Henry will be their first dinner guest. In fact he will be their first visitor.
John and Dina have been in the rented flat two and a half months already and most of the furniture, if not what they would have chosen themselves, is acceptable, particularly the bookshelves in all the rooms, which they have wiped down with wet cloths. Dina is intending to fetch the rest of her books and her desk, which pleases him. After that, it seems to him, there will be no going back. The wooden table in the kitchen is adequate. Three people could sit comfortably around it to eat, talk and drink. They have two brightly coloured table cloths, which they bought in India.
They have started to put their things on the table, mixed up together. She will set something out, experimentally, and he will look at it as if to say, what’s that?, and she watches him; then they look at one another and an agreement is reached, or not. Their pens, for instance, are now in a shaving mug; her vase is next to it; his plaster Buddha appeared on the table this morning and was passed without demur. The picture of the cat was not passed, but she won’t remove it at the moment, in order to test him. There are photographs of them together, on the break they took a year ago when they were both still living with their former partners. There are photographs of his children.
At the moment there are only two rotten kitchen chairs.
John has said that Henry, whom she met once before at a dinner given by one of John’s friends, will take an interest in the blue chairs with the cane seats. Henry will take an interest in almost anything, if it is presented enthusiastically.
It has only been after some delicate but amiable discussion that they finally agreed to go ahead with Henry. John and Dina like to talk. In fact she gave up her job so they could talk more. Sometimes they do it with their faces pressed together; sometimes with their backs to one another. They go to bed early so they can talk. The one thing they don’t like is disagreement. They imagine that if they start disagreeing they will never stop, and that there will be a war. They have had wars and they have almost walked out on one another on several occasions. But it is the disagreements they have had before, with other people, and the fear they will return, that seem to be making them nervous at the moment.
But they have agreed that Henry will be a good choice as a first guest. He lives nearby and he lives alone. He loves being asked out. As he works near Carluccios he will bring exotic cakes. There won’t be any silences, difficult or otherwise.
*
They first saw the blue chairs four days ago. They were looking for an Indian restaurant nearby, and were discussing their ideal Indian menu, how they would choose the dall from this restaurant on King Street, and the bhuna prawn from the takeaway on the Fulham Road, and so on, when they drifted into Habitat. Maybe they were tired or just felt indolent, but in the big store they found themselves sitting in various armchairs, on the sofas, at the tables, and even lying in the deckchairs, imagining they were together in this or that place by the sea or in the mountains, occasionally looking at one another, far away across the shop, or closer, side by side, thinking in astonishment, this is him, this is her, the one I’ve chosen, the one I’ve wanted all this time, and now it has really started, everything I have wished for is today.
There seemed to be no one in the shop to mind their ruminations. They lost track of time. Then a shop assistant stepped out from behind a pillar. And the four blue wooden chairs, with the cane seats – after much sitting down, standing up and shuffling of their bottoms – were agreed on. There were other chairs they wanted, but it turned out they were not in the sale, and they had to take these cheaper ones. As they left, Dina said she preferred them. He said that if she preferred them, he did too.
*
Today on the way to the store she insists on buying a small frame and a postcard of a flower to go in it. She says she is intending to put this on the table.
‘When Henry’s there?’ he asks.
‘Yes.’
During the first weeks of their living together he has found himself balking at the way she does certain things, things he had not noticed during their affair, or hadn’t had time to get used to. For instance the way she likes to eat sitting on the front steps in the evening. He is too old for bohemianism, but he can’t keep saying ‘No’ to everything and he has to sit there with pollution going in his bowl of pasta and the neighbours observing him, and men looking at her. He knows that this is part of the new life he has longed for, and at these times he feels helpless. He can’t afford to have it go wrong.
The assistant in the store says he will fetch the chairs and they will be ready downstairs in a few minutes. At last two men bring the chairs out and stand them at the store exit.
John and Dina are surprised to see that the chairs haven’t come individually, or with just a little wrapping. They are in two long brown boxes, like a couple of coffins.
John has already said they can carry the chairs to the tube, and then do the same from there to the flat. It isn’t far. She thought he was being flippant. She can see now that he was serious.
To show how it must be done, and indeed that it is possible, he gets a good grip on one box, kicks it at the bottom, and shoves it right out of the shop and then along the smooth floor of the shopping centre, past the sweet seller and security guard and the old women sitting on benches.
At the exit he turns and sees her standing in the shop entrance, watching him, laughing. He thinks how lovely she is and what a good time they always have together.
She starts to follow him, pushing her box as he did his.
He continues, thinking that this is how they will do it, they will soon be at the tube station.
But outside the shopping mall, on the hot pavement, the box sticks. You can’t shove cardboard along on concrete; it won’t go. That morning she suggested they borrow a car. He had said they wouldn’t be able to park nearby. Perhaps they would get a taxi. But outside it is a one-way street, going in the wrong direction. He sees that there are no taxis. The boxes wouldn’t fit in anyway.
