At the end of the table, Hettie sat, mirroring her mother’s stance. She was listening in her unnervingly absorbed way; her eyes were going from parent to parent, her mouth slightly open and breathing. In front of her was a heavy blown green Turkish glass, with bubbles still in it, full of a brown fizzy liquid, clinking with ice and a slice of lemon. Her hand went slowly, mechanically, between a bowl of the almost flavourless pastry bits she liked and her mouth. It was all part of Hettie’s Thursday-or Friday-night sophistication; she might even, on other nights, have changed into her best blouse.
‘Is that your first Coke, Hets?’ Kenyon said. ‘You know we don’t like you drinking too much of that stuff.’
‘It’s my apéritif,’ Hettie said sharply. ‘Course I don’t go on drinking it, drink after drink.’
‘Michael’s parents let him drink as much Coke as he likes,’ Miranda said, in a subdued-gleeful tone, smacking her lips silent in a mute stop like an exercising trumpet-player.
‘It’s my apéritif. It’s a drink before dinner,’ Hettie said. ‘Course I only have one.’
‘It’s been known,’ Kenyon said in a falsetto tone, going from larder to pan, ‘for people to have more than one apéritif before dinner, even more than two.’
‘So what’s going to happen, now that you’ve got your own back on this girl?’ Hettie asked.
‘It isn’t a case of getting my own back on anyone,’ Miranda said. ‘I don’t care whether she turns up or not. I only wrote a letter to her parents to bring home to her the consequences of her telling lies like that.’
‘What if she isn’t telling a lie, though? What if they are getting divorced? Won’t you look a bit stupid?’ Hettie said. ‘And she can say, “I told you so.” ’
‘No,’ Miranda said. ‘They will probably agree that their petty disputes are deleteriously affecting their daughter’s academic labours, and put a sock in it.’
‘What was that word you said?’
Miranda explained, almost sure that ‘deleterious’ had actually come up before. ‘In any case,’ she went on, ‘I have some really good students in that class. There’s a boy who comes every week, does all the reading. He makes an effort; he takes notes; he came to see me to discuss some feedback; he’s getting a proper education out of a university. They either have a work ethic or they don’t, and I don’t see why I should help the ones who don’t want to be there.’
‘What’s he called?’ Hettie said.
‘He was just an example, his name doesn’t matter,’ Miranda said. ‘Faisal Khalil.’
‘Is he Asian? Because they work hard, it’s well known. I heard—’
‘Yes, I expect so,’ Miranda said, in her most helpful manner. ‘Or perhaps he feels he ought to make more of an effort, being the only non-white student in his year in this fucking university. I don’t suppose it’s anything innate, really.’
Kenyon had picked up a jar of cinnamon, put it down again; squared off the Pyrex dish by a couple of millimetres; opened and shut the cupboard door without taking anything out of it; turned on the tap and turned it off again; walked three times round the kitchen table and finally stood looking out of the window at where Stanley the dog was defecating mournfully in the middle of the street, apparently unaware of an approaching John Lewis lorry. Miranda and Hettie exchanged an unusual sisterly look of pity and concern.
‘Are you all right there, darling?’ Miranda said. ‘You don’t seem altogether sure of yourself.’
‘I was just thinking,’ Kenyon said. ‘I was just thinking whether—I can’t remember whether I put pepper in the marinade or not.’
‘I don’t think you did,’ Hettie said. ‘But I’ve not been watching all the time.’
‘Is that the Asian boy whose father works at the sixth-form college?’ Kenyon said, and took the largest of the knives, the oblong butcher’s cleaver; he raised it with both hands above the squatting body of the neckless chicken.
‘Yes, I think that’s right,’ Miranda said. ‘Khalil. I can’t remember the father’s first name. Went to university in his home town, not living at home, though, I think he said once. How clever of you to remember, darling.’
22.
