After Everything

by Suellen Dainty

  He loved Angie, he depended on her and he couldn’t imagine life without her. But sometimes, like tonight, he would have given anything to be on his own.

  ‘Penny should have involved herself more in Sandy’s work,’ Angie said. ‘She always looked sniffy about it, like it was just a bit beneath her. If she wanted that sort of conventional life, she should have married a banker. If she’d been more supportive, things might have been different.’

  An image of Penny standing on her own at the side of the Soho recording studio flashed into his mind. It was past midnight and he could see the dark shadows under her eyes even in the dim light. Sandy was greasing up to that girl singer, Kate someone or other. Tim had forgotten her surname. He remembered looking away as a girl’s head bobbed up and down in the sound engineer’s lap behind the mixer console. There was the usual white powder on the table and a case of Puligny-Montrachet, all the bottles opened and sweating condensation. There was a case of Cheval Blanc as well, again every bottle opened. Kate whoever she was had ordered them in her rider, along with foie gras and caviar. But everyone was gobbling crisps and drinking beer from the can, except Penny who was clutching a Diet Coke.

  ‘Come and join us,’ Tim had said.

  ‘But Sandy says I always talk about the wrong thing,’ Penny replied, her eyes darting around the room and settling on Sandy edging closer to Kate. ‘He says I don’t know how to relate to people in his industry. And I’m so clumsy. I might trip and fall over a plug or something. I have nightmares about it.’

  Tim laughed, but he knew she meant it. People saw Penny as the jaw-dropping babe, but behind the glamour, he always thought of her as tentative and afraid of upsetting everyone.

  ‘She had the children to look after,’ Tim said, swallowing the last of the sausage. ‘She couldn’t go traipsing off after him all the time.’

  ‘That’s what nannies are for,’ Angie replied. ‘And what good did it do her anyway? They’re not exactly the best adjusted kids. Emily is wandering around India, and Matthew can’t even hold down a job.’

  The implication was clear. If Angie and Tim had children, they would have been different, happier and more accomplished. They would have chosen between medicine or law. That’s it, kids. Take your pick. Under the pastel vintage clothes and artfully messy hair, Angie could be a brutal member of the bourgeoisie.

  ‘That’s a bit cruel, don’t you think? Emily is a wonderful girl. And Matthew just hasn’t found his way yet.’

  Angie raised her eyebrows and began to clear the table, one of the few things she liked to do alone. Tim felt the lentils subside into a lump in his stomach. He told her he was going to telephone Peter and went into the sitting room. A fire blazed there as well. He chose the least lumpy sofa and pushed a paisley shawl to one side, then punched in Peter’s number. While it rang, he thought up an excuse for the call. That media stock Peter and Jeremy had taken a punt on, up something like thirty-seven per cent in eighteen months, despite the recession. He would ask Peter the name of the company. Better not to mention Sandy immediately. He suspected Peter and Jeremy thought of him these days as the kind of guy who had learned to multi-task and was no longer able to read a map; in short, of turning into an anxious girl.

  Peter sounded rushed. ‘I’ll email you the details tomorrow. It’s doing well. Even old Frieda has put something in it.’ Frieda was Peter’s live-out lover. ‘Talking of which, I have to meet her in fifteen minutes. Some new art thing she just has to see.’

  ‘Great. Thanks,’ said Tim. ‘Angie spoke to Penny today, asked her to come over to see Sandy. Penny didn’t sound too keen on the idea, said she was busy.’

  ‘It’s her decision,’ said Peter.

  Tim could hear the jangle of car keys. ‘Penny said she’d speak to Matthew and email Emily in India, see what they thought.’

  ‘A bit late for family therapy, don’t you think?’ asked Peter. ‘They’re grown up now. Leave them be. Benign neglect and all that sort of thing. Let’s just concentrate on helping Sandy? But it’s good that Angie spoke to Penny.’

  ‘I’ll call tomorrow, tell you about it,’ said Tim. But Peter had already hung up.

  Chapter 9

  Peter perched on a windowsill, watching Frieda walk between the groups of earnest nodding heads clustered around the paintings. She had her back to him but he could guess what she was thinking by her movements.

