In the honeysuckle, suburban bees paused between moments of buzzing. A white butterfly fluttered beside Malcolm’s face. ‘You must be awfully glad to be rid of him,’ he politely said.
‘One’s alone, Malcolm. It isn’t easy, being alone.’
She went into details about how difficult it was, and how various frustrations could be eased. She lowered her voice, she said she spoke in confidence. Sexual fantasy flooded from her, tired arid seeming soiled in the bright sunshine, with the scent of the honeysuckle so close to both of them. Malcolm listened, not moving away, not trying to think of other things. It was nearly two years since Anthea Chalmers had discovered that he would always listen at a party.
In the garden the voices had become louder as more alcohol was consumed. Laughter was shriller, cigarette smoke hung about. By the tool-shed in the far distance the children, organized by a girl who was a little older than the others, played a variation of Grandmother’s Footsteps.
Tom Highband, who wrote under another name a column for the Daily Telegraph, told a joke that caused a burst of laughter. Sandy Mr Fulmer, whom nobody knew very well, listened to the Unwins exchanging gossip with Susanna Maidstone about the school their children all attended. ‘Just a little slower,’ Marcus Stire’s friend pleaded, writing down a recipe for prune jelly on the back of a cheque-book. Taylor-Deeth was getting drunk.
‘It has its own little beach of course,’ the man with the damp-looking moustache informed Jessica. You went down a flight of steps and there you were. They adored the Spaniards, he added, Joan especially did.
And then Joan, who was his wife, was there beside them, in shades of pink. She was bulky, like her husband, with a smile so widely beaming that it seemed to run off her face into her greying hair. She had always had a thing about the Spanish, she agreed, the quality of Spanish life, their little churches. ‘We have a maid of course,’ her husband said, ‘who keeps an eye on things. Old Violetta.’
Glasses were again refilled, the Morrishes together attending to that, as was their way at their parties. She did so quietly, he with more dash. People often remarked that they were like good servants, the way they complemented one another in this way. As well, they were said to be happily married.
Glancing between the couple who were talking to her, Jessica could see that Malcolm was still trapped. The Livingstons tried to cut in on the tête-à-tête but Anthea Chalmers’s shoulder sharply edged them away. Togethei: again after their separation, the Livingstons looked miserable.
‘Violetta mothers us,’ the man with the damp moustache said. ‘We could never manage without old Violetta.’
‘Another thing is Spanish dignity,’ his wife continued, and the man added that old Violetta certainly had her share of that.
‘Oh yes, indeed,’ his wife agreed.
Marcus Stire arrived then, lanky and malicious. The couple with the house in Spain immediately moved away, as if they didn’t like the look of him. He laughed. They were embarrassed, he explained, because at another party recently they’d all of a sudden quarrelled most violently in his presence. The man had even raised an arm to strike his wife, and Marcus Stire had had to restrain him.
‘You’d never think it, would you, Jessica? All that guff about cosiness in Spain when more likely that smile of hers covers a multitude of sins.
What awful frauds people are!’ He laughed again and then continued, his soft voice drawling, a cigarette between the rings on his fingers.
He ran through all the people in the garden. Susanna Maidstone had been seen with Taylor-Deeth in the Trat-West. The Livingstons’ patched-up arrangement wouldn’t of course last. The Unwins were edgy, frigidity was Anthea Chalmers’s problem. ‘Suburban middle age,’ he said in his drawl. ‘It’s like a minefield.’ The Morrishes had had a ghastly upset a month ago when a girl from his office had pursued him home one night, messily spilling the beans.
Jessica looked at the Morrishes, so neatly together as they saw to people’s drinks, attending now to Mr Fulmer. It seemed astonishing that they, too, weren’t quite as they appeared to be. ‘Oh, heavens, yes,’ Marcus Stire said, guessing at this doubt in her mind.
His malice was perceptive, and he didn’t much exaggerate. He had a way of detecting trouble, and of accurately piecing together the fragments that came his way. Caught off her guard, she wondered what he said to other people about Malcolm and herself. She wondered just how he saw them and then immediately struggled to regain her concentration, knowing she should not wonder that.
He was commenting now on the girl who had persuaded the other children to play her version of Grandmother’s Footsteps, a bossy handful he called her. How dreadful she’d be at forty-eight, her looks three-quarters gone, famous in some other suburb as a nagging wife. Jessica smiled, as if he had related a pleasant joke. Again she made the effort to concentrate.
You had to do that: to concentrate and to listen properly, as Malcolm was listening, as she had listened herself to the talk about a house in Spain. You had to have a bouncy wallpaper all over the house, and fresh white paint instead of gravy-brown. You mustn’t forget your plan to get the garden as colourful as this one; you mustn’t let your mind wander. Busily you must note the damp appearance of a man’s moustache and the grey in a woman’s hair, and the malevolence in the eyes that were piercing into you now.
‘I’ve written off those years, Malcolm,’ Anthea Chalmers said, and across the garden Malcolm saw that his wife had collapsed. He could tell at once, as if she’d fallen to the grass and lay there in a heap. Occasionally one or the other of them went under; impossible to anticipate which, or how it would happen.
He watched her face and saw that she was back in 1954, her pains developing a rhythm, a sweltering summer afternoon. A message had come to him in court, and when he’d returned to the house the midwife was smoking a cigarette in the hall. The midwife and the nurse had been up all night with a difficult delivery in Sheen. Afterwards, when the child had been born and everything tidied up, he’d given them a glass of whisky each.
Like an infection, all of it slipped across the garden, through the cigarette smoke and the people and the smartly casual Sunday clothes, from Jessica to Malcolm. Down their treacherous Memory Lane it dragged them, one after the other. The first day at the primary school, tears at the gate, the kindly dinner lady. The gang of four, their child and three others, at daggers drawn with other gangs. The winning of the high jump.
‘Excuse me,’ Malcolm said. It was worse for Jessica, he thought in a familiar way as he made his way to her. It was worse because after the birth she’d been told she must not have other babies: she blamed herself now for being obedient.
They left the party suddenly, while the children still played a version of Grandmother’s Footsteps by the tool-shed, and the adults drank and went on talking to one another. People who knew them guessed that their abrupt departure might somehow have to do with their son, whom no one much mentioned these days, he being a registered drug addict. The couple who had spoken to Jessica about their Spanish house spoke of it now to their hosts, who did not listen as well as she had. Anthea Chalmers tried to explain to Marcus Stire’s friend, but that was hopeless. Marcus Stire again surveyed the people in the garden.
Anger possessed Malcolm as they walked across the common that had been peaceful in the early morning. It was less so now. Cricket would be played that afternoon and preparations were being made, the square marked, the sight-screens wheeled into position. An ice-cream van was already trading briskly. People lay on the grass, youths kicked a football.