The Decision (77 page)

Meanwhile, ‘I want to speak to you,’ he said to Demetrios, ‘about constructing some ramps up the steps for my mother’s wheelchair …’

Mariella found out about the party by accident: a very lucky accident, as she said. She was in New York for a few days, ordering some clothes and shopping and had offered to take a friend to dinner at Elaine’s. The friend was charmed and impressed; ‘I’ve wanted to go there so long. Did you know Woody Allen met Mia Farrow there?’

Mariella said she didn’t, but she wasn’t surprised. ‘Everybody meets everybody here. I love it. And she is so wonderful, Elaine, so bigger than life. Those flower-covered dresses she wears, so vulgar and all those gold chains. I will book a table and we will have a wonderful evening. See how many famous faces we can see.’

However, there wasn’t a table the following evening; Elaine’s was full. Mariella was not one of the vast number of people who would have been told this anyway, or turned away at the door, she was one of Elaine’s pets.

‘We have a big party tomorrow night, Signora Crespi. I am so sorry.’

‘Oh, that is so sad. I am not a large person, nor is my friend, could you not find us a tiny table in a corner?’

‘I’m afraid not. Lunch perhaps?’

‘Ah. Yes. We will come to lunch. Thank you. Not so exciting perhaps but – it will do.’

She and her friend had a very good lunch, eating the fettucine dish that Jackie Kennedy had famously cooked to Elaine’s recipe, and were drinking their coffee when a tall, incredibly thin blonde woman walked in looking distracted, demanding to see Elaine. She was told Elaine was not available.

‘It’s about the seating plan for this evening, I wanted to leave the place names with her and to make sure they were put out before Mr Northcott’s party arrived.’

‘And you are?’

‘Mr Northcott’s PA.’

‘I can do that for you, Madame.’

‘Are you sure? They must be right, it’s quite imperative, I would really like Elaine to do it personally.’

‘I will do it, Madame. If you just give me the seating plan …’

‘Come,
cara
!’ said Mariella to her friend, jumping up, ‘we must go. I have a great deal to do.’

The Summercourt effect had not lasted. They were hardly inside the door before Matt was checking the answering machine, standing over it, listening to it intently, and then rifling through the post. Eliza felt a flash of hurt.

‘You don’t trust me, do you? You really don’t.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Matt, you’re checking up on me. Just to make sure that Jeremy hasn’t rung, that there aren’t any love letters lying on the mat—’

‘You’re being neurotic, Eliza. The purpose of an answering machine is to take messages in the owner’s absence. I merely wanted to see who might have rung.’

‘Yes, sure. Well, now you know. Two of my friends. Women, so that’s all right. Unless you think I might be about to become a lesbian, of course.’

‘Don’t talk in that disgusting way, Emmie might hear.’

‘She’s heard you being pretty disgusting already, in my view. Oh, for God’s sake, Matt, give it a rest. I’m going up to bath her.’

‘It was you not giving it a rest. I’m going to do some work now, some of us have more to do than picking quarrels.’

‘If I had more to do,’ cried Eliza, her voice cracking with pain, ‘I maybe wouldn’t be picking quarrels, as you call it.’

‘God give me strength,’ said Matt. ‘I thought we had heard the last of that one for a while at least. You go to bed, Eliza, I’ll be very late. I’ll go into the spare room.’

‘And bloody well stay there,’ she said and set off up the stairs.

Waking in the morning, alone in the bed, she realised she was still hurting. When she got down to the kitchen, there were the messy remnants of toast-making and a note saying ‘I’ll be late tonight.’

And this was meant to be a marriage.

Reflecting that if marriage and motherhood were genuinely to be her life for the foreseeable future, she must pull herself together and put a one-hundred-per-cent effort into it, Eliza called Matt mid-morning to hold out a rather well-worn olive branch, and ask him if he really had to work late and if not, then she would cook proper dinner for them both, rather than the soup-and-sandwich supper she could leave out for him otherwise. He wasn’t there, and so she left a message to call her; an hour later, Mandy rang and said she was sorry, Mr Shaw was out of town, but he had asked her to say that he would have to be late and not to wait for him for dinner. Stung that he had not even bothered to call himself, and feeling particularly lonely, Eliza rang Maddy and invited her to have supper with her.

‘I need an injection of gossip, I’m going crazy.’

The phone was ringing as Eliza arrived home after school with Emmie and a small friend; she shot over to it but the answering machine had cut in. As so often when a caller unused to such things was confronted by it, there was a long silence, and then a voice said ‘oh, doesn’t matter,’ and rang off. It had sounded like Heather, but she couldn’t be sure, the voice was echoey and distorted; Eliza decided she would go round and see her in the morning, just in case, she could hardly go now, and addressed herself to settling the little girls in the playroom and making their tea. If it was important, Heather would surely ring again.

Heather sighed; she had no more change, and anyway, she needed every last penny for the meter. She would try again tomorrow. And it was perfectly all right about the article, she was sure. She just thought she ought to tell Eliza.

Eliza and Maddy were settling happily into gossip mode in the small sitting room when a key turned in the lock and Matt walked in.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘oh hello.’

‘Matt – hello. What are you doing here?’

‘I live here, I thought,’ he said. He was clearly making an effort to sound light-hearted, but it didn’t quite work.

‘I thought you were going to be late.’

‘Yes, well after your rather touching phone call, I made an effort, got back early, here I am. Evening, Maddy.’

‘Hello, Matt.’

‘Well, how lovely.’ Eliza got up, gave him a kiss. ‘You must join us, of course.’

‘That would be charming,’ he said, a slight edge to his voice, ‘but I can see you’re having a girls’ evening, I won’t intrude. I’ll just have something in the study, Eliza.’

‘Matt, don’t. We’d like you to be with us, wouldn’t we, Maddy?’

