I woke up on the morning of my dinner appointment with Sheba and solemnly promised myself not to start doing anything preparatory until at least midday. It is a great challenge for me not to place inordinate emphasis on this sort of occasion. Any break in my routine—any small variation in the sequence of work and grocery shopping and telly and so on—tends to take on a disproportionate significance. I’m a child in that respect: able to live, psychically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited-for event with the freight of my excessive hope.
By 9:00 A.M., in spite of my vows, I had twice taken my new sandals out of their box to check that they weren’t too tarty. The rest of my outfit, which I had laid out the night before, presented no problems. I had spray-starched my white blouse so it was nice and crisp, and my grey skirt suit from British Home Stores looked as good as new. (It had not left its dry cleaning wrapper since a staff function two years earlier.) The sandals were a worry, though. I had bought them on Saturday at a local boutique in Archway. They were lilac, with tiny bows on the front and a higher heel than I generally wear. Jolly? I asked myself as I stared at them from different angles. Or just cheap?
Would they look silly with tights? And, if so, could I get away with bare legs?
At three o’clock, I took a bath. Afterwards, while my hair was drying, I tried getting a fresh perspective on the sandals by walking quickly into the bedroom and catching them, as it were, by surprise. The first time I did this, they looked all right. Pretty. Dainty. Entirely appropriate for a single woman attending a spring supper. Then I did it again. And this time, when I walked into the room, they seemed to sit up and roar mutton dressed as lamb. In an effort to get off the footwear topic, I tried on my grey skirt. But it seemed that I had put on weight since last wearing it and, as I strained to fasten the waistband, one of the buttons pinged off and rolled into the dark, dusty space beneath my dresser. There followed a rather shameful interlude of female madness, which involved me tearing off the skirt and standing on a wobbly chair in the front room, trying to get a full-length view of my naked form in the mirror that hangs over the gas fire.
It’s always a disappointing business confronting my own reflection. My body isn’t bad. It’s a perfectly nice, serviceable body. It’s just that the external me—the sturdy, lightly wrinkled, handbagged me—does so little credit to the stuff that’s inside. Sometimes, when I lie in bed at night, I can lose all sense of my body, my age. In the darkness, I could be twenty years old. I could be ten. It’s a lovely sensation to slough off one’s battered old casing for a moment or two. But then, I always wonder, what must it be to have a
beautiful
body? A body that you don’t want to escape? Several years ago, when Jennifer and I went to Paris together for a weekend break, we saw a woman dancing on the bar at a little bistro in Montmartre.
She was very pretty and very, very young. All the men in the place were dribbling slightly. It was a silly thing really, but just for a moment, as I watched them watch her, I remember feeling that I would give
anything
—be stupid, be poor, be fatally ill—to have a little of her sort of power.
I must have made quite a bit of noise during my personal appearance crisis, because at some point the woman who lives above me began banging on her floor. I stopped crying then, got down from the chair, and made a cup of tea. While I sat, sipping and sniffling, Portia, my cat, who had been watching my ravings with great, feline contempt, relented and came over to rub herself against my legs.
Slowly, I grew calm. The sandals were all right. I was getting myself in a state over nothing. The skirt was a bother, but it could be safety-pinned. If not, my black one with an elasticated waist would suffice. I would not wear tights.
I left the house with enough time to buy some flowers for Sheba. The flower stall outside the underground station had a rather depleted selection, and I agonised over having left it so late. I ended up opting for a mixed bunch of carnations and sweetheart roses and then, more or less the minute I got into the car, I remembered reading somewhere that multicoloured flower arrangements were in poor taste. Miraculously, I managed to restrain myself from going back to exchange them.
Sheba lived in a large Victorian house in Boise Lane: three storeys, a stoop, a big bay window, and a front garden with a cherry tree. I got a little bit lost on the way and then could only find a parking space two streets away. By the time I arrived on the doorstep, I was rather tense and pink, and the straps of my sandals had begun to chafe.
