Pulse (6 page)

‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked, timid as a first-timer in a book-signing queue.

‘Actually, I was wondering if you’d ever been jealous of me.’

‘Why were you wondering that?’

‘I don’t know. Just one of those stray thoughts that arrive.’

‘Good. Because it’s hardly kind.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘Well, if I admit I’ve been jealous of you, that makes me a mean-spirited friend. And if I say I haven’t, it sounds as if I’m so smug I can’t find anything in your life or your books worthy of jealousy.’

‘Jane, I’m sorry. Put like that – I’m a bitch. Apologies.’

‘Accepted. But since you ask …’

‘Are you sure I want to hear this now?’ Strange how there were still times when she underestimated Jane.

‘… I don’t know if “jealous” is the right word. But I was envious as hell about the Mike Nichols thing – until it went away. And I was pretty furious when you slept with my husband, but that was anger not jealousy, I think.’

‘I suppose that was tactless of me. But he was your ex-husband by then. And back in those days everyone slept with everyone, didn’t they?’ Beneath such worldliness, Alice felt pressing irritation. This again? It wasn’t as if they hadn’t discussed it to death at the time. And afterwards. And Jane had written that bloody novel about it, claiming that ‘David’ was just about to return to ‘Jill’ when ‘Angela’ intervened. What it didn’t say in the novel was that it was two years, not two months, on, and by that time ‘David’ was fucking half of west London as well as ‘Angela’.

‘It was tactless of you to
tell
me.’

‘Yes. I suppose I hoped you’d make me stop. I needed someone to make me stop. I was a mess at the time, wasn’t I?’ And they’d discussed that too. Why did some people forget what they needed to remember, and remember what was best forgotten?

‘Are you sure that was the reason?’

Alice took a breath. She was damned if she was going to carry on apologising for the rest of her life. ‘No, I can’t really remember what the reason was at the time. I’m just guessing. Post hoc,’ she added, as if that made it more authoritative, and closed the matter. But Jane wasn’t so easily put off.

‘I wonder if Derek did it because
he
wanted to make
me
jealous.’

Now Alice was feeling properly cross. ‘Well, thank you for that. I thought he did it because he couldn’t resist the many charms I had to offer in those days.’

Jane remembered how much décolletage Alice used to show. Nowadays it was all well-cut trouser suits with a cashmere sweater and a silk scarf knotted around the tortoise neck. Back then it had been more like someone holding up a fruit bowl in your direction. Yes, men were simple beings, and Derek was simpler than most, so maybe it was all really about a cunning bra.

Not entirely changing the subject, she found herself asking, ‘Are you going to write your memoirs, by the way?’

Alice shook her head. ‘Too depressing.’

‘Remembering all that stuff?’

‘No, not the remembering – or the making up. The publishing, the putting it out there. I can just about live with the fact that a distinctly finite number of people want to read my novels. But imagine writing your autobiography, trying to summarise all you’ve known and seen and felt and learnt and suffered in your fifty-odd years –’

‘
Fifty!
’

‘I only start counting at sixteen, didn’t you know? Before that I wasn’t sentient, let alone responsible for what I was.’

Perhaps that was the secret of Alice’s admirable, indefatigable poise. Every few years she drew a line under what had gone before and declined further responsibility. As with Derek. ‘Go on.’

‘… only to find that there was no one extra out there wanting to know. Or perhaps even fewer people.’

‘You could put lots of sex in it. They like the idea of old …’

‘Biddies?’ Alice raised an eyebrow. ‘Bats?’

‘… bats like us coming clean about sex. Old men look boastful when they remember their conquests. Old women come across as brave.’

‘Be that as it may, you’ve got to have slept with someone famous.’ Derek could never be accused of fame. Nor could Simon the novelist, let alone one’s own publisher. ‘Either that or you’ve got to have done something peculiarly disgusting.’

Jane thought her friend was being disingenuous. ‘Isn’t John Updike famous?’

‘He only twinkled at me.’

‘
Alice!
I saw you with my own eyes perched on his knee.’

