by India Knight
Oh, the gloom. Seriously, what am I supposed to wear? I’d be clearer on this subject if I knew what capacity I had been invited in: am I just a punter, an ordinary guest, or has some single man kindly been earmarked for me by our helpful hostess? Am I simply making up numbers – I was, after all, invited at late notice – or is there a plan at work here? If so, surely I should be let in on the details: assuming there’s a single man designated for single sad me, then what kind of single man is he? Do I dress up or down? Smart, or – horrible word – casual? Hair? Make-up? Shoes? Feather boa? Crotchless pants? It would be terrible to wear heels if Single Man were short, for instance. Should I show I’m still on the case by wearing something trendy? Last time I looked, this involved an Eighties revival: should I wear a Kajagoogoo T-shirt and fingerless gloves?
Perhaps I should ring Isabella up and ask her directly. Hi, Isabella. You know dinner? Well, do you foresee rampant sex for me? What do you reckon, Issy – will I pull? Shall I wear tassels on my nipples? A burka? What?
In the end, I ring Louisa from playgroup. She’s clearly been here before, because she is adamant in her advice. ‘Go as yourself,’ she says. ‘Wear exactly what you would normally wear. Don’t be shy or self-conscious, and behave exactly as you would normally behave. And have fun, more to the point. It’s only dinner. Will you ring me tomorrow and tell me how it was?’
I promise her I will. As soon as I’ve put the phone down, I bathe, drown myself in Shalimar and jump into my favourite little black dress, which happens to be moss green: a silk, strappy nightie sort of an affair, knee-length, miraculously cut to emphasize the good points (bosom) while minimizing the bad (stomach). I throw on a bubblegum-pink cashmere cardigan, slip into a pair of purple raffia mules I’ve had for years, stick some hoops in my ears and race back downstairs to ask Frank’s opinion, stopping on the landing to ring for a taxi.
Frank and Honey are lying on my favourite pinky-red Turkish rug, building stocky creatures out of Duplo: a very charming sight, except it reminds me of playgroup again. God, we have to go again next week – can it humanly be borne? Best not to think about it now.
‘Well?’ I twirl. ‘What do you reckon – will this do?’
‘You smell delicious,’ Frank says.
Honey’s in her blue pyjamas with rabbits on them; Frank, rather touchingly, is wearing matching blue pyjama bottoms (no rabbits, obviously) and a white T-shirt. Both have freshly washed hair. They look adorable.
‘Mama,’ says Honey.
I take her on to my lap and sniff her hair, wondering when her vocabulary is going to evolve.
‘Good, but it’s not the smell I care about! How do I look?’
‘Great. Lovely.’
‘Oh, Frank, honestly. Give details.’
Honey hops off my lap and returns to her Duplo. She looks rather like a rabbit herself, with her fat nappied bottom.
‘Sexy. Like a smart gypsy.’
‘But is that a good look? I’m not sure I want to look like a smart gypsy. Like The Diddakoi in black tie, do you mean? God, I loved that book. Don’t look so blank, Frank.’
‘Who’s the diddykoo?’
‘Diddakoi. I’ll tell you tomorrow, ignoramus. What I need to know now is, do I look potentially sexy and potentially businesslike at the same time? I mean, you’re an artist, you go for that boho stuff. Would you still think I looked nice if you were – I don’t know – a merchant banker?’
‘Rhyming slang?’
‘No – you know Isabella. She always has a couple of City types at dinner, or at least she used to.’
‘If I were a banker, I’d want to ravish you before returning to my little wifey in Wimbledon, yes.’
‘I do wish you’d be serious, Francis. And anyway, there aren’t any bankers in Wimbledon.’
‘Oi Womble,’ Honey says, looking pleased.
‘Clever girl!’ I scoop her into my arms and kiss her: my baby genius. Honey and I love all those old shows on cable – I never saw them as a child, only Barbapapa in French, so they’re new to both of us.
‘Stella?’
‘Yes, Frank?’
‘Don’t do it with a banker. Here, I made you a gin. To help your nerves.’
‘Chin-chin. I wasn’t planning on it, but actually now I think of it, banker-sex might be rather nice. They work long hours, don’t they? So they’d be very tired and rich and one could have the most peaceful, ordered, suburban life. With maids. God, I long for staff, don’t you?’
Frank rolls his eyes. We sit in friendly silence, watching Honey busily making Duplo stacks. I love my house now, I realize: the lilies are still scenting the air, the lights are giving off a yellow glow, the squishy sofas look inviting and comfortable, and the French doors to the garden (complete with impeccably mown lawn) are letting in a damp, bosky smell. We’ll be able to light the fires in a month or so.
