A Natural Curiosity (20 page)

The thought of Blinkhorn leads her to Alix and Brian Bowen, whom she has not yet invited, although she seems to remember that she mentioned her party to Alix at the do at the Holroyd Gallery. Perhaps she’d better ask them. Are the Bowens smart, or not? She does not know. Alix dresses very badly, but she is a good talker, and Brian has published novels and is kind to the elderly. One needs such people to pad a party. And after all, Tony and Sam are friends. Yes, down go the names of Alix and Brian. And what about Beaver, Howard Beaver, the most famous son of Northam? Is he past party-going? Well, why not ask him anyway? It does no harm to ask. She has never met Beaver, but that does not deter her. Down he goes.

Susie Enderby lies on her bed, her eyes closed, listening to
Cosi fan tutte
and wondering what to wear for Fanny Kettle’s party. She hopes that Clive will agree to go with her. She thinks she hopes that Clive will agree to go with her. Clive has been behaving oddly for this last few days, an oddity she connects with the disappearance of that Harper woman. But then, she, Susie Enderby, has been behaving oddly herself, in a way that is quite out of character, or quite out of the character she had thought she had settled into in her adult life.

She has been seduced by Fanny Kettle. No, not in
that
way, no, nothing of
that
sort, for she and Fanny, even in the worst childhood naughtiness, had always been resolutely, nay, excessively heterosexual, in their fantasies, in their experiments. But she had been seduced, by Fanny, back into these memories. Fanny seems not at all ashamed of them, and it is her lack of shame that has seduced Susie. Fanny seems to think that sexual promiscuity is both natural and normal. Susie does not know what to think, is lost, slightly, as she lies there on her bed. She moans, slightly, as Ferrando besieges Fiordiligi with an impetuous torrent of syllables, a surging outpouring of rapid rhyme. She moans, and touches her own body. She touches, wonderingly, her breasts, her thighs. She does not touch her own cunt. She dare not. She dare not even think its name.

‘
Io ardo, e l’ardor mio non è più effetto d’un amor virtuoso: è smania, affanno, rimorso, pentimento, leggerezza, perfidia e tradimento
!’ laments the half-guilty Fiordiligi, as she breaks into her penitent aria. ‘Remorse, regret, frivolity, perfidy, treachery!’ All foreknown, all foreseen, all familiar.

Susie breathes lightly, a shallow light breathing. It is midafternoon. The children will soon be home from school, collected by the Swiss au pair girl. They will be wanting tea, chat, games, talk about their homework. A restlessness runs though Susie’s well-preserved, under-used thirty-seven-year-old body. Her skin is smooth, taut, silk. She feels she might softly explode, as she lies there in her champagne silk underwear and her light oyster-grey wrap. She knows she is beautiful, desirable, desiring. She is wasting away. She will buy some new beads, some new pink coral beads, for her new grey-brown pink silk dress. Her hair is now tinted a soft pink-brown, a grey-brown-strawberry-pink. She will wear the new beads to Fanny’s party.

The telephone by her bed rings. Susie shuts her eyes and listens to its ringing. She does not answer. She holds her breath. It stops. Fiordiligi sings on. ‘
Per pietà, perdona, perdona, per pietà!
’

The children will be home in ten minutes. Heavily, with immense effort, Susie swings her mind round to worrying about her children, who seem to inhabit a different universe from the one occupied by Fanny Kettle. The thought of them disturbs, oppresses her. Her very existence seems to be a troubling betrayal of them, of their eager little faces, their gapped teeth, their freckles, their scabbed knees, their satchels full of projects on dinosaurs and wildlife and Roman Britain, their squabbles, their pleading for a pony of their own. They are far too little to have a pony, Clive says, rightly: they will have to make do with a couple of hamsters and a kitten. Susie once briefly had a pony. A little strawberry roan, called Lightfoot. She had been stabled at a farm out towards Gonersall.

‘
Barbara! Ingrata!
’ shouts the deceived Ferrando.

Last time she had been to Fanny Kettle’s for a drink, Fanny had engaged her in the most appalling conversation about AIDS. How had it happened, how had she, respectable housewife, mother of two, and part-time speech therapist, permitted it?

