King of the World (3 page)

“Earwig” was not a nice thing to call anyone, but all the same you could see what Alistair meant. Norah Payne was small and brown and compact, and there was indeed something insect-like about her swift, nervous movements. You were reminded of the instinctive movements of a creature for ever in the presence of larger, cleverer, weightier creatures, against whom the only protection lay in speed, invisibility and superior reaction-time.

A drink for the visitor? A comfortable chair? – and then the uneasy embarkation on a tenant-landlord interview – particularly uneasy in this case, because the landlord contingent already knew that their final verdict was going to be “No.”.

Well, of course it was. It had to be. Anything else would be crazy: but this undoubted fact was not sufficient, alas, to prevent them feeling like heartless monsters. And every word of Norah’s tale of woe was making them feel worse.

Nineteen years married (About forty, was she? Hard to tell from the dry, brown skin of her face, wholly devoid of make-up, and the lines of tension around mouth and eyes). Long-married, anyway, to this
fantastically
handsome man who had seemed, at first, like
every magazine-heroine’s dream. He was tall and dark, with beautiful manners: the kind of man you were proud to introduce to your family and friends. Oh, and very, very rich …

Rich? Had that mattered so very much?

“Oh
no
, it wasn’t the money”, Norah hastened to assure them. “You see, it’s not a rich man’s money that makes him attractive, it’s that gloss of success that radiates from him. It goes beyond good looks – beyond even a nice nature. Know what I mean?”

Did
she know? Bridget wanted to deny it. Success – yes, and the gloss of success – was something she coveted for herself, not for any man in her life …

But it was necessary to concentrate. Norah was launching, now, on the harrowing story of her marriage: the violence, the threats of worse violence: the knives, the lighted matches, the drunken assaults …

“He’s an alcoholic, then, is he?” enquired Diana, alert with professional interest. “You could have gone to Alcoholics Anonymous, you know. They have a special section for the relatives of alcoholics … We did a programme on them once, and it seems they are very helpful and supportive. If you like, I could give you an address …”

“Oh,
please
!
Oh
no
!” Norah’s hands, folded neatly in her lap, could be seen, if you looked closely, to be trembling slightly. “Oh
no
, I wouldn’t dare do anything like that! Mervyn would kill me if he found out. And he
would
find out. He’s always found out everything … that’s why, in the end, I had to run away, there was nothing else I could do …

“And so that’s how I ended up in this hostel for Battered Wives … I was that desperate … It seemed
to be my only hope. But – you know what happened? Mervyn traced me! I don’t know how he did it, I’ll never know. He’s a Consultant, you know, at a mental hospital; he has his ways. Anyway, there he was, early one morning, I saw him out of the window. So I snatched up the few things I’d brought, and climbed out of the window into the garden, and over the back fence into the road …”

“But, my dear, you didn’t need to go to those sort of lengths,” interposed Diana. “These refuges are specially planned, you know, to protect women from husbands who turn up like like that. They’d have kept him away from you, really they would. Actually, I’ve been involved in a bit of research about the battering syndrome, and I can promise you that …”

The quivering hands had grown still, brown and dry as dead leaves, and clutched together so tightly that they seemed no bigger than a cricket-ball. And now tears were beginning to trickle embarrassingly down the sallow cheeks.

Embarrassingly, because tears
are
embarrassing when you don’t know the person well enough to put your arms round her. Or so it seemed to Bridget, who, in any case, was by now feeling a slight physical revulsion for the sad little creature cowering in the big chair.

Pretend not to have noticed the tears. Change the subject.

“Let me get you another drink” was the best she could manage, and headed for the kitchen, on the pretext of needing more ice.

Deliberately, she dawdled over her errand, gazing longingly at the lamb chops still languishing in the fridge. By now, she and Diana should have been
enjoying them, together with mushrooms, tomatoes, cauliflower and mashed potatoes. Now it had all been spoiled; first by bloody Alistair, and now by this intrusive woman. A born victim-type, no wonder her husband beat her up – but before Bridget had time to examine this uncharitable and wholly unjustified assumption, she was interrupted.

