‘I pay for their cars you know, darling,’ said Alma. ‘Those things with the lights going round on top. We all do. But they don’t let me drive a car. They took my licence off me.’
‘You can hardly blame them for that,’ Binny said. ‘In the circumstances.’
‘Nonsense,’ cried Alma. ‘I was perfectly capable. You’re not a what’s it, you can’t possibly judge.’
‘I bailed her out,’ explained Binny. She felt more relaxed now that dinner was over. Muriel seemed to be enjoying the drama, and as for Simpson, he was just another Edward – too pompous for words. Men were all alike. It was not being involved with children every hour of the day that made them appear superior. She had only to bear in mind the image of Simpson going into a little cubicle to provide a cloudy specimen and she hadn’t the slightest need to feel inferior. ‘Alma was arguing with her husband and swerving all over the road when this police car came round the corner—’
‘I wasn’t swerving, darling.’
‘They booked them and everything, and then Alma said why didn’t the policeman take off his clothes, he’d be more comfortable.’
Muriel started to laugh.
‘He wasn’t a policeman, pet. He was a sergeant and very good-looking.’
‘Drunken driving is a crime,’ said Simpson stiffly. ‘It should carry the harshest penalties.’
‘What are you worried about, darling? I lost my licence, didn’t I?’ All at once Alma’s face crumpled. Tears spilled out of her ludicrous eyes.
‘
You
can talk, George,’ Muriel said coldly. ‘You’re only wearing one shoe.’
Alma rose unsteadily from the table and blundered towards the sofa. ‘I must lie down,’ she moaned. ‘I’ve never been to the South of France.’ She fell on to the couch. The red dress, too short, rode above her hips. Her black boots, stained by the rain, threshed among the cushions. Keening softly and scrabbling to get into a more comfortable position, she dozed off.
Edward came into the room. Seeing Alma, he hoisted his braces on to his shoulders and asked in a pained voice, ‘Didn’t you tell her we were coming?’
‘She had a row with her husband,’ said Binny. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’
‘She’s too vulnerable,’ observed Muriel, hovering anxiously about the sofa. ‘It’s in her face. She’s like a child dressed up for a party. Underneath is a pure heart struggling to come to terms with life. But then, the way the world is, what chance has she got?’
After this extraordinary question there was silence.
Finally Simpson said, ‘That’s all very fine, but put her behind the wheel of a car and she’s lethal. Lethal.’ He himself thought it was in dubious taste to compare Alma to a child. Granted her eyes and mouth seemed to have been crayoned in by a two-year-old with an unsteady hand, but in every other respect the woman was a tart.
‘She’s been to the South of France,’ said Binny. ‘Several times as a matter of fact. She was a croupier in a casino.’
‘One more drink,’ Edward said. ‘And then we’d better call it a night.’ He yawned extravagantly. ‘I’ve a meeting first thing.’ His mind was full of facts and figures, sections and clauses, though there was a small space in which he prepared to defend himself, should Binny attack him for leaving too early. He stood at the table and examined the bottles.
‘Count me out,’ said Simpson. What else could he say when he’d been so critical of the sleeping woman, lying there on the couch with the crotch of her knickers showing through her tights? Besides, if he was going to have lunch with his mistress tomorrow he wanted to appear fairly fresh and virile. He didn’t approve of the word ‘mistress’ but Freeman had used it first. ‘I’m just telephoning my mistress,’ he’d say, or, ‘I’m seeing my mistress tonight.’ Once, in the pub, he’d admitted that Binny had slapped his face for using the word. She said only people like Edward VII could invest it with meaning. Unless he was prepared to set her up in a house in the park and send her children to Eton, he should shut up. Actually, thought Simpson, old Freeman appeared to get more of a look in than most. He himself, apart from some heavy petting in his car, had only managed to persuade Marcia to lie down on one occasion. Who the devil was the man who’d answered her phone?
Muriel asked Binny where she had put the fur wrap. ‘I should like to make her more comfortable,’ she said, gesturing at Alma, who was now lying on her back with her mouth open.
Simpson raged. He said the coat was too damned expensive to act as a blanket.
The women looked at him pityingly.
Edward, thinking that fetching the wrap would hasten their departure, directed Muriel upstairs. He didn’t offer to accompany her because he didn’t want to leave Simpson alone with Binny, and he couldn’t go for it himself, seeing there were no curtains at the window and he might be spotted from the street.
