just eaten tonight,’ said Edward Enderby, smiling a little manically, gesticulating with the carving knife, ‘but Janice, when I first met her, was an atrocious cook. Atrocious. Couldn’t boil an egg, could you, darling?’ Janice stared at her husband with loathing, while the others politely laughed. ‘You remember that first chicken you cooked, when my mother came round? Left the giblets inside in a little plastic bag, didn’t you? Cooked the little plastic bag and all? Didn’t you, my darling?’
‘That wasn’t for your mother,’ said Janice, in a reasonably equable tone. ‘I remember it well. It was for Kate and Bill Amies. It was embarrassing.’
So far, so good. They all sat round and munched the red flesh.
‘No, no,’ said Edward, his grey eyes glinting, ‘it was definitely for my mother. I remember it well.’
‘No,’ said Janice, firmly, but with a note of slight (and to Clive quite understandable) distress creeping into her manner. ‘No, it wasn’t for your mother, it was for Kate and Bill Amies. I remember it well.’
‘A little of the gravy?’ asked Clive, desperately, passing the new fashionable Christmas present gras et maigre sauce-boat along the table to Janice. It ran with thin red blood. No gras, no alleviating emollient gras.
‘No, no, for my mother,’ repeated Edward. ‘We did laugh. Yes, you’ve learned a thing or two since then, Janice. You’ve learned a thing or two about cooking since then.’
‘It was Kate and Bill, and we’d only been married a fortnight,’ said Janice. ‘It was the first time we ever had anyone round.’
‘My mother,’ said Edward, helping himself to another roast potato. ‘Yes, you’ve improved since those days.’ And he laughed, heartily, from his thin asthmatic chest.
‘Yes, we’d only been married a fortnight,’ said Janice, staring straight across the table at Edward. ‘I didn’t know much about cooking. And as I remember, you didn’t know much about fucking, in those days. We weren’t much good, either of us. At cooking or fucking.’
Edward’s face was, Clive had to admit to himself, a study. He turned dark red (which for so pale and grey a man was astonishing) and a vein stood up terribly in his forehead.
One didn’t use words like fucking, over dinner, like that, in 1987, in Yorkshire, in the presence of strangers. It wasn’t done. Or certainly not done to use such a word seriously. As Janice Enderby had done.
A terrible silence fell over the gravy. Susie coughed, nervously. Edward twitched. The Newtons looked at their plates. The unspeakable had been said. Three sexual initiations, three wedding nights, three honeymoons, played themselves in mental images for the three couples around the table. Clive and Susie guessed that their memories were the least disagreeable, as they were the ones to find their tongues first.
‘Well, we all learn as we get older,’ said Susie, platitudinously but boldly: and, simultaneously, Clive volunteered ‘Well, I know I shouldn’t say so, but I think Janice’s beef is much better than Ma’s ever was, she always overcooked it, and her Yorkshire puddings were like soggy dollops of wet cement.’
‘I like soggy Yorkshire,’ said Alice, gamely, and the conversation staggered on. But Janice and Edward said nothing more all evening. They had done one another in, they had murdered one another.
If looks could kill. Sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you.
And now Clive and Susie Enderby sipped their sherry, in the safety of their own home, looking back over the evening before, on the first ominous night of the New Year, contemplating their own marriage and its chances of survival.
Fucking and cooking. Division of labour.
Susie had kept her side of this primitive bargain: Clive wondered, a little uneasily, if he had kept his. The unease of the 1980s. She hadn’t seemed to fancy it much, after the birth of Vicky, but whose fault was that?
These thoughts were uncomfortable: surely it was dinner time? He glanced at his watch ostentatiously, but Susie didn’t seem to notice. He guessed that she was going over it all, apportioning blame, beginning to blame him as well as Edward, blaming all Enderbys, blaming men in general and Enderbys in particular, abstracted by resentment as she sat neatly there in her mustard silk.
But Susie’s mind had moved on. Susie was remembering, with a flutter of panic that she was sure was even now tinting her well-made-up complexion, an encounter on New Year’s Eve, at the Chamber of Commerce dance. An embarrassing encounter, a revival of yet more ancient crimes, and crimes worse (or so it had seemed to her) than cooked giblets in plastic bags, worse than insults over the roast beef. Crimes that she had repressed, disowned, forgotten, until they rose to confront her in the person of Fanny Scott Colvin, whose name she had never ever been able to forget. And there, appallingly, on New Year’s Eve, in the Victoria Hotel, in a black sequined evening dress with great shoulders like wings, like black angel’s wings, stood Fanny Scott Colvin, whom Susie had not seen for twenty years, with whom she had, mercifully, and, she hoped, for ever, lost touch at the age of twelve. She would never have recognized her, never have glimpsed in her that red-haired schoolgirl, but Fanny came swooping up to Susie, and claimed ancient friendship. ‘Susie!’ she shrieked, as though sure of her welcome, ‘It’s Susie Bates, isn’t it? Don’t you remember me? Fanny Scott Colvin I was then, and Fanny Kettle now! How are you, Susie? After all these years and years and years?’
And Susie had stood there shocked, amazed that this woman could stand there claiming acquaintance, as though nothing had ever passed between them, as though they were adults in an adult world. Guilt over her association with Fanny Scott Colvin had nearly killed Susie Enderby nee Bates, and yet there Fanny stood, calling herself Fanny Kettle, invoking old times, as though they had been times of innocence, of childhood innocence, in the school playground, in the bicycle shed, upstairs in the twin bedroom, in the secret dell.
Two evenings of revelations. Susie thoughtfully stroked the sleeve of her silk blouse. Guilt. No, not guilt. Shame. Yes, that was it, shame. Shame, like a dark stain, pouring through her body, flooding her cheeks. And Fanny Kettle had seemed to feel none of it. ‘We must have tea, coffee, lunch, you must come and see me now I’m a neighbour again!’ declared Fanny Kettle, her red hair blazing, her prominent eyes bulging, her neck extended like a fighting swan’s, and Susie had smiled, coldly, drenched in ancient shame.
Clive Enderby coughed. ‘Would you like another sherry, darling?’ he inquired. Susie looked at her gold Tissot watch. ‘Heavens, it’s late. Sorry,’ said Susie, in a voice that spoke from miles away, a choked small diminished voice. Yes, she’s blaming me, acknowledged Clive Enderby. Fucking and cooking. What a disastrous evening. Would they ever live it down?
Janice Enderby lay on the large double bed, moaning and gurgling and thrashing her head backwards and forwards on the hot pillow. ‘Help me,’ she moaned, ‘help me, help me, can’t you help me, help me.’ On and on, a monotonous keening. A sour perfumed psychotic smell rose from the crumpled sheets. Edward Enderby sat and watched helplessly. ‘Never mind, never mind,’ he said, from time to time, ineffectually. His sharp grey pointed face was peaked with misery. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, help me, help me, help me,’ moaned Janice.
A bad start to the new year, said the sardonic corner of Edward Enderby’s consciousness, as the rest of it kept dumb vigil. Yes, a bad start. But at least there’s no one to hear it through the wall. Now we’re detached. Detached misery. Semidetached misery had been hell.
Paul Whitmore was composing a letter about his prison diet, addressed to the prison governor. He had asked Alix’s advice, and she had recommended this course of action. ‘Be polite,’ she had urged. ‘There’s nothing to gain by being rude.’
Paul Whitmore was a vegetarian. He was not satisfied with the variety of diet offered. He would like more fresh vegetables and something other than lettuce and tomatoes in his salad. Eating meat is bad for the mind and body,