Symposium (5 page)

‘You
mean,’ says Ella, ‘you should be able to obtain a divorce on the grounds that
you were madly in love with the spouse?’

‘That’s
what I mean,’ says Hurley.

‘I
never heard that before,’ says Ella.

He
nearly says, very pompously: ‘Ella, my dear girl, in this house you will hear a
great many things that you haven’t heard before.’ But he forbears to say it. He
says nothing, and leaves a little silence.

She
then says, ‘Do you think arranged marriages most likely to succeed?’

‘Only
in some parts of the world. India. South America, maybe. With us, it’s all
finished. Arranged marriages only work where the parents know best. With us,
the parents know nothing.’

‘I
agree with you there,’ says Ella.

The
menu could so easily have been hot salmon mousse, not cold, followed by that
thin-sliced duck, or lobster on a bed of cabbage with raspberry vinegar, which
were among the many ideas for food that Chris and Hurley had discussed over the
past weeks. This homely pheasant in preference to thin-sliced duck, their final
triumphant choice, is delicious. The pheasant was hung just right. Do all among
them appreciate it? Perhaps more than one might expect. ‘I’m glad your mother’s
back in London,’ Hurley says to William.

‘Yes,
she came a couple of days ago,’ William says.

‘She’s
busy about our flat,’ says Margaret. ‘It’s wonderful.’

‘Your
mother’s coming in after dinner,’ says Chris. ‘I spoke to Hilda on the phone
this afternoon. She said she’d look in after dinner.’

‘Good.’

But
Hilda Damien will not come in after dinner. She is dying, now, as they speak.

IT
had been in September, while the young Damiens were still on their
honeymoon, that Chris Donovan had heard how the couple had met. She learned the
details from her old friend Hilda Damien who had come from Australia for the
wedding. Chris and Hurley had been in New York at the time, arranging a show
for Hurley at a very good gallery in Manhattan.

Hilda
on the phone was announced by Charter-house, the name, believe it or not, of
the new young acquisition from the Top-One School of Butlers: ‘Yes, pass her to
me,’ said Chris, among her breakfast muddle of coffee-pot and toast-rack. She
was in bed. It was only nine-twenty in the morning.

‘Now I
ask myself’, said Hilda, ‘what she was doing in the fruit section of Marks
& Spencer’s? It’s not that anyone of that type and generation might not go
and buy her fruit there. But, as it happens, she was staying in a half-board
hostel at the time she met him. What would she want with fruit and vegetables?
She said vegetables — actually vegetables. She had her lunch out. Where would
she cook, and why? The story doesn’t hang together.’

Chris
thought of her friend, already at this hour, up and about, sitting at a desk in
her London office.

‘Come
for lunch,’ said Chris. ‘I have jet-lag. We just got back from New York.’

‘I
can’t,’ said Hilda. ‘I can’t see you this visit. I’m leaving tomorrow but I’ll
be back in a few weeks’ time to see about their flat. That’s all I’m giving
them. A flat in Hampstead, full stop.’

‘It’s a
big enough “all”,’ said Chris.

‘That’s
what I say. They should be thankful.’

Chris
said, ‘I’ll be giving a dinner round about the 17th, 18th of October. Will you
be here then?’

‘I don’t
know. I’ll ring. I don’t believe a word that girl says.

‘Murchie,
the name Murchie …’ said Chris, ‘it rings a bell. What are they like?’

What
the Murchies were like was something Hilda didn’t want to discuss. It was not
that she didn’t trust Chris Donovan, but that she would have found it
impossible to explain what she felt. She was a decidedly practical woman, and
it wasn’t in her to flounder about with words. There had been more than one
occasion for her to experience a sensation of oddness in the two days she had
seen the Murchies before and after the wedding in St Andrews. But the wedding
itself, all their friends, were entirely conventional and friendly, just what
you would expect a wedding to be for a man like her son.

Hilda
said to Chris before she rang off: ‘Oh, the Murchies are all right. I don’t
know them at all. On the whole, I’ll be glad to get away. Sometimes I think
Australia’s not far enough.’

‘If it
wasn’t for Hurley,’ said Chris, ‘I’d be with you.’

Hilda Damien, aged
fifty-three, had a well-preserved look which was only possible to people of
her age who had surplus energy. It took energy, also stamina, to apply a
routine of physical upkeep such as Hilda had adopted as soon as she realized
she was going to have a successful life in her long widowhood. Artists,
musicians, writers and poets tend to neglect themselves and their appearance
while pursuing their burning and fugitive aims. With many types of business
people it is different; they know instinctively the value to their trade of
having been massaged and pummelled, groomed and creamed and slimmed, and they
give great, assiduous, attention to their smart appearance. Hilda had started
as a journalist and now, a real magnate, she took it as a matter of course that
she should rise earlier than anyone else so as to fit in the manicurist and
masseuse, or the hairdresser.

Her
white hair undulated back from her tan-glow forehead, her teeth gleamed, her
good bones held up her facial features; she looked like a mild sunset, she had
a strong body.

At
fifty-three, unbeknown to her children, she wanted to get married again, the
only reason for her secrecy in this respect being that she didn’t yet know
anyone whom she could marry. But she was convinced, and rightly, that she would
easily find a man, preferably a widower, rich, suitable, attractive.

Hilda
was not a feminist. She was above and beyond feminism. She had no need of a
tame husband to help her with domestic chores, she had no domestic chores. She
needed an equal, a mate. And she had always been sexually shy, so she knew very
little about all that, without being unaware of the power of sexual attraction.

