He hadn’t much choice.
Chapter 14
The whole date through she will want to
be treated like Someone – ideally Lady
Someone. That means red carpet under
every footstep, waiters on best behaviour,
everything she wants before she realises
she wants it because you, Dream Man,
will anticipate her every whim.
Michael Woodrose was wearing out the pavement outside Ley-On when they arrived. He looked really cheesed off at being expected to fork out for the taxi.
‘Oh that is kind of you,’ gushed Jane.
‘I was afraid you weren’t coming.’ Idiot. Since when did a date arrive right on the dot?
He was almost handsome in a baby-faced sort of way, in his I-went-to-a-good-school uniform of tweed jacket, checked shirt and knitted red tie.
He had been slightly dreading the ‘friend’. In his (limited) experience decent-looking girls usually had a fat, spotty companion with a Sloppy Joe pullover and a hairy mole. Suzy was a rather wonderful surprise. They both were. He led the way into the cavernous restaurant in a happy wet dream. Waiters, who normally snubbed him, seemed to jump to attention at the sight of Jane and Suzy and treated him with new respect – and envy. Michael Woodrose sat opposite the pair of them, gazing from one to the other in happy disbelief. The waiter buzzed round him annoyingly.
‘Do you both like Chinese food? Or would you prefer something from the English menu?’
This was, in fact, a trick question. Michael was a terrible snob and always sneered delightedly at anyone who ordered plain roast chicken in an exotic restaurant, or ate their spaghetti with a knife and fork, or drank red wine with fish. It hadn’t dawned on him that there was a parallel universe of prejudices in which he, with his tweeds and well-drilled chopsticks, would offend on numerous counts: drinking halves of bitter; wearing ties with pullovers; tipping exactly ten per cent; bathing only once a week; poncing about in a college scarf.
Suzy was enjoying herself.
‘Whatever you say, Tiger.’
The waiter’s face twitched very, very slightly while he wondered what this seven-stone weakling had to offer these two. Tiger? Did he take them both at once? In the waiter’s hot and sour little mind a mental picture sprang up of some delicious English sandwich. He could barely concentrate on the order.
Michael Woodrose had been looking forward to ordering. A year in the pronunciation department had given him the basics of Cantonese inflection which he very much liked showing off. Even the normally poker-faced Chinese waiters found it hard not to laugh when he said ‘chow mein’. But today’s waiter wasn’t amused.
‘You give numbers. Numbers more quick.’
‘Oh. I see,’ sulked Michael, ‘Well in that case we’d like three 12s, a 17, a 23, a 28, a 36, one 41 and three 62s.’
‘Bingo!’ exclaimed Jane.
Michael Woodrose thought that this was really a bit common but then maybe not. The other one was laughing out loud and she wasn’t common at all. Very few fillings. By now he just wanted the waiter to go away so that he could concentrate on this amazing double vision of loveliness. Because they really were lovely. More paint than his mother would have liked but he didn’t mind that. If anything, he was flattered that they’d made the effort. Big eyes – two brown, two blue – soft pink lips and surprisingly large breasts. Padded? He hoped not.
Michael thought about breasts quite a lot. Breasts. The very word made him grateful for the generous cut of his flannels. He had a little collection of artistic photographs back at the flat. And some not so artistic that he’d bought from a Maltese chap in Old Compton Street. He hadn’t much experience of the real thing. A schoolfriend’s fourteen-year-old sister – an early developer – had allowed thirty-second gropes (timed mercilessly with the second hand of her gold-plated Timex) in exchange for sherbet lemons and there had been grudging fumbles under chunky jerseys while he was at Oxford but he was – as Suzy had suspected – a virgin. He had no plans to remain one. Indeed, only last week he had been lured to an upstairs room in Wardour Street by the promise of a ‘busty young model’ only to scuttle back down on finding a desiccated old tart picking her teeth on a dirty candlewick bedspread. And now here he was with two busty young models. And the irony of course was that he only needed one. But which? He watched them both, pinching fastidiously at their chop suey.
