Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

Chapter Twenty-two

However good Nathan was at calling in favours, it was difficult to arrange a party for Poppy and Richard at short notice. In the end, Simon Proffitt offered us his art gallery in Kensington, which had a large conservatory tacked on to its flank. It was a beautiful place, and at night it glittered with candles and tiny white lights. Simon had a theory that people will always buy if their senses are seduced. I saw his point.

The invitations were dispatched for the first week in December.

‘I take it that Poppy will be wearing white.’ Ianthe tackled what was, for her, the important question of colour.

‘A bit late for that, Mum.’

‘You wore white,’ she pointed out.

The party was not to be elaborate but we would serve the best wine we could afford, provide good eats and a decent wedding cake. I had several perfectly polite telephone conversations with Nathan about the details, but he sounded tired and strained.

Poppy remained in Lakey Street and Richard came and went, which did not give me any chance to get to know him. He hated to be pinned down, Poppy explained. When he was staying, I often heard them talking late into the night. Once, I woke and sat bolt upright, for I was sure I had heard Poppy cry out.

Gradually, the spare room filled up with clothes and presents, and the rose painting was obscured by them. But I was happy arranging the party and, best of all, Poppy behaved like a conventional bride. Excited and terrified, she lost weight, groaned over thank-you letters, tried out several hairstyles, made an appointment for contact lenses and bought an extravagantly stylish dress.

The night before the party, Sam arrived from Bath. He kissed Poppy and congratulated her. She kissed him back. ‘How’s Alice?’

Sam tensed. ‘Fine. She’ll be up tomorrow.’ He took off his jacket and draped it over a kitchen chair. ‘She’s thinking of taking off to America for a year or two. Probably a good thing.’

‘Yes,’ Poppy said. ‘What a good idea.’

Sam looked suspicious but let it pass. Alice thinks this country is dying on its feet. She feels we’re a can’t society, not a can-do, and it’s best to get out.’

‘She can vote,’ I said, drily.

Sam shrugged. ‘Politicians. What can they achieve? The only effective opposition is the press, and God help us there.’

I sat down and cupped my cheek in my hand. ‘Will… will you go with her?’

But Sam had got the bit between his teeth. ‘Rules and regulations are mad, public transport chaotic, the roads impossible. Politicians lie. Look at France, Switzerland. They manage to run themselves. If I rendered to my employer the kind of service that the government gives me in return for my taxes, I would have got the sack long ago.’ Then he redeemed himself by grinning. ‘So it’s laughter in the dark.’

Sam’s world-view was decidedly acid. Presumably, this was an accurate reflection of the state of affairs between him and Alice.

Shortly afterwards Richard arrived. He had gone up north to escort his parents to London and to settle them into a hotel. Poppy let him in and brought him into the kitchen.

‘Hallo, Mother-in-law’ Richard kissed my cheek. ‘I’m sorry I’m late.’

I disgraced myself by staring. Gone were Richard’s flowing locks, replaced by a haircut that looked, frankly, expensive. Vanished, too, were the Indian garments, usurped by a linen suit that looked designer. The duffer in beads looked sleek, groomed, almost dangerous.

His smile had a mocking edge. ‘My wedding present to my bride. Like Samson, I have sacrificed my hair to a woman.’

‘Not…’ I collected my wits ‘… that you will be enfeebled.’

‘No, but I might bring the house down.’

‘I hope you’ll spare Lakey Street,’ I said hastily, poured him a glass of wine and announced that supper was ready.

‘Not for me.’ Richard accepted the wine. ‘I’ve eaten.’

‘Nor me,’ cried Poppy. ‘I couldn’t eat a thing.’

‘Sam?

He shook his head. ‘I had a huge late lunch.’

I surveyed the chicken chasseur and mousse à l’abricot. ‘Darling Mum,’ cried Poppy, grabbing both my hands and looking deep into my eyes, ‘you needn’t have bothered.’

The three of them drifted into the sitting room and I could hear them talking. Left in the kitchen, I dismantled the laid places at the walnut table and stowed the food in the freezer. I put away the creamy linen napkins and mats, and replaced the white china bowl in the cupboard.

Quel see-saw, as Mazarine would say. One minute you’re needed every minute by your children, the next not.

