‘Molly dear, smashing, really smashing. You are a clever girl,’ one of them hooted.
Mickey felt her flesh creep. They were silly and patronizing and ‘over the top’, her mother’s friends – women who considered themselves important because their husbands earned a lot of money.
‘So original, lemon,’ the same one, who was wearing emerald green, remarked, turning her attention on Mickey, her gaze fleetingly scanning the waistline.
‘Mickey will be different,’ Molly said with a nervous little laugh. The atmosphere was heavy with Revlon’s ‘Charlie’.
‘We’d better go back,’ Mickey said, sensing dangerous ground. The three of them edged past the others.
‘I should have told them. They’ll be thinking all sorts of things now,’ Molly murmured anxiously as they went back to the main room.
‘Does it matter what they think?’ Mickey said.
‘I’m afraid it does, it does to me and there’s no good pretending it doesn’t.’
Mickey felt a stab of pity for her mother and at the same time admiration; Molly was honest about the things that mattered to her, honest in a way most people were not.
‘Oh, Mum,’ she said, taking her mother’s arm, ‘I’m sorry.’ She felt mean and rotten over the business of the dresses, it had suited her only too well to effect the swap.
‘No dear, this is your day and I don’t want it spoilt,’ Molly said, patting her daughter’s hand.
Mickey felt worse for a couple of seconds but she really was too happy to sustain any other emotion for long. Events of the day had been pretty gruesome so far, but the alternative – just she and David and a couple of witnesses, delicious anonymity – it would never have worked, she’d have felt far too guilty about disappointing Molly, depriving her of a ‘do’.
Mother and daughter, arm in arm, with Laura a few steps behind, re-entered the crowd of guests, and as they did so Molly caught sight of the Walrus and remembered with sweet clarity the day thirty years ago when they’d been spared all this by the austerity of the fifties. Dear man, how dear he had been, she thought, her mind travelling on to the wedding night which she was quite sure had been the occasion of Gordon’s conception. That he’d been born seven months later was just one of those cruel twists of nature, especially as both the girls had gone overdue.
The afternoon wore on. Mickey hardly spoke to David, both were ‘doing the rounds’ although David’s seemed to be largely members of the sporting club and at one point Mickey overheard him and Simon and two or three others having what sounded very much like a selection meeting. After a couple of hours or so, she realized that she had not actually used the lavatory when she’d gone there earlier and found Laura. She made her way back along the corridor and was just in time to see one of the guests disappearing out of the cloakroom window.
Returning again to the main thrust, she was aware of the boredom that had set in, particularly among the men who were generally sitting about looking fidgety. The women had become louder and more aggressive, pointing fingers as they spoke.
Mickey advanced on David, ‘I think it’s time we got changed,’ she said at his shoulder.
He turned, his expression surprised, as if he hadn’t expected to see her, then softening, taking in her presence. It was enough, enough to make the rest of it all quite unimportant. She ached with love and pride and a peculiarly piquant proprietorial lust.
‘Come on,’ she said, taking his hand, ‘before we get a barrage.’
They had arranged a bedroom in the hotel for the business of changing into going away outfits, and feeling conspicuous, they hurried up the stairs.
‘Nearly over,’ David whispered as they approached the room.
‘Thank God!’ Mickey answered.
‘Still, we’re not in that much of a hurry,’ David added, glancing at her as he turned the door handle.
Inside, the bag containing their things had been dumped, still full and zipped up, just beyond the doorway. On the bed lay Laura and Lawrence, the wedding dress on the floor like a deflated parachute.
David and Mickey retreated with the bag, silently closing the door behind them.
‘Where now?’ David said, suddenly staring at Mickey. ‘And how come I married the bridesmaid?’
‘It’s a long story,’ she answered, ‘but it consists of two dresses the wrong size and Laura being a little bit pregnant.’
‘Careless of Lawrence,’ David said.
‘And Laura,’ Mickey protested, but decided against telling him what Laura had confessed about uncertainty. David was intolerant of people who let others down and she didn’t want him to think badly of Laura.
He took her hand and they started along the corridor.
‘I’m afraid it’s going to have to be the bathroom,’ he said, after trying several locked doors.
‘Again?’ Mickey said.
‘We don’t have to,’ he said, unconvincingly.
The bathroom they found was vast. They locked themselves in and Mickey unzipped the bag and started pulling out the crumpled garments.
‘We’ll have to run the bath, really hot, get some steam up in here,’ she said.
Steam rising, she draped the clothes over the shower rail.
‘How long d’you think it will take?’ David asked.
‘I’m not sure, I don’t even know whether it will work.’ Mickey felt annoyed with Laura now. It had been her job to unpack the going-away outfits, and to set them out, uncreased.
The bathroom was unpromising. The floor was covered with cold-looking tiles and the bath itself now filling up with boiling water, David stood by the empty towel rail. Mickey looked at him.
‘I’m sorry, I think I’ve had too much to drink,’ he said.