Out there on the street, in the sun, he squats a little. He gets his arms around the box. It is as if he is hugging a tree. Making all kinds of involuntary and regrettable sounds, he lifts it right up. Even if he can’t see where he is going, even if his nose is pushed into the cardboard, he is carrying it, he is moving. They are still on their way.
He doesn’t get far. Different parts of his body are resisting. He will ache tomorrow. He puts the box down again. In fact he almost drops it. He looks back to see that Dina is touching the corners of her eyes, as if she is crying with laughter. Truly it is a baking afternoon and it was an awful idea to invite Henry over.
He is about to shout back at her, asking her whether she has any better ideas, but watching her, he can see that she does. She is full of better ideas about everything. If only he trusted her rather than himself – thinking he is always right – he would be better off.
She does this remarkable thing.
She lifts her box onto her hip and, holding it by the cardboard flap, starts to walk with it. She walks right past him, stately and upright, like an African woman with a goat on her shoulders, as if this is the most natural thing. Off she goes towards the tube. This, clearly, is how to do it.
He does the same, the whole African woman upright stance. But after a few steps the flap of the cardboard rips. It rips right across and the box drops to the ground. He can’t go on. He doesn’t know what to do.
He is embarrassed and thinks people are looking at him and laughing. People are indeed doing this, looking at him with the box, and at the beautiful woman with the other box. And they look back at him and then at her, and they are splitting their sides, as if nothing similar has ever happened to them. He likes to think he doesn’t care, that he is strong enough at his age to withstand mockery. But he sees himself, in their eyes, as a foolish little man, with the things he has wanted and hoped for futile and empty, reduced to the ridiculous shoving of this box along the street in the sun.
>
You might be in love, but whether you can get four chairs home together is another matter.
She comes back to him and stands there. He is looking away and is furious. She says there’s only one thing for it.
‘All right,’ he says, an impatient man trying to be patient. ‘Let’s get on with it.’
‘Take it easy,’ she says. ‘Calm down.’
‘I’m trying to,’ he replies.
‘Squat down,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘Squat down.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes. Where do you think?’
He squats down with his arms out and she grips the box in the tree-hugging pose and tips it and lays it across his hands and on top of his head. With this weight pushing down into his skull he attempts to stand, as Olympic weight lifters do, using their knees. Unlike those Olympic heroes he finds himself pitching forward. People in the vicinity are no longer laughing. They are alarmed and shouting warnings and scattering. He is staggering about with the box on his head, a drunken Atlas, and she is dancing around him, saying, ‘Steady, steady.’ Not only that, he is about to hurl the chairs into the traffic.
A man passing by sets the box down for them.
‘Thank you‚’ says Dina.
She looks at John.
‘Thank you‚’ says John sullenly.
He stands there, breathing hard. There is sweat on his upper lip. His whole face is damp. His hair is wet and his skull itching. He is not in good shape. He could die soon, suddenly, as his father did.
Without looking at her, he picks up the box in the tree-hugging stance and takes it a few yards, shuffling. He puts it down and picks it up again. He covers a few more yards. She follows.
Once they are on the tube he suspects they will be all right. It is only one stop. But when they have got out of the train they find that getting the boxes along the station is almost impossible. The tree-hugging stance is getting too difficult. They carry one box between them up the stairs, and then return for the other. She is quiet now; he can see she is tiring, and is bored with this idiocy.
At the entrance to the station she asks the newspaper seller if they can leave one of the boxes with him. They can carry one home together and return for the other. The man agrees.
She stands in front of John with her arms at her side and her hands stuck out like a couple of rabbit ears, into which shape the box is then placed. As they walk he watches her in her green sleeveless top with a collar, the sling of her bag crossing her shoulder, and the back of her long neck.
He thinks that if they have to put the box down everything will fail. But although they stop three times, she is concentrating, they both are, and they don’t put the box down.
They reach the bottom of the steps to the house. At last they stand the box upright, in the cool hall, and sigh with relief. They return for the other box. They have found a method. They carry it out efficiently.
When it is done he rubs and kisses her sore hands. She looks away.
Without speaking they pull the blue chairs with the cane seats from the boxes and throw the wrapping in the corner. They put the chairs round the table and look at them. They sit on them. They place themselves in this position and that. They put their feet up on them. They change the table cloth.
‘This is good‚’ he says.
She sits down and puts her elbows on the table, looking down at the table cloth. She is crying. He touches her hair.
He goes to the shop for some lemonade and when he gets back she has taken off her shoes and is lying flat out on the kitchen floor.
‘I’m tired now‚’ she says.
He makes her a drink and places it on the floor. He lies down beside her with his hands under his head. After a time she turns to him and strokes his arm.
‘Are you OK?’ he says.
She smiles at him. ‘Yes.’
Soon they will open the wine and start to make supper; soon Henry will arrive and they will eat and talk.
They will go to bed and in the morning at breakfast time, when they put the butter and jam and marmalade out, the four blue chairs will be there, around the table of their love.
