Seated at the far end of Sophie's kitchen-table, her husband looked at his watch. 'Two minutes, darling,' he called.
'What happens in two minutes?' asked Peter next to him. 'I'm afire with curiosity.'
Well, he was quite interested, and to tell the truth he felt awkward sitting there and saying nothing. He had not had to explain that his presence was part of a routine, the rest of which embraced going wherever he had last heard of Muriel in case she needed a lift home or elsewhere, this without prejudice to her right to leave at any time by taxi without informing him. Having to do that, and so perhaps saving him an hour's profitless drive, made her feel tied down. Tonight he was lucky, in the sense that she was still where she had gone earlier that day, though not visibly so at the moment.
'You'll see, if you're still around then,' said Percy, helpfully answering his question.
'It's more than likely. Finishing a chat with Gwen might take all night.'
'What? Oh, is that what Muriel's doing?’
‘Isn't that what you gathered?'
'I didn't gather anything, Peter, I was busy here, as I still am, but it won't be for much longer . Yes, compared with some I consider myself a pretty lucky fellow, having such an easy-to-cope-with wife.'
Peter could think of nothing to say to that. He had been running into Percy for years and years without ever having had to notice anything in particular about him, and had left it a couple of seconds too late now to scan his face and posture for intimations of irony. Of course the fellow was a Welshman. While he was still considering the point without urgency the door slowly opened and Charlie came slowly in, staying near the threshold for a nimble exit if required.
'I think I'm going to bed,' he announced. 'Okay,' said Peter when no one else spoke. Sophie, next to Dorothy and now as so often her official auditor, looked round. She said through or over some information about the financing of the New Zealander health service, 'Sian's in the little room.'
'What's she doing there?' asked Charlie in the slightly contentious style he had fallen into at Malcolm's. 'Well, sleeping's what she went there for.’
‘Can't she do that at home?'
'She's got nothing to go home for any more. You know.’
‘As long as nothing needs doing about her.'
'Just leave her,' said Sophie.
This exchange had caused Dorothy's discourse to falter severely, but the flow was soon re-established. With a gallantly assumed smile Sophie turned back to her. Charlie wandered halfway down the room.
'Alun in cracking form,' he said.
Percy looked at him brightly and in silence. Peter grunted.
'Rising to the occasion. Just the
sort
of thing that brings out the best in him, convincing a chap like old Malcolm that any misgivings he may happen to have about his ... personal life are quite without foundation. Tones him up. Mind you, I'd love to know what they actually said to each other, wouldn't you?'
'I think you're jumping to conclusions,' said Peter, his eyes flickering towards Percy.
'Maybe. A summons to the telephone followed by what about paying a call on old Malcolm, that notorious nightowl and reveller. M'm. I predict a catastrophe.'
During these last words of Charlie's, Percy had again looked at his watch and now moved at a moderate pace to a position immediately behind and above his wife.
'They've even kept their own cuisine,' said Dorothy. 'A friend of Angela's cooked a Maori dish for us one evening. It had raw-'
Still unhurriedly, Percy leaned forward, put his hands under her arms and hauled sharply upwards, using great but seemingly not excessive force. Dorothy shot to her feet as smartly as a nail responding to a claw-hammer.
'Here we go, darling,' said Percy, pulling and pushing while Sophie at first stood by, then followed their joint progress. After a short interval Peter and Charlie heard him in the hall saying, 'Piece of cake.' Then the front door shut.
'Quite impressive in its way,' said Charlie. 'I hadn't seen it before.'
'Quite impressive. Sometimes she moves under her own steam without waiting to be counted out. No doubt depending on how she feels.'
'Yes, I suppose it must boil down to that in the end.'
'I think I'm going to bed,' said Charlie to Sophie, who had come back into the room.
'You do that, love. Are you all right?’
‘Absolutely fine. Yes, really.'
'I won't be too long. Sian's up there.'
'I'll be fine.' Charlie kissed his wife on the cheek and turned back for a moment to Peter with a distant sparkle. 'Be seeing you. Bit pissed now.'
