A Vision of Loveliness (18 page)

Jane didn’t really like rice, she discovered. Not without jam on it, anyway. The food was all chopped up – God knew what meat was in it – and you ate it out of little blue and white sugar bowls. Michael appeared to be putting some kind of brown sauce on his but it tasted nothing like the normal kind. Jane was managing the chopsticks rather well – better than Michael actually – but the unfamiliar grip was giving her a pain in her hand.

The restaurant was quite full – not many places opened on a Sunday – and there were quite a lot of Chinese people which Michael seemed to think was a good sign although they’d probably eat any old rubbish. There was an English couple at the next table arguing half-heartedly about where to put the garden shed. She was all for putting it down at the end next to the dustbins with a bit of trellis in front. He wanted it bang next to the house (in case of bad weather). That was what marriage did to people. He was wrestling with a big plate of slippery fat noodles and she was eating roast chicken and chips and holding her knife like a pen.

Shed Woman was wearing home-made tan crêpe with powder-blue piping and she kept checking the banquette beside her to make sure her bag was safe. Nasty plastic thing. Navy blue. Didn’t go with the dress at all. She looked sidelong and sulky at Jane’s larky little get-up. She probably had a 22-inch waist when she got married.

Jane carried on pecking at the meat – chicken? She hoped so. And giggled obligingly at Michael who was boring on about some book he’d been reading.
Never let him know you’re bored!
He might be all right for humping suitcases but he was a bit of a wash-out conversationally. It was all very highbrow. Disarmament. Cyprus. But there was nothing intellectual about the way he stared at her bust. Suzy was marvellous, playing with him, pretending to know all about it – or maybe she did know all about it? Maybe it was in the
Sunday Times
. Seemed a bit daft, really, just sitting there quoting the newspapers at each other.

Would they like to go to a jazz club later? And wasn’t Kenneth Tynan right about jazz being a post-mortem on a dissected melody? Tosser. Did she look like a girl who read Kenneth fucking Tynan? Of course she bloody didn’t. She looked like a girl who read
True Romance
and
Romeo
. So what was all that nonsense about? He was either taking the mick – which, given those hungry green eyes glued to the tilt of her bust, seemed unlikely – or he thought she’d be impressed.

Film their table and frame by frame Jane and Suzy would seem to be having the time of their lives, like an ad for king-size cigarettes. Envious glances flashed across the room: some, like the waiter, trying to work out how this chinless wonder had managed to swing such a five-star double date, others just wondering why their evening wasn’t turning out that well.

An old bloke at the corner table by the window was staring at them while his chopsticked hand ferried rice from his bowl to his moustache. Jane batted her eyelashes some more. The nylon filaments were strange and scratchy against her eyelids.

The old bloke by the window was actually Michael Woodrose’s boss from the department. He could only see the back of Woodrose’s tweed jacket but he could see both girls: young, laughing, confiding, teasing, hanging on Woodrose’s every word. He’d never thought of Woodrose as a ladykiller. False hope dawned. Maybe they were his sisters? No, he remembered now. Woodrose had brought his sister into the office once. Joyce? Jenny? Geraldine? Jill. That was it: wan little blonde in horn-rims and very pronounced views on pronunciation. Only she pronounced it
pronounciation
. Amazing how many people did that.

What could Woodrose possibly be saying that entertained them so thoroughly? The last ‘conversation’ his boss had had with him was a Woodrose monologue on the theatre of the absurd. Woodrose had just discovered Beckett at the Royal Court and would bore anyone who would listen with the ins and outs of Beckett and Ionesco. Parker, the other junior assistant, told him exactly where he could stick it but the department secretary had let herself get cornered for a good ten minutes while Woodrose showed off his new knowledge – most of it stolen from an article in some egg-headed weekly. She wasn’t rescued until the
Brain of Britain
producer had rung to check the pronunciation of Ottoline Morrell. Philistine. Michael’s boss sneaked another look at the table. Woodrose could hardly be regaling these lovely young things with N.F. Simpson’s greatest hits. They didn’t look like the women who went to the Royal Court. Far too clean for a start.

