashed and it was us against the world. We were starting to touch each other a lot and comment on each other’s excellent qualities in a way we might well live to regret. I was as bevvied as the next woman, but there was also a small part of me – the part that was Susan’s friend – which remained separate. With the exception of the transparently straightforward Daffs we were all, I suspected, hiding something. Our secrets waved beneath the surface like weed in a murky pond, invisible, but oxygenating the water.
While the others began on their pudding, Lucilla and I went to the Ladies, which was down a precipitate flight of stairs at the back of the restaurant. The facilities here were as unaltered as the rest of the Gondola. My skin remembered the icy temperature of the back extension and the strange clamminess of the black plastic seats, and the grey rubber handles on the loo chains. There were little windows high above the chipped cisterns. You could see next-door’s brick wall through these mean oblong apertures. There was a smell of cooking and old drains.
‘Dear oh dear,’ said Lucilla as we peered hopefully at ourselves in the mirror over the basin. ‘They could do with spending a bob or two down here.’
I agreed. ‘It hasn’t changed in nearly thirty years.’
‘Wish I hadn’t.’ Lucilla gave her thin mouth a swipe of lipstick and smacked her lips. ‘I look like the wrath of God.’
‘You look wonderful.’
‘I don’t feel it. I feel ancient.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘It’s not a topic for discussion, it’s a fact.’ She turned round and perched on the edge of the basin, staring down at her crossed ankles. She wore extremely expensive shoes on her narrow, elegant feet – I thought how my mother would have approved. She looked up suddenly. ‘Laura, may I confide in you?’
‘Of course.’
‘I’m not happy.’
I waited, assuming she was going to expand on this, but she didn’t. Instead, she repeated, ‘ I’m not happy.’
I resorted to platitudes. ‘What’s happy, after all?’
‘Feeling good. Feeling positive. Glad for every new day that comes along.’
‘Impossible.’
‘No it’s not. Look at how Bunny is. And you, for that matter.’
‘Bunny’s on an unnatural high.’
I prayed she wouldn’t ask about me, and she didn’t. ‘ I wish I could bottle some of that.’
‘It’s probably physical,’ I said. ‘It’s our age.’
‘Bollocks to that, I’ve been popping Prempack for over a year.’
‘It’ll pass.’ I was running out of palliative phrases.
She pushed herself upright and wavered for a moment. ‘Do you know what I hate most? Being a cliché. I hate going along to our sweet, fourteen-year-old GP and saying ‘‘ Doctor, doctor, I’m tired and depressed and have no joie de vivre’’ when I can see in his eyes that the chair is still warm from the last tired, depressed, joyless housewife who sat there—’
‘Lucilla, you are not a joyless housewife! You are one of the most glamorous people I know! Don’t say these things about yourself, they’re not true and they make me nervous. It’s called taking the ground out from under a person’s feet.’ It was true. I simply could not cope with Lucilla – firm of jaw, clear of eye, cut-glass of vowel – being tired and depressed.
‘What do you suggest then?’ she asked.
‘Pretend,’ I said, God knows why, it just popped into my head. ‘It’s a proven physiological fact that if you make yourself smile you feel more cheerful.’
She looked at me as if I were completely mad.
‘Are you completely mad?’ I shrugged and opened the door into the icy stone passageway. ‘ Okay,’ she said, tapping my midriff as she went by. ‘It shall be smile city, as my Giles would say.’
As we milled out on to the pavement the rain, which had eased off a bit during the afternoon, was starting up again. After the cosy, winey camaraderie of the Gondola, the great outside with its chill workaday detail and noise was distinctly unwelcome. Various informal arrangements had been made: Mijou was going back to Harley Street with Bunny for a cup of tea and a chat about higher education. Lucilla was heading for Paddington, and was sharing a taxi with the other two. Daffs was going by tube to John Lewis to buy curtain material.
Annette said: ‘What about you, Laura? Do you fancy a little stool-perching for a while? I don’t have another meeting till six.’
The thought of Annette perched on a stool was too much. I didn’t want to be another case history squeezed in between meetings. I didn’t want to be with her at all. She depressed me. Her size, her smell, her awful neediness disguised as bonhomie – they filled me with gloom.
As I stood there I suddenly saw the Shogun on the other side of the road, with Glyn sitting reading the Standard in the driver’s seat.
It’s funny. When you see someone you know unexpectedly, and – more importantly – they don’t see you, they make a fresh impression. It’s like catching sight of your reflection in a shop window, except that that, in my experience, is invariably a chastening experience. Who, you ask yourself, is that trudging, careworn, overweight woman with the funny jacket and the bad hair?
With other people, the opposite is true – such surprise sightings make them appear taller, better-looking, intriguing.
Seeing Glyn before he saw me, I recognised with a shock how attractive he was. With his springy dark hair barely tipped with grey, his thin, muscular arms below the rolled-up sleeves of his yellow shirt, and his fingers tapping the cover of the paper in time to some inaudible music (the Human Condition, possib
ly), he was any woman’s idea of a fanciable man. Even just sitting there at the wheel of his car an air of amiability and openness made him seem ten years younger than he was. The phrase ‘ young at heart’ sprang spontaneously to mind. No one, certainly, would have taken him for a grandfather. A girl no older than Verity who was crossing the road shot him one of those swift, unselfconsciously appraising looks which are the sincerest form of flattery. I was moved, and more than a little shamed, that this was my husband …
Sensing my gaze on him he looked up, and lifted his chin in greeting before returning, relaxed as you please, to the paper.
‘Actually,’ I said to Annette, ‘ my meeting’s earlier than that. I have to dash.’
We exchanged hurried, flurried, kisses in the rain. A taxi chugged alongside the kerb to pick up Lucilla, Bunny and Mijou. Daffs and Annette moved off in the direction of the tube. With wings on my feet I ran across the road and jumped into the car.
‘Hi,’ said Glyn, folding the paper and slinging it on the back seat. ‘Good lunch?’
‘Yes. Lovely. What are you doing here?’
‘We finished early, so I thought I’d come along and meet you.’
‘Have you been here hours?’
He glanced at his watch. ‘Fifteen minutes.’
‘I appreciate it, thanks.’
‘You’re more than welcome.’ He started the engine, then suddenly reached an arm to the floor at the back. ‘I nearly forgot.’
It was a single gardenia, wrapped in white tissue. The scent – the scent of our wedding – filed the car. Glyn gave it to me but didn’t wait for my reaction. He began at once to move out into the traffic.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘It’s gorgeous.’
‘Yes, well—’ He glanced over his shoulder, raising a hand to thank a waiting cab. ‘The world needs useless gestures.’
Chapter Fourteen
I rang Susan next morning. She behaved as if I were returning her call, and said at once, ‘ I wanted to tell you that I’m off to Crete at the end of next week.’
Life After Lunch Page 24
