‘Black’s not exactly Winter Wonderland.’
‘No, but you could jazz it up with a silver stole or something.’
In the end Jo bought nothing. The black dress had suited her, but it was a hundred and eighty pounds, which she didn’t want to spend.
‘I’ve got the navy one with the lacy sleeves. I’ll wear that.’
*
It was a clear, cold February night for the party. Donna and Jo took a taxi to the address in Tavistock Place.
‘Lawrence won’t be there, will he?’ Donna asked.
‘The invitation was for both of us, so clearly they don’t know we’ve split up. And I haven’t mentioned it to Lawrence, obviously. So, no. He won’t be there.’
‘That’s good. You can relax then.’
Although ‘relaxed’ nowhere near described Jo’s state of mind. Butterflies churned in her stomach, she felt awkward and uncomfortable all dressed up – it was months since she’d worn anything other than jeans – and she was absolutely dreading having to socialize with the people who had known her and Lawrence as a couple for so many decades. Added to which, Jo – never good at parties – had always hidden behind Lawrence, let him make all the running.
The taxi pulled up at the entrance to the courtyard, over which tall, silver branches met, twinkling with tiny white lights.
‘Here we go,’ Donna said. ‘Let’s party!’
The elegant, late-Victorian rooms had been transformed by Ruthie’s extravagant taste into a fantasy of grottos and ice-mountains and caves, all sparkling silvery and white and lit with thousands of battery candles and loops of Christmas tree lights. Glowing icicles hung from the mesh-swagged ceiling, accompanied by large silver hearts on which were written Ruthie and Craig’s names in red glitter – the only colour in the decorations.
Donna and Jo looked around, speechless, sipping the delicious – and obviously expensive – champagne they’d picked off a tray held by a waiter looking decidedly uncomfortable in a sequined white onesie.
‘Darlings!’ Ruthie was upon them, carefully air-kissing their cheeks, obviously keen not to damage her make-up or hair with smoochy hugs so early in the night.
Jo shook her head in awe. ‘This is incredible, Ruthie. Totally magic. God, it must have taken years of planning.’
‘I’ve never seen anything like it. You’re a genius,’ Donna added.
Their friend, plump and blonde and bouncy, wearing a ridiculous silver Grecian-style dress and a diamond tiara – Jo failed to see the Winter Wonderland connection – roared with delighted laughter.
‘Isn’t it utter bliss? Craig’ll never recover, of course. But I can divorce him now we’ve had the party.’
They both laughed as Ruthie rushed off to greet some more guests.
‘Shall we check it out?’ Donna pointed through to another room, where there were tables set out and a dance area.
Jo nodded, already feeling the beneficial effects of the champagne on her nerves. ‘Oops, keep moving, just spotted Robert and Alison at two o’clock.’
‘Occupational hazard,’ Donna whispered as they speeded up. ‘Not sure I really bonded with any of those people we met at their barbecues. I mean, they weren’t horrible or anything, just . . . different world.’
‘So what are we doing here?’
‘Getting drunk, having a laugh. We don’t have to talk to anyone if we don’t want to.’
‘Just don’t leave me for one single second.’
*
It was two glasses of champagne and some caviar and sour cream blinis later that Donna spotted Lawrence. She clutched Jo’s arm as they chatted to a very amusing couple Donna had picked up, pointing towards the doorway.
‘Noo,’ Jo groaned.
‘Can’t see Arkadius yet,’ Donna said after a moment checking the throng of guests.
‘Probably doing the coats.’
Her husband looked uncharacteristically awkward, despite his elegant dinner jacket – bought over twenty years ago, at some expense, but hardly worn – and Jo noticed his only concession to the party theme was a silver bow tie. It surprised her. Lawrence was not averse to fancy dress in the way she was. He had, on one occasion, dressed up as a 94 bus – to much raucous acclaim – for a Scarlet and Black party an old college friend had thrown. But clearly he wasn’t in the mood tonight.
‘Are you going to speak to him?’
‘Don’t have much choice.’
He was making his way across the room. Jo watched him go up to Craig and shake his hand, give Ruthie a hug. Then he was on his own again, looking round, seemingly at a loss.
She sighed. ‘Back in a mo,’ she told her friend.
‘Hi, Lawrence.’
‘Jo . . .’ She held her glass in front of her with both hands, so as to avoid an embrace of any kind.
‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ she said.
‘I bumped into Craig getting off the Tube at Oxford Circus last week. He said they’d sent an invitation to the house.’
Jo ignored the implied criticism. ‘Did you tell him we were separated?’
‘I had to.’
‘Ruthie didn’t say anything just now.’
‘No, well . . .’
‘Arkadius not with you?’
‘No . . . he couldn’t make it.’
There was silence between them in the crowded room, the Schumann played by the string quartet in the corner like a Greek chorus to their private drama.
‘Listen, Jo . . . about Christmas . . .’
‘Gotta drag Lawrence away I’m afraid, darling, there’s someone who’s dying to meet him.’ Ruthie shot Jo a wide-eyed glance behind his back as she took her husband’s arm and walked him firmly away. Rescuing me, Jo thought, embarrassed.
The evening was lively and drunken. No formal sit-down for dinner, Jo was relieved to see, just a buffet of smoked salmon, baked ham on the bone, sirloin of beef, cold sea trout delicately layered with sliced cucumber, huge dishes of dauphinoise potatoes, French beans and salads.
‘God, I’m ravenous,’ Donna announced as she sat down next to Jo at one of the tables dotted about the room, her plate laden with enough food to last them both a fortnight.
Jo laughed. ‘You’ll never get through even a quarter of that.’ Donna ate like a bird.
‘I know, but buffets confuse me. I take something, then further along I see something else I want more, but I can’t really take the first thing off, so I just keep on piling it up.’ She inspected her plate. ‘But it does look delicious, doesn’t it.’
‘OK if I sit here?’ Lawrence put his plate down next to Donna and sank gratefully into the chair before either of them had time to speak.
‘Good party, eh?’ Donna said.
He nodded. ‘Fantastic.’
The conversation became general round the table as two other couples joined them, both of whom were old friends of the Carpenters and had been at the summer barbecue most years.
Jo said almost nothing. The initial high from the champagne had dipped to a slightly out of control intoxication where she wasn’t sure she was walking straight or talking sense.
Lawrence’s presence constrained her still further and maybe constrained him too, as he said surprisingly little, allowing Donna – in her element at any social event – to do all the work.
When the band set up on the podium and the speeches were over, Jo breathed a sigh of relief. No one would need to talk now.
The band struck up the first song, Stevie Wonder’s ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’, and the anniversary couple took to the floor alone, Craig taking charge for once and shuffling his wife expertly round the floor to much laughter and applause.
‘Dance?’ Lawrence asked Donna when the band went on to Elton’s ‘Crocodile Rock’, his glance avoiding Jo and a possible rejection.
‘Love to,’ Donna leaped to her feet with alacrity and they were gone.
Jo was envious of her friend. She and Lawrence had always been enthusiastic dance partners when they got the chance. Dreading one of the other men at the table asking her, she got up and trod a careful path to the Ladies, miles away down a flight of polished wooden stairs, where she took a long time doing not much to her hair and face. But when she got back they were still dancing. In fact everyone seemed to be dancing except her, alone at the table and feeling idiotic, until Craig came up behind her and pulled her to her feet.
‘We can’t leave the gorgeous Joanna alone on a night like this,’ he said, in an awkward attempt at gallantry. Craig, a hugely successful accountant, was a decent man, a wonderful husband to the flighty Ruthie, but he had virtually no conversation skills. Jo had dreaded being put next to him at dinner parties in the past. She didn’t know the right questions to ask about accountancy, and he never asked about her life. They usually ended up in the safe zone of The Government.
Tonight his bald head was shining with exertion as he pressed his plump belly, tightly swathed in a vintage maroon cummerbund, against Jo, his feet – surprisingly neat in patent leather lace-up evening shoes – guiding her about the floor in the semblance of a waltz. He was about four inches shorter than Jo in her heels, but this didn’t seem to bother him.
‘Fabulous party,’ she shouted.
Craig beamed and nodded.
‘We miss you, in the street,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’
‘We miss you. In the street,’ she repeated, closer to his ear.
He beamed and nodded again.
Jo gave up, deciding just to enjoy the dance. Donna and Lawrence had gone back to the table and were deep in conversation, their heads pressed closely together, presumably in order to hear the other’s words. Jo wondered what Donna was saying to her husband. She could be quite brutal when she chose.