He had hardly gone, and Peter had hardly had time to start wondering how to handle whatever it was he had to handle, before Muriel entered the kitchen, closely followed by Gwen, whom Peter had barely set eyes on since arriving. Both carried empty glasses and the way each moved brought out for the moment a striking physical resemblance: rather short in the leg and moving slowly and softly, shoulders bowed but head well up and forward, rather pointed nose questing for the wine-bottle. None of those immediately on view had any wine in it. Without verbal or other comment Sophie produced a full one, a litre flask of Emerald Riesling, from a carton next to her sentry-box-sized refrigerator. Sharing the work, Murie1 twisted the
in-situ
cork off the corkscrew in no-nonsense fashion, her head enveloped in cigarette-smoke. Gwen attacked the foil round the neck of the new bottle with a fruit-knife. Neither spoke until liquor was pouring.
'Exit our Dorothy,' said Muriel. 'Not before time let it be added.'
'The sound of the front door shutting was music in our ears,' said Gwen. Muriel settled herself in her previous place. 'Young Percy didn't exactly fall over himself coming to the bloody rescue, did he?'
'He probably felt like an hour off,' said Peter, who was still rather impressed with Percy's smooth, resolute action and, even more, envious of his air of seclusion in some adamantine sphere of his own. 'That seems very reasonable to me.'
The three women looked at him in silence, Sophie only for an instant while she made for the door, Gwen, seated, rather longer. Muriel's look came over the top of her glass and lasted till she had put it down on the table. Then she said, 'Well, Pete lad, now's your chance for a small break yourself. My friend Gwen and I are just about to settle down for a nice cosy little sisterly chat which I don't honestly see you contributing much to, so you could take off right away, couldn't you? No point in sticking around, eh?' She smiled, or drew back the corners of her mouth and raised her eyebrows. He had been expecting to be asked to hang on while his wife had one more drink and then to have to hang on while she had one more after that. Under this arrangement he would have been open later on to a charge of having spoilt the drink(s) in question by a display of impatience - this no matter how hard and continuously he might have beamed at everyone in sight - with another in reserve about having dragged her away while she was enjoying herself. She was not an inveterate boozer but when she was on it there was a routine for that too. He was accordingly ill prepared for being ordered out of Sophie's house.
'Oh ... that's all right,' he said. 'I can easily -'
'No, no, I wouldn't keep you up, old boy.' Muriel gave I a waggish laugh. 'You look as if you could do with an early night. Granted it's not that early, but every little helps.'
After another tepid protest or two he was driven from the room. Gwen gave him a farewell twiddle of the fingers and stylized simper that made him feel quite sorry for Malcolm, but only in passing. In the hall cloakroom he rejected, as frequently before, that if the Thomases had a second car, which they or rather she could readily have afforded, then all this would never have arisen.
All
this? A drop out of the ocean. And of course there would still be times like tonight, with her too pissed, or about to become too pissed, to drive. Well, at times like that, when she actually needed him, she could ring him or ... What was he talking about? Let herself in for feeling tied down and pass up a gilt-edged chance of buggering him about at the same time? He must be joking. He must also have got this far almost as frequently before. Outside in the hall itself he nearly ran into Sophie wearing a turquoise-blue -scarf over her head, which was just unexpected enough to make him say, 'Off somewhere, are you?' Now he remembered, he had heard the 'telephone tinkle a minute or two before.
'Yeah. Why?' Her normal intonation had never needed much sharpening in order to sound snappish.
'Charlie'll be all right, I suppose?'
'Why wouldn't he be?'
'Well ... ' Peter shifted his head about in a way intended to remind her that as an old friend he rather naturally knew something of her husband's nervous troubles.
'Should be safe enough, shouldn't he, with three people in the house?'
'Oh yes. Yes of course. '
'If you're worried you can stay around yourself.'
This time he moved his head in a different way, thinking perhaps she had been pulling his leg.
'I like a bit of time off too, you know, now and then.' Before he could give his answer to that, if any, Sophie went back into the kitchen.
5
Gwen and Muriel looked up at the sound of the outside door shutting a second time.
'Peter in a funny mood,' said Sophie.
