Polly was aware that it was a cliché to compare Malcolm as he had been with the blubbery, rather tedious Malcolm beside whom it was unwise to sit on a sofa. Naturally he wasn’t the same. It was probably a tedious life being a solicitor with Parker, Hille and Harper day after day. He probably did his best to combat the blubberiness, and no man could help being bald. When he was completely sober, and wasn’t at a party, he could still be quite funny and nice, hardly tedious at all.
‘I’ve always fancied you, Poll,’ he said. ‘You know that.’
‘Oh, nonsense, Malcolm!’
She took the brandy glass from him, holding it between them in case he should make another lurch. He began to talk about sex. He asked her if she’d read, a few years ago, about a couple in an aeroplane, total strangers, who had performed the sexual act in full view of the other passengers. He told her a story about Mick Jagger on an aeroplane, at the time when Mick Jagger was making journeys with Marianne Faithfull. He said the springing system of Green Line buses had the same kind of effect on him. Sylvia Meacock was lesbian, he said. Olive Gramsmith was a slapparat. Philip Mulally had once been seen hanging about Shepherd Market, looking at the tarts. He hadn’t been faithful to Sue, he said, but Sue knew about it and now they were going to approach all that side of things in a different way. Polly knew about it, too, because Sue had told her: a woman in Parker, Hille and Harper had wanted Malcolm to divorce Sue, and there’d been, as well, less serious relationships between Malcolm and other women.
‘Since you went away the days grow long,’ sang Nat King Cole in the coffee-coloured sitting-room, ‘and soon I’ll hear ole winter’s song’ Some guests, in conversation, raised their voices above the voice of Nat King Cole. Others swayed to his rhythm. In the sitting-room and the hall and the room where the food had been laid out there was a fog of cigarette smoke and the warm smell of burgundy. Men sat together on the stairs, talking about the election of Margaret Thatcher as leader of the Conservative party. Women had gathered in the kitchen and seemed quite happy there, with glasses of burgundy in their hands. In a bedroom the couple who had been surprised in Malcolm’s den continued their embrace.
‘So very good we were,’ Sue said on the parquet dance-floor. She broke away from Gavin, seizing him by the hand as she did so. She led him across the room to a teak-faced cabinet that contained gramophone records. On top of it there was a gramophone and the tape-recorder that was relaying the music.
‘Don’t dare move,’ she warned Gavin, releasing his hand in order to poke among the records. She found what she wanted and placed it on the turntable of the gramophone. The music began just before she turned the tape-recorder off. A cracked female voice sang: That certain night, the night we met, there was magic abroad in the air…
‘Listen to it,’ Sue said, taking Gavin’s hand again and drawing him on to the dancing area.
‘There were angels dining at the Ritz, and a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.’
The other dancers, who’d been taken aback by the abrupt change of tempo, slipped into the new rhythm. The two spiky breasts again depressed Gavin’s stomach.
‘Angels of a kind we were,’ Sue said. ‘And fallen angels now, Gavin? D’you think we’ve fallen?’
Once in New York and once in Liverpool he’d made love since his marriage, to other girls. Chance encounters they’d been, irrelevant and unimportant at the time and more so now. He had suffered from guilt immediately afterwards, but the guilt had faded, with both girls’ names. He could remeber their names if he tried: he once had, when suffering from a bout of indigestion in the night. He had remembered precisely their faces and their naked bodies and what each encounter had been like, but memories that required such effort hadn’t seemed quite real. It would, of course, be different with Sue.
‘Fancy Sue playing that,’ her husband said, pausing outside the den with Polly. ‘They’ve been talking about the Ritz, Poll.’
‘Goodness!’ With a vividness that was a welcome antidote to Malcolm’s disclosure about the sex-life of his guests, the occasion at the Ritz returned to her. Malcolm said:
‘It was my idea, you know. Old Gavin and I were boozing in the Hoop and he suddenly said, “It’s Polly’s birthday next week,” and I said, “For God’s sake! Let’s all go down to the Ritz.” ’
‘You had oysters, I remember.’ She smiled at him, feeling better because they were no longer in the den, and stronger because of the brandy. Malcolm would have realized by now how she felt, he wouldn’t pursue the matter.
‘We weren’t much more than kids.’ He seized her hand in a way that might have been purely sentimental, as though he was inspired by the memory.
‘My twenty-second birthday. What an extraordinary thing it was to do!’
In fact, it had been more than that. Sitting in the restaurant with people she liked, she’d thought it was the nicest thing that had ever happened to her on her birthday. It was absurd because none of them could afford it. It was absurd to go to the Ritz for a birthday treat: martinis in the Rivoli Bar because Malcolm said it was the thing, the gilt chairs and the ferns. But the absurdity hadn’t mattered because in those days nothing much did. It was fun, they enjoyed being together, they had a lot to be happy about. Malcolm might yet play rugby for England. Gavin was about to make his breakthrough into films. Sue was pretty, and Polly that night felt beautiful. They had sat there carelessly laughing, while deferential waiters simulated the gaiety of their mood. They had drunk champagne because Malcolm said they must.
With Malcolm still holding her hand, she crossed the spacious hall of Number Four Sandiway Crescent. People were beginning to leave. Malcolm released his hold of her in order to bid them goodbye.
She stood in the doorway of the sitting-room watching Gavin and Sue dancing. She lifted her brandy glass to her lips and drank from it calmly. Her oldest friend was attempting to seduce her husband, and for the first time in her life she disliked her. Had they still been at the Misses Hamilton’s nursery school she would have run at her and hit her with her fists. Had they still been in Maida Vale or on holiday on the Italian Adriatic she would have shouted and made a fuss. Had they been laughing in the Ritz she’d have got up and walked out.
They saw her standing there, both of them almost in the same moment. Sue smiled at her and called across the coffee-coloured sitting-room, as though nothing untoward were happening, ‘D’you think we’ve fallen, Polly?’ Her voice was full of laughter, just like it had been that night. Her eyes still had their party gleam, which probably had been there too.
‘Let’s dance, Poll,’ Malcolm said, putting his arms around her waist from behind.
It made it worse when he did that because she knew by the way he touched her that she was wrong: he didn’t realize. He probably thought she’d enjoyed hearing all that stuff about Philip Mulally hanging about after prostitutes and Olive Gramsmith being a slapparat, whatever a slapparat was.
She finished the brandy in her glass and moved with him on to the parquet. What had happened was that the Ryders had had a conversation about all this. They’d said to one another that this was how they wished – since it was the first time – to make a sexual swap. Polly and Gavin were to be of assistance to their friends because a woman in Parker, Hille and Harper had wanted Malcolm to get a divorce and because there’d been other relationships. Malcolm and Sue were approaching all that side of things in a different way now, following the fashion in the outer suburb since the fashion worked wonders with wilting marriages.