It’s not the first time I’ve been told that. Sometimes I feel that my role in life is to be some kind of repository for secrets and confidences. I wish somebody one day would listen to me. I suppose for people to do that, I’ll have to start talking more.
‘I’d better go, I suppose.’ He struggles to his feet on his second try and holds onto me to get his balance.
The desperate way he looks at me, I know I’m not imagining it. He can’t face going back to his empty home.
‘It’ll get easier,’ I tell him.
‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘You’re a good friend.’ He kisses me briefly on my cheek.
I shiver, because it’s so lovely, so meant to be, and for a moment I can feel the warm imprint linger on my skin. And then as I turn to look at him closely, I press against him and kiss him, my mouth on his, hard and urgent. I slide my hands under his shirt, across his smooth, warm back. I want to be so much more than a friend to him. I want to tell him that he should be with somebody who truly appreciates him, but instead, we’re suddenly off-balance and we hang onto each other, with me tripping over my good Pucci gown, and we fall onto the sofa again. A thud … and then the sound of wine spilling from the bottle. ‘Oh, shit!’
‘Got it,’ he says, sliding to the floor to pick up the bottle.
I go to the kitchen, grab a tea cloth and mop the floor hurriedly using my bare foot, but the moment has passed.
‘What does that say?’ David’s staring at the clock. ‘I’ve got to go!’ Acting as if it’s a matter of great urgency.
‘Sure.’ I walk with him to the front door, and he closes it firmly behind him and my flat is empty again. He’s on his way home through the empty streets doing the walk of shame. I resist the urge to run after him.
I sit on the sofa and finish the dregs of the wine in the bottle, alone and apprehensive. Would we have kissed if he’d been sober? Or if I hadn’t made the first move? I know the answer to both questions: no.
The next morning, David’s already at Stables Market when I get there and Dinah’s reading him bits out of the Metro as if he’s an invalid. He glances at me with a faint smile and continues to look distantly out at Stables Yard.
I’m going to apologise, because I don’t want it to ruin our friendship. Come to think of it, those are the exact words I’ll use.
I’m desperate to talk to him, but Dinah’s still reading the paper, commenting loudly on things that she thinks are ridiculous or outrageous. ‘Heh-heh! Why would a person want to knit a twenty-foot scarf?’
I wish I’d brought a book with me. I’m like someone on a blind date that isn’t going well, looking eagerly at everyone who comes along the yard just as a distraction – my spirits sinking as they glance away and walk straight past. I’m looking out for my ideal customer – Kate Moss or Paloma Faith or Demi Moore – but she hasn’t turned up yet.
Eventually, to my relief, Dinah pats David on his cheek and says she’s going to do her shopping in Sainsbury’s.
Time for the apology.
But David picks his book up and shuts me out.
I get up and stand in front of the shop and try to see it through a stranger’s eyes. Even though this is something that happens every day – David reads his book and I rearrange the dresses – today, our actions seem forced and unnatural. Already I can’t remember what it’s like to feel normal with him. To take my mind off it I arrange the dresses in order of colour. I love the rainbow effect and I wait eagerly for customers with my arms folded. There are so many people in the market today the crowds look pixelated.
‘You’re putting people off, you know,’ David comments, using his finger to keep the page.
I unfold my arms. ‘I thought you were reading your book.’
‘I am.’
I say, all of a rush, ‘David, I’m sorry about last night. I know I took advantage, but there’s no need to be mean about it.’
He frowns.
Now I’m irritating him. I wish he’d go home and take his misery with him. He’s making the hours drag. He’s even making the seconds drag.
A girl stops to look at the blush dress that’s still on Dolly. I’ll be glad to get rid of the dress, to be honest. I’m sure it’s not helping David, having it there as a reminder of the wedding in Camden Town Hall that never was.
She’s seventeen, maybe. Young, fair, no make-up. Her grey sweatshirt is baggy and hides her figure. She has an unfinished, cautious look about her, combined with the cockiness of youth.
If you’ve ever tried to coax a sparrow to eat bread from your palm, that’s the feeling I have looking at the girl. So I sit back in my chair, close my eyes and listen to a long goods train rattling by so that she won’t fly away.
