LITMIR.BIZ

       January 15th

      The tickets cost £50 each, including dinner, and the party took place in a room that looked and smelled a bit like my old school houseroom: the same mismatched, pastelcoloured walls, scuffed around the edges, and a pervasive stench of stale air, instant coffee and saliva. Actually it was the old town hall. One of the mothers, kind and welcoming as ever, had made enormous efforts to squeeze us onto her table and so I sat, adding to the festive odour, I suspect, with my very own hint of mothballs. I was underdressed in a strange pink rayon skirt and shirt ensemble, which has languished at the back of numerous wardrobes and storage boxes since I got it nearly twelve years ago. I have often wondered what possessed me to buy it in the first place—or why I ever insisted on keeping it. At least now I know that I’ll never wear it again.

      Fin and I set off for the party full of hope and good will. Fin caught an early train down and we arrived in perfect time. There was no milling about before dinner, which was good, really, since we neither of us had anyone to mill with. We were led straight away to our designated table. And things went pretty much downhill from there.

      On either side of me sat a couple of men whose faces began to merge as the evening wore on. Both had moved with their families down from London (Chiswick) within the last ten years.

      One worked in the City. He spent the week in a small flat in Hammersmith, and the weekend at home, catching up on some ‘much-needed kip’, and—presumably—having his shirts laundered for him by his wife.

      ‘We find it works very well,’ he said to me. ‘It suits us. The kids are settled. We love the school. We love the lifestyle…I can really get my head down during the week. Which is super. And of course Katie’s got her hands full with the kids!’

      He asked me what my husband did for a living.

      He had sandy-coloured hair and sandy eyelashes, a heavy metallic watch with sandy hairs encroaching, and an unyielding, incurious, slightly pudgy face. As, I’m pretty sure, did the man on the other side. But memory can play funny tricks. It’s been a couple of days since I wrenched myself from their company, and I must admit I’m having some difficulty now distinguishing between the two.

      The other man (I think) did not spend all week in London. On the contrary, he came down from his City job on Thursday nights, and spent Fridays working from home.

      ‘We find it works very well,’ he said to me. ‘It suits us. The kids are settled. We love the school. We love the lifestyle…I can really get my head down during the week. Which is super. And of course Sarah’s got her hands full with the kids!’

      He asked me what my husband did for a living, and his goldfish eyes glazed over before I had time to reply.

      I’ve never been very good at small talk. The truth is by the middle of the main course I had pretty much given up trying. One or other of the Sandy Men, in flirtatious mode, uttered a sentence which ended with the words ‘ladies and all things technical!’ and that was when I officially retired. The supreme pointlessness of our attempting to communicate any further became altogether overwhelming. My cheeks had lapsed into paralysis. My tongue had turned to lead. My heart was filled with resentment and boredom and I was thoroughly depressed. I had almost forgotten—if I’d ever even been aware—that men so unreconstructed actually existed. So I sat back and let them burble across me until coffee was served. They talked about Mercedes cars—their own and other people’s—for the rest of the night.

      At some point I looked across the table at Finley. He was faring better than I was, which wasn’t really saying much. Some jolly old bird, squeezed into a strapless ball dress she should have chucked out back in 1983, was leaning across the table towards him, pressing her discodusted boobs together while he held out a light for her cigarette. She was having the time of her life, poor girl, oblivious to the scatter-gun approach of Fin’s delightfulness, and glowing beneath his fantastic care. As he held out the flame she rested one of her hands on his arm. Her nails were freshly painted for the ball, I noted: dark plum, just like Uma Thurman’s in Pulp Fiction, all those years ago. I caught F’s eye. Noticed, beneath all the layers of delightfulness, an inescapable gleam of desperation there. It cheered me up enormously.

      We danced after that, Fin and I. To a deafeningly loud and intermittently off-key rendition of FYC’s ‘She Drives Me Crazy’. And—it was kind of lovely. London seemed a long, long way away.