The taxi arrives. ‘Hair up or down?’ I ask Frank, suddenly feeling panic-stricken.
‘Down,’ says Frank, unpinning it for me and fanning it out with his hands.
‘Easy, Casanova,’ I grin.
He grins back, and wriggles his hips suggestively. ‘I’ll see you out.’
‘Don’t wait up,’ I call, as I climb into my taxi.
5
Isabella Howard’s Islington house is one of those interior-designed numbers of the kind where the glacial, soulless owner pays the designer thousands of pounds to make the house look warm and soulful. This usually involves a kind of update of the rich casbah look, with low tables, an overabundance of cushions, overpriced rugs from shops in Notting Hill and lots of little ethnic trinkets to suggest that whoever lives here a) is well travelled, a global citizen rather than an unimaginative provincial, and b) has an ‘eye’ for beauty. The glass lights are Moroccan lanterns; the throws on the sofas are antique saris; there is a stone Buddha on the left-hand side of the mantelpiece. I recognize her interior, having seen many like it in houses from Clapham to Hampstead, and can even tell that the decor in question is by an ageing queen with an indeterminate accent rejoicing in the name Ricky Molinari, absurdly known to his clients as Mr Ricky.
Mr Ricky has two looks: de luxe ethnic, as in Isabella’s house (he rather invented this look, cleverly deciding four decades or so ago to put his holidays in Tangiers to professional use), and ‘maximal minimal’, which is basically your old minimalist look – loft-like spaces, rubber or concrete floors, uncomfortable linear furniture in black, grey or chocolate brown – except roughed up with cherry wood, books (which do furnish a room), contemporary art (from my ex, Dominic, usually), and either orchids (bit passé) or cacti or Venus Flytraps, planted in amusing and unexpected containers, such as petrol cans. Mr Ricky buys books by the yard, basing his choice upon the height and colour of the spines, with occasionally startling results: the faintly dusty, pretty pale green spines of The Story of the Eye or 120 Days of Sodom in a Cheyne Walk lavatory belonging to an elderly woman who lives for Botox and egg-white omelettes, for instance.
I don’t share any of my thoughts with Isabella, obviously, pausing instead to congratulate her on the beauty of her house.
‘Do you really like it?’ Isabella says, touching my arm. ‘It’s taken me absolute ages to put together.’ (Actually, Mr Ricky tells his clients to leg it to the South of France, or wherever, for a couple of weeks, during which he and his armies of helpers ‘do’ the house at breakneck speed.)
Isabella, who must be about forty-five, was married for twenty years to Mark, a publisher, who left her six or seven years ago for one of his authors, a troubled young woman with very pert breasts. Mark was richissime, combining a hefty salary with family money, and eased his conscience by donating a large proportion of his annual income to his former wife. Isabella reinvented herself as a thin, spry champion giver of parties, stealthily inserting herself into every imaginable London social circle over a period of months, and returning home with the phone numbers of its principal players; she is particularly keen on ‘young people�
��. She brings all of these together every week for dinner and thrice a year for what she refers to as ‘my big dos’ (which always raises a snigger from me: I do love a poo joke). I slipped off her list some time ago, although, judging by tonight, I’m back on – which I’m pleased about, because, say what you like about Isabella, she has a kind of genius when it comes to party giving and these evenings are seldom dull.
The other guests are already gathered in the drawing room, which is softly lit by pink-glass lanterns and candlelight coming from outsize scarlet candles. Some indeterminate jazz is playing in the background. The low, carved coffee table – about eight feet in length – is scattered with rose petals, and little silver dishes containing delicacies are piled on to each surface. (Frank would say that it is very like me to notice the snacks on offer before noticing the people.) The overall effect is mildly poncy – why are we pretending to be in Fez crossed with Jaipur? – but not without charm.
‘Now, Stella, darling, have a drink. The usual selection, or one of my cocktails?’
‘Mm, a cocktail please.’
Isabella hands me a flute of champagne, sugar and fresh mint.
‘Now, do you know everyone?’
I peer through the seductive gloom: no, actually, I don’t think I know anyone at all.
‘Hello,’ I say, boldly advancing towards the couple by the mantelpiece. ‘I’m Stella.’
‘Stella was with Dominic Midhurst,’ Isabella says helpfully. ‘Weren’t you, darling? How is Dom these days? Do you know?’
