Life After Lunch Read online

  The umpire said time was up and the Swede bounced to his feet and moved briskly into position to receive. The American, as befitted a much-loved idol of the crowd, rose more slowly, adjusted his headband and walked pensively with his distinctive rolling gait to the base-line, amidst tumultous applause, rejecting the first two balls sent to him by the ballboy for reasons that only he would ever know.

  The American delivered an ace. The crowd exploded with delight. The Brits’ traditional support for the underdog flew out of the window before their passion for this cuddly clown and his withering ground-strokes. Amidst the jubilation the camera picked up the chanteuse, but she remained impassive and after lingering hopefully for a few seconds it slunk away again, deprived of its prey.

  I admired her steely sangfroid, with which my own behaviour compared unfavourably. After all, I had come back here to confront Patrick, to say my piece, and to walk out of the door with my pride and integrity intact. Instead of which I was behaving like the ultimate saddo. It wasn’t my fault, I told myself. If he’d been here when I arrived it would all have been over by now. There again, if I hadn’t been putting off the evil hour in the company of Susan I might have caught him before he left for the vet …

  The American held his serve to love, and by way of a flourish sent one of the balls up to his opponent with a courtesy ace. He followed this with a pretended prayer of thanks and a self-deprecating gesture. The crowd berserked. The camera, sneaking another quick look at the chanteuse, was rewarded with the flicker of a smile.

  I didn’t hear Patrick come in. The first I knew of his return was when he appeared in the doorway, cat basket in hand. He was even more rumpled than usual and looked glum.

  ‘Hallo,’ I said, ‘how did it go?’

  He mumbled something and retreated into the hall. The next I heard of him was a clanking in the kitchen.

  I glanced into the hall. The cat basket stood on the carved teak chest he’d picked up in Thailand. It was empty.

  I sat down on the sofa and waited for him to reappear. There was silence. It was ridiculous, but I went out to the kitchen. He was sitting at the table with a glass of some disgusting Dutch eau-de-vie, and a lighted cigarette resting on the rim of a striped saucer. This was quintessential Patrick – an exhibitionist neediness that bordered on arrogance; raffishness hinting at ruin; his grizzled hair in need of cutting, his blue chin in need of shaving, his large body and old clothes crying out for a woman’s touch … which they would not, I reminded myself, be getting from me.

  ‘Did you have to leave her there?’ I asked.

  ‘Yup.’ He took a swig of the firewater and picked up his cigarette with a hand that trembled slightly.

  ‘Poor old Peaches.’

  ‘Yup.’ He coughed. ‘I was offered the option, but I couldn’t face burying her down the garden.’

  For some reason, and in spite of my earlier unkind thoughts, it had not crossed my mind that Peaches would be put down. She was indestructible, surely? I was seriously wrongfooted. The bloody animal had stolen a march on me from beyond the grave. It didn’t make my task any easier.

  ‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Can’t be helped,’ he said tersely.

  ‘What was the matter with her?’

  ‘Kidney failure.’

  ‘So it was the best thing,’ I said firmly.

  ‘Yup.’ He coughed again, his eyes watering. He had a constitution like an ox and a build like a grizzly, yet he had the brass neck to affect this consumptive air.

  ‘You wouldn’t want to see her suffer, surely?’

  ‘I wouldn’t, no.’

  Casting around for a displacement activity under cover of which to change gear, I approached the sink. As one does. I washed up what was there – two mugs and a cereal bowl – and ran hot water into a porridge saucepan, amidst a silence you could have spread on bread. I’d moved on to picking the sludgy bits out of the plughole when he coughed again, and that proved a cough too far – it triggered me into action.

  ‘Patrick,’ I said, turning to face him. He looked up at me and raised his eyebrows. Exhausted but doing his best. Please. ‘ Patrick, I’m going.’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He sighed, and stubbed his cigarette out. ‘ I’m sorry to be poor company.’

  ‘It’s not that—’

  ‘And you’re doing the fucking washing up!’

  ‘That’s okay—’

  ‘Come here, tresh.’

  As he said this he pushed his chair back and stood up. I suppose he must have taken a step forward but it seemed as though he simply stretched out an arm and pulled me over.