When I next open them, she’s taking a photograph of the dress. She looks at the dress in a way I recognise – the same way that I look at clothes, the combination of an intense gaze and a dreamy half-smile.
It’s no use – I have to ask. ‘Are you a fashion student?’
She frowns as if I’ve offended her. ‘No. Science. I want to study medicine,’ she says sternly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘Why?’
I back off quickly. ‘The way you were looking at it, I thought …’
‘Oh,’ she says, cutting me off before I finished the sentence. ‘I’m looking for a prom dress.’
‘Ah! Do you want to try it on?’
‘No.’ She clutches her cross-body bag. ‘I’ve only got eighty pounds to spend, max. It’s just, you know, I might find something like it, now that I know what I’m looking for.’
She has good skin. Well, she would, she’s a teenager. I can imagine her in the dress. Pale, ethereal, pretty.
I want to see her in it; I want her to see herself differently. ‘There’s some movement on the price,’ I say. ‘You might as well try it on. If it doesn’t look good then you’ll know it’s not the style for you.’
‘Oh-kay,’ she says with a reluctant sigh, as if she’s doing me a favour. Which she is.
I disrobe Dolly. This particular beaded dress has no fasteners. It’s heavy and dates from the 1920s, drop-waisted, designed to be slipped on over the head. I point her towards the dressing room and wait.
She steps out a couple of minutes later. The cautious look has entirely gone.
As I’m watching her, she’s watching me, too.
It hangs perfectly on her and she’s tied her hair back at the nape of the neck, giving her an edgy, boyish, Twenties look.
‘Like, I can breathe in it,’ she says seriously, as if breathing is usually an added bonus where style is concerned.
‘It’s the shape. You look confident.’
‘Well, I am confident. We get taught self-esteem in assembly.’
‘That’ll be it, then. Turn around.’
She turns slowly and really, it’s such a delight to see her wearing it – barefoot, her shoulders back, her head high. Wearing it, as opposed to being clothed in it; there’s a difference. ‘It could have been made for you,’ I tell her.
She goes back behind the screen to change, and she comes back with her hair loose over her grey sweatshirt and the dress in her arms. She holds it out to me. ‘Thanks, anyway,’ she says diffidently.
‘You can have it for eighty if you want it,’ I say suddenly.
She looks at me warily. ‘But that’s almost half price.’
‘It’s never going to look as good on anyone else as it does on you,’ I point out.
I can see what she’s thinking. She’s thinking that there has to be a catch. Only somebody whose thoughts veer that way, someone cautious and realistic, would come shopping for a prom dress alone, without a mother or a friend to share the moment and advise. ‘Okay, then.’
‘Would you like to sign up for my mailing list?’ I ask.
‘Okay!’
As she writes in my book – Daisy Redbourne – I take the dress from her. I wrap it in acid-free tissue and put it in a paper carrier bag as she counts out her money. We swap; transaction done.
‘Enjoy your prom,’ I say.
‘Thanks,’ she says. She walks away, swinging the bag.
David’s watching me. He looks gloomy. ‘You just sold my wedding dress.’ He’s holding his book like a shield between us.
‘That’s right.’
‘You’re not really a businesswoman, are you?’ he points out.
Why does everyone keep telling me that? ‘So what?’ I say warily.
‘I would have bought it from you last week for the full price.’ He closes his book and puts it on the table with a thud. He gives me a crooked smile. ‘Of course, if I had, Gigi would have jilted me at the actual ceremony, in front of witnesses, so I should be thanking you, you saved me from that.’
I’m not sure how to reply.
Then he adds, ‘About last night …’
‘Yes?’ I’m hopeful that the rest of the sentence is going to be something on the lines of it being the best kiss he’s ever had.
‘I had to get back to let Duncan out.’
‘Oh. Okay. That’s fine.’
‘I didn’t want you to think I rushed off for any other reason.’
‘No problem. Thanks.’
I really mean it. The thanks is because I’m grateful he at least had the decency to spare my feelings and come up with a decent excuse.
