PARKING NEAR THE de Witts’ for their annual Easter lunch was a problem – made worse since a couple of innocuous cafés at the end of the road had been smartened up and now attracted late breakfasters who sat around in cashmere scarves. The streets and cul-de-sacs of stuccoed Victorian houses were lined with cars. One or two of Paula and Hartley’s guests double parked, hoping the locals would be lenient in this well-decorated part of west London, but Richard Epworth considered the strategy risky. A scratch etched along the side of the car, or an outraged note, would ruin his day. He found a spot nearly a quarter of a mile away and he and the family walked briskly. A cold wind drove them along the pavement. Easter was early.
A smiling young woman from a catering company opened the front door and directed people down to the open-plan basement. Another stood at the foot of the stairs, with a tray of glasses filled with sparkling wine or fresh orange juice. Talk was loud, trapped under the low ceiling, but Paula’s greetings rose above it. Richard edged his way down the stripped-pine stairs, hampered by children who pushed past his legs. Arriving at the tray, he chose the wine – his first drink since the start of Lent. He grasped the glass by its stem and made for a patch of empty space. There was already quite a crowd; familiar-looking adults, fresh from church, wearing confident colours. Paula had filled the room with flowers – white tulips and Madonna lilies. ‘Where’s the bride?’ someone boomed. Richard took a large sip from the glass.
‘Vivienne and the girls here?’ The face, close to Richard’s, which appeared to conceal two symmetrically placed boiled sweets in the lower jaw, was topped by a fuzz of greyish hair. Everything below the face was dominated by a yellow V-necked jersey, stretched over a prominent stomach. A pair of beige trousers was belted beneath the curve.
‘Somewhere,’ Richard said. ‘I lost them at the top of the stairs.’
‘Any plans for the holiday?’
‘No. I go back to work on Tuesday. How about you?’ Richard took another gulp. He didn’t recognise the man though the fellow seemed to know who he was.
‘Off to France this evening to check up on the builder. See if he’s managed to saw through any more pipes,’ the man said.
‘Sounds fun.’
‘Three times he’s done it. Numero uno, notre ami went through the mains – massive great fountain, high as the trees – cut off the neighbours’ water supply. Madame et Monsieur were none too pleased, I can tell you, started jabbering on about indemnité. They seemed to care more about that than getting the damned thing mended . . .’
The man was in full flood, looking over Richard’s shoulder, somewhere past his left ear. The oblique gaze made Richard feel paranoid and slightly woozy, as if the room had tipped. The ceiling seemed oppressively near his head. He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths.
‘Is something the matter, my friend?’ The man was holding Richard’s elbow and looking at him with concern. The jersey was brighter than previously. God, it was bright.
‘No, no,’ Richard said, releasing himself. ‘I’m absolutely fine. Just forgot where I was for a moment. Nothing to worry about.’
Vivienne appeared at Richard’s side. ‘Vivienne, my dear. You’re looking neat.’ The man took her hands and held her at arm’s length, before kissing her. ‘Hang on. A la française, please. That’s at least three times in our village.’ He kissed her twice more, making more luscious contact each time. Vivienne waited, smiling faintly. Her right cheek glistened. ‘I was just about to say to Richard it could be petit mal, this lapse thing,’ the man said. ‘Go and see a good neurologist. I can recommend someone if you like. Get him checked out.’
Vivienne looked puzzled. Richard raised his eyebrows a couple of times at her in what he hoped was a comic French manner.
‘How’s the bespoke bathroom business?’ the man asked Vivienne.
Richard took the opportunity to slip away. He dodged between a woman in a delphinium-blue jacket and Glen, the vicar of St Dunstan’s, who touched his forehead in a mock salute as Richard passed. One of the patio doors on to the garden was propped open and although the draught coming through the gap was chilly and a dozen children, including his own, were racing round the lawn, Richard stepped outside.
‘Darling. Happy Easter,’ Paula said. ‘You look as if you could do with a top-up. If Poppy doesn’t appear with the bottle, I’ll go and get you one myself as soon as I’ve blown the starting whistle for the Easter egg hunt. Do you want to blow the whistle? You could, you know.’
‘No, I’m sure you’ll do it better than me. Super party,’ Richard said. He was glad to be in the fresh air.
Paula pushed back the fair curls that were lifting in the wind. She was wearing a red wind-proof coat over her party dress and had a whistle on a ribbon round her neck. ‘Just look at the energy these guys have,’ she said.
Under the flowering fruit trees the children were gathering up handfuls of wind-blown blossom and chasing each other, flinging petals that never met their targets. They were hopeless projectiles. The little ones kept on trying, hurling with greater and greater force, but Bethany, Richard’s elder daughter, and an older boy whom Richard didn’t recognise, changed tactic. They began closing in on the children, grabbing whoever they could get hold of and cramming petals down their necks. Martha, his younger daughter, wasn’t taking part. She was at the far end of the garden by the summer house. Enveloped in Vivienne’s pashmina, she stood on one leg and clasped the foot of her raised leg behind her. She hopped on the spot, staring at her reflection in the glass doors of the summer house, hopping closer and closer, until the pashmina slid off her head and on to the floor. Then, wearing only her vest and knickers, she stood with her bare feet digging into the cloth, and began to twirl round and round until the folds had wound in a spiral up to her ankles. She was more fragile-looking than her sister – more Vivienne’s build – with the same pale skin like the inside of shells. Richard wondered where her clothes had gone. He called her name but she ignored him.
