Life After Lunch Read online

‘Me too,’ I said. The music rapped us as we stood there together, my face against his cheek, his arm encircling me. It was a moment of sweet content.

  As the last attenuated notes spiralled up into the blue like larksong, Glyn gave me a squeeze. ‘ Clever old Susan, eh?’ he said. ‘ The girl done super.’

  Henry launched into ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ and Glyn and I drew apart. Glyn grabbed my mother and began to dance, moving his arm up and down like a pump-handle. As I walked towards the end of the garden everyone joined in, a wild antic hay like a bunch of peasants in a Brueghel painting. Someone shouted ‘ Laura, come and dance!’ but I waved a hand over my shoulder to show I’d be back in a moment.

  I just wanted to sit and listen a bit more, and to observe the party from a distance. I also wanted to see off my earlier uncharitable thoughts about Susan who had indeed, as Glyn said, ‘done super’.

  Ours was not a large or distinguished garden. The lawn was mainly composed of plantains, moss and daisies, and most of that was taken up with Josh’s old green metal swing (dug out and reassembled for the grandchildren) and a sturdy but unaesthetic red plastic climbing frame which I’d bought with good-customer points accumulated on a mail order catalogue. Glyn had made a pond, which was as green and greasy as the Limpopo but which seethed with wildlife, and we had two apple trees which supported a hammock in summer. Our herbaceous border was jolly with daffodils at this time of year and then despite our best efforts turned completely blue in the summer, as it filled up with self-seeded larkspur and canterbury bells which crowded out everything else.

  The far end of the garden was divided from the rest by a screen of forsythia, not yet in full flower but green and bushy enough to hide the dilapidated shed, the overflowing compost bin, and the spreading pile of leaves, weeds, twigs and old newspapers which would be Glyn’s next bonfire. The garden was bordered by a high fence with a green wooden gate in it beyond which was the twitten that ran between the two rows of houses. When younger the girls had been absolutely forbidden – fruitlessly in Becca’s case – to use the twitten after dark because it struck me as exactly the sort of place where unpleasantness would be most likely to lurk.

  Today it seemed that my worst fears might turn out to be justified, for as I came through the gap in the forsythia a stranger was standing just inside the gate. At least I was practically certain he was a stranger, but because the house and garden were full of people some of whom I hadn’t seen in years, I hesitated momentarily before accusing him of trespass. This allowed him to speak first, which he did with a disconcerting lack of embarrassment.

  ‘I do apologize – I was lured in by the music.’

  ‘Really?’ I said weakly. ‘He is rather special, isn’t he?’

  ‘A faery fiddler,’ said the stranger, advancing and gazing down the garden to where the dancers jigged and jumped, their arms waving madly in the air. ‘Wonderful stuff.’

  On the basis that both of us could now actually be seen, I decided that this irregular situation posed no threat.

  ‘He was a present from a friend,’ I said. ‘It’s our silver wedding.’

  ‘Congratulations.’ He held out his hand and we shook on it. ‘Patrick Lynch.’

  ‘Laura Lewis.’

  ‘How do you do, Mrs Lewis. Please forgive the intrusion.’ He didn’t sound in the least like someone begging forgiveness. He stood next to me – presumptuously close to me, in fact – gazing down my garden at my guests as though he had as much right to be there as me. He was tall and broad with a burgeoning gut, a rower, perhaps, or rugger-player, just past his prime, dark, unshaven and smelling faintly of beer – I guessed he was on his way back from the pub.

  Without asking, he fished out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. ‘I take it you don’t?’ he asked, raising an eyebrow. ‘ Nobody these days does.’

  I wasn’t sure I cared for his assumption that I was like everyone else. If I hadn’t been completely certain that it would send me into a paroxysm of coughing I’d have accepted one. His air of indulged self-confidence stopped only a whisker short of arrogance. An ostentatious scruffiness underlined his manner – his matted guernsey was frayed at the neck, and balding cords sagged over desert boots shiny with age. The impression was of a man who could well afford not to make an effort. A man who could take it or leave it, because it was always on offer.

  Henry was playing ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’. Patrick Lynch began to warble along with the words.

  ‘Why don’t you come and join us and have a drink?’ I suggested.

