Blind Date (5 page)

OK, suit yourself. The older one wasn't bad, he conceded, sulking, but the mutual indifference was palpable. Besides, the older one had cleared a space on that little dance floor, throwing herself round with lots of arms, trying too hard, so that after a while no-one asked her any more and she didn't seem to care one way or another, like Mike, as if she was there simply to drink and nod her head at the music, ignoring everything else. Mike sort of led their team: she led hers by showing off more.

They were
all showing off, come to think of it: telling jokes and stories, every word bellowed, shrieking with laughter, waving arms, pushing back hair, moving their bodies, crossing and uncrossing their legs. Rob staggered to the Gents, slightly pissed, dizzy with drink and his own frustration. He looked longingly at the dance floor, searching for his three friends. They had broken the essential rule of cruising, which was stick together. Girls didn't make the same mistake.

And then when he came out, it was over. He must have been in there longer than he thought, resting his head against the mirror, not quite liking what he saw while hearing the rush of giggling footsteps past the door, the muted sounds of plotting in the adjacent Ladies' lav. His body ached, his head ached, and he wondered what he might have spent. Outside, a few bodies were dancing langorously now, all selections made, all rejections refined into this few, while those whose choices had been spoiled took the hint and left without parading their failure. Rob peered across at the girls' table. There was one woman remaining, the older one. Arranged in the dim light like a bunch of flowers, waiting for him. Anger swelled. This tribe of bitches had passed him from hand to hand, outflanked him and left him this. All that effort, to be left with the one he liked least.

“Look,” he said, slumping next to her, “I wouldn't take you home if you were the last person alive.” The words, once out of his mouth, were instantly regretted.

She was silent, her lips pursed, her hands clasped loosely over her knees. She had curly hair, smudged make-up, a plunging neckline and a short skirt over long legs which were, in this unkind light, faintly yellow. Her face was even older than he'd thought, almost motherly. She took one of his hands in both of hers and looked deep into his eyes. He felt paper scrunched into his palm as her lips moved nearer, mouthed a mocking kiss, then retreated. He felt something heavier land in his lap and, at the same time, recognized what was squeezed against his fingers. It was not her telephone number.

“Surprise
, surprise,” she murmured. “You ordered all that booze we didn't really want. And you dropped your wallet. Is your mother waiting up for you?”

He opened his palm, looked at the bill. The total swam before his eyes. He rubbed his sleeve against his face, smelling his own dried sweat.

“I can't pay this.”

She got up, gracefully, brushing the skant material of her skirt, hauling a large handbag over her shoulder.

“Don't worry about it, sunshine. You just did. Only we went halves. Saves you two weeks worth of washing up. I hope you've got enough for your bus fare tomorrow.”

He sat, paralysed with shame, looking first at the bill and then at her retreating back as she joined the remainder of her coven by the stairs. There was one, lonely fiver left in his wallet. By the time he reached the neon glare of the street beyond, he could see how she was the tallest, her arms round the shoulders of the others, all three of them helpless with laughter. From the darkness, Mike the Owl and big, untidy Joe emerged, waiting for him.

“Only a game,” Joe said, looking at Rob's flushed face. Only a game. A laugh. A night out. The kind of night out which always ended up costing a bomb and made Rob feel at the end that he was paying in advance for romance which never arrived.

He was sick of it.

A
nother
part of town; the same game. Patsy knew it was one she had been playing far too long. Looking for love. The hunt for the dream man, played by herself and Hazel and shy little Angela who had to be guarded as if she was blind. There's got to be a better way, Angela was thinking, remembering the features of the man in the bar, revolted by the memory of his closeness. Executive, he'd said: her mother would approve; she didn't, but could not manage to say so, either. The others had looked after her as usual, recognizing that she, the perfect, natural blonde, acted as a flame to draw the male moth which she did not know how to swat. She resented their protection as much as she hated her own innocence. She got silly with booze.

