Deranged Marriage (52 page)

1

As hostess, Catrin Howden didn’t actually mind her guests playing Russian roulette – it was just the thought of the mess it made on the towels.

It was twenty minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve.

Across the bright debris of the table, where candles were flickering through empty champagne bottles and crystal flutes reflected rainbows of light, the guests had fallen silent.

Catrin, too, was silent.

She played with a long strand of her fine dark hair and looked across the table at her white-knuckled husband.

William’s calm, fine-featured face stiffened. He glanced at her for a second but before she could react he looked away and with a sudden jerk he pulled the thin pale string viciously. Instantly there was an explosion of sound and out of the emerald party popper that he was still clutching flew a large quantity of aubergine dip. It hit the side of his head with force and trickled down his temple slowly, a clotted mass, grey as brains.

Gunpowder smoke lifted pungently upwards. There was a deafening cheer and the table began bouncing beneath pounding fists, setting the china ringing and making the glasses dance sideways on the damask cloth. Catrin could feel it shuddering under her bare forearms as in the din she kept her gaze on her husband. She began to smile – William’s handsome face was still impassive and the dip had splattered into his fair, wavy hair. She watched him touch it briefly and wipe his fingers on the tablecloth.

He stood up suddenly amidst the noise, the legs of his chair screeching on the polished floor, and he picked up the silver tray which held the weapons of war.

‘Your turn, Hugh,’ he said, handing the tray across the table towards his friend and colleague.

Hugh, chief reporter at
Media
News
, was a large man whose dark eyes were fringed with white eyelashes which hid his eyes as he stared at the tray. He stroked his palms down his white shirt front through which his stomach showed pinkly but it was impossible, just by looking, to tell which of the party poppers had been refilled and which were empty. His hand hovered for a moment and he chose a blue one and tossed it in the air.

Then, with a grimace, he aimed it at his forehead, narrowed his eyes and pulled recklessly. There was a small explosion and a puff of sulphurous smoke but that was all. He did a thumbs-up sign in response to jeers from around the table and the tray was held out to Catrin. Choosing red, to match her dress, she lifted up the party popper, pointed it towards her forehead and pulled the string.

The smoke stung her nose. Another blank. The plastic was hot in her hand and she dropped it on the table with relief and blew a strand of hair away from her eyes.

‘I’m going to get some towels,’ she said, glancing at William, and she reached over for her glass to take up with her. She sipped her champagne as she went upstairs, smiling as she heard another cheer. She went into the bathroom and sat down on the cold edge of the bath, feeling...happy.

She loved New Year’s Eve. She loved the feeling of having the old year all wrapped up and done with, survived, and what was more, enjoyed. She liked the thought of a new year stretching out before her like a stream of computer paper waiting for input.

As Sales Controller of South East Television, her new year wasn’t exactly a blank; but still – a New Year held promise. It smacked of infinite possibilities and surprises.

She stood up and finished off her champagne, enjoying the sensation of it prickling her tongue. She put the glass down on the chilly windowsill and, remembering why she was there, she walked over to the airing cupboard where the towels were kept. As her fingers touched the chrome knob she hesitated; she’d heard something, some sound that didn’t belong to the house. Frowning, she stood for a moment listening, her fingers loosening themselves from the cold chrome. The echoey bathroom was silent. Not even the taps dripped.

She was mocking herself gently as she opened the cupboard door. For a split second she had a faint impression of subdued life inside the warm darkness. There was a slight movement in the gloom and she jerked her head, startled. Suddenly from the top of the pile of pastel towels there came a great flurry of movement and as it swept towards her she felt a swift flash of pain in her hand.

Instinctively she banged the cupboard door closed. It shook, bounced slightly and then the latch caught, containing the harsh chattering within.

Panic had made the adrenalin burst under her skin like pin-pricks and swearing softly she looked at her hand. A bead of blood had welled up and she turned on the tap and rinsed her hand under the cold water, wincing at the sound of wings dashing and flapping against the door. Her heart was thumping but as she patted her hand dry the flapping stopped, replaced by jittery, clicking noises of distress.

She glanced at the windowsill and wished she hadn’t drunk all her champagne.

