Life After Lunch Read online

  I didn’t exactly work the rooms, but I did cruise them, blissfully surfing the crest of the party wave. By the buffet I found my father deep in conversation with Bunny. She had rifled my table-centre and now there was a daffodil in my father’s buttonhole and one in Bunny’s cleavage – of which there was more on view than is customary at lunchtime.

  ‘May I kidnap Peter?’ she asked me.

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘Not so much a kidnap, perhaps,’ said my father, ‘as an octogenarian-heist.’

  Bunny held his tie and waggled it back and forth. ‘ I don’t care if you’ve got a telegram from Brenda, you’re still the most attractive man in the room.’

  ‘I aim to please,’ said my father.

  My mother was having a similar effect on Cy Boseley-Thwaite and Hugh Heaton, who had married Old Edelrat Lucilla. Dressed in a vibrant turquoise shirtwaister and impeccable pearls, with Sinead perched decorously on her knee, she invested even our nice-but-naff sixties peacock chair with her ineffable brand of glamour. Cy – Glyn’s best man and business partner – was still a bit tottery in the backwash of a messy divorce. He and Hugh, unaccustomed to such high-octane charm, were obviously in thrall.

  ‘Darling,’ said my mother, taking my hand and holding it as if I were eight years old, ‘darling, help. I’ve started telling Simon and Hugh about the frightful dives Peter and I used to dance in before the war, always a bad sign. They’re much too polite to shut me up, so I think you should rescue them before they keel over absolutely rigid with boredom.’

  Both men protested. ‘That’s not all she told us,’ said Hugh. ‘ I had no idea Diana was a Bluebell Girl.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t, you’ve never met her before,’ I pointed out.

  ‘I knew,’ said Cy, pulling Best Man’s rank. ‘And even if I didn’t it wouldn’t take a genius to guess – check out those legs.’

  My mother released my hand and tweaked her hem, glancing down at what were still, without doubt, among the best legs in the room. ‘Oh yes, the pins have held up pretty well, but being this height can be a curse too. What size shoe do you take?’ She looked up, eyebrows raised, at Cy.

  ‘Nine,’ said Cy.

  She directed the look at Hugh. ‘And you?’

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘Snap. And you cannot imagine the nightmare of being an elderly body trying to find pretty shoes with plates that size. Herring boxes without topses would be no exaggeration, though on this occasion Charles Jourdan rode to the rescue. Didn’t he?’ she added rhetorically, kissing Sinead’s cheek.

  ‘And now,’ she added with her most warm, regretful, melting smile, ‘you must take these two chaps as far as possible from my skinny hand and glittering eye. With a whole roomful of good-looking women to talk to, they don’t want to be doing old-lady duty for a second longer.’

  The protests began to swell once more, but I took the hint. ‘Come on,’ I said, interposing myself and linking my arms through theirs. ‘Circulate. Put yourselves about. You didn’t come here to enjoy yourselves.’

  I bore them reluctantly away, and they were at once replaced by George Ionides, armed with a bottle of Sauvignon and a soppy smirk. As usual my mother had, with an enchanting display of self-deprecating humour, achieved exactly the outcome she desired – or at least a change of company, because I rather doubted that George’s charms would be enough to keep her amused for long. All Diana’s life, men had been drawn to her as wasps to an ice-cream, and she had learned to cope with this embarras de richesses with a silken tact that never failed her.

  ‘I think I may be in love with your mother,’ said Cy, a bit red-eyed, gulping wine. ‘Is she spoken for at all?’

  ‘They don’t make ’em like that any more,’ agreed Hugh. I suppose it was bound to be said, but only he would have said it. Cy gave him a look which was only one drink away from blistering rudeness. In another age it would, I suppose, have been pistols at dawn. Now, unless I brought my hostessly skills into play, it would be verbals over the tiramisù.

  I took Cy to be soothed by Verity and Jasper on the sofa, and Hugh out to the tent where Lucilla and the other Edelrats had convened to chew the fat.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Lucilla, on seeing the two of us. ‘ This is a girls-only tent.’

  ‘Don’t be mean,’ I said. ‘And anyway, he’s with me, and it’s my party.’

