Jomier is invited to dinner by Ruth to meet her friend Judith. Jomier has known Ruth for many years. There was almost something between them. Almost. But not quite. She is not a former lover but a might-have-been. An also-ran. That is a sufficient basis for lifelong friendship: women never forget the men who have fancied them. The friendship went into abeyance when Jomier married Tilly because Tilly could not stand Ruth. She went reluctantly to Ruth’s dinner parties but never asked Ruth back. Ruth was gushy, blowsy, not in their league. The friendship revived when Jomier was cut loose from Tilly and became that rare commodity, an unattached man. Ruth is a matchmaker. She introduces Jomier to her single friends and her single friends to Jomier. Ruth herself is divorced but has tethered a presentable lover. He is tall and languid and was once an important person in the BBC. He does not have much money but, at Ruth’s stage in life, one takes what one can get. No one knows what he does now and no one likes to ask.
Ruth is a natural evangelist. She is determined that her friends should succeed where she has succeeded and enjoy what she enjoys. Jomier finds this tiresome. Ruth tells him that he must read this novel or go to that play or see such-and-such an exhibition. Jomier dislikes reading novels. It is an invasion of his privacy to have an author enter his mind and manipulate his imagination. He also blames the novel for flattering women. Nineteenth-century novelists knew which side their bread was buttered: their books were bought by women and they portray lovely, clever, witty, charming heroines and spin elaborate narratives around what au fond is their quest for insemination.
Jomier also dislikes the theatre. As actors prance around on a stage, it strikes him that they are having more fun than he is: why, then, is he paying them? The dramas are banal. Playwrights titillate the bourgeois audience with obscenity and left-wing views. Rich solicitors and brokers from Hampstead get a frisson from the leftist agitprop; their wives from the ‘fucks’ and ‘shits’ and simulated sex onstage.
Why does such mediocrity thrive? Raison d’état. The state has spent many millions on building theatres and theatres must have plays. Actors must have something to act, directors something to direct, critics something to criticise, the inhabitants of Hampstead and Islington something to discuss with their friends. It is the same with the visual arts. Great galleries have been built. Something must be placed on the podia or hung on the walls. Millions file through former power stations or warehouses to gawp at the totems of modernity that they have been told are high art. Who will dare say that the Emperor is naked when the art-world apparatchiks insist that he is fully clothed? So thinks Jomier who once loved to look at a painting by Manet or Vermeer. But now even the old masters do not draw him from his home. Why travel up west on the crowded Underground to be jostled by the crowd of culture pilgrims, and peer over their shoulders to catch a glimpse of some sculpture or painting? Will Jomier lie on his deathbed racked with regret that he has never seen the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo? No. When Jomier hears the word ‘culture’, he reaches for his TV remote.
Jomier does not express these thoughts to Ruth. No one, not even Jomier, wants to be thought uncultured. He assures Ruth that he will go to see the Gormleys at the Royal Academy or the Freuds at the Tate; and, when caught out at missing a show at Dulwich or Whitechapel, he hits his forehead with the palm of his hand to show his exasperation at his own forgetfulness. Or he lies. Yes, no sooner had he read Dorment’s review in the Telegraph than he went straight to Cork Street! Yes, he was enormously excited at the Frieze Art Fair. Or he turns the tables. How could Ruth have driven to the Dordogne without stopping off to see the tapestries at Angers? Or from Rome to Naples and miss the amazing murals in the crypt of the cathedral at Anagni?
As with art, so with women. Ruth tells Jomier that he is sure to like Judith. Jomier has heard this before and has never known Ruth’s predictions fulfilled. By ‘like’ Ruth does not mean a temperamental affinity; she means sexual desire. Jomier recognises that some women in late-middle age are more intelligent than others, some more amusing than others, some more elegant than others, but as a genus they are unlikely to inspire desire. Nature dictates that men will be attracted only to pre-menopausal women. In Africa, Arabia or the Mediterranean littoral, older women shroud themselves in black. Even younger women, once they are married, wear veils and shawls and loose-fitting garments to cover their bodies which, if they remain delectable, are for the delectation of their husbands alone. If, after giving birth to children, they are no longer delectable they are best hidden from public view, leaving their menfolk free to play backgammon, puff at hookahs and sip sweet mint tea.