They were really very alike. Suzy seemed the livelier of the two. She was asking him something about D. H. Lawrence – there had been an article in one of the Sundays and she had absorbed it very cleverly. Give her a few of the learned weeklies and you could probably introduce her to colleagues. He imagined their faces. Brian, this is Suzy. And those soft red lips would smile – a slightly pitying smile at Brian with his stained tie and his dandruff and his flat-chested girlfriend (a primary-school teacher from High Wycombe). And Suzy would read and digest Encounter and Nation and then quietly dazzle with a few smart remarks about the modern novel – not too smart, obviously – Don’t waste time trying to be ‘smart’ with a man.
But of course the other one was rather lovely, too (if less chatty) and she did seem to have a narrower back. He imagined slipping that low-cut jumper off her shoulders and scooping one of those ripe young breasts from its black lace brassière (he had glimpsed the strap when she reached for a spring roll). He shifted into a more comfortable position.
‘Or do you?’ Suzy was saying.
‘Or do I what? I’m sorry. I was miles away.’
Suzy flashed him an unguarded glance from under those fluffy nylon lashes as if she knew exactly where his dirty little mind had travelled to.
‘Prefer blondes?’
What was the woman talking about?
‘Er. No. No-no-no. Far, far from it.’
He toasted them ineptly with his half of lager. Suzy sipped at her pineapple juice, eyelashes working overtime. Then she tossed her head back and laughed, showing those pretty white teeth. It was the pose from the matchbook: the pose of a woman having the time of her life. Jane stored the move away for future reference and opted to lean forward and work the conspiratory giggles.
Jane didn’t really like rice, she discovered. Not without jam on it, anyway. The food was all chopped up – God knew what meat was in it – and you ate it out of little blue and white sugar bowls. Michael appeared to be putting some kind of brown sauce on his but it tasted nothing like the normal kind. Jane was managing the chopsticks rather well – better than Michael actually – but the unfamiliar grip was giving her a pain in her hand.
The restaurant was quite full – not many places opened on a Sunday – and there were quite a lot of Chinese people which Michael seemed to think was a good sign although they’d probably eat any old rubbish. There was an English couple at the next table arguing half-heartedly about where to put the garden shed. She was all for putting it down at the end next to the dustbins with a bit of trellis in front. He wanted it bang next to the house (in case of bad weather). That was what marriage did to people. He was wrestling with a big plate of slippery fat noodles and she was eating roast chicken and chips and holding her knife like a pen.
Shed Woman was wearing home-made tan crêpe with powder-blue piping and she kept checking the banquette beside her to make sure her bag was safe. Nasty plastic thing. Navy blue. Didn’t go with the dress at all. She looked sidelong and sulky at Jane’s larky little get-up. She probably had a 22-inch waist when she got married.
Jane carried on pecking at the meat – chicken? She hoped so. And giggled obligingly at Michael who was boring on about some book he’d been reading. Never let him know you’re bored! He might be all right for humping suitcases but he was a bit of a wash-out conversationally. It was all very highbrow. Disarmament. Cyprus. But there was nothing intellectual about the way he stared at her bust. Suzy was marvellous, playing with him, pretending to know all about it – or maybe she did know all about it? Maybe it was in the Sunday Times.
Seemed a bit daft, really, just sitting there quoting the newspapers at each other.
Would they like to go to a jazz club later? And wasn’t Kenneth Tynan right about jazz being a post-mortem on a dissected melody? Tosser. Did she look like a girl who read Kenneth fucking Tynan? Of course she bloody didn’t. She looked like a girl who read True Romance and Romeo. So what was all that nonsense about? He was either taking the mick – which, given those hungry green eyes glued to the tilt of her bust, seemed unlikely – or he thought she’d be impressed.
Film their table and frame by frame Jane and Suzy would seem to be having the time of their lives, like an ad for king-size cigarettes. Envious glances flashed across the room: some, like the waiter, trying to work out how this chinless wonder had managed to swing such a five-star double date, others just wondering why their evening wasn’t turning out that well.
