‘I think she must be. She’s actually revising, cramming, with real books and notes, Sherry. On a Friday evening.’ Sheridan took a slow, thoughtful draft and nodded.
‘Revision, eh? Right. Best leave her for the time being.’
Once more Jennifer was humming. Over and over the same infuriating refrain. Sheridan attempted to identify it but couldn’t and this incensed him all the more. Then he remembered. The song was popular in the fifties. He’d loathed it at the time and, though he couldn’t explain it, was shot with a fury each time he’d heard the song subsequently. Its daft tune seemed to follow him into lifts, shops and once even, he seemed to recall though he could scarcely credit it, he’d heard an instrumental version on a corporate telephone hold. The song was about a bikini. And the reason he detested it so was because the chorus contained the expression, itsy-bitsy. Itsy-bitsy – he grimaced.
‘Sherry! I do believe you’ve got a tick.’
‘Tick, eh? Done something right for a change have I?’
‘There, it happened again. Your cheek muscle just twitched. Unless, you were winking at me, of course, ho ho.’
Sheridan wiped a palm over his cheek and kneaded the flesh upwards. He sniffed. ‘Tired, that’s all. Work … summer bloody madness. Never really noticed it before. Remember me telling you about a lad called Ashby? Ashby Giles?’
‘The upstart.’
‘That’s the man. Anyway, I got back from a lunch and the lad had only seen fit to don a pair of bloody shorts.’ He began to laugh. ‘Wearing them, bold as you like, around the office he was.’
‘Ooh. Sapid, nine.’
‘Quite. I mean for all the lad knew I may have been expect …’
‘Bread and butter, six.’
‘I say, you are quick this evening.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, grinning monstrously.
‘As it happened I wasn’t expecting a client.’
‘Still, you upbraided the lad?’
‘I did indeed.’
‘And he accused you of sexual discrimination because naturally you passed no comment on your bare-legged female staff …’
‘How in God’s name did you know that?’
Jennifer laughed and slapped a hand down on the arm of her chair. ‘Because, my dear. At times you’re what can only be described as a predictable old … um … light brown oon, seven.’
‘A what?’
She didn’t answer and went back to her humming.
More to move out of earshot than further inebriate himself, Sheri dan rose and wandered across to the gin bottle. He hadn’t the faintest idea why the expression, itsy-bitsy, enraged him so. It just jarred inexplicably. Like executives in shorts. Like sneering women. Like politically correct language. Like much on this increasingly unsatisfactory planet.
The sitting room door opened a fraction and Folucia’s head peered round. She addressed them with exaggerated boredom.
‘Going out now. Where yer going? Ask no questions, hear no lies. What about your revi-jun? Fi-nished. What about su-pper? Not hungry, thanks all the same? Just a minute young lady? Minute’s too long, life’s too short …’
‘Folucia!’ yelped her mother.
‘Folucia, please,’ entreated Sheridan. ‘Before you go, could I please just have a very short word.’
‘Tit!’ she chimed. ‘Short enough for you, Daddy? By-ee.’
Jennifer said nothing. And, although Sheridan was swallowing a chortle, he shook his head solemnly and said nothing in agreement. That was it then, he thought, the evening’s agenda had just been written. Silent supper followed by reading the paper, occasionally glancing up to look at whatever was happening on the television, then up to bed for another bout of insomnia. If he was lucky, she might get stuck on the odd clue and be forced to speak to him. But he doubted it.
Sheridan tried to imagine what Jennifer’s reaction might be if he suddenly announced that he was going out. He couldn’t. Not that after twenty-three years of marriage he didn’t know her, rather, in the last decade or so he’d more or less dried up on the surprises – just as she’d virtually dried up on the lovemaking.
Jennifer sat motionless staring at the blank television screen. And Sheridan, though he had nothing much to say, experienced a colossal urge to break the silence. Like a child who’s taken on an adult’s bribe to remain silent for a time, he felt a stream of iconoclastic statements jostle up into his larynx. It reminded him of these last six weeks, when being in the paradise state between waking and sleep, he’d detect the vaguest of urges to get up and pee. Invariably, he would attempt to sublimate it and succumb to the delicious gravity of sleep. Yet in his heart he’d know that, having acknowledged the urge, all hope of sleep was absurd, and sooner or later he’d be forced to capitulate.
He glanced over at her. And, perhaps, there was something unusual about the light but she appeared suddenly as she might have two and a half decades ago.
She twitched.
Still he glared at her.
She looked away.
He smiled.
*
As was usual, Sheridan had pulled into the Lloyd Park car park. And, as was usual, he’d turned off the ignition, clicked off his lights and pushed his face into Jennifer’s. Yet this night she did not respond with her accustomed ardour.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked her.
‘Nothing … I s’pose.’
‘No there is, I can tell.’
She cupped his cheek and murmured a small kiss onto his mouth. ‘Can you tell?’
‘Yes, I can.’
‘How’s that then?’
Though Sheridan may have been an expert at the games played over telephones and in the meeting rooms of the major pharmaceuticals, he was clueless when it came to this sort of thing.
‘I dunno.’
‘Maybe it’s because you know me quite well. Sherry.’
‘Right.’
‘You know, Sherry.’ She tightened her hold on his cheek and began to wipe awkward, wet kisses over his face. Her mouth progressed round to his neck, practically panting at his ear. Then she whispered something to Sheridan Entwhistle.
‘Sorry?’
‘I said,’ she spoke with a slightly louder frustration, ‘you can do things to me if you want.’
*
Sheridan laughed out loud.
‘You can do things to me if you want,’ he blurted.
Jennifer looked up at him.
The sternness of her expression made him laugh again. How that face could have once uttered those words was beyond him now.
‘Sherry?’
‘Nothing, sorry.’
*
At work Sheridan was not reticent about the fact he had a girlfriend. And when people asked, Have you had her yet? – which was the way people put things at the time – he’d reply, ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’ Then when someone quipped, Is that bald for no? and everyone collapsed, he considered it perhaps time to put it to her. After all, he reckoned, the worst she could do was decline.
Prior to the ecstatic rummagings Jennifer