Not so the women of the West. They eschew such primitive customs. They wear décolleté dresses and spend billions of pounds on elixirs and unguents to retard or reverse the depredations of nature. Wax strips off the unwanted hairs and tights flatten ripples of cellulite and veil scaly skin. Bright-coloured skirts and tops distract the eye from the wrinkled flesh and bleary eyes. Artful coiffeurs and coiffeuses wash and dye and tint and streak what is left of a once glorious head of hair. And what does Western man do but play the game – pretend to notice and admire and chatter and flirt; pretend to respond to the fluttering of eyelashes, heavy with caked mascara; pretend to be open to possibilities when he would rather be chatting up their daughters or be back at home watching TV.
But TV offers no respite from the aphrodisiacal imperative. It is not a backgammon board containing dice and counters and geometric shapes but a glass window through which Jomier sees gangsters and pundits and attractive women. Every soap, every drama, cries out: cherchez la femme. Jomier does not watch porn: he does not want sex. He watches film noirs where the good guy gets the girl. They fall in love. Jomier wants to love. To be loved. To cherish. To be cherished. He wants a Veronica Lake to fall in his arms. The urge to mate has left his loins but remains lodged in his brain. But Jomier is a retired barrister, not a taciturn private eye. He does not bear the scars and bruises from punch-ups with thugs and toughs on his body; he bears the scars and bruises on his psyche from the punch-up of life. Veronica Lake would sniff out a loser and move on to a Max.
Ruth does not give up. She has introduced Jomier to Pamela, Annabel and Taffeta. Now Judith. Jomier arrives before Judith. He talks to Ralph, Ruth’s languid lover who was once someone important in the BBC. It is June. Ralph talks about Wimbledon. Jomier has no interest in tennis but listens all the same. Ralph asks Jomier why Serbia produces champions when Britain does not. Jomier talks about the legacy of state sponsorship under Communism but his mind is elsewhere. It is on Ruth’s bust and bottom which extend in equal proportion to front and rear. Jomier notes the unusual equilibrium. There are women with large busts and women with large bottoms but rarely do they balance one another so well. It is unusual to see, outside Africa, a woman’s bottom as muscular as it is large. Jomier wonders if Ruth has African blood.
‘Do you remember Boris Becker?’ A direct question from Ralph distracts Jomier from his train of thought.
‘Wasn’t he the blond German who won Wimbledon in . . .?’
Ralph: ‘1985. And 1986.’
Becker, Jomier recalls, had a black wife who bore him two children. Ruth’s ancestors were slave traders from Bristol. Could one of them have fathered a child by an African and passed it off as his heir? Is there a touch of the tar brush in her past? A big-bottomed African gene introduced by one of the slave traders in Bristol? Or were they sugar merchants? Or perhaps both. The triangular trade. Trinkets from Bristol to Africa, slaves from Africa to America, sugar back to Bristol.
Ralph: ‘But he lost in 1987.’
Enter Judith. Jomier notes at once that Judith is physically unlike her friend Ruth. She is tall and has no protruding bust or bottom. Jomier notes too that Judith seems familiar. This puts him on his guard. There have been embarrassments in the past. Jomier has put questions to a woman over dinner which she had answered over dinner a year before. He had forgotten. She had not. And Ruth? Has she forgotten that she has already introduced him to Judith? Jomier thinks not. If he has met Judith, it was not at one of Ruth’s dinner parties. It was further back in the past.
Jomier does not talk to Judith as they stand awaiting the call to dinner. He knows he will be placed next to her at the scrubbed pine table in Ruth’s basement kitchen and wishes to hold in reserve what little he might have to say. Ruth has briefed him. Judith is not a widow. She is divorced. This encourages Jomier. He prefers divorcees to widows. Widows are sentimental about their dead husbands. With death all the sharp edges are rubbed off. A special bovine look comes into their eyes as they reminisce about their happy years with Edward or Humphrey or James. Safely reduced to ashes in an urn, Edward and Humphrey and James are not there to contradict them. Dead men tell no tales. Only a few friends who knew the couple well wonder at the rewriting of history.