A couple of songs later, Craig carefully escorted her back to the table. Donna and Lawrence stopped talking as soon as she sat down, both their expressions tense and preoccupied. It obviously hadn’t been party chit-chat.
‘Hi . . . good dance?’ Donna asked.
‘Great. You?’
‘Can’t go wrong with the old favourites.’
She saw Lawrence gazing at her and looked away.
Geoff, one of the other guests at the table, asked Donna to dance, and Jo was left alone with her husband. He moved over into Donna’s seat so that he was next to her. For a while they just sat there, as they had on so many other similar occasions in the past, facing the dance floor, watching the couples, tapping the rhythm out on the white table cloth.
‘Jo . . .’ He leaned closer. ‘Listen, I know you’ve been avoiding me since Christmas Day, and I understand why. I was totally out of order hitting on you like that. I’d had too much to drink – you said so yourself – and . . . well, it just happened. But let’s not fall out about it. It’s stupid us not being able to talk to each other.’
‘You just don’t get it, do you Lawrence?’
He was staring at her intently. ‘Get what?’
‘That kiss . . . like you owned me. Pick me up, put me down, whatever turns you on . . .’
‘That’s really not fair.’ His eyes were wide with indignation. ‘It wasn’t even remotely like that—’
‘Your boyfriend’s away in Russia – and anyway, things are a bit tricky at the moment – so you think you’ll just pop round and get your leg over the ex?’
‘Jo, come on. That’s ridiculous. You know I’d never behave like that in a million years.’
‘I have absolutely no idea how you’ll behave, Lawrence. Not anymore.’
Rebuked, he dropped his gaze. When he raised his head again, his eyes were imploring.
‘Please . . . please, Jo. You know I respect you more than anyone else on earth. I’d never intentionally take advantage of you, make you feel used. Never.’
Jo suddenly felt very tired. ‘Respect’? Wasn’t that the word people used to distance themselves? She didn’t want to be respected by Lawrence as if she were some aged aunt or senior work colleague. She wanted to be loved. She seemed to be losing the thread, her head spinning with that last glass of white she’d drunk.
‘God, I hate this. I hate it so much.’ She swallowed back tears, turning her head away, reaching for the jug of water in the centre of the table and pouring herself a glass. She didn’t want him to feel sorry for her.
‘I hate it too.’ His voice was soft and low, but she still heard him above the strains of another Stevie Wonder song.
They stared at each other, and Jo saw the anguish in her husband’s eye.
‘Why?’ she whispered, feeling the tears gathering despite herself.
For an answer, Lawrence placed his hand gently over hers.
‘God, way too much exercise.’ Donna breezed back from the dance floor, flopping one arm across both Jo’s and Lawrence’s shoulders, dipping her head to their level. ‘What’s going on here?’ She giggled drunkenly, turning from one to the other, her eyebrows raised.
Jo pulled back as Lawrence shifted quickly over to his own chair so that Donna could sit down.
‘Tell me,’ Donna plumped down between them, letting out a sigh of relief, checking each of their faces in turn. ‘Go on. What have I missed?’
‘A heated debate about climate change?’ Lawrence said, straight-faced.
Donna looked at him in disbelief. ‘Ha, ha.’
The music had slid into a slower tempo as the evening began to wind down. Jo was suddenly aware of the opening bars of Roberta Flack’s ‘Killing Me Softly’. This was
their
song, hers and Lawrence’s. The first time she’d heard it was the very first time they kissed, at a drunken birthday bash for his university mate, Jono Lacy, held in his father’s grand Mayfair flat. Lawrence told her later that he thought she’d be impressed he knew such people, although in fact she didn’t give a fig about Jono, his father’s money or anyone else there. Even though she and Lawrence had only met up once before for a hasty coffee before she caught a train to see her mother, she had already decided she was in love with him. And Roberta had seemed to confirm this. For a moment she was lost in the long-distant past.
Now Lawrence heard it too and raised his eyebrows at her. She didn’t reply, but he got up and came round to where she was sitting, holding out his hand.
Jo only hesitated for a moment. Then she too got to her feet and walked in front of him towards the floor. They danced. And it felt so good, to be in his arms again. He held her close, as if he were relishing it as much as she. Neither of them said a word. And when the song ended they quickly pulled apart and went back to the table, almost sheepish that they had allowed such intimacy to happen.