Olivia’s Luck (2000) (14 page)

Moments later Nanette opened the front door and my high spirits took a dive.

“Darling!” She stepped back for me to admire. She was dressed in an extraordinary sort of embroidered silk pyjama ensemble; her neck weighed down with heavy silver beads; her feet skippy in floppy gold sandals; her toenails bright red and dazzling. Rude not to comment.

“Nanette, you look…amazing.”

“Isn’t it divine? Roger had the whole lot sent across from Hong Kong and I simply
had
to wear it. It’s desperately see-through, of course, so I’m wearing a thong – Roger’s idea – although he’s devastated he’s not here to see it. Poor bunny, he’s still stuck out there in the Far East, I’m afraid. I can’t
wait
to get him back and kiss him to bits!”

“Ah, so he’s not here?” That was something of a bonus, anyway. Roger was her current amour, a computer salesman: smooth, dark, and very, very softly spoken – a deliberate ploy, as I’d discovered to my cost one day, when I’d leant in close to catch his drift and a hand slipped up my skirt.

“No, still trying to screw money out of the slit-eyed nips, as Prince Philip would say, but I have got some
super
people for you to meet, Olivia. Come on, come on through!”

I followed her jangling beads and floppy sandals down her shiny parquet hall and into her ornate, swagged, dragged, beribboned and bowed drawing room. Four people stood in a silent, awkward circle around a glass coffee table, each clutching a glass of pinkish wine and gazing through the table to the carpet. Nanette clapped her hands prettily, as if to break up the bustling chatter.

“Everyone! Oo-oo! This is Olivia, my very good friend from just along The Crescent, and Olivia, these dear people are Cliff and Yolanda Blair, who are desperately old friends of mine – ”

“No relation!” piped up Yolanda, “but I’m a big fan of Cherie’s!” She pronounced it like the drink, but it was clearly her habitual opening gambit so I smiled politely.

“– and Sebastian, who, actually, you
might
know because he lives in The Crescent.” Nanette always referred to The Crescent by its name, never ‘the road’. “And Malcolm here, who if I was a single girl I’d want to keep
all
to myself because he’s a complete and utter cutie-pie and makes an absolute
fortune
at the BMW concession in Luton!”

I wanted to turn and run right now, but we all smiled and I shook hands; first with Yolanda, a broad-beamed lady, who managed to prise her hand from Cliff’s arm for literally two seconds before firmly replacing it, then with Cliff who was tiny and frail and failed to meet my eye, then Malcolm who was very golf-club tie and belted grey slacks, and finally with Sebastian, tall, pale, with watchful slanting eyes and rather too long dark hair, and who, now you come to mention it, I did recognise.

When I’d first moved in here, Nanette had made it her business to bustle straight over with a kettle and a fruit cake. She’d introduced herself as ‘a very merry widow’ and swept around my scullery in a full-length fur coat. I later discovered that Nanette nearly always wore her fur coat, even in a heat wave, and even after the nasty incident in the high street when a militant youth had approached her shouting, “And what poor creature had to die just so you could put that on your back!” To which she’d replied, “Er, my mother-in-law” – yes, even after that little debacle she kept it firmly round her bony shoulders, and on that, our very first meeting, had sunk down into it in my Lloyd Loom chair and proceeded to give me the lowdown on the entire neighbourhood. This one, Sebastian, was apparently, ‘decidedly odd’. Not only, she’d hissed to me over the Nescafe and the fruit cake, did he pace up and down at his window all day long, waving his arms about, mouthing obscenities at anyone who passed and shaking his head like a mad dog, but he’d also been seen squeezing the grapefruit in Waitrose, wearing his pyjamas. Apparently he refused to answer if anyone spoke to him in the street, and at thirty-six, still lived at home with his mother. I’d already spotted his mother actually: a thin, pinched little woman who hurried everywhere, her head well in advance of her bent waist and her scuttling legs, always hastening back to her house with her shopping, slamming the door behind her and giving very black looks to anyone who caught her eye. They were Irish, apparently, had only been in The Crescent about six months, and according to Nanette, the
en dit
was that since they were only renting, most people were keen they didn’t stay. In some small way, the son apparently taught at the boys’ school in town, but Nanette reckoned it was just a way of integrating him back into the community. And now here he was, at my left elbow, staring distractedly at a spot somewhere above the top of my head.