She knew who to blame – Roger, she thought bleakly, looking warily at the airing cupboard door; Roger Elsworth, the St Francis of Stanmore. He actually fed pigeons on bird seed despite the fact they preferred Big Macs. William had joked that the three days that Roger, Sarah and their daughter Lottie had stayed with them had convinced him of the benefits of divorce and contraception. So she’d hit him with
The
Times
. And secretly agreed.

‘And on my towels,’ she muttered as the magpie kept up the barrage of noise. Well, the Russian roulette victims were going to have to have old ones. She whipped three crumpled, white hand towels from the rail and hurried back downstairs.

The game was still in progress.

The shock, she thought, must have sobered her up because suddenly it didn’t seem so much fun anymore. She reached for a bottle and refilled her glass.

The weapons tray was half-way round again, having passed Hugh, and Jean, Hugh’s naturist friend, and presumably Roger, because it was now being offered to Sarah who was stretching back from it with an expression of distaste and fastidiousness.

‘I don’t have to, do I?’ she pleaded to her husband. Roger, his bald head tanned from skiing, smirked at her. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘you might be lucky.’

Sarah narrowed her eyes at him malevolently and then she turned to Catrin, reaching over to rest her hand on her arm.

‘I don’t have to, do I, Catrin?’

Catrin put thoughts of the bird in the airing cupboard out of her mind. ‘Of course not,’ she said loyally. ‘Yes, you do,’ Roger said.

‘Do you know how much this dress cost?’

‘Aim it at your head then, darling,’ Roger suggested.

Sarah pouted. ‘You think the hair was free?’ Still, she stretched out a manicured hand and let her fingers dance for a moment over the tray. She picked up the orange party popper and fired at herself, changing her mind at the last moment so that a high-velocity charge of camembert and fresh cream skimmed her head and exploded on the wall behind her. She giggled nervously and turned to look at the wall.

‘Give her a yammer as a forfeit,’ Hugh said, banging the table with his glass.

Tim, an old schoolfriend of William, was sitting diagonally across from Catrin. He smoothed back his thinning hair with one hand and cut a piece of stilton with the other.

‘I’ll do it.’ He mixed champagne, port and stilton in a small glass and handed it to Sarah with a grin. Sarah took it and looked at it distastefully.

‘I can’t drink this,’ she said.

Hugh banged the table with his glass again and the base snapped off. ‘Oops.’

Sarah had shut her eyes. She jerked her head back, swallowed the contents of the glass and gagged for a moment on the cheese before looking at them through watering eyes that finally settled on Roger. ‘I hope you’re happy,’ she said.

William glanced at Catrin. Her eyes caught his. He gave her a faint conspiratorial smile. From within their own happy marriage they saw signs of upheaval in others as a weakness.

‘Make one for Roger,’ he called across the table. ‘He gloated.’

‘You all gloated,’ Roger protested.

‘We cheered. It’s not the same.’

Sarah looked mollified but suddenly, as though in a fade-out, the room fell silent.

Catrin had her back to the stairs and turned as a small voice behind her said with pompous indignation: ‘Can’t you all go home? I’m trying to sleep.’

Sarah and Roger’s daughter, Lottie, was standing on the stairs wearing non-sexist striped pyjamas.

Sarah, still sporting a quiff of camembert and cream, leapt out of her chair with a frantic look in her eye, no doubt wondering how Penelope Leach would have played it.

‘Now look what you’ve done,’ she said to Roger through gritted teeth, and in a soothing, insincere voice to Lottie, ‘We’ll be quiet, darling. Let Mummy carry you back upstairs.’

‘Not with that yucky stuff on your head,’ Lottie said, retreating indignantly. Sarah followed her.

The table erupted into giggles.

‘Thirty-three is not at all old for a woman,’ Catrin said to no-one in particular, ‘but four is.’

‘What’s the time?’

‘Ten to.’

Catrin got up, pushed her chair back and followed Sarah to the bathroom.

‘Hair all right?’ she asked, glancing at the airing cupboard. All was quiet.

Sarah ducked her head for Catrin to look. ‘Is it all off?’

‘Spotless. Oh, just a dab of camembert there, I’ll wipe it off for you.’ She dabbed at Sarah’s blonde hair. ‘That’s it.’ She lifted the lavatory lid up and put the tissue in. ‘By the way, what on earth is in the airing cupboard?’