“Barbara!” Sheba cried when she opened the door. “How lovely you look!” She hugged me. “And what lovely flowers!” She took the bouquet that I held out. “Come in. Come in. Let’s get you a drink.”
We walked down a long, bright hallway into a living room that occupied roughly the same square footage as my entire flat. Everything in it was very large—the carpets covering the wooden floorboards, the slabs of worn furniture, the cavernous fireplace. I sat down, at Sheba’s urging, in a leather armchair, but the seat was so deep that, as I leaned back, my feet lost contact with the floor and I found myself semirecumbent. When I attempted to haul myself up into a less ridiculous position, my hand grasped a child’s sock that was stuck down the side of the chair cushion.
“Oh God, what slobs we are!” Sheba said, clutching her forehead.
She was only playing at being embarrassed, though. When I handed the sock to her, she threw it in a wooden bowl on the coffee table. “Hang on,” she said, “let me go and put your flowers in some water. Richard and the children should be down any minute …”
The first time Jennifer came to my flat, I cleaned the place scrupulously in preparation for her arrival; I even groomed Portia, for God’s sake. And still, I had the most terrible feeling of exposure when she walked in. It was as if my dirty linen basket, rather than my unexceptionable sitting room, were on display. But the awkwardness of having a professional colleague observe her living arrangements had not occurred to Sheba. She wasn’t thinking about what I was thinking. She had that absolute, bourgeois confidence in the rightness of her living room, her tatty, gigantic furniture, her children’s stray underwear.
Left on my own, I swivelled about at the edge of my chair, taking the opportunity to inspect my surroundings with a less inhibited curiosity. Hanging on the wall were several paintings—the sort of gimmicky modern abstracts that aren’t my cup of tea—and a primitive wooden instrument, possibly African, which looked as if it might be rather smelly if one got too close to it. The bookshelves housed a decent but not very inspired collection of fiction, suggesting the strong influence of newspaper “Books of the Year” lists. You could tell there weren’t any real literature lovers in the family. The mantelpiece was a gathering point for household flotsam. A child’s drawing. A hunk of pink Play-Doh. A passport. One elderly-looking banana.
There was a level of disorder in the place that I doubt I could ever tolerate. And yet, there was something in the disarray that was enviable. When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence. You know with painful accuracy the provenance of everything you touch and the last time you touched it. The five little cushions on your sofa stay plumped and leaning at their jaunty angle for months at a time unless you theatrically muss them. The level of the salt in your shaker decreases at the same excruciating rate, day after day. Sitting in Sheba’s house—studying the mingled detritus of its several inhabitants—I could see what a relief it might be to let your own meagre effects be joined with other people’s.
“You’re Barbara,” a voice said. I looked up and saw a tall man with a lot of crazy grey hair standing in the doorway, peering at me through thick spectacles. “Hello,” he said. “I’m Richard.” Sheba had mentioned that her husband was older than her; I was taken aback to discover by how much. Richard
was not yet what you could call elderly, but middle age was no longer a plausible category for him either. His shoulders had begun to slope in the manner of overburdened coat hangers. The backs of his hands had a shiny, yellowish look.
“Sheba has spoken so fondly of you,” he said, coming over to shake my hand. His belt was cinched a little too tightly beneath his potbelly and there was art, I saw now, in the tousling of his hair. He was not going unprotestingly into his dotage. “I gather you’re one of the few civilised people at St. George’s.”
“Oh, I don’t know … ,” I began.
“Now!” he said, ignoring my demurral. “I see my wife has abandoned you without even giving you a drink. Monstrous woman! What can I get you?” He rubbed his hands and grinned. His eyes, behind the spectacles, had a bulbous, insectoid look. A rogue image swam into my head, of his pruney old mouth pursed at Sheba’s breast.
“Whatever you … What do you have?” I said.
Richard waved his arms expansively. “Everything! We’re very dedicated boozers in this house.”
“Well then … a sherry would be lovely.”
