‘Estrella babysitting, is she?’ Malcolm asked. ‘All right if you’re late, is she? You’re not going to buzz off, Poll?’
‘Estrella couldn’t come. We had to get a girl from Problem.’
He suggested, as though the arrangement were a natural one and had been practised before, that he should drive her home when she wanted to go. He’d drive the babysitter from Problem home also. ‘Old Gavin won’t want to go,’ he pronounced, trying to make it all sound like part of his duties as host. To Polly it sounded preposterous, but she didn’t say so. She just smiled as she danced with him.
They’d made these plans quite soberly presumably, over breakfast or when there was nothing to watch on television, or in bed at night. They’d discussed the game that people played with car-keys or playing cards, or by drawing lots in other ways. They’d agreed that neither of them cared for the idea of taking a chance. ‘Different,’ Malcolm had probably quite casually said, ‘if we got the Dillards.’ Sue wouldn’t have said anything then. She might have laughed, or got up to make tea if they were watching the television, or turned over and gone to sleep. On some other occasion she might have drifted the conversation towards the subject again and Malcolm would have known that she was interested. They would then have worked out a way of interesting their oldest friends. Dancing with Malcolm, Polly watched while Gavin’s mouth descended to touch the top of Sue’s head. He and Sue were hardly moving on the dance-floor.
‘Well, that’s fixed up then,’ Malcolm said. He didn’t want to dance any more. He wanted to know that it was fixed up, that he could return to his party for an hour or so, with something to look forward to. He would drive her home and Gavin would remain. At half past one or two, when the men threw their car-keys on to the carpet and the blindfolded women each picked one out, Gavin and Sue would simply watch, not taking part. And when everyone went away Gavin and Sue would be alone with all the mess and the empty glasses. And she would be alone with Malcolm.
Polly smiled at him again, hoping he’d take the smile to mean that everything was fixed, because she didn’t want to go on dancing with him. If one of them had said, that night in the Ritz, that for a couple of hours after dinner they should change partners there’d have been a most unpleasant silence.
Malcolm patted her possessively on the hip. He squeezed her forearm and went away, murmuring that people might be short of drink. A man whom she didn’t know, excessively drunk, took her over, informing her that he loved her. As she swayed around the room with him, she wanted to say to Sue and Malcolm and Gavin that yes, they had fallen. Of course Malcolm hadn’t done his best to combat his blubberiness, of course he didn’t make efforts. Malcolm was awful, and Sue was treacherous. When people asked Gavin if he made films why didn’t he ever reply that the films he made were television commercials? She must have fallen herself, for it was clearly in the nature of things, but she couldn’t see how.
‘It’s time we went home, Sue,’ Gavin said.
‘Of course it isn’t, Gavin.’
‘Polly –’
‘You’re nice, Gavin.’
He shook his head. He whispered to her, explaining that Polly wouldn’t ever be a party to what was being suggested. He said that perhaps they could meet some time, for a drink or for lunch. He would like to, he said; he wanted to.
She smiled. That night in the Ritz, she murmured, she hadn’t wanted to be a blooming angel. ‘I wanted you,’ she murmured.
‘That isn’t true.’ He said it harshly. He pushed her away from him, wrenching himself free of her arms. It shocked him that she had gone so far, spoiling the past when there wasn’t any need to. ‘You shouldn’t have said that, Sue.’
‘You’re sentimental.’
He looked around for Polly and saw her dancing with a man who could hardly stand up. Some of the lights in the room had been switched off and the volume of the tape-recorder had been turned down. Simon and Garfunkel were whispering about Mrs Robinson. A woman laughed shrilly, kicking her shoes across the parquet.
Sue wasn’t smiling any more. The face that looked up at him through the gloom was hard and accusing. Lines that weren’t laughter-lines had developed round the eyes: lines of tension and probably fury, Gavin reckoned. He could see her thinking: he had led her on, he had kissed the top of her head. Now he was suggesting lunch some time, dealing out the future to her when the present was what mattered. He felt he’d been rude.
‘I’m sorry, Sue.’
They were standing in the other dancers’ way. He wanted to dance again himself, to feel the warmth of her small body, to feel her hands, and to smell her hair, and to bend down and touch it again with his lips. He turned away and extricated Polly from the grasp of the drunk who had claimed to love her. ‘It’s time to go home,’ he said angrily.
‘You’re never going, old Gavin,’ Malcolm protested in the hall. ‘I’ll run Poll home, you know.’
‘I’ll run her home myself.’
In the car Polly asked what had happened, but he didn’t tell her the truth. He said he’d been rude to Sue because Sue had said something appalling about one of her guests and that for some silly reason he’d taken exception to it.
Polly did not believe him. He was making an excuse, but it didn’t matter. He had rejected the game the Ryders had wanted to play and he had rejected it for her sake. He had stood by her and shown his respect for her, even though he had wanted to play the game himself. In the car she laid her head against the side of his shoulder. She thanked him, without specifying what she was grateful for.
‘I feel terrible about being rude to Sue,’ he said.
He stopped the car outside their house. The light was burning in the sitting-room window. The babysitter would be half asleep. Everything was as it should be.
‘I’d no right to be rude,’ Gavin said, still in the car.
‘Sue’ll understand.’
‘I don’t know that she will.’
She let the silence gather, hoping he’d break it by sighing or saying he’d telephone and apologize tomorrow, or simply saying he’d wait in the car for the babysitter. But he didn’t sigh and he didn’t speak.
‘You could go back,’ she said calmly, in the end, ‘and say you’re sorry. When you’ve driven the babysitter home.’
He didn’t reply. He sat gloomily staring at the steering-wheel. She thought he began to shake his head, but she wasn’t sure. Then he said:
‘Yes, perhaps I should.’
They left the car and walked together on the short paved path that led to their hall door. She said that what she felt like was a cup of tea, and then thought how dull that sounded.
‘Am I dull, Gavin?’ she asked, whispering in case the words somehow carried in to the babysitter. Her calmness deserted her for a moment. ‘Am I?’ she repeated, not whispering any more, not caring about the babysitter.
‘Of course you’re not dull. Darling, of course you aren’t.’
‘Not to want to stay? Not to want to go darting into beds with people?’
‘Oh, don’t be silly, Polly. They’re all dull except you, darling. Every single one of them.’
He put his arms around her and kissed her, and she knew that he believed what he was saying. He believed she hadn’t fallen as he and the Ryders had, that middle age had dealt no awful blows. In a way that seemed true to Polly, for it had often occurred to her that she, more than the other three, had survived the outer suburb. She was aware of pretences but could not pretend herself. She knew every time they walked into the local Tonino’s that the local Tonino’s was just an Italian joke, a sham compared with the reality of the original in Greek Street. She knew the party they’d just been to was a squalid little mess. She knew that when Gavin enthused about a fifteen-second commercial for soap his enthusiasm was no cause for celebration. She knew the suburb for what it was, its Volvos and Vauxhalls, its paved paths in unfenced front gardens, its crescents and avenues and immature trees, and the games its people played.