'I will never forget this.' Edith's voice was sonorous with significance and from it Tommy could easily gauge the treatment she had been receiving elsewhere from her erstwhile world.
'Don't get your hopes up too much,' he said. He was after all fully aware of the powers she was ranging herself against.
===OO=OOO=OO===
I was already in the Wainwright drawing room when Edith arrived. It wasn't a large party, roughly twenty or thirty souls who had nothing better to do. They had dutifully assembled in the cramped mews house near Queen Anne Street to start their evening with a few smoked salmon whirls from Marks & Spencer and some bottles of Majestic champagne. The gathering was already past its zenith and the guests had begun to peel away, heeding the call of dinner reservations and theatres and baby-sitters, when Edith came through the door. She was smiling with anticipation but I could see her face shrink with disappointment as she surveyed the room. I went up to her.
'Don't tell me Charles has gone. I got stuck in traffic and I left too late anyway.'
It was easy to see why. She had taken immense trouble with her appearance and I could not remember seeing her in better fettle, her lovely face flawless, her hair shining and an alluring evening outfit encasing her already desirable form.
'Stop worrying,' I murmured reassuringly. 'He hasn't arrived yet.'
'But he is coming?'
'I suppose so. Tommy said he was.'
'That's what he said to me but where is he?'
She bit her lip in annoyance as a couple of her former friends grudgingly decided to acknowledge her presence and draw her into conversation. Adela came up to me.
'What's she doing here?' she said. 'I thought this was the other camp.'
'Not really. I gather Tommy was trying to bring them together.'
'You amaze me. Two days ago, I ran into Arabella at Harvey Nicks and she was saying the break-up was the best thing that could have happened.'
'I don't doubt it but even married couples can on occasion disagree. Or don't you believe such a thing possible?'
'I believe it,' said Adela sourly, 'but I still don't see how Arabella could have allowed the invitation in the first place.'
The answer, of course, which I could not give then but I was able to supply later, was that Arabella had given no such agreement.
The party was on its last legs. A few of us had been invited to stay on for dinner and we were in that uncomfortable, if familiar, period when almost everyone who is not invited to remain has gone but there is always a couple who do not realise that they are delaying the launch of the next stage of the evening. Usually, the hostess weakens and says to the obdurate, 'Do stay for something to eat if you'd like to.' To the trained ear, this translates as, 'Please go. We are hungry and you are not invited.' The old hand on the cocktail party circuit will then look around, blush and scuttle away, muttering about having to be somewhere else. But there is always the risk that the stayer will be uninitiated in these rituals or stubborn or simply stupid — in which case they may accept the unmeant offer of hospitality. In this instance, Arabella Wainwright was clearly not prepared to take a chance on having to entertain Edith for the rest of the evening and so she said nothing. But still Edith would not leave. I strolled over to her.
'I suppose you're having dinner here?' she said.
'We are. And so I imagine is more or less everyone else in the room.'
She looked around. When she spoke her voice had a bleakness that almost brought tears to my eyes. 'I was all geared up.
It didn't occur to me that he wouldn't come. His mother must have got wind of it and put him off somehow.'
'I don't see how. Tommy didn't tell me you were coming and I can't imagine he would have told anyone else.'
She didn't linger all that much longer. When Arabella brought a pile of plates out of the tiny kitchen and plonked them noisily onto the dining room table alongside an arrangement of sporting mats even Edith had to admit defeat.
'I must run,' she said to her detached and unbending hostess. 'Thank you. It's been lovely seeing you again.'
Arabella nodded silently, only too glad to be rid of her but Tommy took her to the door. 'I don't know what happened,' he said. 'I am sorry.'
Edith gave him a sad little smile. 'Oh well. Perhaps it's not meant to be.' Then she kissed him and left. But for all her pretended acceptance of fate, she continued to think someone had wrecked her chances. And she was right.
It was much later in the evening when, in a rare break with my personal tradition, I was helping to clear some plates away, that I overheard a short snatch of conversation coming from behind the kitchen door.
'What do you mean?' said an exasperated Tommy.
'Exactly what I say. I thought it was unfair to spring an ambush on him when we're supposed to be his friends.'
'If that was really what you thought then why didn't you tell Charles and let him make up his own mind?'
'I might ask you the same question.'
Tommy was clearly flustered. 'Because I'm not sure he knows his own mind.'
When Arabella spoke again, it was hard to discern the faintest traces of regret. 'Precisely. And that is why I told his mother.'
'Then you're a bitch.'
'Maybe. You can tell me I was wrong in six months time. Now take in the cream and don't spill it.'
Unable to pretend that I was arranging the dirty plates for much longer, I pushed the kitchen door open to find no sign of dispute within.
'How kind you are,' said Arabella, smoothly relieving me of my burden.
My wife was reluctant to be drawn into a moral position as we drove home. 'Just don't do anything of the sort to me,' she said, and I agreed. Not that I would criticise Tommy. Indeed I thought he had acted the part of a true friend but, rather feebly perhaps, it was not a position I was anxious to find myself in. I did not repeat what Arabella had said about the six-month interval probably because, even at that stage, I did not want to take it on board.
===OO=OOO=OO===
A few days later, Edith awoke to find herself vomiting into the lavatory bowl. She must have fumbled her way there in half-sleep and it was only the act of retching that finally brought her to her senses. When at last it seemed that even the very lining of her stomach must have been discharged into the pan, she stopped, gasped for air and sat back. Simon came to the door, with his hand over the portable telephone. He slept naked and normally the sight of his godly form cheered her into a sense of present good but this morning, his lightly muscled charms were wasted on her.
'Are you all right?' he asked superfluously.
'I think it must have been those prawns,' she said, knowing full well that he had chosen the soup.
'Poor you. Better out than in.' He smiled, holding up the receiver, and mimed, 'It's your mother,' with a comic grimace.
Edith nodded and reached out her hand for the telephone. 'I'll make some coffee,' said Simon, and wandered off to the kitchen.
Edith wiped her mouth and settled her thoughts. 'Mummy? No, I was in the bathroom.'
'Was that you being sick?' said Mrs Lavery at the other end.
'Well, I don't know who else.'
'Are you all right?'
'Of course I'm all right. We went to a ghastly place in Earl's Court last night that's been opened by some failed actor Simon knows. I had shellfish. I must have been mad.'
'Only I thought you were looking rather green around the gills when I saw you.' Edith had accompanied her mother on a fruitless search for a hat the previous week. That was enough in itself to make most people fairly green but she said nothing.
'So you're not ill?'
'Certainly not.'
'You would tell me if there was… something, wouldn't you?'
Edith knew very well that she would hesitate to trust her mother with the time of day but there was no point in going into that now. 'Of course I would,' she said. There was a pause.