Life After Lunch Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  www.panmacmillan.co.uk/bello

  Contents

  Sarah Harrison

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Life After Lunch

  Sarah Harrison is the bestselling author of more than twenty-five books. She is best known for her adult fiction, which has included commercial blockbusters such as The Flowers of the Field and A Flower That’s Free (both now re-released, along with the third part of the trilogy, The Wildflower Path). She has also written children’s books and the successful writer’s guide How to Write a Blockbuster, as well as numerous short stories and articles.

  Sarah is an experienced speaker and broadcaster, who has taught creative writing both here in the UK and on residential courses in Italy. She has been a judge for literary and public-speaking competitions, and is also an entertainer – her three-woman cabaret group, Pulsatillas!, has an enthusiastic and ever-growing following.

  Dedication

  For Jeremy

  Chapter One

  I prolonged that particular lunch. Like you do.

  My friend Susan Upchurch, sitting across from me at our corner table in the Tiffin House in King Street, was blissfully unaware of any procrastination. She never thought to question why she had railroaded me even more easily than usual into sharing the second bottle of house red that I would later regret.

  Whatever she might say, there was a lot Susan didn’t know, and was not curious about. A sublime self-centredness was chief among her charms. I’d go so far as to say that this, combined with those random flashes of inspired perception, was the reason our odd-couple association had survived with only the regulation number of stops, stand-offs and start-ups, for more than thirty years. From the murky mire of puberty at Queen Edelrath’s School for Girls in Watford to the sunny uplands of our middle years, Susan had talked and I’d listened. One of the things she said most often was what a good listener she was, and I always agreed. For when you got right down to the wire, there was no doubt that Susan was a blue-chip friend. I knew that if I were ever in trouble she would leap to my aid with all the furious energy of her naturally spirited nature (latterly enhanced by HRT), and rout my enemies with a thoroughness which would effectively depopulate my life.

  The clock on the wall, I noticed, had a long hand which moved forward with a little jerk, flagging the passing of each relentless minute.

  Emptying the last of the house red into her glass (the only one in which there was sufficient room), Susan leaned forward, the bottle still grasped in her right hand, and said, ‘Did I tell you about Brünnhilde?’

  She had told me a great deal about Brünnhilde (not her real name), the business acquaintance who was currently Number One in the Most Hated list, but I was right in assuming there would be masses more.

  ‘The Hun from Hell!’ she elaborated with loud and gleeful relish, adding, ‘The Teutonic Tart With No Heart!’ in case I’d failed to catch her drift.

  ‘What’s she been up to?’ I spoke very quietly, in an attempt to protect our fellow-diners from my friend’s robust revisionism.

  ‘You won’t believe this!’ she hissed, adjusting the tone but not the volume. ‘She invited poor Simon, a widower of barely two months’ standing, out to lunch, on her own, without reference to anyone else, purely and simply to suck up! I mean, that is such bad form it takes your breath away! She wants to take us over, that’s what it is, and she’s far too chickenshit to deal with me.’

  There was neither rhyme nor reason to Susan’s violent, visceral loathings. They were a kind of obsessive hobby with her, like thimble-collecting or bird-watching. The good thing about them was that they went away – usually when some fresh candidate stuck his or her unsuspecting head over the parapet.

  ‘… but Simon’s not a fool,’ concluded Susan. ‘He’s got her number. The British are so sophisticated like that. Don’t you think? I mean, you should know,’ she added slyly. I had called a moratorium on discussion of my private life, but she couldn’t resist the odd dig.

  It was three-thirty. There were now only two other people in the restaurant – a couple of men in suits – and the waiters were beginning to congregate by the till and talk about their social lives. Like all the best condemned women I had eaten a hearty lunch, comprising several trips to the curry buffet, followed by banana fritters, a speciality of the chef. Added to which I was sloshed. I doubted whether I could even make the door. I felt sure that if I did I would leave moist, greasy footsteps on the floor like something out of Stephen King.

  ‘It’s been so good talking to you about it,’ said Susan, ‘because it makes me feel vindicated. The woman’s a Nazi. Or she has the mentality that put the Nazis into power. I’m so glad I’m not like that.’

  The two men signalled for their bill.

  ‘Now,’ said Susan, ‘ I can see I’ve depressed you. Let me tell you something really wonderful to cheer you up. I wasn’t going to mention this, because it feels like tempting fate, but what the hell?’ She grinned tigerishly. It went without saying that whatever the wonderful thing was, it was to do with her, not me. My secret was quite safe. My long dark hangover of the soul would on this occasion remain unillumined by even the smallest glimmer of insight from Susan. This perverse sense of security made me generous.

  ‘Go on then,’ I said, ‘tell me the good news.’

  The grin grew even wider; her eyes glittered. The pleasure and excitement came off her in waves.

  ‘He called!’ she said, in a smoky stage whisper. ‘ The one I was telling you about. At nine o’clock yesterday evening.’

  My eyes and throat brimmed with demeaning tears of self-pity. I raised my glass to her and took a swig of wine.