Alice gave a tight smile. She could remember it all quite clearly: someone’s flat in Little Venice, the usual faces, a Byrds LP playing, a background smell of dope, the famous visiting writer, her own sudden forwardness. ‘I perched, as you put it, on his knee. And he twinkled at me. End of story.’

‘But you told me …’

‘No I didn’t.’

‘But you let me understand …’

‘Well, one has one’s pride.’

‘You mean?’

‘I
mean
he said he had an early start the next day. Paris, Copenhagen, wherever. Book tour. You know.’

‘The headache excuse.’

‘Precisely.’

‘Well,’ said Jane, trying to hide a sudden surge of jauntiness, ‘I’ve always believed that writers get more out of things going wrong than things going right. It’s the only profession in which failure can be put to good use.’

‘I don’t think “failure” exactly describes my moment with John Updike.’

‘Of course not, darling.’

‘And you are, if you don’t mind my saying so, coming on a little like a self-help book.’ Or like you sound on
Woman’s Hour
, brightly telling others how to live.

‘Am I?’

‘The point
is
, even if personal failure
can
be properly transformed into art, it still leaves you where you were when you started.’

‘And where’s that?’

‘Not having slept with John Updike.’

‘Well, if it’s any consolation, I’m jealous of him twinkling at you.’

‘You’re a friend,’ Alice replied, but her tone betrayed her.

They fell silent. Some large station went by.

‘Was that Swindon?’ Jane asked, to make it sound as if they weren’t quarrelling.

‘Probably.’

‘Do you think we have many readers in Swindon?’ Oh, come on, Alice, don’t get huffy on me. Or rather, don’t let’s get huffy on one another.

‘What do you think?’

Jane didn’t know what to think. She was half in a panic. She reached for a sudden fact. ‘It’s the largest town in England without a university.’

‘How do you know that?’ Alice asked, trying to appear envious.

‘Oh, it’s just the sort of thing I know. I expect I got it from
Moby-Dick
.’

They laughed contentedly, complicitly. Silence fell. After a while they passed Reading, and each gave the other credit for not pointing out the Gaol or going on about Oscar Wilde. Jane went to the loo, or perhaps to consult the minibar in her handbag. Alice found herself wondering if it were better to take life seriously or lightly. Or was that a false antithesis, merely a way of feeling superior? Jane, it seemed to her, took life lightly, until it went wrong, when she reached for serious solutions like God. Better to take life seriously, and reach for light solutions. Satire, for instance; or suicide. Why did people hold so fast to life, that thing they were given without being consulted? All lives were failures, in Alice’s reading of the world, and Jane’s platitude about turning failure into art was fluffy fantasy. Anyone who understood art knew that it never achieved what its maker dreamt for it. Art always fell short, and the artist, far from rescuing something from the disaster of life, was thereby condemned to be a double failure.

When Jane returned, Alice was busy folding up the sections of newspaper she would keep to read over her Sunday-night boiled egg. It was strange how, as you aged, vanity became less a vice and almost its opposite: a moral requirement. Their mothers would have worn a girdle or corset, but their mothers were long dead, and their girdles and corsets with them. Jane had always been overweight – that was one of the things Derek had complained about; and his habit of criticising his ex-wife either before or shortly after he and Alice went to bed together had been another reason for finishing with him. It wasn’t sisterliness, more disapproval of a lack of class in the man. Subsequently, Jane had got quite a bit larger, what with her drinking and a taste for things like buns at teatime. Buns! There really were a few things women should grow out of. Even if petty vices proved crowd-pleasing when coyly confessed into a microphone. And as for
Moby-Dick
, it had been perfectly clear to all and sundry that Jane had never read a word of it. Still, that was the constant advantage of appearing with Jane. It made her, Alice, look better: lucid, sober, well read, slim. How long would it be before Jane published a novel about an overweight writer with a drink problem who finds a god to approve of her? Bitch, Alice thought to herself. You really could do with the scourge of one of those old, punitive religions. Stoical atheism is too morally neutral for you.

Guilt made her hug Jane a little longer as they neared the head of the taxi queue at Paddington.

‘Are you going to the Authors of the Year party at Hatchards?’

