A Rather English Marriage (21 page)

‘How's life treating you, then?' asked Molly across the kitchen table. The teapot nestled under a quilted cosy. Beside it on a flowered plate with a doily stood a home-baked cake made with fresh butter and eggs. The milk jug, sugar bowl, side-plates and teacups were of matching china, the tablecloth and napkins hand-embroidered. In ten minutes she'd done him proud. She poured the tea, cut them each a slice of cake and sat back.

‘You look as though you'd got yourself a new girlfriend. Thought you might have had a vacancy for me, a few months ago. There's no call to look so shocked, Roy Southgate. Grace wouldn't have minded. Well, go on. Bakes a nice Victoria sponge, does she? Good as mine?'

‘There's only ever going to be one girl for me, you know that. I look in at the Kelsey Arms once in a while to see my old mates from the dairy - fewer of them there each time I go - but aside from that I haven't been out since we had our New Year's Eve,' said Roy.

‘What you up against? Money tight?'

‘No, not that. Been keeping myself busy, looking after him and cooking for the both of us, bit of shopping sometimes - like today.'

‘And here was me thinking you a gentleman of leisure, living up at Nevill Park all posh, real la-di-da you'd become, no time for old friends. He look after you all right, all found?'

‘He doesn't pay me.'

‘What, no wages? Nothing is for nothing, sonny, nothing is for free.'

‘He buys food and everything. I've just got my rates to pay-'

‘Poll tax.'

‘Whatever they call it - on my house; and the insurance for, you know, funeral and all that. I been sending Junie a bit of money now and again, for the boys. Nothing else.'

‘If you're so rich you can take me to the pictures. Do you good to get out. That Woody Allen's ever so funny. Nearly as good as Charlie Chaplin. Make you laugh.'

‘I'll ask the Squadron Leader.'

‘Mind he lets you go. Long time since I had a date. That's that, then. Time you was heading off home. Been good to see you and have a chat.'

Reginald and Roy ate in the dining-room, usually in near silence. Roy put the food on the table; Reginald dished it out. Sometimes, if the meal had been particularly good, he said so.
Afterwards, smoking a cigarette in the drawing room, he watched the Gulf War on the
Nine O'Clock News
, and then, as often as not, again on
News at Ten
and again on
Newsnight
. He was both thrilled and dismissive about the pictures of aerial bombardment. The technology enthralled him; but as far as the pilots were concerned, he said, there was nothing to it. ‘All done by numbers now - or robots. Where's the skill, what's left for your rear-gunner to do? Ruddy computers taken over.'

When Roy had finished the chores and made coffee, he would join him, and they would watch whatever programme Reggie had chosen. He liked old films best, and police serials:
LA Law
or
Inspector Morse
. Once or twice a week he went out for the evening. If he put his sheepskin jacket on, Roy knew he was ‘going for my constitutional', which meant down to the Broker's Arms. If he changed from his tweed jacket and corduroys into a suit, it meant he was seeing his lady-friend. Roy had spoken to her on the telephone once or twice, when she had asked peremptorily for ‘the Squadron Leader', and he knew her name was Liz something or other, but Reggie had revealed nothing else.

Occasionally, if they had spent an evening talking about the war and had felt, briefly, some sense of camaraderie, of shared experience, Reginald would invite Roy to come with him to the pub. It was half-timbered and horse-brassy, with aged wooden settles and wheelback chairs. Confident, loud-voiced young people stood around saying ‘Yah, yah,' and when he was there, Reggie said ‘Yah' as well, instead of his usual ‘Roger' or ‘Okey-doke' or ‘Yup'. The barman would pour a double Glenmorangie without being asked, and after a cursory glance at Roy, would listen to one of Reggie's flying stories. Roy and Reginald would buy each other a token round of drinks and as often as not go home separately. Roy knew that they might live under the same roof but the social divide was always and for ever unbridgeable. He did not mind; he was even relieved that it should be so. His best jacket and sharply pressed trousers looked all wrong among
the ribbed sweaters and kitten-soft jackets of the Grahams and Joyces in the Broker's Arms. Their bad language shocked him, though no one else seemed to mind, not even the girls.