I ran my hand over the table. Under my fingers, it felt like satin. I opened the store cupboard and sniffed cinnamon and vanilla. Nathan and I should have been spending these final moments before Poppy’s send-off in talking over arrangements, fussing about the guests, going over the speech, telling each other that we would be fine. But we were not. All the same, I had a presentiment that Nathan and I would go on insisting that we were rid of each other yet continually be brought up short against the fact that we were not.

Before the guests arrived the family gathered in the gallery. Ianthe had chosen a pistachio-green dress, which was a little startling, but Poppy, eyes huge with the new contact lenses, looked quite different and dazzling in the Vivienne Westwood with cream roses in her hair.

I was wearing my French underwear, of course, a skirt and jacket with a scoop neckline and nipped-in waist that Madame Zou Zou had fitted on me so carefully. I have to say that I took deep delight in its clever and feline artistry. Nathan was in his best dark suit and a silk tie. He kissed everyone and told Poppy she looked magnificent. She hugged him with the old tenderness and pride.

‘Goodness,’ said Ianthe, who, I noticed, had not returned Nathan’s kiss, ‘you do look tired, Nathan.’

Nathan frowned. ‘Work, as ever,’ he said, and turned to Richard. ‘Have you any idea where you two are going to live yet?’

‘I’m on the case,’ said the bridegroom. ‘It should be sorted by the new year.’

‘What?’

‘The flat in Kensington.’ Richard was cool.

Nathan’s patent amazement was not flattering. ‘Bought? How?’

‘The usual way’ There was just a hint of danger in Richard’s demeanour. ‘Two bedrooms. It should do us for the time being. I rang my father while we were in Thailand and instructed him.’

‘Oh, good. I just wondered if I should offer some help… but no need.’

‘No,’ agreed Richard.

This was certainly not the tree-hugging, spirit-of-earth’s-sanctity persona to which Nathan and I subscribed. Richard added, ‘I’ll be starting the job in a couple of weeks.’

Usually so good on his feet, Nathan only managed, ‘Where?’

‘Arthur Andersen. Have you heard of them?’

‘Why didn’t you warn me?’ Nathan hissed at me as soon we could exchange a private word. ‘He’s got it all sorted, and there’s no need for the heavy-father act.’

‘Shush.’ I touched his arm. ‘The guests are arriving.’

The waitresses moved into place and poured champagne with a soft hiss. The massed candles glowed. In the middle of the room, Poppy swirled round and round, gripping Richard’s arm, and I caught my breath at the beauty and colour.

Nathan was collared by Clive Berry, one of his cousins who lived in Lincolnshire. They launched into the route conversation.

‘You came by the A12?’ Nathan was surprised. ‘Didn’t you barrel through Boston and Eye?’

‘Hallo, Clive.’ We had known each other a long time, and I gave him a kiss. From having been perfectly at ease Clive tensed, for he was not sure how to handle the situation. Taking pity, I tried to defuse it: ‘Have you seen the bride?’

At that point, Poppy grabbed me, ‘Oh, hallo, Clive. Nice to see you. Speak later, I must just have a word with Mum,’ and dragged me over to the comparative privacy of the catering area. ‘Mum,’ she said furiously, ‘who said that woman could come?’

‘Which woman?’

‘Dad’s woman. She’s here. How could she?’ Poppy’s mouth was pale and set. ‘I so wanted it to be just us. I don’t want people noticing and talking.’

‘Minty? Are you quite sure?’ I stroked Poppy’s cheek to calm her. ‘Of course she wasn’t invited. If she’s here, I’ll get rid of her.’

Rubbing at the tattoo on her finger had become a habit with Poppy and I put my hand over hers. ‘I wanted it to be as if you and Dad hadn’t split up and we could pretend we were a family. I don’t like everyone seeing that he’s an old goat.’

‘Rose… and the lovely bride.’ Sally Curry hove into view, trailing in her wake a husband who worked with Nathan on the paper. ‘Your dress is wonderful, Poppy, and it’s such a smart setting. How did you do it?’

‘It’s easier than arranging a full-scale wedding.’ My disloyal daughter pulled her hand free and faded expertly away leaving Sally, who rattled with gold jewellery, to focus on me.

