Jake's Thing

eight yards of gravel path and let himself in.

       A great deal had managed to get itself done to the inside of no. 47 because so much of it was in items small in themselves and capable of being introduced a bit at a time. He was also at the mercy of the view that whatever rights a man might have over the exterior of his dwelling lapse by definition once its threshold is crossed. The place was full of things. It had to be admitted that some of these weren't as small as all that, like the heavy- duty cheval glass near the front door and the giant's coffin-sized Dutch (or some such) clock in the alcove by the sitting room fireplace, but a lot were. No flat surface except the ceiling and parts of the floor was free of ashtrays bearing quotations from poem and song, serious souvenir mugs and antique paperweights, and screens supplemented the walls for the hanging of small pictures enclosed in large mounts and photographs of dead strangers. It was hard to find a square foot that hadn't been made nice.

       The person who had brought all this about was Jake's fat wife Brenda, who stood up, brushing cake- crumbs off her knee-length fisherman's-knit cardigan, to be kissed on the cheek by him. He went over and greeted similarly her old friend Alcestis

       Mabbott, who was fat too, not as fat as Brenda but short with it. And then Alcestis' hair stood away from her head in a stiff dun froth while Brenda's, though no more vivid, was smooth and abundant, so that almost anybody would have decided that Brenda had the better of things between the two of them.

       'Hallo, Allie dear,' said Jake. 'What a nice surprise.'

       'I told you she was coming,' said Brenda.

       'Did you, darling? I must have forgotten.'

       One way or the other the presence of Alcestis was certainly a surprise to Jake. If it hadn't been he wouldn't have come carting his recent purchases into the sitting room like a boy back from the fair. It was on them, as he could have predicted without the least trouble, that Alcestis round-eyed gaze instantly fell.

       'Been shopping, have we?' she asked gruffly. It wasn't a tone or vocal quality adopted for the occasion. On their first meeting, round about ten years earlier at a dinner-party in some cultural crapper south of the river, Jake had come really close to congratulating her on a marvellous imitation, unasked for though it was, of the way retired colonels were supposed to talk. All that had deterred him was puzzlement about why she thought it went well with the detailed account she was giving him of how she had made the unpleasant dress she had on. Then, soon after she had switched the focus of attention to the new wallpaper she was going to have in her dining room and kept her voice the same, he had got it. Whenever he considered he had done something particularly foolish, which wasn't often, he would cheer himself up by remembering that at least he'd never made a pass at Alcestis ('Smudger' to him in his thoughts).

       He answered her question, or anyhow spoke while looking at her. 'Just one or two odd things.'

       'One of them looks to me like a very odd thing indeed.' She meant the bottle which, though wrapped in brown paper, was obviously either a bottle or an object shaped just like a bottle.

       Forewarned of he knew not quite what, Jake put it down on a tiled coffee-table slightly to his rear and said to his wife, 'Got you a little something.'

       'Ooh....' Brenda moved her spectacles from the top of her head to the region of her nose and uncovered the liqueur chocolates. 'Oh, darling, you really shouldn't.'

       'Nonsense, everybody deserves a bit of a—'

       'I mean you shouldn't, darling,' said Brenda. Her eyes, unlike her friend's, were long from corner to corner and also bright, both in the intensity of their greenish colour and in the shining of their surfaces even through glass. Jake had never forgotten the first time they had been turned full on him: not where or when, just how they had looked. 'You know, this is exactly what I'm not supposed to have because they're sugar and booze and I can't resist them. It's very sweet of you but honestly.'

       'You haven't got to dispose of the whole—'

       'I'm sure good old Janelle give you a hand if you're well and truly stuck. Always ready to help out, our Jake, eh, what?' Alcestis didn't actually utter the last two words but they were there in the way she rocked her long head to and fro and pushed her lips up afterwards.

       'I should jolly well hope so, I can tell you,' said Jake, and saw Brenda give him a sharp glance over the top of her glasses. He added hastily, 'I mean that's right, I can always—'

       'What absolutely fills me with the most burning curiosity is the question of what's inside the other parcel, the chappie over there.'

       'Well, it's a .... a 'bottle' actually of all things, Allie. With drink corked up inside it.'

       'Absolutely agog.'

       The two women waited. Jake reached out and snatched up the bottle and tore the paper off it as fast as he could. In wine-waiter style he displayed the label to Alcestis, who nodded several times and gave a grunt or so of approval. There was another pause.

       'I wonder....' said Alcestis. 'Of course it is a bit on the early side.'

       'Would you like a glass?' asked Brenda.

       'Well, I must say, I don't normally, I—'

       'Come on, do you good, why not, fill your boots, great stuff, that's the spirit.' It wasn't (Jake saw) that Alcestis had guessed he had been going to give himself a treat which she had maliciously decided to impair, nor that she had simply fancied a glass of wine: she had sensed, without realising that she had sensed, that he hoped she wouldn't ask him for one and so naturally had asked him for one, or better still had got herself asked to have one. 'Shan't be a jiffy.'

       Along in the kitchen he got going fast. Off with the vile plastic foil they put round the necks of bottles these days and out with the cork; same treatment for a bottle of Tunisian Full-Bodied Red Table Wine (Dry). Now a jug, or rather pair of jugs.

       'I remember as if it were yesterday,' he said as he worked. 'Jerry had given our lads a fearful pasting round St Quentin and Compiegne and most of us thought that when the big push came in the spring we'd be done for. Not a word of a lie. Literally. I said done for and I meant done for.' He raised his voice. 'Where's the bloody corkscrew? Oh, here it is—all right—got it.'