There had been a silence after that. Matthew had looked at his pasta and at the ceiling, and tried to remember what it was that he saw in Ben all those years ago. He had liked him. They had been friends, and now this thing – this running – had come between them.
There was another close friend from the Academy, Paul, whom he used to see and whom he now avoided. He had married young – they were both twenty-two at the time – and now had two young children. This friend now spoke only of issues relating to babies: of nappies, unguent creams, and feeding matters.
“Here’s a tip for you, Matthew,” Paul had said to him the last time he had seen him. “When you put a baby over your shoulder to wind it, make sure you put a cloth underneath it, just where its mouth is. No, I really mean it. It’s important. I found that out the hard way when I was about to go to work when little Hamish was about four months old. He’d just had his feed and I put him over my shoulder and started to pat his little back.
The wind came up very satisfactorily, but what I didn’t realise was that half the feed came up too and went all the way down the back of my suit jacket! I didn’t notice it and went off to the office. I went to a meeting – it was quite an important one –
and I was standing next to one of our clients and I could see him sniffing and puckering his nose. And then one of the secre-taries came and whispered in my ear and the penny dropped.
So just you remember that, Matthew!
“And here’s another thing. When you travel with a baby, make sure that you’ve got a good, strong bag to put the dirty disposables in. We went off to see some relatives of Ann’s who live at St Andrews. Stuffy bunch. We had to change the kids on the way there and we put the disposables in the same bag that we had put the flowers for Ann’s aunt. Now, you can imagine what 80
happened when we took the flowers out of the bag and thrust them into her hand! Yes. So that’s another bit of advice for you.
You don’t mind my giving you this advice, do you, Matthew? I know that you’re not at that stage yet, but it’ll come before too long and you’ll thank me. I’m sure you will.”
Depressed at the thought of his shortage of friends – or “viable friends”, as he put it – Matthew made his way that evening into the Cumberland Bar. He looked about him: there were one or two people he recognised, but nobody he knew well enough to go and join. So he bought himself a drink and sat at a table on his own. Sad, he thought; how sad. Here I am sitting in a bar, by myself, drinking; a situation in which I never imagined I would find myself. What lies beyond this? Drinking by myself in the flat? Of course, people drank by themselves; there was nothing essentially wrong in that – a glass of wine at one’s solitary table in the company of
There were worse things than that. It was hardly problem-drinking.
He looked at his watch. He would sit there for perhaps half an hour, and if nobody he knew had come in by then he would go out and buy himself a pizza and take it back to India Street and eat it in the flat. India Street was not the sort of place where people sat and ate pizzas by themselves; it was dinner-party territory. Now, that was an idea! He would plan a dinner party and invite a group of brilliant guests. The wit at the table would be coruscating; the exchange of ideas vital and exciting.
There would be elegant women and clever men, and people would go off into the night buoyed by the stimulation of the evening . . .
But then he thought: where would I get the guests? Do I actually know any brilliant and witty people? He thought of his friends: none of the crowd by any stretch of the imagination
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could be described as brilliant company, and the crowd was breaking up now anyway. Then there was Ben, who would only talk about running – he had heard that Ben actually went to dinner parties in his running kit so that he could run there and run home again afterwards. There was Paul, who would only talk about babies, and who would only accept an invitation if it included the babies. So that ruled both of them out. Would Pat come? He would like it if she did, but now that she had that ridiculously-named boyfriend of hers, Wolf, she would probably not want to come without him, and Matthew could not face the prospect of entertaining that Wolf. What would one serve him?
Raw venison? Wolves liked venison.
He sighed, and looked at his watch again. Ten minutes had passed. If he bought another half pint of lager, then that would last him until the thirty minutes was up and it was time to go and order the pizza. Thirty minutes of loneliness in a place of society, he thought; thirty minutes to himself while everyone else in the bar was with somebody. A sudden, vaguely shameful thought struck him. Nobody else in this bar has four million pounds – nor even one million pounds – and yet I am alone. It was an absurd, self-pitying thought, a thought which implied that money brought social success, brought happiness, which it patently does not; and yet he thought it.
He stood up and went to the bar, suddenly wondering whether his distressed-oatmeal cashmere sweater was right. Nobody else in the bar was in distressed oatmeal; in fact nobody else was in cashmere. Yet should it matter? Teenagers worried about whether their clothes were the same as everybody else’s; when you were safely into your twenties, that was not so important.
You could wear what you like . . . Or could you? Could you get your colours entirely wrong and wear a colour that nobody else would wear? The colour of failure?
When Matthew reached the bar, the barman was waiting for him. Matthew saw the man’s glance move quickly to the distressed-oatmeal sweater and then slide back again, discreetly, professionally. Or had he imagined it? Barmen saw everything; it was all the same to them. He ordered another half pint of 82
lager and then, half turning, he saw a young woman standing beside him. They looked at one another almost inadvertently and one of them – and it was Matthew – had to say something, or at least smile.
“It’s quiet,” he said. “I don’t know where everybody is.”
“Wherever they are,” she replied, “it’s not here.”