  ‘That’s great,’ I said, ‘I’m so pleased. Fantastic.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Susan graciously. ‘And I have to tell you he makes my corny old heart beat faster.’

  ‘Terrific.’ Reminding myself of something I’d read about it taking fewer muscles to smile than to frown, I stretched my mouth and bared my teeth dutifully.

  ‘So there you are.’ She leaned forward and cocked her head with a teasing expression. I’m not too old for romance.’

  She made it sound as though I’d argued the opposite. ‘Of course you’re not,’ I assured her. ‘ So what’s he like?’

  ‘Let’s see. Maddeningly attractive, but definitely different – not my usual type.’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ She laughed rustily at the foolhardiness of it all. ‘I don’t know anything about him! He could be married for all I know. It was a classic case of instant chemistry. I expect,’ she went on happily, ‘that he’ll turn out t
o be a serial killer and six weeks from now I’ll be found murdered in my bed with his initials carved on my chest and ‘‘ Every Time We Say Goodbye’’ playing on the CD.’

  ‘Probably,’ I agreed, and she shrieked with laughter again. These coups de foudre occurred in Susan’s life about every couple of years, and were as necessary to her as the Most Hated list. I suspected that both had their source in the same congenital need for emotional excess. In this she was the opposite of me, and we both knew it. My most fervent wish (and one which unbeknown to Susan I was about to realize) was to swap my current emotional Bosnia for the tranquil Switzerland which ought to have been the prerogative of the mother and grandmother with twenty-five years of marriage on the clock.

  There was no justice in our respective situations. Susan’s ordered, unencumbered, well-heeled lifestyle enabled her actively to pursue and enjoy the luxury of an operatic sex life. When agony followed ecstasy as it invariably did, she would withdraw into a pale and nun-like purdah simply not available to the married woman, ameliorated by a full hand of credit cards, a riverside flat to die for, and a small but infinitely supportive coterie of friends of both sexes, myself among them.

  ‘Did I tell you how we met?’ she asked.

  ‘You mentioned something about it.’

  ‘It was total magic, total madness, total romance!’ Susan had got moved to the back when understatement was being handed out. ‘We know nothing about each other, but I have the definite feeling we’re simply going to fall into each other’s arms and bonk ourselves brainless on the first date.’

  She was the only person I knew who still used the expression ‘date’.

  ‘I had that extremely unpleasant contretemps with the bus-driver,’ she told me for what was probably the fifth time, ‘ and I was aware all the time that he was listening in, you know how one is aware of those things. And at the end – when I’d won – he gave me this extraordinarily sexy smile, with a sort of implied wink of encouragement. I did nothing. I didn’t smile back. I didn’t do anything! Then when I got off he followed me at the very last minute. And all he said was. ‘‘Mind if I ring you?’’’

  ‘You were picked up,’ I agreed.

  ‘I was!’ She was enchanted by the notion. ‘I kid you not, it makes me feel eighteen again.’

  ‘And didn’t you tell me he wrote your number on his hand?’ I prompted dully.

  ‘He did! That’s such a teenagery thing to do, isn’t it? But I was completely charmed.’

  ‘Anybody would be,’ I conceded. The waiters had all gone now and the Malay girl on the till had put on hornrims and was reading Madame Bovary, but I still had one or two tried and tested delaying tactics up my sleeve.

  ‘Aren’t you worried,’ I began, and was rewarded by an intensifying of Susan’s gaze as she prepared to consult her innermost feelings, ‘that after such a brief first meeting you’ll be disappointed?’

  ‘Not at all! For one thing I trust my judgement – poor old unmarried thing that I am, I do have some experience in these matters.’

  ‘Of course you do,’ I said humbly.

  ‘And for another, what does it matter? Fuck it! It was a magic moment. Even if he turns out to have halitosis, nylon socks and a collection of Roger Whittaker albums, that won’t detract from the fact that in a few short minutes on the bus and on a crowded pavement he made my heart leap!’

  I marvelled anew at Susan’s ability to mythologize her experience instantly and at will. Perhaps if I had been able to do that, to make myself the romantic heroine of my own life, I wouldn’t feel such a sad case now.

  ‘Do you believe in angels, Laura?’ she asked.

  ‘I haven’t really thought about it.’

  ‘No, you should,’ she said, ‘ they’re all the rage in the States. Everyone believes in them. By angels I don’t mean bird-men in white kaftans, but beings who appear suddenly in your life, alter everything for the better, and then quite as suddenly disappear again.’

  ‘I can’t say I’ve ever come across one.’

  ‘I bet you have,’ said Susan, another of whose gifts was never to give house-room to a view which did not conform with hers. ‘I bet if you sit down tonight and look back over all the really good things that have happened to you in the past few months, especially the unexpected ones, you’ll find that at least one of them is associated with a particular individual who touched your life, no matter how fleetingly, at that particular moment.’

  This suggestion was free-ranging enough to be almost irrefutable, but for one thing – in my present frame of mind I was pushed to recall any of the really good things to which she referred.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  ‘What about Henry?’

