A Natural Curiosity (11 page)

‘Well,’ says Liz, you’re looking very pleased with yourself. So I guess something good has happened to you. Have you got a new job? No? Have you been promoted? No? Ah, I know what it must be—are you in love?’

Ivan nods, encouragingly.

‘Yes? But there’s more to it than that? Are you getting
married?’

‘Yes,’ says Ivan. He is beaming satisfaction at her, and of course, now she sees that this must be why he has been so amiable, so benevolent, so well disposed, he has been hugging this secret all the way through lunch, waiting to astonish her with it. And she is astonished.

‘Good Lord, Ivan, how amazing! I thought you never would, I thought you were the only real bachelor left in London! Congratulations! Am I allowed to ask the name of the other party, or do I have to wait for the official announcement?’

‘If you read the serious information in gossip columns, as everybody else does, you’d know it already. So I might as well tell you. I’m going to marry Alicia Barnard.’

‘Good heavens. Are you really? Good Lord!’

Liz is silenced by this coup, silenced and delighted. No wonder Ivan is looking so smug. Alicia Barnard is not only a beauty, she is also a distinguished classical guitarist of impeccable provenance and reputation—how can it be that Ivan has persuaded her to
marry
him?

‘Congratulations,’ repeats Liz, rallying. ‘That
is
romantic. What a happy story! What wonderful news!’

‘The story,’ says Ivan, twiddling with the stem of his wineglass, and quite unable to stop smiling, ‘is called Beauty and the Beast.’

‘Oh Ivan, I hope you’ll both be
very very
happy. Tell me about her. Tell me what she’s like. Tell me how it happened.’

And Ivan tells, and Liz listens, making up for lost time and shameful indifference and incuriosity, learning what all London knows already, that Ivan and the red-haired Alicia have been courting for eighteen months, that they have been spotted at concerts and cited at functions and photographed at receptions and caught dining in small smart restaurants, that they have been on holiday together in Tuscany and shopping together in Harrods and have bought a small house together in Berkshire. Ivan relates all this with a helpless innocence, with a naive delight that brings tears to the eyes of Liz. Love has transformed him. The arbitrary, accidental goddess has smiled on Ivan, and he has become another person, a nicer person. In his fifties, he has become a new man. They call for a cognac with their coffee, to celebrate.

‘I was a stage-door Johnny, I admit it,’ says Ivan, blotched and glowing with pride. ‘I just hung around. I waited. I drove her around. I made myself useful. And she let me. She liked it. She got to like it. And then one thing led to another. And here I am, an almost married man. Do you think I’ll be able to manage it? I’ve never really lived with anyone before. Or not for long. And neither has she. Amazing, isn’t it? She’s very shy, you know. She’s a very
nice person
.’

‘I’m sure she is,’ says Liz, faintly. It is almost too much for her, this late flood of hope and innocence. She wishes Ivan and his Alicia well, yes, of course she does, but how can she, at her age, have any faith in their vision of married bliss in a small house in Berkshire? Unless they are freaks, who have escaped the human condition altogether, one can be certain that grief, boredom, infidelity or disillusion await Mr and Mrs Ivan Warner, will creep up upon them more familiarly, more insidiously, than love itself did . . . Liz shakes her head, drains her glass, looks bright again. Maybe Ivan has been
so horrible
in the first fifty years of his life that he has already paid his debts to human nature, and can now be free, like the frog prince, to sit by his fireside and listen to music and gaze across his lawn?

‘Goodbye, Ivan,’ says Liz, on the dirty Soho street, where old newspapers, cardboard boxes, cauliflower stalks, empty bottles and plastic bags of prawn shells heap and rustle and sigh and stink in the March breeze. ‘Goodbye, Ivan, good luck!’

The last, perhaps, of her little lunches with Ivan, she thinks, as a taxi bears her back to St John’s Wood and work. Or the last until he and Alicia quarrel, and he needs a shoulder . . . but enough, enough of these gloomy thoughts, she tells herself, as she tries to compose her mind to receive her next patient, who is suffering from severe depression which he thinks was caused by the sudden death of his wife. As perhaps it was, perhaps it was: but whatever caused it, it is with him now, sitting on him heavily, as he puts it, like a heavy beast. Can Liz charm it, can she turn it into a little frog, can she make it hop lightly away? He hopes so, she hopes so. They work together to seduce the heavy beast. The wife stays dead, she will not come back to life and sew and dance and sing. She is ash in a north London garden, where a few crocuses outlive her and her planting of them.

