Jo was disgruntled at her failure to obliterate — or at least kill — him. ‘Thanks for nothing, scum.’
‘I confess,’ Norman said, fully recovered, ‘that I’m looking for another girlfriend, though I can’t see myself handing her over to you after I’ve done with her. Every likely looking candidate I come across gets a written questionnaire, in any case, so’s there’ll be no misunderstanding. For instance, I want to know whether or not she smokes. I wouldn’t like her to live longer than me and burn all my letters and notebooks, though I expect we’d be separated long before that. I want to know if she’s married. I don’t want to get a dagger in my back from her squash-playing husband. Can she drive? Then I can get drunk at parties and she can take me home. Is she a dab hand at a word processor? That’s essential, because I’m bloody hopeless with them. Does she have a sense of humour? She’d certainly need one. Are both her parents dead? Mine are, so it’s only fair hers are too. Does she have children? I don’t want any of those puking little bastards competing for attention. In any case, little Crispin with the heavenly curls might grow up to be a yobbo and kick me in for hitting his mother. Does she have a job? — preferably with TV or in films, so that she can get my novels put on. Then, of course, will she keep thinking I’m a genius when she hears me fart in bed at night? Does she have a centrally heated flat in the middle of London? I’ve taken a shine to Pimlico. And does she have a cottage in Dorset, with no neighbours to hear the screams when we start quarrelling and I give her a good hiding? And oh yes — God-Almighty, I nearly forgot — can she unravel the mysteries of VAT? A positive response to such queries might result in a satisfactory relationship for a month or two, but in the meantime,’ he ended, with little-boy wistfulness, ‘I’ll go for any halfway personable woman who takes pity on me. Until the paragon turns up, of course, when I’d throw her aside like an old floorcloth.’
Diana noted the admiration on Tom’s face at how Bakewell had ignored the cut from Jo’s glass, and now his awe at such a horrid screed. Her face was warm with hatred, and she wanted to say something that would wither all men to pitiable stumps, though Charlotte came in before her: ‘Norman, I shan’t buy your next novel if you don’t behave to my guests.’
He swabbed his forehead again rather than quarrel with his hostess, and said mildly: ‘You’ll regret it, if you don’t. It’s called The Lovers of Burnt Oak. Bound to get onto the short list for the Windrush Prize.’ He manufactured an expression of repentance. ‘I’m sorry, though. I was feeling a bit on the dark side of bilious when I flopped out of bed this morning.’ He apologised to Barbara, who responded with silence, so he looked around for another victim. ‘Anybody want to talk about modern English literature?’
He lit a cigar when no one did. He was drunk, and Diana hoped everyone would ignore him, but he was malevolent and wouldn’t let them. ‘I’ll tell you about the new novel I’m writing.’ He looked at Tom, whose firm had beaten all competitors to get him on its list during an auction at the Groucho Club. ‘The hero’s a publisher,’ he said, beady-eyeing Tom as if to damage him for having bought him like a slave at the market, and hoping that what he was going to say would turn into a prophecy. ‘Well, his wife has a relationship — dare I call it, Jo? — with a woman. The husband’s quite happy because it takes her attention from a little bit of business he’s got on, also with a woman. Even so, the wife carries on in so shameless a way that at times he feels humiliated, but puts her affair in cold storage, as it were, to be dealt with in the future. Well, our hero publisher and his wife have a grown-up son, who he’s always suspected to be the result of an early affair of his wife’s, though we’ll let that pass. This son has an affair with the daughter of the woman his wife is passionately involved with. Are you following me? A real alligator playground, because listen: both affairs tail off, you might say, but as time goes on the husband feels slighted and his thoughts stray towards revenge. A few years later he has a relationship with the woman’s daughter that his son has by now finished with, and little by little he blasts her life, as only a swine like him can, to such an extent that she does herself in. The mother then lives unhappily ever after, as a played-out harridan.’
‘You’re sheer fucking evil,’ Jo cried, after the silence. ‘I should have pushed this carving knife into your guts.’
‘It’s a very moral tale,’ he huffed. ‘I was hoping you’d see something of that sort in it.’ He began to cry, head forward over the ashtray, and Diana felt a shameful urge to comfort him.
Jo stood, pushing her chair away. ‘The gas-oven’s the only place for a snotchops like you.’
They walked with their coffee through the French windows onto a large well-shaved lawn, the grass dry enough for those who couldn’t find places on the scattered park bench seats. The softened thump of a cricket ball sounded from the vicarage garden next door as Diana went towards the lilac bushes followed by Jo Hesborn.
Jo worked on lay-out for Home and Country. Her grey eyes sparked from behind the smallest of half-moon spectacles which, Diana thought, might be made of plain glass. Her hair was between fair and dark, the androgynous body dressed in a white silk shirt and tie, and checked trousers. She smoked a black papered cigarette from a holder made of bone.
Diana had heard she was a friend of Charlotte’s because she had ‘impeccable working-class credentials’. It was also put about that as a lesbian she had slept with most of the media women in London, who thought it less of a risk to tangle with the working class through her than get involved with an obese plumber or building worker. Diana considered such slander drummed up by a male chauvinist slob who thought it was witty, because she found Jo likeable, plain and straightforward, and envied her for making the only possible protest against Norman Bakewell. After saying so, she asked: ‘Who was that bloke sitting opposite me? Do you know him?’
She spoke with a modified Northumbrian accent. ‘He used to be a writer.’
‘Why is he here, though?’
‘Oh, he did a reportage, for a magazine Charlotte brought out in the eighties called The New Oppressed. She thought his piece was wonderful — social realism stuff straight from the front line, to use Charlotte’s words, far better than Orwell ever wrote, she said, who she’d always thought a traitor to the working class.
‘Tom lived among no-hopers and winos for a month, hung around DHSS offices, talked to kids on housing estates who loved nicking expensive cars and driving them on wasteland to burn. It was a long piece, went through three issues, but the magazine didn’t last long. Even Tom’s brilliant piece couldn’t save it. The chattering classes weren’t all that interested, and the unemployed couldn’t afford it with their giros. They’d have laughed about it, anyway.
‘Tom said that even before finishing it he decided that all he’d met were unhelpable, or just having a marvellous time burning and looting, for which he couldn’t blame them. I’m sure he’s never said as much to Charlotte, which is why she still likes him. Then he went into publishing, and now he’s on the way to becoming a millionaire, or so it’s whispered in the trade.’
‘What about his love life?’
Jo laughed. ‘Don’t ask! When he was slumming among the deadbeats he fell in love with a young married woman he got talking to in the DHSS queue. Or maybe he fell for another at the same time, knowing him. Anyway, it all went wrong. She saw through him, I suppose. Then he went down like a ton of bricks for this hardbitten tart from the North called Angela, a coalminer’s daughter, who worked at his firm. He married her. Got what he deserved, I suppose.’