“Bridget! What on earth have you been doing? Leaving me to cope single-handed all this time!”

Diana’s hissed reproaches were justified, Bridget had indeed been dodging out of an awkward situation, and was ready – almost – to admit it.

“Sorry. I was thinking about those chops. I’m
starving
, aren’t you? Why don’t I start cooking while you get rid of the woman? Or, better still, get Alistair to do it. Time he did
something
useful about the place.”

“Oh, but Bridget,
no
! It’s Alistair that’s the problem. He’s saying things like: haven’t I any compassion for a fellow-creature in distress? You know how he was going on about it even before she arrived, and it’s worse than ever now she’s started crying. Out loud, like a baby, and he’s got her in a great compassionate bear-hug on purpose, just to show me how uncompassionate
I’m
being. I know that’s why he’s doing it, I can see his eyes peering at me triumphantly through those dried-up gingery wisps of her hair. He knows he’s winning, he knows he’s making me feel awful, he’s doing it
on
purpose
!”

Bridget agreed that he probably was.

“But, Di, you don’t have to take any notice, you know how he is. He loves to tease you, and anyway everything’s just a game to him: I think that’s why I get so fed up with him, and you should, too. Just take a firm
line. Get him to give her a lift to wherever she wants to go.
That’ll
exercise his compassion all right, especially if it’s somewhere in South London.”

“But that’s the whole point, Bridget. She
hasn’t
got
anywhere to go. That’s why she’s here. She thought, you see, that anyone advertising a room to let would at least
have
a spare room, and could let her stay in it for a night or two, just until they got a proper tenant. And of course we
could
do that. As Alistair says …”

“To hell with what Alistair says! It’s what
we
say that counts. And so long as we back each other up saying ‘No’ …”

“She wants to pay us,” Diana interposed tentatively. “She’s not asking for charity, she says. She just wants … just for a night or two …”

“It won’t be just a night or two! You know that as well as I do. Once she’s here, there’ll be no way of getting her out. There are actual laws we’d be breaking if we put her out on the street, never mind Alistair and his compassion. Talking of compassion, what about all those dozens of applicants he says phoned up this afternoon? Haven’t
they
any rights, having applied before she did? And how does he know
they
aren’t all cripples or mental defectives or something, and even more deserving of his precious compassion than she is?” She was being really nasty, she knew; but, Hell, she was so
hungry.

“There weren’t dozens, actually” Diana now
admitted
. “He says now that there were only two – and neither of them in the least bit crippled. One was an American fast-food executive wanting a pied-a-terre in London for the next six months while he organises a merger, or something. The other was a Yuppie sort of a
fellow who wanted to make sure there would be parking space for both his cars. Besides, as Alistair says …”

Bridget felt that if she heard even one more thing that Alistair had said, she might actually scream.

“Look,” she said, “Let’s just throw them out – both of them – and have our meal in peace. Neither of them have been invited – Alistair wasn’t supposed to be coming again until Sunday, I thought you said.”

She slammed on the gas, noisily filled a pan with water and set it to boil, then bent to light up the grill. Only now did she notice that Diana still hadn’t responded to this tirade. Turning round, she saw her friend fiddling uneasily with the egg whisk and not looking up.

“Ye-es” Diana began guiltily, “I did say that, I know. But what’s happened, you see, Bridget – I was at the clinic for my test results this afternoon, and they took my temperature – they do that, you know, it’s routine – and it turned out to be a little bit up. Ninety-nine, that’s all, nothing much, but enough to show that I must be ovulating right now, three days early. So I rang Alistair straight away to see if he could come tonight instead of Sunday. But I only meant the
night
, Bridget, honestly. It never occurred to me that he’d turn up early like this, in time for a meal and everything …”

Why
hadn’t it occurred to her? She’d known Alistair for six or seven years now, and for three of them they’d been lovers, surely by now she should be familiar with his wayward, self-centred ways? If it was convenient to him to arrive at the flat early, in time for an evening meal, then early he would arrive, serenely confident that a meal of sorts would be forthcoming.

