At half past four he stood by the window, looking out at the empty street below. She would be on her way to the bus station, to catch the five o’clock bus to Teheran. He could dress, he could even shave and still be there in time. He could pay, on her behalf, the extra air fare that would accrue. He could tell her his story and they could spend a few days. They could go together to Shiraz, city of wine and roses and nightingales.
He stood by the window, watching nothing happening in the street, knowing that if he stood there for ever he wouldn’t find the courage. She had met a sympathetic man, more marvellous to her than all the marvels of Isfahan. She would carry that memory to the bungalow in Bombay, knowing nothing about a pettiness which brought out cruelty in people. And he would remember a woman who possessed, deep beneath her unprepossessing surface, the distinction that her eyes mysteriously claimed for her. In different circumstances, with a less unfortunate story to tell, it would have emerged. But in the early morning there was another truth, too. He was the stuff of fantasy. She had quality, he had none.
Angels at the Ritz
The game was played when the party, whichever party it happened to be, had thinned out. Those who stayed on beyond a certain point – beyond, usually, about one o’clock – knew that the game was on the cards and in fact had stayed for that reason. Often, as one o’clock approached, there were marital disagreements about whether or not to go home.
The game of swapping wives and husbands, with chance rather than choice dictating the formations, had been practised in this outer suburb since the mid-s. The swinging wives and husbands of that time were now passing into the first years of elderliness, but their party game continued. In the outer suburb it was most popular when the early struggles of marriage were over, after children had been born and were established at school, when there were signs of marital wilting that gin and tonic did not cure.
‘I think it’s awfully silly,’ Polly Dillard pronounced, addressing her husband on the evening of the Ryders’ party.
Her husband, whose first name was Gavin, pointed out that they’d known for years that the practice was prevalent at Saturday-night parties in the outer suburb. There’d been, he reminded her, the moment at the Meacocks’ when they’d realized they’d stayed too late, when the remaining men threw their car-keys on to the Meacocks’ carpet and Sylvia Meacock began to tie scarves over the eyes of the wives.
‘I mean, it’s silly Sue and Malcolm going in for it. All of a sudden, out of the blue like that.’
‘They’re just shuffling along with it, I suppose.’
Polly shook her head. Quietly, she said that in the past Sue and Malcolm Ryder hadn’t been the kind to shuffle along with things. Sue had sounded like a silly schoolgirl, embarrassed and not looking her in the eye when she told her.
Gavin could see she was upset, but one of the things about Polly since she’d had their two children and had come to live in the outer suburb was that she was able to deal with being upset. She dealt with it now, keeping calm, not raising her voice. She’d have been the same when Sue Ryder averted her eyes and said that she and Malcolm had decided to go in, too, for the outer suburb’s most popular party game. Polly would have been astonished and would have said so, and then she’d have attempted to become reconciled to the development. Before this evening came to an end she really would be reconciled, philosophically accepting the development as part of the Ryders’ middle age, while denying that it could ever be part of hers.
‘I suppose,’ Gavin said, ‘it’s like a schoolgirl deciding to let herself be kissed for the first time. Don’t you remember sounding silly then, Polly?’
She said it wasn’t at all like that. Imagine, she suggested, finding yourself teamed up with a sweaty creature like Tim Gruffydd. Imagine any school-girl in her senses letting Tim Gruffydd within two million miles of her. She still couldn’t believe that Sue and Malcolm Ryder were going in for stuff like that. What on earth happened to people? she asked Gavin, and Gavin said he didn’t know.
Polly Dillard was thirty-six, her husband two years older. Her short fair hair had streaks of grey in it now. Her thin, rather long face wasn’t pretty but did occasionally seem beautiful, the eyes deep blue, the mouth wide, becoming slanted when she smiled. She herself considered that nothing matched properly in her face and that her body was too lanky and her breasts too slight. But after thirty-six years she’d become used to all that, and other women envied her her figure and her looks.
On the evening of the Ryders’ party she surveyed the features that did not in her opinion match, applying eye-shadow in her bedroom looking-glass and now and again glancing at the reflection of her husband, who was changing from his Saturday clothes into clothes more suitable for Saturday night at the Ryders’: a blue corduroy suit, pink shirt and pinkish tie. Of medium height, fattening on lunches and alcohol, he was dark-haired and still handsome, for his chunky features were only just beginning to trail signs of this telltale plumpness. By profession Gavin Dillard was a director of promotional films for television, mainly in the soap and detergent field.