Divorcees are more entertaining. They are bitter. There are only rough edges. Johnny, Simon, Tim or Harry were weak, two-timing, alcoholic, stingy, absent. Jomier listens with attention because this is no doubt how Tilly talks about him. Weak, yes. Two-timing, yes. Alcoholic, no. Stingy, yes. Absent, no. Bad in bed? The undersized penis? The premature ejaculation? Or adequately equipped but sexually neglectful? Saturday nights spent reading Herodotus. Or watching CNN.
Will Judith be different? A non-embittered divorcee? Ruth ushers her guests down the stairs to her basement kitchen. It is not large but she has crammed in an Aga, a dresser, an upright piano with a sofa in the bay. The view from the bay window is of the door to the coal-hole beneath the pavement. The other window looks out on to a paved gully with steps leading up to the garden. The dresser displays Victorian plates and saucers.
Jomier is placed between Ruth and Judith. This is to prevent him from talking to any of the other women among the guests. Jomier knows what is expected of him and turns to Judith. Again the sense that he has met her before. He asks: ‘Who do you think will win Wimbledon?’
Judith laughs. ‘You have changed.’
Jomier is caught off guard. She remembers. He does not.
‘Changed?’
‘You used to say that sport was for idiots.’
‘I did?’
‘Don’t you remember?’
‘When?’
‘A long time ago.’
‘Where?’
‘At your parents’ house. I came over with the Hardings for lunch.’
The Hardings. Neighbours in Sussex. Suddenly Jomier remembers. The pretty girl, a school friend of Lucy Harding. Cheerful. Friendly.
‘We played croquet. You said that humanity’s obsession with hitting and kicking balls was only explicable in theological terms.’
‘Theological terms?’
‘Yes. Games were the Devil’s distractions.’
‘Divertissements.’ Jomier remembers. He had been reading Pascal.
‘You had been reading Pascal. Anything to take our minds off death and eternity.’
‘How pretentious.’
‘Not at all. I was impressed. Particularly because you went on playing croquet in a most vicious way, knocking me into the bushes.’
‘I knocked you into the bushes?’
Judith blushes. ‘My ball.’
A sheet of light-sensitive paper immersed in a chemical solution in the darkroom: slowly the patches of dark and light take shape. Jomier remembers that hot day in June; a lunch al fresco; the Hardings – Mr and Mrs Harding, Fred their son, Lucy their daughter, and Lucy’s friend Judith. The image is like a Seurat or a Manet in his imagination – déjeuner sur la terrasse chez les Jomiers – with this utterly beautiful girl whose eyes had twinkled with merriment as he aired his sophomoric theories about ball games, male rivalry and man’s potential destiny outside space and time.
‘You married young.’
‘You remember?’ Judith holds an oval plate to enable Jomier to help himself to a slice of kipper pâté – that stand-by hors d’oeuvre of the 1970s. Has Ruth organised the evening as a trip down memory lane?
‘I remember because . . .’ He now holds the oval dish for Judith: a glaze covers the brightly painted clay. ‘I remember because I wrote to you.’
Judith looks puzzled.
‘But you never received the letter.’ Jomier feels around for memories in the sludge at the bottom of his life. ‘I wanted to ask you out . . .’
Judith waits; a slice of toast holding a smear of kipper pâté is suspended in mid-air.
‘But you lived in Suffolk.’
‘Norfolk.’
‘I thought we might meet in London.’
Judith takes a bite from her piece of toast; munches; listens.
‘But I had to get your address from Lucy.’
‘Wouldn’t she give it to you?’
‘It took time to summon up the courage to ask her.’
‘Courage? Why?’
‘It was a declaration of intent.’
‘To Lucy?’
‘And through Lucy to the world.’
‘Was the world that interested?’
‘One thought so . . . at the time. I had to have a pretext.’
‘For writing to me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wasn’t it to ask me out?’