They paused in a doorway, helpless with nervous mirth, and for all that, it was still serious; another night's disappointment before they parted and went home, each one afraid that this was a pattern of life, repeated over and over like a tired joke told by someone who thought they were funny. They linked arms, walked to the taxi rank. The drizzle began. Angela's blonde hair, a beacon of gold in the indoor light, gleamed with moist drops and hung like damp wool.

“Bye girls.” “Byeee.” Only a game. Going home alone, again.

I
nside her own flat, Patsy thought of Elisabeth and the thought of Lizzie frightened her a bit, until she remembered that Lizzie had a family at least and there was nothing to worry about for Lizzie, whatever else happened. Patsy did not have family, only money and success, but money made her careless, details made her lazy. She could have got those curtains fixed, for instance: they had cost so much and still never quite closed at the top. Summer rain on the lower rooftops opposite played strange tricks with the street lamps; bars of light extended across the white ceiling like half of a star sneaking into the room. The fingers of the star waved like the flames of a fire: she could almost have read small print in such light. The club where they had been might pay dearly for just such an effect. Elisabeth, come home: you always looked after me and I look after them. Tell me that life is fun, instead of this paranoid search.

It was
not the transfiguration on the ceiling which woke her later, but cold, curling her knees to her chin. She had lain on top of the bed, still hot, unwilling to creep inside, dozed. Another cooler, August night, disturbed by dreams, and then,
that
sound had pushed a path right through the middle of her brain.
That
sound was the noise of a diesel engine, panting, three floors below. A taxi, like the one which had bought her home, that family of sound, not threatening in any way, but the more she came to concentrate, the more the sound persisted, became mixed with the hint of footsteps, then a door closing. She straightened stiff legs and contemplated getting off the bed and into it, postponing the effort which would make her colder for the minute, and still the diesel throb persisted until it was fearful.

Patsy shrugged into her dressing gown, heavy silk, pale lavender and instant warmth, and padded to the living room for a better view. Opposite her attic-level apartment there was a block of purpose-built flats, snug enough dwellings with steps sweeping up to the front, unsuitable for some of the elderly residents who clutched the iron railing and took five minutes to get down. She had watched them. An ambulance stood with the doors open at the back, the interior of it glowing calmly, the engine throbbing warmth, the inside almost inviting, like a secret room. Moving up the steps from the basement area, two uniformed men carried a stretcher. The street light shone down on the hump filling it, hidden under a green blanket. Patsy could not see a head, only the form itself, aged into shapelessness, the prominent point either bosom or belly; a scrap of hair protruding from the cover.

The men
were gentle and respectful, with a slight edge of carelessness, a nonchalance in their movements as the stretcher bumped against a lamppost. There was no urgency in the task; no rushing to close doors, present oxygen, scream away into the night. There was no fussing around the mound beneath the blanket, no real need to keep it warm. One of the men stood in the road and lit a cigarette.

A couple appeared, full of neighbourly concern. The woman signed a form and shook her head: then they all hung about in the street while the ambulanceman finished his smoke, their breath visible against the drizzle, talking without hurry, making the kind of chat which was simply the receiving and imparting of information, accompanied by nodding. Finally, the doors closed on the green blanket, to which Patsy's eyes had strayed, again and again.
That
diesel note changed from throb to roar. The neighbouring couple went back down the steps together, pulling their coats around themselves. Whom should they inform, what could wait until morning and what should they do with the cat?

I have no next of kin, Patsy told herself. I am entirely free to die like that.

She would die alone like that; in the middle of the city, like this, and wait for someone to find her, subject only to the kindness of neighbours. She could have diamonds, a girl's best friend, and still die like that.

She hugged herself.

I've gotta find myself a man.

E
lisabeth
had always loved the story of how her mother and father had come to meet. There he had been, standing in his own jeweller's shop, a shy man, although obstinate in his way, surveying all he owned and rearranging the display, when he had seen her outside with her nose pressed against the window. Not only Diana, with her long, blonde hair, but also the tiny child she was holding in her arms. She was pointing out the rings one by one to the baby who waved fat fingers and blew bubbles at the display of wealth.