Twenty minutes later they emerged in damp clothing and went downstairs to face the last and worst – the car. It was raining again and the festoons of lavatory paper had settled in wet clumps over the roof and bonnet. A semi-inflated contraceptive hung limply from the top of the radio aerial. It was all so predictable but Mickey was determined to appear a good sport as she and David pushed their way through the guests.
The Aga Brigade, armed with rice and confetti, let fire. Josephine threw her arms around David’s neck and kissed him again. Dan Lovell touched Mickey’s arm and wished her all the luck in the world. The bridal bouquet was tossed to the sky and caught with a squeal by Simon’s girlfriend, Emily. The Walrus solemnly shook hands with David, as if he were about to embark on a death-defying expedition, and Molly, stern-faced against tears, wrestled to hold on to hiccups and the dignified new status of mother-in-law.
‘Be happy!’ someone shouted as they got in the car which had unpleasant things on the seats.
‘Be good!’ another echoed.
The car would not start
Chapter Two
Seven months earlier, during the Easter recess, Dan Lovell saw his daughter, Victoria, for what might be the last time as a child. They had spent a week together, the longest space of time he’d had with her since Charlotte had left him and remarried. Now Charlotte and her husband were going to live in America, and Vicky, of course, was going too.
Dan had planned the week carefully, to keep sadness at bay, to give Vicky a happy time so the memory would be good. But the week had been bitter-sweet. Several times Vicky had asked him why he was staring at her and told him not to, and once he had wept, although after Vicky was asleep in bed. She had grown more and more like Charlotte, not so much in appearance as in little mannerisms; the way she walked, held on to the lobe of her ear when she was thinking. It was nearly three years now since Charlotte had remarried but it was the going to America that finally convinced Dan there was no hope; and losing that last vestige was harder than he could have imagined. It took him by surprise, the renewed sense of loss, and left him feeling weak, and not for the first time in his relationship with his former wife, pathetic.
He’d kept the house where they’d lived as a family. It was a nice house, old and se
cluded, chosen by Charlotte who liked only old buildings and had now gone to live in a new apartment block in Los Angeles. He’d kept it as a sort of test, a means of defying emotion, but the place still made him miserable, the happy memories clubbed to death by the sad and the mean. As a result he spent little time there, living mostly at the flat he’d bought in London following his election to the House. But he was still senior partner of Marriott and Lovell, whose offices were not far from the house in the country, and it would be bowing to those emotions he sought to combat to ignore the convenience of a home close by; besides which, it was expected he should have an address in the constituency.
The day after he delivered Vicky back to her mother, just three days before they went to America, he got up early, before the emptiness of the house could thicken round him.
The watery sunlight of early morning lay in streaks across the crisp gravel outside the house. As he went round to the car he noticed a clump of pale yellow flowers at the edge of the trees, the first primroses. ‘Charlotte will be pleased,’ he thought and then marvelled at the way this could happen, the momentary lapse, three years on. He had an urge then to get in the car and drive over the fragile blooms, but he was not a destroyer, and what passion there was left was too suppressed to surface in such a manner.
He drove to the office and when he got there experienced the peculiar sensation of realizing he had completed the journey without being aware of the route; it was so familiar and yet he couldn’t remember passing through any of it. He found such preoccupation an unnerving experience.
The offices of Marriott and Lovell were old and bland, the latter deliberately contrived to keep faith with clients’ expectations. The people who employed their services wanted the reassurance of dullness and Dan himself would not have been comfortable in a radical setting. Victor Marriott, who’d retired two years earlier, had observed with relief and satisfaction his much younger partner’s propensity to maintain the status quo and had felt confident in retiring a little earlier than might have been the case in different circumstances. He was just sorry that Dan didn’t have a wife to look after him: a good wife made a considerable difference to a man’s well-being, although he’d not much liked Charlotte, a prickly young woman who’d made him feel uncomfortable on the few occasions they’d met socially.
On this particular morning, Victor Marriott called into the office on his way to the bakers, a daily errand he had undertaken since his retirement and one of the many tasks that led him to repeat quite frequently that he didn’t know how he’d ever had time to go to work.
He liked popping into the office. It made him feel the elder statesman, in spite of the shopping bag. He liked the people who were there, the Canadian girl, Wilma who had been his secretary: he still thought of her as a girl even though she was in her fifties; Povey, their senior clerk who knew more about the law than most qualified men; and Mickey, such a silly name but a nice girl and a good solicitor. Dan had taken her on, persuaded him she was clever. That had been the one time he’d had a moment’s doubt about Dan, but he had to be fair, Mickey had turned out as good as any man.
This morning he had a specific purpose in calling at the office. It wasn’t a very pleasant matter but an old friend at the golf club had asked him if the firm could help and it pleased him that people still approached him.
Wilma made a fuss of him, jumped up to make him a milky coffee, seemed genuinely pleased to see him.
‘Mr Lovell still drinks it black and thick as tar,’ she said, as if it were poison.
‘He’s here today, is he?’ Victor Marriott enquired. ‘I was hoping he might be.’