  A tilt of her head to one side indicated interest in what the person opposite her was saying. A tilt combined with a simultaneous swivel of her neck was a sign that she had spotted a potential client, and a sweep of her right hand through her crop of thick black hair meant that she was bored and any minute would make her excuses and turn away.

  Before he met Frieda, Peter would never have imagined that he would be happy to sit on a draughty windowsill deducing a woman’s thoughts by the angle of the back of her head. But he was happy, sitting alone, watching her move among strangers as he thought about kissing the whorls of hair on her temples or tracing the curve of her spine with his forefinger.

  From her side of the room, Frieda turned to him and smiled, a flash of white teeth. The smile said that she would be with him as soon as possible, but at the moment there was work to be done and could he possibly wait just a little longer?

  Yes, Peter thought, smiling back at her and crossing his legs to disguise an unexpected erection. He had all the time in the world for Frieda, although he didn’t fully understand why.

  They were in Hoxton, at the private showing of a dealer who specialised in native Australian art. A lonely-looking Aboriginal sat in the corner producing low groaning noises from a didgeridoo, as waiters dressed in long black aprons served prawns and Fosters.

  Frieda liked to keep abreast of current trends. She owned a gallery on Theobald’s Road, dealing in what she called twentieth-century modern; minor Surrealists, Lichtenstein and Warhol lithographs, and bits and pieces in between. She was good at it, trilling down the telephone to potential clients, bristling at any hint of a sale.

  Peter followed Frieda’s progress around the gallery. He watched her talking to the dealer, a tall thin man with a walrus moustache who kept stroking her arm. Peter watched more closely until Frieda swept her right hand through her hair and moved away of her own accord. She was wearing one of her habitual black asymmetrical dresses, a slash of red lipstick her only makeup. Peter saw that she was getting plump, but he didn’t mind. Neither did Frieda. She just went off to her favourite Japanese designers and bought bigger clothes.

  A waiter offered him a beer. He was unexpectedly thirsty and drank half the can in two swallows. As Frieda chatted to an elderly couple, a young girl with tossed blonde hair sat beside Peter and smiled. She had that lustrous confidence produced only by an expensive education followed by a History of Art degree from the Courtauld or Cambridge.

  ‘Don’t I know you?’ she asked, sipping her Fosters and smoothing her hair. Peter smiled, but kept watching Frieda.

  ‘I’m Hannah,’ the girl continued. ‘I work in the gallery here.’ Peter was sure he didn’t know her because he had the best visual memory of anyone he knew. But he was accustomed to the question because he resembled a lot of other people, brooding French film stars in particular.

  His own kind of good looks (Christopher Lambert crossed with early Gérard Depardieu, but with floppy dark hair that kinked over his ears) had its apogee thirty years earlier and he’d been very grateful for the steady stream of girls it brought him. Even silverback Jeremy had envied his easy success. Now, he didn’t care that much about being handsome. At least he thought he didn’t. Frieda didn’t agree.

  ‘Dear Peter,’ she’d said near the beginning of their relationship. ‘There is a reason you like cities, not the country. Cities have shop windows and mirrors and you can look at yourself in them. And you do. You never miss. No harm, no shame. I still like you.’

  The blonde girl next to him crossed and uncrossed her legs. They might have been unfurling flags. Peter turned
to her. Hannah. That was her name.

  ‘Wonderful exhibition,’ he said. ‘But you’ll need to excuse me. I have to drag my girlfriend away, otherwise she’ll never leave.’ Hannah smiled graciously, but he could see she wasn’t used to any man, particularly an older man, walking away from her.

  Later, lying in bed waiting for Frieda to join him, Peter called out to her, ‘I didn’t think much of that exhibition. Everything looked like acrylic pixels.’ She was still in the bathroom doing something complicated with the tiny wire flossing she carried everywhere with her.

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ said Frieda, joining him in the bedroom. ‘I think those painted stories of the dreaming are so beautiful. And there is a market for them. Some artists can sell for half a million.’