‘And then David here—he’s only fourteen, I think it’s the first time he’s ever been in a bar—he goes back into the bar, and he’s had one big beer, and he doesn’t know what they call them in France. He does his best, poor lad, he says to the barmaid, “Can I have half a kilo of beer, please?” —half a kilo—and she says, doesn’t she, David?, she says—what was it she said? She said—’
It was a favourite story of David’s father, but he hadn’t got to the end of it. He was overtaken with hilarity, and Mauro sat and waited politely, a glass of gin-and-tonic in his hand. David’s mother was mopping her eyes at the story, and for a moment David wondered whether the pair of them had been drinking before he and Mauro had even got there; but of course company had this effect on them, egging them on and geeing them up. I could tell you a story about that holiday in the south of France, a couple of decades ago, David thought. It would be a much better one than yours, which was just how I got my weights and measures mixed up; I could tell you about the day I said I had a headache and wanted to stay in the dark in the hotel, and you two went off to see a Roman amphitheatre, and the second you’d driven off, I went down the swimming-pool with the German man who was staying in the hotel, and we came back to the hotel afterwards, and he fucked me in his room. I was fourteen, and he was twenty-eight, and he must have been terrified, because he gave me a false address afterwards, somewhere in Munich where I know he didn’t live. But fourteen and twenty-eight—that’s a story.
David’s father seemed to have come to an end. ‘So you see,’ he said inconsequentially; he had gone quite red in the face. ‘It’s nice to meet you, Mauro.’
‘What is that castle over there?’ Mauro said politely. The big picture windows of the flat gave over the estuary. The room was quite elegantly furnished, with a new beige carpet and a Persian rug David didn’t recognize. His parents had had a good clear-out when they moved, offering him quite a lot of furniture he certainly didn’t want if they didn’t, and this flat held only the best and most treasured pieces from their old house. David thought it had a winnowed-down air, like the soulless end-result of a TV de-cluttering show or, worse, like a retirement home where nothing comfortably related, where all the little links and piles and untouched matter between and under stuff had been removed and thrown away. From the window, as Mauro was indicating, there was a good view; the puckered and pleated silver of the river—the estuary—succeeded by water-meadows, a lonely white-painted pub on a kind of headland, a glint of some more river, and then a narrow road and the hills rising beyond. The castle Mauro was asking about might have been a folly, or might have been the inhabitable turret of a Victorian eccentric, placed dramatically at the crest of the hill.
‘Ah,’ David’s father said urbanely. ‘The View. Yes, it’s rather special, isn’t it? It was the thing that persuaded us to buy this flat.’
‘We knew we liked the town,’ David’s mother said. ‘But we had some difficulty finding the right place to live. We never thought we would want to live in a flat, to be honest. But after a while…’
David’s thoughts wandered. Mauro’s stance was exactly the right thing; he was not a tall man, and yet, standing there, in his ordinary weekend clothes, he looked quite noble as the afternoon light fell on him. David inwardly apologized for having thought Mauro’s choice of clothes inadequate, casually chosen or thoughtless. He saw, now, in his parents’ sitting room that this T-shirted, barefoot figure with its five-second grin struck exactly the right raffish note of the short, charming urchin—Mauro had cast off his brown-and-orange Onitsuka Tiger trainers almost as soon as he entered. It was some sort of gesture towards domestic politeness. Clearly, prepared, they had taken to him. David wondered, again, what Mauro was going to do for clothes for the rest of the weekend, and the question brought another piece of ment
al discomfort to mind: the way his mother had ushered both of them into the same bedroom, with one double bed, without asking. Mauro had casually thrown down his bag, turned round and gone straight back into the sitting room, just as David’s mother— ‘Catherine’ to Mauro, immediately—was explaining that she expected he’d like to have a rest and a lie-down. David supposed that he would have to have some kind of conversation with Mauro about what his father referred to as ‘the sleeping arrangements’ at some point. He did hope Mauro wasn’t going to ask him to sleep in the armchair in the bedroom.
‘That castle?’ Alec said to Mauro. ‘It’s on the ridge behind our friends’ village—I mean the village where our friends live. It belongs to the old manor house—it’s the earls of Bakewell, I believe. They say you can see three counties from the top of the tower. We’ve never been.’
