Upgrading (8 page)

“I’ll have a Bud,” says David in a strong Geordie accent.

“Now I can’t drink champagne, my hairdresser says nothing fizzy, it makes my hair brittle.”

“White wine?” I suggest.

“So acidic,” says Farrah, staring at the drinks cabinet. “Oh, Marion, what do you think?”

“The boys are drinking Absolut and cranberry juice,” says Marion, breaking off from Daria. I am about to point out that this is acidic as well, but then realize that if Anna Maria doesn’t get Farrah something to drink soon we’ll never eat.

“A vodka,” says Farrah triumphantly. “Yes, why not? A vodka please, with ice and lemon.”

Immediately Anna Maria sets about making it for her and Farrah, clearly not wanting to lose the momentum she has built up turns round and asks, “So what have we all been up to today?”

It is a completely unanswerable question, mainly because no one has done anything, and it is clearly just an excuse for her to tell us about her day, which she does. “Marion, I went to Joe’s for lunch today with Vincente. David joined us for coffee after.” Farrah squeezes David’s hand as they sit together on a settee; she is pert and upright, he is sitting back with legs open wide and face set in an uninterested, slightly aggressive way. “Anna Maria, I spent this morning throwing out old clothes I never wear and I found a couple of dresses that would be perfect for you. David, don’t you think those two dresses would look great on Anna Maria?” David nods unconvincingly, obviously not over-exercised on the subject of dresses.

She prattles on. Marion mildly amused, Daria fuming, Christopher Maurice-Jackson listening politely and the boys smirking quietly. David is taking us in one by one. “Us?” I mean the others.

After a while, I notice that Christopher Maurice-Jackson has moved away from everyone else. He is standing, legs apart, arms loosely folded with one hand touching his chin. He stares intently at a section of wall beside the kitchen door as if it were the most important thing in the world.

“Marion,” he says, measuring the space in mid-air with his hands.

She looks across.

“I have an exquisite Beidermier table that would fit in here beautifully. The proportions are right, the width is right and it would give this room a little lift, a touch of—”

“Yeah, like I really need some more furniture,” says Marion, finishing her champagne. “Three houses full and then some.”
Three houses?
I’m intrigued. Christopher Maurice-Jackson pauses for a moment. “Just a thought,” he says, pained. Turning back to the group he sees me smiling and begins to scowl. “You ought to get rid of something, then,” he suggests, still looking at me.

Marion gets up. “Let’s eat,” she says. “I’m starved.” She squeezes my neck gently as she walks past me to the table. She allocates places quickly. We sit down, no one particularly pleased to be next to anyone else. I have Farrah and David on one side, which isn’t bad, and Marion on the other.

Daria, who has managed to put herself the far side of Marion, gives a little laugh and touches Marion’s hand.

“We played such an amusing game at Marina’s the other night,” she says, laughing again at something that just cannot be that funny. The two French guys start laughing as well but this makes her nervous so she stops and eyes them suspiciously, then she continues, “We played a game where you have to say who from history you would invite to your ideal dinner party.”

“Not you, that’s for sure,” one of the French guys whispers to the other.

“Who would you invite, Marion? I wanted Marilyn Monroe, Mozart, Einstein, Peter the Great, Tutankhamen, and Keats. Imagine the conversation!”

“Yeah, great, except they wouldn’t be able to understand each other,” sniggers one of the French guys. I smile too at this.

“Marina always knows such great games,” says Farrah, trying to smooth over the embarrassment.

Anna Maria and another South American girl I have not seen before bring in plates of Parma ham and figs. We eat with Marion’s huge, heavy, silver cutlery. I look round the table. Marion, who I notice only has figs, eats slowly using only her fork while listening passively to Daria. She gives me a slow, subtle wink which makes me feel ten times better. Farrah is telling David something. The French boys have their heads down low over their plates and shovel in their food ravenously, throwing in lots of bread. I realize that I have one thing in common with them: we have to try and eat as much as possible tonight because it’s free food. Christopher Maurice-Jackson takes a tiny mouthful, puts his elbows on the table and forms a roof with his fingers as he chews.

