The Collected Stories

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ Sue said, returning to the subject of the Irish baby sitter. ‘She could probably stay the night. She’d probably be delighted.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so, Sue.’

  He imagined without difficulty the hands of men at the party unbuttoning Polly’s lace blouse, the hands of Jack Meacock or the sweaty hands of Tim Gruffydd. He imagined Polly’s clothes falling on to a bedroom carpet and then her thin, lanky nakedness, her small breasts and the faint mark of her appendix scar. ‘Oh, I say!’ she said in a way that wasn’t like her when the man, whoever he was, took off his own clothes. Without difficulty either, Gavin imagined being in a room himself for the same purpose, with the orange woman or Sylvia Meacock. He’d walk out again if he found himself in a room with Sylvia Meacock and he’d rather be in a room with Sue than with the orange woman. Because he wasn’t quite sober, he had a flash of panic when he thought of what might be revealed when the orange trouser-suit fell to the floor: for a brief, disturbing moment he felt it was actually happening, that in the bonhomie of drunkenness he’d somehow agreed to the situation.

  ‘Why don’t we dance?’ Sue suggested, and Gavin agreed.

  ‘I think I’d like a drink,’ Polly said to Philip Mulally, an executive with Wolsey Menswear. He was a grey shadow of a man, not at all the kind to permit himself or his wife to be a party to sexual games. He nodded seriously when Polly interrupted their dance to say she’d like a drink. It was time in any case, he revealed, that he and June were making a move homewards.

  ‘I love you in that lace thing,’ Malcolm Ryder whispered boringly as soon as Polly stopped dancing with Philip Mulally. He was standing waiting for her.

  ‘I was saying to Philip I’d like a drink.’

  ‘Of course you must have a drink. Come and quaff a brandy with me, Poll.’ He took her by the hand and led her away from the dancers. The brandy was in his den, he said.

  She shook her head, following him because she had no option. Above the noise of Cilia Black singing ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ she shouted at him that she’d prefer some more white burgundy, that she was actually feeling thirsty. But he didn’t hear her, or didn’t wish to. ‘Ain’t misbehaving,’ the foxy estate agent mouthed at her as they passed him, standing on his own in the hall. It was an expression that was often used, without much significance attaching to it, at parties in the outer suburb.

  ‘Evening, all,’ Malcolm said in the room he called his den, closing the door behind Polly. The only light in the room was from a desk-lamp. In the shadows, stretched on a mock-leather sofa, a man and a woman were kissing one another. They parted in some embarrassment at their host’s jocular greeting, revealing themselves, predictably, as a husband and another husband’s wife.

  ‘Carry on, folks,’ Malcolm said.

  He poured Polly some brandy even though she had again said that what she wanted was a glass of burgundy. The couple on the sofa got up and went away, giggling. The man told Malcolm he was an old bastard.

  ‘Here you are,’ Malcolm said, and then to Polly’s distaste he placed his mushy lips on hers and exerted some pressure. The brandy glass was in her right hand, between them: had it not been there, she knew the embrace would have been more intimate. As it was, it was possible for both of them to pretend that what had occurred was purely an expression of Malcolm Ryder’s friendship for her, a special little detour to show that for all these years it hadn’t been just a case of two wives being friends and the husbands tagging along. Once, in 1965, they’d all gone to the Italian Adriatic together and quite often Malcolm had given her a kiss and a hug while telling her how edible she was. But somehow – perhaps because his lips hadn’t been so mushy in the past – it was different now.

  ‘Cheers!’ he said, smiling at her in the dimness. For an unpleasant moment she thought he might lock the door. What on earth did you do if an old friend tried to rape you on a sofa in his den?

  With every step they made together, the orange woman increased her entwinement of Oliver Gramsmith. The estate agent was dancing with June Mulally, both of them ignoring the gestures of June Mulally’s husband, Philip, who was still anxious to move homewards. The Thompsons, the Pedlars, the Stevensons, the Suttons, the Heeresmas and the Fultons were all maritally separated. Tim Gruffydd was clammily tightening his grasp of Olive Gramsmith, Sylvia Meacock’s head lolled on the shoulder of a man called Thistlewine.

