A Bit of a Do (42 page)

Ted hurried out.

‘I’m awfully sorry, Rita,’ said Neville. ‘We had no idea.’

‘Absolutely not!’ said Liz.

‘I believe you,’ said Rita. ‘I imagine his appearance must have been quite as embarrassing for you on your wedding day as it was for me.’

‘What very nice wallpaper this place has,’ said Betty hastily.

‘Doesn’t it?’ said Rodney. ‘I noticed that.’

Ted leant wearily against the large table in the middle of the kitchen. Alphonse, the scruffy young chef from Bootle, stared at him as if he couldn’t believe that he’d just been asked, at this short notice, to prepare three vegetarian meals. Lil Appleyard and Ros Pennington, the double act with the double meanings, were putting the finishing touches to the salad gamishings for the lobster mayonnaise. Nobody had ever yet commented on the way they formed tiny vegetable genitalia with an injudicious juxtaposition of two radishes and a gherkin.

‘Oh dear oh dear,’ said Ted.

The cake-loving Sandra Pickersgill looked at him accusingly. ‘You said I was all that mattered,’ she said.

‘Sexually,’ said Ted. ‘Emotionally. But.’ He took a handful of cress and began to chew mechanically. Lil Appleyard gave him a dirty look.

‘Take your hands off my gamishings,’ she said.

‘Oooh!’ said Ros Pennington. ‘You dirty beast.’

‘But what?’ said Sandra.

‘What?’ said Ted.

‘You said “but”,’ said Sandra. ‘But what?’

‘There’s my two boys in there,’ said Ted. ‘They still mean a lot to me. She doesn’t.’

‘Oh no?’ said Sandra. ‘I saw the way you looked at her bit of stuff. You’re jealous.’

Alphonse dropped six eggs into a saucepan contemptuously, as if blaming them for not being lobsters.

‘Sandra! I’m not! Love! I’m not! But!’ Ted spread out his arms, appealing for moral support from Lil Appleyard and Ros Pennington. An error! There was to be no support from that quarter. Or from Alphonse. Suddenly they were all so deeply involved in their preparations for the wedding feast that they didn’t even seem to be listening to these exchanges. But Ted knew that they were riveted. Sandra waited patiently for him to continue. He continued. ‘Rita was a good wife. She was a good mother. She kept a good home. I mean … she did. I mean … I don’t like to see her gallivanting around. Spending time in London. Letting herself be used by that young whippersnapper. I mean … would you, in my position? Right. You wouldn’t. So.’

‘How do you know he’s using her?’

‘Sandra! She’s more than ten years older than him!’

‘You’re more than twenty years older than me. I’m not using you.’

‘That’s different.’

‘Are you using me?’

All these questions were exhausting him. He slumped into a chair in the comer. Sandra looked down on him. She was carrying a tray, with four portions of lobster mayonnaise on it.

‘No, love!’ he said.

He stuck his left hand up her nineteenth-century Provençale costume. The fingers of his right hand explored the hole in her twentieth-century tights. She shrieked and dropped the tray. Three of the plates broke, and four portions of lobster mayonnaise were scattered across the tiled floor. Monsieur Albert entered like twelve vultures which have spotted a corpse.

‘Sandra!’ he said. ‘You’ll be paying me by the end of the week!’

‘It wasn’t her fault,’ said Ted, as he helped Sandra rescue what she could of the four starters. ‘Not this time. It was mine. I mean … you can’t take it out of her wages if it wasn’t her fault, can you?’

‘I can, if I want to. You’re all non-union,’ said the Geordie Monsieur Albert. ‘But I won’t.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I’ll take it out of
your
wages instead.’

In the bar, over the champagne, two separate efforts were being made, by two different generations, to bridge some of the gaps that had developed between the Rodenhurst and Simcock families.

In both instances, the initiative was being taken by the Simcock representative.

Rita led Liz away from the group to a comer of the bar, beside a photograph of one of the smaller châteaux of the Loire.

Liz raised her eyebrows as she waited for Rita to speak.

‘I want to apologize,’ said Rita. ‘I didn’t come here to make bitchy remarks like that.’

‘Why did you come here? To show off your conquest? To let us all see how far you’ve travelled?’