  ‘Hellfire, no,’ was his response. ‘I’m on my way.’

  He went to the gate and opened it. Then he paused and looked me up and down. ‘You’re a beautiful woman on your silver wedding day, Mrs Lewis,’ he remarked with a blarneyish lilt. ‘Mr Lewis is a lucky man.’

  Oh, the cliché! Oh, the bullshit!

  But how they made my heart beat faster.

  Chapter Three

  Glyn was a Barnardo’s boy. By an odd coincidence the home he had been brought up in turned out to have been only a few miles from my old school Queen Edelrath’s. He claimed to have had a happy and secure childhood, but it didn’t take a psychologist to deduce that his subsequent career in the emotionally charged world of showbusiness, and his happy immersion in my own family, stemmed from his lack of personal roots.

  I met him at a Rolling Stones concert in Exeter in 1965. I was nineteen and reading English at the university, and he was two years older and gophers for the road manager of the bottom-of-the-bill support group, an outfit called the Fallen Idols. The folie de grandeur implicit in their title was carried through in the Idols’ stage gear, which was by Georgette Heyer out of Carnaby Street, with long dandy jackets, stand-up collars, ruffled shirtfronts, Cuban heels and hairdos like dralon tea-cosies. This was their big moment without a doubt, but their strenuous glamour compared ill with the Stones’ ineffably rebellious crew-necked jumpers and unpressed cords. The Idols’s set, comprising a brisk canter through not so much their greatest but their only hits, was played against a burble of inattention and impatience.

  Ike and Tina Turner were the chief support act, trailing clouds of transatlantic glory, all tigerish eroticism and snarling vibrato. My memory of their set was tinged with revulsion at what Tina must have been going through at the time. Did Ike actually beat the bijasus out of his wife in some chintzy hotel room in the West Country the night before the show? It didn’t bear thinking about.

  I and my then-boyfriend Stuart, a chemist taking his Dip. Ed., had seats about halfway back in the stalls of the Gaumont, a cinema bravely masquerading as a concert hall for the occasion. There were very few men in the audience and we were a conservative pair, a little ill at ease with the frenzy of adulatory lust inspired by Jagger and co. The screaming began in earnest while Ike and Tina were still taking their curtain calls, and rose to an ear-splitting sonic chatter like the amplified roosting of a million giant starlings. It intensified as the curtains closed on the Turners, and again as a dozen locally recruited heavies ranged themselves in a row before the stage with a studiously cultivated air of menace.

  Because of being with Stuart I didn’t like to join in, and he adopted a look of nervous academic interest as our eyes watered under the onslaught of noise, and several girls in our immediate vicinity collapsed in full-blown hysterics. We had to stand up, because everyone else had and we would not have been able to see the stage otherwise. But since we had been impelled by simple necessity rather than feverish excitement, we stood amongst the screeching mob rather sheepishly, our arms folded, necks craning, hoping it would all be worth it and each of us conscious, I’m sure, that this embarrassing experience would mark the end of our relationship.

  The curtains were held apart by an anonymous arm to allow the MC to step through. These were not high-tech days. There were no lasers, gantries, metal towers and walkways; no dry ice, holograms and giant screens; no squads of half-clad sexually ambivalent dancers; nothing, in fact, to winch up the
existing levels of excitement except the wavering house lights, a rather tinny drum-roll from the orchestra pit, the row of local lads in vests – and now this cheeky chap in a dj, carrying a mike that trailed yards of flex. He was a dapper, peanut-faced man with more than a passing resemblance to Norman Vaughan. He was going to make the most of it.

  ‘Okay, ladies and gentlemen, I thought I’d give you a song.’

  There was a brief lull of disbelief followed by a growl of disapproval. The band – such teases! – struck up with a slithering cascade of violin notes, and the growl turned into a mutinous roar. The MC laughed and waved his hands in the air. He was like a drunk who’d wandered out of a window on to a tightrope and still hadn’t realized the danger. It was terrible to watch.

  ‘Sorry, what’s that?’ He cupped his hand to his ear. The clamour was deafening – they didn’t think it was funny. ‘Sorry, you want who?’

  ‘The Stones!’ we bayed. I felt it was legitimate to join in with this particular game, but Stuart was still po-faced.

  ‘Pardon? Who?’

