A Vision of Loveliness (32 page)

Suzy appeared to have made a complete recovery. ‘Oh you lucky thing! Henry says I can’t have a little runabout until I’ve passed my test but I can’t very well practise in the Bentley, can I? I’ll never get a licence at this rate. What breed is it, darling? Is it small enough for me and Janey to have a go in?’

‘If you don’t mind left-hand drive.’

It was a brand-new red Volvo that belonged to a chap in the overseas department who had gone back to Stockholm for a fortnight’s holiday. The girls managed to bundle into the back but it was a bit on the small side and poor old Henry looked suddenly very big and old and stiff, cooped up in the passenger seat, rather than stretched out at the wheel of his Bentley. He’d got his arm caught in one of the straps at the side of the seat.

‘What’s this supposed to be?’ You could tell he was getting fed up.

‘Safety belts. It’s a new thing. All the new Volvos have got them.’

‘Bloody Swedes. I don’t see why we can’t just take a cab. Or walk. It’s only a few hundred yards, for God’s sake.’

Suzy pulled a face. She hated arriving anywhere on foot. It looked cheap. And Henry was starting to sound like someone’s dad. He’d be talking about petrol coupons next.

The restaurant was crowded with out-of-towners but they were shown to a decent table anyway (waiters clearly had a sixth sense about good tippers). The girls got their usual admiring stares only now there was the odd whisper to go with them – Suzy might be right about Frockways. There was even some poor deluded cow wearing one of the bloody things – even the black with gold lamé wasn’t nearly dressy enough for the Coq d’Or.

They’d all ordered oysters except Johnny but when his soup came he called the waiter over and complained that it was cold.

‘It’s vichyssoise, sir,’ he hissed, happily. He always enjoyed this one.

‘I don’t care what it’s supposed to be. It’s stone cold.’

The waiter stayed dead pan and whisked the soup away, planning the usual kitchen revenge. Henry and Suzy had hardly noticed but Jane felt sick with embarrassment. Johnny’s soup came back hot but he had more sense than to drink it. Instead he began cutting up his bread roll with his butter knife. An old bitch in beige lace at the next table eyed him with utter contempt. Models. What could you expect?

When Johnny’s steak arrived he took a sip of Chablis, tucked his napkin into his collar and began sawing away at it, holding his knife like a pen.

It was more like two tables for two than a foursome. Suzy had angled her body away from Johnny and seemed determined to keep talking – or get Henry talking – anything to keep Johnny quiet. Henry was telling Suzy about a property he’d just acquired in South Kensington somewhere – a friendly little bargain he’d struck with Jane’s Mr Mutation so maybe the girl wasn’t such a bad idea after all. The house was a complete wreck at the moment, all carved up into poky little bedsits, but it would be ideal, apparently. Ideal for what?

‘I wouldn’t care where it was.’ Which was sort of true. Eaton Square would have been fine too.

Johnny had dropped his napkin and was asking the waiter for another serviette.

‘Why are you doing this?’ hissed Jane.

He looked at her hard and drained another glass.

‘Doing what, Janey? What am I doing exactly?’

‘You know perfectly well what you’re doing.’

Oh God.
Don’t whatever you do complain. You sound your shrillest and look your worst when you do.
She’d better keep that note out of her voice. Only married women could afford to take that tone. ‘You can’t see the look on the waiter’s face.’

‘I don’t want to see the look on the waiter’s bloody face, Janey darling. He could be stood there dolled up like Marlene bloody Dietrich for all I care, Janey darling. He’s there to bring my food. When I want his opinion of my manners, I’ll jolly well ask for it.’

Christ. The beige woman was staring now and the bad language meant that her husband would have to gear himself up to complain. Last thing he wanted. It was their wedding anniversary. Twenty-eight years and she’d still never actually touched it.

Johnny called the waiter over before the man could start.

‘Excuse me,
garçon
, could you direct me to your smallest room?’

Suzy thought this was very funny but then Suzy had had half a bottle of Moët and three glasses of Chablis. The woman at the next table set her off laughing again. It was an attractive laugh. But loud.