The hall doorbell rang as Polly rose from the chair in front of her looking-glass.
‘I’ll go,’ he said, adding that it would be Estrella, their babysitter.
‘Estrella couldn’t come, I had to ring Problem. Some Irish-sounding girl it’ll be.’
‘Hannah McCarthy,’ a round-faced girl at the door said. ‘Are you Mr Dillard, sir?’
He smiled at her and said he was. He closed the door and took her coat. He led her through a white, spacious hall into a sitting-room that was spacious also, with pale blue walls and curtains. One child was already in bed, he told her, the other was still in his bath. Two boys, he explained: Paul and David. His wife would introduce her to them.
‘Would you like a drink, Hannah?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t say no to that, Mr Dillard.’ She smiled an extensive smile at him. ‘A little sherry if you have it, sir.’
‘And how’s the old country, Hannah?’ He spoke lightly, trying to be friendly, handing her a glass of sherry. He turned away and poured himself some gin and tonic, adding a sliver of lemon. ‘Cheers, Hannah!’
‘Cheers, sir! Ireland, d’you mean, sir? Oh, Ireland doesn’t change.’
‘You go back, do you?’
‘Every holidays. I’m in teacher training, Mr Dillard.’
‘I was at the Cork Film Festival once. A right old time we had.’
‘I don’t know Cork, actually. I’m from Listowel myself. Are you in films yourself, sir? You’re not an actor, Mr Dillard?’
‘Actually I’m a director.’
Polly entered the room. She said she was Mrs Dillard. She smiled, endeavouring to be as friendly as Gavin had been, in case the girl didn’t feel at home. She thanked her for coming at such short notice and presumably so far. She was wearing a skirt that Gavin had helped her to buy in Fenwick’s only last week, and a white lace blouse she’d had for years, and her jade beads. The skirt, made of velvet, was the same green as the jade. She took the babysitter away to introduce her to the two children.
Gavin stood with his back to the fire, sipping at his gin and tonic. He didn’t find it puzzling that Polly should feel so strongly about the fact that Sue and Malcolm Ryder had reached a certain stage in their marriage. The Ryders were their oldest and closest friends. Polly and Sue had known one another since they’d gone together to the Misses Hamilton’s nursery school in Putney. Perhaps it was this depth in the relationship that caused Polly to feel so disturbed by a new development in her friend’s life. In his own view, being offered a free hand with an unselected woman in return for agreeing that some man should maul his wife about wasn’t an attractive proposition. It surprised him that the Ryders had decided to go in for this particular party game, and it surprised him even more that Malcolm Ryder had never mentioned it to him. But it didn’t upset him.
‘All right?’ Polly inquired from the doorway, with her coat on. The coat was brown and fur-trimmed and expensiv
e: she looked beautiful in it, Gavin thought, calm and collected. Once, a long time ago, she had thrown a milk-jug across a room at him. At one time she had wept a lot, deploring her lankiness and her flat breasts. All that seemed strangely out of character now.
He finished his drink and put the glass down on the mantelpiece. He put the sherry bottle beside the babysitter’s glass in case she should feel like some more, and then changed his mind and returned the bottle to the cabinet, remembering that they didn’t know the girl: a drunk babysitter – an experience they’d once endured – was a great deal worse than no babysitter at all.
‘She seems very nice,’ Polly said in the car. ‘She said she’d read to them for an hour.’
‘An hour? The poor girl!’
‘She loves children.’
It was dark, half past eight on a night in November. It was raining just enough to make it necessary to use the windscreen-wipers. Automatically, Gavin turned the car radio on: there was something pleasantly cosy about the glow of a car radio at night when it was raining, with the background whirr of the windscreen-wipers and the wave of warmth from the heater.
‘Let’s not stay long,’ he said.
It pleased her that he said that. She wondered if they were dull not to wish to stay, but he said that was nonsense.
He drove through the sprawl of their outer suburb, all of it new, disguised now by the night. Orange street lighting made the façades of the carefully designed houses seem different, changing the colours, but the feeling of space remained, and the uncluttered effect of the unfenced front gardens. Roomy Volvo estate-cars went nicely with the detached houses. So did Vauxhall Victors, and big bus-like Volkswagens. Families were packed into such vehicles on summer Saturday mornings, for journeys to cottages in the Welsh hills or in Hampshire or Herts. The Dillards’ cottage was in the New Forest.