  ‘The Stones!’ we screamed. The heavies unfolded their arms and took a step forward, their scowls a fraction less convincing than they had been on entering, as who could blame them? They probably wished fervently that they were at home eating a fish tea in front of the telly with their mums instead of stuck here in front of a thousand teenage banshees.

  The MC held up his hand again. ‘Hang on a tick, I’ll take a look.’ He parted the curtain, stuck his head through, and withdrew it again. ‘No one there, I’m afraid.’ We screamed and stamped and waved our arms in the air. The heavies held their arms away from their sides as though about to draw six-guns and waste the lot of us. It was impossible at this stage not to be infected by the general fervour. Only Stuart still evinced a lofty immunity to it all, confining himself to adjusting his glasses and – I could not hear, but could tell by the movement of his Adam’s apple – swallowing nervously.

  The MC went through his routine once more, this time toying with us to an almost unbearable degree. With his head and shoulders hidden by the curtain, he communicated through the hand, first flapping it up and down in a pretended attempt to silence us, then waving it from side to side to indicate that nothing was happening, then lowering it wearily … only to raise it slowly once more, the thumb lifted in triumph.

  We were beside ourselves. Even at the time I realized how horribly easy it was to get caught up in a mood of mass hysteria. When Stuart and I had entered the Gaumont an hour and a half earlier it had been in a spirit of curiosity. I had some Stones records but I was a John Lennon girl myself and had never fantasized about tying Mick, let alone Brian, Keith or Charlie, to the bedpost. But now I began to feel that when the curtain parted to reveal these undernourished subversives I might be unable to prevent myself from leaping knickerless on stage and forcing myself upon them. And Stuart’s cringeing superiority only made matters worse. Who did he think he was?

  ‘We want the Stones! The Stones! The Stones!’ we roared. Talk about putting on our very own Nuremburg Rally right there … it made my blood run cold to think of it.

  The MC withdrew from the curtains and scythed his hands back and forth, palms down, to quieten us. We subsided into a rumbling silence.

  ‘You want to see the Stones?’

  ‘Yeah!’ we screeched.

  ‘Well, I’ve got news for you …’ He glanced behind the curtain teasingly. ‘ They’re here!’

  We went ape. The heavies took another step forward looking still more wary, since common sense must have told them that any real advance on our part, fuelled as we were by a ferocious hormonal rush, would have resulted in them being trampled underfoot by a myriad Saxone slip-ons and left for dead.

  The curtains indulged in a certain amount of jerky foreplay and finally parted, to reveal the stars in their pullies. Richard, Jones and Watts were thumping out the opening chords of something but it was virtually inaudible. Jagger twitched and cramped like a man attempting not to wet his trousers.

  Their performance was something of an anti-climax since we’d left ourselves with almost nowhere to go in terms of noise, and amplification was in its infancy so we had no idea what they were playing. For Stuart, though, it was better. He could now legitimately sway and nod with the preoccupied air of the serious student of rhythm and blues. I decided then, if I had not done so before, that he was a complete prat.

  To complete this revelatory moment I felt a pressure on my shins and looked down to see, crawling on all-fours along the row, among the sweet papers, stamping feet, hairslides and urine on the floor, at considerable danger to life and limb, the man I was destined to marry.

  At first I thought he was some pathetic representative of the weaker sex enjoying a free peep-show – hemlines had climbed rapidly over the past year – until he suddenly got to his feet, forcing himself upward between me and the back of the seat in front. Our bodies were crushed uncompromisingly together and I couldn’t see the stage. I had to brace one arm against the back of my own seat to prevent myself from falling over into the row behind. It didn’t escape my attention that Stuart continued to bob about, indifferent to my plight.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I yelled in his face.

  ‘Mercy dash!’ he yelled back, jabbing a finger in a direction along the row to my left. ‘ Sorry!’

  ‘Go on then, get on with it!’

  He began squeezing crabwise along the row, attracting the opprobrium of everyone along the way, and I saw that yet another girl had collapsed. There was no centre aisle at the Gaumont, and he was obviously going to attempt to drag her out the way he’d come to the St John’s Ambulance team who hovered near the exit. The girl was built on an epic scale and I found that in spite of myself I kept glancing away from Jagger’s gyrations to see how the intrepid Samaritan would tackle the problem.