  Habit and ambivalence made me ineffectual. Lack of the least suspicion or insecurity made him unstoppable. My feeble ‘No’ was smothered by his familiar, self-confident embrace. He snuggled his face into the side of my neck. I mumbled something about this not being the time or the place, and he grabbed my bottom and kneaded it appreciatively. As I bowed to the inevitable I entertained a mental picture of Peaches, in her prime, wearing that plump-cheeked, slit-eyed, smug expression that said, unequivocally: sucker.

  One thing I will say for Patrick, he was not one of the turn-overand-snore-noisily types that one reads about. Post-coitally speaking, he was the gnat’s pyjamas. But then why wouldn’t he be, when that constituted the only purely social part of our meetings? We never went anywhere and I never needed feeding – I was wonderfully cheap to run. On this occasion I could actually have made good use of a snooze-period during which to summon my resources for the ordeal which had been postponed yet again. But he was like a child after food – cheered, revived, raring to go.

  ‘Don’t go away,’ he admonished, sliding his faithless arm from beneath my neck and padding downstairs to the kitchen. ‘Get you anything?’ he called.

  ‘Water.’

  He sang ‘When I’m Sixty-four’ as he waited for the tap to run cold. He never hummed, but sang properly, with all the twiddly bits and most of the right words. There was a practised twang to his singing voice which I imagined came from exposure to too many Irish show bands as a child. He was still singing when he came back in, carrying the Dutch gut-rot beneath his arm, my water and his glass in one hand and the striped saucer containing cigarettes and matches in the other. He stood by the bed, still holding everything, and went into the big finale.

  ‘If I stayed out till quarter to two, would you close the door?’ He leaned towards me, eyes rolling beseechingly. ‘ Will you still need me? Will you still feed me? When – I’m – sixty – four!’

  He handed me the water and got back under the duvet with a series of self-satisfied bounces and grunts. Then he sloshed some liquor into the glass, lit a fag, balanced the saucer on his chest and said, ‘I’ve got it all back in perspective now, you’ll be glad to hear. You were absolutely right.’ I held my breath, but he went on with scarcely a pause. ‘It’s just that she seemed like a perfectly healthy cat when I took her in and within seconds she was under sentence of death. On the other hand, she was in a very real sense already under sentence of death, and this dispensed painlessly with what would have been a distressing lingering decline.’

  It was that ‘in a very real sense’ which nudged me back on course. Like the cough earlier, only this time I was on safer ground because he’d shot his bolt and there could be no smothering of the issue. I hoisted myself into a more commanding position, put my water glass on the floor by the bed, and held the duvet firmly in place over my torso.

  ‘I’m glad you were here though,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you waited.’

  ‘That’s all right. Patrick—’

  ‘They’ve got Doctor Feelgood on at the Multiplex. They say it’s a hoot. Have you seen it?’

  ‘No. You know I said earlier I was going—’

  ‘Sorry about that, was it urgent?’

  ‘No – yes,’ I said, incisively.

  ‘I love you when you’re overbearing. If I’m a very naughty bo
y, will you beat my botty with a slipper?’

  ‘Shut up!’ I shouted. ‘Be quiet, why don’t you, for five seconds? When I said I was going, I meant as in leaving.’

  He paused, as if considering this, and then nodded. ‘Ah. Right then.’

  ‘I’m not coming back.’

  ‘I see,’ he replied a little over-promptly. And then, quizzically: ‘After all this time?’

  ‘After five months, yes.’

  He stubbed out his cigarette and put the saucer on the floor by the bed, nudging aside a slithering pile of paperbacks. With his back to me he asked, ‘ Now will you beat me with that slipper?’

  I got out of bed and began dressing. He watched me, with a thoughtful frown. That morning I’d put on a black M&S suit with an edge-to-edge jacket and a short skirt – a snappy, sassy, businesslike look designed to carry me through lunch with Susan and on, coolly confident, through the anticipated vicissitudes of the afternoon.

  ‘That’s a good get-up,’ he commented, as though the frown had been occasioned by my clothes. ‘Have I seen that before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s new, then?’