  ‘Remember the Ritz?’ Sue said to Gavin.

  He did remember. It was a long time ago, years before they’d all gone together to the Italian Adriatic, when they’d just begun to live in Maida Vale, one flat above the other, none of them married. They’d gone to the Ritz because they couldn’t afford it. The excuse had been Polly’s birthday.

  ‘March the 25th,’ he said. ‘1961.’ He could feel her breasts, like spikes because of the neat control of her brassière. He’d become too flabby, he thought, since March the 25th, 1961.

  ‘What fun it was!’ With her dark, petite head on one side, she smiled up at him. ‘Remember it all, Gavin?’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘I wanted to sing that song and no one would let me. Polly was horrified.’

  ‘Well, it was Polly’s birthday.’

  ‘And of course we couldn’t have spoiled that.’ She was still smiling up at him, her eyes twinkling, the tone of her voice as light as a feather. Yet the words sounded like a criticism, as though she were saying now –fourteen years later – that Polly had been a spoilsport, which at the time hadn’t seemed so in the least. Her arms tightened around his waist. Her face disappeared as she sank her head against his chest. All he could see was the red band in her hair and the hair itself. She smelt of some pleasant scent. He liked the sharpness of her breasts. He wanted to stroke her head.

  ‘Sue fancies old Gavin, you know,’ Malcolm said in his den.

  Polly laughed. He had put a hand on her thigh and the fingers were now slightly massaging the green velvet of her skirt and the flesh beneath it. To have asked him to take his hand away or to have pushed it away herself would have been too positive, too much a reflection of his serious mood rather than her own determinedly casual one. A thickness had crept into his voice. He looked much older than thirty-eight; he’d worn less well than Gavin.

  ‘Let’s go back to the party, Malcolm.’ She stood up, dislodging his hand as though by accident.

  ‘Let’s have another drink.’

  He was a solicitor now, with Parker, Hille and Harper. He had been, in fact, a solicitor when they’d all lived in the cheaper part of Maida Vale. He’d still played rugby for the Harlequins then. She and Gavin and Sue used to watch him on Saturday afternoons, in matches against the London clubs, Rosslyn Park and Blackheath, Richmond, London Welsh, London Irish, and all the others. Malcolm had been a towering wing three-quarter, with a turn of speed that was surprising in so large a man: people repeatedly said, even newspaper commentators, that he should play for England.

  Polly was aware that it was a cliché to compare Malcolm as he had been with the blubbery, rather tedious Malcolm beside whom it was unwise to sit on a sofa. Naturally he wasn’t the same. It was probably a tedious life being a solicitor with Parker, Hille and Harper day after day. He probably did his best to combat the blubberiness, and no man could help being bald. When he was completely sober, and wasn’t at a party, he could still be quite funny and nice, hardly tedious at all.

  ‘I’ve always fancied you, Poll,’ he said. ‘You know that.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense, Malcolm!’

  She took the brandy glass from him, holding it between them in case he should make another lurch. He began to talk about sex. He asked her if she’d read, a few years ago, about a couple in an aeroplane, total strangers, who had performed the sexual act in full view of the other passengers. He told her a story about Mick Jagger on an aeroplane, at the time when Mick Jagger was making journeys with Marianne Faithfull. He said the springing system of Green Line buses had the same kind of effect on him.
Sylvia Meacock was lesbian, he said. Olive Gramsmith was a slapparat. Philip Mulally had once been seen hanging about Shepherd Market, looking at the tarts. He hadn’t been faithful to Sue, he said, but Sue knew about it and now they were going to approach all that side of things in a different way. Polly knew about it, too, because Sue had told her: a woman in Parker, Hille and Harper had wanted Malcolm to divorce Sue, and there’d been, as well, less serious relationships between Malcolm and other women.