Janice Enderby is preparing food for another dinner party. She has rashly invited Alison Peacock, the director of Northam’s Theatre-in-the-Round, and Tony Troughton, local radio reporter and his wife, and a couple of staff from the school where her husband Edward teaches. She asked them without properly consulting Edward, and he was not wholly pleased to be told. He knows she will get in a state about it, and take it out on him later. He knows that something will go wrong. It always does. It goes wrong because she tries too hard. In vain does he urge her not to make such efforts, in vain does he try to persuade her that everyone is quite happy just with a plateful of spaghetti or shepherd’s pie. Janice has pretensions, and they make her and everybody else very uncomfortable.

At the moment she is making chicken liver pâté, with butter, sherry, juniper berries and minced bay leaf. Round it goes, in the liquidizer, reducing itself to a warm smooth pale-brown paste. She takes the lid off the machine, sniffs the contents. The smell, warm, is nauseating, although she knows it will taste all right cold. The texture too is nauseating. She splatters it out into a bowl, flattens it. It steams, odiously. It looks like a mound of shit. Janice shudders with distaste.

She runs the hot water over the complicated interior structure of the blender, directing the rubber swizzle tap into its innards. The tap pulses, hotly, in her fingers. It pulses and throbs like a live thing.

Janice feels quite faint with disgust. She decides to make herself a cup of instant coffee, opens a new jar, has to break the paper ring that seals the contents. She tears it, clumsily, with her finger, she violates it. The smell of coffee granules rises at her, rank like a tomcat.

She slices a red cabbage. Its red and white veins open, its crisp pretty involuted guts stare back at her. Her fingers are stained red, and so is the butcher’s block. She has killed the cabbage.

Prunes, then, she stones, to add to her braised cabbage and her dish of quail. The prunes are like small turds, small sticky turds. She had been given prunes, as a child, when suffering from constipation. Prunes and syrup of figs. But how had her mother
known
she was suffering from constipation? She had never complained of it. Her mother did not watch her, day and night. Nevertheless, once a week or so, ‘Oh, Janice
is
out of sorts, she
is
a grumpy little girl today. Prunes and syrup of figs for Janice tonight!’ It had seemed a violation then, and seems one now, as Janice, unforgivingly, looks back.

The body is a trap, a trick, a betrayer. One should keep one’s own body secret, private, concealed. Not let them poke about in one’s entrails. Not let them have power.

Edward had seemed a bodiless person, a disembodied person. But it had not been so.

Janice knows she is neurotic, hysteric, on the verge of some classifiable disorder. She wonders what it is. She has a lump in her breast, but has no intention of telling anyone about it. Sometimes she finds herself almost hoping that it may be fatal. If she were to die, she wouldn’t have to go on worrying, would she, about what else it is that is wrong?

She slices an onion, and weeps. She layers the earthenware pot with cabbage, prunes, apples, cranberry jelly, onion, she sticks in cloves and pours over it raspberry vinegar, which has reached the north of England, as fish sauce reached the outposts of the Roman Empire. She puts it in a slow oven, and gets the quails from the freezer.

Little birds, frozen in a row. Some people are squeamish about little birds. Janice, who is squeamish about a cabbage, does not feel too strongly about little birds. They do not much resemble any part of the human body.

Rabbits are another matter. The quail farm, where Janice buys the quails, sells frozen rabbits. But they remind her of dead, skinned, red, sad babies. No, she could not cook a rabbit.

One could be a vegetarian, of course. Like Alix Bowen’s murderer. Janice had thought of asking the Bowens to dinner, but had hesitated—she does not really know them, she has met them only once, at the Northern Schools Drama Festival, she had no excuse for inviting them. But she had had a conversation with Alix, as they sat next to one another on hard institutional seats, waiting for the curtain to rise on High Cross Comprehensive’s winning production of Doctor Faustus. A proper conversation. Alix had asked Janice what she did, and Janice had said that she had once been an actress (which was more or less true) and that now she worked part-time at the Regional Arts Office (which was not
very
true), and that her husband Edward (that ‘skinny chap over there waving his arms about’) was Head of English and Drama at High Cross, and the director of this ambitious production that they were about to behold. Alix in turn had divulged that she had herself been an English teacher and had taught female offenders in a psychiatric prison in London, and that she recognized Edward’s name because she had heard he was trying to set up a Drama Group at Porston Prison, where Alix visited. ‘Ah,’ said Janice, ‘you’re the person who goes to see that murderer.’ Alix admitted that she was, and answered a few stock questions about P. Whitmore. She then pointed out Brian, who was also up front, talking to a group of civic dignitaries and the Mayor, and claimed him as her husband and the Head of Educational Projects of Northam Council. ‘Your husband ought to meet my husband,’ said Alix. ‘I’m sure he’d be interested in the prison drama group.’

