‘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 expensive: 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 girclass="underline" 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.