“Now, you’ll have a little drinky, Olivia?” Nanette fluttered her hand bossily in Malcolm’s direction. “Do the honours, Male, there’s a love. It’s Kir, Olivia – I don’t know if you’ve had that before? And then if you’ll excuse me for just two sees, I’m going to put the finishing touches to the canapes in the kitchen. Don’t fight over her now, will you, boys!”

Well, that surely put the kiss of death on any intelligent conversation. We stood about a bit more in the awkward circle, and somehow, Malcolm and I managed to exchange a few, polite words about the traffic congestion in the city, Sebastian continued to stare above my head, and Yolanda persisted to whisper urgently – and in my view, rudely – in Cliff’s ear. After several minutes of torture I made my excuses and escaped, on the pretext of helping in the kitchen.

“Nanette!” I hissed as she squirted some squiggles of paté out of a tube and on to some tired-looking Ritz biscuits. “What the bloody hell’s going on here!”

She paused mid-squiggle, raised heavily made-up eyes. “Sorry?”

“Well, isn’t that the arm-waver in there? Are you trying to set me up with a nutter?”

“Ah!” She put the tube down. “Yes, Olivia, listen – I was going to warn you about him – ”

“It is him, isn’t it!”

“Yes it is, but listen, he’s fine, honestly. I had a chat to him in the street the other day and he was wearing perfectly ordinary clothes and I really think he’s absolutely normal!”

“Oh, come on, you’ve changed your tune! You told me he was certifiable!”

“Well I know, but I really think that was just a phase or something. After all, we all get depressed, don’t we? And when I saw him in the street I did just feel a tiny bit sorry for him, and anyway,” she went on hurriedly, “Gerald cancelled at the last moment so I just sort of asked him, otherwise you’d have been the odd girl. He’s terribly shy and lonely, Olivia. He just needs bringing out.”

“Well, not by me!” I hissed. “I might bring out a lunatic!”

“Ssh, he’ll hear you. Well, OK, Malcolm then? Christ, I gave you a choice! Malcolm’s lovely, known him for years, he used to be in oil with my brother – hair oil, actually – but now he’s with BMW. He’s a complete catch, you know.”

“Nanette, I do not want to ‘catch’ anyone! I wouldn’t have come if I’d known you were matchmaking!”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Olivia. You can’t hunker down like a hermit for ever. You’ve got to live a little. Johnny has to be shown that you’re a very desirable woman!” And with that she picked up her plate of paté and marched past me with her canapes into the drawing room.

If drinks were tortuous, supper was worse. I made a mental note to tell Imogen and Molly that my foresight had been extraordinary: it was far worse than an evening with Brenda Archdale. Malcolm, beside me, of hair oil and now BMW fame, told me in confidential I-wouldn’t-share-this-with-just-anyone tones, exactly why the sixteen-valve fuel-injected 318IS was a superior machine to the 1SE, and how he could never go back to an eight-valve even though it was more competitively priced. He even hinted that if I played my cards right, he might take me for a test drive.

“You get sleeker body styling,” he murmured confidentially, ticking off the points on his fingers, “you get alloy wheels, you get sports suspension, and you get all that for less spondulos than any other car in its class. What more could you want?”

“Very little,” I agreed. He had the most enormous open pores on his nose.

“And it does nought to sixty in 9.7 seconds, too.” He sat back in his chair and raised his eyebrows in awe. “Incredible, isn’t it?” He leant forward urgently again. “And you see, the mistake you little ladies make is that you think you don’t
need
something with that much poke, am I right?”

“Quite possibly,” I murmured, maniacally smearing cucumber mousse around my plate, longing for oblivion, longing for going-home time.

“Take you, for instance, tootling off to the shops, taking the kiddies to school – what car do you drive?”

“Hmm?” I raised my eyes from the psychedelic pattern I’d created on my plate, and suddenly remembered Johnny’s garage. My tired eyes flashed in their brave old sockets.

“I’ve got a Bristol and a Lagonda 3-litre Drophead Coupe.”

As he spat his cucumber mousse across the table, I turned coolly to Sebastian.

“I gather you’re a teacher,” I said gently. After Malcolm I could be kind. I could bring him out, just an inch or two.

“Well, yes, occasionally. Just a couple of days a month really.”

Ah, so it was like day release.

“That’s good. You must enjoy that?”

“Yes, I do.”

“It’s nice to get out, isn’t it?”

He frowned at this. Didn’t answer. Too difficult perhaps. I persevered.

“And what is it you teach, exactly?” Even more softly.