But it hadn’t got any further than that, because the curtain had gone up, and pleasantries had to be abandoned. Janice, who had seen the production before, was of course worried about all the things that might go wrong—Edward had been complaining that the stage was too shallow for the set, and that the lighting man was a fool and wouldn’t let Edward’s own lighting trainee protégé explain the schedule to him properly—and she was also apprehensive that Alix would be bored out of her mind. But Alix had settled into a dutiful attention, which seemed to intensify into real interest. And it
was
a good production, even though it was Edward’s: the modern-dress balletic chorus moved beautifully, the Helen of Troy apparition got a round of applause, and the Faustus and the Mephistopheles were excellent. Edward had chosen it for them, and they had done him proud. Two sixth formers, friends, rivals, passionate amateur actors, desperate to get into RADA or LAMDA or the Central, both immensely talented, in Edward’s view—sophisticated, delicate, perfect timing. The boy who played Faustus was an Indian, a doctor’s son, tall, lank, elegant, melancholy with a strange deep husky catch to his voice: the Mephistopheles was big, broad, physically assertive, red haired, potato featured, compelling. ‘I’ve cast them
against
the grain,’ Edward had explained to Janice, a hundred times, until she had said all right, I’ve got that, let’s talk about something else, shall we?—but it had worked, and they worked together, with a sinister intimacy, a suggestion of erotic collusion. Brilliant, thought, as Marlowe’s mighty lines rolled on.

‘Brilliant!’ said Alix, turning to Janice at the end, her hands hot with clapping, her cheeks pink with excitement. ‘Quite, quite brilliant! What talented boys—and what a wonderful production. Your husband must be very proud!’

The audience had clapped on, and the young men had smiled and bowed. Beautiful, they both were, in their different styles. Eighteen years old. The world before them. Utterly confident, utterly assured. They bowed, on a civic stage in Sheffield, as though they were already stars. The theatre tempted them, they would sell their souls to it. The hot bright lights shone on them.

And so they had shone, once, on Edward Enderby. He too had been stagestruck, he too had dreamed of applause, of the footlights, of green rooms and dressing-rooms and good luck telegrams and dazzling notices in the press. He had been ruined by delusions of glory. He had refused to go into the family firm, as his younger brother Clive was to do: he had insisted on going to drama school, had thrown himself into wild hopes, had worked and worked—and to what avail? He had had a few jobs, here and there, odd jobs. And was now a teacher of drama. Still stagestruck, still besotted, still convinced that he could dazzle the nation, given the chance.

Yes, that was the odd thing about Edward, reflected Janice, as she cracked eggs for the lemon mousse. He really hadn’t accepted that he wasn’t a star. Inside himself, he really thought he was. He thought he was better than Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole and Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi and Tom Conti and all those other talentless actors who had so mysteriously made it to the top. Edward really thought he could do it better given a chance.

And once, he had been good. Oh yes. She had seen him shine. At drama college, where she first met him, when he could have been little older than those two boys, Shokat and Stuart. She had seen him give his Prospero and it had been—yes, magical. Magical. Against all the odds. A twenty-year-old playing an old man. A twenty-year-old with the remnants of a Yorkshire accent playing the Duke of Milan. Not a part much coveted by the young, a dull part, a prosy, unshowy, sexless part. But Edward had inhabited it, had made it his own. He had been dark, frightening, powerful: Miranda and Ferdinand, Ariel and Caliban, Alonso and Sebastian had been shadows, puppets. His puppets. He had shone, he had stolen the play’s thunder. The college had admired, theatrical agents had admired and solicited, his contemporaries had applauded wildly—and Edward had been ruined.