  ‘No, but you haven’t seen it.’ It was truly astonishing how he gave no credence to my life beyond these four walls – this bedroom, for goodness’ sake.

  I put on my shoes and from habit gave my reflection the once-over. Patrick didn’t own a full-length mirror, so I had to tilt the old-fashioned stand-and-frame model on the chest of drawers. I ducked to fluff my hair, and then straightened to smooth my skirt, run my thumbs beneath my shirt collar and shoot my cuffs. Beyond my reflection I could see his, arms folded over his chest, cigarette held before his face.

  ‘Do you have any idea,’ he said musingly, ‘how sexy that little pantomime is?’ When I didn’t answer he went on: ‘I do love a dash of testosterone in a woman.’

  I turned to face him. ‘But do you understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘It’s over.’

  ‘If you say so.’ With a sudden and rather unnerving briskness he stubbed out his cigarette and lurched out of bed. ‘Would you hang on just till I get some strides on? I feel at a disadvantage.’

  I should have been out of there before he even asked, but now that he was hopping and tugging into his rumpled bags I felt I had to wait. He sucked his stomach in to hoist the fly, released it comfortably (he was disarmingly un-figure-conscious) and said, ‘There we go.’

  Annoyingly he left the bedroom first and jogged, flop-flop-flop, down the stairs in front of me. I felt prissy mincing down in my high heels, carrying the glasses and the saucer that I’d picked up from force of habit. Turning at the bottom he barred my way, one hand on the newel post and the other braced against the wall. He was never particularly clean, and he exuded his usual fragrance, essence of pub. The hand on the wall was inches from my face. Blessed understanding swept through me like a chemical high.

  Nothing could stop me now. ‘ Excuse me.’

  ‘Come on, tresh, this is silly.’

  ‘Get out of my way.’

  He stood aside, and immediately went to the front door and stood in front of that. I took the glasses and saucer out to the kitchen. When I came back he was still in front of the door. I picked up my handbag from behind the empty cat basket – there was a certain gloomy poetry in that – and rather than ask him to move again, remained where I was and said, ‘ Sorry, but I won’t be part of your glee club any longer.’

  ‘Glee club? That’s rather good,’ His face lit up with a surprised, admiring smile. The admiration was mostly, I knew, for himself.

  I was absolutely sure he’d use the phrase again, quite soon, and pass it off as his own. That gave me the strength to walk briskly towards the door – so briskly that he’d have had to use force to stop me – and open it.

  ‘Goodbye, Patrick,’ I said. ‘And all the very best.’

  From the corner of my eye as I passed I saw him tilt his head.

  ‘No kiss?’

  What sort of question was that? I was no longer under any misapprehension. He was a monster of self-regard. He may have claimed to be turned on by my dash of testosterone, but it was pure oestrogen that saw me out of his front door, and his life, with his corkscrew and bottle-opener in my handbag.

  I’ve no idea whether he watched me till I turned the corner, the way people are supposed to do. I rather doubt it. My guess is he closed the door, padded into the kitchen to fold a piece of bread round something tasty, and phoned the glee club’s newest recruit to see if she fancied Doctor Feelgood at the Multiplex.

  Even then, through the beginnings of a crunching wine-and-stress headache, I thought: ‘And the best of British.’

  Chapter Two

  When, six months before that, Glyn and I had reached our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, it was with a start of surprise. We had been jogging along with our eyes on the ground for so long that we hadn’t realized we’d reached the top of this particular hill. In fact it was only when we were invited to Old Edelrat Bunny Ionides’ silver wedding party that we realized we too were up for a long-service award.

  Bunny was loosely tethered to George Ionides, who owned an international children’s wear chain and didn’t care what she did as long as it didn’t get in the way of making a profit. Their bash in north Herts was an eye-smacking explosion of conspicuous expenditure with orchids, caviar, Bollinger, a flotilla of ice swans holding the strawberries, two bands with an American magician in between, fireworks, a separate sixties disco, full English breakfast, and a thousand giant pearlized balloons released, with extravagant vanity, into the thick dark of early dawn.

  ‘Did you meet your old school chums?’ asked George in his amiably pompous way as we did a sedate rock ’ n’ roll to ‘All Shook Up’.