‘Fine, I think. He spends a lot of time in Tokyo.’ Do I really still have to be defined by a man I was briefly attached to? It seems extraordinary in this day and age.
‘Hello there,’ says the male half of the couple. ‘George Bigsby. Can’t say I thought much of your husband’s stuff, I’m afraid.’ He laughs friendlily, his eyes crinkling up. ‘All those installations. More of a Rubens man, myself.’ His face is rather red and rather fat, and he has a big nose. Jolly, though, and he looks kind.
‘Me too,’ I smile back. ‘I couldn’t agree more.’
‘This is my wife, Emma,’ George says, pointing to a pale, elfin woman, wearing what appear to be fairy clothes – pastel-coloured wisps of fabric clinging to her thin, boyish frame: more Giacometti than Rubens. I fleetingly wonder whether she has an eating disorder – who doesn’t, these days?
‘Hello,’ I smile.
‘Hi,’ says Emma, looking me rather rudely up and down, not what you’d call wildly enthusiastically.
‘And over here,’ says Isabella – a lesser hostess would have left me standing in silence by Emma – ‘is William Cooper, whom I particularly wanted you to meet.’ She gives me a significant look from behind his back: here is the Designated Single Man. ‘William’s a cosmetic surgeon, so if you make friends with him you can have free tummy tucks!’
‘Gosh,’ I say, breathing in sharply. Great: the single man is uniquely positioned to make me feel physically lacking.
‘Not that you need a tummy tuck,’ says William Cooper smoothly, having a good old look at my abdomen. ‘Not yet, anyway. Very pleased to meet you.’ He raises his eyes until they come to rest on my chest, at which point he looks up and gives me rather a sexy smile.
Hello, I think to myself. Hel-lo.
William Cooper has a velvety voice and is ridiculously handsome (does he do work on himself? I must ask him) if slightly overgroomed: his skin is tight, polished, absolutely porelessly clear in a way that you don’t see much in men of his age, which is roughly late forties-ish, at a guess (nattering lighting in here, though). His very white teeth shine in the half-dark, as do his fingernails (manicured?). His hair is black, and, peering closer, I see he has blue eyes: I always love that combination. I never quite know what to make of his kind of look: it is, aesthetically speaking, quite overwhelming, but there is a plastic quality to it that somehow doesn’t look human. Still, there’s no denying he’s foxy.
‘And I’m Tree,’ says a woman, coming up to join us. Ah, this I know: this is familiar, a species I immediately recognize. Tree has long, straggly hair, very expensively cut and streaked though you wouldn’t know it, held off her hard, make-up-free, not especially youthful (or indeed intelligent) face with glittery little clips. She is thin to the point of looking simian, and is wearing the dernier cri in bohemian chic – to you and me, a nondescript rag, to Tree, £800 worth of fabulous clothing. She has toe rings and, I expect, a couple of tattoos. I know she must live just off the Portobello Road in a five-storey house, must have a trust fund and a very rich husband, must do something ‘creative’ and – we’ll see at dinner – must suffer from an unusually cruel number of allergies.
‘I love your shoes,’ Tree says sweetly. Her accent is perfect Estuary. ‘Well wicked.’
‘Thanks. I’ve had them ages.’
‘Raffia,’ she says. ‘Beautiful. Natural, you know.’ Tree stretches. ‘I’m knackered, actually. Went for a swim before coming out and it’s made me sleepy.’
‘Porchester Baths?’ I venture, wanting to test out my theory.
‘Nah, at home,’ Tree shrugs. Bingo! She has a swimming pool in her garden.
‘What do you do, Tree?’ I ask.
‘I’m training to be a music therapist,’ she says, looking more animated now.
‘What’s that?’
‘You work with, like, really damaged people, and heal them through the beauty of music. I have a drum.’
‘That’s nice,’ I say, hoping not to sound sarcastic. ‘What kind of drum?’
‘It’s, like, a drum of wisdom and peace?’ Tree explains. ‘With beads. Abba Babu gave it to me.’ Seeing me look blank, she adds, ‘That’s my guru. I go to an ashram for three months a year. India is such a spiritual place, don’t you think?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve only been once. I really loved the shops.’
‘It has feathers.’
‘The guru or the ashram?’
‘No, the drum.’
‘Mmm,’ I say, rather lost for words.