My mother always asks for small portions of everything. “Just a little bit for me, please. Ooh! Far too much, someone else better have this one.” I remember one Sunday lunchtime at my grandparents. My grandfather had had his first stroke and was “not quite himself,” as everyone put it. I didn’t know quite who he was now but whoever it was, he wasn’t very nice. He had never been very affectionate or even very friendly towards his grandchildren. Me and Grandpa never went fishing together and he didn’t have a mysterious shed at the bottom of the garden full of weird, dangerous things like stuffed fish and hacksaws.

He had a car, well, a series of cars, I suppose, over the years. Always very nice ones—Mercedes, Jaguars and I think he was one of the first people where they lived to have a BMW. When we went over for Sunday lunch, as we did every Sunday, he would wash his car all morning and spend the afternoon waxing it, polishing it and hoovering the inside, occasionally shooting me and my sister a suspicious glance as we played on the lawn or in the driveway. At the time we thought it was the one good thing about Grandpa that he left us to do whatever we wanted and play anywhere as long as we kept away from the car. Looking back, it’s a bit sinister really that he didn’t mind us messing about in the road or with the lawn mower, just as long as we didn’t damage his precious bloody motor.

God, I hated that house. It was a mean little 1950s bungalow on an estate about three-quarters of an hour’s drive from us. It always smelled stale and musty. My grandparents’ huge, ugly old furniture was crammed into it, ridiculously out of proportion, hopelessly out of place. Doors wouldn’t open properly because there wasn’t room. Wherever you stood, you were in the way of something or someone. It was cold and empty and at the same time stifling and overcrowded. When we arrived Grandma would check us over, trying to hide her disappointment and we would kiss her very quickly on the cheek. I think she had seen Prince Charles do something similar to the Queen when he was young. Grandpa would pass through as quickly as he could. He died before I could tell him, “I know how you feel. I don’t want to be here either.”

Their stuff had been brought back from India where they had “stayed on,” as my grandmother called it. I realize now that she hoped to give the impression that they had been part of the colonial service or that they were old army types. In fact, my grandfather had worked for an electronics company out there until, as with the colonials they always pretended to be, the Indians decided that they could do it better themselves and needed no more help from the British.

This particular lunchtime we sat in their dining room as usual, their large, grim dresser casting a menacing shadow over me and my sister as we ate Grandma’s thick, tasteless food and struggled with her huge, unwieldy bone-handled cutlery in silence. Our parents’ polite conversation was stretched like worn lace across the table, ready to break at any moment. In the end it was broken by my grandfather or, at least, the person he became after his stroke.

My grandma graciously offered my mother some pudding, guests first, of course, making it clear that Mum would never really be family. As always, my mother smiled weakly and said, “Oh, just a bit for me, please.” This is what she had said when offered the roast lamb and the packet oxtail soup before it. It was what she said to everything. Just a little bit, just a little one, don’t bother about me, I’ll make do with this. No, really.

Grandpa stood up (at first I thought he was going to the loo) and shouted at her: “Oh, for Christ’s sake, woman, have some more. There’s bloody heaps of it. Take as much as you want.”

Then he sat down calmly and waited for Grandma to pass him his. My mum was horrified. She turned her eyes away from him and obediently handed her plate back to Grandma who spooned some more thin, evaporated milk rice pudding onto it and then served the rest of us. It was actually quite frightening but I also wanted to laugh. What was really so funny was to hear Grandpa say “bloody.” We ate in silence and fled soon after, leaving the old bugger vacuuming angrily under his rear passenger seat.

In the car on the way home my mother took a tattered paper tissue from the sleeve of her cardigan and began to sob. My dad quickly put his arm round her during a straight stretch of road and muttered something about Grandpa not meaning it, not being himself.