It was Diana’s fault entirely. How could a man
not
come to expect something that was invariably forthcoming? Even the Pavlov dogs had had that much intelligence.

What had the Pavlov dogs done when, on occasion, the expected meal wasn’t forthcoming? This must surely have formed part of the experiment – Pavlov had been a painstaking and thorough researcher. Indeed, Bridget had a vague recollection of having read somewhere that the dogs had gone on salivating for a surprising number of minutes – 27.4 or something like that. Which meant (she glanced at her watch) that Alistair would still be salivating when everything was ready, the cutlets done to a turn.

He
wasn’t
going to have any. He just wasn’t. How could four cutlets be divided between three people? Bridget was the cook tonight, and the cook, always and everywhere, is the one with power. The power to inspire friendship, peace and contentment for a whole evening; also the power to wreck everything.

All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts
absolutely
. Disagreeable though she was feeling, Bridget did not fancy the idea of being corrupted absolutely, and so she sought a compromise. Couldn’t they get Alistair to take this Norah woman out for a meal, dump her back wherever she came from, and then, if he had to, return to the flat?

Yes, he did have to. That was already clear from Diana’s fraught expression and the increasingly
nervous
gyrations of the egg-whisk. The tiresome drama surrounding Diana’s ovulation cropped up month after month: the arithmetic – the calculation of the exact night, almost the exact hour, when love-making (if
one could still call it that) would have the maximum chance of making Diana pregnant. Then there were the calculations – all the unpredictable variables – the hasty summoning of Alistair when the moment seemed ripe. It was irritating, but Bridget bore it as best she could. After all, Diana
was
thirty-seven, she couldn’t afford to wait much longer for Mr Right to turn up; wiser, no doubt, to settle for Mr Wrong while she still had him. “Striking while the iron was hot”, as Alistair himself would doubtless have put it, had he known what was going on.

But Alistair
didn’t
know – or so Diana insisted. But was he really so stupid, Bridget sometimes wondered, as not to have put two-and-two together in respect of these periodic, urgent summonses to Diana’s bed, especially considering the low-key, lackadaisical nature of their normal relationship. Or, on the other hand, perhaps he wasn’t stupid at all, but fully aware of Diana’s frantic manoeuvreing of their love-life, and secretly flattered by it? After all, for someone to be going to all this trouble to create a replica of oneself – it must surely be flattering on some level?

Whatever his attitude, Diana seemed undeterred by the problems.

“Men are funny about babies, you see,” she’d explained one night when she and Bridget had both arrived home after midnight, and had sat talking in the kitchen instead of going to bed, “The human race would have died out long ago if it had depended on men agreeing to have a baby. So women have to take it into their own hands – since the invention of birth-control, that is. Men
always
want to put it off. Not now, dear, not till I’ve passed my exams…. settled into my new
job … got the business back on its feet … got my promotion. And what about our lovely holidays abroad, darling, wandering free as air to any part of the world we like – how could we do
that
if we were lumbered with a baby?

“And finally, when maybe, in the end, he’s come round to it – by that time the woman is too old. So, like I’m telling you Bridget, the survival of the human race from now on depends on women. It’s a grave responsibility.”

Grave indeed; and dependent, according to Diana, on women pretending to have taken the Pill when they hadn’t … pricking holes in their female condoms … “A11 sorts of dodges” as Diana put it; and Bridget would listen, slightly perturbed, but in no position to argue. After all, she wasn’t thirty-seven, and had so far experienced no maternal urges whatsoever. On the contrary, her feelings on the subject were virtually identical with those of the male sex as described by Diana. Not now. Not yet. I want to get on with my career. I want to enjoy my freedom.

Anyway, this was no time to get involved in such discussions. Prodding the potatoes with a fork, Bridget judged that they were just about done. The cutlets under the grill were beginning to smell delicious, and she was just nerving herself to march into the
sitting-room
and explain (as pleasantly as such a thing can be explained) that neither of the unexpected visitors were going to get anything to eat, when Alistair sidled into the kitchen with a plan of his own.