Gavin parked the car in Sandiway Crescent, several doors away from the Ryders’ house because other cars were already parked closer to it. He’d have much preferred to be going out to dinner in Tonino’s with Malcolm and Sue, lasagne and peperonata and a carafe of Chianti Christina, a lazy kind of evening that would remind all of them of other lazy evenings. Ten years ago they’d all four gone regularly to Tonino’s trattoria in Greek Street, and the branch that had opened in their outer suburb was very like the original, even down to the framed colour photographs of A.C. Milan.
‘Come on in!’ Sue cried jollily at Number Four Sandiway Crescent. Her face was flushed with party excitement, her large brown eyes flashed adventurously with party spirit. Her eyes were the only outsize thing about her: she was tiny and black-haired, as pretty as a rosebud.
‘Gin?’ Malcolm shouted at them from the depths of the crowded hall. ‘Sherry, Polly? Burgundy?’
Gavin kissed the dimpled cheek that Sue Ryder pressed up to him. She was in red, a long red dress that suited her, with a red band in her hair and red shoes.
‘Yes, wine please, Malcolm,’ Polly said, and when she was close enough she slid her face towards his for the same kind of embrace as her husband had given his wife.
‘You’re looking edible, my love,’ he said, a compliment he’d been paying her for seventeen years.
He was an enormous man, made to seem more so by the smallness of his wife. His features had a mushy look. His head, like a pink sponge, was perched jauntily on shoulders that had once been a force to reckon with in rugby scrums. Although he was exactly the same age as Gavin, his hair had balded away to almost nothing, a rim of fluff not quite encircling the sponge.
‘You’re looking very smart yourself,’ Polly said, a statement that might or might not have been true: she couldn’t see him properly because he was so big and she was so close to him, and she hadn’t looked when she’d been further away. He was wearing a grey suit of some kind and a blue-striped shirt and the tie of the Harlequins’ Rugby Club. Usually he looked smart: he probably did now.
‘I’m feeling great,’ he said. ‘Nice little party we’re having, Poll.’
It wasn’t really little. Sixty or so people were in the Ryders’ house, which was similar to the Dillards’ house, well-designed and spacious. Most of the downstairs rooms, and the hall, had coffee-coloured walls, an experiment of Sue’s which she believed had been successful. For the party, the bulkier furniture had been taken out of the coffee-coloured sitting-room, and all the rugs had been lifted from the parquet floor. Music came from a tape-recorder, but no one was dancing yet. People stood in small groups, smoking and talking and drinking. No one, so far, appeared to be drunk.
All the usual people were there: the Stubbses, the Burgesses, the Pedlars, the Thompsons, the Stevensons, Sylvia and Jack Meacock, Philip and June Mulally, Oliver and Olive Gramsmith, Tim and Mary-Ann Gruffydd and dozens of others. Not all of them lived in the outer suburb; and some were older, some younger, than the Ryders and the Dillards. But there was otherwise a similarity about the people at the party: they were men who had succeeded or were in the process of succeeding, and women who had kept pace with their husbands’ advance. No one looked poor at the Ryders’ party.
At ten o’clock there was food, smoked salmon rolled up and speared with cocktail sticks, chicken vol-au-vents or beef Stroganoff with rice, salads of different kinds, stilton and brie and Bel Paese, and meringues. Wine flowed generously, white burgundy and red. Uncorked bottles were distributed on all convenient surfaces.
The dancing began when the first guests had eaten. To ‘Love of the Loved’, Polly danced with a man whose name she didn’t know, who told her he was an estate agent with an office in Jermyn Street. He held her rather close for a man whose name she didn’t know. He was older than Polly, about fifty, she reckoned, and smaller. He had a foxy moustache and foxy hair, and a round stomach, like a ball, which kept making itself felt. So did his knees.
In the room where the food was Gavin sat on the floor with Sylvia and Jack Meacock, and a woman in an orange trouser-suit, with orange lips.
‘Stevie wouldn’t come,’ this woman said, balancing food in the hollow of a fork. ‘He got cross with me last night.’