'You know I don't think drink agrees with him,' said Muriel. 'Never has.'
'Decent of the old boy,' said Gwen, 'to stick up for Percy like that. And shows a great breadth of sympathy too.'
'You'd think he'd realize there's others needs a break,' said Sophie, and went briskly on, 'I'm just off round to Rhiannon's for half an hour. Now you won't be rushing away yet awhile, will you? Stuff in the fridge if you want 'it,' she said further, though there was enough stuff on the
table to keep both the other two chewing hard for a couple of hours. 'Stay if you like, mind, 'there's another bed in the -'
Muriel interrupted to say she would get a minicab and Gwen interrupted her to say she would drive her, and the two fought over it briefly until Sophie had actually left, though they each managed to get in their thanks for the party and their sendings of love to Rhiannon. After assuring herself that they were indeed alone Gwen turned to Muriel with an intent frown.
'What we were saying - a tin of a good brand with a spoonful of yogurt stirred in ... '
'And a spot of chopped parsley ... '
' ... and they start asking you just which vegetables you've used, isn't there endive in this, can't I taste celeriac. And wanting to know
how
you did it, surely you melted them in butter and so on. I just tell them, the old way, m'm, it's the only proper way.'
Muriel laughed with more elation than might have been expected at a simple discussion of kitchen methods. 'Right, there's not much they can say to that. And of course when it comes to chicken or Scotch broth or whatever, well, what is it, it's cubes and booze, that's what it is, cubes and booze. A tin of oxtail soup and a cube and a tablespoon of whisky and that's it. Not only easier, incomparably easier.
Better,'
she said challengingly. 'Better all along the line.'
'When I look back,' said Gwen, resting her chin on a hand that also had a lighted cigarette in it and squinting towards a recent wine-stain on the tablecloth, 'and think of all that carry-on with the wretched stock-pot, never let it leave the stove, in with every scrap of the joint and you'd have thought a chicken carcass was worth ten times the chicken itself and ... Do you know, Muriel, would you believe it, time was when I'd go along to the butcher and get bones for the dog, no dog, straight into the bloody pot with the beef-gristle. And for what? What possessed us?'
This time Muriel's response was affectionate as well as appreciative, or at least it sounded like it. In the usual run of things she and Gwen got on no better than all right even when she was not finding Gwen sly nor Gwen finding her loud or strange or both, but midnight could bring some display of amity. Part of this must have come from mere co-survival at the drinks table, as both had re1lected before now. But not all; not this time, at least.
Gwen waited for a moment, then said more or less at random, 'After all, it's not as if anybody in the world's going to notice, let alone appreciate even the most obvious ... ‘
‘Don't make me laugh.'
'I mean they don't even
know.'
'Of course they don't
know,
love. You can only know if you want to know, and they don't want to know. They have other claims on their valuable attention, as I imagine you must have noticed before.'
'I can't bear the way they -'
'What, them bestir themselves to notice how life's lived in their own home, what makes the bloody world go round? Not them. Why should they? They've won.'
By this stage there was little doubt that those now under discussion were not the same as those who asked Gwen just which vegetables she had used. Nevertheless whatever the two women most wanted to talk about had pretty clearly not yet been broached. Give it time, as they used to say in South Wales when an unlooked-for silence descended on the company. Gwen was the one who let it come, that being what you did if you were the one with the luck when everybody present had given it time.
'Of course she still is very striking, I quite see that, I wouldn't call her beautiful, I never thought she was beautiful, but she is very striking.' She left the name out - not through any Cymric instinct of non-committal but because her thoughts were undeviatingly fixed on Rhiannon, as in fact they had been for some minutes past. Perhaps Muriel's were too: she joined in promptly enough. 'Oh, agreed, with the benefit of a small fortune laid out on facials and massages and health farms and I don't know what all. Plus never having to do a hand's turn in the home.'
'Oh fair enough, but you don't get skin like that out of a tube. And that carriage, you're born with it or you're not. But as for-'
'Not so much as heave a plate on to the bloody rack.’
‘It's when it comes to the what would you call it, the social side that I start, um, veering away from the consensus a bit. The conversational -'