*
‘What do we
know
about Mrs P?’ I said next afternoon, laying my book down.
Across the table, Bel was crimping her eyelashes with some sort of metal contraption. ‘Hmm?’ she said.
‘I mean, she’s been here with us for – what, two years? Three? And yet we don’t
truly
know what makes her tick.’
‘You’re not going off on one of your paranoid delusions,’ she said, inserting the top lashes of one eye between two steel prongs.
‘No,’ I said impatiently. ‘I just think it
odd
that someone should live in one’s house for so long and remain a veritable stranger, albeit a cherished and well-paid stranger. Do we – are we giving her enough attention? Should we be, you know, talking to her, and so forth?’
‘What’s brought this on?’ Bel said curiously.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘But everybody needs love, though.’
She cackled unflatteringly. ‘Maybe you should have a bed-in?’
‘Well, haven’t you found her a little… unbalanced lately? Take the business with the kidney beans. She keeps making these bizarre gestures of atonement. Yesterday she bought me
pants
.’
‘I don’t think there’s anything unbalanced about her wanting to make it up to you, Charles, except that it was entirely your fault, of course –’
‘Yes, well, you didn’t see the pants. Anyway, it’s hardly appropriate, is it, buying underwear for one’s employer – unless…’ A terrible thought struck me. ‘Good God, Bel, you don’t think she’s developed some sort of obsession with me? I mean, she’s not trying to seduce me, is she?’
‘I’d say she probably knows all it takes is a half-bottle of Jameson and a Wonderbra…’
‘I’m being serious. There’s other things. The other night – at a quite ungodly hour – I caught her making me breakfast. I can’t fault her dedication, obviously, but she was preparing what looked like a full pheasant. Isn’t that a little strange?’
She raised her eyebrows thoughtfully. ‘Not really. Not for you. Not when you remember your lobster-breakfast phase, and your foie-gras phase, and that
atrocious
Moroccan concoction –’
‘Yes, yes… But lately I’ve been quite frugal. I take just a croissant and the cricket pages.’
‘Yes, but only because
lately
you’ve been hungover every morning – do wish you’d curb your drinking, Charles, have you seen the wine cellar? Of course you have, silly question. But it looks like it’s catering for a whole shedful of rakes, not just you.’
‘Well, better a rake than a hoe, as I always say. That’s quite enough, anyway. Kindly return to your maquillage.’
She made a face and began to dab her nose with a powder-puff. Bel always took great care with her appearance: most of her clothes came from charity shops, but her look – penniless Parisienne student circa 1968 – was artfully constructed. I wondered how Frank prepared for a night out. One suspected that once he had hidden the bolts in his neck he was satisfied.
‘I was talking about Mrs P. I simply feel we ought to make more of an effort. She’s getting on and she needs our support. Polite inquiries, suchlike. I daresay she’s got a few rum stories from that place she’s from, what is it, Bosnia?’
‘I daresay.’
‘What’s it like, Bosnia? Do you know anything about it?’
‘For heaven’s sake, Charles, it was only on the news for about three solid years –’
‘Well, which one is it? Is it the one with the chaps with those funny hats?’
‘I can’t believe you. Don’t you know anything about current affairs?’
‘Hardly my cup of tea.’
‘Oh,
genocide
isn’t your cup of tea, is it?’ she said sarcastically, pulling a miniature pencil over her eyebrows. ‘One wonders whose cup of tea it is.’
‘Well, I don’t recall
you
doing much about it,’ I retorted. ‘I don’t recall
you
… collecting bottle-tops, or, or writing stern letters to the UN.’
‘Collecting bottle-tops,’ she said, reaching for an emery board. ‘The great humanitarian. That’s priceless.’
‘Well, it seems to me,’ I objected, ‘that the only reason you know about these things is to lord it over me. In fact, it seems to me that that’s the only reason anyone knows about these things, so they can act superior and have heated discussions in pubs and make everyone else feel guilty for not watching more television.’
‘You go and talk to Mrs P then,’ Bel scowled, ‘and I’m sure she’ll be delighted to share in your informed opinions. Maybe you can swap traditional recipes, you can give her kidney beans à la Charles –’
‘So where’s Frank bringing you tonight, then?’ I said, as the gloves appeared to be off. ‘Badger-baiting? Mud-wrestling? Are you going to drink cans in a field?’
‘The pact!’ she cried, outraged. ‘The pact!’
‘
Habeas corpus
,’ I countered. ‘The pact isn’t sealed till you fulfil your half.’
