That Was Then Read online

‘Yes.’

  ‘What, your eyes met across a crowded room.’

  ‘I suppose so – yes.’

  ‘So just how stunningly beautiful is she? On a scale of one to ten?’

  ‘I don’t think you’d put her on the scale of stunning beauty at all,’ Ian said gently. ‘ That’s got nothing to do with it.’

  Those few words put me in my place, and brought me to my senses. My choleric heat was doused by the cool, restrained touch of truth. As I stared ahead through a stinging veil of tears, Ian stretched out his hand again, this time without hesitation, and laid it over both of mine where they lay locked together on my lap.

  At the station I declined his offer to accompany me to the train. I’d recovered just enough to swallow my pride and say: ‘By the way, that’s a nice shirt.’

  He looked down at himself. ‘Do you like it? I bought it in Bath.’

  Bath? I thought, as the train rattled through the snaggle-toothed streets south of Victoria. In a reasonably well-travelled life I had never been to Bath. But the new-look Ian and his better-than-beautiful Julia had been. And while they were there she’d bought him a shirt. For one thing I knew – his might have been the cash but hers, for sure, the taste.

  Ben was lying on the sofa, reading Marie Claire with the TV on when I came in.

  ‘Hi there, good time?’

  ‘Yes thanks.’

  ‘Good grub? Where did you go?’

  ‘Oh, Hammersmith – on the river. Yes, it was nice.’

  I went into the kitchen. ‘Kettle’s boiled,’ he called.

  ‘Why, do you want one?’

  ‘Wouldn’t say no.’

  I made a couple of mugs of tea. He zapped the TV as I walked in.

  ‘Cheers. How was Dad?’

  ‘Fine.’

  Ben gave me a bright, sceptical look. ‘Fine as all that, huh?’

  ‘No, I meant it. He was in good form. He’ll get those Test tickets.’

  ‘Cool.’ He picked up Marie Claire and gave it a waggle. ‘I was reading this article about more women wanting to live alone.’

  ‘Interesting?’

  ‘So-so.’

  This was one of those exchanges, not uncommon with Ben, where a statement had seemed to herald an observation, which was then withheld.

  I sat down and took off my sandals. ‘So what conclusions do they reach about this phenomenon?’

  ‘Nothing very startling. They reckon women don’t want to wash socks any more. So far so plausible. There you go—’ he tossed the magazine in my direction. ‘ You can read it yourself.’

  ‘I probably will.’

  He stretched and yawned mightily, rotating his feet at the ankle and pushing his linked fingers towards the ceiling.

  ‘Anyway,’ he gaped round the yawn, ‘it’s not going to tell you anything you don’t already know – is it?’ On the last two words he relaxed, brought his face to order and grinned expansively in my direction.

  ‘Probably not …’ I picked up the magazine. ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re one of them, aren’t you?’

  ‘One of what?’

  ‘Women who choose to live alone.’

  I was uncomfortable. ‘I don’t live alone. You’re here.’

  He yawned again and rubbed his face. ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘No. Ian and I are separated. It’s not something I chose.’

  ‘Take it easy, Mum, suit yourself.’

  ‘It’s just that I don’t understand what you’re getting at,’ I insisted. I kept my voice down and smiled but even I could feel it was an anxious, angry smile.

  ‘Nothing, Mum, settle down—’

  ‘Don’t tell me to settle down!’

  ‘Who rattled your cage?’ he asked, laughing. ‘Dad forget his wallet or something?’ He dropped a glancing kiss on my temple. ‘Chill.’

  I was unable to ‘ chill’ as he put it. I stayed up far too late in an effort to distract myself with television, and when I did finally go to bed I couldn’t sleep. Ben’s question was apposite – who, exactly, had rattled my cage?

  Ian and I had met at the wedding of mutual friends in 1970. He knew the bridegroom, James Palmer, I the bride, Linda Price. We first saw each other across the aisle of a soulless church in Birmingham, as we turned to watch Linda make her entrance on the arm of her father. These nuptials were a lavish, hard-edged, no-expense-spared affair, a big bash thrown by Mr Price with an eye to future business for his industrial cleaning company. It was difficult to make the connection between Linda, the shy secretary I shared an office with in the Rover showrooms in St Johns Wood, and this congregation of full-to-bursting morning dress, high complexions, sugar-almond bouclé suits and lethally chic hats on spun-glass coiffures.

