‘Susie,’ Kate said. The street light, and the light above the restaurant’s fascia board, revealed the young man who had come in with the sneering, flamboyant girl. He was wearing the same loose, dark coat, with the collar turned up.
‘Oh. Susie.’
‘Can I help you?’ Kate said. ‘Did you leave something?’
‘Oh no. No. It was just that you were so kind—’
‘I don’t think I was,’ Kate said firmly. ‘I don’t think I said anything. I was too surprised to say anything.’
‘You looked kind. It meant a lot. I was feeling pretty awful, as you can probably imagine.’
‘Well, I’m glad,’ Kate said. She took her gloves out of her jacket pocket and began to pull them on.
‘It wasn’t just that you were kind,’ the man said. ‘It was more than that. I really liked the look of you. I do, I really do.’
Kate took a step away. ‘I’ve got to get home.’
‘Please,’ he said, putting a hand out. ‘Don’t be alarmed. I’m not a nutter, I’m just not doing this very well because I’ve never done it before. My name is Mark. Mark Hathaway. I’m head of the English department at a private tutorial college. Perfectly on the line, you see.’
‘Well,’ Kate said, laughing, ‘how do you do, Mark Hathaway.’
‘And you?’
‘Kate.’
‘Kate what?’
‘Kate Bain,’ Kate said.
‘May I walk you home, Kate Bain?’
Kate hesitated. Now that the evenings weren’t pitch-black by four-thirty, Leonard didn’t draw his curtains so early, but sat at his window, like an elderly heron, watching the street for incident.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Are you married?’
‘No.’
‘Then what is the harm in my escorting you home?’
‘This is all happening in the half-dark,’ Kate said. ‘It feels peculiar.’
‘I think it feels exciting.’
She took a step away. ‘I’m going,’ Kate said. ‘Thank you for your offer, but I’m going now. Alone.’
He followed her. ‘Please may I see you in daylight? Will you have lunch with me?’
‘No,’ Kate said without conviction.
‘Coffee, then. Meet me for coffee. Please.’
‘I don’t think so—’
‘Look,’ he said, and he took her arm. ‘Please just look. I’m a straight bloke who happens to be charmed by your appearance and your manner. Meet me for coffee, just once, and if it isn’t a success I will never trouble you again, cross my heart and hope to die.’
Kate removed her arm. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Just one cup of coffee.’
‘Thursday?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll meet you at the entrance to the Golden Cross. Eleven-fifteen.’
‘Why aren’t you teaching?’
‘I am. But I’m not at eleven-fifteen on Thursday.’ He stepped back and the light from a nearby street lamp fell on his rumpled dark head. ‘Goodbye, Kate Bain, Miss. Till Thursday.’
When she reached Richmond Villa, having paused to buy chops for supper and collect James’s only suit from the cleaners (who would collect his suit in future? He would, of course. Oh God. Don’t think about it), Leonard was waiting. James had been in, and gone out again, with Hugh, for a drink, and Leonard was bursting with news.
‘Give you three guesses—’
‘What about?’ Kate said. She looked round the kitchen. Mrs Cheng had left it as she usually did, with the floor and taps and surfaces gleaming, and all the room’s intractable muddle of living piled in a reproachful heap on the table.
‘Mindless yellow peasant,’ Leonard said, poking the pile. A small avalanche of opened letters slid to the floor.
‘Don’t call her that. Not even as a joke.’
‘She doesn’t mind. Adores me. Hide like a rhino. Guess what.’
Kate began to transfer little heaps of the muddle back on to the dresser and worktops, where it usually lived.
‘Can’t possibly guess.’
Leonard craned forward on his stick. He’d had a lovely day, first three hours of Mrs Cheng, now a really first-rate morsel of gossip.
‘Old Bat Bachelor believes in euthanasia!’
Kate had paused to read part of a letter from Joss’s school, saying that they were trying to arrange a student exchange with a high school in Kiev, and could they please have parental co-operation over this.
‘Euthanasia?’
‘Euthanasia, my dear, half-educated dimwit, is the term commonly applied to the direct painless killing of the incurably ill or insane.’