  There was no attempt at heroics. He grabbed her round the upper chest, beneath the armpits, and began hauling her back along the row, her vast legs in lacy tights bumping along like a couple of bolts of cloth, one shoe missing in the melee. I remember thinking her rescuer did well to hold her like that without, intentionally or otherwise, taking a purchase on her enormous sagging bust. She slid further and further down, until by the time he reached me her arms stuck straight up and he was more or less pulling her by the chin. He was sweating profusely. The Stones were doing another quick reprise of ‘Not Fade Away’ but he looked as if he might do exactly that unless he got some help. On an impulse I picked up the girl’s legs, one on either side of my waist like a competitor in a wheelbarrow race, and together we lugged her to the side aisle and thence through the exit into the narrow corridor.

  As the St John’s people got to work with kind words and capable hands, the Samaritan said, ‘Thanks. Excuse me,’ and headed up the narrow passage to the Gaumont’s rear door. I followed.

  It was a summer evening, damp and cloudy but still light. He leaned against the wall, breathing heavily, offered me a cigarette which I refused, and lit himself one.

  ‘Well done,’ I said. ‘She weighed a ton.’

  ‘If it wasn’t for you I’d still be in there,’ he replied. He had a pleasant voice with a fashionably urban twang. This was the heyday of working-class glamour, when all the smartest people came from the wrong side of the tracks. The only childhood photograph of Glyn, taken when he was about twelve, shows a boy who would have been perfectly cast as the Artful Dodger. When I met him he bore a slight likeness to Terence Stamp, with shaggy dark hair and blue eyes, but less patrician features than the cockney star. He wore a white collarless shirt and a black leather waistcoat, with jeans, all of which bore testimony to the current state of the Gaumont’s five-and-nines.

  ‘Glyn Lewis,’ he said, holding out his hand.

  ‘Laura Beech.’ We shook. I couldn’t tell where my hand ended and his began.

  The back door on the other side of the Gaumont opened and the Fallen Idols emerged with suits on hangers, guitar cases an
d a couple of hardbitten functionaries. The Idols in mufti looked less ridiculous but more vulnerable: dwarfed by their luxuriantly styled hair, they were just four peaky, undernourished youths whose lucky break had not amounted to as much as they’d hoped, and who were in consequence occupying the slippery edge of only modest success. It was taking all their effort, concentration and hard graft to walk that edge and not fall into the black hole of obscurity below. I felt embarrassed for them. I was easily embarrassed then.

  ‘Hey, lads!’ called Glyn. ‘I’ll be right there.’ He dropped his cigarette end and trod on it. ‘ Got your phone number? I’ll be back this way in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘Um, yes …’ I realized I’d left my bag under my seat in the auditorium, but he was already holding a chewed biro and a dog-eared concert pass. I gave him the number and he scribbled it down.

  ‘I’ll give you a bell. Thanks for your help.’

  I stood and watched as he helped the Idols load up. And then I waved to him as the vans pulled away, like some western farmer’s wife watching the stagecoach clatter out of town.

  I left the handbag – and Stuart – where they were, and wandered home in the afterglow to my flat in Heavitree where my flatmate, expecting at least another hour to herself, had her boyfriend in our shared bedroom and was busy setting in train those events which would lead to her second abortion.

  The next time I saw the Stones it was on their Voodoo Lounge tour, and Mick, Glyn and I were all grandparents. I considered that given Mick’s fiscal advantages, we bore the comparison pretty well.

  We were married eighteen months later, in church, from my parents’ house in the Surrey Hills. It was Glyn, a susceptible agnostic, who was sold on the church idea. He had an open mind where the Almighty was concerned, but thanks to Barnardo’s he had a surprisingly sound knowledge of the Anglican calendar and liturgy.

  My father was a bank manager with the Westminster, who read the lesson once a month with a dry, crystalline credibility; my mother brought her stage experience to bear on music and movement with the Sunday school, the slightly irregular results of which were presented to the local congregation at family services and feast days. But neither was particularly pious, and my father in particular took the view that mortification of flesh and spirit in the form of church attendance was essential to the full enjoyment of Sunday lunch and whatever stand-up-and-shout preceded it.