Female Friends (25 page)

Chloe hasn’t eaten a morsel of her food. It congeals on her plate. She tells herself that Oliver does not mean what he is saying, and that tomorrow he will be friendliness and sweetness itself. After such outbursts he usually is. So long as she can hold her tongue all will yet be well.

Chloe
I don’t take any notice of what they say, Oliver. You know I don’t.

Oliver
Then why bother to go all the way to London to see them? If you must gad about why didn’t you go to a matinee and keep up on your culture like all the other middle-aged mums?

Chloe
You didn’t seem to mind me going this morning, Oliver.

No, she should not have said that.

Oliver
I’m not your keeper. You do what you want and go where you want. So long as I’m not expected to look after the children. What really upsets me is you coming back from London. Why didn’t you stay away?

Chloe
Please. Oliver.

Oliver
Oh, listen to you! Grovel, shmovel. I wish you’d find yourself a lover, you mightn’t spread so much gloom and despondency around. You used to be good at that. What’s the matter, isn’t Patrick interested any more?

Chloe
I haven’t seen Patrick for nine years.

Oliver
No. You can’t achieve any kind of friendship with a man, it seems. You see sex in everything. If you did see him, you couldn’t appreciate him, Chloe, you’d just fall down in front of him and open your legs as you did before and reduce everything about him to the banal and the ridiculous.

Françoise
Oliver, I am afraid you are being unkind.

Oliver
Shut up.

Chloe
He’s mad, Françoise. Take no notice.

Tears of rage and misery flow down her cheeks. He’s smiling.

Oliver
No, you’re mad. Sitting here at my table when you’re not even wanted any more. You have no place here. You don’t even do the cooking. You embarrass everyone, hanging on the way you do.

Her hand moves to pick up a knife. She thinks she will kill him. He bangs his hand down on hers so that it hits the table with a thwack.

Oliver
You want to kill me now. You murderess. You aborter of my children.

She runs from the room. The pain in her hand is intense.

Oliver (After her)
And don’t think you can have Imogen. She’s mine legally, you know.

Inigo turns the television louder. He cannot hear his parents with his ears, but he hears them with his heart. There is a flickering before his eyes—the beginning of a migraine, he fears. He suffers from migraine, taking after his father.

I have heard it all a hundred times before, he thinks. The details are different, but the essence is the same. He looks forward to leaving home, and is glad for Imogen’s sake—he is very fond of Imogen—that she goes to bed early.

C
HLOE LIES ON HER
bed and cries.

Chloe refrains from running back into the kitchen and uttering all the retorts, taunts and insults which she could so easily deliver.

Chloe is conscious of a certain sense of victory, having put Oliver so firmly in the wrong. Oliver has behaved badly. There is, for once, no possible doubt about it. Even he must see it. If she had not picked up the knife her conduct would have been perfect. Still, Oliver damaged her hand, thus neutralizing her offence. So long as he sees it like that.

It does not occur to Chloe that perhaps Oliver means what he says. He has said it before, and hasn’t meant it.

Oliver, poor Oliver, has cried wolf too often.

Chloe falls into a half doze. Her misery drifts with her; the house seems to fall in upon her, its beams eaten through with distress.

Grace once ran to Chloe and Oliver in the middle of the night, in such a state as Chloe is now, but with rather more reason.

Picture it. Oliver and Chloe in the front of the car—their first car, a Ford Anglia—reasonably rational and kindly people. A happy and loving couple, though with the pleasure of their days now disturbed by the distress of their friend, Grace, who huddles in the back of the car, gasping and sobbing with hatred and grief.

They are on their way to Christie’s house in Kensington to retrieve Piers and Petra. Christie took them out of school that afternoon. Stole them.

Christie and Grace are separated. Grace lives with the children in a cheap two-roomed flat (‘cooped up’ Christie claims in Court. ‘A normal home’ Grace maintains, though through a free Legal Aid solicitor, who has not the flair of Christie’s team of legal advisers). The battle over the children wages to and fro: files thicken; writs fly. He doesn’t want the children, Grace maintains. All he wants is her unhappiness. She’s unfit, he maintains. A whore. A criminal lunatic, she says, but who’s going to believe that? He doesn’t love the children, she repeats.