Gavin ate from his fingers a vol-au-vent full of chicken and mushrooms that had gone a little cold. Jack Meacock said nothing would hold him back from a party given by the Ryders. Or any party, he added, guffawing, given by anyone. Provided there was refreshment, his wife stipulated. Well naturally, Jack Meacock said.
‘He wouldn’t come,’ the orange woman explained, ‘because he thought I misbehaved in Olive Gramsmith’s kitchen. A fortnight ago, for God’s sake!’
Gavin calculated he’d had four glasses of gin and tonic. He corrected himself, remembering the one he’d had with the babysitter. He drank some wine. He wasn’t entirely drunk, he said to himself, he hadn’t turned a certain corner, but the corner was the next thing there was.
‘If you want to kiss someone you kiss him,’ the orange woman said. ‘I mean, for God’s sake, he’d no damn right to walk into Olive Gramsmith’s kitchen. I didn’t see you,’ she said, looking closely at Gavin. ‘You weren’t there, were you?’
‘We couldn’t go.’
‘You were there,’ she said to the Meacocks. ‘All over the place.’
‘We certainly were!’ Jack Meacock guffawed through his beef Stroganoff, scattering rice on to the coffee-coloured carpet.
‘Hullo,’ their hostess said, and sat down on the carpet beside Gavin, with a plate of cheese.
‘You mean you’ve been married twelve years?’ the estate agent said to Polly. ‘You don’t look it.’
‘I’m thirty-six.’
‘What’s your better half in? Is here, is he?’
‘He directs films. Advertisements for TV. Yes, he’s here.’
‘That’s mine.’ He indicated with his head a woman who wasn’t dancing, in lime-green. She was going through a bad patch, he said: depressions.
They danced to ‘Sunporch Cha-Cha-Cha’, Simon and Garfunkel.
‘Feeling OK?’ the estate agent inquired, and Polly sa
id yes, not understanding what he meant. He propelled her towards the mantelpiece and took from it the glass of white burgundy Polly had left there. He offered it to her and when she’d taken a mouthful he drank some from it himself. They danced again. He clutched her more tightly with his arms and flattened a cheek against one of hers, rasping her with his moustache. With dead eyes, the woman in lime-green watched.
At other outer-suburb parties Polly had been through it all before. She escaped from the estate agent and was caught by Tim Gruffydd, who had already begun to sweat. After that another man whose name she didn’t know danced with her, and then Malcolm Ryder did.
‘You’re edible tonight,’ he whispered, the warm mush of his lips damping her ear. ‘You’re really edible, my love.’
‘Share my cheese,’ Sue offered in the other room, pressing brie on Gavin.
‘I need more wine,’ the woman in orange said, and Jack Meacock pushed himself up from the carpet. They all needed more wine, he pointed out. The orange woman predicted that the next day she’d have a hangover and Sylvia Meacock, a masculine-looking woman, said she’d never had a hangover in forty-eight years of steady drinking.
‘You going to stay a while?’ Sue said to Gavin. ‘You and Polly going to stay?’ She laughed, taking one of his hands because it was near to her. Since they’d known one another for such a long time it was quite in order for her to do that.
‘Our babysitter’s unknown,’ Gavin explained. ‘From the bogs of Ireland.’
The orange woman said the Irish were bloody.
‘Jack’s Irish, actually,’ Sylvia Meacock said.
She went on talking about that, about her husband’s childhood in County Down, about an uncle of his who used to drink a bottle and a half of whiskey a day – on top of four glasses of stout, with porridge and bread, for his breakfast. If you drank at all you should drink steadily, she said.
Gavin felt uneasy, because all the time Sylvia Meacock was talking about the drinking habits of her husband’s uncle in County Down Sue clung on to his hand. She held it lightly, moving her fingers in a caress that seemed to stray outside the realm of their long friendship. He was in love with Polly: he thought that deliberately, arraying the sentiment in his mind as a statement, seeing it suspended there. There was no one he’d ever known whom he’d been fonder of than Polly, or whom he respected more, or whom it would upset him more to hurt. Seventeen years ago he’d met her in the kitchens of the Hotel Belvedere, Penzance, where they had both gone to work for the summer. Five years later, having lived with one another in a flat in the cheaper part of Maida Vale, they’d got married because Polly wanted to have children. They’d moved to the outer suburb because the children needed space and fresh air, and because the Ryders, who’d lived on the floor above theirs in Maida Vale, had moved there a year before.