  Linda was a plumpish girl with difficult hair. I had the uneasy suspicion that her mother, in a cerise costume with gold buttons and a hemline that revealed (as they all did that year) a pair of best-kept-hidden knees, had knowingly allowed her daughter to select a spectacularly unflattering wedding dress. With hindsight, the vast nimbus of flounces and frills prefigured the choice of Lady Diana Spencer a decade or so later, but at a time when frocks were either sculpturally spare or whimsically girlish it appeared gross. Linda’s rosy skin looked florid, her hair – scraped up into the style, popular at the time, which looked as though several giant rollers had been left in on the crown – was too fine for what was being asked of it, and her beam had never been broader.

  I cringed on her behalf, but I caught sight of Ian just after she passed between us, and was shamed. For his expression betrayed not a hint of censure, but was serious and benign, almost tender.

  In those days, as now, Ian had the reassuring, conservative good looks of a young TV intern. Never one to alter where he alteration found, his style, give or take an inch on the hairline, had remained the same over the years. This meant that he was now enviably free of those embarrassing photos featuring elephant loons, pop-art tanktops, mutton-chop sideburns and highwayman jackets which haunted other men who had considered themselves the dog’s bollocks at the time.

  The wedding reception was at Mr Price’s Country Club deep in the expense account belt of Solihull. The modern all-day event, culminating in dancing, had yet to come in, but this was a four-course lunch with a combo of the Royal Marines playing hits from the Broadway shows, a river of champers and a free bar serving everything else including fancy cocktails.

  It would be true to say that Ian swept me off my feet. He had the sort of manner that I’d always found particularly charming – focused, generous, enquiring. He wasn’t just a good listener, he was an inspired one. He made me feel like the only girl in the room, and (I discovered this later, it wasn’t his style to mention such things) he had an ice-blue Lotus Elan in the carpark.

  I got sloshed, but his chivalrous attention never faltered. We both of us laughed immoderately at my jokes, and when I asked about the groom he said he didn’t know him all that well but that in his opinion he was lucky to have netted such an obviously sweet girl as Linda. This perception of her, in the face of the Frock from Hell, endeared him to me still further. If he could somehow see the real Linda beneath all those frills and flounces, then it must be the real me he was attracted to, too.

  She was a creature quite hard to find, the real me. I was wearing a pink gingham mini dress from Ginger Group, with cutaway armholes and a zip up the front, pale tights and pink chunky shoes, and a floppy white hat with a pink rose stuck on the side. In the photos which Linda sent us afterwards, and which I still had in the desk drawer, it was the same old story. Ian looked the same but younger, I was the sort of freak show that made my children howl with disrespectful mirth. The Rocky Horror, they called me in those photographs, whereas Linda looked no worse than a thousand later Di-wannabees. An object lesson in the perils of being a fashion victim.

  ‘I’d have you know,’ Ian would say to the children, loyal, but laughing in spite of himself, ‘that your mother was the undisputed belle of the ball
.’

  ‘There’s no need to overdo it,’ I growled.

  ‘I’m not. You were. You were probably too pie-eyed to notice, but I was fighting off the competition.’

  ‘You’re having a laugh. Dad.’

  ‘Certainly not. And she hasn’t changed a bit.’

  Ah, palmy days, when we were the happiest married couple that anyone knew. Too happy, it now transpired, or at least too content. Too content to notice when love first began to slip through our fingers and then, when we’d lost it, so separately and secretly shocked that we nearly let our friendship go too.

  And we might have done, if not for Ian. We had reached the point where we were no more than carefully co-operative roommates, leading separate (and, it must be said, sadly blameless lives), avoiding one another’s eyes, leaving a space in the bed, embarrassed by love songs. We were living through a grinding daily attrition of suppressed suffering, but to everyone we knew (and who knew us so much less than they believed) we were Ian and Eve, the redoubtable Piercys.

  Ian was the brave one. ‘Don’t you think,’ he said one Sunday morning when the sun shone and the children were still in bed, ‘don’t you think we should stop this marriage spoiling our relationship?’