Kate looked up. ‘I know.’
‘James and Hugh took old Beatrice out to tea. Randolph, no less. I said to James, “What did you talk about?” and he said, “Euthanasia. She believes in euthanasia.”’
‘So what,’ Kate said rigidly.
‘So nothing. Just thought you’d like to know.’
‘Why should I want to know?’
‘Just thought you’d like to keep tabs on James.’
‘Stop it,’ Kate said furiously. ‘Stop it. I never have and I never will. What James does is no concern of mine.’
Leonard hesitated. He had gone too far. He craned towards Kate.
‘Marry him,’ Leonard pleaded. ‘It’s what he wants. It’s what you want. Do it. Marry him.’
Kate turned away. ‘I can’t,’ she said.
‘Why? Why the devil not?’
‘I can’t explain. You’d never understand.’
Leonard let his breath out in a windy sigh. Then he limped to the door. ‘In that case,’ he said, as he creaked out, ‘you ought to leave. It’s the only decent thing you can do.’
Late that night, sitting in the bath while James brushed his teeth at the basin, Kate said, ‘I gather you had tea at the Randolph.’
James spat and stooped for a mouthful of water from the cold tap.
‘I took Hugh to meet Beatrice. It was meant to be a distraction and actually it was rather successful. He’s dreading his golf course.’
Kate began to wash one foot with exaggerated thoroughness.
‘Leonard said you talked about euthanasia.’
James peered at his teeth in the mirror above the basin.
‘They may all be my own, but they don’t half look like it. Do I look sixty-one or a hundred and sixty-one?’
‘So you won’t tell me about Miss Bachelor,’ Kate said, starting on the other foot.
James turned to look at her.
‘What would you like to know?’
Kate glared. ‘Nothing.’
‘My darling Katie,’ James said, ‘I’ll tell you anything you want to know. You know that.’
‘I wouldn’t have known about this tea party, except for Leonard—’
‘I didn’t tell you because you’ve made it abundantly plain you don’t want me to. There is nothing in the least furtive about my friendship with Beatrice, except your attitude to it. Yes, we had tea. Yes, we talked about euthanasia, and Hugh is now all fired up about a telly programme.’ He came to kneel by the bath. He put out a hand and touched Kate’s breast. She flinched.
‘Katie.’
She shook her head.
‘Why not?’
She turned her head away.
‘Oh Katie,’ James said sadly, getting up. ‘How I wish you’d at least talk to me.’
Kate bowed her head. ‘I would if I could.’
‘You don’t laugh. I haven’t heard you laugh for weeks.’
‘No,’ Kate said. She clenched her hands round the sponge until her knuckles gleamed white. ‘No. I’ve forgotten how.’
The Rapswell Golf and Country Club sent a car for Hugh, a Mercedes with a polite driver who asked diffidently for Hugh’s autograph, for his daughter. Hugh had had a discussion with Julia, and then several more with himself, about what he should wear, and ended up in a blazer that he said made him look like a game show host.
‘You look great,’ Julia said seriously.
‘Where are your golf bats?’ George asked.
‘I’m going to talk about golf, not play it.’
‘Don’t you be so sure, Mr Hunter,’ the driver said later. ‘They’ll have you up to all sorts of stunts. They’re a very lively crowd up at Rapswell.’
Hugh made faces of mock panic. ‘I couldn’t hit a golf ball. I couldn’t hit a beach ball at two paces.’
They drove peacefully through the north Cotswolds. Hugh, who had chosen to sit beside the driver in an effort to appear approachable (‘Good old pro,’ he told himself), began to feel happier as the miles rolled by, less resentful and more as if he were approaching a performance. His feelings had also, without question, taken an upward turn after the extraordinary tea party in the Randolph Hotel, and he had spent much of the night after it planning a memo on a projected programme for a mate of his whom he could trust to be executive producer. He had no intention of telling Kevin McKinley, not, at least, until the programme was about to go out, and it was too late to halt it, to fuss about consulting the ITC, and risk having it stopped. He’d also thought a good deal about Miss Bachelor. He saw, now, why James had made a friend of her. You could say typical spinster of Beatrice, you could say she was dried-up, dusty, bookish, sexless, but for all that she had a powerful appeal, the appeal of someone with intellectual poise and the zest added by originality and by wit. ‘Why not indeed,’ she’d said to Hugh about his proposal that she should appear on television. No fluster, no old-ladyish demurring and terror of being conspicuous. ‘Why not indeed,’ she’d said. Bravo, Hugh thought, bravo, Miss Bachelor.