That Was Then
We are unerring in our choice of lovers, particularly when we require the wrong person. There is an instinct, magnet or aerial which seeks the unsuitable. The wrong person is, of course, right for something – to punish, bully or humiliate us, let us down, leave us for dead, or, worst of all, give us the impression that they are not inappropriate, but almost right, thus hanging us in love’s limbo. Not just anyone can do this.
All morning he had wondered whether Natasha would try to kill him.
He was not sure what she wanted, but it would not be a regular conversation. After four years of silence, she had suddenly become unusually persistent, writing to him several times at home and at his agent’s. When he sent a note to say there was no point in their meeting she rang him twice at his new house and finally spoke to Lolly, his wife, who was so concerned she opened the door to his room and said, ‘Is she trying to get you back?’
He turned slowly. ‘It’s not that, I shouldn’t think.’
‘Will you see her?’
‘No.’
‘Will you tell her not to ring again?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good‚’ said Lolly. ‘Good.’
Natasha was drinking coffee at a table outside the café, wearing black, but not leather at least; probably she was the only such sombre, self-conscious person in the park. He had arrived early, but in order to be late had taken his coffee and newspaper to the conservatory, where he had considered the flowerbeds and wished for his son. Soon they would be having conversations and Nick would have less need of other people.
He had phoned Natasha unexpectedly that morning to give her the time and the place to meet, the grounds of an eighteenth century Palladian villa in West London. He was apprehensive, but could not deny that he was curious to see where they both now were. He calculated that he hadn’t actually seen her for five years.
It had been a dull summer and the schools had been open for two weeks. But a day like this, with the sun suddenly breaking through, reminded him of the seasons and of change. On the lawn that sloped down to the pond, people were in short-sleeves and sunglasses. Young couples lay on one another. As it was a middle-class area, families sat on blankets with elaborate picnics; corks were pulled from wine bottles, cotton napkins handed out and children called back from rummaging for conkers in the leaves and long grass.
He had got up and headed towards Natasha with determination, but the soft focus of the light mist and the alternate caresses of autumn heat and chill put him in an unexpectedly sensual mood. This renewed love of existence was like a low erotic charge. He came regularly to this park with his wife and baby and if, today, they were not with him, he could mark their absence by considering how meagre things were without them. At night, when he joined his woman in bed – she wore blue pyjamas, and his son, thrashing in his cot at the end of the room, a blue-striped, short-sleeved babygro, resembling an Edwardian bathing costume – he knew, at last, that there was nowhere else he would prefer to be.
What he wanted was to have a surreptitious look at Natasha, but he thought she had spotted him. It would be undignified to dodge about.
With his eyes fixed on her, he strode out of the bushes and across the tarmac apron in front of the café, weaving in and out of the tables where dogs, children on bicycles and adults with trays were crowded together, irritable waitresses tripping through. Natasha glanced up and started on the work of taking him in. She even rose, and stood on tiptoe. If he was looking to see how she had aged, she was doing the same to him.
She kissed him on the cheek. ‘You’ve cut your hair.’
‘I’ve gone grey, haven’t I?’ he said. ‘Or was I grey before?’
Before he could draw back, her fingers were in his hair.
‘Behind the ear, there used to be a few white hairs‚
’ she said. ‘Now – there’s a black one. Why don’t you dye it?’
He noticed her hair was still what they called ‘rock ‘n’ roll black’.
He said, ‘Why would I bother?’
She laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you’re no longer vain. Look at you in your shiny dark blue raincoat. How much did those shoes cost?’
‘I have a son now, Natty.’
‘I know that, Daddio‚’ she said. She tapped her big silver ring on the table, given to her as a teenager by a Hell’s Angel boyfriend.
‘You like fatherhood?’
He looked away at the tables piled with the Sunday papers, plates and cups, and children’s toys. He heard the names of expensive schools, like a saint’s roll-call. He remembered, as a child, his parents urging him to be polite, and wished for the time when good manners protected you from the excesses of intimacy, when honesty was not romanticised.
He said, ‘My boy’s a fleshy thing. There’s plenty of him to kiss. I don’t think we’ve ever seen his neck. But he has a bubbly mouth and a beard of saliva. I bring him here in his white hat – when he cries he goes red and looks like an outraged chef.’
‘Is that why you made me come all this way? I couldn’t find this bloody place.’
He said, ‘I thought it would amuse you to know … In May 1966 the Beatles made promotional films here, for “Rain” and “Paperback Writer”.’
‘I see‚’ she said. ‘That’s it?’
‘Well, yes.’
He and Natasha had liked pop of the sixties and seventies; in her flat they had lain on oriental cushions drinking mint tea, among other exotic interests, playing and discussing records.
Before he met her, he had been a pop journalist for several years, writing about fashion, music and the laboured politics that accompanied them. Then he became almost respectable, as the arts correspondent for an old-fashioned daily broadsheet. On this paper it amused the journalists to think of him as young, contradictory and promiscuous. He was hired to be contrary and outrageous.