In the room above, Muriel was careful not to come into contact with any of the furniture. She was scandalised at the presence of a ping-pong table, whose surface was ringed with the indentures of vanished cups of tea, in a room of such beautiful proportions. It was simply unbelievable. She scrutinised the pictures on the walls. There were various photographs of the same three children from infancy to adolescence. The chubby toddlers smiled, the lean teenagers scowled. There was a wedding portrait of a young Binny in a three-quarter-length dress and a small round hat rimmed with flowers. She was linking arms with a bearded man. Underneath someone had scrawled in pencil ‘Our Dad, Our Hero’. He didn’t look like a person who could ever have business commitments. Next to the happy couple hung two framed pictures, cut from magazines, of different men lying in black pools of blood, dying of assassination. There were a lot of books on shelves grey with dust.
Muriel thought it a shame to live in such squalor. No wonder the children didn’t appear to be in the house; at a certain age children became very conscious of their surroundings. She could scarcely see out of the unwashed windows – there were pigeon droppings spattered on the glass. Across the road, parked outside the block of flats, waited a police car. It had stopped raining.
She took her fur downstairs and laid it over the hips of Binny’s sad friend. Alma was gently snoring.
‘There’s a car outside,’ Muriel said. ‘With two policemen in it. Do you think it’s anything to do with her?’
Binny jumped up from the table and went to the window. She began to tug at the bar that kept the shutters in place.
‘Don’t open them,’ cried Edward. ‘Don’t encourage them.’
‘It’s hardly likely,’ Simpson said, ‘that they’d follow her to the door. I didn’t believe a word of that harrassment nonsense.’
‘You don’t know Alma,’ Binny said darkly. ‘She probably called them every name under the sun. She got deported, you realise, from the South of France.’
She sat down again at the table, pleased that she’d alarmed Edward. He was itching to leave – she’d seen him look twice at his watch in the last five minutes.
They began to talk about France and holidays in general. Edward tried to say as little as possible. Any mention of the two weeks he’d spent with his family in Malta last year would doubtless inflame Binny. It might conjure up visions of his wife lying on the sand, limbs shimmering with
ambre solaire –
of love in the afternoon. In actual fact, most times they’d travelled abroad he’d gone down with a tummy upset on arrival and spent part of each night in the bog.
‘We’ve tried Corfu,’ said Simpson. ‘It’s fairly picturesque. Cricket in the square, pig and chips in the tavernas. Have you tried Corfu?’
‘No,’ Edward said. ‘Helen’s rather tied up, you know – meetings and so forth.’
‘Meetings?’ said Muriel.
‘Well, she’s on various committees . . . politics . . . school . . . that sort of thing.’
‘What schools?’ asked Binny. ‘What sort of thing?’
‘She’s a school governor,’ admitted Edward. ‘And she’s secretary of the local Liberal party.’
Binny started to have palpitations. She had to put her hand to her mouth to stop abusive words coming out. Though Edward had mentioned on occasions that Helen was at one of her meetings, she had somehow gained the impression that they were to do with the W.V.S. or even the church. He hadn’t hinted that Helen was clever or influential, or in a position of power.
‘I’ve a lot of time for the Liberals,’ said Simpson.
Binny moved the vase of carnations to one side so that she could see Edward clearly. ‘Last April,’ she began, ‘I was taken out for the day by a gentleman friend. It was terribly exciting for me, as you can imagine. Just for the day, you understand. We went to Yorkshire—’
‘It’s getting awfully late,’ Edward said.
‘We left London very early in the morning and arrived about eleven. The moment I stepped into the car, I couldn’t stand him. I went right off him. I don’t know why . . . he just annoyed me—’
‘Yorkshire’s so pretty,’ said Muriel.
‘I wanted to go to sleep in the car but he wouldn’t let me. He kept pointing at trees and boring things like that, as if I’d never seen one before. I was worn out. And then, when we got there, he wouldn’t just stop and get out so that we could walk in the country. He kept driving on a little bit further to find somewhere more suitable. It was all suitable to my mind. I couldn’t see why, if I wasn’t allowed to get out and walk, I couldn’t have a bit of shut eye. He was still going on about trees. Anyway, he found somewhere he called suitable and we set off with the sandwiches I’d made. I was terribly hungry . . . I was ravenous—’
‘You’d had breakfast,’ Edward said. ‘I expect.’