‘Do you know,’ announced Suzy, in what she thought was a whisper, ‘I thought for one terrible moment that that woman was starkers. Her dress is exactly the same colour as her skin. Couldn’t work out why she had ruched tits.’

By the time the baked Alaska arrived, they were all four of them plastered.

The manager (who’d been put in the picture by the head waiter) came over for a quick ooze.

‘Was everything all right this evening, sir?’ Johnny might have made the booking but it was still Henry they spoke to.

Henry, who was busy stroking the hand of the second Mrs Swan-to-be, looked up crossly.

‘What?’

‘Is everything all right, sir?’ He looked pointedly in Johnny’s direction. Johnny was holding his coffee cup in a very poncey way. Suzy went to powder her nose without waiting for Jane like she normally did. She hadn’t said one word to her all evening. Henry got up and headed off in the direction of the Gents’.

‘Why are you doing this?’

He looked sharply at her.

‘You can’t stand it when people break the rules, can you, Jane? But only the little rules. Suzy can sleep with another woman’s husband so long as she doesn’t drink red wine with fish. That’s it, isn’t it?’

Hard to know how to play that one for the best. Nothing fancy. Just a tear or two and a broken whisper.

‘She’s my friend, Johnny.’ Was she?

Piece of cake. He took her hand.

‘I know. I know. I’m sorry. Why won’t you let me take care of you?’

Buildings had caretakers. Men with overalls and buckets keeping everything tidy and disinfected and locked up securely after dark. Why would a girl want taking care of?

Johnny paid the bill while the girls tripped outside and bundled into the back of the borrowed Volvo, their frilly petticoats bunched up around them like a pair of matching dollies packed in tissue paper. Henry, by now in a bad mood, had remembered he ought to phone the wife and tell her he was staying at his club after a late business meeting (she’d get his lawyer’s letter on Monday). He refused to be trussed back into the passenger seat and insisted on walking back to the flat on his own. It took the drunken Johnny so long to figure out the safety strap that Henry had already disappeared upstairs to ring Penelope by the time they eventually pulled into the forecourt.

Penelope was on the phone to her sister in Cirencester. No, she didn’t think there was Another Woman as such, no one serious anyway, but Henry was at that very difficult age. Her sister hooked the phone into her right shoulder and reached for her copy of
Vogue
. Henry listened to the engaged signal for a few furious seconds then dialled again, pulling the sitting-room curtain back to see what the other three were up to down below.

Suzy was in the mood for a test drive.

‘Johnny, darling.’
Darling
. Fucking cheek. ‘You did say Janey and I could have a spot of practice while you still had the car?’

Johnny chucked the keys over his shoulder then staggered out of the driver’s seat, propped himself up against the wall by the entrance and lit one of Henry’s half coronas.

The girls climbed into the front of the car.

‘Once round Berkeley Square and back,’ cried Suzy.

‘Drive carefully!’

‘We will, darling! Very carefully indeed. Safety belts and everything.’

The red car roared back down the forecourt and reversed blindly into the side road and off into Curzon Street. There wasn’t much traffic around (most of Mayfair was in the country for the weekend) and a couple of minutes later the car was zooming back round the flowerbed in front of the main entrance. Henry peered out of the fifth-floor window as the two girls danced round the car, sitting on the bonnet and posing pertly like dolly birds at a motor show. One of them waved up at him – he couldn’t tell which – before they climbed back in on opposite sides and roared off again for another run round the block.

Johnny was starting to nod off against the wall but he was woken by the sound of tyre on tarmac as the speeding car pulled off Curzon Street a second time and back into the home straight. His bleary eyes looked up at the two dark heads above the goofy round headlights, at the gleaming chrome of the radiator, picturing the damage about to be done to the brake linings, waiting for the moment when the engine stalled to a halt once more.

The moment never came. Instead a ton of Swedish engineering carried right on accelerating into the wall where he stood, squashing his lower body like a wasp on a window pane.

