Starter For Ten (14 page)

The theme from the Cornetto adverts plays on a loop in the background, and after some silent deliberation, we're ready. I look around for Luigi, but can tell he's approaching behind me by the sucking noise his footsteps make on the linoleum. Alice goes for the stuffed mushrooms and a margarita pizza with a side salad, while I opt for the whitebait and the barbecued half-chicken with chips and complementary relish tray. 'Hope it's not the back half!' I say, and Alice smiles, ever so subtly, and insists I choose the wine. There's stuff by the carafe, but even I know that wine shouldn't be that cheap, so I decide to go for something bottled and sparkling. The champagne's way too expensive so I settle on the Lambrusco. Didn't Rebecca say something about her liking it? I don't know much about wine, but I know white goes with chicken and fish, so I order the white Lambrusco Bianco.

After the waiter's gone I say, 'Oh God, Faux-Pas City!'

'Why?'

'Well, I asked for white Lambrusco Bianco and of course "bianco" actually means white! Tautology or what!' As amusing anecdotes go, I realise that this wouldn't really hold its own on the Parkinson show, but it serves to break the ice, and she smiles and we start to talk. Or rather she does, and I nod and listen, pick sticks of red wax off the candle, melt the ends, stick them back on at odd angles, and watch her. She's talking, as she often does, about school days at Linden Lodge, one of those massively expensive socialist private schools out in the country, and I have to say it sounds like a pretty cushy number to me, and not like boarding-school at all, more like a sort of seven-year slumber-party. As far as I can tell from the way Alice describes it, a typical academic day at Linden Lodge goes like this:

8.3O/9.30 Smoke joint. Bake bread.

9.30/10 so Have sex with son/daughter of Famous Person.

10.30/11.30 Build barn. 11.30/12.so Read T.S. Eliot aloud, listen to Crosby,

Stills and Nash, play cello. 12.3O/1.3O Experiment with drugs, have sex. 1.3O/3.3O Double skinny-dipping. Swim with dolphins.

3.30/4.30 Dry-stone-walling. Sex (optional). 4.30/5.3O Acoustic guitar lesson. 5.3O/6.3O Have sex, then sketch sleeping naked partner in charcoal. 6.30/O4.OO Compulsory Bob Dylan. 04.00 Lights out, but only if you want to.

Obviously, from a political point of view I don't approve of a school like this, even if it sounds frankly fantastic. What with all the dope-smoking and sex and endless singing of Simon and Garfunkel songs, you'd think they'd never actually get any studying done, but they must be doing something right, because Alice is here after all, and though I haven't asked about her A-level grades yet, not on a first date, she is doing a degree, even if it's only in Drama. Maybe if you listen to enough Radio 4 from an early age, you just get educated subliminally.

My whitebait arrive, about thirty of the little silver things washed up on a leaf of iceberg lettuce, looking up at me and saying 'we died for you, you bastard, at least do something amusing!' So I put one in my mouth with the tail sticking out and pretend to be a cat. This goes down only moderately well. She returns to her garlic mushrooms.

'How are they?'

'Nice! Very garlicky. No snogging for me tonight!'

And there it is, the subtle warning, like a klaxon in the ear, in case I was getting any fancy ideas. I'm not surprised really, it's pretty much what I expected, and I take comfort from the fact that it's an ambiguous warning, albeit only very, very slightly ambiguous - it's not you, Brian, it's the mushrooms - the implication being that if she'd ordered a different appetiser, the deep-fried Camembert for instance, then we'd have already made love by now.

'So did you have many boyfriends there?' I ask casually, nibbling on a fish.

'Oh, just one or two,' and she proceeds to tell me all about them.

From the point of view of sexual politics, I think it's really important not to have double standards about men and women's sexual history. Of course, there's absolutely no reason why Alice Harbinson shouldn't have had an active romantic and sexual past, but still, I think it's fair to say that 'just one or two' is a little misleading. By the time the main courses arrive, the names have started to blur, but there's definitely someone called Rufus, who's dad's a famous film director, and who had to move to LA because their love for each other was just too dark and intense, whatever that means. And Alexis, the Greek fisherman who she met on holiday, and who kept turning up at their London house asking for her hand in marriage, until they had to phone the police and get him deported. And Joseph, a really beautiful jazz musician who she had to finish with because he kept trying to get her to take heroin with him. And Tony, a potter friend of her father's who made stunning ceramics in this beautiful crofter's cottage in the Highlands of Scotland, and was great in bed for a sixty-two-year-old, but then wouldn't stop phoning in the middle of the night and eventually tried to commit suicide in his own kiln, but is okay now.