Finally, after what seemed like days of self-glorifying claptrap, the waiter brought the bill and Michael spent an embarrassing few minutes checking the maths. Jane reckoned that if you weren’t one of those people who could add up columns of figures in their head – like Uncle George – you should just pay whatever it said. They’d probably done most of the cheating when they priced the bloody menu in the first place – it was only a few scraps and some rice, after all, not a proper dinner. Woodrose had obviously undertipped the waiter and they had to wait for their coats which he then fumbled them into before they walked out into the night. Where next?

‘Are you going to take us dancing, Mr Woodrose?’

He winced like a salted slug.

Michael Woodrose couldn’t dance. His mother had insisted on lessons after watching him sneering on the sidelines of a birthday party when he was thirteen. Spotty, boring but peculiarly arrogant, the teenage Michael’s only interests were wanking and the wireless.

He was not a hit with the (mostly female) dancing class. They complained about his sweaty hands, his big feet, the way he stared dumbly at their cardiganed chests. Mummy relented and he was too vain and proud to try again. Which meant that dances – the one time you were actually licensed to grope girls – were terrible ordeals spent loafing on the touchline with half a pint of bitter trying to talk smart while better men foxtrotted their way over the stocking tops.

‘I don’t dance.’ He used to practise saying it in the mirror: world-weary, a little contemptuous, a tiny bit reproachful – how could they talk of dancing with so much sadness and uncertainty in the world? It never had cut much ice and Jane and Suzy were no different. Jane knew he’d say no to dancing. He just wasn’t the type.

He took a deep breath. Would they like to come back to his flat for a nightcap?

‘Your flat?’ Suzy was surprised – and impressed. He looked more like the type that lived at home.

‘It belongs to my uncle but he’s down in Sussex most of the time.’

Michael’s ‘uncle in Sussex’ was a bit like Jane’s ‘aunt in Surrey’. Uncle Jack ran a chain of gents’ outfitters in the Bexhill area but there was no need to dwell on that. Gents took a lot of fitting out in the Bexhill area and Uncle Jack had spent much of the proceeds on a West End bolt hole where he could entertain willing young boys without endangering trade. He popped up about once a fortnight and Michael would doss down on a friend’s sofa or go home to his mother’s in Sevenoaks until the coast was clear.

‘I’ve got some whisky . . . and I think there’s some crème de menthe’ (Uncle Jack’s younger friends liked a drop of crème de menthe).

Jane didn’t especially want to go back to their freezing cold flat but she wasn’t too sure about the nightcap at his place either. What for?

‘There’s a taxi,’ said Suzy. It wasn’t a statement; it was an order.

‘I’ve got the car,’ trumped Michael, happily. The girls purred with surprise. He didn’t look much like a driver – but then it didn’t look much of a car. Uncle Jack’s finances had been stretched buying the flat, let alone the runabout to go with it, so he’d settled for a smart new Ford. He’d wanted red but red was Export Only for some peculiar reason – why? It was only paint, for God’s sake – so he settled for black with snazzy red seats.

‘Ooh!’ squeaked Suzy. ‘I’ve driven one of these. My uncle used to have one.’ Uncle. Like hell.

Woodrose became very panicky and started muttering about third party and no syncromesh.

‘What makes you think I can’t double declutch? Cheek. Daddy taught me. I can double declutch in my sleep – often do as a matter of fact.’

He was really panicking now but Suzy was already behind the wheel – first time she’d opened a car door for herself since she left school.

‘Have you passed your test?’

‘Oh don’t be such an old woman, Mikey.’

Had she passed her test? Unlikely. She might be all right with double declutching but she used far too much choke and her steering was terrifying. She blithely shot a red light crossing Oxford Street. Suzy carried on regardless, squealing with excitement, fag stuck jauntily between her smiling red lips. Her skirt had ridden high above her knees but Michael Woodrose was past caring. There was a horrible knot of fear in his stomach, a nasty, queasy feeling that dredged up blushing memories of long-forgotten boyhood crimes. Uncle Jack’s Ford Consul might not be much of a car but every Sunday he was in London he would be out with a chamois leather polishing the chrome trim, waxing the bodywork. One of his young friends had been sick in it once – having discovered (a bit late in the day) that red biddy and blue curaçao didn’t really mix. Uncle Jack had blown a fuse, obsessively rinsing and wiping the floor and clearing out all the crevices in the map pocket with an old toothbrush. God knew what he’d do if anyone scratched the paintwork.

