The Collected Stories

sitting-room, through the french windows to the garden, all of them with glasses in their hands. The Morrishes – he pink and bluff, she pretty in a faded way – were busily making certain that these glasses contained precisely what people wanted. In the garden their French au pair boy was handing round bowls of nuts and shiny little biscuits from Japan. Children – the Morrishes’ and others’ – had congregated in a distant corner, by a tool- shed.

Jessica and Malcolm both asked for white wine, since chilled bottles of it stood there, inviting on a warm morning. They didn’t say much to the Morrishes, who clearly wanted to get things going before indulging in chat. They stepped out into the garden, where a mass of flowers spectacularly bloomed and the lawns were closely shorn.

‘Hi, Jessica,’ Marcus Stire’s friend said, a short, stout young man in a blue blazer. He’d made her black-bottom pie, he reported. He shook his head, implying disappointment with his version of the dish.

‘Hullo, stranger,’ Anthea Chalmers said to Malcolm.

She always seemed to pick him out. Ages ago he’d rejected the idea that a balding solicitor with glasses might possibly have some sensual attraction for her, even though all she ever talked to him about were sensual matters. She liked to get him into a corner, as she had done now, and had a way of turning interlopers away with a snakelike shift of her shoulders. She’d placed him with his back to the wall of the house, along which a creamy honeysuckle had been trained. A trellis to his right continued to support it; to his left, two old water-butts were swathed with purple clematis.

‘A pig,’ she said, referring to the man she’d once been married to. ‘And I told him, Malcolm. I’d sooner share a bed with a farmyard pig was precisely what I said. Needless to say, he became violent.’

Jessica, having discussed the preparation of black-bottom pie with Marcus Stire’s friend, smiled at the stout young man and passed on. The au pair boy offered her a Japanese biscuit and then a man she didn’t know remarked upon the weather. Could anything be nicer, he asked her, than a drink or two on a Sunday morning in a sunny London garden? He was a man in brown suede, expensively cut to disguise a certain paunchiness. He had damp eyes and a damp-looking moustache. He had well-packed jowls, and a sun-browned head that matched the shade of his clothes. A businessman, Jessica speculated, excessively rich, a tough performer in his business world. He began to talk about a house he owned near Estepona.

*

On the surface of the tea which Jessica had earlier brought her son a skin had formed, in which a small fly now struggled. Nothing else was happening in the room. The sound of breathing could hardly be heard, the dream about birds with blue plumage had abruptly ceased. Then – in that same abrupt manner, a repetition of the suddenness that in different ways affected this boy’s life – his eyes snapped open.

Through the gloom, and seeming larger than reality, the Spitfires and the Heinkels greeted his consciousness. He was in a room with aeroplanes, he told himself, and while he lay there nothing more impinged on his mind. Eventually he rose and began to dress, his youthful beard scanty and soft, quite like a bearded lady’s. Tears ran into it while slowly he pulled his clothes over his white flesh.

His T-shirt was pale blue, the paler message it bore almost washed away. Wham! it had said, the word noisily proclaimed against lightning flashes and the hooded figures of Batman and Robin. A joke all of it had been: those years had been full of jokes, with no one wanting to grow up, with that longing to be children for ever. Tears dripped from his beard to the T-shirt now; some fell on to his jeans. He turned the electric light on and then noticed the cup of tea by his bed. He drank it, swallowing the skin and the fly that had died in it. His tears did not distress him.

‘Well, that was it, Malcolm,’ Anthea Chalmers said. ‘I mean, no one enjoys a bedroom more than I do, but for God’s sake!’

Her soup-plate eyes rapidly blinked, her lips were held for a moment in a little knot. The man she’d married, she yet again revealed, had not been able to give her what she’d wanted and needed. Instead, intoxicated, he would return to their house at night and roar about from room to room. Often he armed himself with a bamboo cane. ‘Which he bought,’ she reminded Malcolm, ‘quite openly in a garden shop.’

In the honeysuckle, suburban bees paused between moments of buzzing. A white butterfly fluttered beside Malcolm’s face. ‘You must be awfully glad to be rid of him,’ he politely said.

‘One’s alone, Malcolm. It isn’t easy, being alone.’

She went into details about how difficult it was, and how various frustrations could be eased. She lowered her voice, she said she spoke in confidence. Sexual fantasy flooded from her, tired arid seeming soiled in the bright sunshine, with the scent of the honeysuckle so close to both of them. Malcolm listened, not moving away, not trying to think of other things. It was nearly two years since Anthea Chalmers had discovered that he would always listen at a party.

In the garden the voices had become louder as more alcohol was consumed. Laughter was shriller, cigarette smoke hung about. By the tool-shed in the far distance the children, organized by a girl who was a little older than the others, played a variation of Grandmother’s Footsteps.

Tom Highband, who wrote under another name a column for the Daily Telegraph, told a joke that caused a burst of laughter. Sandy Mr Fulmer, whom nobody knew very well, listened to the Unwins exchanging gossip with Susanna Maidstone about the school their children all attended. ‘Just a little slower,’ Marcus Stire’s friend pleaded, writing down a recipe for prune jelly on the back of a cheque-book. Taylor-Deeth was getting drunk.

‘It has its own little beach of course,’ the man with the damp-looking moustache informed Jessica. You went down a flight of steps and there you were. They adored the Spaniards, he added, Joan especially did.

And then Joan, who was his wife, was there beside them, in shades of pink. She was bulky, like her husband, with a smile so widely beaming that it seemed to run off her face into her greying hair. She had always had a thing about the Spanish, she agreed, the quality of Spanish life, their little churches. ‘We have a maid of course,’ her husband said, ‘who keeps an eye on things. Old Violetta.’

Glasses were again refilled, the Morrishes together attending to that, as was their way at their parties. She did so quietly, he with more dash. People often remarked that they were like good servants, the way they complemented one another in this way. As well, they were said to be happily married.

Glancing between the couple who were talking to her, Jessica could see that Malcolm was still trapped. The Livingstons tried to cut in on the tete-a-tete but Anthea Chalmers’s shoulder sharply edged them away. Togethei: again after their separation, the Livingstons looked miserable.

‘Violetta mothers us,’ the man with the damp moustache said. ‘We could never manage without old Violetta.’

‘Another thing is Spanish dignity,’ his wife continued, and the man added that old Violetta certainly had her share of that.