Wilma took him through to the office that had once been his. Dan looked out of sorts, he thought, grey in the face. They exchanged pleasantries, talked about the miners’ strike and other current issues. Victor was enjoying himself, stimulated by the awareness of discussing such a matter with someone ‘in the know’. It irked him now that he had come about the other business. The golf club friend’s son had landed himself in a pretty pickle. Victor didn’t know the boy although he’d seen him playing cricket on the odd occasion and he was a fine bat; but this was a nasty business, this charge against the boy.
Reluctantly, the old gentleman turned the conversation to the reason for his visit. He explained it briefly, feeling a little demeaned himself having to trouble Dan, a Member of Parliament, with such a thing.
He finished the milky coffee Wilma had brought him, ate the Garibaldi biscuit (a sinful exercise as his wife had put him on a diet) and took his leave.
After he’d gone, Dan called Mickey into the office. She did most of the court work. She could think quickly, a great asset in a courtroom, although at times her legal arguments were so complicated it seemed the defendant ‘got off’ merely because nobody could understand the point Mickey was making and therefore there had to be an element of doubt. Dan had never been quite sure whether or not this was a deliberate tactic and did not see really how he could ask. It presented a dilemma peculiar to the legal profession wherein ethics were all yet tactics meant survival; where the degree of knowledge was more often than not a conscious decision.
‘How’s it going?’ he asked as she came into the office. He had not seen her earlier, had not really spoken to her for quite some weeks. He no longer drew a salary from the partnership. There were five partners and four juniors, and the majority of his work had been taken over between them, including Mickey, who was his protégée, the one he’d stuck his neck out for with the old man. And now, he not only recognized her ability, but hoped she was a friend. He liked her because she was clever and yet never paraded her intelligence. She was unassumingly able and in the company he kept these days that was a rare combination.
‘Not too bad,’ she answered him, ‘except for a shoplifting case I’ve got at the moment. This poor little woman stole a jumper, which would have been much too big for her anyway.’
Mickey was for the underdog, a leaning with which Dan could identify. He liked to think it was the reason he’d become a solicitor, and an MP, perhaps even the reason he’d married Charlotte although he’d got it wrong there.
‘No other problems then?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’
She had sat down opposite him, although only after he had indicated that she should. He watched her for a moment and wondered, not for the first time, whether he ought to ask her out to dinner one night. She was much younger than him, but did that matter? He was not sure, not sure whether it was this which prevented him from asking or whether he was merely using it as a more straightforward reason than all the others – fear of rejection, fear of spoiling the pleasantness of the relationship they already had, comparisons with Charlotte. He knew she did not have a man friend, a lover, at least he was fairly certain, although he could not understand why. She was really very attractive but he couldn’t tell whether he found her so because he knew and liked her; to the casual eye she might not appear anything very special. He ruminated on this and it made him feel a little less heavy within himself. He would not ask her out to dinner, of course he would not, but he was grateful to have been able to have the thought, especially today.
She too was talking about the miners’ strike, unaware that his thoughts had been elsewhere. He interrupted her as she was really only being polite, if slightly provocative and left-wing. He told her about the case the old man had brought in.
‘Will you take it?’ he asked her, after he’d passed on the brief details. ‘I’m sorry I can’t tell you a bit more but that’s all I know. I think Victor was rather embarrassed, but the boy’s father is one of his golfing cronies.’
‘It doesn’t sound very promising,’ Mickey said. ‘These sort of cases never are. Is it his first offence?’
‘I really don’t know, but let’s hope so.’
An appointment was made for the following week. When Mickey arrived at the office in the morning she looked in her diary and seeing the entry felt a sense of disap
pointment that two or three years ago would have been dread. She’d discovered though, that men of that type were not in any way frightening, just pathetic and depressing, casting a gloom over the day. Often they cried and she’d never quite learnt how to cope with this, whether to sympathize or ignore it. They were family men, some of them, terrified of their wives and children finding out, which they almost certainly would. That was the real punishment, the story in the local newspaper read by all the neighbours, never forgotten. At least this one today was not married, in fact for some reason she was expecting him to be little more than a boy, so that when he was shown into her room she thought at first he must be someone else, there to see her on some other, innocuous matter.
Mr Evans was about thirty. He was also confidently self-possessed and extremely good-looking.
Mickey put aside her pity and realized she was a little nervous. Mr Evans’ very blue eyes gazed at her with smiling openness. The whole thing was really very unfortunate: he’d been playing rugger, an away match, they’d all had rather a lot to drink afterwards, far too much to drive back.
‘There was a girl who’d been watching the match and she stayed on during the evening. She offered to drive my car back, which was nice of her, especially as there were so many of us, five or six, as I remember, I don’t think it could have been more.
‘Anyway, on the way home we had a bit of trouble with the car, loss of water. We had to stop. I’m afraid we really were very drunk and it was one of those ideas that seem like a good one at the time. The unfortunate part was when the police turned up. It wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds, after all, the car bonnet was up so the girl who’d been driving couldn’t see.’
Not Playing the Game Page 2