There had seemed to be no resisting, no turning back. ‘What
I
don’t like to think about,’ Fanny had said, balancing a tumbler full of gin and tonic on her plump upholstered chair arm, and wriggling her bracelets on her thin wrist, ‘is the idea that the virus sort of
hangs around
for years, I mean, I don’t mind being a little careful
now
, but what about all those episodes six years ago, seven years ago? Before we knew
anything
? One might have caught
anything
, in those days.’ Fanny giggles, changes tack slightly. ‘Do you remember those cholera graves, outside the churchyard wall, that we used to walk past on the way back from school? And how everybody said they were still full of cholera, and that if you went near them it might leak out, and how they didn’t dare move them to widen the street because cholera germs never never die? Do you remember?’

Susie nodded: yes, she remembered those schoolgirl superstitions. But Fanny was not content with the harmless, distant past. She returned to more recent alarms.

‘I mean, that Frenchman who picked me up in the Gatwick Hilton, now I think about it, he could have been
anyone
, he could have been
anywhere
. One can’t tell with the French, can one? Or at least maybe
you
can, but
I
can’t.’ Susie listened, wide-eyed. Fanny reminisces, relentlessly. ‘Though now I think about it,
he
was the one who was so obsessed with hygiene. Insisted on us both getting into the bath together and
scrubbing
ourselves before we got on with it.
I
thought he was just kinky about baths with strange women, but maybe he knew something I don’t know? He can’t have done, can he? It was’—she counts on her fingers—‘at
least
seven years ago.
Nobody
knew about AIDS then, did they?’

Susie is lost, shocked, has no idea and yet has every idea of what Fanny is talking about.

‘No,’ concludes Fanny, to her own satisfaction, ‘I’m fairly sure he was just kinky. He had a suitcase full of porno magazines. Fairly mild stuff, but all to do with water, now I think about it. Bathroom scenes, showers and swimming pools and that kind of thing.’ Fanny sighs, for the good old days. ‘I feel sorry for young people,’ she says. ‘They’re going to have a hard time, eroticizing the condom. Don’t you think?’

Susie had not known what to think, for her own sexual experience (as surely Fanny must divine?) had been confined to a few harmless pre-marital flirtations, a doomed romance with an inept young medical student with whom she had slept perhaps half a dozen times and who had left her for a radiologist, and marriage to Clive Enderby. Since marriage she had been faithful to Clive, and had never been much tempted to be otherwise: the nearest she had got to temptation had been a lunch-time meeting or two in the hospital canteen with Stewart Folger from neurology, who had seemed to like to get next to her in the queue with his tray and to make occasional plaintive and pointed references to his wife, who had run off with an ophthalmic surgeon. Not much risk of catching AIDS from Stewart Folger, Susie reflected. Fanny seems to suggest that everyone in Northam and Hansborough was at risk, whereas Susie was quite convinced that the kind of behaviour Fanny seemed to think normal was aberrant, deviant, almost pathological.

Or was it?

‘Hai vinto!’
cried the conquered Fiordiligi. ‘You have prevailed!’ she sobbed, as she flung herself into the arms of the triumphant but betrayed Ferrando.
Cosi fan tutte
. Cosi fan tutte, tutti.

Susie hears the door open, hears children’s voices downstairs. Guiltily, in a hurry, she banishes her dubious oyster-coloured consumer romance fantasies, strips off her wrap, struggles into her camel skirt and beige cashmere sweater (which don’t quite go with her new hair, but never mind, all the better for that), runs a comb through her new hair, puts an everyday expression on her face, and runs lightly down the stairs to greet William, Vicky, and the bad-tempered Danielle. ‘Hello, darlings,’ she cries, and kisses the little ones. Danielle glowers, crossly. Susie puts the kettle on for tea, chatters brightly as Vicky unpacks her felt-tip drawings of the day and displays a painted egg box, as William complains about a character called Ollie Cox, and shows her his sketch of an Iron Age Celtic chariot, as Danielle grudgingly gets out the Marmite and the honey. Susie feels flustered, at a loss. ‘Look, Mummy,’ says Vicky, unrolling a tattered scroll, ‘look, here’s a picture of you and Daddy!’ Two stick figures in bright green, with huge inane smiles, stand square and large on the page. They are holding hands, after a fashion. One has short hair sticking straight up, the other has orange curls and a short triangular miniskirt. They are strangely recognizable. ‘Lovely, darling,’ says Susie, faintly cheered, as she slices a Marmite sandwich into fingers, and reminds herself that it is only two months, two weeks and three days until Danielle’s departure.

