had lost track of her. That had been pleasant for a moment there, relaxed nonsense behind which their eyes had been reading each other like a sub-text. He had enjoyed her presence. He figured her about mid-thirties, maybe slightly over that. She had an attractiveness that made him not just wonder where she had been but wish a little he could have been there with her. Her body had reached the point of being opulently fleshed without yet being heavy. The soft blonde hair imbued her maturity with a warm glow. Given the almost anorexic fashionability of most of the younger women in the room, she had been like coming upon a Renoir in a gallery of Lowrys. Not that he didn’t like Lowry but he knew whose figures he would rather get physically involved with.
‘I don’t see why lawyers should be criticised for finding enterprising ways to ply their trade.’
His eyes were wandering round the room when he saw her. She was standing among a group of men. Well, she would be, wouldn’t she? But she was looking at him. The glance congealed into a stare. He didn’t know how long it took her eyes to turn away towards one of the men. Five seconds? Fifteen? But it had been as if they were looking at each other down a private, silent corridor. If that was just a glance, it was one your imagination could feed off for a month. It was a glance that felt like an assignation.
‘I say, good on them,’ the lawyer was saying.
Had he imagined it? She was talking with the men again. They weren’t a bad-looking group either. Especially two of the three. And they were young.
He hadn’t imagined it. To think that would just be giving himself an excuse for not trying to connect. She hadn’t come in with those men. The man she had come in with was looking as if the stomach pump might have to be summoned at any moment. He knew him as a friend of Dan Galbraith. Alec Something he was called. Maybe his connection with Mary Sue was casual.
He had to do something. He suspected that if he tiptoed away from the talking man, the absence might not be noticed. The man was so busy listening to himself, he didn’t need anybody else.
Maybe he had shut down his reception system automatically as a mode of self-protection, but he could no longer follow the lawyer’s monologue in detail. It had degenerated in his ears into a babble of soundbites in contemporary non-speak – stopping bucks and care in the community and final analyses and, bizarrely zooming in from outer space, the trial of Oscar Wilde.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I’m just going over to the table here.’ (It’s either that or suicide.) ‘Maybe we’ll connect with each other later.’ (Say, if you’ve got a lasso.)
‘Hold on a minute,’ the man said, putting his hand on his arm. ‘I don’t think you’ve got my point at all.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you got mine. The main thing I was saying in the piece was that a democracy functions on consensus. Mutual goodwill. Take that away and it caves in on itself. If you’ve got one of our crucial institutions skulking round the premises of another for profit, and one that happens to be the most important one in our lives, you’ve got consensus disintegrating. Every dingo dog for himself. I admire the NHS. Apart from women’s emancipation, I think it’s the single most important piece of legislation we had in the twentieth century. You haven’t confronted any of that.’
‘No, no, no. Listen.’
‘I’ve listened. Two things. Take your hand off my arm. And – as Oscar Wilde probably didn’t say – piss off.’
He went over to the table which had been set up as an improvised bar. He was angry at himself for getting angry. This was Dan’s party. Once at the table, he loitered, waiting to calm down. He was also waiting for an amazing plan to arrive. All he could think of was that she drank gin and tonic. That was what Dan had given her. He made one carefully, turned and walked towards her group.
She noticed him as he came towards her. She smiled at him and was about to say something. Anything. Maybe ‘Hello again.’ But he took the almost empty glass she was nursing and replaced it with a full one. He looked at her and turned and walked away. The men around her had gone silent. She took a tentative sip from the glass. It was gin and tonic. She was impressed that he had remembered. The voices started up around her again.
‘What was that all about?’
‘Is he the part-time barman?’
‘Who is he anyway?’
‘Harry Beck,’ she said.
They obviously had never heard of him. She was remembering the sudden darkness of his eyes. They were intense. She liked that.
‘Anyway,’ the one called John said. ‘Then we started on the champagne. And it was Moët. That was a party.’
She watched him cross to the table and mix himself a drink. Whisky and water he took. Dan Galbraith called to him and he went over and sat on the floor beside Dan’s chair, leaning his back against the wall. She enjoyed the way he moved. She wondered what they were talking about.
‘I need a bit of company tonight,’ Dan was saying. ‘I don’t want to go into my fifties alone.’
‘You’ve got plenty of that, then.’
‘I don’t know about Sylvia’s insistence on the long dresses, though. A bit formal, isn’t it?’
‘I like it. I like seeing women like that. I don’t know. It makes me imagine a more romantic time. Fin de siècle or something. End of the nineteenth century.’
‘In a way it’s quite a good wake, I suppose,’ Dan said. ‘Burying your forties. That was a nice funeral oration you gave.’
‘It was meant to be about the future as well as the past.’
‘I know, I know. It’s all right for you. You’ve still got most of your forties to come,’ Dan said.
‘Uh-huh. But what am I doing with them?’
It was a remark thrown out casually that came back to attack him. He was mugged by his own question. While Dan reminisced gently, he found himself trapped among thoughts the question had released in him. His part in the conversation became mainly nods and vague sounds of assent.
What was he doing with his forties? He sometimes felt his nature was a beast he hadn’t learned to domesticate. It did what it wanted rather than what he tried to train it to do.
‘Remember the party we had when your first novel came out,’ Dan said. ‘That was an event.’
‘It was.’
And thanks for giving me a memory I don’t need at the moment. How many years ago was that? Fifteen? Sixteen? It was in a wine bar which had since disappeared. Passing the place where it used to be, he sometimes wondered if he had dreamed it. It was a Pizzaland now. He certainly seemed to have dreamed the possibilities with which he had sensed the place shimmering that evening.
Lodgings in Eden had been out for three weeks then. He had decided to wait before having the party in case the book sank without trace and people wouldn’t know what they were supposed to be celebrating. But all the reviews that were in had been good. The book had reached number nine in a bestseller list. Since he had never again appeared on any such list, he had, of course, realised that they were things of no serious significance. But then that entry at nine had seemed an omen of a bright future.
So many other things that evening had supported the feeling. He was standing among a lot of people who were happy for him and wishing him well. He was twenty-eight. He had already written a book that he was entitled to call, however briefly, a bestseller. Maggi was still with him and they had plans to choose somewhere to live where she could take a job teaching and he could write his next book. The publishers were happy and waiting for it. He had ideas for evermore. If this was what he could achieve at the first attempt, what might he be able to do over the next few years?
Not a lot, as it transpired. He still couldn’t understand it. How had something as solid as that moment turned into a mirage? Perhaps the first