‘But given everything…’ she said sympathetically. Sally’s husband nudged his wife but she ploughed on: ‘Miles and I are sorry we haven’t been in touch but Miles says,’ she glanced at the appalled Miles, ‘Miles says that, in these cases, one has to choose. You can’t be friends with both and since Miles…’

I did not blame Sally Curry. Loyalty to the side that provides the bread and butter is, perhaps, not the best loyalty but it is sensible. All the same, I took a small revenge. As we weren’t really friends, Sally, that’s perfectly all right. It is useful to know where one stands…’

They drifted off, leaving me to reflect on the blasted heath of my social life. Sam glanced up from the group centring on Alice, who looked superb in bright red, and came over. I drew him aside. ‘Sam, Poppy thinks Minty’s here. Have you seen her?’

Sam tucked a supportive hand under my elbow. ‘Poppy’s probably fantasizing. She wants even more of scene than she’s getting. Don’t worry, Dad wouldn’t do that.’

‘I’ve just been rude to Sally Curry because she told me that Dad is more useful to her as a friend than I am. She’s right.’

‘That’s fine, then.’ His gaze lingered on Alice, who was now chatting up Nathan’s assistant, a handsome, spin-doctor type. The latter reached over and touched her shoulder. Sam flinched and I took action.

‘You haven’t seen Jilly for ages, have you? Not since she got back from New Zealand. I warn you, the ugly duckling is now a swan.’

I dragged Sam off and collared Jilly, who turned a countenance on Sam so radiant with pleasure and admiration that I blinked. ‘Sam,’ she said, in her light rapid voice, ‘I’ve been longing to see you.’ There was a tender, questing quality about Jilly that was difficult to describe, but quite specific in its effect. Her blonde hair brushed her bare brown shoulders, and she looked young and fresh and avid for the next turn of events.

Sam’s expression lightened. I left them to it and went in search of Minty. As I saw it, I had two options: one was to kill myself; the other was to devise on the spot an etiquette for dealing with a gate-crashing husband-pincher.

I did not have to search for long.

At the other end of the conservatory, framed by one of the illuminated arches, Minty was talking to Clive. She was wearing enormously high heels, which pitched her forward, and a sleeveless black dress. It was the outfit of the Good Wife – but she had got it all wrong: it was too short, too tight and too low-cut. She looked both terrible and wonderful, and Clive was hanging on her every word.

At the sight of her my anger, against which I had struggled, sprang to the surface. She had gone too far, presumed too much. As I pushed my way towards her, Minty turned her head and saw me. The dark, slanting eyes widened with… what?

I would find out.

Clive was well launched into the science of the wind turbine, his speciality. ‘Sorry to interrupt.’ I planted myself in front of them. ‘Minty, could I have a word?’

Clive merely glanced at me and continued in full flow, blotting me out. In doing that, he caught me savagely on the raw. In that shadowy moment of erasure, I felt the wing-tips of my grief brush my spirit, and the rush of hard, bitter hatred, which I hoped I had discarded.

‘New technology, ‘Clive said.’Regional rejuvenation…’

I opened my mouth to spit out bile and anger, but just then Minty sent me one of her cool, complicit looks, a smile hovering at the back of her eyes. It took me back to the office – the glance exchanged between friends and colleagues. What a bore, it said. Pity me.

Now that I was close up, I could catalogue changes. Small, tense lines had been drawn round Minty’s mouth by a light pencil. A suggestion of disappointment? There was a hint of defiance, rancour even, in the way she was holding herself. But, most of all, determination to see through what she had begun.

Minty had no idea of the indescribable pain she had caused – or perhaps she had, and those lines were the result. Even so, I surprised myself by regretting the change to the pretty, greedy face on which shadows had settled.

Again, I cut across the history of the wind turbine. ‘If you wouldn’t mind, Minty’

Clive was arrested mid-flow. He was about to take the coward’s option of slithering away when Minty laid a hand on his arm. She had always possessed excellent fighting instincts. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Shall I catch up with you in a moment, Rose?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Now.’

Clive seized his chance and bolted. ‘So,’ I said, ‘what are you doing gatecrashing Poppy’s wedding?’

Minty licked her glossed lips. ‘Pots and kettles,’ she said.

