by Maeve Binchy
But if I didn’t go, Alice would kill me, and Alice and I often had a laugh over the perfection of Malcolm and Melissa. She said I had made them up, and that the people in the photos were in fact models who had been hired by the Greek Tourist Board to make the place look more glamorous. Their names had passed into our private shorthand. Alice would describe a restaurant as a ‘Malcolm and Melissa sort of place’, meaning that it was perfect, understated and somehow irritating at the same time. I would say that I had handled a situation in a ‘Malcolm and Melissa way’, meaning that I had scored without seeming to have done so at all.
So I rang the number and Melissa was delighted to hear from me. Yes, didn’t Greece all seem like a dream nowadays, and wouldn’t it be foolish to go to the same place next year in case it wasn’t as good, and no, they hadn’t really decided where to go next year, but Malcolm had seen this advertisement about a yacht party which wanted a few more people to make up the numbers, and it might be fun, but one never knew and one was a bit trapped on a yacht if it was all terrible. And super that I could come on the 20th, and then with the voice politely questioning, would I be bringing anyone else?
In one swift moment I made a decision. ‘Well, if it’s not going to make it too many I would like to bring this friend of mine, Alice,’ I said, and felt a roaring in my ears as I said it, Melissa was equal to anything.
‘Of course, of course, that’s lovely, we look forward to meeting her. See you both about eightish then. It’s not far from the tube, but maybe you want to get a bus, I’m not sure . . .’
‘Alice has a car,’ I said proudly.
‘Oh, better still. Tell her there’s no problem about parking, we have a bit of waste land around the steps. It makes life heavenly in London not to have to worry about friends parking.’
Alice was delighted. She said she hoped they wouldn’t turn out to have terrible feet of clay and that we would have to find new names for them. I was suddenly taken with a great desire to impress her with them, and an equal hope that they would find her as funny and witty as I did. Alice can be eccentric at times, she can go into deep silences. We giggled a lot about what we’d wear. Alice said that we should go in full evening dress, with capes, and embroidered handbags, and cigarette-holders, but I said that would be ridiculous.
‘It would make her uneasy,’ said Alice with an evil face.
‘But she’s not horrible, she’s nice. She’s asked us to dinner, she’ll be very nice,’ I pleaded.
‘I thought you couldn’t stand her,’ said Alice, disappointed.
‘It’s hard to explain. She doesn’t mean any harm, she just does everything too well.’ I felt immediately that I was taking the myth away from Malcolm and Melissa and wished I’d never thought of asking Alice.
Between then and the 20th, Alice thought that we should go in boiler suits, in tennis gear, dressed as Greek peasants, and at one stage that we should dress up as nuns and tell her that this was what we were in real life. With difficulty I managed to persuade her that we were not to look on the evening as some kind of search-and-destroy mission, and Alice reluctantly agreed.
I don’t really know why we had allowed the beautiful couple to become so much part of our fantasy life. It wasn’t as if we had nothing else to think about. Alice was a solicitor with a busy practice consisting mainly of battered wives, worried one-parent families faced with eviction, and a large vocal section of the female population who felt that they had been discriminated against in their jobs. She had an unsatisfactory love-life going on with one of the partners in the firm, usually when his wife was in hospital, which didn’t make her feel at all guilty, she saw it more as a kind of service that she was offering. I work in a theatre writing publicity-handouts and arranging newspaper interviews for the stars, and in my own way I meet plenty of glittering people. I sort of love a hopeless man who is a good writer but a bad person to love, since he loves too many people, but it doesn’t break my heart.
I don’t suppose that deep down Alice and I want to live in a big house in Holland Park, and be very beautiful and charming, and have a worthy job like Melissa raising money for a good cause, and be married to a very bright, sunny-looking man like Malcolm, who runs a left-wing bookshop that somehow has made him a great deal of money. I don’t suppose we could have been directly envious. More indirectly irritated, I would have thought.
