“Me, Cara, Gemma, Mrs. Etchells, Mandy, and then you.”
“You’re a bit light on men. Can’t you phone Merlyn?”
“We did. But his book came out, and he’s gone to Beverly Hills.”
It put Colette in a temper, the whole thing: the news about Merlyn, the insult of being called up last, and the fact that they would be performing at short notice in a so-called banqueting suite, cleared for the occasion, where beyond the wall a mega sports screen in the bar would be roaring with football chants, and in the “family area” a bunch of low-rent diners would be grimly hacking their way though honey-basted chicken kebabs.
She made her feelings known.
Alison drew the Papessa, with her veiled lunar face. She represents the inward world of women who love women, the pull of moods and gut feelings. She represents the mother, especially the widowed mother, the bereft
Next morning, when Colette came downstairs, her temper had not improved. “What’s this? A fucking midnight feast?”
There were crumbs all over the worktop, and her precious little omelette pan lay across two rings of the hob, skidded there as if by some disdainful hand which had used and abused it. Its sides were encrusted with brown grease and a heavy smell of frying hung in the air.
Alison didn’t bother to make excuses. She didn’t say, I believe it was the fiends that were frying. Why protest, only to be disbelieved? Why humiliate yourself? But, she thought, I am humiliated anyway.
She rang up Silvana. “Silvy, love, you know at the Fig and Pheasant, will there be a space to set up beforehand, you know, my easel and my picture?”
Silvana sighed. “If you feel you’ve got to, Al. But frankly, darling, a few of us have remarked that it’s time you retired that photo. I don’t know where you got it done.”
Oh, you
Next day when they came to pack the car, they couldn’t find her silk, her apricot silk for draping the portrait. But it’s always, always, she said, in just the same place, unless it’s in the wash, and to prove to herself it wasn’t she turned out her laundry basket, and then turned out Colette’s.
Her heart wasn’t in it, she knew it had vanished or been filched. For a week she had noticed the loss of small objects from her bathroom and dressing table.
Colette came in. “I looked in the washing machine,” she said.
“And? It’s not there, is it?”
Colette said, “No. But you might like to look for yourself.”
In the kitchen, Colette had been running the extractor fan, and spraying room freshener. But the odour of burst fat still hung in the air. Al bent down and looked into the washing machine. Her hand shrank from it, but she picked out the object inside. She held it up, frowning. It was a man’s sock, grey, woolly, the heel gone into holes.
So this is what it’s led to, she thought; Morris going on a course. It’s led to him sucking away my silk and my nail scissors and my migraine pills, and taking eggs out of the fridge and frying them. It’s led to him intruding his sock into Colette’s sight: and soon, perhaps, his foot. She looked over her shoulder, as if he might have materialized entirely; as if he might be sitting on the hob and taunting her.
Colette said, “You’ve had that vagrant in.”
“Mart?” How wrong can you be?
“I’ve seen him hanging around,” Colette said, “but I draw the line at his actual admission to the premises, I mean his using the cooking facilities and our utilities. I suppose that would account for the lavatory seat left up, which I have found on several occasions over the last few days. You have to decide who’s living here, Alison, and if it’s him or me, I’m afraid it won’t be me. As for the frying, and the bread that was obviously brought in somehow, that will have to rest with your own conscience. There isn’t a diet on this earth that allows the wholescale consumption of animal fats and burning another person’s pan. As for the sock—I suppose I should be glad I didn’t find it before it was washed.”
The Fig and Pheasant, under a more dignified name, had once been a coaching inn, and its frontage was still spattered with the exudates of a narrow busy A- road. In the sixties it had stood near-derelict and draughty, with a few down-at-heel regulars huddled into a corner of its cavernous rooms. In the seventies it was bought out by a steak-house chain and Tudorized, fitted with plywood oak-stained panels and those deep-buttoned settles covered in stain-proof plush of which the Tudors were so fond. It offered the novelty of baked potatoes wrapped in foil, with butter or sour cream, and a choice of cod or haddock in bread crumbs, accompanied by salad or greyish and lukewarm peas. With each decade, as its ownership had changed, experiments in theming had suceeded each other, until its original menu had acquired retro-chic, and prawn cocktails had reappeared. Plus there was bruschetta. There was ricotta. There was a Junior Menu of pasta shapes and fish bites, and tiny sausages like the finger that the witch tested for plumpness. There were dusty ruched curtains and vaguely William Morris wallpaper, washable but not proof against kids wiping their hands down it, just as they did at home. In the Sports Bar, where smoking was banned, the ceilings were falsely yellowed, to simulate years of tobacco poisoning; it had been done thirty years ago, and no one saw reason to interfere with it.
To get to the function room you had to push through the bar, past the winking fruit machines. Colette got a round in, counting on her fingers: Gemma, Cara, Silvana, Natasha—four large vodka tonics, include me in and make that five, sweet sherry for Mrs. Etchells, and a fizzy water for Alison. The internal walls were thin, porous; at the noisy reenactment of early evening goals the rooms seemed to rock, and cooking smells crept into the nostrils of the Sensitives as they gathered in an airless hutch behind the stage. The mood was militant. Mandy read out the order.
“I’ll only do twenty minutes because of my arthritis,” Mrs. Etchells said, and Mandy said, “Look, love, you were only doing twenty minutes anyway, that’s the whole idea, it’s like a tag team, or passing the baton.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do anything like that,” Mrs. Etchells said.