  She took off her clothes, folding each garment and placing them in her leather overnight bag with her toothbrush and jars of face cream. Peter was used to women leaving bits and pieces behind, as if laying down a trail on territory about to be colonised. Empire builders, he called them. The Cecilia Rhodes and Roberta Clives of our times.

  Frieda never left anything. There was enough mess in his flat already, she said. On the occasional nights when he stayed in her minimal monochrome house off Marylebone High Street, she packed everything of his into a plastic bag and handed it to him at the front door in the morning. Somehow these rigid boundaries made both feel more secure, more able to enjoy each other.

  Frieda stood at the end of the bed. She wore the most glorious underwear. Silk bras with cunning embroidered lace inserts around her dark brown nipples, cleverly draped sheer camisoles and satin French knickers in beige and cream with hand-stitched hems. He had drunk too much and eaten too little at the gallery opening, but the swell of her breasts and the sight of a stray tendril of lush pubic hair excited him and she knew it.

  ‘So, a good night just now and a good day just been,’ she said, unclasping her bra. Her breasts jiggled. ‘Some uppity puppy walked in off the street. Apparently he’d liked comic books when he was a kid and so his mother went out and bought him a set of Lichtenstein lithographs – you know the slam splat fighter ones – for his thirteenth birthday. Can you believe it? Now the precious darling wants a new kitchen for his Notting Hill flat and so he’s selling them. And I’ve got just the buyer.’

  Peter nodded approval, waiting for her to take off her pants, something she did with erotic elegance, like a sepia-tinted Degas. ‘Can’t match that,’ he said. ‘I spent today filming bog rolls in a bathroom and trying to get a stroppy toddler to sit on the loo. I kept asking myself would Danny Boyle be doing this. The child was hideous. The mother was quite sexy though.’

  ‘Really,’ smiled Frieda. She got into bed and lay beside him, smelling of the amber soap she always used. ‘How sexy?’

  Her hand played with the hairs on his stomach and he turned to her without answering. They kissed gently and he moved towards her, grateful for the familiarity of her body and the way they made love with uncomplicated passion. He never tired of her slow easy thrusts and the way she knew exactly when to reach between his legs and gently stroke his balls until they tightened and he came so sweetly.

  Just before sleep, she asked about Sandy. ‘How is he doing? Has he recovered?’ Frieda was intrigued by Sandy. Sometimes Peter was jealous of her interest in him, particularly as she never pretended to be anything other than bored by Tim and Jeremy.

  ‘He’s getting better,’ said Peter. ‘It’s going to be hard for him.’ He stroked her neck. ‘There were times when I thought you found him attractive. There was a bit of the green-eyed monster going on.’

  Frieda snorted. ‘You, mister matinee idol. Well, well, I’m flattered. But no need to be jealous. I don’t fancy men like Sandy – too fair-skinned. I’m sure he wasn’t the world’s most attentive husband, but he seems kind and self-deprecating in his own funny way. When I asked him about his songs, he just shrugged and said he’d been lucky.’

  ‘Perhaps he was,’ said Peter.

  ‘We all need some luck,’ said Frieda. ‘And the four of you intrigue me, not just Sandy. I mean the four of you together. You never talk properly to each other. You’re all too busy drinking and eating and having your little boy chat-chats about football and silly games.’

  Peter slid his hands under the duvet and warmed them between her thighs. ‘Thank the Lord you don’t do that Brazilian thing. I love your bush. And anyway, we’re men, not boys, and we talk about other things apart from sport.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Movies, plays, the markets, news. The whole world really.’

  ‘That’s lipstick and nail varnish gossip for boys,’ Frieda replied. ‘That’s not talking. That’s not saying what you think, telling someone else how you feel. Be honest, it’s not. I’ve watched you. You speak in an entirely different way when you’re with them. You’re so abrupt and hard. Jeremy is the arrogant head boy, Sandy is his grateful little fag and you and Tim are the underlings. Has any of you ever actually confided in each other? About something that really matters?’

  Peter played with her hair. ‘We’re not lady-boys, you know. And may I remind you that’s how you and I first came across each other – during one of our little boy chat-chats, as you call them.’

  Frieda smiled and kissed his cheek. ‘I haven’t forgotten. Why would I want to forget something so good?’

  They had met three summers ago, one of those rare warm London evenings when the city glowed, a gentle breeze meandered through the streets, and harassed commuters looked up from the pavement and thought yes, this is why I live here.

  He and the other three were at La Famiglia in Langton Street after watching Andy Murray win against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga at Queens. Jeremy was a member and he had organised the tickets and a car to pick them up from Baron’s Court. The four of them had a table in the garden at the back. Sandy always made fun of the plastic canopies, but they all liked the fried courgette flowers too much to take him seriously. Peter couldn’t finish his second course of squid risotto and a dark-haired woman at the next table leaned towards him.

  She had deep-set brown eyes, an aquiline nose and the air of a louche and elegant smoker. There was something about the way she tapped her thumb and forefinger on the table, like stubbing out a cigarette on an invisible ashtray. Not at all his usual lean blonde shiksa.

  ‘If you’re not going to finish it, may I?’ She took the plate and began eating his meal without waiting for an answer. Her companion, a young man who he later found out was her nephew, blushed. Peter was taken aback by her boldness and impressed by her greed as she finished his risotto without speaking, scraping up the last grains of rice with a spoon.

  ‘Very good,’ she said in a low pleasant voice with no discernible accent. ‘Although the rice might have been a trifle more al dente.’ She handed the plate back to him, and continued her conversation with the young man. On the plate, speckled with squid ink and olive oil, was her card. Peter took it and rang her the next day.

  mattman5@hotmail.com

  To: emily.ellison@gmail.com

  Hey Em,

  Forgot to say. That Jump place you wanted me to go to before you left…It was okay, but I could think of better ways to spend a weekend. Not a total waste of money, but too full on really. We had to trust our intuition and jump into the future, leaving the past behind. They kept telling us to write letters to all the people who had disappointed us in our lives. I started writing one to Dad, but didn’t finish it. They told me I wasn’t being serious enough and then they tried to get me to sign up my friends. A lot of people there kept bursting into tears. The leader didn’t do anything to help them. He was too busy texting.

  Mum said we should try to feel some compassion for Dad. I don’t see why. He’s such a fucking tosser and she’s forgotten all the times they couldn’t even be in the same room together without hissing at each other. I can’t keep up with her. One minute it’s the red voice. The next she’s calling for peace and understanding. She’s differen
t now from how she used to be in London. What’s got into her?

  I’d like to join you over there. Maybe if I get this new job as a courier and I can save some money. We’ll see. Keep in touch. Watch out for the men in orange. Small is powerful. I should know.

  Chapter 10

  It was a mistake to return Amy’s call. Experience had taught him never to go back. But Jeremy was out of sorts. Sandy was part of it. He couldn’t dispel the memory of Sandy at the hospital. He looked so old and defeated, his eyes fogged by drugs as he tried to get out of bed, the flimsy gown gaping around his bare buttocks. It was as if Sandy’s failings and failures might somehow prove to be a viral contagion and Jeremy couldn’t risk any chance of infection.

  Then, after three meetings and far too many telephone calls, Ronald Hudson Junior, the owner of the lazy ten million pounds, had decided to play elsewhere. Jeremy was annoyed, not so much by the money, but by his own failure to read the situation. He’d been so sure the deal was all but done. He only suggested the second and third meetings as a favour, thinking it would bolster the American’s confidence if the investment strategy was outlined in the painstaking detail so beloved by his backroom team.

  Jeremy had liked Ronald Hudson Junior, although part of that, of course, was due to his family’s trust fund, which he’d estimated as being worth at least half a billion, with the first tranche of ten million slipping Ronald’s way on his twenty-seventh birthday. Jeremy had checked with a pal in New York. A second tranche of twenty million was due when Ronald turned thirty-three.

  What had made his white-shoe family decide those specific ages? Was anyone wiser, more able to make sound financial decisions, at twenty-seven rather than a year earlier? Or a year later? Jeremy knew his reputation was that of a manipulative and devious old Turk. This was unfair. He could still be kind every now and then, just to convince himself that he was able to summon something approaching compassion.