I was very irritated with myself on the night of the 20th because I changed five times before Alice came to collect me. The black sweater and skirt looked too severe, the gingham dress mutton dressed as lamb, the yellow too garish, the pink too virginal. I settled for a tapestry skirt and a cheap cotton top.
‘Christ, you look like a suite of furniture,’ said Alice when she arrived.
‘Do I? Is it terrible?’ I asked, anxious as a sixteen-year-old before a first dance.
‘No, of course it isn’t,’ said Alice. ‘It’s fine, it’s just a bit sort of a sofa-coverish if you know what I mean. Let’s hope it clashes with her décor.’
Tears of rage in my eyes, I rushed into the bedroom and put on the severe black again. Safe, is what magazines call black. Safe I would be.
Alice was very contrite.
‘I’m sorry, I really am. I don’t know why I said that, it looked fine. I’ve never given two minutes’ thought to clothes, you know that. Oh for God’s sake wear it, please. Take off the mourning gear and put on what you were wearing.’
‘Does this look like mourning then?’ I asked, riddled with anxiety.
‘Give me a drink,’ said Alice firmly. ‘In ten years of knowing each other we have never had to waste three minutes talking about clothes. Why are we doing it tonight?’
I poured her a large Scotch and one for me, and put on a jockey necklace which took the severe look away from the black. Alice said it looked smashing.
Alice told me about a client whose husband had put Vim in her tin of tooth powder and she had tried to convince herself that he still wasn’t too bad. I told Alice about an ageing actress who was opening next week in a play, and nobody, not even the man I half love, would do an interview with her for any paper because they said, quite rightly, that she was an old bore. We had another Scotch to reflect on all that.
I told Alice about the man I half loved having asked me to go to Paris with him next weekend, and Alice said I should tell him to get stuffed, unless, of course, he was going to pay for the trip, in which case I must bring a whole lot of different judgements to bear. She said she was going to withdraw part of her own services from her unsatisfactory partner, because the last night they had spent together had been a perusal of The Home Doctor to try and identify the nature of his wife’s illness. I said I thought his wife’s illness might be deeply rooted in drink, and Alice said I could be right but it wasn’t the kind of thing you said to someone’s husband. Talking about drink reminded us to have another and then we grudgingly agreed it was time to go.
There were four cars in what Melissa had described as a bit of waste land, an elegantly paved semicircular courtyard in front of the twelve steps up to the door. Alice commented that they were all this year’s models, and none of them cost a penny under three thousand. She parked her battered 1969 Volkswagen in the middle, where it looked like a small child between a group of elegant adults.
Malcolm opened the door, glass in hand. He was so pleased to see us that I wondered how he had lived six months without the experience. Oh come on, I told myself, that’s being unfair, if he wasn’t nice and welcoming I would have more complaints. The whole place looked like the film set for a trendy frothy movie on gracious modern living. Melissa rushed out in a tapestry skirt, and I nearly cried with relief that I hadn’t worn mine. Melissa is shaped like a pencil rather than a sofa; the contrast would have been mind-blowing.
We were wafted into a sitting-room, and wafted is the word. Nobody said ‘come this way’ or ‘let me introduce you’ but somehow there we were with drinks in our hands, sitting between other people, whose names had been
said clearly, a Melissa would never mutter. The drinks were good and strong, a Malcolm would never be mean. Low in the background a record-player had some nostalgic songs from the Sixties, the time when we had all been young and impressionable, none of your classical music, nor your songs of the moment. Malcolm and Melissa couldn’t be obvious if they tried.
And it was like being back in Andrea’s Taverna again. Everyone felt more witty and relaxed because Malcolm and Melissa were there, sort of in charge of things without appearing to be. They sat and chatted, they didn’t fuss, they never tried to drag anyone into the conversation or to force some grounds of common interest. Just because we were all there together under their roof . . . that was enough.
