Gavin felt uneasy, because all the time Sylvia Meacock was talking about the drinking habits of her husband’s uncle in County Down Sue clung on to his hand. She held it lightly, moving her fingers in a caress that seemed to stray outside the realm of their long friendship. He was in love with Polly: he thought that deliberately, arraying the sentiment in his mind as a statement, seeing it suspended there. There was no one he’d ever known whom he’d been fonder of than Polly, or whom he respected more, or whom it would upset him more to hurt. Seventeen years ago he’d met her in the kitchens of the Hotel Belvedere, Penzance, where they had both gone to work for the summer. Five years later, having lived with one another in a flat in the cheaper part of Maida Vale, they’d got married because Polly wanted to have children. They’d moved to the outer suburb because the children needed space and fresh air, and because the Ryders, who’d lived on the floor above theirs in Maida Vale, had moved there a year before.
‘She’ll be all right,’ Sue said, returning to the subject of the Irish baby sitter. ‘She could probably stay the night. She’d probably be delighted.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so, Sue.’
He imagined without difficulty the hands of men at the party unbuttoning Polly’s lace blouse, the hands of Jack Meacock or the sweaty hands of Tim Gruffydd. He imagined Polly’s clothes falling on to a bedroom carpet and then her thin, lanky nakedness, her small breasts and the faint mark of her appendix scar. ‘Oh, I say!’ she said in a way that wasn’t like her when the man, whoever he was, took off his own clothes. Without difficulty either, Gavin imagined being in a room himself for the same purpose, with the orange woman or Sylvia Meacock. He’d walk out again if he found himself in a room with Sylvia Meacock and he’d rather be in a room with Sue than with the orange woman. Because he wasn’t quite sober, he had a flash of panic when he thought of what might be revealed when the orange trouser-suit fell to the floor: for a brief, disturbing moment he felt it was actually happening, that in the bonhomie of drunkenness he’d somehow agreed to the situation.
‘Why don’t we dance?’ Sue suggested, and Gavin agreed.
‘I think I’d like a drink,’ Polly said to Philip Mulally, an executive with Wolsey Menswear. He was a grey shadow of a man, not at all the kind to permit himself or his wife to be a party to sexual games. He nodded seriously when Polly interrupted their dance to say she’d like a drink. It was time in any case, he revealed, that he and June were making a move homewards.
‘I love you in that lace thing,’ Malcolm Ryder whispered boringly as soon as Polly stopped dancing with Philip Mulally. He was standing waiting for her.
‘I was saying to Philip I’d like a drink.’
‘Of course you must have a drink. Come and quaff a brandy with me, Poll.’ He took her by the hand and led her away from the dancers. The brandy was in his den, he said.
She shook her head, following him because she had no option. Above the noise of Cilia Black singing ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ she shouted at him that she’d prefer some more white burgundy, that she was actually feeling thirsty. But he didn’t hear her, or didn’t wish to. ‘Ain’t misbehaving,’ the foxy estate agent mouthed at her as they passed him, standing on his own in the hall. It was an expression that was often used, without much significance attaching to it, at parties in the outer suburb.
‘Evening, all,’ Malcolm said in the room he called his den, closing the door behind Polly. The only light in the room was from a desk-lamp. In the shadows, stretched on a mock-leather sofa, a man and a woman were kissing one another. They parted in some embarrassment at their host’s jocular greeting, revealing themselves, predictably, as a husband and another husband’s wife.
‘Carry on, folks,’ Malcolm said.
He poured Polly some brandy even though she had again said that what she wanted was a glass of burgundy. The couple on the sofa got up and went away, giggling. The man told Malcolm he was an old bastard.
‘Here you are,’ Malcolm said, and then to Polly’s distaste he placed his mushy lips on hers and exerted some pressure. The brandy glass was in her right hand, between them: had it not been there, she knew the embrace would have been more intimate. As it was, it was possible for both of them to pretend that what had occurred was purely an expression of Malcolm Ryder’s friendship for her, a special little detour to show that for all these years it hadn’t been just a case of two wives being friends and the husbands tagging along. Once, in 1965, they’d all gone to the Italian Adriatic together and quite often Malcolm had given her a kiss and a hug while telling her how edible she was. But somehow – perhaps because his lips hadn’t been so mushy in the past – it was different now.
‘Cheers!’ he said, smiling at her in the dimness. For an unpleasant moment she thought he might lock the door. What on earth did you do if an old friend tried to rape you on a sofa in his den?
With every step they made together, the orange woman increased her entwinement of Oliver Gramsmith. The estate agent was dancing with June Mulally, both of them ignoring the gestures of June Mulally’s husband, Philip, who was still anxious to move homewards. The Thompsons, the Pedlars, the Stevensons, the Suttons, the Heeresmas and the Fultons were all maritally separated. Tim Gruffydd was clammily tightening his grasp of Olive Gramsmith, Sylvia Meacock’s head lolled on the shoulder of a man called Thistlewine.
‘Remember the Ritz?’ Sue said to Gavin.
He did remember. It was a long time ago, years before they’d all gone together to the Italian Adriatic, when they’d just begun to live in Maida Vale, one flat above the other, none of them married. They’d gone to the Ritz because they couldn’t afford it. The excuse had been Polly’s birthday.
‘March the 25th,’ he said. ‘1961.’ He could feel her breasts, like spikes because of the neat control of her brassière. He’d become too flabby, he thought, since March the 25th, 1961.
‘What fun it was!’ With her dark, petite head on one side, she smiled up at him. ‘Remember it all, Gavin?’
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘I wanted to sing that song and no one would let me. Polly was horrified.’
‘Well, it was Polly’s birthday.’
‘And of course we couldn’t have spoiled that.’ She was still smiling up at him, her eyes twinkling, the tone of her voice as light as a feather. Yet the words sounded like a criticism, as though she were saying now –fourteen years later – that Polly had been a spoilsport, which at the time hadn’t seemed so in the least. Her arms tightened around his waist. Her face disappeared as she sank her head against his chest. All he could see was the red band in her hair and the hair itself. She smelt of some pleasant scent. He liked the sharpness of her breasts. He wanted to stroke her head.
‘Sue fancies old Gavin, you know,’ Malcolm said in his den.
Polly laughed. He had put a hand on her thigh and the fingers were now slightly massaging the green velvet of her skirt and the flesh beneath it. To have asked him to take his hand away or to have pushed it away herself would have been too positive, too much a reflection of his serious mood rather than her own determinedly casual one. A thickness had crept into his voice. He looked much older than thirty-eight; he’d worn less well than Gavin.
‘Let’s go back to the party, Malcolm.’ She stood up, dislodging his hand as though by accident.
‘Let’s have another drink.’
He was a solicitor now, with Parker, Hille and Harper. He had been, in fact, a solicitor when they’d all lived in the cheaper part of Maida Vale. He’d still played rugby for the Harlequins then. She and Gavin and Sue used to watch him on Saturday afternoons, in matches against the London clubs, Rosslyn Park and Blackheath, Richmond, London Welsh, London Irish, and all the others. Malcolm had been a towering wing three-quarter, with a turn of speed that was surprising in so large a man: people repeatedly said, even newspaper commentators, that he should play for England.