  ‘Since you went away the days grow long,’ sang Nat King Cole in the coffee-coloured sitting-room, ‘and soon I’ll hear ole winter’s song’ Some guests, in conversation, raised their voices above the voice of Nat King Cole. Others swayed to his rhythm. In the sitting-room and the hall and the room where the food had been laid out there was a fog of cigarette smoke and the warm smell of burgundy. Men sat together on the stairs, talking about the election of Margaret Thatcher as leader of the Conservative party. Women had gathered in the kitchen and seemed quite happy there, with glasses of burgundy in their hands. In a bedroom the couple who had been surprised in Malcolm’s den continued their embrace.

  ‘So very good we were,’ Sue said on the parquet dance-floor. She broke away from Gavin, seizing him by the hand as she did so. She led him across the room to a teak-faced cabinet that contained gramophone records. On top of it there was a gramophone and the tape-recorder that was relaying the music.

  ‘Don’t dare move,’ she warned Gavin, releasing his hand in order to poke among the records. She found what she wanted and placed it on the turntable of the gramophone. The music began just before she turned the tape-recorder off. A cracked female voice sang: That certain night, the night we met, there was magic abroad in the air…

  ‘Listen to it,’ Sue said, taking Gavin’s hand again and drawing him on to the dancing area.

  ‘There were angels dining at the Ritz, and a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.’

  The other dancers, who’d been taken aback by the abrupt change of tempo, slipped into the new rhythm. The two spiky breasts again depressed Gavin’s stomach.

  ‘Angels of a kind we were,’ Sue said. ‘And fallen angels now, Gavin? D’you think we’ve fallen?’

  Once in New York and once in Liverpool he’d made love since his marriage, to other girls. Chance encounters they’d been, irrelevant and unimportant at the time and more so now. He had suffered from guilt immediately afterwards, but the guilt had faded, with both girls’ names. He could remeber their names if he tried: he once had, when suffering from a bout of indigestion in the night. He had remembered precisely their faces and their naked bodies and what each encounter had been like, but memories that required such effort hadn’t seemed quite real. It would, of course, be different with Sue.

  ‘Fancy Sue playing that,’ her husband said, pausing outside the den with Polly. ‘They’ve been talking about the Ritz, Poll.’

  ‘Goodness!’ With a vividness that was a welcome antidote to Malcolm’s disclosure about the sex-life of his guests, the occasion at the Ritz returned to her. Malcolm said:

  ‘It was my idea, you know. Old Gavin and I were boozing in the Hoop and he suddenly said, “It’s Polly’s birthday next week,” and I said, “For God’s sake! Let’s all go down to the Ritz.” ’

  ‘You had oysters, I remember.’ She smiled at him, feeling better because they were no longer in the den, and stronger because of the brandy. Malcolm would have realized by now how she felt, he wouldn’t pursue the matter.

  ‘We weren’t much more than kids.’ He seized her hand in a way that might have been purely sentimental, as though he was inspired by the memory.

  ‘My twenty-second birthday. What an extraordinary thing it was to do!’

  In fact, it had been more than that. Sitting in the restaurant with people she liked, she’d thought it was the nicest thing that had ever happened to her on her birthday. It was absurd because none of them could afford it. It was absurd to go to the Ritz for a birthday treat: martinis in the Rivoli Bar because Malcolm said it was the thing, the gilt chairs and the ferns. But the absurdity hadn’t mattered because in those days nothing much did. It was fun, they enjoyed being together, they had a lot to be happy about. Malcolm might yet play rugby for England. Gavin was about to make his breakthrough into films. Sue was pretty, and Polly that night felt beautiful. They had sat there carelessly laughing, while deferential waiters simulated the gaiety of their mood. They had drunk champagne because Malcolm said they must.

  With Malcolm still holding her hand, she crossed the spacious hall of Number Four Sandiway Crescent. People were beginning to leave. Malcolm released his hold of her in order to bid them goodbye.

