by Angela Huth
He was not among the guests.
‘Looking for me, little girl lost?’
The cement man swung her into the dark room where couples were rasping together, hoping for some flame of romance. Imogen felt her partner’s fat lips nibble at her cheek, and the wedge of his thigh fought to prise its way between her knees. Suddenly near to unaccountable tears, she broke away from him with no explanation and went upstairs. There, on the landing, she found Di the student brushing small dry leaves from her hair. Imogen hesitated.
‘You haven’t seen Piero, Di, have you?’ she asked.
The brushing stopped.
‘Why, no. Well, yes. I have, as a matter of fact. He just came back from taking a walk. He must be on the terrace.’
‘Thank you.’
Imogen turned to go back downstairs. She paused when Di called to her.
‘Say, Mrs . . .? If you don’t mind my saying . . .’ she was brushing her hair again. ‘You look awful pretty.’
‘Thank you, Di.’
Imogen hurried back to the terrace. Her heart was beating very fast. She saw Piero sitting between Camilla and Olivia, drink in hand, a small leaf on his shoulder. He smiled at her.
‘Where’ve you been?’
She managed to smile back.
‘Where’ve you been?’
‘That’s what we’ve all been asking,’ said Camilla.
‘I’ve been sitting out in the garden, not two yards from here, watching you all through the screen. Listening. Hearing terrible things about myself.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Olivia. She got up to say goodbye to departing guests. Imogen took her seat. Piero patted her hand.
‘Serves her right for asking in the neighbours,’ he said.
The neighbours were emerging from the darkened room where their dancing had left them in various states of disarray. The women patted at their hair while the men, hands deep in their pockets, made what they hoped were inconspicuous arrangements to their private parts.
‘Sex maniacs, the lot of them,’ said Piero. ‘I wish they’d go.’
Imogen wished the same. It was already two o’clock: not much of the last night left. Giles, rather drunk, opened more bottles of wine. They could hear cars driving away too fast. Olivia returned to the terrace, for the first time careless of her deportment, hair blowing into her eyes.
‘Thank God they’ve gone,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. You were all marvellous. Now we can play the truth game.’
She looked round the table, provocative. Her four guests remained silent. Her husband scratched his neck slowly, savagely.
‘That’s a silly idea, darling,’ he said. ‘Always ends in disaster.’
‘I’m for it. Anyone else?’ Olivia’s eyes circled the table again.
‘One round,’ said Piero. ‘Then bed.’
Imogen closed her eyes, watched spinning particles of gold beneath the lids. Her hands, round a glass of icy wine, felt too far away to raise the glass to her lips. She heard them asking each other innocent questions. She heard desultory answers. No one’s heart seemed to be in the game.
‘Your turn, Imo.’
She opened her eyes, fixed them on Piero. He had the look of a victim, hunched.
‘Is it true,’ she said, ‘you spent some time earlier this evening sitting in the garden, just beyond the screen, listening to what we were saying?’
‘No,’ he said, at once, and although she did not take her eyes from him, Imogen felt the shift of the others’ glances, one to another. The question, which she had tried to resist, exhausted her. The answer, a mere confirmation, flayed her. She managed to stand, with some dignity, and announce she was going to bed. If her smile looked as grim as it felt, the others were in no condition to notice it.
She went to her room, and let her clothes drop to the floor. She got into bed. For a summer night, the sheets were icy.
Two hours passed. During that time, propped up against a bank of ruffled pillows, Imogen watched the square of sky in the window change from dark to pale. There was no colour: a blanched dawn.
She listened to occasional noises, signals she could not understand. Muffled talk on the stairs, a sob. Camilla’s voice, she thought. Then a single step, Piero’s, going past her door. She waited for him to return. She imagined it might be a long time: he would have to wait till the others were all upstairs.
Much later there was sudden laughter from the terrace. Then the sound of two people heavily creeping. Doors shutting softly. Long, long silence. Piero didn’t come.