  For a week, I did nothing but weep. I thought my world would implode and my heart would shatter, simply because he was right.

  My husband had uttered the unthinkable, and set us free.

  But now this had happened. No longer was it just Ian and I, amicably separated but essentially unchanged, the thread of our relationship still stretched even and unbroken between us. We were suddenly and alarmingly sundered by this offstage presence who went to Bath and bought clothes.

  Discreet, Nursing Times Julia, with her inner beauty and her good taste in shirts … She it was who’d rattled my cage.

  Chapter Seven

  Sabine and Martin were party-givers of note. As Ronnie said, they had both cash and dash, and Sabine in particular was a natural show-off. She also had a keen sense of the hierarchy of social events, and those who were reasonably regular attenders had learned to appreciate the finer points of the Drage scale of entertaining.

  For instance, Sabine’s fortieth had been the top-of-the-range do, a Georgian extravaganza awash with fresh-fruit sculptures, tinkling spinnets, and an apparently endless procession of crystal flutes brimming with Bolli borne on silver salvers by flunkies liveried in green and white. The marquee alone, with its real doors and spindly gold furniture must have cost more than several average weddings, and the rock band which followed the spinnets was one that had actually featured in the charts, even if Ben, on being told their name, dismissed them as sad bastards. And as for the guests – we were transformed. Never had le tout Littelsea looked so alluring. Powdered embonpoints, fluttering fans, fetchingly rumpled stocks and smoothly sculpted breeches transformed every couple, if only in their own imaginations, into Elizabeth and Darcy.

  Their wedding anniversary was a lunchtime affair – jazz band, American food, tables on the terrace. Very nice too, but the message was that whereas growing old glamorously was a triumph, staying married to one man for fifteen years was something like a perfect school attendance record, to be celebrated with a touch of irony.

  Sophie’s drinks (Martin’s birthday had become somewhat eclipsed) was a mere bonne bouche – the sort of little something that Sabine could knock up in her sleep with one hand tied behind her. That wasn’t to say that it wasn’t good of its kind: all Sabine’s entertaining was pre-eminent in its field. But there was a certain studied insouciance in its delivery which flagged that it had been thrown together for the dear child on the spur of the moment.

  There was Pimms, champagne and passionfruit juice, and an array of fancy bottled beers for the young ones (I took credit for suggesting this, Sabine cared not a fig for beer). The caterer’s girls, under the fearsome auspices of Sabine’s Maltese housekeeper, Clea, moved tirelessly among us in the conservatory and on the terrace, bearing trays of artfully prepared seafood bites, devils on horseback and hot cheese straws.

  The only wrong note – in the sense that it was a touch too tasteful – was the harpist, a young woman in a flowing terra-cotta robe. She was tiny, which made you wonder not so much that the harping was done well, but that it was done at all. Every ripple of notes caused her to lean forward stressfully as if using a rowing machine, and in the more passionate passages her small feet left the ground altogether.

  ‘She’s piloting that harp,’ observed Ben. ‘Lift off is imminent.’

  That was about the only remark he addressed to me, because the young’, as they were wont to do, and as Sabine had intended, gravitated to one another outdoors, leaving the rest of us covering the usual ground inside.

  I left my amusing card for Martin on the mantelpiece, and washed up near the French windows with Dennis Chatsworth.

  ‘Well done you,’ I said. ‘ Getting the whole team out.’

  He shrugged. ‘They both just happened to be at home this weekend with nothing better to do. Can’t really take any credit.’

  ‘Where’s Ronnie?’ I asked.

  ‘Not too jolly as a matter of fact. Putting her feet up at home.’

  ‘That’s not like her.’

  ‘No it’s not, but maybe that’s what people mean by saying one isn’t oneself.’

  ‘Good point.’

  ‘It’s not serious, anyway. Would it be terribly incorrect of me to say she’s at a funny age?’

  ‘It would,’ I smiled. ‘But we all are, there’s no getting away from it.’

  ‘She sent her regards, so let it be minuted that I passed it on.’

  ‘Do you think she’ll be on for tennis next Saturday?’

  ‘Good heavens, yes.’