‘I am counting to ten.’ It was Bethany’s voice above the squealing. ‘Starting from now. One. Two. Three. Four . . .’
The squeals changed to shrill screams. One little girl was already down on the ground with the older boy lying on top of her, apparently strangling her. Another had crashed into a tree, trying to escape, and was sobbing.
‘Probably time for chocolate,’ Paula said. She put the whistle to her lips and gave a long blast. ‘Right, guys. Easter egg hunt. All stand up. When I blow the whistle again, all you little kids start hunting for eggs round the patio. Try not to hurt the daffodils. Conrad and Bethany, there are two special eggs in the front garden. Go and wait by the side gate. I’ll let you through in a minute.’
‘Brilliant,’ Richard said. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. The wine was making him sweat.
The children were all on their feet. Conrad, flushed and panting, looked as though he regretted abandoning the fleshly sin of strangling for the uncertain promise of egg collecting. The child who had banged her nose stopped crying. Martha, at the far end of the garden, bent down and untangled her feet from the pashmina. She picked it up and wrapped it round her head, flipping the ends behind her with an elegant flourish. She sped across the garden, as if energised by the confinement of her head – the concealment of her hair – and disappeared indoors. Paula blew the whistle again. The young children ran towards the house and started to scrabble in the pots and raised beds. Bethany walked past Paula and Richard towards the gate in a self-important way. She didn’t acknowledge her father. ‘Hurry up, Conrad,’ she called over her shoulder.
‘Darling.’ Paula turned to Richard. ‘Be an angel and keep an eye on the tiddlers while I go through to the front. There should be three eggies each. Something like that.’ She put her hand into her coat pocket and, having pulled it out again, grasped Richard’s hand and filled it with foil-wrapped eggs. ‘Make sure no one gets left out,’ she said, moving away.
‘Are there special ones in the front garden,’ Richard asked.
‘Any minute now there will be,’ Paula replied. ‘Richard, you are such a boy.’
Was he? Vivienne often looked at him as if she discerned arrested development and he didn’t necessarily disagree with that. He had a core that had remained the same since he was, say, eight or nine, possibly younger. Yet he knew from observing children, his own and other people’s, that he was no longer the same person. He was hurt and pleased, as the children were – as he had once been – and those feelings of hurt and pleasure tapped straight into parts of him that were like old underground watercourses. But the rise and fall of his moods was different. Flatter, certainly, if they could be plotted – shot through by surprise but not by outrage. He sometimes wondered if his children were genuinely outraged. Their reaction was so extreme. They relished outrage for its own sake, putting on astonished faces and, in Bethany’s case, more often than not, planting her hands on her hips as if she were about to begin line dancing.
Richard, nursing his empty glass, glanced back at the house to see if Poppy was in evidence. Having started on the wine he didn’t want to stop. The numbing effect was welcome. He saw through the window that Vivienne was still trapped by Petit Mal. She seemed younger than the other adults, a slight figure in a simple sweater dress, with the look of a girl who has borrowed her mother’s high-heeled shoes. Petit Mal towered over her. Richard recognised her expression; the well-mannered passivity. She was too polite to move away and talk to someone else, but he could tell that she wasn’t actually listening. Getting around at parties was a skill. He wasn’t sure he had acquired it. Naturally, no one expected you to stay talking to them until a substitute turned up, but sometimes at these gatherings he felt as if he were simply standing to attention and longing for the Changing of the Guard. He tended to stick it for as long as he could and then bolt.
One of the catering girls had wriggled through the crowd and was proffering an oversized tray. Petit Mal was picking up a little mound and holding it as if he thought it might fall apart. He was conveying the morsel towards Vivienne’s mouth, which opened into a reluctant O. Richard turned back towards the garden, glad to have been given a task that allowed him to be unsociable. Easter was a funny time of year. The March sky was grey as an old sheet, behind the extravaganza of blossoms – flower on flower bursting from wood. Who could have thought of that combination? It was a way of throwing nature into maximum relief; an excess of excess which he didn’t know what to do with – perhaps no one knew. The children didn’t look up into the branches. They were happy, picking off bits of coloured foil from the eggs they had found and placidly munching chocolate.
‘You’re young. Perhaps you can answer this question,’ Richard said when Poppy stepped outside and came towards him with the bottle.
‘I’ll try,’ Poppy said brightly. Her face was nursery-fresh, at odds with her height and the breasts, under the thin white shirt, that were straining against the cloth and an inner layer of white lace.
‘It’s about music,’ he said.
‘OK.’ Poppy refilled his glass.