‘I called her,’ she protested. ‘She gave me her work number and said she would be delighted to hear from you any time.’
‘Well,
that’s
no use!’ thumping my hands on the table. ‘You know I hate using the phone.’ In fact, I abhorred all modern gadgetry –
gadgets
, even the word had an ignoble ring to it. ‘Couldn’t you call her back and tell her to come over here?’
‘What are you, an invalid? I’m not your lackey.’
Maybe Mrs P would call her – but no! The pact had not been honoured, and I was going to make a stand. ‘The pact has not been honoured,’ I told her, ‘and until it is, we remain in a state of war.’
‘War?’
‘So I must insist on joining you tonight as chaperone.’
‘Charles,’ she warned, glaring at me through her black-frosted eyelashes.
‘I insist.’
‘Every day you plumb new depths, do you know that?’
‘Be that as it may,’ I replied peaceably. ‘So where are we going?’
*
‘Go on, Ask Me Hole, you useless fucker!’ Frank was shouting abuse at the top of his voice, between dips into a bag of coagulated chips. ‘Go on, you shit-bag, run, for fuck’s sake!’
I chuckled to myself. My hound, Jasper, had turned out to be a superb brute, and had left Ask Me Hole and the pack trailing in his wake. Bel’s choice, meanwhile, the insipidly named Piece of Lightning, seemed to have given up the ghost entirely.
Ascot it wasn’t, but the proprietors of the dog-track had made a brave effort to lift it above its inherent squalor. There was a well-lit bar with a long glass window from which one could look down on the action; mixed in with the luckless reprobates gambling away their welfare were several groups of normal people. Frank, however, had eschewed the bar as for ‘ponces’, and dragged us out to shiver in the stands with red-eyed, desperate types as whippet-thin as the dogs to whom they had entrusted their fortunes. None of them was quite as terrifying as Frank himself, though, and I was oddly comforted by his presence. They all seemed to know him, anyway: throughout the races a litany of Mickers, Antos and Farrellers approached to pay their respects – ‘All right, Francy, how’s your wobbly bits?’ they would say, or ‘Howya Frankie, get up the yard ya bollocks.’
He seemed to have grown even larger in the open air; beside him Bel looked small and pinched, her eyes glowing sparely like cold blue moons. I don’t know if she was still sulking because I’d insisted on coming along, although Frank didn’t seem to mind, or if she was ashamed of me seeing him in his natural milieu, or if it was something else entirely, but she’d hardly spoken two words all night: she kept her face buried deep in her muffler, and her eyes locked on the track. After asking her twice if she was all right, and offering her a chip, Frank had left her to her silence. We’d discovered I had a hitherto untapped gift for picking winners, and I had risen several notches in his estimation.
‘Who’d you fancy for the next one?’ he said respectfully, ‘Up the Duff or Gordon’s Couscous?’
‘Neither,’ I replied. ‘Look at them there in their pens. These are dogs whose spirits have been snuffed out. They might be fast, but neither of them has the self-belief to actually win. Take a look at Meet the Wife, on the other hand. Note the calm gait, the proud, lofty bearing. A regal dog. That’s where I’d put my money. If you ask me, he’s already won it.’
‘Right – here, Bel, you’ll have a flutter, won’t you?’
‘I don’t have any money,’ came the icy response.
‘I’ll spot you, come on.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said flatly, not looking up.
‘Ah, go on, look, I’ll put a bet on for you. Meet the Wife is Charlie’s tip, I’ll put a fiver on him –’
‘No!’ she exclaimed, suddenly animated. ‘I don’t want Charles’s tip.’ She unfolded her track sheet and studied it, white-fingered in the frosty light of the floods. ‘I want to bet on this one. Number Four.’
‘An Evening of Long Goodbyes,’ Frank read over her shoulder. ‘I dunno, what d’you think, Charlie?’
‘Well,’ I said even-handedly, ‘they’re nice odds if he’s any good at all – Number Four, where is he anyway?’
We scanned the track. The trainers had brought the dogs out and were leading them up and down the grassy area in the middle; sleek coats gleamed, pink tongues quivered athletically as they went through their paces. ‘I don’t see Number Four though – oh.’
Number Four, wearing an unflattering chartreuse jacket, was sitting alone on the chewed-up grass, despondently licking his testicles. ‘Hmm, I don’t know, Bel…’
‘That’s the one I’m betting on,’ Bel said adamantly.
‘Would you not listen to Charlie, Bel, he always wins.’