Imogen looked at herself in a small mirror. She had had no energy to remove her make-up, so in the opalescent light her face was a clown’s: thick eyelashes and shining lips. Considering the energies of the weekend she thought she looked quite good. Beautiful, Piero had said earlier. Piero! What was he doing?
With no conscious plan in mind Imogen got out of bed and crept to the door. She paused, opened it. Listened. Silence. She tiptoed down two passages, winced at every creaking board. Piero’s room was at the opposite end of the house. Reaching it, at last, she found the door shut. If he was asleep, she thought, she would wake him gently, slip in beside him, lightly chiding.
Not the sort of thing she was in the habit of doing, she reminded herself: but it was the last night, and she was in America. Liberation seemed in place.
Quietly she opened his door. The bed was empty. Untouched. Imogen listened to the thudding of her own heart for a while, and felt the chill of dawn, from some passage window, about her shoulders. Then, from the room next to Piero’s, she heard a low moaning, a laugh, a pleading voice.
‘Please don’t go back to her, not again, not tonight. Please stay with me.’ It was almost a cry.
Imogen crept back to her room. Cold, she sat upright in bed again and regarded once more the empty sky that filled the window.
A couple more hours went by, this time filled with pantomime. Imogen watched, glassy-eyed as the characters played out their parts in her mind. A familiar figure she recognised as herself seemed to be the heroine: attractive, confident, swooshing about, watching the smiles of admirers, never still, eyes always on some further horizon. Men followed, men returned, and on she strode, this figure, strong in the belief of her own power. Piero was in the queue, in his blue shirt, undone to the waist for some reason. When it came to his turn he danced with her: they spun off their feet then earthed again. And back on the ground he stretched out his arm towards something, a bundle of rags in the corner. He touched the bundle and it stood up, an ugly girl. He put his arm about her and they walked away. The heroine was left standing, mists swirling about her feet, shouting after Piero, but the shouts were silent. After a while, words came, quietly. ‘For the first time,’ Imogen heard herself saying, out loud. And then came the laughter. She laughed herself to scorn. She laughed wildly, her body churning among the frilled pillows and cold sheets. The humour of the situation, suddenly clear to her, gave great strength. She knew as she laughed like a maddened creature, stifling the noise with the bedclothes, that she had passed some kind of crisis. Total vulnerability would never exist again. A protection against caring, and trusting, and believing, and assuming, would take its place. Perhaps even those mean stabs of jealousy would return no more. Ah, strength. The tiredness of her body and mind were nothing to her strength. But there was just one, last, important thing to complete the night: the hunting of the truth.
At six Imogen heard the cry of a child, and the heavy clump of Di the student going down to the kitchen. Swiftly she left her room again, ran to Piero’s, careless of creaking boards this time. He was asleep in bed. She climbed in beside him, stirring him.
‘Oh, it’s you . . . I’m so sorry. I was so tired last night.’ He opened his eyes. Imogen, resting on her elbow, looked down at him.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I know what happened last night. No-please don’t deny it. And please believe – I can’t ever explain why, but something odd happened to me in the night, too. Anyhow, whatever it was, I don’
t mind. Do you understand – I don’t mind. In fact, I think it’s all rather funny.’ She began to laugh. Piero joined her.
‘Oh my Christ, what was I thinking of? She seduced me in the kitchen, you know. Just lifted up her tee-shirt, stirring the spaghetti, and said how about it, and she loved me and all that crap. Then, in the garden, I don’t know, all that dope . . . I got quite turned on, her dreadful spectacles. After, in bed, of course it was a disaster, all her proclamations and worries about getting pregnant. She was a virgin, poor thing, out of her mind with jealousy of you.’
‘What about the others?’
‘Goodness knows who was doing what to whom. There were terrible noises. I saw Olivia and David out of the window walking towards the graveyard.’ Imogen laughed again. Piero pulled her towards him.
‘Here, it’s so early, and our last day.’
They made love. From the kitchen beneath them came the noises of Di the student as she set about the dreadful task of washing up.