An old bloke at the corner table by the window was staring at them while his chopsticked hand ferried rice from his bowl to his moustache. Jane batted her eyelashes some more. The nylon filaments were strange and scratchy against her eyelids.
The old bloke by the window was actually Michael Woodrose’s boss from the department. He could only see the back of Woodrose’s tweed jacket but he could see both girls: young, laughing, confiding, teasing, hanging on Woodrose’s every word. He’d never thought of Woodrose as a ladykiller. False hope dawned. Maybe they were his sisters? No, he remembered now. Woodrose had brought his sister into the office once. Joyce? Jenny? Geraldine? Jill. That was it: wan little blonde in horn-rims and very pronounced views on pronunciation. Only she pronounced it pronounciation. Amazing how many people did that.
What could Woodrose possibly be saying that entertained them so thoroughly? The last ‘conversation’ his boss had had with him was a Woodrose monologue on the theatre of the absurd. Woodrose had just discovered Beckett at the Royal Court and would bore anyone who would listen with the ins and outs of Beckett and Ionesco. Parker, the other junior assistant, told him exactly where he could stick it but the department secretary had let herself get cornered for a good ten minutes while Woodrose showed off his new knowledge – most of it stolen from an article in some egg-headed weekly. She wasn’t rescued until the Brain of Britain producer had rung to check the pronunciation of Ottoline Morrell. Philistine. Michael’s boss sneaked another look at the table. Woodrose could hardly be regaling these lovely young things with N.F. Simpson’s greatest hits. They didn’t look like the women who went to the Royal Court. Far too clean for a start.
Finally, after what seemed like days of self-glorifying claptrap, the waiter brought the bill and Michael spent an embarrassing few minutes checking the maths. Jane reckoned that if you weren’t one of those people who could add up columns of figures in their head – like Uncle George – you should just pay whatever it said. They’d probably done most of the cheating when they priced the bloody menu in the first place – it was only a few scraps and some rice, after all, not a proper dinner. Woodrose had obviously undertipped the waiter and they had to wait for their coats which he then fumbled them into before they walked out into the night. Where next?
‘Are you going to take us dancing, Mr Woodrose?’
He winced like a salted slug.
Michael Woodrose couldn’t dance. His mother had insisted on lessons after watching him sneering on the sidelines of a birthday party when he was thirteen. Spotty, boring but peculiarly arrogant, the teenage Michael’s only interests were wanking and the wireless.
He was not a hit with the (mostly female) dancing class. They complained about his sweaty hands, his big feet, the way he stared dumbly at their cardiganed chests. Mummy relented and he was too vain and proud to try again. Which meant that dances – the one time you were actually licensed to grope girls – were terrible ordeals spent loafing on the touchline with half a pint of bitter trying to talk smart while better men foxtrotted their way over the stocking tops.
‘I don’t dance.’ He used to practise saying it in the mirror: world-weary, a little contemptuous, a tiny bit reproachful – how could they talk of dancing with so much sadness and uncertainty in the world? It never had cut much ice and Jane and Suzy were no different. Jane knew he’d say no to dancing. He just wasn’t the type.
He took a deep breath. Would they like to come back to his flat for a nightcap?
‘Your flat?’ Suzy was surprised – and impressed. He looked more like the type that lived at home.
‘It belongs to my uncle but he’s down in Sussex most of the time.’
Michael’s ‘uncle in Sussex’ was a bit like Jane’s ‘aunt in Surrey’. Uncle Jack ran a chain of gents’ outfitters in the Bexhill area but there was no need to dwell on that. Gents took a lot of fitting out in the Bexhill area and Uncle Jack had spent much of the proceeds on a West End bolt hole where he could entertain willing young boys without endangering trade. He popped up about once a fortnight and Michael would doss down on a friend’s sofa or go home to his mother’s in Sevenoaks until the coast was clear.
‘I’ve got some whisky . . . and I think there’s some crème de menthe’ (Uncle Jack’s younger friends liked a drop of crème de menthe).