‘And what does that mean?’

But I knew.

I wore white at my wedding to which, in a manner of speaking, Hal came, and for which Nathan’s parents paid – tactfully, of course. Thus, I was not married from Pankhurst Parade – no loss there – but in an alien Sussex village with a picturesque church.

I longed to be at Yelland where, at that time of year, the straw would have been baled in the fields. If I closed my eyes, I could see pictures: the wash of soft colours, the umbers, burnt yellows, tired greens and the grey-blue sky. Up there, the air would be cool and pure and everything so much simpler. But maybe I was remembering it wrongly, through a childish filter, and I kept my feelings private.

If Nathan was the groom, Hal was the knight who kept vigil through the violet summer night. Somehow he discovered where the wedding was being held. Perhaps Mazarine told him. If she did, she never admitted it.

Hal was the spectre at the feast, the beautiful, rackety, solid flesh of love’s witchery, the personification of the poet’s sweet madness and disordered senses. Nathan was collected, rational, sure and loving. He was the rock that Hal would never be.

I remembered his sureness particularly.

Syringa and lilies perfumed the Saxon church. In the beamed village hall, a cake drowsed in three white boxes of graduated sizes. Covered by a protective sheet, my dress hung on the wardrobe in the hotel bedroom. I laid out tissues, lipstick, scent on the dressing-table. The last thing I did before getting into bed was to replace my engagement ring in its leather box.

It was dawn, and someone had moved across the gravel in front of the hotel. Confident and practised. The tread of a person who was used to darkness and tough terrain. In a second I knew who it was.

I slid out of bed, parted the curtains and saw Hal outlined in the milky grey light. I saw him so clearly. I saw right through him even, with the X-ray vision of my put-aside love and desire.

I pulled on my clothes and slipped down the staircase, which smelt of occupancy and cheap pot-pourri, and let myself out into the hush where every sound was magnified.

I had loved Hal so much that I couldn’t stand it. I knew this love was too ferocious and demanding to have a long life, and I did not trust it. It would burn for those moments when, my feet leaving black smudges on the dewy lawn, I fled towards him on the morning of my wedding and we held each other. Flesh chilled and damp, breath on each other’s cheek. Then burning love would consume itself, and the darkness would be the blacker for it.

‘You can change your mind,’ he muttered, covering my face with kisses. ‘You can, you can.’

Shakespeare’s Prince Hal renounced the chimes at midnight, the madness and the passion. So did I.

Later, with Nathan resting his hand on my waist at the point where the heavy satin dress curved over my hips, I looked up from cutting the cake and through the window to where Hal was walking down the road. He did not look back.

With a steady hand, I grasped the knife and plunged it down. I loved Nathan, too, and I was quite, quite sure.

Sweet goodbye.

‘So you see,’ Minty pointed out politely, ‘it is pots and kettles. Nathan guessed it was Hal at the wedding. He told me, when you were cutting the cake… He saw him through the window.’

‘Did he?’

‘Yes, he did, and he’s never forgotten it.’

I stared at the hateful, but now shadowed, face. What had I done in my life? How had I arrived at this point of dismemberment, blown, decaying, finished? Bitterness and despair rose and elbowed aside the peace and stillness I had striven to cultivate. We choose between certain paths we label ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and it is important that we believe in the goodness and badness. Or I think so. What else is there? I had believed in Nathan: he had been good, and so, too, had been what we had made together.

Nothing lasts.

Minty smiled, a smug little flicker of her lips, and it burst from me: ‘How dare you? How dare you come here? You have no sense of compassion. None. Go away and take your curiosity with you.’

Under the lash of my words, Minty’s eyes narrowed. She glanced around quickly. ‘Shush,’ she muttered, much as Ianthe might have done. ‘People will hear.’

I paid no attention. ‘Have you no kindness at all, Minty?’

‘And you have a monopoly on goodness, I take it? So much so that your lover comes to your wedding. That’s how you used Nathan.’

‘It’s none of your business.’

She shrugged: careless, knowing, triumphant. I took a step towards her and Minty took a step back and the too-tight dress rode up her thigh. ‘You will never have what I have had with Nathan.’

She turned deathly white. ‘We’ll see.’