Sarah looked at the cupboard door rather sheepishly. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘The magpie. We found it under the bridge this afternoon. Roger thought this was a great way to teach Lottie about death in a controlled environment.’

Catrin looked at her wryly as she washed her hands. ‘What’s Roger going to do, strangle it?’

‘Is it still alive?’ Sarah said, touching her earring uncertainly. ‘Isn’t it amazing, you’re here in Central London and you have magpies in the garden.’

‘Amazing is finding them in the airing cupboard,’ Catrin said. ‘You country types, we’re going to have to use towels with magpie shit on them. Come on, let’s go back down or else they’ll have yammed in the New Year without us.’

***

They went into the kitchen and Catrin took two bottles of Bollinger out of the fridge and gave them to Sarah. She took two herself and they returned to the dining room where Hugh was accepting raucous advice on how to solve a puzzle that had fallen out of a cracker.

‘It’s nearly midnight,’ Catrin said as they put the bottles on the table. William got up and started taking the foil off.

‘Put Moira Stewart on,’ Tim said.

‘Isn’t she the newsreader?’ his wife, Lisa, asked irritably.

‘No, that’s Moira Anderson.’

‘You always get them mixed up,’ she said, hitting him with a spoon, and they tumbled into the sitting room which was full of balloons and switched the television on.

Catrin and Jean distributed glasses. The grandfather clock began to chime midnight.

They lapsed into silence as the seconds sounded by. On the eleventh stroke Hugh gave a premature shout. On the twelfth, to the shout of ‘Happy New Year’ they toasted each other and tipsily joined hands to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Catrin, as always, found she’d forgotten the words.

‘Let’s do the fireworks!’ William said, as whichever Moira it was launched into the second verse.

‘He’s always been a pyromaniac,’ Catrin said to Jean, out of the corner of her mouth.

Jean wrinkled her nose and gave William a sideways glance. ‘Pervert.’

They went out into the dark, cold garden. Frost glistened on the grass from the lights of the house.

Catrin, Sarah and Jean huddled together under the trees that sheltered them from London’s alien orange sky. Behind them Lisa grumbled at having to come out at all. A dark shadow that was William crouched over the fireworks, lighting the touchpapers.

He hurried away as with a hiss the fireworks agitated, spewing out sparks in a rush of light that coloured their faces red.

‘Aaaaahhhh...’

Someone handed Catrin a glass of Armagnac. It blazed through her as she watched the sparks from the fireworks burst in the sky, spreading themselves wide as they scribbled down the night like glitter thrown across black paper.

Hugh came and stood next to her and he put his heavy arm around her shoulder. ‘I wonder what’s in store for us all,’ he said reflectively, holding his glass up to the showers of light.

‘That’s up to us,’ Catrin said.

‘Ah! You think it’s as simple as that?’ He sounded amused.

‘And isn’t it?’

When he didn’t answer her she linked her arm in his. ‘Life is what you make it,’ she said. ‘It’s a script that you write for yourself. You choose what you want from life and then you make it happen.’

‘I’m sure you do,’ Hugh said lightly. ‘And where does fate come in?’

He sounded amused and Catrin felt a flicker of annoyance. She wondered whether he was mocking her. ‘Our fate is in our own hands, don’t you think?’

Hugh sipped his drink. ‘You make it sound so simple.’

‘But?’

‘Oh, no buts – ’

He started to say something else but his words were drowned out by staccato cracks from white blazing stars that lit up the sky and drifted, spent, over the emptiness of Regent’s Park.

Catrin glanced back at the house. Through the half-open curtains she could see the lights of the Christmas tree. She looked at the garden sheltering their guests, their friends; the fireworks were lighting it up like a grotto. She smiled to herself. Fireworks; for celebration.

***

Later, when they were saying goodbye, a red balloon that had broken free shied away from the gust from the opening door. It scooted in a circle and drifted out with Hugh and Jean, floating around their ankles anxiously. They laughed and caught it and got into a chugging cab.

Catrin watched with William until the rear lights of the taxi disappeared down the road and then she heard a small voice behind them. ‘Catrin? Where’s my mummy?’ Lottie’s small hands fiddled with a loose red button on her pyjama top as William closed the door.