‘Course.’

‘Come on. Sit down, chat to Maddy while I cook the pasta.’

After about an hour of stultifyingly awkward conversation, with Matt sitting silent and half-sullen, Maddy left, clearly embarrassed; Eliza turned on him in a fury.

‘That was so rude. Maddy was my guest and you couldn’t have been less friendly to her, didn’t even try to join in …’

‘Eliza, I can’t do all that stuff. It makes me feel even thicker than I look. I offered to go to my study, you had to insist. I suppose she’d come to commiserate with you over the job,’ said Matt, ‘show solidarity with – what is it, oh, yes, the sisterhood.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Eliza, struggling to sound calm. ‘She’d just come for a gossip. About, you know, the business, what she’s doing, all that sort of thing.’

‘Why is it always that lot you want to see? From your old life? You just can’t tear yourself away, can you? What about some new friends?’

‘I have new friends, thank you, I just don’t particularly want to spend the evening with them.’

‘Because?’

‘Because they’re not interested in what interests me.’

‘And she is?’ he said indicating the chair where Maddy had been sitting. ‘A woman with no children, just obsessed with the business as you call it, banging on about all those poncey designers and photographers, that interests you, does it? Nothing else? I thought – I hoped,’ he said, ‘after our last little upset, you were really going to throw yourself into it, forget all that rubbish—’

‘It is not rubbish,’ she shouted, ‘it’s what I care about, what I want to be doing—’

‘Oh, so you don’t want to be at home, looking after Emmie, you’re just doing it out of some sense of duty. You really want to be back out there, having your arse licked. You’re not really going into this wholeheartedly at all, are you?’ he said. ‘You’re just biding your time, softening me up, waiting for the next opportunity.’

‘That is so unfair—’

‘Is it? I don’t think so. It seems very fair to me. Oh, I’m going to do some work. I’m sorry I’ve spoilt your girly evening.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you have. Totally.’

He finally picked up the phone, took a deep breath.

‘I – well – that is, I wondered if you’d like to have dinner one night,’ he said. ‘Nothing – nothing grand, more like supper really.’

He had put it off several times, finding excuses: he was too tired one day, too busy the next, a bit low the third. He needed to feel his absolute best to do it right.

He had often wondered why he was so pathologically shy when it came to relationships. He could, after all, be charming and amusing when he was on show: a different person altogether. But the combined terror of looking foolish and being rejected was too much for his rather fragile ego.

He had only been in love twice in his life: first with his childhood sweetheart, who had turned her back on him and gone off with the rich, smooth heart-throb of the Upper Sixth; and the second time with a sweet, gentle, funny girl who had demanded nothing of him except that he loved her in the way she loved him. They had been engaged for only six months when she had found a lump in her breast; she had died exactly a year later, leaving him utterly broken both in his heart and his head. Since then, and for over ten years now, he had not ventured into a new relationship.

He could not have told you what it was about Scarlett that appealed to him so much; she was lovely, of course, and she had a glamour about her which he liked. And she was clearly very clever and successful in a business that was notoriously tough and cut-throat and didn’t suffer fools in any way. But those were all qualities that would normally have frightened him off. And while she was very intelligent, she was far from well-educated and not well-read – which would normally have troubled him, not for any intellectually snobbish reasons, but because it precluded so many sources of conversation. He had decided that what drew him to her was her vulnerability, which lay beneath the gloss and the glamour and the success; like him, he felt she was not personally secure and that personal happiness had eluded her. And if she was looking for it in people like that idiot at lunch that day, no wonder.

Whatever the reason, he was sufficiently drawn to her to risk an invitation to dinner …

There was a long, rather unnerving silence. Then she said, ‘Mark, I don’t think so. I’m sorry. You must know the reason, you really must. But thank you. And it’s very flattering, Goodbye, Mark. I’ll – I’ll see you on Trisos.’

‘Yes, of course,’ he said, longing to ask her what was this reason that he must know. And wondering how he could ever feel easy on Trisos again, were she around.

‘Oh, shit,’ said Scarlett, close to tears, looking at the phone, now replaced on its receiver. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

It was so long since anyone she fancied and liked so much had asked her out. But she wasn’t risking that again.

‘Fuck,’ said Mark Frost, feeling utterly wretched, looking at the phone as he replaced it on its receiver. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

It was so long since he had fancied and liked anyone enough to ask them out. But he wouldn’t be risking that again.

Suddenly, with frightening speed, Eliza and Matt seemed to have moved into a new, strange country; a silent, unsmiling land, filled with suspicion and a lack of warmth or even courtesy. They moved around, wary of one another, he staring at her with cold, blank eyes, her expression resentful and defiant. Day after day.

He went to work, came home very late, went into his study and then to bed. The spare-room bed.

With Emmie he was himself: greeting her with hugs and kisses, talking to her, playing with her, reading to her, taking her out to the park. Emmie had begun to notice the coldness and the blankness, did her best to ease it. She tried to set up conversations, said, ‘Will Mummy come too?’ when Matt said he’d put her to bed, or take her to the swings. It was precociously touching; it did no good.

Eliza was in despair.

Johnny Barrett was writing his ‘wicked landlord’ piece. He, in the end, had found the terrace quite quickly; there were only two that fitted the description, and after spending a couple of hours in his car outside each of them, and watching a pretty, heavily pregnant young woman walking gingerly down the steps of one of them with a little girl, and then returning half an hour later carrying shopping, he felt confident he had found Eliza Shaw’s friend.

He went over to her the second morning and smiled.

‘Excuse me, but can I help you with that shopping? It looks very heavy and those steps seem pretty treacherous to me.’

She flushed, clearly embarrassed.

‘Oh – no, no, it’s perfectly all right. I’m fine.’