And Saul, a really gorgeous and wealthy American model who was amazing-looking with a (whisper it) 'really massive penis', but you can't have a relationship based on sex, even if it's mind-blowing sex. And then, saddest of all, there was Mr Shillabeer, her English teacher, who turned her on to T.S.Eliot and apparently once made a girl orgasm just by reading The Four Quartets aloud, and who fell in love with Alice while they were doing The Crucible, but became a bit obsessive. 'In the end he had a nervous breakdown and had to leave. He's gone back to live with his parents now. In Wolverhampton. It's quite sad, really, because he was a cool English teacher.'

By the time she's finished, I've stripped half-a-chicken in barbecue sauce down to its carcass, and the remains lie on my plate looking like, well, one of Alice's ex-lovers. Nearly all of her relationships have ended in madness, obsession and devastation, and suddenly my wheely-bin adventure with Karen Armstrong round the back of Littlewoods seems to have lost some of its tragic grandeur.

'It's strange isn't it - how many of them end badly?' I say.

'I know! Weird isn't it? Tony, Dad's ceramic friend, the guy in the kiln, once told me that when it came to love I was like The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!'

'But do you ever end up getting, you know ...hurt?'

'Of course I do, Brian. That's why I'm not going to have any relationships at all at university. I'm going to concentrate on my work,' and then she adds, unaccountably, in an American accent, T'm going to get me to a nunnery!'

And there it is again, the klaxon. Casually, she goes back to peeling the melted Cheddar off the top of her margarita, and wrapping it round her index finger. 'Anyway, sorry - me, me,

me. What do your mum and dad do, again? I've forgotten . . .' she says, sucking on her ringer.

'Mum works in Woolworths, and Dad's dead.'

She puts her napkin to her mouth, swallows.

'You didn't tell me that . . .'

'Didn't I?'

'No, I'm sure you didn't.' She reaches across, puts her hand on my arm. 'Brian, I am so sorry.'

'Oh, it's alright, it was six, no, seven years ago now, when I was twelve.'

'What happened?'

'Heart attack.'

'Oh God, how old was he?'

'Forty-one.'

'That must have been awful.'

'Oh, well, you know.'

And she's leaning forward now, eyes wide and she's holding my hand and squeezing it, and with the other hand she takes the wax encrusted bottle, and puts it to one side so that she can see me properly.

'Do you mind talking about it?'

'No, not at all,' I say, and I start talking.

QUESTION: Lee J. Cobb, Frederick March and Dustm Hoffman have all played the unfortunate Willy Loman in which Arthur Miller play of 1949?

ANSWER: Death of a Salesman.

'Dad was a double-glazing salesman, which is a funny job really, because it's one of those jobs that people think it's okay to laugh at, like traffic warden or tax inspector or sewage worker. I suppose it's because, at the end of the day, no one loves double-glazing. Dad certainly didn't, not after ten years of it, anyway. He was in the army before that, where he'd met Mum and had me. He'd done his National Service, one of the last people to do it, and sort of liked it, and hadn't known what else to do, so he stayed on. I do remember worrying, whenever there was a war somewhere on the news, tension with Russia, or when Northern Ireland was flaring up or something, worrying that he'd be called up, stuck into uniform, given a gun. But I don't think he was that kind of soldier really, I think he was more on the clerical side. Anyway, when they had me Mum put her foot down and said he had to leave the army because she was fed up with moving round all the time, and she hated West Germany, where I was born, so he came back to Southend, and he got the double-glazing thing and that was it really.'

'Did he enjoy it?'

