‘Come on in!’ Sue cried jollily at Number Four Sandiway Crescent. Her face was flushed with party excitement, her large brown eyes flashed adventurously with party spirit. Her eyes were the only outsize thing about her: she was tiny and black-haired, as pretty as a rosebud.
‘Gin?’ Malcolm shouted at them from the depths of the crowded hall. ‘Sherry, Polly? Burgundy?’
Gavin kissed the dimpled cheek that Sue Ryder pressed up to him. She was in red, a long red dress that suited her, with a red band in her hair and red shoes.
‘Yes, wine please, Malcolm,’ Polly said, and when she was close enough she slid her face towards his for the same kind of embrace as her husband had given his wife.
‘You’re looking edible, my love,’ he said, a compliment he’d been paying her for seventeen years.
He was an enormous man, made to seem more so by the smallness of his wife. His features had a mushy look. His head, like a pink sponge, was perched jauntily on shoulders that had once been a force to reckon with in rugby scrums. Although he was exactly the same age as Gavin, his hair had balded away to almost nothing, a rim of fluff not quite encircling the sponge.
‘You’re looking very smart yourself,’ Polly said, a statement that might or might not have been true: she couldn’t see him properly because he was so big and she was so close to him, and she hadn’t looked when she’d been further away. He was wearing a grey suit of some kind and a blue-striped shirt and the tie of the Harlequins’ Rugby Club. Usually he looked smart: he probably did now.
‘I’m feeling great,’ he said. ‘Nice little party we’re having, Poll.’
It wasn’t really little. Sixty or so people were in the Ryders’ house, which was similar to the Dillards’ house, well-designed and spacious. Most of the downstairs rooms, and the hall, had coffee-coloured walls, an experiment of Sue’s which she believed had been successful. For the party, the bulkier furniture had been taken out of the coffee-coloured sitting-room, and all the rugs had been lifted from the parquet floor. Music came from a tape-recorder, but no one was dancing yet. People stood in small groups, smoking and talking and drinking. No one, so far, appeared to be drunk.
All the usual people were there: the Stubbses, the Burgesses, the Pedlars, the Thompsons, the Stevensons, Sylvia and Jack Meacock, Philip and June Mulally, Oliver and Olive Gramsmith, Tim and Mary-Ann Gruffydd and dozens of others. Not all of them lived in the outer suburb; and some were older, some younger, than the Ryders and the Dillards. But there was otherwise a similarity about the people at the party: they were men who had succeeded or were in the process of succeeding, and women who had kept pace with their husbands’ advance. No one looked poor at the Ryders’ party.
At ten o’clock there was food, smoked salmon rolled up and speared with cocktail sticks, chicken vol-au-vents or beef Stroganoff with rice, salads of different kinds, stilton and brie and Bel Paese, and meringues. Wine flowed generously, white burgundy and red. Uncorked bottles were distributed on all convenient surfaces.
The dancing began when the first guests had eaten. To ‘Love of the Loved’, Polly danced with a man whose name she didn’t know, who told her he was an estate agent with an office in Jermyn Street. He held her rather close for a man whose name she didn’t know. He was older than Polly, about fifty, she reckoned, and smaller. He had a foxy moustache and foxy hair, and a round stomach, like a ball, which kept making itself felt. So did his knees.
In the room where the food was Gavin sat on the floor with Sylvia and Jack Meacock, and a woman in an orange trouser-suit, with orange lips.
‘Stevie wouldn’t come,’ this woman said, balancing food in the hollow of a fork. ‘He got cross with me last night.’
Gavin ate from his fingers a vol-au-vent full of chicken and mushrooms that had gone a little cold. Jack Meacock said nothing would hold him back from a party given by the Ryders. Or any party, he added, guffawing, given by anyone. Provided there was refreshment, his wife stipulated. Well naturally, Jack Meacock said.
‘He wouldn’t come,’ the orange woman explained, ‘because he thought I misbehaved in Olive Gramsmith’s kitchen. A fortnight ago, for God’s sake!’
Gavin calculated he’d had four glasses of gin and tonic. He corrected himself, remembering the one he’d had with the babysitter. He drank some wine. He wasn’t entirely drunk, he said to himself, he hadn’t turned a certain corner, but the corner was the next thing there was.
‘If you want to kiss someone you kiss him,’ the orange woman said. ‘I mean, for God’s sake, he’d no damn right to walk into Olive Gramsmith’s kitchen. I didn’t see you,’ she said, looking closely at Gavin. ‘You weren’t there, were you?’
‘We couldn’t go.’
‘You were there,’ she said to the Meacocks. ‘All over the place.’
‘We certainly were!’ Jack Meacock guffawed through his beef Stroganoff, scattering rice on to the coffee-coloured carpet.
‘Hullo,’ their hostess said, and sat down on the carpet beside Gavin, with a plate of cheese.
‘You mean you’ve been married twelve years?’ the estate agent said to Polly. ‘You don’t look it.’
‘I’m thirty-six.’
‘What’s your better half in? Is here, is he?’
‘He directs films. Advertisements for TV. Yes, he’s here.’
‘That’s mine.’ He indicated with his head a woman who wasn’t dancing, in lime-green. She was going through a bad patch, he said: depressions.
They danced to ‘Sunporch Cha-Cha-Cha’, Simon and Garfunkel.
‘Feeling OK?’ the estate agent inquired, and Polly said yes, not understanding what he meant. He propelled her towards the mantelpiece and took from it the glass of white burgundy Polly had left there. He offered it to her and when she’d taken a mouthful he drank some from it himself. They danced again. He clutched her more tightly with his arms and flattened a cheek against one of hers, rasping her with his moustache. With dead eyes, the woman in lime-green watched.
At other outer-suburb parties Polly had been through it all before. She escaped from the estate agent and was caught by Tim Gruffydd, who had already begun to sweat. After that another man whose name she didn’t know danced with her, and then Malcolm Ryder did.
‘You’re edible tonight,’ he whispered, the warm mush of his lips damping her ear. ‘You’re really edible, my love.’
‘Share my cheese,’ Sue offered in the other room, pressing brie on Gavin.
‘I need more wine,’ the woman in orange said, and Jack Meacock pushed himself up from the carpet. They all needed more wine, he pointed out. The orange woman predicted that the next day she’d have a hangover and Sylvia Meacock, a masculine-looking woman, said she’d never had a hangover in forty-eight years of steady drinking.
‘You going to stay a while?’ Sue said to Gavin. ‘You and Polly going to stay?’ She laughed, taking one of his hands because it was near to her. Since they’d known one another for such a long time it was quite in order for her to do that.
‘Our babysitter’s unknown,’ Gavin explained. ‘From the bogs of Ireland.’
The orange woman said the Irish were bloody.
‘Jack’s Irish, actually,’ Sylvia Meacock said.
She went on talking about that, about her husband’s childhood in County Down, about an uncle of his who used to drink a bottle and a half of whiskey a day – on top of four glasses of stout, with porridge and bread, for his breakfast. If you drank at all you should drink steadily, she said.