Jane didn’t especially want to go back to their freezing cold flat but she wasn’t too sure about the nightcap at his place either. What for?
‘There’s a taxi,’ said Suzy. It wasn’t a statement; it was an order.
‘I’ve got the car,’ trumped Michael, happily. The girls purred with surprise. He didn’t look much like a driver – but then it didn’t look much of a car. Uncle Jack’s finances had been stretched buying the flat, let alone the runabout to go with it, so he’d settled for a smart new Ford. He’d wanted red but red was Export Only for some peculiar reason – why? It was only paint, for God’s sake – so he settled for black with snazzy red seats.
‘Ooh!’ squeaked Suzy. ‘I’ve driven one of these. My uncle used to have one.’ Uncle. Like hell.
Woodrose became very panicky and started muttering about third party and no syncromesh.
‘What makes you think I can’t double declutch? Cheek. Daddy taught me. I can double declutch in my sleep – often do as a matter of fact.’
He was really panicking now but Suzy was already behind the wheel – first time she’d opened a car door for herself since she left school.
‘Have you passed your test?’
‘Oh don’t be such an old woman, Mikey.’
Had she passed her test? Unlikely. She might be all right with double declutching but she used far too much choke and her steering was terrifying. She blithely shot a red light crossing Oxford Street. Suzy carried on regardless, squealing with excitement, fag stuck jauntily between her smiling red lips. Her skirt had ridden high above her knees but Michael Woodrose was past caring. There was a horrible knot of fear in his stomach, a nasty, queasy feeling that dredged up blushing memories of long-forgotten boyhood crimes. Uncle Jack’s Ford Consul might not be much of a car but every Sunday he was in London he would be out with a chamois leather polishing the chrome trim, waxing the bodywork. One of his young friends had been sick in it once – having discovered (a bit late in the day) that red biddy and blue curaçao didn’t really mix. Uncle Jack had blown a fuse, obsessively rinsing and wiping the floor and clearing out all the crevices in the map pocket with an old toothbrush. God knew what he’d do if anyone scratched the paintwork.
‘This is it, on the corner.’
Suzy braked very abruptly, and stalled to a stop outside the mansion block, thoroughly exhilarated by her little spin.
‘That was fab, darling, I must get a car. How much are cars, darling?’
You could practically hear the tumblers working in that little tart’s brain of hers. Would the generous Mr Swan be good for a car as well as a flat?
‘I do wish we had a car. Maybe we should see about getting one. Can you drive, Janey?’
She thought of Uncle George teaching her to drive round the block in his old Austin.
‘Y
es, actually.’
Well, if you called that driving she could bloody drive.
Michael Woodrose was back to normal now, able to appreciate Suzy’s stocking tops. Had she worn panties this evening? Jane wondered. Probably. It was a cheap Chinese, not a Mayfair flat after all.
Uncle Jack’s flat wasn’t too bad so long as Uncle Jack wasn’t actually in it. The old boy gave the place a rather snacky smell of pipe tobacco and hair oil and suits that were pressed but never cleaned but he hadn’t been up to town for nearly three weeks (up to his eyes in the January stock-take) and the whiff was starting to fade.
The phone was ringing as they came in.
‘No, Mr Woodrose is away. No. No. I’m his nephew. No. No, honestly. I really am his nephew.’
The girls sat at each end of the chesterfield while Michael poured two very large crème de menthes and a small whisky. He remembered now that you were supposed to get them to talk about themselves. They liked that, apparently.
‘So, er, what sort of modelling do you do?’
‘Lingerie mostly,’ lied Suzy.
This was just to get him at it, of course. She was breathing oddly so that her bust rose and fell.
‘We do quite a lot of double shots. One of us in the long line, the other in the strapless. We’re both sample size, you see. Both E cups.’
Michael had gone the colour of his tie.
‘And I do quite a bit of photographic work for lipsticks. Just my lips. Showing all the different colours.’
A Vision of Loveliness Page 13