‘You’re here with me, not Charles, and anyway I thought you were going to
spot
me, why are you so concerned who I bet on?’ Her jaw thrust out palely against the first flecks of rain blowing down and backward from the roof of the stand.
‘It’s just it has such a stupid name…’
‘They all have stupid names, Charles.’
A barrage of noise from the loudspeaker signalled that the race would be commencing shortly. The dogs were locked into their traps.
‘Yes, but names are important, you have to pay attention to them.’ I said this with a curious certainty: for here at the dog-track, I was finding my senses awakening to the resonances of seemingly superficial things, the intricate spectral machinery of Luck…
‘Here youse, the race is startin,’ Frank said. ‘I’ll put a fiver on him anyway, all right?’
‘I don’t think it
is
a stupid name,’ Bel said, ignoring him. ‘I think it’s romantic.’
‘It’s a
dog
, that’s why it’s stupid. I mean, if it was a song or a book or something, that’d be different, but who on earth names their dog An Evening of Long Goodbyes?’
‘Ponces,’ Frank chipped in. ‘You get some posh benders down here fancyin themselves as trainers, as a hobby, like, prob’ly cos they can’t afford a horse. Their dogs are always crap.’
‘Exactly. There’s a time and a place, Bel. Not everything can be theatre –’
‘Why not?’ she said, colouring. ‘Anyway, there’s more to it than winning.’
‘Depends who’s paying for it,’ I returned.
Frank sighed and shrugged and went off to the plate-glass hatch to place the bets – perhaps with a forlorn glance over to the far side of the stand, where his down-at-heel pals merrily drank their cans – leaving us to stare furiously into the thickening sheets of rain, starting as the gun went off and the electric rabbit began another lonely circuit…
After Meet the Wife’s storming victory, Frank took us to a local inn to celebrate. Bel’s mood improved once we had left the track. None of us mentioned An Evening of Long Goodbyes, whose race had been so catastrophic that, by the end, neither Frank nor I could summon the will to gloat. He had begun badly, getting his head stuck in the gate and having to be extricated by the stewards, and continued with a series of humiliating and distinctly uncanine trips and stumbles; disgracing himself beyond redemption in the third lap, when his muzzle came off and, to the boos of the crowd, he abandoned the race to leap over the hoardings and snatch a hot-dog from the hand of a small boy.
The pub was seedy and glum and my white wine arrived in a diminutive bottle with a screw-off lid. My sister joined Frank in a conciliatory Guinness, and as they clinked glasses I looked about at my fellow drinkers. Was I the only one in evening wear? These chaps were a uniformly rough-looking lot, and many of them, I realized, were directing unfriendly stares at me.
‘Quite an ambience, this place,’ I laughed nervously.
‘We come here a good bit,’ Frank told me, ‘don’t we, Bel?’
‘That’s right,’ Bel looking me straight in the eye. ‘It’s our favourite pub.’
I sighed inwardly; I came up against this kind of attitude quite often in my dealings with girls in general, and Bel in particular. They love to flirt with transgression: give them a lout who breaks the odd window and they will pull each other’s hair out for him – without ever diluting or moderating their own careful delicacy, needless to say. Sometimes Bel reminded me of an E M Forster heroine, traipsing about the jungle in a ballgown, with a full set of china and embroidering work for the evenings. What was she looking for, I wondered, in her lonely dallyings outside her own realm; while keeping that same realm locked tightly up inside her.
‘Well, I like it here too,’ I said to annoy her. ‘We should do this more often. I like the company of the working man. Good, honest folk, enjoying their time for reflection after a hard week in the jar factory.’
‘You always get a deadly scrap in here,’ Frank said. ‘Last week me and me mate, right, saw these two scumbags we know, and we go up to them, straight in with the dujj, and bop! I loaf one of them and then I see his mate’s got me mate on the ground and he’s stampin on his head, so I grab this bottle, and
smash
, right between the fuckin eyes. The both of them fuckin legged it.’
I absorbed this silently.
‘I was just laughin,’ Frank added.
‘Aha,’ I said.
‘That’s one of the cunts there,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘See that cunt sittin at the bar? The poxy little fuck? That’s one of the cunts we done.’
The cunt in question was a short man with a crew-cut and a long fresh scar down his jaw. As Frank spoke he turned his head slowly in our direction. An interchange of baleful stares ensued. Caught in the middle, I rubbed my nose and coughed and was beginning to hyperventilate when, mercifully, the cunt bowed his head. Frank snorted victoriously. Bel let out a worried coo.