‘Yes. But I didn’t want Lucy to know that.’
‘Why not?’
‘I felt that she might want me to ask her out.’
Judith shrugged as if to say that this was a poor excuse.
‘And she would gossip.’
Again, a shrug.
‘We were very timid about dating.’
‘Who?’
‘Young men from public schools.’
‘Some young men from public schools.’
‘Clearly not . . .’ Jomier could not remember the name of her husband.
‘Beresford.’
‘Anyway, I told Lucy that a friend was giving a party in London and didn’t know any girls; that I’d put her on his list and thought that you might like to be asked.’
‘So she gave you my address in Norfolk.’
‘Yes.’
‘Was there a party?’
‘No.’
‘But you had my address . . .’
‘I had your address and I was about to write the letter but I put it off.’
‘Why?’
‘The summer holidays. I went to Greece.’
‘Why not write before you left?’
‘To make a date for September? It seemed too far off.’
‘So you went off to Greece . . .’
‘And when I got home I wrote the letter.’
‘Asking me out?’
‘Yes. I suggested that we meet up in London to have supper or go to a film. I wrote the letter at night, before I went to bed. I meant to post it the next morning.’
‘And?’
‘The next day I read The Times at breakfast.’
‘Ah. The Times.’
‘The Court Circular. Births, deaths, marriages and engagements. Your engagement. To Beresford. You had been taken off the shelf.’
‘So you never sent the letter?’
‘I tore it up.’
‘A pity.’
‘Why?’
‘You might have been a reason not to marry Beresford.’
‘I was still very young.’
Judith nodded. ‘Beresford was older.’
‘How much older?’
‘Ten years.’
‘Thirty. A grown man.’
‘Yes. And you were?’
‘Twenty-one.’
‘Too young to marry.’
Yes. I had had little . . . experience.’
Judith smiles. ‘You were not part of the sexual revolution?’
‘Later. When I went to live in London.’
‘Sowing your wild oats?’
‘You might call it that.’
‘Though that phrase,’ says Judith, taking Jomier’s empty plate, placing it on hers, then passing both to Ruth, ‘dates from long before the 1960s.’
‘From the nineteenth century?’
‘The eighteenth. So one can’t blame Freud or D. H. Lawrence or Havelock Ellis for the breakdown of traditional morality because the sowing of wild oats went on long before Freud or Lawrence or Havelock Ellis – indeed, one might say it is a constant of human nature.’
‘Among young men.’
‘Yes. Among young men. The real change that took place in the 1960s – I mean what was radical and quite different from anything that had taken place before in human history – was precisely the fact that, thanks to the pill, girls could, and did, scatter their wild oats without having to worry about getting pregnant –’
‘Or social stigma.’
‘Or social stigma. Because, while it was always thought that social stigma was a by-product of Christian morality, it was in fact a social construct. Bastard children had to be paid for by the parish.’
‘But you –’ Jomier begins.
‘I was born three years too soon.’
‘No wild oats?’
‘A few snogs and fumbles.’
‘Necking.’
Judith laughs. ‘Yes, necking. And then marriage.’
‘Which didn’t last.’
‘No. But it might have lasted if I’d married ten years later.’
‘After more than a few snogs and fumbles.’
Judith nods, then looks over her shoulder to see if she should help Ruth serve up the chicken-and-mushroom fricassee from the Aga. She rises, goes to the Aga but is sent straight back to her seat. ‘Where were we?’ she asks Jomier.
‘Sex.’
Judith sighs. ‘Yes, sex. Sex before marriage. A good thing or a bad thing?’
‘A good thing, surely.’
‘Well, I think so because if I’d married later my marriage might have lasted . . .’
‘To Beresford?’
‘To whoever. But because I married at the age of twenty, without having sown any wild oats whatsoever, there came a moment when I was bogged down with the children and bored by Beresford and I thought to myself – Am I really going to die only ever having slept with one man? And there was this very attractive other man and we’d have lunch together and the time came when we either did it or we didn’t do it and we did do it, and Beresford found out and it broke him. Poor Beresford. He wasn’t cut out to be a mari complaisant.’