‘Pay no attention to Alec, Mauro,’ Catherine said. ‘That’s his idea of a joke. You can’t see three counties from up there, not unless you can see right across the Bristol Channel. I know it’s old, though—they’ve lived there for hundreds of years. Maybe we’ll go over there tomorrow, have a nice day out.’
‘I’m sorry we have to go back so soon, after lunch,’ Mauro said smoothly. ‘It looks beautiful.’
‘Well, you must be used to old things,’ Alec said. Then he seemed to see an ambiguity, and said, ‘Coming from Rome.’
‘That’s right,’ Mauro said, and it stayed there, rather taking something away from the conversation than adding to it. ‘Could I have another drink, please?’ And David took his glass and poured himself a fat one, too.
‘Seems very nice,’ Alec said, when he and Catherine were washing up the glasses, and ‘the boys’, as they seemed to be called for the purposes of the weekend, were preparing and titivating and chatting in the spare room. ‘You couldn’t take offence,’ he went on.
‘Nothing to take offence at,’ Catherine said, drying a glass, holding it up to the light and placing it on the work surface. These were not the glasses they would be using for the party tonight: those, hired from Oddbins, were in cardboard boxes underneath the breakfast bar. The best ones would go back into the cupboard, safe and sound. ‘He seems very nice. I always…’ She paused, not quite knowing what to say, how to put the sense of an intuition into words. ‘I always wonder about David, though.’
Alec dried his hands, shook them once more, inspected his nails. ‘Shall we have a little walk?’ he said. ‘We’ll be inside all day if we don’t make a bit of an effort. Might as well show them Hanmouth.’
‘It won’t take long,’ Catherine said, wondering whether she had spoken at all; she had not quite understood what she meant about David, so it was strange that Alec accepted it without remark. Perhaps she had heavily struck one of many soft and embarrassable patches that appeared to be lying around in Alec’s vicinity today.
23.
Once the Bears had been invited to Sam and Harry’s instead of Peter’s, a number of them found that, after all, they didn’t have something else to do that evening. It turned out that, like Sam and Harry, five or six of the Bears had talked about it, and decided that they didn’t really feel like going out to Peter’s. Not that they had anything much against Peter, but an evening he was in charge of was an evening that some of the other Bears would avoid. So they second-guessed each other, like small children, saying, ‘Well, I’m only going if everyone else is going,’ but not quite getting round to canvassing opinion. The turnout had been looking rather grim; Sam and Harry were relatively popular, generous hosts. It was ruthless of them to announce without any real consultation that it would be better if they held the party, since—the brilliant excuse—Harry needed to be in Hanmouth that night, and otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to make it to the ‘get-together’ at all. Peter put up only token resistance at first; then, a couple of days later, called in bored tones to say that it was just as well, since he’d forgotten it was his brother-in-law’s retirement party and he had to go to that. So no Peter either.
All this phoning around resulted in—Peter apart—a full house. More than a full house: Steve had phoned to ask if he could bring a lad, a mechanic of his, just moved down from London with his wife and baby. ‘I’ve had him,’ Steve said. ‘In the back office, twice. Can he come?’ And Blaise had acquired a couple of keen admirers too in the last month, or so it seemed, and Adam thought they might as well be asked. This sort of thing had happened before. You did a small scout round, picking up anything small and valuable—a silver Georgian snuff box, a cloisonné cigarette case thought to be Cartier—or breakable. The coked-up Bears would fling their limbs and members about the floor of the drawing room, and glass and porcelain treasures were best tucked away for the night. Stanley, the basset hound, had a graceful knack of walking between the precarious treasures, but a Bear after a drink or two would have lost whatever knack he ever possessed. It had to be admitted, too, that some of these last-minute invitations were not the most trustworthy people imaginable. In fact, that was sometimes their attraction, and a year or two ago, a boy called Darren, whom Phil had somehow met, announced frankly as ‘a burglar’, had had a high degree of success one evening. Never returned: serving a four-year stretch.