The low hum of conversation is interrupted by the late arrival of a woman so very masculine that you wouldn’t be overly astonished to find that she did, in fact, have a penis. She is very tall, somehow broad in the beam without being in any way overweight, and her appearance is striking: she is wearing mannish black trousers and a mannish, but rather beautiful, black cashmere sweater over a pristine white shirt. Boots on her feet; six or seven thick, plain silver rings on her long, elegant fingers, and cropped grey hair that is slicked back to reveal flat, neat ears and a pair of cheekbones that would be the envy of women half her age: she herself must be somewhere in her mid-sixties. She has the palest blue eyes and an intelligent, take-no-prisoners face.
‘Ah, Barbara, darling,’ says Isabella, jumping up. ‘So delighted you could join us.’
‘Good evening, Isabella,’ Barbara says in a sixty-a-day voice. ‘Delighted to be here. Does me good to get out of the house every now and then,’ she adds, turning to me and smiling. She smells of Guerlain Vetiver, one of the loveliest men’s scents in the world. ‘I sometimes feel my limbs are in danger of atrophying.’
‘What nonsense, Barbara – you’re hardly ever in,’ Isabella says, affectionately patting her arm. ‘You’re a social whirl. Have a drink,’ she adds, racing off to find one of her pitchers of cocktails.
‘I’m Stella,’ I tell Barbara.
‘No surname? Then I’m Barbara.’ She gives me a bold, frank look – right in the eyes, bang bang. ‘Come and sit by me. I don’t like standing when I don’t have my stick.’
We walk over to the sofa and sit side by side. ‘Who are these people?’ Barbara asks.
‘I don’t really know any of them. He’s a plastic surgeon.’ I point at Cooper.
‘Oh, yes, I know him – William Cooper. Raised my sister’s jowls last year; she rather fell in love with him. Do you know, I think he may have had a fling with Isabella.’
‘Really? How fascinating. When? I wonde
r whether she had anything done.’ Good of Isabella to pass him on, I suppose. Is that what women do now? Probably: we’re always hearing about how there aren’t enough men to go round.
‘Anything done? I should hope not. Ghastly business, plastic surgery. So many women of my generation had their faces ruined. Lumps, you know, suddenly appearing years afterwards.’
‘Eeeoo.’ I make a face. ‘Anyway, next to him is a woman called Tree who is training to be a music therapist.’ Barbara looks over and smiles so knowingly at me that I grin back. ‘And then the couple by the mantelpiece,’ I continue. ‘I don’t know what they do, but he seems very jolly.’
‘And she less so?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then dear Isabella. My god-daughter, you know.’
‘I didn’t actually. How nice. Do you have children of your own?’
‘No, my dear,’ smiles Barbara. ‘What about you?’
‘One, a little girl. Eighteen months. Her name’s Honey.’
‘What a sweet name.’
‘Isn’t it? She’s a sweet little girl.’
‘And what do you and Honey do all day?’
‘Not much, actually. Well, I do the odd bit of translating now and again, but mainly we’re at home in Primrose Hill. Her father and I are separated.’ Blissfully, Barbara spares me the platitudes – the so sorrys, how sads, oh dear what happeneds that I never have any replies to.
‘I live in Hampstead,’ Barbara says instead. ‘We could get together sometimes. Do you walk?’
‘Yes – unless it’s absolutely pouring, I try to take Honey to the playground once a day, and then for a trot around the park.’
‘We could walk together, if you liked. I’m rather slow, I’m afraid.’
‘I’d love that,’ I say, meaning it.
I’m pretty sure Barbara is a lesbian, which is really neither here nor there except for the fact that I think I must give off gay vibes myself, because lesbians absolutely always make a beeline for me. This occasionally leads me to wonder whether I am, in fact, batting for the wrong team: if every single lesbian I’ve ever met has looked at me in the manner of like recognizing like, perhaps they know something I don’t. On the other hand, Barbara is a very old lesbian, and if I were to start exploring the notion of sexual fluidity, I’d rather do it with someone my own age. More to the point, I can’t imagine what sex would be like without a flesh-and-blood penis being involved. Slurpy, I suppose, like glutting on oysters. I groan quietly to myself: try as I might, I really can’t fancy the idea of hot lezzo action much at all. But surely it must have something to recommend it if so many people practise it? Very confusing. Perhaps the slurping is optional. And people’s breasts are interesting, I remember from the showers at school: some girls had that thing where the combination of two nipples and one tummy-button made a perfect sort of face – huge, rather boggly eyes (the nipples), small nose (the TB), furry triangular mouth (the pubis) – which used to fascinate me. But the fact remains: fascination or not, I didn’t yearn to get close to the faces, or to grope them.