‘What happened to the other man?’
Judith laughs. ‘He got scared and ran off.’
‘He left you?’
‘He had a wife.’
‘Did you think that he would leave his wife?’
‘I hadn’t really thought it through.’
‘And since?’
Judith does not answer his question but continues with her train of thought. ‘But are women really better off? My daughter Ophelia has led the life of a liberated woman – a career, relationships, a six-month marriage, divorce, bla-bla-bla – and now she’s thirty-eight with no boyfriend, mixing with exes and rejects, and the prospect of a nuclear family looking increasingly remote.’
‘And Beresford?’
‘Oh, Beresford’s fine. He’s made a pile of money in the City, and married again – a mousy, calculating, demure risk analyst – who as soon as she had secured Beresford stopped work and now spends her time doing up their houses in Chelsea and Gloucestershire and the South of France.’
‘While you . . .’
‘I get by in Wandsworth.’
Jomier is attracted to Judith. Her breezy ‘fallen woman’ line does not irritate him; he does not react adversely, as he usually does, to this woman of ‘a certain age’, though the neckline of her dress shows that her breasts, while still smooth and soft, no longer run on in a continuous curve from her breastbone but have sunk in their foundations. The eyeshadow, the artificial curls of her tinted hair – all the artifices of the post-menopausal woman – do not trigger the usual indifference. It is as if Jomier has removed his varifocal rimless glasses and sees Judith through an astigmatic haze that softens the image, airbrushing away the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, the small bleb on her lower lip. Using the tools of an inner Adobe Photoshop, the memory of the twenty-year-old Judith is superimposed upon the reality of the same woman forty years on. Jomier is thinking: this woman is intelligent, amusing, sincere. If she had married me instead of Beresford . . . If I had married her instead of Tilly . . .
And might it be possible, all these years later, Jomier asks himself, to pick up where we left off?
‘Perhaps we should pick up where we left off,’ Jomier says to Judith. By now they have done with the chicken fricassee and are eating rhubarb fool.
Judith smiles – a nice, friendly, youthful smile. ‘You mean . . .’
‘I’ll rewrite the letter and ask you out.’
‘Or an email?’
‘What is the address?’ Jomier is about to reach for the small notebook and ballpoint pen in the inner pocket of his jacket but suddenly feels the same awkwardness that he had felt forty years before. He does not want to be seen writing down Judith’s email address by the other guests.
‘grant.j76@absmail.com.’
Jomier repeats what she has said. ‘I’ll remember it.’
Judith looks at him sceptically. She has understood. Again Jomier fails to feel the irritation he habitually feels when a woman reads his thoughts. ‘If you forget, you can always ask Ruth.’
‘Of course.’
‘Unless . . .’
‘What?’
‘You might be embarrassed as you were with Lucy?’
‘At my age?’ Jomier gives an unconvincing laugh.
‘I’ll give you my card before we go.’
‘Your card?’
‘A business card.’
‘You have a business?’
‘I teach yoga.’
A yoga teacher. A potter. A garden designer. A psychotherapist. An instructor in the Alexander technique. These are the occupations of women of a certain age. A yoga teacher will at least have a supple body. She will know the routines of the Kama Sutra. When they stand at the end of dinner, and for a moment Judith looks away, Jomier stands back to assess her figure but her dress is long and loose. It covers her like muslin over a cheese. All that is exposed is her face, her hands and what can been seen through the window of her décolletage – the loose skin under her chin, the tight skin over her breastbone, the soft, tanned, freckled, chamois leathery base of her breasts. And her eyes? Jomier cannot remember their colour. And now she is looking away.
It is eleven o’clock. The guests would like to go home but if they leave now Ruth would consider that her evening was a flop. It is another half-hour before the party breaks up. Jomier takes his leave. As he enters the narrow hall, Judith comes down the stairs. ‘Here.’ She hands him her card. Jomier smiles at her but she is already past him. Jomier leaves the house. He stops, takes out his wallet, puts the card in one of the slots designed for credit cards. He gets into his Volkswagen Golf and returns home.