  ‘‘‘It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to!’’’ we chanted. Hugh looked distinctly nervous in the presence of this witchy sorority.

  ‘Ah – can I get anyone another drink?’

  ‘What a good idea,’ said Lucilla. ‘No, don’t prat about with glasses, Huggers, just get a couple of bottles.’

  Hugh withdrew. Bunny, who had torn herself away from my father (or more probably he from her), put her arm round my shoulders.

  ‘Now, tell me, Laura,’ she said. ‘We were just saying, you and I have got to the big two-five, don’t you think we’ve earned a rest? Don’t you think we should pack it in and turn sapphic, like Daffs?’

  Daffs’s haircut hadn’t changed one iota since our schooldays, but the word was she was reborn since trading in her RAF dentist for another woman. She blushed scarlet and shook with laughter. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Bun!’

  ‘No, sell it to us, Daffs,’ said Mijou, whose exotic Persian lustre was remarkably untarnished by serial marriage (she was between husbands), a partying habit that would have finished off most people, and personal tragedy (her son, stepson and third husband had been killed in a skiing accident). ‘ Tell us why we should all become gay. You’ve got a captive audience.’

  Daffs turned an even deeper shade of red. ‘I don’t think you should all become gay …’

  We jeered noisily. Hugh, rejoining us with two bottles, smiled bemusedly. ‘ May a mere man know what the joke is?’

  ‘You may, my love, but you won’t like it,’ said Lucilla, ‘Daffs is going to tell us all how to become happy, carefree lezzies.’

  ‘Go on then,’ said Hugh, filling our glasses. ‘I’m all ears.’

  ‘Except you. Bog off, Huggers.’

  I spotted Becca, hypnotizing David near the tumble-dryer, and pointed them out to Hugh. ‘Would you go and help out my brother? My daughter’s painfully shy and it can be rather hard work …’

  ‘My pleasure,’ said Hugh, and went off like a lamb to get the vamping of a lifetime.

  ‘… I don’t think anyone ought to be gay,’ Daffs was saying. ‘It was the last thing I wanted with Jamie still at Cirencester, and Gordon due for retirement, we’d even bought a house near Devizes—’

  ‘So what happened?’ asked Bunny.

  ‘I met Ruth—’

  ‘How?’ asked Mijou.

  ‘Where?’ asked Lucilla.

  I supplied the ‘When?’

  ‘She’s a district councillor—’ began Daffs, answering the one question we hadn’t asked.

  ‘Sleaze!’ we cried. ‘Scandal!’

  ‘She’s a district councillor, and we met at a public meeting about eighteen months ago … about the motorway loop—!’ Daffs had always been wonderful tease-fodder. She was now in a St Vitus dance of giggles, with tears streaming down her cheeks, and we were almost as bad.

  Lucilla got a grip first. ‘ Okay, so your eyes met across a crowded council chamber—’

  ‘Village hall,’ corrected Daffs, dabbing her eyes with a Devon Violets hankie.

  ‘Whatever. And then what?’

  ‘Well, nothing to speak of, not at that stage, I mean, we got talking about the loop and so on, she was collecting signatures, we got on really well …’

  Bunny put her arm round Daffs. ‘Cut to the chase, Daffs. You know what we all want to know – when did she first put a match to your fire?’

  It was at this crucial stage in the conversation that I caught sight of Anthea, grimacing and semaphoring over the heads of the people in the kitchen. Her madly jabbing arm seemed to indicate that something or someone needed my attention at the front of the ho
use.

  Most unwillingly, as Daffs was urged on to describe the details of her courtship, I dragged myself away and elbowed through the party to the hall, where Anthea was waiting. The front door was open and a tall young man, in a glum mac buttoned to the neck, stood there with a black case on the step next to him. He conveyed the impression that he was being messed about but was suffering in silence.

  Anthea moved in close with her back to him and spoke urgently and low. ‘ Sorry, I can’t quite catch the burden of his song, so it’s over to you.’

  She withdrew. I advanced. ‘ Can I help?’

  ‘Probably. Are you Mrs Lewis?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s your silver wedding, correct?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’ve come to play.’