  ‘Henry?’

  ‘Yes – I sent you Henry, and romance stepped into your life.’

  ‘I don’t know about—’

  ‘I’m sure of it. And the point about my bloke on the bus is, he’s an angel!’

  ‘A moment ago,’ I reminded her, ‘you said he was going to carve his initials on your chest.’

  ‘A dark angel then!’ She squawked with mirth. ‘Who knows? Who cares?’

  Because there was no one left to summon, we paid our bill at the till. Lunch was always Dutch, though we tended to choose the venue to fit in with my more fluctuating finances.

  ‘Thank you, it was excellent,’ Susan told the Malay girl, who was marking her place with her finger throughout the transaction. ‘I like this restaurant. It was nice of you not to hurry us.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ said the girl.

  Susan put her card away and nodded at the book. ‘Are you enjoying that?’

  ‘I’m reading it for my exam.’

  ‘I don’t want to put you off,’ explained Susan kindly, ‘but it’s the most depressing novel ever written.’

  ‘But wonderful with it,’ I said.

  Susan placed a hand on my arm without looking at me and continued addressing the girl. ‘There speaks my friend the married woman! Now quickly, off the top of your head, without thinking, tell me: do you believe in angels?’

  With a polite, wary smile the girl glanced from Susan’s face to mine and back, and then shrugged one shoulder.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘There you are!’ Susan turned to me in triumph, vindicated once again. ‘I told you so.’

  The world can seem a chilly, heartless place after lunch, especially when that lunch has been a haven in a sea of troubles. Even on this sunny September afternoon I shivered as I squeezed guiltily behind the wheel of the half-timbered Morris and prepared to sort my life out.

  The tall, terraced house in Calcutta Road was untidy and, more surprisingly, empty. Again. In other words, this was my second opportunity simply to go away and let things end by default, but I craved a confrontation. There was a note from Patrick clamped beneath the Fritz the Cat magnet on the fridge door.

  ‘F.A.O. LAURA. WED. P.M. TAKEN PEACHES TO VET.’ He always wrote notes in capitals, and I’d always assumed it was because he had the worst handwriting in the world. But this afternoon the habit irked me. It was patronizing, treating me as though I couldn’t read. As to Peaches, if she were to be despatched to the great cattery in the skies it was a consummation devoutly to be wished as far as I was concerned. Patrick’s attitude towards this indulged Persian with her delicate digestion and her coat that clung to everything it touched was nothing short of unbalanced. For all his Corinthian former sporting prowess, his towering intellect and his earthy charms, I suspected him of turning into an old woman.

  Patrick’s house was one of a select few that made me feel good about my own. It was untidy in a crazed, large-scale way that left ours for dead. The sitting-room was still in twilight with the curtains half-drawn. The mantelpiece was a dense clutter of old invitations, candlewax, half-eaten apples, loose change, biros, broken watches objets trouvés, and cough sweets. The carpet was invisible beneath an unstable drift of paper, slut’s wool, and tinfoil takeaway cartons well into their sec
ond incarnation as ashtrays. He had some nice things, of course, but they had to take their chances with the general mess. Some paintings were carefully hung in groups, others still stood propped against the wall exactly where he’d left them when he brought them back. Half the bookcases were polished beechwood designed and built by a master joiner in Goose Yard, the other half were MFI white laminate with the obligatory screw missing.

  I scrunched to the middle of the floor and surveyed the scene. Awash with red wine, I found myself thinking, what would Susan do? Leaving aside the fact that she wouldn’t be here at all, waiting for a man who lived like a pig and took her for granted, she would certainly not fall prey to any knee-jerk compulsion to tidy up.

  I flopped down on the sofa with my feet up. The cushions were still disposed and dented to accommodate Patrick’s large body last night. I knew if I simply allowed my hand to drop to the floor I’d find the television zapper, and there, sure enough, it was, between the empty Boddington’s can and the London Review of Books. With tears trickling backwards into my hair I pressed a couple of buttons and found an indoor tennis match, some celebrity event from a conference centre on the south coast. It was a men’s singles between a seeded American in funny shorts and hair extensions and a workmanlike young Swede. Grunt-pop-biff-ping-grunt-oh- I-say!

  The Swede held serve and the players changed ends. The American threw a large towel over his head but the camera stayed doggedly at its post, filming his shrouded, expressionless form while the pundits speculated as to his frame of mind, his intentions, his old knee injury and his relationship with the famous chanteuse who watched inscrutably from the celebrity box. I thought how good it would be if in everyday life you could simply throw a towel over your head and leave everyone to guess what was going on inside.

  The umpire said time was up and the Swede bounced to his feet and moved briskly into position to receive. The American, as befitted a much-loved idol of the crowd, rose more slowly, adjusted his headband and walked pensively with his distinctive rolling gait to the base-line, amidst tumultous applause, rejecting the first two balls sent to him by the ballboy for reasons that only he would ever know.