‘I was an Author of the Year last year. This year I’m a Forgotten Author.’

‘Now, don’t get maudlin, Jane. But since you’re not going, I shan’t either.’ Alice said this firmly, while aware that she might later change her mind.

‘So where are we off to next?’

‘Is it Edinburgh?’

‘Could be. That’s your taxi.’

‘Bye, partner. You’re the best.’

‘So are you.’

They kissed again.

Later, over her boiled egg, Alice found her mind drifting from the cultural pages to Derek. Yes, he had been an oaf, but one with such an appetite for her that it had all seemed not worth questioning. And at the time Jane didn’t appear to mind; only later did she start to become resentful. Alice wondered if this was something to do with Jane, or with the nature of time; but she failed to reach a conclusion, and went back to the newspaper.

Jane, meanwhile, in another part of London, was watching television, and picking up cheese on toast with her fingers, not caring where the crumbs fell. Her hand occasionally slipped a little on the wine glass. Some female Euro-politician on the news reminded her of Alice, and she thought about their long friendship, and how, when they were on stage together, Alice always played the senior partner, and she always acquiesced. Was this because she had a subservient nature, or because she thought it made her, Jane, come across as nicer? Unlike Alice, she never minded owning up to weaknesses. So maybe it was time to admit the gaps in her reading. She could start in Edinburgh. That was a trip to look forward to. She imagined these jaunts of theirs going on into the future until … what? The television screen was replaced by an image of herself dropping dead on a near-empty train coming back from somewhere. What did they do when that happened? Stop the train – at Swindon, say – and take the body off, or just prop her up in the seat as if she was asleep or drunk and continue on to London? There must be a protocol written down somewhere. But how could they give a place of death if she was on a moving train at the time? And what would Alice do, if her body was taken off? Would she loyally accompany her dead friend, or find some high-minded argument for staying on the train? It suddenly seemed very important to be reassured that Alice wouldn’t abandon her. She looked across at the telephone, wondering what Alice was doing at that moment. But then she imagined the small, disapproving silence before Alice answered her question, a silence which would somehow imply that her friend was needy, self-dramatising and overweight. Jane sighed, reached for the remote, and changed channel.

At Phil & Joanna’s 2: Marmalade

I
T WAS THE KIND
of mid-February which reminds the British why so many of their compatriots chose emigration. Snow had fallen intermittently since October, the sky was a dull aluminium, and the television news reporting flash floods, toddlers being swept away and pensioners paddled to safety. We had talked about SAD, the credit crunch, the rise in unemployment and the possibility of increased social tension.

‘All I’m saying is, it’s not surprising if foreign firms operating here fly in foreign labour when there are piles of job-seekers at home.’

‘And all I’m saying is, there are more Brits working in Europe than Europeans working here.’

‘Did you see that Italian worker giving the finger to photographers?’

‘Yes, I’m all for importing foreign labour if it looks like that.’

‘Don’t give her any more, Phil.’

‘Without sounding too much like the prime minister or one of those papers we don’t read, at the moment I think it should be a case of British jobs for British workers.’

‘And European wine for British wives.’

‘That’s a non sequitur.’

‘No, it’s a postprandial sequitur. Amounts to the same thing.’

‘As your resident alien –’

‘Pray silence for the spokesman of our former colony.’

‘… I recall when all you guys were arguing about joining the single currency. And I was thinking: what’s their problem? I’ve just driven to the middle of Italy and back using a single currency and it’s called Mastercard.’

‘If we joined the euro the pound would be worth less.’

‘Surely, if we joined the euro –’

‘Joke.’

‘You’ve got the same colour passports. Why not cut to the chase and say you’re all Europeans?’

‘Because then we wouldn’t be allowed to make jokes about foreigners.’

‘Which is after all a central British tradition.’

‘Look, go to any city in Europe and the stores are more or less the same. At times you wonder where you are. Internal borders hardly exist. Plastic’s replacing money, the internet’s replacing everything else. And more and more people speak English, which makes it even easier. So why not admit the reality?’

‘But that’s another British trait we cling to. Not accepting reality.’