By the time the waiter takes away their empty plates the Italiano has almost emptied. Marjorie, nevertheless, consults the menu and orders zabaglione for Chloe and herself. Marjorie never gives up, never saves herself, thinks Chloe. She invites trouble, in order to face it. She struggles in some monstrous swimming-pool of dire events, forever almost drowning, forever bobbing up again, reproachful and gasping for breath, and forever declining to stretch out her hand and be saved.
‘How’s your mother?’ inquires Chloe. It was Helen who pushed Marjorie into the pool, in the first place, and that’s why she won’t get out.
Yes. Listen to her now.
‘Mother? Mother’s marvellous!’ says Marjorie. ‘She’ll be seventy next week. She was in Vogue last month. ‘Didn’t you see? No? I thought you’d be sure to read Vogue. She gives fashionable dinner parties for the gay political crowd. All very camp. I don’t know if she knows that’s what it is, but it’s something for old ladies to be appreciated by somebody, isn’t it, and they all adore each other over the lace napery and the flower pieces and the Coq à la Tunisie cooked by a sublime little Suliman imported from the Bosphorus.’
‘I hope he washes the napery,’ says Chloe, to whom tablecloths have always been a burden, for her husband Oliver cannot digest food without one, and she has no washing machine.
‘I do them for her,’ says Marjorie. ‘I collect them on Sunday, do them by hand in luke-warm suds on Sunday afternoon, dry them in my little yard, and send them back in a taxi on Monday morning from the office. I wish I could move in with her and look after her properly but you know how independent she’s always been.’
‘You do quite a lot of washing, these days,’ says Chloe. ‘What with your mother’s table cloths and Patrick’s undies.’
‘What else do I have to do in my spare time?’ asks Marjorie. ‘And who else would do it?’
The zabaglione, astonishingly, is rich, warm and good. The waiter even smiles as he offers it. Perhaps it was shame, rather than resentment, which had so afflicted him. Marjorie smiles back. She has, after all, won a victory.
‘She could pay a laundress,’ Chloe ventures.
‘Oh no.’ Marjorie is shocked. ‘She has to be very careful. You know how worried the elderly become about their futures – having so little of it left, I suppose. She’s even having to sell the Frognal house.’
‘Not before time.’ Chloe has not liked Helen since she over-heard her commenting on Esther’s liberalism in letting her daughter associate with the village children. Chloe, that is, the bar-maid’s daughter. Or so Chloe assumed.
The Frognal house, scene of Helen’s early happiness with Dick, has been unoccoupied for the past fifteen years, while Helen toys with the notion of selling it. Occasionally hippies or squatters move in, and move out again, of their own accord.
‘She has a sentimental attachment to it,’ says Marjorie. ‘It’s hard for her.’
‘I expect it’s past repair now,’ says Chloe. ‘And that’s what she’s been waiting for. It will have to be pulled down, there’ll be planning permission for flats, and she’ll make a fortune.’
‘It’s not like that at all,’ says Marjorie. ‘Nothing could destroy that house. It’s solid concrete. She’s not a calculating person at all, she just needs the money.’
Over the years Helen has sold the paintings Dick bought in the twenties. She has done very well from them. Unfortunately the first editions, which would have fetched even more, were left under the leaky roof and eventually disintegrated.
When Dick left for the war there had been only one loose tile on the roof, but the anti-aircraft batteries on Hampstead Heath had shaken the ground and loosened thirty-two more. Or so a fire watcher, up on the roof with his bucket of sand, waiting for incendiaries, had once told Helen. And she, going up to the attic one rainy day, looking at those mildewing pages, could not bring herself so much as to move the volumes from beneath the drips.
His books. His fault. And only one chance for anyone.
‘I don’t know why you don’t live at Frognal,’ says Chloe to Marjorie, although she knows quite well why, and how painful the reason is. But as Marjorie gets warmer and happier Chloe finds herself becoming more and more disagreeable. ‘All that space going to waste.’
And ‘I hope your mother asks you to her smart parties in return for all that washing,’ knowing full well that Helen doesn’t.
And finally, ‘Do you wash Patrick’s sheets as well as his undies? The ones he uses with Lady This and Lady That while you wait outside?’
Marjorie seems pained rather than angry.
‘You’re not usually like this,’ she says. ‘There is something the matter. That’s why you wanted to see me. Well, we all know what it is. You’ve stayed married to the wrong man for twenty years, for reasons that have more to do with snobbery, greed and fear, than anything else.’
Chloe is silent. Presently Marjorie says,
‘I wonder why I keep coming to this dreadful place? The service is appalling, the food is rancid, the waiter is round the bend, and they put us at this draughty table on purpose.’
‘That’s right,’ says Chloe.
Marjorie begins to laugh. Chloe begins to snivel.
‘Oh Marjorie,’ says Chloe.
‘Oh Chloe,’ says Marjorie. ‘Nothing ever changes.’
‘Yes it does,’ says Chloe. ‘It must.’
But it doesn’t really. This is what it’s like now and then it was much the same. You ask for bread, and get given stones.