“Oh, I know he can’t help it,” my mother sniffled, “old people get like that, especially after what has happened to him. It just took me by surprise, that’s all. It was a bit of shock, I’m not used to being shouted at like that.”

David is talking to me across Farrah.

“Sorry?” I say.

“I was just asking what line of business you’re in.”

What line of business? Pissing about in an office and skiving off to watch a rich woman shop.

“I’m in media sales,” I say instead, trying to make it sound like a serious, heavyweight profession.

“Space,” says David.

“Er, yeah.”

“Friend of mine did that for two years. Then he went into media
buying.
You know, gamekeeper turned poacher. He’s making a packet, huge basic plus commission, must be on £120K by now.”

“Who’s that?” Farrah asks sweetly.

“Rob,” David says quickly to her. “And he does consultancy work now as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if he sets up on his own soon.”

“Great,” I say without enthusiasm. “What about you? What do you do?”

It sounds really aimless and studenty, as if I’m expecting him to say that he is travelling a bit before starting teacher training.

“At the moment I’ve got a number of projects on the go,” he says, swallowing, obviously glad I’ve asked. “I deal in old cars. Not vintage ones, you know, not London to Brighton crap but sporty little numbers from the fifties—Aston Martins, Panthers and the like. There’s an incredible market for them down here. My dad and my brother pick them up for next to nothing up in the North East, we drive them down, I’ve got a couple of lads who check them over and do them up and then we flog ’em. Amazing what they go for.”

“Brilliant.” Part of me is, I’m afraid to say, genuinely impressed but mainly I’m amazed, as usual, at how easy it all sounds.

“They’re such beautiful cars,” says Farrah with an almost pained look on her face. “And my brother in New York is going to help him import American ones as well—Buicks, Cadillacs and stuff.”

David cuts her off, “Also me and my mate are opening a club in South London next month and we’re going to use these cars to ferry the VIP guests to and fro. Emma Bunton and that bloke from
EastEnders—
what’s his name?—are doing the opening night. I’ll get you and Marion on the guest list. You can use the VIP suite.”

“Oh, right, thanks.” Yeah, thanks, but somehow I
don’t
think so, you flash tosser. Emma Bunton and
EastEnders!
That’s the kind of thing that would impress most of the people in my office but I think I can aim higher than that now. I look round at Marion who is listening to the French boys and grinning. I stare harder but she doesn’t see me. David has more.

“Then me and this mate of mine from the army are going to start opening clubs in Europe, Ibiza and places. There are no licensing laws or any of that shit and some of those clubs are huge—”

Then he is telling me that he can get me some Versace stuff, seconds, dead cheap, all sizes when I realize that the one consolation that comes with this wanker, other than that my girlfriend is richer than his, is that, with a bit of luck, he might be in prison by this time next year.

Anna Maria and the other girl clear away our plates. We move onto the next course and I realize what it is that’s so strange about Marion’s parties: when her friends talk, no one actually connects with what anyone else says. Sometimes their comments are sort of related but there is no interaction, no reply. People just politely wait for a pause and then stick their oar in. It is as if they are in competition with each other, trying to dominate the conversation.

“New York was terribly hot last week. We hardly went outside. To the opera once and to a party at Vanora Fielding’s.”

“The only city I visit in the summer is London. I would never go to New York during July or August.”

“But you must have been to Judy’s new apartment there?”

“If you want to see Judy you
have
to go to New York. She never comes here, she hates Paris and London. I just think she hates Europe altogether.”

“We went to an amazing club in Paris last weekend—go-go dancers, boys and girls. You’ll never guess who we met there. Peter Katzberg. Oh, you remember Peter Katzberg, you must do. Can you imagine it? Darling Peter in this crazy club?”

“Peter Katzberg decorated Petronella Bywater’s first home. You must know it, off Cadogan Square. Petronella hated it so much she sold it immediately and stayed with her parents in Venice until she found somewhere else. That cute kid, what was his name? Kevin? He picked up the search fee—£10,000, so the woman he used to live with told me.”