“Sherry?” The ghost of a smirk passed across his face. “Really? Goodness, I think you may have hit upon the one thing we
don’t
have.”
He went over to the drinks cupboard and began rootling around. Sheba came back, carrying my flowers in a vase. “Oh, you’ve met!” she said. She looked anxiously at Richard and then back at me. “The children will be down any minute.” She spoke with a strange, ersatz cheerfulness. She had probably had to do some wheedling to get her husband to agree to my visit, I thought. This would explain the self-conscious saintliness with
which Richard was attending to me. In the little economy of the marriage, my invitation to dinner had posted a substantial credit in his column.
“Darling,” Richard said, removing his head from the interior of the drinks cupboard, “do we have any sherry that you know of? Barbara wants sherry.”
“No, honestly,” I protested. “I’ll be perfectly happy with something else. White wine …”
“I know!” Sheba said. “I’ve got some Marsala in the kitchen. I use it for cooking. Would Marsala do, Barbara?”
“Absolutely. But please, don’t go to any trouble …”
“Oh!” Sheba cried, pointing at my feet. “You’ve hurt yourself.”
I looked down, and sure enough, blood was trickling down my left ankle; the strap of my stupid shoe had bitten into the skin.
“Poor you,” Sheba said. “Are they new shoes? Let me go and get you a plaster …”
“No, no, don’t worry …”
“Don’t be silly. I won’t be a sec.” She disappeared.
Richard smiled at me, embarrassed. “You ladies and your stilettoes,” he said.
“They’re hardly stilettoes … ,” I protested.
“Bash used to insist on wearing high heels,” he went on. “And then, one time, she fractured her ankle running for a bus. After that I put my foot down … Ha! As it were. I made her buy a pair of clogs.”
There was a short silence.
“I’ve never seen the point of high heels myself,” Richard continued. “It’s all about creating a sexually provocative posture, isn’t it? Bending the spine, forcing the bottom out. Like
those marvellous, purple-arsed orangutans …” He paused. “I think I’ll make myself a drink while we’re waiting for your sherry.”
Sheba came back now with the Marsala and the plasters and her daughter, Polly—a sulky, rather beautiful seventeen-year-old, with her father’s curly hair and her mother’s long, thin body. “Polly, this is Barbara, my friend from school,” Sheba said.
“Hello,” Polly said curtly, casting a quick glance in my direction. She gestured at the box of plasters in her mother’s hand. “What are they for?”
“Barbara cut her foot,” Sheba said.
Polly turned to look at my bleeding heel. “Oh, gross,” she said.
“Polly!” Richard murmured in a tone of vague reproof.
Sheba came over and handed me a plaster with a bundle of toilet paper to clean my wound.
Polly slumped on the sofa with a gusty sigh. “Can I have a vodka with a twist, Dad?” she asked.
“Oh, all right,” her father said, all twinkly indulgence. He smiled at me and shook his head. “My daughter the alcoholic.”
“So, Polly,” I said, as I tended to my ankle. “You must be doing your A levels now. How are your courses going?” The blood soaked through the first toilet paper tourniquet with no sign of staunching.
“Fine,”
Polly said in a bored voice, pulling at the hairs on her arm.
“Polly!” Sheba said.
“What?” Polly said. “What was I meant to say?”
This riposte evidently stumped Sheba, or perhaps she was trying to avoid a scene. In any case, she didn’t pursue it. I
chuckled, to indicate that I had not taken offence. Although of course I had. It sounds mad for a woman who has spent her life in the teaching profession to say so, but the truth is, I am not very good with young people. I am perfectly confident in a classroom, where the rules—regardless of whether or not they are respected—are clearly defined. But in other contexts I find myself at a loss. I cannot affect the casual, knockabout style of conversing with the younger generation that seems to be de rigueur these days. I am not a casual person. Horseplay and nonsense jokes do not sit well on me. I tend to become stiff and awkward in young company—and then, when I see that my companions are bored by me, I grow preemptively cold and forbidding.