And indeed little Piers and little Petra, rocks in two languages, shrink even further back into themselves when Christie appears, bearing gifts for which he expects to be thanked by formal letter. Christie believes in healthy discipline and a clear organizational framework as the key to successful child rearing. Their little anxious eyes peer out from beneath furrowed brows. Piers sulks and Petra whines. It is as if they have decided that their best defence against their parents’ battles is to present themselves as a prize scarcely worth the winning.

Nevertheless Grace loves them immoderately. Now he has stolen them. Grace has been to the police station but they will do nothing for her. That afternoon Christie, unbeknownst to her, became their legal guardian. He has already, forestalling her, been to the police and shown them the Court Order, properly signed, properly witnessed, properly come by. Grace can appeal if she wants. Another six months, at least, during which time Christie has care, custody and control.

Oliver, Chloe and Grace reach Christie’s house. It is in a quiet, almost remote avenue in Kensington. Here the rich live, enclosed. The house is, allegedly, burglar proof. It stands on a corner, its windows set in a stuccoed concrete face, its garden enclosed by a high brick wall. It was built at the turn of the century by a dishonest industrialist with a paranoiac fear of thieves. As their car parks outside, guard dogs in the garden begin to bark.

Grace rings the bell. The dogs stop barking, begin again. No-one comes.

Oliver, standing on the roof of the car, can see into the high windows, brilliant with light.

He can see pictures on the walls and the backs of chairs and people moving inside. It seems warm, cosy and prosperous in there, and so it is. If the curtains are left undrawn it is from sheer indifference to the outside world.

Oliver, Chloe and Grace ring and ring the door-bell and bang upon the knocker. Still there is no response. Oliver goes to the corner phone-box and telephones the number Grace, her fingers trembling, writes down for him. When the phone rings, someone lifts the receiver off the hook. That’s all.

The top window opens and closes again. Christie’s hand, Grace swears. Something flutters down, and falls at Grace’s feet, as she clutches the railings and screams and shakes her fist. No-one from all those other houses comes to see or intervene or help. They remain closed, and silent, and shut, as always, to the implorings and imprecations and dying desperations of those outside. All’s well within.

Grace has tears pouring down her cheeks. She seems scarcely human.

‘Petra, Petra,’ she shrieks. ‘You bastard,’ she cries. ‘You bastard. Christie, you murderer. I’ll kill you.’

‘If she behaves like this,’ says Oliver wretchedly, ‘perhaps Christie’s right, perhaps she’s not fit—’ but he knows himself, how else can Grace behave?

What fluttered down is a narrow strip of yellow ribbon. Petra’s hair ribbon. Christie’s token of mirth and victory.

Oliver thinks Grace will have a heart attack. She has collapsed on the ground. She is screaming.

‘Get an ambulance, for God’s sake,’ Oliver says to Chloe. ‘That bastard Christie, it’s too much. We’ll all be locked up—’

Chloe phones. Grace picks herself up, crawls towards the house, scrabbling at the cream stucco until the walls and her hands are pink with plaster and blood mixed.

When the ambulance comes she seems surprised to see it.

‘I don’t need that,’ she says. ‘Why should I need that? I’m perfectly all right.’

The ambulance goes away. Grace stays the night with Chloe and Oliver. In the morning Grace seems composed, even cheerful.

‘The children are much better off with Christie,’ Grace says. ‘I can have a much better time without them, can’t I. That little flat is dreadful.’

And so it is, and so she can, and so she does. It’s as if part of her brain has been burnt out.

Later, when Grace becomes pregnant by Patrick, it is Chloe who persuades her not to have an abortion. She believes vaguely that the burnt out parts will be reactivated, but of course they aren’t—what’s dead is dead, and childbirth may be a miracle for the child but it is not for the mother. And this is why Chloe now feels Stanhope to be her responsibility; her fault.

And indirectly, why Chloe feels responsible for Kevin and Kestrel, whose mother might still be alive, if it had not been for Stanhope’s birth.