‘Have you heard of Ba-roque?’ Richard asked, leaving a hint of a pause between the two syllables with a degree of self-consciousness.
‘Yes, of course,’ Poppy answered.
‘Would I like them? Give me an album name.’
‘Vivaldi?’ she suggested. ‘The Four Seasons?’
‘Really? Nothing more recent? Are you sure?’ Richard tried to catch hold of her arm but she disappeared with her bottle and napkin, through the patio doors and into the crowd, her ponytail swinging as she went. Richard followed.
He was hoping for food, but before he reached the table he was importuned by the woman in the delphinium-blue jacket. ‘You’re Richard, aren’t you?’ she said, planting a foot in front of his. He nodded. ‘I’m Isobel – but everyone calls me Bellsie.’ Her earrings jangled like wind chimes as she moved her head. ‘What stage are your girls at?’ she asked.
‘Early,’ Richard said.
The woman laughed. ‘You’ve obviously been asked the question several times already.’
‘Some of the time they’re grown-up.’
‘And do they get on?’ she asked, emphasising the last word as if it were something significant.
‘Bethany’s quite bossy but otherwise, yes.’ Richard felt extraordinarily tired.
‘A phase, I expect. My Hugh is thirteen. He’s in a curious one at the moment.’
Richard waited but Bellsie didn’t elaborate. ‘My father has a theory about phases,’ he said. ‘Says that it’s important not to get stuck in them. Keep moving on. For instance, if you’re wondering whether to marry, change jobs, have a child – do the thing, get on with it. Life’s all in the future.’ He was aware that he had attempted too many sentences at a stretch. His speech was blurring. Or was it his thoughts? Father, with his thumbs tucked into the belt loops of his grey flannel trousers, would have been more assured.
‘He sounds rather unusual,’ Bellsie said. ‘Alternative.’
‘No. No, he isn’t. A very ordinary, mild-mannered man. The phase he got stuck in began when he was about twenty-eight. There’s been nothing new since then. Nothing.’
‘Oh de-ar,’ Bellsie said.
Robbie Patterson sang a creamy tenor. And Jennifer Patterson played the piano. Jennifer Patterson was obliging and sat down to play whenever she was asked, without nerves or interventions of the ego. St Dunstan’s made various demands on her and she rose to the occasion every time, playing by ear, sight-reading, making an attempt on the organ when the organist was away for his summer break. She was a good sort and always wore the right shoes for pedalling. At about four o’clock Paula and Hartley’s guests, tired of standing, were becoming soporific with lunchtime drinking. They started to move up to the ground floor and the comforts of sofas and armchairs. Hartley asked Robbie if he would sing. He said he would give it a go. Somebody went to find Jennifer.
Richard remained in the basement, failing to join the guests who were making their way up the stairs, talking and laughing as they went. Because he was feeling lethargic, Richard sat down at the kitchen table. Among the used plates, glasses and platters, two bottles of wine stood, half finished. The catering girls had abandoned the dishes and were occupied with making coffee and tea at the other end of the kitchen. Richard helped himself to the wine, filling up his glass, thinking, cloudily, how pleasant it was to smell coffee and drink alcohol. Better than the opposite, which brought back memories of childhood holidays with his mother and father – car journeys on A roads and the ritual of stopping off for morning coffee in pubs. Morning coffee. The words – the concept – encapsulated those holidays. Always the feeling of prissy isolation, sitting round a small polished table overcrowded with cups and saucers, while the regulars stood at ease by the bar, drinking pints. Afterwards, there was the drama of asking the barman if he would fill up the dog bowl with tap water. Tap water, in case the barman decided on another kind, maybe from the soda siphon. His mother would produce the brown earthenware bowl from her bag and hand it over. Once they had been given the water, out they’d all troop, two grown-ups, one boy and a slopping dog bowl. No question of slipping out unobtrusively. The dogs would start to bark as they approached the car, then fall out of the hatchback, wagging their tails, as soon as Father raised the door.
Richard cradled the glass in his hands. The sound of the piano vibrated through the floorboards – the scrape of chairs and thumps made by people shifting about. Robbie’s voice was less ample from a distance, but still reverberant. The medley began with ‘Sweet By and By’, and moved on through ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘My Shepherd Will Supply My Need’. Richard enjoyed listening from below, happy to suffer the imbalance of instrument and voice for the benefit of not being part of the crowd and, if he were honest, not having to look at the Pattersons. He reached across the table and, although he didn’t particularly like hard-boiled quails’ eggs, picked up a couple that had been left on a plate and munched them. After a moment’s break, Jennifer began playing again. Her hands came down on the keys and – unexpectedly, but as if in response – Richard’s head sank down on to the table. Richard, tasting egg in his mouth, heard Robbie’s voice through the inebriated roar in his ears.
The catering girls, on the far side of the kitchen, started humming along. They stopped when they noticed Richard, resting on the table, and looked at each other with concern. Then the coffee machine reached its climax and they shrugged their shoulders and got on with counting cups.