In what was left of the morning everyone was subdued, drank nothing but fresh orange juice. Di the student, emboldened by her experience, emerged from the kitchen terrace where she fed the children and cleared the tables in a dreamlike manner. Imogen could see she tried to hear what Piero was saying: leaning in his usual position by Imogen’s chair, he soliloquised about his work, seemed unaware of Di’s presence. Then he broke into Italian, explaining she had caught him for a moment in the kitchen to ask him to write to her, and not to forget her, and to send her some money if she got pregnant ‘Che pazza,’ he said, and sounded quite hostile.
For a moment, refilling jugs of orange in the kitchen, Imogen too was caught by Di.
‘I just wanted to say I’m so sorry, Mrs . . . about last night. If I snatched him from you.’
‘That’s all right. He’s nothing to do with me. Just a weekend friend.’
‘But you’re going back to New York with him?’
‘Yes, but I go home to England tomorrow.’
‘You’re lucky, you’ll see him again. I wonder if . . .’
‘Look here, Di, don’t wonder: don’t hope, don’t think, don’t remember.’ She knew she sounded tired and old. ‘He’ll never come back. It was just another night for him.’
‘Yes. But it was terrible, you know, those first two nights, hearing you. My God, I thought, I can’t bear it. This is the first man I want. I must have him, I thought. What can I do? You, there, having him, and not really caring. It wasn’t fair, I thought. So I showed him my breasts, bigger than yours by lots.’ Imogen smiled. ‘It worked, didn’t it? It worked. And then you must have heard us, so you knew how it felt for me.’ Imogen smiled again. There was no point in explaining that part of it Di the student had miscalculated. They said goodbye, then, shaking hands, suddenly formal.
Later, everybody but Olivia left. Piero, Imogen noticed, did not bother to find Di and say farewell: he left five dollars for her on the kitchen table.
That night in New York she and Piero ate quantities of raw fish in a Japanese restaurant and drank too much saki. Near to exhaustion by now, some adrenalin kept them going. There was no sleep that night: much speculation about what the others had been up to. Imogen felt half inclined to tell Piero what had really happened to her on Sunday night. Then, in her new wisdom, she kept silent. Traumatic experiences that end well, she decided, are even more private than those that end badly. Next day in the darkness of the Algonquin bar, mid-morning, she drank a whisky-sour for final strength, and felt quite grateful to Piero. All women should learn to take advantage of such monsters, then minor adventures would be happier. She was quite impatient to go, even: when the porter announced her taxi was ready Piero said he wouldn’t come to the door, he didn’t want to say goodbye. Had it not been for Sunday night, Imogen realised she would have minded such a juvenile decision. As it was, with genuine glee she left him without a word. And in the aeroplane, glancing at the distant land for a last look at Up-State New Jersey, she bought champagne to celebrate the first of many happy endings. Piero’s face and voice and feel and smell wonderfully extinguished themselves from her tired mind, and in all her new wisdom she slept.
The Outing
Mrs Christopher Radcliffe, as the wife of an M.P., was a practised speaker. Since she had married she had made dozens of speeches, opened numerous shows, shops and fêtes. Nevertheless, she still felt slight unease before a public occasion, however small, and this nervous tension always seemed to mar her judgement about precisely how long it would take to reach her destination.
On the Saturday afternoon of the local fête, which was held every year in early summer, Mrs Radcliffe drove her car very slowly along the narrow road that twisted over the moors. She was a good ten minutes early. Just before entering the village she stopped the car in a gateway to check her appearance. Navy straw stetson at a nice angle; neat belted coat; navy gloves; sensible shoes for tramping from stall to stall. Not too ostentatious for the country. She should do, she thought.
Miss Warburton, head of the local branch of the Country Women’s Guild, was looking out for Mrs Radcliffe as she drove up to the village green.
‘Oh, Mrs Radcliffe. How kind of you to come.’
‘Hello.’ Mrs Radcliffe brandishing her practised smile. ‘How nice to see you again. All right if I park here?’
She was aware of a small flutter among the onlookers as she got out of the car.