M
IND YOU, CHRISTIE WAS
right to be angry with Grace.

Grace slapped his face at a party, and humiliated him in public, and that was the start of their troubles. Petra was two, at the time, so such mad behaviour could not even be attributed to post-natal mania.

It was not because Christie was flirting with an elderly titled lady in a corner—that kind of thing seldom worried her—that Grace slapped Christie’s face. It was because, having had a little too much to drink, she had decided all of a sudden that he had no business to be at the party at all.

‘You murderer,’ she cried, ‘you mass murderer,’ and Christie had to hustle her off home in a taxi. He couldn’t even use his own car because the chauffeur had been instructed to circle the block until midnight, and was nowhere in sight.

A week previously one of Christie’s hotels had fallen down, the day before its official opening, killing fifty-nine people, and injuring twelve. Amongst the dead were:

Two LCC Building Inspectors, called by the Manager to inspect the cracks which had appeared that day in the foyer ceiling.

The Manager himself.

Assorted interior decorators, florists, publicity men, developers, architects.

A conscientious pop singer supervising the setting up of amplifiers.

And the destruction was so total, and even the rubble so pulverized, that no amount of sifting the evidence proved anything much to anyone. And the architects’ plans and Christie’s specifications had to be dug up from all kinds of remote files, and that of course took time. The Inquiry was postponed.

Not one of my hotels, said Christie, to the Press and everyone. The architects’ hotel, the owner’s hotel, the public’s hotel. Not
my
hotel, and besides, everyone knows it was a strategically placed bomb which brought the building down. And off Christie went, busier than ever; to the office, and to clients’ meetings; and to parties and dinners, without, it seemed, a spark of grief or anxiety or remorse.

Christie’s telephone bills trebled that week, however, and Christie drew several thousands of pounds from the bank in cash, and sent off many cases of whisky to all kinds of addresses. Grace knew, for she helped him at home with various accounts which he did not, he said, trust his office to do properly. She would transfer certain figures from one ledger to another under Christie’s direction. Grace enjoyed doing it—she had an eye for the shape of figures on the page, and she wrote the numbers with all the delicacy of a Chinese calligrapher.

Now, at this latest party, as she watches Christie chatting up a blue-haired lady in a corner—wife of an LCC Alderman—she sees him as if with someone else’s eyes. The dead Manager’s wife, perhaps, or even a florist’s widow. She slaps him. Slaps Christie, murderer.

On the way home from the party, in the taxi, she can feel Christie trembling. She is surprised; her own anger has been shortlived, springing out of nowhere, it seems, and vanishing as quickly. She is herself again. The spirit which possessed her, so momentarily but so effectively, has passed on.

‘I’m sorry,’ Grace says. ‘I don’t know what came over me. It was as if I was someone else. Of course it wasn’t your fault that hotel fell down. And you only knew one or two of them, anyway, and only in a business sense.’

But he isn’t satisfied. He is savage.

‘Hold your tongue in public, you bitch,’ he says. ‘Or do you want me in prison? Is that it? It’s costing me enough as it is; do I have to bribe you too? What do you want, diamonds, mink?’

She shrivels up. And things have been going so well, too. She is such an ornament in his life, she knows it, so loving, so happy, so pleased to be married, with her long slim legs and her wide cool eyes, running the house like clockwork, flattering the right guests, discouraging the wrong ones; loving the children, always there to admire her husband’s resourcefulness and guile, his shrewdness and his wealth; to listen to his plans and sit out his indignations; never nagging when he’s too busy to get home, confident that home is where he’d rather be than anywhere (and so it is—oh, marvel!). Never critical, never complaining, yet with a whole host of trivial likes and dislikes with which she regales and enchants him. Kippers she finds repugnant but she adores Velasquez. Wet leaves depress her, kittens cheer her up. A man without a tie is unmanly, braces are ridiculous, belts erotic. And so on.

And to think that he, Christie, owns all this rampant femininity, that he can take his pleasure in it as and when he chooses—even in the afternoons, if he wants; if only he could spare the time from work.