It looked like being the most successful evening for a while. Usually people phoned afterwards, the next day, to chew it over, what had happened, who had done what, and usually to say, ‘Never again,’ about some overindulgence or other. This time, half the Bears had phoned up in advance, the day of the ‘get-together’, to say they couldn’t wait, to see if they could give anyone a lift, to offer to bring something or other. The anticipation was keen. Harry observed that Peter, without anyone really admitting it or even understanding it, had been a cup of cold water on the festivities for a while now. ‘How did we get to know him?’ Sam said, but Harry couldn’t remember. Someone had brought him, and he had stayed, his wandering hands making no kind of contribution to their communal pleasure. Tonight, a brother-in-law was having a retirement party, and they could get on with it. There was no reason why he should ever be included again. It was hard, but there it was.
In the end, there were fourteen Bears coming. Harry and Sam’s drawing room was no more fussy than anyone else’s, but they’d acquired a fair number of objects over the years that had to be cleared away—ceramics from Sweden and the five Hagi tea-bowls, a vase from a local ceramicist with a kiln on Dartmoor, blazing red and three feet tall, resting precariously on a base only three inches wide. The heavy Victorian silver from Harry’s family he’d taken good-naturedly, and it was locked away in the cellar, never to be used; it was fair to say that the other valuable residues from Harry’s family treasures were unlikely to be walked off with by any of the Bears or their guests. They were too massive: a Tabriz carpet acquired by a great-great-great-uncle in Iran; or, as well, too ugly—a five-foot greeny-orange Fuseli of (Sam had to peer) ‘Bertram of Roussillon In Thrall To Helena, His Wife’. The white sofas and armchairs were covered up with shawls acquired by Sam during Indian adventures. Stanley’s bed was carried upstairs for the evening—Stanley had always sighed and spluttered when he saw them lifting up his bed. He knew what it meant. Then they totted up the stores.
Harry had driven to Plymouth to meet with his long-term dealer, now running a fairly respectable mini-cab company, and had come back with a dozen grams of coke and some K. Six bottles of poppers had arrived via mail-order, and the condoms and lube were placed in (non-valuable) bowls here and there about the place; a plastic bowl full of dildos had been put under the sofa out of sight, if anyone felt like using them later in the evening. Sam had driven to Sainsbury’s, and had got three pounds of mince, potatoes, onions, tomatoes and mushrooms, enough for a big bowl of salad, and a couple of litres of ice-cream—the pudding was never much of a draw at these events. The wine merchant had delivered a case of white wine and a couple of cases of beer, placed in the fridge next to the bottles of poppers. It was all looking very cheerful.
‘I thought we had some
carrots,’ Sam said to Harry on Saturday afternoon.
‘Carrots?’
‘I thought we had some.’
‘What do you want them for?’
‘What do you think? For the shepherd’s pie. You need them for shepherd’s pie.’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ Harry said. ‘I thought we had some, too. I wasn’t really paying attention to the carrot stores, though. Can’t you do without?’
‘It’s only up the road, and I only need three,’ Sam said.
‘Doesn’t make any difference whether it’s three or thirty,’ Harry said. ‘I’ve still got to walk up to the greengrocer’s, apparently.’
But in the end Sam thought he’d drop in on the shop, to make sure things were ‘under control’, as he put it, and Harry had nothing else to do, so they went out together.
‘I’m sure there are other things I’ll have forgotten,’ Sam said to Harry, as he closed the front door, incidentally pushing Stanley out into the street—he had been sniffing the air for rain, unwilling to commit himself to a walk if the weather was uncertain. ‘I’ll only know when we get to the shops. Come on, Stanley.’
‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ Harry said. ‘And no one’s coming for the shepherd’s pie.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ Sam said. ‘The number of times I’ve found myself in the kitchen at a party, discussing what it is exactly they’ve put in the vol-au-vents. Did I ever tell you about the Transvestite Goulash Challenge in Berlin?’
(A German friend of Sam’s had once told him about a bar in Berlin where a transvestite had told another transvestite, one night, that her mother’s recipe for goulash sounded rubbish, and an argument had broken out. The landlord had settled the argument by inviting the two of them, and any other drag queens in the district, to cook their mother’s goulash and bring it in so it could be judged by the regulars. This story had tickled Sam’s fancy, and he retold it quite regularly, on the smallest encouragement.)
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