  The way he said it was so exactly like the way the children’s friends used to talk that I half-expected him to stride in and begin making a mess with Lego.

  ‘Play?’

  ‘For you – and your guests.’ He glanced over my shoulder at the heaving party, assuming a wincing expression as he picked up Josh’s sounds. ‘Music,’ he explained.

  ‘Oh, I see … But what – who – I mean, did my husband book you? Because I don’t believe I—’

  ‘I’m so sorry. Hang on.’ He took a card from his pocket. ‘This should explain everything.’

  The card showed The Wedding of Arnol Fini on the front, and on being opened it read: ‘To Laura and Glyn – so sorry I can’t make your celebrations after all, but Henry is guaranteed to give your party lift-off, which is more than I ever could. He comes all bought and paid for, and with lots of love – Susan.’

  Glyn had appeared at my shoulder and was taking in this message at the same time.

  ‘How do you do, Henry,’ he said. ‘Come on in. What do you play?’

  ‘The fiddle,’ replied Henry, picking up the black case.

  ‘Terrific,’ said Glyn. ‘What a smashing idea. Let me get you a drink – what sort of fiddle would that be, classical, Appalachian, Country, Cajun …?’

  In seconds he’d relieved Henry of the sad mac and taken him and his instrument to the bar in the kitchen. Glyn was always good with performers, and the more unsure of themselves they were, the better he handled them. I was only too happy to let him get on with it, because frankly I was browned off. Yet again Susan was a no-show. Yet again she had bottled out – or turned her nose up – at the thought of having to compete with my family and friends and the other Edelrats, and yet she hadn’t been able to resist getting her oar in. Susan, I thought uncharitably, should either have made the effort to be here or settled for a bunch of flowers and butted out.

  My mother’s younger sister, Caro, swam into view (a liquid metaphor was the all-too-obvious choice) and I directed her to the first-floor loo. I went back into the sitting-room where Josh’s jocks, relieved of their duties, were grouped mutinously round the CD player debating whether it was worth staying a moment longer in the face of such blatant culture-terrorism.

  ‘Who is that bloke anyway?’ asked Josh.

  ‘Henry,’ I said.

  Only ‘John Smith’ would have raised a more scornful smirk. ‘Henry who?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know. He’s a friend of a friend. A professional musician. He’s going to play for us.’

  Something in my tone gave me away.

  ‘Come on. I thought this was supposed to be a party, not a wake.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be very good,’ I said with a calculated hint of implied reservation.

  ‘Oh yeah …’ Josh and the jocks went back to discussion of their contingency plans. I took a weaselly satisfaction in their discontent.

  Caro came back into the room. Her family resemblance to my mother did her no favours. She wore one of those droopy skirt-and-tunic outfits in brushed cotton which although voluminous, only look good on the slim, short-haired and vibrantly well-groomed. In hers, which was maroon, Caro contrived to look like an article of furniture with slightly sagging springs. Her pale, fine hair, not subjected to the same expert trimming and tinting as Diana’s, gave her round face with its expression of amiable anxiety a distracted appearance. She was also tiddly.

  ‘Have you seen Steph?’ she asked, putting a hand on my arm.

  ‘No. I didn’t know she was coming.’

  ‘Well, initially she said no,’ explained Caro, ‘but then she thought it was time she appeared in public with Monty.’

  ‘Oh well then,’ I said, ‘I’ll look out for them.’

  I reflected that this was pretty typical of my cousin. Her twin sister Ros had emigrated to Canada and led an outdoor life with her husband Brian, a geology professor at Vancouver University and their two square-jawed, clear-eyed kids. But Steph had hung around, not giving anyone in the family the time of day but at the same time insisting that they be riveted by her life. It was unfair really. Once every couple of years Caro was whisked over to Vancouver, all expenses paid, and given six weeks to remember – trips to the Rockies, whale-watching, rodeos. Red Indians, lakeside cabins, cookouts, you name it. But it was Steph she always talked about. In her capacity as a professional fundraiser Steph was smart and opportunistic, with a nose for the sexiest good causes. Now that we were middle-aged the gap between us cousins had narrowed and I realized that whereas both girls had been fairly obnoxious in their teens, in Ros’s case it had been the normal effect of biology in uproar but in Steph’s it was something more. The Monty to whom Caro referred – and I disliked myself for even knowing this – was the television newsreader whom Steph had recently stolen from his live-in lover of many years’ standing.

