Geoffrey had not departed from his cheerful tone. The two women laughed affectionately. Jake held up the wine bottle, which still held about a glassful, but Geoffrey smiled and shook his head and went on as before.
"And the stupidest thing of the lot is, I don't think poor old me, or poor old me in the financial sense, though I jolly well could like everybody else these days, and certainly not 'brilliant' old me. Just, just me. It's not enough, you know."
"It certainly is not by a long chalk," said Alcestis, going up to her husband and putting her arm through his. "I only married you because you were the most boring chap I knew so nobody but me could stand you. Now I'm going to take you home, or rather you're going to take me home and we'll leave these good people in peace."
"Why don't you stay to supper?" asked Brenda. "There's nothing very much but I'm sure you and I could knock something up, Allie."
.. .Yes, do," said Jake.
"No, sweet of you, but we've tried your patience long enough already." Alcestis embraced Jake briefly. "Come along Mabbott, let's hit the trail."
By custom Brenda saw the visitors out while Jake stayed behind in the sitting room. Normally at such a time he could count on a good five minutes to himself, but today it was only a few seconds before he heard the front door slam and his wife approach along the passage.
3—Domestic Interior
"When the bishop farted we were amused to hear about it," said Jake. "Should the ploughboy find treasure we must be told. But when the ploughboy farts .... er .... keep it to yourself."
Brenda had started putting the tea things together, not very loudly. With her back turned she said in her dear soprano, "Did you make that up?"
"Free translation of one of Martial's epigrams."
"Quite good, I suppose."
"It enshrines a principle poor old Allie would do well to—"
A saucer whizzed into the empty fireplace and broke. "You leave Allie alone! You did quite enough when she was here l"
"What? I didn't do anything at all."
"Much! I know you can't be expected to like my friends, that isn't reasonable, why should you, we can't all be the same, I don't necessarily like your friends." Brenda was talking very fast, though not for the moment quite at the pitch to be expected from someone who had reached the crockery-throwing stage. Now she paused and bit her lower lip and gave a shaky sigh. "But I don't see why you feel you have to make your low opinion of my friends so devastatingly crystal-clear!"
Jake heard the last part with annoyance and some self-reproof. He had thought his behaviour to the Mabbotts a showpiece of hypocritical cordiality. And now he came to think of it, hadn't Brenda said something of this sort the last time they had seen Alcestis, or the time before? "I haven't got a low opinion of Allie," he said with an air of slight surprise, "I just find her a bit of a—"
"She knows exactly what you find her, she's not a fool whatever you may think, though even a fool could tell. The way you imitate her and take the mickey out of her and the way your face goes when she tells a story and the way you 'sit,' I didn't think it was a very terrific story either but she wouldn't have told it if you hadn't shut her up and absolutely sat on her about the doctor and brought the whole conversation to an absolute full stop. You used to quite like her, I can't understand it."
"I didn't want to discuss the doctor with her, obviously." Jake poured out the last of the wine. He longed for a smoke but had given it up four years previously and was determined to stick to that. There were no cigarettes in the house anyway.
"You still had no need to sit on her and be crushing," said Brenda in about the same tone as before. Although she was standing above him she talked with her chin raised, a mannerism that had stood her in good stead since she began to put on weight. "And I don't know what she thought when she finished her story and you just 'sat' there as if you hadn't heard a word, or rather 'I do'."
"I didn't realise it was over at first. I honestly thought that couldn't be the end. And what do you mean she wouldn't have told it if I hadn't shut her up about the doctor? She'd already started to tell it to you before I got back, that was quite clear."
"I meant she wouldn't have gone on with it. She'd been telling it to me because it was a tiny little thing in her life that she thought might interest me for about five seconds. That's what old friends do when there's just the two of them together, or didn't you know that? I tell her the same sort of thing all the time. We don't go on swapping translations of epigrams by Martial hour after hour."
"No of course you don't, I quite see," said Jake mildly, as opposed to saying harshly that that would be all right if the story didn't take fifty times as long as it was supposed to be interesting for.
Brenda's expression softened in response but a moment later it had hardened again. "And the way you treat poor old Geoffrey, as if he's off his head or something."
"I think he is a bit off his head, always has been as long as I've known him. Look at those bloody silly clothes he—"
"That's no excuse for treating him like that. You should have seen the way you were looking at him."
"When?"
"'When?' Whenever he said anything or was getting ready to say anything, when he said he'd like some wine... And what was all that about the wine in the kitchen? What were you up to?"
"Nothing, just opening it. The other bottle was...."
"No, you were up to something but I know it's no use going on about it. When he said something about Mexico and when he said he was absent-minded, Allie saw the way you were looking at him, and then when I asked them to stay and after about five minutes you said what a good idea as if it was your own funeral. You should have heard yourself."
She paused. Jake looked up at his wife. Her breasts were about as large as Curnow's receptionist's but her hips were large too. And, partly concealed by the loose-fitting cardigan, one of her favourite forms of dress over the last couple of years, her waist, her thighs and her upper arms were also large and her paunch was fairly large. But her face, as he had recently noticed from a photograph, had hardly changed in ten years: it was still the face of a woman anxious not to miss anything good or happy that might come her way in the future. That anxiety in it had been the second thing he had observed about her, after her eyes. She turned their glance on him now. He reached out his hand and she took it; he considered getting up and putting his arms round her but somehow decided not to. Without hostility she soon withdrew her hand.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'll try to do better next time." Of course he meant do and nothing more: how could anyone change his attitude to a pair like the Mabbotts? But next time was going to have to include next time they came up in conversation as well as in person, and that meant fewer of those jocular little sallies about them which had so often cheered up his half of the breakfast or lunch table. A few moments earlier he had thought of telling Brenda that in fact the idea of those two having noticed anything in the least objectionable was a load of rubbish and that she was cross with him for what she knew he felt about them, not for how he had behaved to them, but that too he decided against.
She had moved to the fireplace, he now saw, and was carefully picking up the pieces of china. "How did it go with the doctor, darling? I should have asked you before."
"That's all right. Oh, he .... asked me the sort of questions one might have expected and said he couldn't do anything and fixed up an appointment for me with some fellow who might be able to do something."