  ‘I’ve seen Lucilla. She looks wonderful.’ Lucilla had turned into a honed Home Counties chatelaine with a manicure to die for and a jawline you could cut cheese with.

  ‘Annette’s here too, somewhere,’ said George, subjecting me to an inexpert twirl, which gave my dorsal muscles a painful tweak. Annette – cussing, puffing, mutinous Annette – had become the biggest thing in social work (in every sense).

  ‘She’s done awfully well,’ said George, who hadn’t an ounce of poetry in his soul. ‘She’s one of the top people in her field.’

  ‘So I understand,’ I said. It was typical of him to apply the buzz-talk of commerce to the badlands of social work.

  ‘Do you see any of the other girls from the old days?’ he asked, mopping his face with a large hankie as the music stopped.

  ‘Only Susan Upchurch,’ I said. ‘I see a lot of her.’

  ‘Doesn’t ring a bell.’ George took a glass from a passing tray. ‘Bunny can’t like her.’ This didn’t surprise me, but Bunny didn’t know what she was missing.

  Back at our table Glyn was having a lovely time. ‘Should we have a party?’ he asked me, beaming, as I returned.

  ‘Of course!’ cried Bunny, who was doing her hostessly rounds, bursting out of a puce Alaïa body-tube. ‘You must! There aren’t many of us diehards about.’

  Empowered by ‘Hi-Ho, Silver Lining’, she towed Glyn on to the dance-floor, and I thought, as I watched them sway and chant with boisterous abandon, that still being married after a quarter of a century meant different things to different people.

  We found one of Bunny and George’s gleaming balloons in the car park of the South Mimms service station, thirty miles from its launching place. It was losing air and looked like a used novelty condom.

  I told Susan we were having a party, and that she was invited. She expressed herself thrilled, charmed, and definitely committed. I knew she wouldn’t come.

  ‘You know what I think you should do to celebrate all those years of blameless union?’ she said, grinning satanically at me over the saltimbocca.

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘I think you should have an affair.’

  Our party was nothing like t
he Ionides’. Glyn’s music agency, Guys ’n’ Dolls, was successful, but not to the full-band-and-Bolli extent. We first contacted all the usual suspects, and then everyone we’d known for more than ten years (taking a charitable line on whether we liked them or not, since even quite obnoxious people tend to be agreeable when invited to a do). Not wanting to appear grasping, we didn’t tell them what it was in aid of, but secretly hoped that a good number of them would realize. The take-up was good. Of the A-list, only Simon and his companion Richard were unavailable, destined to be taking a short break in Marrakesh at the time.

  We opted for Sunday lunchtime, on the basis that expectations of a daytime party tended to be lower, and therefore less likely to be dashed. The month being April, we thought it unlikely that we could expect everyone to be outside. But we didn’t want seventy-odd people confined to the house, and couldn’t afford a marquee. In the end, and fittingly, we compromised. The Dog and Duck in Stoke Newington, where our elder daughter Becca’s current boyfriend Nathan worked as a barman, had a lean-to tent which they hired out for peanuts provided the hirers could transport, erect and return it themselves. Nathan, having obtained the evening off, duly drove out on the Saturday with several hundred square metres of stained and tattered red canvas stuffed into the back of his Hyundai van.

  ‘Is that it?’ I asked, peering in.

  ‘Yup.’ Nathan, who had the physique of a gladiator and the face of a debauched angel, opened the back doors of the van. ‘This is it. Where do you want it?’

  It took the two of us, and our other daughter, Verity, twenty minutes to manhandle the tent with its accompanying sheets of resistant tarpaulin and plastic, and several sheaves of rusty pegs, hooks and nails, round to the back of the house where it lay on the patio with a sullen and intractable air, daring us to make sense of it. When our son Josh finally fell out of bed he and Nathan began erecting this unpromising structure against the rear wall of the house, assisted in due course by Glyn when he returned from London, and supervised by Becca who sat in the kitchen with a Southern Comfort and a fag while Verity bathed the children. Sinead, just three, and Amos, rising five, were staying the night so their mother could go clubbing.