Part Three

Chapter 24

Your allure is a science. Take control of your
movements. Make them slow. Make them
graceful. Monitor every pose, every gesture,
so that nothing is ever left to chance.

The policemen were quite chummy first off, sitting the pair of them down on a settee by the main door and telling them not to worry. The central heating went off at eleven and it was freezing in the foyer. There was an old paraffin stove behind the porter’s desk but its heat didn’t seem to reach any further than his knees.

One of the upholstery pins on the settee had torn a tiny hole in Jane’s stocking and she could feel the ladder tickling its way up the side of her leg every time she moved.

When the ambulance men had finished outside one of them came over and asked if they were all right and was either of them a relation? He stank of disinfectant. That and the smell of floor polish and the dusty spray of plastic carnations in the vase on the front desk made Jane feel like she was in hospital. He asked again if either of them had been hurt in the crash.

‘We’re both fine,’ insisted Suzy in her very best hockey-captain tones, ‘completely unscathed.’

Unless you counted the bruised feeling across the chest from those rotten safety straps, thought Jane, but she said nothing.

‘Your hand’s like ice.’

He walked back to the desk to say something to one of the patrol-car policemen then drove away in the ambulance. No need for the siren.

The nosey old bitch on the ground floor had been woken up by the crash but she’d missed the ambulance coming and going because of the time it took to get her curlers out and change into her best housecoat (quilted nylon,
much
too long on her). She said they ought to have hot, sweet tea, like in the Blitz. It wasn’t proper tea, though. It was that perfumed gnat’s piss they all pretended to like. Very friendly all of a sudden but she served it in the kitchen china just the same and she didn’t offer any to the policemen.

One of them came over. Did either of them know the deceased and where did his family reside?
Reside
. Pillock. Then he went back over to the porter’s desk to arrange for some poor sod from the Putney branch to wake Old Mother Hullavington with the glad tidings.

‘What the bloody hell happened to Henry?’ whispered Jane.

Henry had been watching the whole thing from the sitting-room window upstairs while he was trying to get through to the wife. Once he’d seen the girls safely out of the car he sloped off down the fire escape to the garage where he kept the Bentley. The A30 was clean as a whistle and he was back in Virginia Water by midnight. Penelope was alone in the house when he got back, having waited up with a bottle of Cointreau. Penelope wanted to know what time he called this so he called it half past ten – just in case he needed an alibi.

The phone on the desk rang while the policemen were outside inspecting the front of the Volvo. Jim the porter answered it, nodded and yes-sirred a few times then signalled to Suzy who had started to cry. Whoever it was didn’t have a lot to say and she was back on the settee before the policemen had even noticed her get up.

‘Was that him?’ whispered Jane.

‘He wasn’t here, all right? He’ll sort everything out.’ Suzy spoke very quietly, without moving her lips.

It was all shaping up like a tragic accident – Careless Driving at a pinch – until the police started taking statements from people and Jim the porter told them he’d seen the car deliberately accelerate into the wall. Thanks, Jim. And then the other nosey old bitch – the one who had the flat on the other side of the main door where the crash was – went and stuck her oar in. Mrs Kowalski, her name was. Foreign.

Mrs Kowalski had seen the whole bloody thing and she’d tottered out into the front hall and started shooting her mouth off. She had a ginger wig stuck on all anyhow and a white space at the front of her head where her face ought to have been: no eyebrows; no eyelashes; no cheeks; no lips. Without Max Factor there was nobody there. They took her statement over by the porter’s desk but she was stone deaf so you could hear every word. Young women in motor cars at all hours driving. Decent people asleep. And not the first time flat fifty-two a nuisance made. The policeman’s ears pricked up. What flat number did she say? He finished taking her statement and was just nipping out to have a word with the radio bloke in the police car when he heard the clang of a tin pail on the tarmac outside. While he’d been busy with Mrs K, Jim the porter had wandered off to his little glory hole under the main stairs to get a mop and a bucket and a bottle of Jeyes Fluid and had calmly trotted outside to wash all that mess off the stonework. What was his game? More to the point, what were the CID going to say?