And it seemed to be enough for everyone. A great glow came over the group in the sunset, and the glow deepened when a huge plate of spaghetti was served. It was spaghetti, damn her. But not the kind that you and I would ever make. Melissa seemed to be out of the room only three minutes, and I knew it takes at least eight to cook the pasta. But there it was, excellent, mountainous, with garlic bread, fresh and garlicky, not the kind that breaks your teeth on the outside and then is soggy within. The salad was like an exotic still-life, it had everything in it except lettuce. People moved as if in a dance to the table. There were no cries of praise and screams of disclaimer from the hostess. Why then should I have been so resentful of it all?
Alice seemed to be loving every minute of her evening, she had already fought with Malcolm about the kind of women’s literature he sold, but it was a happy fight where she listened to the points he was making and answered them. If she didn’t like someone she wouldn’t bother to do this. She had been talking to Melissa about some famous woman whom they both knew through work, and they were giggling about the famous woman’s shortcomings. Alice was forgetting her role, she was breaking the rules. She had come to understand more about the Melissa and Malcolm people so that we could laugh at them. Instead, she looked in grave danger of getting on with them.
I barely heard what someone called Keith was saying to me about my theatre. I realised with a great shock that I was jealous. Jealous that Alice was having such a nice time, and impressing Melissa and Malcolm just because she was obviously not trying to.
This shock was so physical that a piece of something exotic, avocado maybe, anyway something that shouldn’t be in a salad, got stuck in my throat. No amount of clearing and hurrumphing could get rid of it and I stood up in a slight panic.
Alice grasped at once.
‘Relax and it will go down,’ she called. ‘Just force your limbs to relax, and your throat will stop constricting. No, don’t bang her, there’s no need.’
She spoke with such confidence that I tried to make my hands and knees feel heavy, and miracles it worked.
‘That’s a good technique,’ said Malcolm admiringly, when I had been patted down and, scarlet with rage, assured everyone I was fine.
‘It’s very unscientific,’ said the doctor amongst us, who would have liked the chance to slit my throat and remove the object to cries of admiration.
‘It worked,’ said Alice simply.
The choking had gone away but not the reason for it. Why did I suddenly feel so possessive about Alice, so hurt when she hadn’t liked my dress, so jealous and envious that she was accepted here on her own terms and not as my friend? It was ridiculous. Sometimes I didn’t hear from Alice for a couple of weeks; we weren’t soul mates over everything, just long-standing friends.
‘. . . have you had this flat in the City long?’ asked Keith politely.
‘Oh that’s not my flat, that’s Alice’s,’ I said. Alice was always unusual. She had thought that since the City would be deserted at weekends, the time she wanted a bit of peace, that’s where she should live. And of course it worked. Not a dog barked, not a child cried, not a car revved up when Alice was sleeping till noon on a Sunday.
‘No, I live in Fulham,’ I said, thinking how dull and predictable it sounded.
‘Oh I thought . . .’ Keith didn’t say what he thought but he didn’t ask about my flat in Fulham.
Malcolm was saying that Alice and I should think about the yachting holiday. Keith and Rosemary were thinking about it, weren’t they? They were, and it would be great fun if we went as a six, then we could sort of take over in case the other people were ghastly.
‘It sounds great,’ I said dishonestly and politely. ‘Yes, you must tell me more about it.’
‘Weren’t you meant to be going on holiday with old Thing?’ said Alice practically.
‘That was very vague,’ I snapped. ‘The weekend in Paris was definite but the holiday . . . nothing was fixed. Anyway weren’t you meant to be going to a cottage with your Thing . . . ?’
Everyone looked at me, it was as if I had belched loudly or taken off my blouse unexpectedly. They were waiting for me to finish and in a well-bred way rather hoping that I wouldn’t. Their eyes were like shouts of encouragement.
‘You said that if his wife was put away for another couple of weeks you might go to their very unsocialistic second home? Didn’t you?’
Alice laughed, everyone else looked stunned.
Melissa spooned out huge helpings of a ten thousand calorie ice-cream with no appearance of having noticed a social gaffe.