‘Oh Lord,’ said Rita. ‘Perhaps I did. I hoped I’d come as a gesture of … I don’t know … goodwill. Reconciliation …
after all our families have been through.’

‘That’s certainly why we invited you. I mean … let’s face it … our families are still linked by marriage.’

‘What do you mean, “Let’s face it.”?’ Rita looked round as she spoke. Paul was talking to Jenny. ‘Don’t you want Paul and Jenny to get together again?’

‘Of course I do. They’ve got a baby.’

Rita felt a sharp longing to see little Thomas again. They grew so fast.

‘Ah!’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t want them to if they didn’t have a baby?’

‘Conversation’s impossible if you examine every word under a microscope, Rita,’ said Liz. ‘I hope Paul and Jenny get together again. I hoped you and I could strike up some kind of friendship against all the odds.’

‘What do you mean … “against all the odds”?’

‘Rita! No microscopes!’ Liz realized with a shock that there was humour in Rita’s eyes, that Rita had found it funny, not hurtful, when she’d said ‘Against all the odds’. She was disconcerted. This wasn’t the atmosphere in which she expected conversations between Rodenhursts and Simcocks to be conducted. ‘All I meant was,’ she said, conscious that it was a bit lame, ‘who’d have thought that you and I could ever be friends?’

‘Nobody in the old days,’ said Rita. ‘But things have changed. You need all the friends you can get.’

Their eyes met. Each held the look firmly. Who would have given way first, or would they have stared at each other for all eternity, if Ted hadn’t approached, with more champagne, and chucked a conversational stone onto their frozen village pond?

‘Making friends? How touching!’ he said.

The stone bounced. The ice cracked, but it didn’t break.

The ageless peace of the old stone hill town above the Dordogne formed the backcloth to Paul’s efforts to restore his relationship with Jenny.

‘You don’t really want to live on your own, do you?’ he said. ‘It must be hard work bringing up a baby on your own.’

‘Two babies.’

‘Well, that’s all the more reason to … two babies??’

‘I’m pregnant.’

‘Jenny!’

Paul put a hand out, to touch his wife with the deep love that surged through him. She wriggled to get free of his touch, at exactly the moment when it occurred to him that it might not be his baby, and he withdrew his hand as fast as he could.

‘Ironical, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I must have conceived the night before the Crowning of Miss Frozen Chicken (UK).’

It was his! How could he ever have doubted it? She wasn’t … she wasn’t like him! Oh God!

She couldn’t see that he was thinking these things. He couldn’t see that she was wondering about the old man who was crossing the square in the photograph. Was he still alive? What was he doing at this moment? How strange for him to be so unaware that he was immortalized in this restaurant in northern England. It seemed an insult to the dignity of his life to use him as picturesque local colour.

‘The night before I found out that while I was in the maternity hospital you were having it off with the runner-up.’

‘Jenny! It doesn’t help to exaggerate.’

‘You weren’t having it off?’

‘She wasn’t the runner-up. She came third.’

The doorbell rang, and there was a rattling and banging on the locked door of the restaurant. Monsieur Albert rushed out with his sternest, most Gallic face. If it was those kids again …

‘We’re closed,’ he called out.

‘I’m invited,’ shouted the young man outside.

‘It’s Simon!’ said Liz.

Simon Rodenhurst, of Trellis, Trellis, Openshaw and Finch, was well dressed in his usual rather anonymous way. He blinked and smiled nervously at the assembled guests.

Liz kissed him. ‘Simon!’ she said. ‘You’ve come!’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve come. I’ve … er … I’ve compromised. I wanted to show you I disapprove …’ Liz flinched. ‘… but I also wanted to show that I still love you.’ Liz touched his arm. Monsieur Albert locked the door, and Ted approached with a glass of champagne. Simon Rodenhurst stared at him in astonishment. ‘Thanks,’ he said feebly. ‘Yes,’ he continued to his mother. ‘So I decided to come to one and not the other. Then I decided
that the ceremony was really the official wedding, so to show my disapproval that’s what I should stay away from, and the breakfast’s the really personal thing, so to show my love that’s what I should come to. Besides, I don’t like registry offices and I’m starving. Well, I hope I haven’t missed too much of the fun.’