‘I hope we’ll be lucky with the weather.’ Miss Warburton was a little nervous. She led Mrs Radcliffe across the village green. The grass was a sour yellow: the colour grass goes before a storm. Huge oak trees surrounded the green, towering into the thunderous sky, their leaves an ominous colour, too. Behind the trees stood the small village houses: built of West Country grey stone, the deep-set windows in their gaunt façades showing glimpses of snug rooms lit with flowers.
‘It looks as if it might hold out,’ said Mrs Radcliffe. ‘Let’s hope it does.’
They reached a trestle table that had been set with a cloth and a long, narrow vase of carnations stuck into a ruffle of fern. Mrs Radcliffe took her place behind the flowers and nodded at a few familiar faces. She looked about her: the stalls weren’t up to much, at a glance, but she would make straight for the home-made cakes. It was easy genuinely to appreciate them. There wasn’t a bad crowd, for a dull day. But they were a bit scattered. With no microphone, she’d have to raise her voice. She could be away, she calculated, in just under an hour.
‘I am so pleased to be able to welcome today,’ Miss Warburton was saying, ‘Mrs Christopher Radcliffe – wife, of course, of our local M.P.’ A smattering of claps from the listeners. Mrs Radcliffe smiled in response and turned to take an interest in the introduction. She would keep on smiling, now, till the end of the welcome, which Miss Warburton was having some trouble in reading from a small piece of paper that fluttered nervously in her hand.
A couple of hours previously Miss Pears had been told it was time to get ready for the outing. This news, like almost any news that involved action on her part, put her mind into a considerable flurry. What should she take with her? Her lunch, for one thing. That was sure. She had it beside her on the bed, in a scrumpled up paper bag. Two hard boiled eggs, a piece of cold fried bacon and a buttered roll. That would be nice, later on.
She glanced out of the high windows to the dull sky. Scarf, she thought. My pink or my blue? It might come on to rain, but then again it might not. But when in doubt wear a scarf, had always been her motto. Mrs Grace had only set her hair yesterday. It would be a pity to have it all come out in a sudden shower. Money – how much money should she take? They’d been told it would be a nice outing, to a garden party or a fête or something – she had forgotten exactly – up on the moors. There would be a chance to spend.
Miss Pears scrambled about her locker for her purse. It was a worn old leather purse appliquéd with a giraffe that was coming unstuck, but somehow there was never any glue handy. Janet, her only niece had sent it to her, Christmas
’68, before she’d married and become too busy to send more than a card. The purse contained exactly forty new pence – eight shillings to Miss Pears. She’d die before they got her round to decimals.
She tied her blue scarf round her head, pushing it well forward so that her fringe, should it rain, would at least be partially protected. There was no mirror, but the hefty knot she tied felt secure: it felt as if it gave her chin a good lift.
She set off down the dormitory. There was no one else there. She was the last, as usual, but then she’d never been quick on her feet. She laughed out loud a little to herself, anticipating the chiding she’d get from the others on the bus. ‘Good old Apples,’ they’d say, ‘late as usual.’
‘Buck up, Apples, we haven’t got all night,’ one or two of them did shout, as they climbed the steep bus steps. But by this time the laugh had died in her throat and she knew her face looked quite stern. Funny how she wanted to laugh with them, just as she’d done a few moments ago alone in the dormitory. But when it came to the time that they actually teased her the laugh always vanished, and some of them, the grumpier ones, said she was stuck up.
Miss Pears found an empty seat next to Mrs Grace. She sat down beside her. Mrs Grace was almost her friend. She didn’t say much, Mrs Grace, but she’d made her mark by doing things. Little things, like setting your hair or giving you a cigarette or a chocolate, all for nothing in return. She had a temper, of course. Sometimes, she went wild. Semolina all over the place, for no apparent reason, more times than Miss Pears could remember. And then Mrs Grace would be taken away for a few days, and come back sleepy, and start doing things for you again. Miss Pears liked Mrs Grace. She would have shown her the Valentine card she got this year, had some sudden intuition not told her that it was Mrs Grace herself who had sent it.