Dorian Kennedy had been a romantic; not the type of romantic who was in tune with the chanting for peace and free love principles of the younger of his generation, but the introverted awkward kind, growing into a bachelor, preternaturally old in his thirties and wearing exactly the same clothes as his father. Until he saw outside his window two such pieces of perfection, they made his jewellery fade by comparison. So, he had invited them in, discovered a young mother, although older than she looked, alone in the world, steeling herself to sell the ring which was the only valuable souvenir she had left from the father of the child. It was a scenario so fitting Dorian's dream, he could not believe anything as heaven sent. The rest, as they say, was history.

Could
that really happen? Elisabeth had asked. Could her mother's mother really have abandoned a beautiful daughter for the single crime of producing a bastard child? Yes, if she was old herself, sick with disappointment, and it was all in the dark ages of the nineteen-sixties, she could, she did.

Elisabeth had so often wished she had not been that child by the window. She wished she had been Emma, the one who had brought such unqualified delight, whereas she had not. But we wanted you, her father had said, you cannot imagine how much we wanted to love you: you are a pearl beyond price, a diamond. He stuttered when he spoke thus, always giving the impression he would take back his own, scrambled words as soon as they were out of his mouth. I waited a long time for you, he had said; and the subtext of this, to Elisabeth's mind, was, and look at what we got.

Not that Dad came to mind very often now, or at all. In fact he might barely have tripped across her daydreams, were it not for all these idle hours of recuperation when anything and everything flooded in to fill the gap and distract her from the more recent past. After all, he had been inconsiderate enough to die just before he could see her reach twenty-one. A middle-aged fool to take up sailing so late, desperate to get out of the house and remove his tired eyes from the contemplation of cheap engagement rings, watch batteries and all the things he was forced to sell. He was also a clumsy man when not handling a pair of tweezers or looking into a spectroscope. Inept with his borrowed dinghy, he came home one day, sick and shivery after he had capsized, took to his bed and never got up.

Perhaps
he was like me, Elisabeth thought now. A person who wilfully persisted at something he could not do and was then irreconciliable in defeat. All the same, it seemed an odd motive for dying.

Bronchial pneumonia in a small, thin man who had always resembled the runt of the litter, was a better excuse.

Something had reminded her of all this ancient history. Perhaps it was the voices downstairs, caught in the breeze from the far end of the garden where Steven and her mother sat on the bench, talking. She remembered Mother sitting there, first with the doctor and then, later, with Mrs. Smythe, all those years since. Or was that all in her imagination? And then there was that other memory of low-voiced, bitter rows, coming from another room making her feel as she did now, full of the longing to leave.

Her father had had so few passions in his life. Look at how they shine, he would say in wonder, never referring to the stars. Look at the fire, child; have you ever seen anything like that? He kept his heart locked inside a sapphire, adored all precious stones, but only revered the hardest: rubies, sapphires and diamonds. She was falling asleep, thinking how it was that lovely Emma had delighted in jewellery, whereas she had loved only the stones. She did not want to own them, or wonder what her father had done with them, but she loved and revered them, all the same. Those two outside, sitting with their coffee, talking about her, never looked at the stars either. Their feet were firmly planted on the ground.

“S
he's just
like her father,” Diana was saying to her son-in-law. “Mean, secretive and jealous. Also prone to excess. I'm sure she could have told us more about how the trial failed. She could have found out more than we were told. But she wouldn't.” She paused. Irritation was exhausting. Positive comments were better for the soul. “At least this ghastly accident has stopped her drinking,” she added.

“Without getting hooked on anything else, hmm? Look, Mother, you're hardly being fair. Secretive, yes. Difficult, yes, yes, yes. But mean? Never. Not Lizzie. We had our explanation, didn't we? It's not enough, but it's something.”