‘Nearly there, sir,’ the driver said.
Hugh looked out of his window at the landscape which had abruptly turned from being a nondescript succession of fields and bungalows to being a manicured series of small green hills and curved yellow sandpits.
‘Cost millions,’ the driver said proudly. ‘Best course in the Midlands. All-weather greens, club house with jacuzzi and gym, you name it. Those bunkers are filled with sand brought in from Saudi Arabia.’
‘Is Saudi sand better than our sand?’
The driver looked shocked. ‘’Course, sir. They had to fly it in. It wasn’t just dug up at Bournemouth.’
The car turned in between curved walls ending in huge stone gateposts crowned with lions holding shields. Chiselled stone tablets pronounced, ‘Rapswell Golf and Country Club. Members Only’.
‘There’s a waiting list of hundreds,’ the driver said. ‘Half Birmingham wants to get in.’
The smooth drive was edged with smoother verges, the latter protected by a spiked chain looped between short, varnished posts.
‘It looks very tidy,’ Hugh said.
The driver said reverently, ‘I tell you, Mr Hunter, it’s the last word.’
Outside the club house, a vast verandahed structure which would have looked perfectly at home in Texas, the club chairman and committee waited in violent agitation. The scheduled golfing star had been stricken by a gastric virus and had cried off only an hour before. They were in despair. They had telephoned every substitute they could think of, but no-one was available at such short notice, no-one, that is, of any distinction. They clustered round Hugh, almost pawing him in their anxiety and disappointment.
‘Well,’ Hugh said. ‘You will simply have to make do with me.’
‘Mr Hunter,’ the Chairman began. ‘Forgive me but—’
‘Why not?’ said Hugh, smiling at him. ‘Why not? I’m game for anything. I’ve never played golf in my life, but I’ve been performing for over thirty years.’ He waved to the television cameras waiting at the edge of the group. ‘Morning, lads!’
One of the cameramen, who knew him, waved back. The committee looked at one another.
‘You haven’t a choice, really,’ Hugh said. ‘You’ve half an hour to kick-off. I’ll carry it, I promise you, I’ll open this club like no club has ever been opened before. Which of you is going to give me a golf lesson, on camera, that is? Then we’ll do a tour of the facilities. I’ll have a wallow in the jacuzzi if you like. Anything.’ He leaned forward and patted the Chairman’s arm. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘trust me.’
George and Edward Hunter, wearing identical dark-blue dressing gowns piped in scarlet, shared a bean bag in front of the television. They were not usually allowed television as late as this, but tonight was an exception because Hugh was appearing on Midland Miscellany, the daily round-up of news items from around the region. Behind George and Edward, Hugh and Julia sat on a cream-coloured sofa. Hugh had a tumbler of whisky in his hand; Julia, a glass of white wine diluted with soda water.
The screen filled with some stone writing. Julia read it out. It said, ‘Rapswell Golf and Country Club. Members Only’. Then a voice said that the television personality, Hugh Hunter, had opened the club earlier in the day and there had been a crowd of over eight hundred people. There were pictures of a huge, house-like thing, and then some of a room full of sofas and a lot of men standing about holding glasses, and a girl with a lot of teeth wearing a bathing suit under a towelling dressing gown, and then there was Hugh.
‘You took your jacket off!’ Edward said reprovingly.
‘I had to,’ Hugh said, ‘watch.’