  She stood in the doorway of the sitting-room watching Gavin and Sue dancing. She lifted her brandy glass to her lips and drank from it calmly. Her oldest friend was attempting to seduce her husband, and for the first time in her life she disliked her. Had they still been at the Misses Hamilton’s nursery school she would have run at her and hit her with her fists. Had they still been in Maida Vale or on holiday on the Italian Adriatic she would have shouted and made a fuss. Had they been laughing in the Ritz she’d have got up and walked out.

  They saw her standing there, both of them almost in the same moment. Sue smiled at her and called across the coffee-coloured sitting-room, as though nothing untoward were happening, ‘D’you think we’ve fallen, Polly?’ Her voice was full of laughter, just like it had been that night. Her eyes still had their party gleam, which probably had been there too.

  ‘Let’s dance, Poll,’ Malcolm said, putting his arms around her waist from behind.

  It made it worse when he did that because she knew by the way he touched her that she was wrong: he didn’t realize. He probably thought she’d enjoyed hearing all that stuff about Philip Mulally hanging about after prostitutes and Olive Gramsmith being a slapparat, whatever a slapparat was.

  She finished the brandy in her glass and moved with him on to the parquet. What had happened was that the Ryders had had a conversation about all this. They’d said to one another that this was how they wished – since it was the first time – to make a sexual swap. Polly and Gavin were to be of assistance to their friends because a woman in Parker, Hille and Harper had wanted Malcolm to get a divorce and because there’d been other relationships. Malcolm and Sue were approaching all that side of things in a different way now, following the fashion in the outer suburb since the fashion worked wonders with wilting marriages.

  ‘Estrella babysitting, is she?’ Malcolm asked. ‘All right if you’re late, is she? You’re not going to buzz off, Poll?’

  ‘Estrella couldn’t come. We had to get a girl from Problem.’

  He suggested, as though the arrangement were a natural one and had been practised before, that he should drive her home when she wanted to go. He’d drive the babysitter from Problem home also. ‘Old Gavin won’t want to go,’ he pronounced, trying to make it all sound like part of his duties as host. To Polly it sounded preposterous, but she didn’t say so. She just smiled as she danced with him.

  They’d made these plans quite soberly presumably, over breakfast or when there was nothing to watch on television, or in bed at night. They’d discussed the game that people played with car-keys or playing cards, or by drawing lots in other ways. They’d agreed that neither of them cared for the idea of taking a chance. ‘Different,’ Malcolm had probably quite casually said, ‘if we got the Dillards.’ Sue wouldn’t have said anything then. She might have laughed, or got up to make tea if they were watching the television, or turned over and gone to sleep. On some other occasion she might have drifted the conversation towards the subject again and Malcolm would have known that she was interested. They would then have worked out a way of interesting their oldest friends. Dancing with Malcolm, Polly watched while Gavin’s mouth descended to touch the top of Sue’s head. He and Sue were hardly moving on the dance-floor.

  ‘Well, that’s fixed up then,’ Malcolm said. He didn’t want to dance any mo
re. He wanted to know that it was fixed up, that he could return to his party for an hour or so, with something to look forward to. He would drive her home and Gavin would remain. At half past one or two, when the men threw their car-keys on to the carpet and the blindfolded women each picked one out, Gavin and Sue would simply watch, not taking part. And when everyone went away Gavin and Sue would be alone with all the mess and the empty glasses. And she would be alone with Malcolm.

  Polly smiled at him again, hoping he’d take the smile to mean that everything was fixed, because she didn’t want to go on dancing with him. If one of them had said, that night in the Ritz, that for a couple of hours after dinner they should change partners there’d have been a most unpleasant silence.

  Malcolm patted her possessively on the hip. He squeezed her forearm and went away, murmuring that people might be short of drink. A man whom she didn’t know, excessively drunk, took her over, informing her that he loved her. As she swayed around the room with him, she wanted to say to Sue and Malcolm and Gavin that yes, they had fallen. Of course Malcolm hadn’t done his best to combat his blubberiness, of course he didn’t make efforts. Malcolm was awful, and Sue was treacherous. When people asked Gavin if he made films why didn’t he ever reply that the films he made were television commercials? She must have fallen herself, for it was clearly in the nature of things, but she couldn’t see how.