  I joined the general drift towards the garden. Glyn was drumming up an audience for Henry. I was shamed by his willingness to enjoy Susan’s contribution. It was therefore comforting to see two other people who obviously had no intention of moving. I approached the sofa where they were sitting and realized too late who they were.

  ‘Laura – congratulations!’

  ‘Hallo, Steph, I was looking out for you actually. I didn’t realize you were here till I spoke to Aunt Caro.’

  ‘Well, no,’ said Steph, ‘ you wouldn’t, because I wasn’t originally intending to come, but Monty hadn’t met any of the family, so here we are.’ She lifted Monty’s hand to her lips and kissed it. It was hard to know where to look. Monty was taller and thinner than he appeared on TV, with an unexpectedly chinless profile and hair that curled on his collar. He got to his feet a touch bashfully and offered me the hand Steph had just kissed.

  ‘What can I say? I’m a gatecrasher.’ His voice had an actorly timbre.

  ‘Every halfway decent party has one.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  We shook, and I resisted the urge to wipe my palm on my skirt. There was a burst of laughter from the garden.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Steph. ‘ Have you got jugglers or something?’

  ‘Not a juggler. A fiddler.’

  ‘What a nice idea,’ said Monty politely.

  ‘Not mine, I’m afraid – a present from a friend.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Steph, ‘you won’t take it personally if we stay here.’ She gave Monty’s cuff a tweak so that he sat down next to her again.

  ‘Not at all.’ I began to move away. ‘Can I get you anything?’

  Monty dropped an arm over the side of the sofa and lifted a half-full bottle. ‘ Well supplied, thank you.’

  It was no good – I couldn’t escape the impression that my party had been hijacked. And to underline the situation I heard the front door slam on the departure of the disaffected DJS.

  I had literally to elbow my way through my own guests to reach the garden. Their attention was focused elsewhere. My ill-humour made me slow to react, or I should have noticed the music sooner.

  None of Glyn’s suggested styles was right. Henry played jazz. As I reached the front of the crowd, and emerged from beneath the awning into the garden which was now bathed in spring
sunshine, I was doused in a torrent of glittering notes which stopped me in my tracks. The number was ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’,’ but Henry seemed to have more than the regulation number of hands, for the tune skipped and swooped on its way adorned in a virtuoso swirl of improvised melody. He was standing on the grass like something that had grown there, tall and skinny in grey trousers and an RAF surplus sweater. Amos and Sinead sat on the ground at his feet. His music filled the air with exuberance, and delight, and sheer frolicsome happiness. It was the music of lasses and lads, and young men and maids, of sap rising and fancy lightly turning – but with a wistful, worldly edge that snagged the heartstrings. I stood and listened, captivated. I felt my shoulders relax and my expression soften. Glancing round at the faces of my friends and family, I saw they too were transformed. Gone were the rag-bag crew of individuals whose only connection was knowing us. They had become a happy and unified throng, their eyes alight with pleasure and a sort of – I searched my mind and this was the only word I could come up with – innocence. It was more than the power of cheap music, because this music wasn’t cheap. It was sophisticated, bittersweet, full of dazzling wit and heartfelt sentiment, although Henry’s eyes remained downcast and his face inscrutable. Only a slight working of the muscles round his mouth showed that there was any conscious effort at all in his playing. He seemed to have no notion of the effect he was having on us.

  When he finished the number there was a burst of applause, followed by something unusual – a kind of murmur of delight and longing. People’s glasses were empty but no one moved away. Arms crept about waists, some people joined the children on the ground. Everyone wanted more.

  Henry didn’t so much as look up in acknowledgement. He simply paused, before lifting his bow again and holding it poised it for a split second. When an enthralled silence fell, and he began once more to play – ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine’ – I felt an arm around my shoulders and Glyn’s hand turned my face to his as he kissed me.

  ‘Well done, Mrs Lewis,’ he whispered. ‘I love you.’