‘Oh Simon!’ His mother began to cry. Simon was astounded. He had never seen her cry before, not even at his father’s funeral.

Liz had understood that Neville was going to arrange the seating for the wedding breakfast. This was probably because he’d said ‘I’ll arrange the seating for the wedding breakfast’. Judge then of her astonishment when he made no attempt to do so. The guests drifted towards the table. She gave Neville a meaningful look, but its meaning escaped him. People sat exactly where they liked, or, if they were among the last to arrive at the table, exactly where they didn’t like.

‘I thought you were going to arrange where people sat,’ she said.

‘I forgot,’ said Neville. ‘Anyway, it’s all worked out all right, hasn’t it? Anybody unhappy?’

Everyone shook their heads.

‘You see,’ said Neville. ‘Everybody’s perfectly happy.’

Liz forebore to point out that it wasn’t possible to say, ‘No. I’m extremely unhappy. I hate the people I’m sitting next to.’

‘It couldn’t have worked out better if we’d planned it all,’ beamed Neville.

Neville sat at one end of the table. On his left, along the wall, with their backs to a huge photograph of the wide, shallow, stony river Loire, sat Gerry Lansdown, Rita, Carol Fordingbridge, Elvis, Simon and Jenny. Liz sat at the other end. On her left were Rodney and Betty Sillitoe, Arthur Badger, Paul, and Andrew Denton. If one started at Rodney, it went man, woman, man, man, man, man, man, woman, woman, man, man, woman, woman. Hopeless. Liz felt that it was quite wrong that Rita should sit next to Gerry, Elvis next to Carol, and Rodney beside Betty. Couples should be split up and made to be sociable, otherwise they might just as well be at home. It was also wrong that Jenny should be beside Simon, and appalling that Simon should be next to Elvis. And it seemed almost deliberately perverse that Paul and Jenny, the one couple who
should
be next to each other, because
they were estranged and should therefore be made to be sociable, were separated by the length and width of the table.

Apart from these criticisms, she was totally happy with the seating arrangements.

Monsieur Albert entered with a huge tray, resplendent with ten portions of lobster mayonnaise. Sandra followed with a smaller tray, and three portions of egg mayonnaise. Ted brought up the rear with the chablis.

Monsieur Albert placed a dish in front of Liz, beaming with self-satisfaction. He waited, as if expecting lavish praise and astonishment.

‘Thank you,’ said Liz coolly.

‘Ah!’ said Neville, as Ted approached him with the chablis. ‘Good man!’

Ted didn’t exactly relish being addressed as ‘Good man!’ by Neville, but he bore it stoically. He was almost beyond social suffering on his own behalf. His main concern was for Sandra.

Sandra moved stiffly and nervously round the table under Ted’s discouragingly encouraging eye. After what Lil Appleyard and Ros Pennington had said, she couldn’t bring herself to look at the twenty-six round red radishes and the thirteen sad shrivelled gherkins that topped the garnishings.

Nobody else had realized that there were thirteen at table, but it worried Sandra dreadfully.

Miraculously, there were no disasters.

‘Chef, ‘e apologizes if ze egg, he is slightly of ze lukewarm,’ said the Gallic Monsieur Albert. ‘’e was not given much noticings.’

Neville smiled apologetically at Liz.

Paul had been particularly unfortunate over the seating arrangements. Not only was he seated between Arthur Badger and Andrew Denton, but every time he looked across the table he could see his mother making a fool of herself with Gerry Lansdown. Mutton dressed as lamb was bad enough, but mutton dressed as lamb and falling in love with another lamb, that was going too far. He munched his lukewarm eggs morosely. If he wasn’t going to be able to go back to Jenny, he’d a good mind to become a meat-eating, fish-guzzling slob again.

Jenny said, ‘Doesn’t it worry you that they scream when they’re boiled alive?’ to Rodney, and Paul called down the table, ‘Thanks
to you, Jenny, two fluffy yellow chicks have been aborted,’ but apart from that the conversation was well suited to the occasion, and Andrew Denton enjoyed his lobster so much, being happily oblivious that it had recently been sliding across the kitchen floor, that he didn’t make a single joke throughout the whole first course.