‘To Paris?’ says the middle-aged travelling man. Shirley nods. She has declined a second Dubonnet, on the grounds that she is or will be driving, but has accepted an orange juice, and allowed him to join her at her table, where he sips his second drink.

‘I haven’t been to Paris for years,’ she confides, misleadingly: implying that she once visited France frequently, and for some casual reason has allowed this habit to lapse. Well, perhaps the implication is not all that misleading, for in the prosperous old days she and Cliff had taken several package weekend breaks in Paris, had stayed a few days there once or twice with the children on their way to summer holidays in Spain or the South of France. Shirley is not totally unacquainted with Paris. She recalls, fleetingly, visiting a nightclub with Cliff. Cliff had tried to get her to argue with the waiter and the bob-tailed semi-nude hostess about the price of drinks. ‘Go on, you speak French,’ he had said, when his own efforts at protest had been shrugged off.

‘Yes, but not
much
,’ Shirley had said, remembering a few phrases from Battersby Grammar O-Level, ‘and anyway, not that
kind
of French.’

‘Go on, Shirl,’ Cliff had insisted, and Shirley had been forced to try phrases like
‘Monsieur, sur le menu il dit vingt francs et vous avez dil cent francs
.’ The waiter, not to Shirley’s surprise, had continued to pretend to be bewildered, and after a lot more huffing and puffing Cliff had been forced to pay up. But he had felt guilty about this little display of unreasonable anger, and as the cancan dancers lifted their legs and showed their scarlet skirts he had taken Shirley’s hand and squeezed it in apology. Shirley had enjoyed the seedy splendour, the bright lights, the steep views over Paris, the street thronging with people in the warm night air, the hot friendly breath of the Metro, the displays of oysters and
langoustines
and lemons and sea urchins and prickly erotic monsters of the deep. Was that perhaps the night that Celia, the austere Celia, had been conceived?

‘I suppose Paris must have changed quite a lot in the past few years,’ Shirley says, mildly, to her new companion. ‘Do you know it well?’

‘Quite well,’ he nods, reflectively, modestly, a man of the world. ‘Quite well.’

‘And do you come this way often?’

He shrugs. ‘Usually I fly,’ he says. ‘But this time I had to bring the car. To pick up some stuff. From my ex’s apartment.’ A rueful little smile disguises a more sombre note. Shirley thinks, Aha, I guessed right. He too is in trouble. Obviously. Why else would we be talking to one another? She is in a dilemma. She does not know whether to continue the conversation or not. She smells danger, involvement, confidences. Is this what she wants, what she has come to seek? She cannot be sure. Yet.

‘Do you think they will ever really build the Channel Tunnel?’ she asks, politely, harmlessly. ‘Would you like to be able to drive to France?
Will
we be able to drive, when they finish it, or will it just be for trains?’

They discuss the Channel Tunnel. Cliff had been very keen on the Channel Tunnel. He thought it was go-ahead. Shirley shares with her new friend her unfavourable impressions of the motorway facilities, and of the as yet unserviced M25. She is talked into acknowledging that she comes from South Yorkshire.

Is he a detective, planted there to apprehend her and take her home against her will? No, surely not. He wants to talk about his ex. Ex-wife? Ex-girlfriend? Shall she let him? It would be safer, surely, than saying more about herself. Delicately, she probes.

Ah, but here is real pain, real, banal, everyday pain. A crossChannel love affair, solid for ten years, now in ruins, and worse than ruins, for her new friend is now discovering that some of those ten years have been far from solid, have been marked by hidden treachery. His woman, he hints, had been carrying on behind his back for most of those years. He blames himself for having been so gullible, for having accepted the way things were, for having been decent, loyal, trusting. These are not the words he uses about himself, but this is what he implies, what she receives. He has been the faithful party, the victim. And now he is on his way to pick up his books, his shoes, his clothes, his birthday presents to and from her, his specially designed armchair.

‘It’s for my back,’ he explains. ‘It’s made to measure. I have a bad back. I hope to God it fits in the car.’

He laughs, lightened by confession. She likes him.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘it’s the end of the affair. She’s moved out already. Won’t even see me. Not that I want to see her. Ever. She’s gone off to live in the Marais. I forget, did you say you knew Paris well?’

Shirley, smiling, shakes her head. Not well, she says, not well.