They watched. They saw Hugh being taught how to hold a golf club by a man with a grey moustache. They saw Hugh swing the club at a ball and miss and go spinning about, clowning, apparently out of control, and then fall over. They saw him pick himself up and do it again and land up in the arms of a lady in a red suit who was laughing so much she could hardly stand up herself. Then they saw him flailing away at another golf ball in a sandpit and then trying to kick it nearer the little hole in the middle of the green, and being told off by the man with the moustache, except the man with the moustache was laughing all the time and didn’t sound very cross. Then they saw Hugh running into the huge building chased by a crowd of people, and jumping into a sort of enormous bath, and then the camera got faster and faster and Hugh went scampering in and out of rooms, pursued by all these people, and there was very loud, very fast music and suddenly there was a great banging chord in the music and the camera stopped dead on Hugh, flopped out in an armchair, with his eyes crossed. The twins cheered and squealed and fell off the bean bag.
‘I have to tell you,’ Hugh said to Julia, ‘I was an absolute wow.’
‘I can see—’
‘They want me to go back and host the Christmas dance.’
‘Will you?’
‘They doubled my fee, you know. I could bear the Christmas dance for another double fee.’
‘Oh Hugh,’ said Julia, taking his hand and smiling at him.
‘Long ago, before you were born, I did that kind of thing in a pantomime at Kidderminster. I’d forgotten I could.’ He leaned forward towards the rolling, giggling twins. He felt tremendously happy. ‘Well, then. Was I funny?’
‘Yes!’ shouted Edward. He scrambled to his feet and began to tear round the room. ‘This is you, this is you, this is you!’
George joined him. A lamp, its flex caught by their flying passage, tottered on its table.
‘Stop it!’ Julia said, but she was smiling.
‘Here’s you!’ George yelled, leaping into an armchair and scattering cushions. ‘Here’s you in that bath!’ He collapsed on his back and kicked his legs about.
‘Amazing,’ Hugh said, watching him, holding Julia’s hand, ‘amazing, isn’t it, to be paid six hundred pounds and a case of champagne for doing exactly that?’
‘But they loved you, you can see that, they loved you.’
‘He looked away for a minute and then took a gulp of his whisky.
‘Yes,’ he said. He sounded pleased and confident. ‘Yes, they bloody well did.’
Six
Mark Hathaway bought Kate a cappuccino with grated chocolate scattered on
the foam. He wore blue jeans and a black jersey of indefinable elegance and he looked, to Kate, like a French film star. He also looked young. His age worried Kate; he might turn out to be younger than she.
He said, sitting down opposite her, ‘You look terrific.’
‘Could we,’ Kate said, ‘start with a more ordinary conversation?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like details about ourselves.’
‘Specification?’
‘If you like.’
‘Right,’ he said, grinning. ‘Five-foot-ten inches, eleven stone, and thirty-two. Born in Hereford, chorister at the Cathedral, minor public school, Oxford, teacher training college, more Oxford, single. Father dead, mother still living, one brother married with two children. Salary adequate, prospects ditto. Restless. Your turn.’
Kate swallowed. ‘Thirty-six, single, daughter of fourteen, born in Oxford, educated at a comprehensive in Oxford, no further education, no professional qualifications. Both parents living, but hardly see them because my mother is a Catholic, and disapproves of the fact that I’ve lived with someone for eight years and haven’t married them. Two older brothers, one in London, one in the North. Five foot-three and seven and three-quarter stone. Restless.’
‘Wow,’ Mark said. He looked at her. She drank a mouthful of her coffee and looked back.
‘Of course you know the bit I’m most interested in,’ Mark said.
‘My living with James,’ Kate said, without coquetry.
‘Yes. Eight years. It’s like a marriage.’
‘I know.’
‘Why haven’t you married him?’
‘I never thought it would be right.’
‘Right? What kind of right? Morally right? Emotionally right? Appropriate?’
‘All that,’ Kate said. ‘Everything.’
‘And you still don’t?’
‘More than ever, just now.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘He’s much older than me. Twenty-five years older than me.’
‘Lord. Like a father. Don’t you—’ He paused, then he said, ‘Don’t you miss being with someone young, someone your own age?’
‘I don’t know,’ Kate said. ‘I haven’t been, not for eight years. I’ve just been with James.’
The Men and the Girls Page 8