‘But I wasn’t allowed to eat the sandwiches, because that had to be done in a suitable place as well. So I ran off over a field and the next thing I knew this bull started coming towards me—’
‘Good God,’ said Simpson. He was relieved to hear about the bull. He’d feared she was going to divulge all sorts of intimacies in the grass. It couldn’t be much fun for old Freeman, listening to tales about her ex-boyfriends. He was looking jolly miserable.
‘I ran like hell in the other direction and called this man’s name. He wouldn’t answer at first . . . he thought I’d come back for the sandwiches. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I felt I’d been a bit rotten and to make amends I asked him about what his uncle did to the grass. He was very fond of this uncle and I thought if I sounded interested he’d be pleased. His uncle used to set fire to tussocks of grass or something. To help the sheep. When it all gets matted and old after the winter, the sheep can’t get at the new grass underneath. Have you ever tried to light a fire in the open air?’
‘Not often,’ said Muriel. ‘As a child perhaps, when camping.’
‘It’s damned difficult,’ Simpson said. ‘There’s a knack to it. You have to build a kind of tent made out of twigs. It’s a question of—’
‘Well, I’d never had the knack,’ continued Binny. ‘I just idly struck a match and put it to the ground.’ Dramatically she pursed her lips and made a zipping sound. Her fist shot into the air like a rocket taking off.
The Simpsons stared at her open-mouthed.
‘I only did it to be nice to him . . . to show I had faith in his silly old uncle. It was meant as a compliment really. There were sheep having small sheep . . . you know, they were pregnant—’
‘Lambing,’ said Simpson knowledgeably.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it. A little flame ran up the hill like a worm . . . Then the whole field caught fire. There were forests not far away. The police came and six fire trucks from the Forestry Commission.’
‘How awful,’ breathed Muriel.
‘The sheep went galloping off on those thin little legs, with their stomachs flopping about. This man wouldn’t take the blame. I didn’t see why we couldn’t run for it and drive off in the car. There was too much smoke to read the number plate. He wouldn’t . . . He made me own up.’
‘Was there much damage?’ asked Simpson, shocked. He felt enormous sympathy for this unknown man, his bright day ruined by a lunatic woman.
‘No,’ said Binny. ‘The wind was in the wrong direction. It went out after half an hour.’ She paused. ‘He called me a cunt.’
Edward cleared his throat. His blue eyes, irritated by his constantly burning pipe, looked sore. He said: ‘All the men you’ve known seem to have let you down. One way and another.’
Behind him on the sofa, Alma stirred, attempted to sit upright, and was that instant violently sick.
8
B
inny and Muriel cleaned up the mess on the carpet. The fur cape, speckled with fragments of undigested food, was shaken out over a piece of newspaper and then dropped inside a large carrier bag.
‘I’ll take it to the cleaners,’ Binny promised.
Muriel, thinking in that case she might never see it again, said it didn’t matter. The two men, grown pale, were unable to assist.
‘I’m so sorry,’ moaned Alma weakly. ‘What a nuisance I am. It must have been something I ate.’ She saw Edward hovering by the door. ‘Teddy darling,’ she cried. ‘Fancy seeing you. Have you had a nice bath, pet?’
Simpson tried to lift up the back window but it was stuck fast. He went into the hall and opened the front door to let out the smell of vomit.
‘Look here,’ whispered Edward, following him. ‘We really must go home. I’m frightfully late as it is.’ He shut the door.
‘It’s not me,’ said Simpson. ‘It’s my wife. She’s well into her Florence Nightingale routine.’
Muriel rubbed energetically at the carpet with a piece of rag. When she had finished she rolled the cloth and various soiled tissues into a piece of newspaper and made a parcel of them. Fetching a damp flannel from the bathroom, she wiped Alma’s hands and face. The false eyelash came away.
‘My goodness,’ cried Alma. ‘It
is
bright in here.’
‘Muriel,’ said Simpson, taking her to one side. ‘Edward wants to leave.’
‘Really,’ she said curtly. ‘Who’s stopping him?’
Alma allowed the stains to be sponged from her red dress. ‘Is he a friend of yours?’ she asked.