He paused, perhaps trying to remember. “Music,” he intoned eventually.

I clasped my hands and contrived to look enchanted. “Music! Lovely! Songs, and things?”

“Um, some…songs, yes.”

“Super!”

A silence ensued.

“And do you play?”

“Sorry?”

“An instrument, you know, the violin or – ” oh God, no – “the recorder? I used to play the recorder!”

“Really.” Rather drily perhaps.

“Yes, at school. Not any more. If people ask “What do you play?” I just say, ‘Oh, the fool!’”

Suddenly I cringed. Oh God, you idiot, Olivia – the fool! He’ll think you’re taking the mickey! I cast around desperately.

“I – um, and – how is your mother?”

He turned almost 180 degrees to look at me. Really rather closely. “She’s well, thank you. How’s yours?”

“Oh! Oh, fine. No, no the reason I ask is because I see her around quite a lot.”

“Who?”

“Your mother.”

He stared at me with his slanting, dark eyes, as if I had two heads, but happily Yolanda was causing a diversion on the other side of the table and the silence was averted. Nanette was bustling around her, changing plates.

“I’m
so
sorry, Nanette, it’s such a bore, but they do say no liver, no blue cheese, no unpasteurised products and absolutely nothing that’s been in the microwave. I take it the mousse had raw egg in? Ah yes, well, that’s why I left it, and I’m afraid this hollandaise sauce is out, but if you scrape if off I can eat the salmon, and then what is it to follow…chocolate pots? More raw egg! Gosh, anyone would think you were doing this on purpose, you naughty girl! No, no, don’t worry about me. Bumpy and me will be fine with an apple or something for pudding, won’t we, bumpy?”

She patted what I now realised was a burgeoning stomach and smiled smugly at Cliff, the father, it transpired, of her five children. For these weren’t newly weds who couldn’t keep their hands off each other as I’d originally imagined, but a fabulously fecund couple who were about to inflict their sixth child on the world.

“I’ll take the sauce off,” muttered Nanette, removing the plate.

“Oh dear, what a shame, and it looks so lovely, but one really can’t be too careful and I’d never forgive myself if anything happened. Five perfectly healthy ones and then God forbid disaster should strike. Has anyone else got little ones here? Nanette, yours are all grown up now, aren’t they?”

“Er, well. Not so grown up.”

“But teenagers, surely? At university?”

“Just.” Nanette ground her teeth and, as she replaced the salmon, I could have sworn she wiped a smear of hollandaise back on top.

Malcolm held up his hands and was quick to claim absolutely no offspring whatsoever, so no patérnity suits, please, ho, ho, ho. Sebastian failed to answer and looked at her blankly, and I was forced into admitting I had one.

“Just one? A baby then, is it? The first?”

“No, she’s ten.”

“Ah, I see!” Yolanda laid down her knife and fork for dramatic emphasis. “Oh, I
am
sorry.”

All eyes were on me. “Well, no, please don’t be,” I stammered nervously.

“Oh, but I know what it’s like.” She leant forward, all concern. “Friends of ours have been to hell and back with it, haven’t they, Cliff? All those blood tests, laparoscopics, Clomid injections, in and out of the infertility clinic – not to mention poor Bernard doing unmentionable things into a test tube with a porno mag – and all for absolutely no reason! You see, quite often,
just
like you, a child has already been conceived – as Bernard and Gill’s child was –
totally
naturally, and there’s no rhyme or reason why another one hasn’t popped along after it! The one thing that everyone
does
say, though,” she confided, lowering her voice, “is to relax about it. The more het up you get, the more it’s just not going to happen, and d’you know, that’s absolutely true. The number of couples I know who’ve adopted as a last resort and then – hey presto – the wife gets pregnant! They’ve stopped
thinking
about it, you see, stopped fretting, and another little tip – even more extraordinary – get a puppy. Sounds odd, I know, but it’s the stroking apparently, the caring, the release of all your pent-up maternal instincts. You see, you’re looking after something tiny and vulnerable and – what? Nanette, did you kick me? Am I opening my big mouth again?
Oh!
” Her hand flew to her big mouth. “Oh gosh, I
am
sorry. Nanette did say, but I forgot.” She puckered her brow in consternation. “You’ve had a sadness, haven’t you?”

Naturally, I’d been busy blushing away throughout her weighty monologue, but this last remark really shot an extra bathful of blood up the back of my legs. A sadness. Christ!