If ever Reginald happened to come to the basement kitchen at eleven o'clock when Roy and Aggie were having their mid-morning coffee together, the position was reversed. Last time, Aggie had been telling some tale of hospital life. ‘What she's done she ain't admitting,' she concluded. ‘But she's knitting!' As Roy shook with laughter, he saw the Squadron Leader appear briefly in the doorway. He looked discomfited, apologized and withdrew. Aggie had called after him, ‘Come on, join in the fun!' But Reginald's feet on the stone steps did not even falter.

The house in Nevill Park now ran like clockwork, to Reginald's complete satisfaction. He was so delighted with the outcome of the vicar's plan that he invited him round for a drink just after Easter. The vicar was slightly perturbed to find that Roy served the drinks and did not join them. But Reggie's vigorous defence of American air support during the Gulf War provided such a beguiling subject for agreement that he soon forgot about Roy, who had slipped away down to the kitchen. Reginald had lost his neglected, dishevelled look and was as sleek as a seal. The vicar stifled his doubts; he congratulated Reggie on looking so well, and they toasted the success of General Schwarzkopf and the modern RAF.

From time to time Reginald wondered briefly if he ought to be paying Southgate. He was a good cook; meals were on time, plentiful, and tasty. Of late he had also acted as an efficient and tactful valet, looking after Reginald's suits, brushing and pressing them, and taking them to be dry-cleaned. What with him and the big black mammy laundering, ironing and folding away, his clothes were more efficiently organized than even Mary had managed. Then Reginald would reflect that Roy was living free, a permanent house guest, in surroundings he could not possibly have afforded for himself; that he contributed nothing towards the household and little enough for the car, beyond an occasional tank of petrol. Honours, he would conclude, were pretty even. His conscience was clear.

Reginald's pursuit of Liz was no longer motivated by practical necessity. It became tactical, a game of conquest marked by small erotic concessions on her side, little local advances that might be denied at their next encounter, or consolidated and even improved upon. She had not yet permitted him to make love to her, although he had once got as far as her
bedroom, where they had wrestled on the billowy satin bedspread, the bad boy painfully stiff and impatient. He was not importunate enough to force her, and not only because he doubted whether he had the physical strength and agility to overcome any real resistance. After seeing her for nearly six months he had, in the language of his adolescence, done ‘everything but'. The ‘but' impaled him with a young man's baffled desire. Love, he believed, had nothing to do with it; but Reginald, a few weeks after his seventy-second birthday, found himself obsessed with lust.

Despite a lifetime of trivial infidelities, he had never been a man of ungovernable or even urgent sexual appetite. He had taken his opportunities where he found them – be it a compliant typist or another man's inebriated wife after an evening of dinner or bridge. Just occasionally chance proximity on a commuter train had allowed his free hand to wander and, even more occasionally, it had encountered no defence. Then he and a stranger, their averted faces inches apart, would engage in furtive pleasure, all the more acute for taking place in public, marked only by a few seconds of quickened breathing. Those impassive, covert encounters had ended with his commuting days. Thereafter, Reginald visited Sabrina in London, because otherwise he might as well be dead. Cock gone, all gone.

It had been a very long time, however – probably not since his courtship of Mary – since Reginald had enjoyed the tantalizing suspense of an evening, let alone many evenings, in the company of a woman without knowing whether he would end up in her bed. Mary, of course, had kept her virginity until their wedding night. But Liz was a divorcée aged, what? – forty-five, forty-six, mid-forties, surely? Sometimes, displaying her body to its best advantage for his benefit, she would seem to signal that tonight was the night, and the big bad boy would be rigid with happy anticipation. At other times she would be so preoccupied and distant that he took an early leave of her. Then she might clasp him with quite unexpected passion and guide his head down to her breast, his hand to
her thigh. ‘Reggie,' she would breathe, ‘Oh Reggie, I mustn't. Oh darling, no!'

He did not at first acknowledge in so many words that these games of advance and retreat were campaign tactics, conducted with skill and deliberation on Liz's part; yet he knew it to be so, and thought none the worse of her for that. This was the sort of encounter that he understood. There could be no victory without opposition; no satisfaction in a too easy conquest. Women had always bartered their bodies in return for male protection; or their parents had done it for them – what else was the London Season for? He knew that Nanny, let alone his mother, would not have judged Liz to be quite a lady, but as far as he was concerned she was near enough; and when did he get a chance to meet
ladies
nowadays? Long-dead Nanny and Mamma would never know; and they certainly wouldn't have wanted him to be lonely.

