He lowered his newspaper, glancing at her through the tops of his bifocals.
‘We’ve been through that, dear.’
‘Have we? Well I think it’s very silly that we can’t invite them for cocktails just because they haven’t had time to invite us back for dinner yet. I think it’s very stuffy and conventional, if you must know.’
‘If they’d wanted to socialise with us, they’d have found time to invite us over in the year and a half since we had them to dinner, don’t you think?’
‘How would I know? I’m not them. Anyway, why wouldn’t they want to socialise with us?’
‘I can’t imagine.’
‘It isn’t as if they have any right to be high and mighty with us. You’re a company director. Lawrence goes to a perfectly good school. I may be a bit of a nobody, but at least I’m not a frump, which can’t exactly be said of Jill Bestridge. I should have thought they’d want to bend over backwards to be friends with us. Perhaps they’re shy, perhaps that’s all it is, Robert. Perhaps they need more encouragement. Robert?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Oh, you’re no help!’
‘You can’t force people to like you, Geraldine dear. It’s against the laws of physics.’
He turned the page of his newspaper and shook it straight with a single practiced snap.
My mother stood up and wandered about the room, fussing with her ornaments and flowers. She wasn’t done with this topic, I could tell. Her restless, aggrieved spirit never settled easily, once aroused.
I sensed also that she hadn’t yet come to her point, her real point; that to get to it she had to conjure a more vexed and petulant atmosphere than currently prevailed.
‘I don’t see how you ever get what you want in life if you aren’t prepared to push a little. You have to push! I’ve had to push people all my life.’
‘And you wonder why people find you pushy.’
‘Do they?’ my mother asked, her violet-blue eyes suddenly wide and vulnerable.
I could see that my stepfather regretted his riposte.
‘No dear, I’m just saying they would -’
‘Is that why the Bestridges don’t -’
‘Don’t let’s start, Geraldine -’
‘I suppose you think I pushed you. Is that what you think?’
‘Geraldine -’
‘All those afternoon drinkies at the Portingham Cellars – was that me pushing you? Those romantic tête-à-teêtes down in the storage room at Findley Street, did I push you down there? Did I? Pushy Geraldine shoving poor weak Mr Robert Julius Lloyd down the basement stairs in the middle of the morning when she couldn’t wait another second for a bit of what you fancy, is that how you remember it darling?’
My stepfather sighed, folding away his newspaper. He disliked confrontations, and would agree to almost any demand in order to avoid them. His own dissatisfactions he worked out silently and in private, in stratagems that didn’t emerge until their fruit was already fully ripened. For all I know, as he sat there gazing mildly at my mother, he was already plotting how to start siphoning off funds to set up the flat (or ‘love nest’ as the newspapers later called it) for his new mistress, a private casino waitress by the name of Brandy Colquhoun, whose existence burst on us a year or so later.
‘What is it you want, my love?’
‘Want? I don’t want anything. I’d like to think I had a husband who took some interest in the well-being of my child -’
‘Geraldine, I’m simply saying I don’t think the Bestridges -’
‘Oh who cares about the Bestridges? Do you think I care tuppence about those snobs?’
‘Well what is it you want me to do?’
‘What’s the point of even discussing what I want you to do since you refuse to do anything I suggest anyway?’
‘What have I ever refused?’
My mother looked away from him; adjusted a dried rose.
In a quiet voice, she said:
‘The Royal Aldersbury, for one thing.’
There.
‘Ah, now Geraldine…’
‘What? Just because your daughter’s a member does that mean it’s too good for Lawrence? I find that a little bit insulting, if you must know.’
The Royal Aldersbury was a sports club for well-to-do county families. Robert’s daughter Emily was a member and, from what I could gather, spent all her free time there, in a gilded haze of tennis tournaments, dinghy regattas, and country dances.
It was near the Lloyd house, twelve miles from us, on the banks of a wide stretch of the Medway. Robert met his daughter and two young sons there for tea every Sunday, an event from which he would return in a state of dejection that my mother had come to feel offended by, so that they had had to institute a counter-ritual of dining out at an expensive restaurant – the White Castle or the Gay Hussar – every Sunday night when they arrived back in London.
Several times she had raised the subject of Robert getting me into the Royal Aldersbury, ostensibly so that I would have something to do when I came to the cottage, though the more Robert had resisted the idea, the more firmly it had acquired the higher significance of a measure of his current regard for her. Robert was too much of the English school of obtuseness to say right out that he was afraid it might upset his daughter to have to mix with the son of the woman he’d left his family for, but that was evidently what he felt, and my mother found this mortifying. She had taken the position that once she and Robert had married, the entire situation regarding both families had become irrevocably normalised and stable, almost to the point of retroactively annulling the fact of his previous marriage. She often tried to get Robert to bring his children to our home, and even hinted that it was about time he took us over to visit his former wife. Perhaps she had visions of joining Selena Lloyd and her set for ladies’ luncheons in Tunbridge Wells.
Even so, she was probably as surprised as I was when Robert suddenly stood up and telephoned the Royal Aldersbury, asking to speak to the Club Secretary.
A few minutes later I was a probationary member.
‘Satisfied?’ he asked my mother, sitting back down to his newspaper. He was affecting nonchalance, but he must have been aware of the magnitude of what he had done; its fundamental destructiveness. I suspect he was the type of man who even took a certain fastidious pleasure in setting off small avalanches of this nature: proving to himself and the world just how much of a source of disorder he was.
My mother was pleased: deeply, physically pleased. She flushed, and her eyes shone. She brought the bottle of white port over to Robert and filled his glass. They were guarded about showing physical affection in front of me, but they had evolved numerous small acts of attention that by now were as obvious an indication of the flow of feeling between them as the deepest of French kisses would have been.
The next morning my stepfather took me to the Royal Aldersbury. It was a fine spring day: the May was flowering in the hedges and the apple orchards were in bloom. We drove in silence: by tacit agreement we never spoke to each other when my mother wasn’t around.
The main building of the club was a grand, gabled, chimneyed pile covered in Virginia creeper. Around it were tennis courts, squash courts, croquet lawns, a badminton lawn with stout-legged ladies leaping around in pleated skirts, and at the back, gliding blackly in its flower-filled banks, the river.
Robert took me uptairs to meet the Treasurer and Secretary. He was politely aloof with these functionaries, who appeared to regard him as a mighty personage. An enigmatic smile played across his features as they made conversation with him, supplying their own answers when none was forthcoming from him. Though I had no idea what he was thinking, I felt that he was privately amusing himself at everyone else’s expense. I didn’t mind.
A woman came to the door and signaled to the Treasurer. He tiptoed over to her, murmuring an apology. They stood in the next room talking in hushed voices, then the Treasurer tiptoed back. He cleared his throat: