My name is Susan Slade and I hate cocktail parties. Not just the weary excrescences on toast and the faceless waitresses with their inevitable offerings of mouthfuls that disintegrate at the touch or are too hot, but the very format of the things.
The desire to turn and flee for home that comes between the ringing of the bell and the opening of the door. The self-confidence of which one is divested with one’s coat. The bitter taste of smoke and the back-to-front tape of a hundred unintelligible voices. With assimilation, a drink, exchange of pleasantries with a familiar face, things usually improve, only to turn sour when on the doorstep, whipped back to reality by comparatively unpolluted air, you realise that you are partly full, partly drunk, partly satiated with partly heard conversation.
Drusilla’s party was on Sunday, which made it worse. It meant stepping out of the comfortable morass of unmade beds and Sunday papers and The Critics, and dressing, as one did every other day.
Informal, Drusilla said, don’t bother to dress, but of course just as much effort was needed for the ‘thrown together’ look as for the biggest gala appearance. It was just a figure of speech.
I don’t think Drusilla would have cared for my Pyrenean wool housecoat against her Chinese Chippendale, nor Simon’s glad rags, which bore abundant testimony to the Sunday he creosoted the side gate, and pruned the roses a little too enthusiastically, and the dog who had a fit in the scullery, and the sailing dinghy – begun a hundred Sundays ago and now languishing in the garage.
Knowing Drusilla’s crowd and unable to compete, I chose an understated tweed suit, the most expensive garment I had in my wardrobe, and Simon, begging for one more moment in his slippers, settled for the natty fisherman’s pullover I had bought him for his birthday in which he would never have dreamed of going fishing.
Reluctantly we kicked the newspapers into a semblance of tidiness – my skirt was too tight to allow me to pick them up and Simon was too lazy – admonished the children to behave, turned the oven down upon the lunch and set off.
Drusilla was the sort of woman who collected people as others did jade or old sugar tongs or first editions. She strung them on the bracelet of her basic loneliness and insecurity, and the moment she felt the slightest sign that life was passing her by she took them out and looked at them. Mostly they were glad enough to dance for a while to Drusilla’s tune. Many of them were poets, writers, musicians, painters, rarely averse to the hospitality or adulation that Drusilla dispensed unstintingly.
To be fair to Drusilla herself, she was beautiful and indefatigably cheerful, and there were few who did not benefit from an hour in her company. Lavished by her kisses and caresses, by her endless sincere insincerities, there was not a woman who did not feel more feminine, a man more manly, in the rosy aura of her charm. If we had to waste a Sunday morning, there was no one more capable than Drusilla of sugaring the pill.
Naturally there was nowhere to park. Drusilla did not believe in doing things by halves and the cars filled the not inconsiderable carriage drive and spilled along the kerb a good half-mile down the road.
‘Simon! Simon!’ The door was flung wide and immediately one was in Drusilla’s arms pleasantly anaesthetised by ‘Moment Supreme’ and struggling to remind oneself she didn’t mean the praises she showered on one.
‘Simon, you’re handsomer than ever! He doesn’t age a day. Susan, darling, what a dream of a suit!’
Thoroughly kissed, we had a chance to look at Drusilla. It was always a surprise. Today she had on a baby-pink dress and pink phosphorescent shoes. Her hair was pink, too; Drusilla could do things like that and get away with it.
I was about to compliment her on her appearance but the door had opened behind us and someone else was drowning in her welcome, so we allowed ourselves to be carried on the tide into the depths of the party.
There was the usual nucleus of familiar faces. Drusilla always made use of the hard core of her acquaintances, of which Simon and I were a part, and embroidered it with her latest acquisitions. We waggled our fingers at those similarly extricated from their Sunday limbo and did what was expected of us by chatting amiably to the newcomers.
I lost Simon in what was now a reasonable facsimile of the platform of Tottenham Court Road station in the rush hour and was attempting manfully to keep a guard on my third champagne cocktail, an oozing asparagus roll and my tongue, when Drusilla in her pinkness appeared beside me and said: ‘Susan, darling, I want you to come and meet someone special.’
There was always a ‘someone special’. A particularly succulent morsel gleaned from studio or stage, frequently in transit between exciting places and dished up as the pièce de résistance at Drusilla’s parties.
Her slim arm round my waist, she steered me across the room, clearing a pathway with friendly hugs and squeezes to her guests as we went. The noise had become intense and reminded me of the parrot house at the zoo.
By a group near the concert grand, which took up only a corner of the great room, Drusilla stopped. A ring of upturned, attentive faces, some with cigarettes stuck in them, were listening to a tall man in a black, cable-stitch jersey. Obviously the lion, I thought. Drusilla stroked the back of his neck with slim, pink-tipped fingers. He turned round and with a zoomp of the time-machine I was face to face with my past.
The group that had been hanging on his words knitted together and left the three of us a separate entity.
‘This is Stefan,’ Drusilla said. She put the accent on the last syllable, conjuring up an image of some colourful eastern European village.
‘Hello, Steve,’ I said.
‘Susan!’ He was as shattered as I.
In the hubbub Drusilla hadn’t even noticed. She hugged us both to her and said: ‘Stefan paints. You simply must see his exhibition at the Cotterell. For fabulous sums he’ll paint your portrait, won’t you, darling?’
Fabulous sums! He must have covered over a hundred canvases with my face and I hadn’t paid him a penny.
With a delighted smile to each of us Drusilla was gone and we were left on an island of silence to roll back the years. He looked first at my hair, no longer the savage jungle it had been when I was eighteen, to be posed over my shoulder or across my mouth, but a neat tribute to fashion and my hairdresser, then at my understatement of a suit which in his eyes I could see was the grossest of overstatements.
‘So you’re really a cake-eater …’
‘And you,’ I said quickly in self-defence, looking pointedly at his champagne glass. But I knew it wasn’t true. Nearing forty he was still as thin as a lathe, hollow almost in the middle, and I could tell he had never returned to the petit bourgeoisie of Blackheath where he was raised.
It was a game we used to play in the nasty cynicism of our tender years. Looking out of the gritty window of his studio through a peephole we had rubbed with our fingers in the dirt, we’d watch the shoppers in Fulham Road disappear with predatory faces into packed shops and then reappear laden with weekend joints and teeth-rotting, fruit-filled pies. ‘Cake-eaters’, we named them disparagingly for their philistinism.
At night we watched the ‘fat’ cake-eaters, an even more despicable class, shrugging off fur coats at restaurant tables, through lighted windows in the King’s Road. Ourselves, we lived on beans and tea and love. In summer, dust griming our sandalled feet, we roamed like an ‘entwined dryad’ in the parks; in winter we huddled in front of the electric fire in Steven’s studio.
As if I had spoken my thoughts aloud Steven, his black hair still at sixes and sevens, though greying elegantly now above the ears, reached for my hand. He turned it over gently in his own and looked at the white scar that puckered the palm. I could feel the pain of it now.
We used to do our cooking by turning the little stove on to its back and standing the saucepan or the kettle on its bars.
It was snowing, I remember; snow that drifted unhurriedly in fat flakes past the window. Steven had been painting all day and I sitting. We were both exhausted. I had grabbed hold of the stove too quickly, not thinking what I was doing, and the next moment was screaming hysterically in Steven’s arms.
Our idyll had lasted until the term before we were due to finish our course at the art school. To hear us talk you would have thought it infinite.
I had been home for the mid-term break and there, neat and tidy, living the other half of my chameleon existence, I met Simon. With the part of myself that recognised the need for stability and family and roots, and a thousand other things we had derided in the cake-eaters, I fell in love. For the other half, for my dream self, there was no one but Steven.
For the rest of the term I managed to keep my two lives separate. I dined with Simon in fashionable restaurants, dressing myself suitably, and discussed the future.
With Steven there was no future, only the intensity of existence from day to day. Because I was afraid of him I put off the moment when I must tell him. When I finally did I made the terrible mistake of throwing a sop to his disappointment.
I had always refused to sit for him in the nude. Not for any reasons of modesty, three years at the art school had put an end to any pretensions I might have had of that, but on the odd grounds that if Steven ever became famous and his pictures hung, I might be exposed toute nue to the horrified gaze of my relations.
A week before the end of the term in which I had met Simon, Steven had asked me to sit for a study of Ariadne, a painting he was doing in a series of scenes from Greek mythology. Without saying anything I took off my clothes and arranged myself on the couch he had prepared. He gave me a long look, but with no more comment, squeezed Chinese white on to his palette and started to paint.
He painted all that week and I don’t think that we even stopped for our customary diet of beans. At the end of it we could hardly stagger, but on the canvas was the finest painting Steven had ever done. Wrapped in his dressing gown I looked at it with tears in my eyes; it was an inspiration of Steven and myself and paint and canvas: it lived.
‘What made you change your mind?’ Steven said, as he cleaned his brushes, and I knew the moment had come.
He looked at me, happily saturated with achievement. ‘Don’t bother to answer,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t really matter. We’re on to great things, Sue. This is only a beginning. Next term we shall conquer the world.’
‘There’ll not be a next term for me,’ I said. ‘I’m going to be married.’
He stopped with his brush in mid-air and cocked his head as though he hadn’t quite heard.
‘I’m not coming back.’
The next five minutes were the worst I had lived through to date and even now I cannot think of any experience since that made me feel so bad.
With the brush he had been cleaning, Steven attacked his palette savagely, and white-faced, desecrated Ariadne from top to toe until there was nothing to be seen on the canvas but a hideous, glutinous, string-coloured mess weeping great tears of viridian.
That was my first love and that was how it ended. After almost twenty years I could relive the vicarious suffering I was unable to assuage.
I didn’t see him again but I learned from a student at the art school that my place had been taken by a girl called Nadia who had Russian parents and hair she could sit on.
‘So now you charge fabulous sums to the cake-eaters?’
He had the grace to blush. ‘I don’t paint just anyone. I have to want to.’
‘Of course,’ I said, helping him, and we smiled the smile of friendship into each other’s eyes to hide the love that was almost, but not quite dead.
‘Stefan!’ a voice from the present said, and a girl with pure black hair to the waist, a blue canvas tube of a dress and no make-up, came from nowhere and leaned her really beautiful face upon his shoulder.
‘This is Katya,’ Steven said.
We shook hands politely, although she did not really look at me, but hung on to Steven as if she would never let him go.
‘The lunch will be burning,’ Simon’s voice said from my side; and my eyes met Steven’s, laughing, the old lines of communication still open.
‘This is Stefan,’ I said, introducing Simon. ‘He has an exhibition at the Cotterell Gallery.’
‘My wife was at art school when we met. You’ve always been keen on painting, haven’t you, Sue?’ Simon said.
‘I was never any good, though, at painting.’
‘Stefan, Katya, you mustn’t monopolise my friends!’ Drusilla said. ‘Susan, darling, I want you to talk to the Walshes. They come from New York and are in biscuits in a fabulous way and are on their way to Madrid.’
‘We have to go, Drusilla.’
‘The lunch is burning,’ Steven said.
I looked him in the eye. ‘Indeed it is.’
He took my hand, running his thumb along the scar. ‘Goodbye,’ he said, and I knew that this and not the volcanic separation of twenty years ago, was really the parting.
In the crowded room at Drusilla’s I realised the futility of an ageing Ariadne and knew that only Steven’s work had identity and that whatever happened, there would always be a Nadia or a Katya with hair to her waist; there had to be.
We said our goodbyes slowly, gradually making our way to the hall in the now dispersing crowd.
In the car my mind went to the lunch in the oven and the children and the now thinning dream of Steven. I pulled the fine kid gloves on to my carefully manicured hands, obscuring the cicatrice and the odd illusion that my fingers were covered with paint.
When I was settled in my seat I smiled up at Simon who was waiting, as he always did, with infinite patience. He smiled back at me, turning the day once more into an ordinary Sunday, and unequivocally shut the door.