I’m out with Betty and Mercia in Cafe Rouge in Hampstead and we’re having afternoon tea, my treat, to thank them for their kindness to Enid, and to me. We’ve dressed up for the occasion. They’re wearing flowery dresses and pink lipstick and I’m wearing my maroon paisley cravat.
We’ve got seats by the window, looking out onto Hampstead High Street, and we know what we want: afternoon tea with cakes, scones and croque monsieur.
The charming young waitress is French, with dark hair curling around her face. She tells us that for five pounds extra we can have prosecco.
‘Ooh,’ Betty says.
‘I say,’ adds Mercia.
I throw caution to the wind. ‘Then we’ll have prosecco,’ I announce.
The prosecco arrives toute-de-suite, as they say in France, and we watch the waitress fill the glasses then we raise them in a salute to each other and ourselves.
‘Chin-chin,’ Betty says with a sparkle in her eye.
‘Bottoms up,’ responds Mercia.
‘Cheers,’ I say.
‘I do love afternoon tea,’ Betty says. ‘It revives you at that time of the day when you’re flagging, I always think.’
‘The meal I’ve never understood is brunch,’ Mercia says thoughtfully. ‘I can’t fit brunch into my day at all. It’s like an overblown elevenses, with pancakes instead of biscuits.’
‘It’s not elevenses,’ Betty says, shaking out her napkin. ‘Elevenses comes between breakfast and lunch, whereas brunch replaces breakfast and lunch. Isn’t that right, Kim?’
‘I think so.’ I’m flattered that she’s asking my opinion. ‘It’s American, I believe. Heavier than breakfast but lighter than lunch.’
‘Americans don’t have tea though, do they? So after brunch, what time would their evening meal be?’
‘Oh, gosh …’
This conversation is quite exciting, because it makes us feel cosmopolitan, being in a French restaurant discussing American mealtimes.
The cakes, when they come, are wonderful. I feel as if I’ve never eaten cakes quite this good before. Presently, I notice that our glasses are empty, so we look around for our waitress and I alert her, with more drama than is usual for me, to the unfolding emergency of the empty glasses. She says that for economic reasons, it would be better to buy a bottle rather than three more glasses, especially if we want three more glasses after that.
I must say, I sober up at the idea of buying nine glasses of prosecco in the middle of the afternoon. But, of course, it only amounts to three each, which feels perfectly manageable, or doable as my son, George, would call it, so I agree on the bottle.
Betty and Mercia are looking pink and flushed. I expect I am, too. I feel carefree and young, and even though I wasn’t going to talk about Enid today, she pops into my head in case I’ve forgotten her. Hello, here I am!
‘Enid would have loved this,’ I say, reaching for a scone. But as I look at the condensation beading on the glass, I think it’s more likely that she’d be appalled by my extravagance.
However, the women are nodding.
‘Absolutely,’ Mercia says. ‘To Enid!’
‘Enid.’
It’s funny how you can be married to someone all that time and not be sure you ever knew your wife all that well.
I’m not sure that I know myself anymore. I feel carefree, more carefree than I ought to feel being newly bereaved, and I split the warm scone and put the cream on, and the strawberry jam. I wonder if all couples feel like this. I wonder how well Betty knew Stan, bearing in mind the mix-up about his last resting place. ‘Why did Stan wear safari suits?’ I ask her.
She dabs her mouth with her napkin, leaving a trace of pink lipstick with the dislodged crumbs. ‘For the pockets,’ she says. ‘Stan always liked a pocket. It’s hard to get shirts with pockets, you know. Stan used to blame it on the smoking ban.’
‘Suits have pockets,’ Mercia points out.
‘Stan gave up suits when he retired. Except for golf club dinners and funerals, that sort of thing.’
They both look at me quickly.
‘Sorry. Insensitive of me,’ Betty says.
I wave my hand. Don’t worry.
Cafe Rouge is filling up with mothers and small children. The noise level rises.
‘School’s ended,’ Mercia says, looking around and smiling. But her mind is now on her husband, too, and his clothes. ‘The first time I went out with Bertie, he drove us to Brighton in an open-top car that he borrowed. He wore a suit to the beach. After we’d been married about ten years, he took to wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and khaki shorts with turn-ups.’
‘I don’t think there was such a thing as casual wear in those days,’ I point out. ‘My casual wear was my cricket whites and a football jersey for sport. We dressed for the occasion. Casual meant taking off one’s tie.’ I chuckle to myself. ‘For my eightieth, we went out for a meal and Enid asked George to wear a tie – he turned up at the restaurant wearing it around his head!’
They laugh sympathetically.
‘This kind of conversation should make us feel old, but I don’t feel old at all,’ Betty says. ‘I feel younger than them,’ she says, looking at the mothers. ‘We don’t have their worries.’
I realise that I’ve never been drunk with Betty and Mercia before. I have an urge to ask them about Enid and whether she knew about my sartorial penchants. I feel it’s important to know whether she’d have thought like them, or whether she’d have mocked me like the two women in Kentish Town. If I ask, I have to be prepared to live with the answer. And if I don’t, I’ll miss my chance because I might never get drunk with them again.
‘Penny for them,’ Mercia says, and her eyes are kind.
I decide that, all things considered, it’s something that I would like to find out one way or another, so I take my courage in both hands. ‘Did Enid know that I had a fondness for her clothes?’
Betty and Mercia snap their heads towards each other, wide-eyed.
I raise my glass aloft and stare at the bubbles, wishing I could drown in them.
‘It’s not anything that we discussed,’ Betty says after a moment, ‘although she did once ask me if Stan had ever expressed an interest that way. But he was a lot bigger than you, Kim. Nothing of mine would have gone near him.’
Mercia’s licking her finger and pressing it on the cake crumbs on her plate. ‘She asked me, too.’ She looks up at me and laughs. ‘You know what Bertie was like. I’ve got more pictures of Bertie in a dress than I have of myself.’
‘Really?’ This is news to me.
‘Crossing the equator, Bertie always threw himself wholeheartedly into the fancy-dress ceremony. On his last cruise, his very last, he did a wonderful Lily Savage in a gold sequined gown and a blond wig – he made a marvellous drag queen. All the British men dressed up as women and had a whale of a time. Only the British men, now I think of it. The Americans went as Uncle Sam or Superman. And the Europeans ignored it altogether.’
How unlike Enid to ask her friends such an intimate question.
She’d allowed me to keep my secrets without judging or prying or disapproving, or at least, without showing it, which amounts to the same; Enid was never usually slow to show her disapproval.
‘I sort of guessed it was something to do with you, but she didn’t go into it,’ Mercia said.
That’s a tender side of Enid, an understanding side of her that I didn’t foresee. I suppose what I’ve learnt is that you can’t second-guess people. Even with a fuzzy head, it strikes me as being vitally important that I remember it.