KIM
I’m out with Betty and Mercia in Cafe Rouge in Hampstead and we’re having afternoon tea, my treat, to thank them for their kindness to Enid, and to me. We’ve dressed up for the occasion. They’re wearing flowery dresses and pink lipstick and I’m wearing my maroon paisley cravat.
We’ve got seats by the window, looking out onto Hampstead High Street, and we know what we want: afternoon tea with cakes, scones and croque monsieur.
The charming young waitress is French, with dark hair curling around her face. She tells us that for five pounds extra we can have prosecco.
‘Ooh,’ Betty says.
‘I say,’ adds Mercia.
I throw caution to the wind. ‘Then we’ll have prosecco,’ I announce.
The prosecco arrives toute-de-suite, as they say in France, and we watch the waitress fill the glasses then we raise them in a salute to each other and ourselves.
‘Chin-chin,’ Betty says with a sparkle in her eye.
‘Bottoms up,’ responds Mercia.
‘Cheers,’ I say.
‘I do love afternoon tea,’ Betty says. ‘It revives you at that time of the day when you’re flagging, I always think.’
‘The meal I’ve never understood is brunch,’ Mercia says thoughtfully. ‘I can’t fit brunch into my day at all. It’s like an overblown elevenses, with pancakes instead of biscuits.’
‘It’s not elevenses,’ Betty says, shaking out her napkin. ‘Elevenses comes between breakfast and lunch, whereas brunch replaces breakfast and lunch. Isn’t that right, Kim?’
‘I think so.’ I’m flattered that she’s asking my opinion. ‘It’s American, I believe. Heavier than breakfast but lighter than lunch.’
‘Americans don’t have tea though, do they? So after brunch, what time would their evening meal be?’
‘Oh, gosh …’
This conversation is quite exciting, because it makes us feel cosmopolitan, being in a French restaurant discussing American mealtimes.
The cakes, when they come, are wonderful. I feel as if I’ve never eaten cakes quite this good before. Presently, I notice that our glasses are empty, so we look around for our waitress and I alert her, with more drama than is usual for me, to the unfolding emergency of the empty glasses. She says that for economic reasons, it would be better to buy a bottle rather than three more glasses, especially if we want three more glasses after that.
I must say, I sober up at the idea of buying nine glasses of prosecco in the middle of the afternoon. But, of course, it only amounts to three each, which feels perfectly manageable, or doable as my son, George, would call it, so I agree on the bottle.
Betty and Mercia are looking pink and flushed. I expect I am, too. I feel carefree and young, and even though I wasn’t going to talk about Enid today, she pops into my head in case I’ve forgotten her. Hello, here I am!
‘Enid would have loved this,’ I say, reaching for a scone. But as I look at the condensation beading on the glass, I think it’s more likely that she’d be appalled by my extravagance.
However, the women are nodding.
‘Absolutely,’ Mercia says. ‘To Enid!’
‘Enid.’
It’s funny how you can be married to someone all that time and not be sure you ever knew your wife all that well.
I’m not sure that I know myself anymore. I feel carefree, more carefree than I ought to feel being newly bereaved, and I split the warm scone and put the cream on, and the strawberry jam. I wonder if all couples feel like this. I wonder how well Betty knew Stan, bearing in mind the mix-up about his last resting place. ‘Why did Stan wear safari suits?’ I ask her.
She dabs her mouth with her napkin, leaving a trace of pink lipstick with the dislodged crumbs. ‘For the pockets,’ she says. ‘Stan always liked a pocket. It’s hard to get shirts with pockets, you know. Stan used to blame it on the smoking ban.’
‘Suits have pockets,’ Mercia points out.
‘Stan gave up suits when he retired. Except for golf club dinners and funerals, that sort of thing.’
They both look at me quickly.
‘Sorry. Insensitive of me,’ Betty says.
I wave my hand. Don’t worry.
Cafe Rouge is filling up with mothers and small children. The noise level rises.
‘School’s ended,’ Mercia says, looking around and smiling. But her mind is now on her husband, too, and his clothes. ‘The first time I went out with Bertie, he drove us to Brighton in an open-top car that he borrowed. He wore a suit to the beach. After we’d been married about ten years, he took to wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and khaki shorts with turn-ups.’