  Out on the terrace, the Drages’ stone balustrade was already adorned with clusters of beer bottles and glasses, and the flagstones were acquiring a scattering of cigarette ends and bits of canape. At first I couldn’t see Sophie, but then I spotted her on the far side of the room talking earnestly to a tall, toothy woman in a smock. Why on earth didn’t Sabine usher her outside with the rest of them? What was the point, when the flower of Littelsea’s youth had been pressed into service to make the girl feel at home, in leaving her beached with what looked like rather dull female company? Especially since, on this second meeting, Sophie did not disappoint. The dark, humorous good looks, the mop of what in a more formal age would certainly have been ringlets, the carelessly voluptuous figure … all were still much in evidence, today arrestingly presented in some sort of floppy dark red sundress with an uneven hem, which might have been from a jumble sale or Bond Street, it was impossible to tell. In spite of my misgivings I had to concede that she looked perfectly content to be talking to the smock. But that might just have been good manners.

  Dennis and Ronnie’s older son, Philip, came over. Of those offspring here present the Chatsworths’ were – at least outwardly – the sort you could take anywhere. Philip was the image of his mother, tall and fair and open-faced, king of the wet bobs at Radley, and now a hopeful for the Cambridge eight.

  ‘How you doing Eve – so where is she?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ replied his father, ‘ I wouldn’t know her from Adam, and Sabine’s omitted to introduce us.’

  ‘Well, by a process of elimination we’ve reached the conlusion she’s not out there.’

  ‘That’s her—’ I nodded – ‘by the door.’

  Attuned as I was, I caught the micro-flicker of assessment. ‘OK.…’

  ‘Not the tall one,’ I said. ‘The dark one.’

  An infinitesimal reappraisal. ‘OK.’

  ‘Pretty girl,’ said Dennis, glancing over without much interest.

  ‘Why don’t you go and do the honours?’

  ‘I think I will.’

  We watched as Philip made his way in Sophie’s direction. I couldn’t help wishing that it was Ben making this first, gallant approach. Where was he, for heaven’s sake? Leaning on
the terrace wall, legs crossed, gassing to Nozz, was the answer.

  Martin joined us. He acknowledged our birthday wishes and then tilted his head in Philip’s direction and leered amiably at Dennis.

  ‘Sent in the crack troops, I see.…’

  ‘Don’t know about that,’ muttered Dennis.

  ‘How are you getting on?’ I enquired. ‘It must be quite a change for all three of you.’

  ‘Fine, fine, tremendous!’ declared Martin. ‘I’m a completely proud and doting father.’

  ‘She looks a lovely girl.’

  ‘Want to meet her?’ He grabbed my arm. ‘Come on—’

  ‘No, no, leave her be. Let her talk to the others of her own age. I have met her anyway,’ I assured him, ‘that night when I came over.’

  ‘A great girl,’ declared Martin, ‘and no slouch with cattle, either.’

  ‘What can he mean?’ asked Dennis as Martin moved on.

  ‘She’s going to train as a vet – working on one of Martin’s farms for the summer.’

  ‘Gosh. Impressive. Like some of these round-the-world yachts-women, look as if a puff of wind would blow them over, but they’re tough as old boots underneath …’ I smiled and waited, because he seemed to be about to add something, but all he did was peer again at Sophie and say: ‘ Extraordinary.’

  The Shaws arrived, and Desma towed Rick over to talk to us. Perhaps because of their relative youth they were not one of those married couples who felt it was their duty to separate the moment they entered the room.

  ‘Hey, Eve,’ she cried, ‘Rick says he met you on the cliff path – talk about a double life, I had no idea he yomped that far with Bryony on board.’

  ‘Well he does,’ I said, ‘ I can vouch for it. Springing up the slopes like a chamois, he was.’

  Not many men blush, but it was the second time I’d seen Rick colour up. ‘I like it up there.’

  ‘I tell you what,’ went on Desma, ‘it isn’t half nice to be child-free of a Sunday lunchtime. I love Bryony to bits, but you need to be away from them sometimes, don’t you?’ Dennis and I agreed that you did. ‘Of course I’m a late starter,’ she added, ‘ you can probably hardly remember this stage.’