Although
she had no idea whom she might marry she had a good sense of how to go about
it. She was relieved that William had got married, and, not expecting the
marriage to last, thought she should marry before William’s marriage broke up.

Hilda
had a woman friend who, in the early days of one of her wealthy widowhoods, sat
in the lobby of the Excelsior Hotel in Rome with a little dog on her lap.
Before long, a man of suitable age and means turned up to caress the little dog
and get into conversation with the widow. Hilda’s friend didn’t look further.
She married this man, who was verging on elderly, and remained happily married
till he died. She then returned to the lobby of the Excelsior. Another of
Hilda’s women friends, well on in her sixties and three times widowed, decided
to find a husband about her own age. She went to the Bahamas, where she had
some property, and soon met a charming business man at a smart cocktail party.
He was her fourth husband and they were still married — she, wrapped in a cloud
of contentment. These were the sort of examples Hilda had in mind. She felt,
reasonably, that it was a matter of focusing one’s mind on the possibility:
someone would come and fill the screen. Someone, perhaps, on the plane to or
from Australia. Hilda had even thought, how nice it would be to meet a future
partner at William’s wedding.

The
Murchies had made a very good, unspectacular wedding for their daughter. They
lived in a turreted edifice near St Andrews called Blackie House, with fewer,
and more poky, rooms than the outside suggested. The fact that the rooms were
so small was, according to Margaret’s mother, Greta, a godsend: ‘Otherwise we
could never afford to heat the place.’ Her husband, Dan Murchie, said his
family had occupied the place since 1933. He put a strong emphasis on this
insignificant fact, as if 1933 was hundreds of years ago.

‘Oh,
how often’, Dan said to Hilda, ‘I was a page-boy at weddings! How I remember
the satin suits, the tartan kilts. The blond heads of hair at those weddings,
the bridesmaids’ curls, and our curls — I could show you photographs. Every
month or so a yellow satin suit, a pale blue suit! In a way our parents had
money to burn. In another way they didn’t have a penny.

‘Luxuries,
as we would call them luxuries today, were cheaper. Dressmakers were cheap,’
said Greta.

Hilda
let them speak on as much as possible. It was her habit to let people speak on.

Hilda
stayed with the Murchies for one night, before the wedding. Her room was
comfortable in a way that was irreproachable. It had the right curtains
co-ordinated with the right bedcovers. It had paper tissues and cotton wool.
There was a bathroom attached, pale mushroom-coloured with white birds in
flight on the tiles. The towels were right. Everything was right. Hilda had
just arrived, been shown to her room. Everything was right, including the piece
of Dresden china on a shelf, a silly little man with pink breeches playing a
violin. What was wrong with these people? Hilda changed her clothes, which
wasn’t necessary, or should not have been, as she had arrived in a very smart
pair of trousers and a woollen jacket. She looked at the bedside books: three paperbacks
by Anthony Powell,
The Trumpet Major
by Thomas Hardy, Palgrave’s
Golden
Treasury,
three paperbacks by Agatha Christie, one by P. D. James,
something by Thackeray, something by Alan Sillitoe. Nothing wrong with that
selection, not a hair out of place. Hilda wore a dress and jacket, black with
some white, very good and striking. She went down to meet the Murchies. It was
seven-thirty in the evening.

For the
first time she met Dan Murchie, Margaret’s father. He wore tinted glasses and
came into the room with that stiff, correct, Jaruzelski walk that we used to
see on the television when the Polish news came up.

‘Well,
Hilda (if I may),’ he said, ‘what sort of a journey did you have? Sit down. I’m
glad you found us without difficulty. What would you like to drink? Whisky,
gin, vodka, sherry, anything.’

She
asked for a whisky and soda. In came Greta. ‘So lovely to see you,’ said Greta
(in black and white, she also), ‘especially now that the arrangements are all
made and the worst’s over, one can relax. It’s the third wedding I’ve coped
with. My two other daughters. Margaret’s the third. The fourth is still at
school so I suppose we have that to come one of these days. What a pity you
couldn’t have come sooner or stayed on a bit; we could get to know one
another.’

Her
husband handed his wife a vodka and tonic, clinking with ice. He took a neat
whisky for himself, tossed it back and poured another.

Hilda
thought, ‘They are quite all right but there’s something wrong.’ Then she
thought, ‘Why should I give a damn?’ She sat back in her chair, knowing herself
to look splendid, and aware, as they must be aware, that she was very rich and
altogether an independent person.

‘It was
all so sudden,’ said Greta. Hilda felt she had expected her to say just that.
Was there anything to be said or done that everyone else wouldn’t say or do?
Hilda thought: ‘I have been much too successful. I am out of touch. This,
obviously, is what ordinary life is like.’

The
Murchies made their living out of quarrying granite and other stone. They had a
well organized small business about which Hilda had found out before she left
Australia. Dan Murchie of Murchie & Sons, Quarriers and Extractors, Mining
Equipment Supplied, was about to retire. But the family business was involved
in a sub-contractual way with the Channel Tunnel; and Hilda assumed they needed
that sort of money which is necessary to make very much more money. If Margaret
had not met William casually in the fruit section of Marks & Spencer’s, she
would have suspected, and without rancour, that the Murchies might be after
William’s, that was to say, her, money. It was a situation that Hilda could not
have it in her to be too sure of, too cynical about. People did fall in love,
quite simply.

‘You
must be dead tired,’ said Hilda to Greta.