'God, no. I mean, he must have at first, I suppose, but I think he really grew to despise it. It's long hours, you see, because you have to catch people when they're in, which means early mornings, evenings and nighttime, so it was usually dark when he got home, even in summer. And I think there was a bit of door-to-door involved; "Excuse me madam, but are you aware of the huge difference double-glazing could make to your heating bill," that kind of thing. And I know it was paid mainly on commission, which meant that there was this constant worry about money. Whatever job I end up doing, I never, ever want to be paid on commission. I know it's meant to be an incentive, but it's just an incentive to fuck up your life, it's working with a gun to your head. It's really evil, I think. Anyway. Sorry. Boring.

'Anyway, he hated it. He never told me he did of course, because why would you, to a little kid, but he must have because he was angry whenever he got home from work; not shouting or punching or anything, but just this silent, clenched, white-knuckled, red-faced rage at the tiniest thing, like toys left out or wasted food. You want your memories of your parents to be about picnics or being carried round on their shoulders, or pooh sticks, or something, but no one's childhood is perfect and all I mainly remember is him arguing in the kitchen with Mum about money or work or whatever, his face all red, clenching and unclenching his fists.'

'That's terrible.'

'Is it? Well, I'm probably exaggerating a little bit. Mostly I remember watching telly with him, if I was allowed to stay up until he got home. Sitting on the floor between his legs. Quiz shows. He loved quiz shows, and nature documentaries, David Attenborough, educational stuff, he was always going on about how important an education was, I suppose because he thought that was the key to a good life, to not being miserable, to a job you didn't despise.'

'So, how did he, you know ...?'

'Well, I'm not sure exactly. I don't like to ask Mum about it, because it sets her off, but apparently he was out at work, in some strangers' house, trying to convince them of the benefits of double-glazing or whatever, and he just...fell over. Right there, in their living room. I'd got back from school and was watching telly while Mum was cooking tea, and there was a knock at the front door, and some talking in the hall, I went out to see what had happened, and there were two policewomen and Mum was curled up in a ball on the carpet. To begin with I thought maybe Dad had been arrested or something, but this policewoman said he'd been taken poorly, and then they rushed Mum off to the hospital while I stayed with the next-door neighbours, and he died shortly after she got there. Oh, look. No more wine. D'you want some more? Another bottle? I stayed over at the neighbours, and they told me the next morning. Another bottle of Lambrusco please, no, we've not decided about desserts yet, can we have five minutes?

'Anyway. Looking back, I'm not surprised, even though he was only forty-one, because he was just like this ...knot, all the time. And he did drink, I mean a lot, pub at lunchtime and after work, you could always smell the beer on him. And he smoked about sixty a day. I used to buy him fags as a Christmas present for fuck's sake. I don't think I've got a single memory of him where he isn't puffing away on a fag. There's even a photo of him and Mum with me in the maternity ward, and he's got a fag lit up. In a hospital, with the ashtray and a bottle of beer balanced on top of my cot. The silly sod.'

'And how did you react?'

'To him dying? Um. Not sure. Weirdly, I think. I mean I cried and everything, but they wanted to keep me off school, which worried me because I didn't like missing lessons, so that should give you some idea of the kind of swotty, cold little freak I was. I was more upset by Mum to be honest, because Mum really loved Dad, and she was only, what, thirty-three at the time, and he was the only man she'd ever slept with, before or since, as far as I know, and she did take it really, really badly. Oh, she was okay as long as there were people around, and of course for the first two weeks the house was absolutely crammed - assorted vicars, and mates of Dad's, and neighbours, and my gran, and aunts and uncles - so there wasn't time for Mum to get too upset really, because she was always busy making sandwiches and pots of tea, and making up camp-beds for these strange cousins from Ireland, who we'd never seen before or since. But then after a couple of weeks they all started to drift off and it was just me and Mum. And that was the worst time, when things had calmed down and people left us alone. Quite a weird combination, a teenage boy and his mum. I mean, you're very aware that there's someone ...missing.

'And I suppose, looking back, I could have been better with Mum, sat with her and stuff. But I used to hate sitting in that living room every night, watching her watch Dallas or whatever and then suddenly bursting into tears. When you're that age, that kind of thing, grief, well it's ...just embarrassing. What are you meant to do? Put your arms around her? Say something? What are you supposed to say, a twelve-year-old boy? So in a strange, terrible way I started to resent it. I used to avoid her. I'd just go from school to the public library and from the library to my room to do my homework; there was never enough homework as far as I was concerned. God, what a creep.'