“Hey,” said Colin. “You’ve got tinsel tied all around your chair.”
“Tom said I had to glam it up. He was right, I think.” Then she saw Serena, dancing with the young women. “Jesus God, is that your Aunty’s friend?”
Wendy nodded.
“She will be falling out of that dress.”
“I think she’s pissed out of her head,” said Colin. Then he gasped, because Serena was holding one of the women in a close embrace and they were kissing as they danced.
When Serena joined them at the bar, she said, “I kept telling her I was never a dyke. Well, not a very good one. Sometimes these young women just won’t listen.” She turned to Wendy. “Don’t you just love being post-feminist?”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“Oh, it was such a relief to me. It was my very own Stonewall riot. I felt free to attack anyone the slightest bit dowdy.”
“Ah, Tom,” shouted Astrid. “This is Wendy’s aunty’s best friend, Serena.”
“Tom runs a gay sauna,” shouted Colin as Tom, grinning, pumped Serena’s hand.
“Delightful,” said Serena. “You must have a lovely time.”
“Wheel me on!” called Astrid. “My request has come on! I bribed the young lady for Tom Jones.”
Serena stood to watch with Wendy as the others gave Astrid a hand, and unclipped her brakes. “I rather like it here,” she smiled, her mouth going up at the side. “I thought it would be much more earnest than this. And I absolutely love these baby gay boys in their swishing kilts.”
They helped Serena to her bed at five o’clock. She howled at
them to take her shoes off first, or she’d break her ankles in her sleep. “Will you be quiet?” hissed Colin. “My dad’s sleeping…”
“Oh, he can’t hear anything,” mumbled Serena, ashamed.
“He can hear everything,” said Colin, and walked out.
“That Tom, the sauna man, is a lovely man,” said Serena.
“Hmm,” said Wendy, struggling with laces.
“Why aren’t there any saunas for women like that? Why don’t they think women wouldn’t want love like that? Why can’t women do their thing? In the dark, in dark cellars?”
“Would you want that?”
“Oh, yes,” said Serena. “I want to be in the dark.”
The next morning she was immaculate, sitting early at the table in a neat grey suit, sipping coffee from an orange bowl. She was talking to Aunty Anne and they were making plans.
“First stop will be Newton Aycliffe,” Anne was saying.
“That ghastly place. There’s nothing there. Not for you.”
They talked like very old friends, Wendy thought, not thinking they needed to look at each other.
“You must come to London. With me.”
“I need to go to Ralph.”
Serena scowled.
“Don’t you approve of this Ralph?” Wendy asked, and they stared at her. “None of us have met him.”
Serena composed her features and would say nothing more on the subject of Ralph. She inclined her head in a suggestion of a bow. “I must thank you for a lovely evening,” she told Wendy. “And for removing those ridiculous shoes of mine.”
Aunty Anne looked amused. “Wendy doesn’t realise that beauty means pain. I imagine she was very scornful of your shoes.”
“I don’t remember,” said Serena.
“Wendy doesn’t approve of dressing up and making an effort.”
“She looks charming.”
“As she gets older, she’ll see the effort it takes.”
“Hmm,” said Serena, gazing at Wendy, who was surprised to find she enjoyed this attention.
“Aunty Anne, you make me sound like a slob.”
“In many ways you are. Are you going out like that today?”
“Yes.”
“There you are, then.”
Serena said, “Your Aunt hasn’t kept with the times, Wendy. She doesn’t understand. I’m sure, Anne, that Wendy knows very well what clothes and disguises can do. She has a shrewd head on her shoulders.”
“Perhaps,” said Anne sourly.
That morning Aunty Anne set to work with dustpan and shovel, mop and scalding water. “These bloody stone floors,” she said. “These bare boards! There’s hardly anything to hoover. There’s nothing like hoovering.”
“Why are you cleaning everything?” Colin asked, squeezing between shifted furniture. He hadn’t seen his mother do this for years.
“I’ve got the urge to purge,” she said.
Captain Simon sat by his friend that morning, thinking it might be the last time he’d see him.
Where will I be without you, Pat?
I haven’t many friends these days
it isn’t like the old days
when we
did we
know each other back then?
Sometimes I think I remember
and I can see you and me and being in
fields and the moving dogs
and leaves stuck-in-grass
it all comes back
You never asked me questions
You thought I was boring, I know
I think I’m boring, too
a boring friend
who always wears the same yellow
coat and I don’t remember why
and with you goes whatever
clue I might have had.
Pat slept fitfully through that day and, in the late afternoon, the sky over the Royal Circus already black, Colin was sitting beside him, staring at lit windows when he died.
THIRTY
The idea of influence came up and it seemed that everyone was talking about it. Serena Bell spoke again about the two combative spheres in the world, the Appollonian and the Dionysian, and Wendy started to find her persuasive. On the streets of Edinburgh, when life returned to the city, ordinary, ordered life after their rather subdued Hogmanay, she saw men in pinstriped woollen suits bustling round the insurance buildings in St. David’s square and they looked browbeaten by Appollonian culture. They swished past the drunks and the down-and-outs, who to her now seemed like the battered survivors of Dionysian rounds.
Whenever Wendy was introduced to someone’s view of the world, she found it pervading her own senses and everything started to look that way. She took to Serena’s influence as easily as she had taken up Aunty Anne’s reducing the world to one divided between women who kept themselves nice and those who let themselves go. Still jogging around in her head was
