Angel Cake (3 page)

Involuntarily, she drew her dressing-gown closer across her collapsed breasts, as though someone were still out there, looking in at her. She patted her hair with her free hand and stared searchingly at the door, struggling with her dulled memory. Who on earth could it have been? And what a nerve! She stood deliberately a little straighter, as if to put the intruder in his place. How many times had he rung? And on a Sunday, at that hour too. She turned her back on the door with exaggerated purposefulness as if to show him that, whatever his business, he was not wanted here.

The memory of the shadow followed her into the kitchen, she filled the kettle at the stiff tap and, on her third attempt, she lit the gas. What month was it, she suddenly thought? Surely too early for ‘Penny for the Guy’? She went into the
scullery where, she remembered, there was a calendar, but it turned out to be from two years previously, and displaying a midsummer page of a glorious flowery meadow which she had kept up because the picture cheered her. Drat it, she knew it was October and it didn’t help her identify her caller at all.

All the time she was preparing her breakfast, all the time she sat at the kitchen table eating it – for even tea and a slice of bread and margarine can be a business with dentures – the mystery worried her. It returned every time the sight of the front door or something else reminded her of it. And, as the morning progressed and no other event occurred to upstage it, it began to plague her.

As if an ominous presence had been positioned at the front door to snoop on her, Alicia began to act that Monday morning as if she had an audience. She was careful not to dab at her dripping nose with the back of her hand, nor to pick up breadcrumbs from her plate with the moistened tip of her finger. She felt that she no longer had her house to herself, although she scolded herself several times for being ridiculous. She wished that there were someone she could tell about the mystery, and she calculated when she would next have someone in the house whom she could talk to. Monday; that meant there were still two whole days before her home-help came on Wednesday, and her home-help was not a person in whom she would wish to confide anyway. The more she resolutely avoided paying attention to the footsteps on the pavement outside, the louder they resounded. The more she kept her face averted from the front door as she went through the hall, the brighter the stained-glass flowers blossomed.

Once, towards lunchtime, when she had her ears strained for the lady from the Meals on Wheels, a new thought nearly formed in her head, to the effect that it was nonsensical that here she was, so petrified because someone had come and rung her bell, and at the same time she was desperate because she had no one to tell about it. The thought nearly formed but, requiring greater mental agility than drugged Alicia could manage, it did not.

I was the first one at the main entrance of the museum, of course. Because Rob wasn’t there yet – anyway, who knew if he would turn up at all? – I walked round the museum in the windy dusk. It takes ten minutes to walk right round the buildings. Gusts of wind untidied my carefully combed hair and, coming at sharp angles, brought tears to my eyes. I felt sorry for myself in advance because I thought Rob was not going to be there.

By the time I got back to the front entrance again, it was nearly a quarter-past six and it must have been quite clear to Rob – who was by then standing on the steps and looking out for me – what I had done, since I was coming from such an odd direction and so windblown.

He bounded down the steps and said jokingly, ‘Hi, I thought maybe you’d stood me up.’ The sort of joke which can easily be made by someone who has thought nothing of the sort.

I smiled rather forcedly and said unconvincingly, ‘Sorry, I had to deliver a letter.’

Rob never lies.

He did not seem to read any special significance into this beginning. One of the first things I noticed about him was that he goes on living fluently in the present after incidents and comments on which I would get snagged. At night I would replay that first exchange, and others, dubbing my character with brighter better lines. But Rob had already dismissed my botched beginning and with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders slightly hunched against October, he was looking around keenly and he said, ‘Well, you know this part of town. Where’s somewhere decent we can go for a drink?’

I had expected him to take that initiative. Over the preceding days, all my preparations had centred on conversation and clothes and I was thrown into a panic by the responsibility of the choice. The only place I could think of was the little mews pub where all the museum people go. I suggested it hastily and Rob, who had never been there, said, ‘Fine. Why not?’ It is crowded and stiflingly chintzy; that was why not. It would be full of people from the museum too, who would take note and ask me questions in the
morning. But by the time I realized all this, we were already on our way there and of course it would have made an even worse impression to change my mind.