‘I don’t think there was such a thing as casual wear in those days,’ I point out. ‘My casual wear was my cricket whites and a football jersey for sport. We dressed for the occasion. Casual meant taking off one’s tie.’ I chuckle to myself. ‘For my eightieth, we went out for a meal and Enid asked George to wear a tie – he turned up at the restaurant wearing it around his head!’
They laugh sympathetically.
‘This kind of conversation should make us feel old, but I don’t feel old at all,’ Betty says. ‘I feel younger than them,’ she says, looking at the mothers. ‘We don’t have their worries.’
I realise that I’ve never been drunk with Betty and Mercia before. I have an urge to ask them about Enid and whether she knew about my sartorial penchants. I feel it’s important to know whether she’d have thought like them, or whether she’d have mocked me like the two women in Kentish Town. If I ask, I have to be prepared to live with the answer. And if I don’t, I’ll miss my chance because I might never get drunk with them again.
‘Penny for them,’ Mercia says, and her eyes are kind.
I decide that, all things considered, it’s something that I would like to find out one way or another, so I take my courage in both hands. ‘Did Enid know that I had a fondness for her clothes?’
Betty and Mercia snap their heads towards each other, wide-eyed.
I raise my glass aloft and stare at the bubbles, wishing I could drown in them.
‘It’s not anything that we discussed,’ Betty says after a moment, ‘although she did once ask me if Stan had ever expressed an interest that way. But he was a lot bigger than you, Kim. Nothing of mine would have gone near him.’
Mercia’s licking her finger and pressing it on the cake crumbs on her plate. ‘She asked me, too.’ She looks up at me and laughs. ‘You know what Bertie was like. I’ve got more pictures of Bertie in a dress than I have of myself.’
‘Really?’ This is news to me.
‘Crossing the equator, Bertie always threw himself wholeheartedly
into the fancy-dress ceremony. On his last cruise, his very last, he did a wonderful Lily Savage in a gold sequined gown and a blond wig – he made a marvellous drag queen. All the British men dressed up as women and had a whale of a time. Only the British men, now I think of it. The Americans went as Uncle Sam or Superman. And the Europeans ignored it altogether.’
How unlike Enid to ask her friends such an intimate question.
She’d allowed me to keep my secrets without judging or prying or disapproving, or at least, without showing it, which amounts to the same; Enid was never usually slow to show her disapproval.
‘I sort of guessed it was something to do with you, but she didn’t go into it,’ Mercia said.
That’s a tender side of Enid, an understanding side of her that I didn’t foresee. I suppose what I’ve learnt is that you can’t second-guess people. Even with a fuzzy head, it strikes me as being vitally important that I remember it.
LOT 19
Turquoise A-line mini dress, Biba, 1960s, medium, with beaded neckline, high set short sleeves.
It’s a cloudy day and I’m dressing naked Dolly in a turquoise Biba dress with a beaded neckline and cutaway shoulders, humming with pleasure at the texture of the silk. A woman with her hair pulled fiercely into a red rubber band is looking at my daffodil-yellow Chloe maxidress with a distant, slack-muscled look of misery and I hope it might be something she loves, something that’ll raise her spirits.
A busker is playing Simon and Garfunkel and it’s merging with the reggae on the music stall. The smell of onions blows on the breeze.
David’s talking to a bearded man about the constellation of Aries; they’re debating the compatibility of Aries with Pisces. Pisces and Aries can get on as long as there’s room for compromise, according to David.
If you ask me, that applies to all relationships. I still haven’t been able to work out what David thinks about the whole astrology business, especially now his astrologically perfect Gigi has dumped him.
The bearded man is showing him an astronomy app on his phone but despite the app, he hasn’t been able to find Aries in the night sky, a confession he admits to in the worried tone that suggests he blames himself for mislaying it. David tells him to look for Hamal in the autumn – Hamal apparently meaning sheep boy – and he’s pointing it out on a light box, here, the brightest star of Aries. From where I’m standing, the constellation of Aries in the light box is pretty well a straight line. It looks more like a snake than a ram.
A Random Act of Kindness Page 23