‘Well, when the two of you make up your minds, do tell us,’ she said. ‘It would be great fun, and we have to let these guys know by the end of the month, apparently. They sound very nice actually. Jeremy and Jacky they’re called, he makes jewellery and Jacky is an artist. They’ve lots of other friends going too, a couple of girls who work with Jeremy and their boy friends, I think. It’s just Jeremy and Jacky who are . . . who are organising it all.’
Like a flash I saw it. Melissa thought Alice and I were lesbians. She was being her usual tolerant liberated self over it all. If you like people, what they do in bed is none of your business. HOW could she be so crass as to think that about Alice and myself? My face burned with rage. Slowly like heavy flowers falling off a tree came all the reasons. I was dressed so severely, I had asked could I bring a woman not a man to her party, I had been manless in Greece when she met me the first time, I had just put on this appalling show of spitely spiteful dikey jealousy about Alice’s relationship with a man. Oh God. Oh God.
I knew little or nothing about lesbians. Except that they were different. I never was friendly with anyone who was one. I knew they didn’t wear bowler hats, but I thought that they did go in for this aggressive sort of picking on one another in public. Oh God.
Alice was talking away about the boat with interest. How much would it cost? Who decided where and when they would stop? Did Jeremy and Jacky sound madly camp and would they drive everyone mad looking for sprigs of tarragon in case the pot au feu was ruined?
Everyone was laughing, and Malcolm was being liberated and tolerant and left-wing.
‘Come on Alice, nothing wrong with tarragon, nothing wrong with fussing about food, we all fuss about something. Anyway, they didn’t say anything to make us think that they would fuss about food, stop typecasting.’
He said it in a knowing way. I felt with a sick dread that he could have gone on and said, ‘After all, I don’t typecast you and expect you to wear a hairnet and military jacket.’
I looked at Alice, her thin white face all lit up laughing. Of course I felt strongly about her, she was my friend. She was very important to me, I didn’t need to act with Alice. I resented the way the awful man with his alcoholic wife treated her, but was never jealous of him because Alice didn’t really give her mind to him. And as for giving anything else . . . well I suppose they made a lot of love together but so did I and the unsatisfactory journalist. I didn’t want Alice in that way. I mean that was madness, we wouldn’t even know what to do. We would laugh ourselves silly.
Kiss Alice?
Run and lay my head on Alice’s breast?
Have Alice stroke my hair?
That’s what people who were in love did.
We didn’t do that.
Did Alice need me? Yes, of course she did. She often told me that I was the only bit of sanity in her life, that I was safe. I had known her for ten years, hardly anyone else she knew nowadays went back that far.
Malcolm filled my coffee cup.
‘Do persuade her to come with us,’ he said gently to me. ‘She’s marvellous really, and I know you’d both enjoy yourselves.’
I looked at him like a wild animal. I saw us fitting into their lives, another splendid liberal concept, slightly racy, perfectly acceptable. ‘We went on holiday with that super gay couple, most marvellous company, terribly entertaining.’ Which of us would he refer to as the He? Would there be awful things like leaving us alone together, or nodding tolerantly over our little rows?
The evening and not only the evening stretched ahead in horror. Alice had been laying into the wine, would she be able to drive? If not, oh God, would they offer us a double bed in some spare room in this mansion? Would they suggest a taxi home to Fulham since my place was nearer? Would they speculate afterwards why we kept two separate establishments in the first place?
Worse, would I ever be able to laugh with Alice about it or was it too important? I might disgust her, alarm her, turn her against me. I might unleash all kinds of love that she had for me deep down, and how would I handle that?
Of course I love Alice, I just didn’t realise it. But what lover, what poor unfortunate lover in the history of the whole damn thing, ever had the tragedy of Coming Out in Malcolm and Melissa’s lovely home in Holland Park?
NOTTING HILL GATE
Everyone knew that Daphne’s friend Mike was a shit and to give us our due most of us said so. But she laughed and said we were full of rubbish. She agreed, still laughing, to take the address of the battered wife place, just in case, then we gave her a lovely fur jacket that Mike wouldn’t be able to share, and she left us and married him. We never saw her again. But we had to find a new secretary.