‘This is it, on the corner.’

Suzy braked very abruptly, and stalled to a stop outside the mansion block, thoroughly exhilarated by her little spin.

‘That was
fab
, darling, I must get a car. How much are cars, darling?’

You could practically hear the tumblers working in that little tart’s brain of hers. Would the generous Mr Swan be good for a car as well as a flat?

‘I do wish we had a car. Maybe we should see about getting one. Can you drive, Janey?’

She thought of Uncle George teaching her to drive round the block in his old Austin.

‘Yes, actually.’

Well, if you called that driving she could bloody drive.

Michael Woodrose was back to normal now, able to appreciate Suzy’s stocking tops. Had she worn panties this evening? Jane wondered. Probably. It was a cheap Chinese, not a Mayfair flat after all.

Uncle Jack’s flat wasn’t too bad so long as Uncle Jack wasn’t actually in it. The old boy gave the place a rather snacky smell of pipe tobacco and hair oil and suits that were pressed but never cleaned but he hadn’t been up to town for nearly three weeks (up to his eyes in the January stock-take) and the whiff was starting to fade.

The phone was ringing as they came in.

‘No, Mr Woodrose is away. No. No. I’m his nephew. No. No, honestly. I really
am
his nephew.’

The girls sat at each end of the chesterfield while Michael poured two very large crème de menthes and a small whisky. He remembered now that you were supposed to get them to talk about themselves. They liked that, apparently.

‘So, er, what sort of modelling do you do?’

‘Lingerie mostly,’ lied Suzy.

This was just to get him at it, of course. She was breathing oddly so that her bust rose and fell.

‘We do quite a lot of double shots. One of us in the long line, the other in the strapless. We’re both sample size, you see. Both E cups.’

Michael had gone the colour of his tie.

‘And I do quite a bit of photographic work for lipsticks. Just my lips. Showing all the different colours.’

Jane couldn’t see her face down at the far end of the sofa but she could hear her backcombing her voice into the full Joan Greenwood, could practically hear her lips pouting for his kiss. He made a disgusting noise doing it. Like someone eating.

‘Don’t you think you ought to kiss poor Janey as well? Fair’s fair.’

Oh God. Still bright red and starting to sweat unpleasantly he turned to Jane and began kissing her. It was horrible. He hadn’t a clue what he was doing and his tongue kept flicking around the inside of her lips as if he’d lost something. He tasted of beer and whisky and that Chinese brown sauce but there was something else: the fresh, Polo-mint tang of Suzy’s liqueur mixed with the oily fragrance of her lipstick. That was quite nice. Jane hadn’t kissed that many boys – a few fumbles at the Locarno was about it. She’d had more practice with the back of her own hand. Suzy was probably a really good kisser so, although Jane didn’t fancy this berk in the slightest, she still wanted him to think she was sexy. Just as sexy as Suzy and so she kissed back, arching herself against him slightly, hoping to goodness he’d keep his hands to himself.

He was planning on one more kiss each – to get them both going – and then he would mould his hand around the outline of one of those firm young E cups. Then who knows what might happen? Was the bed made?

‘It’s been a super evening.’ Liar. Suzy had stood up and was checking her hair in the mirror over the fireplace. Thank God for that. He’d had his hot wet hand on Jane’s waist and you could practically smell his next move.

‘Yes, it was really delicious.’ Jane stood up too, leaving poor Michael Woodrose sat forlornly on the sofa wishing he’d made a grab earlier. Once you got them really worked up, they lost their inhibitions. He should have bought them wine at the restaurant. Fifteen bob a bottle was exorbitant but it would have been worth it. As it was, he’d have to work it off with his little photograph collection. Not the artistic ones this evening, he felt.