Reginald, when finally invited to dinner in Liz's swagged and striped, tarted-up but cramped Georgian terraced house, knew very well that she was wagering her body against his status and worldly goods. The knowledge did nothing to diminish his lust or his enjoyment of the chase.

Liz found the game, not the man, erotic. She did not dislike Reginald – far from it; she often found herself moved by his gallantry and naïvety, the simple way he could be relied upon to play the rules. He had evidently been handsome once. But he had let himself go to seed; food and drink and cigarettes had taken their toll, so that, however smartly he dressed for her benefit, he wheezed and he smelled. His distended belly, coarsened features and stiffened limbs could hold no possible sexual attraction. It was her own body that excited her.

She enjoyed the narcissism of dressing for Reggie; selecting from her new spring stock an artfully cut evening suit which looked perfectly correct, even formal, yet revealed more of her breasts than – surely? – she could have intended. She enjoyed lying in a scented bath with pads soaked in eye lotion placed coolly against her closed lids, nail varnish drying on splayed fingers; enjoyed standing naked in front of her long mirror,
admiring the taut result of thrice-weekly aerobic classes while she blow-dried her hair to a soft halo. She enjoyed the skilful application of expensive cosmetics. Preparations completed, she enjoyed sallying forth – sometimes without a bra, sometimes with only the skimpiest silk pants – to meet this rich, spoiled, rubicund old man who could, if she played her cards right, solve all her financial problems. Above all, she enjoyed watching him reduced to childlike, pawing desire.

She took care to amuse him. She would pick up gossip and jokes like a magpie, cocking an ear to her customers' conversation for sparkling titbits that would make him chortle. She read the
Daily Mail
, watched the news on television. She did not bore him. Yet sometimes, as he held forth on Saddam Hussein or the prime minister or Japanese imports, Reginald would find himself thinking of the long, cold mornings when they waited for the mist to lift and the order to scramble: a dozen young men sitting around not knowing which of them, in a few hours' time, might be alive, and which dead or maimed or burned or limbless.

Sometimes Liz would remember her mother telling her the story of how, as a little girl, she had pointed skywards out of a train window and said ‘Spitfires!' – correctly, as chance would have it – which made the other passengers admire her precocity. Might he have been flying one of those? It was not impossible. They did not reveal these thoughts to one another. Liz could not because to do so would have given away her age, something she was careful to conceal from him; Reggie could not because they might have come under the category Nanny had called ‘moaning and groaning', which was taboo in conversation. So she sparkled and he chuckled, or he pontificated and she concurred, and this staved off silence well enough while he wondered what his chances might be later on, whether in car, or sofa, or bedroom.

Afterwards she would close her own front door behind her in a fever of excitement, sure that her goal of a trouble-free, luxurious life was perceptibly closer. She would go up to her bedroom, undo her jacket and skirt and let them slide softly
down her body, watching herself in the full-length mirror as her scented nakedness was gradually revealed. Satisfied, she would drop her underclothes fastidiously into the laundry basket and walk into the bathroom to cleanse her body of Reggie's bloodshot eyes and liver-spotted hands. Finally she would wipe the subtle colours and textures from her face until the pale lashless eyes and wrinkled mouth of an ageing woman looked back at her. Then she would wink at herself, for this image was a secret known only to Liz and her mirror. Usually she slept very well indeed.

Business in the shop was bad, and getting worse. Her newly rich customers came in not to buy, but to perch on the sofa and drink coffee, lamenting over husbands who were on edge with the fear of redundancy, or had already been made redundant. Some would complain at length, and bitterly, about dress allowances cut by half; holidays cancelled; weddings at which last year's outfit had to be worn again. The old rich kept their own counsel in rambling russet houses set behind high walls or hedges in quiet villages skirted by the main roads, but even they were staying at home. Liz offered free alterations, free delivery – even, if she was sufficiently desperate to secure a sale, a week's free trial of some sumptuously extravagant garment; and still the stock stayed on the hangers.