Rob was forbearing. He did not burst out, ‘My God, don’t you know anywhere better than this dump?’ He pushed his way to part of a bench seat for us and he capably fetched our drinks. He sat down next to me, managing by the way he spread himself, to cut out the doleful elderly drinker who shared our seat. He placed his cigarettes beside his beer mug and then he concentrated on me. But I sat in a state of miserable embarrassment, sure that my poor choice had spoilt my chances. Rob could not fail to equate the pink pub trimmings with my taste, the staid surroundings with me. I was too absorbed in my own disappointment to pay attention to him.

I had envisaged dinner. I had thought that, after the drink, Rob would suavely suggest that we went on somewhere smart to eat and, when he did not, of course I decided that I had fallen at the first hurdle. I never noticed that he liked me, that he, so capable, found my muddle and embarrassment endearing and that, in the laborious course of our conversation, I had managed to talk ‘fascinatingly’ about an exhibition of the first mechanical toys and capture his interest.

I was completely crushed when, at about eight o’clock, he said, ‘Look, you’ll have to excuse me, I’m afraid, but I’ve got to meet a guy in Fulham at half-past eight. Which way are you going?’ I was convinced then that I had been a failure and, for days afterwards, I sulked over the bungled opportunity.

I didn’t believe Rob’s casual, ‘I’ll be in touch,’ at the Tube and when, about a week later, he rang me at the museum and asked if I was free for dinner one night that week, I was quite angry with him for having misled me.

We went to his friends Jean and Eddy last night. Although they are all in their mid-thirties, hardly any of Rob’s friends are married. Jean and Eddy aren’t married either, but they have a baby. Their baby is called Adam Pluto and all the group of friends dote on him. He is a self-assured, solid baby, who accepts their spoiling with amiable indifference.
If he were my baby, I would wash him more. Jean and Eddy give him, in smaller quantities, whatever they are having to eat themselves, and when you bend down to greet him, sometimes you are struck by a waft of pungent garlic breath which seems monstrous coming from such a small pink face. They feed him curry and Chinese take-away too, even though Jean once told us over dinner that it makes his nappies terrible. But when I said to her, was she really sure that babies ought to eat things like that, she answered, why on earth not? That was what they ate in less developed societies and all those special baby foods you saw in the supermarket were nothing but a great marketing ploy.

On our way home that night, Rob took me up on what I had said to Jean. ‘You don’t really believe in all that ready-processed crap, do you, Alison? You don’t think babies should be cellophane-wrapped and sanitized and only introduced to life in gentle stages?’ And quickly and dishonestly I had said no, no.

That was one of the few occasions when I stuck my neck out and challenged their group thinking. They are all taking Adam Pluto’s upbringing very seriously. He is their first prototype baby and they want to do everything right by him. I was not yet on the scene when Adam was born, but I shouldn’t be surprised if Jean’s labour was jointly planned and discussed at the dinner table in just the same way.

Last night’s dinner was in honour of Adam in a way too. Jean and Eddy recently started their own small publishing company and one of their first books is an ‘alternative baby book’, featuring their baby in all the photographs. The official publication date is in ten days’ time, but yesterday being Adam Pluto’s second birthday, they had decided to invite their close friends round for a private pre-publication launch.

Eddy greeted us at the front door, wearing a cardboard badge which read, ‘Adam Pluto’s PRO’.

‘Sick,’ Rob said to him, handing over our bottle of wine. ‘Commercial exploitation of an infant. Sick!’

‘Hi, Rob. Hi, Alison,’ Eddy answered, beaming. ‘Come on in. Meet the mega-star.’

Adam was in the middle of a bad cold and, I thought,
should not have been kept up for the party. He was propped, bleary-eyed and wheezing, in a mound of bean bags with a montage of pictures from the book on the wall high above his head. Around him, Eddy and Jean’s friends stood in a vivacious circle, holding their drinks and cracking jokes about Adam’s debut in the media.

‘Rob!’

‘Rob!’

‘Rob!’ everyone said as we came in. Even among his friends – I nearly said his equals – Rob makes an entrance. I come into their parties in his wake, cravenly hoping to be overlooked.

A thin red-haired woman called Madeleine came out of the circle and lunged at him. ‘Rob, you bastard,’ she said. ‘You never sent me those tapes you promised.’

Rob struck his forehead and then clung on to her in apology.

‘Lousy selfish pig,’ she cooed. ‘I know you don’t mean a word you say.’ She generously included me in the exchange by repeating, ‘He’s a mean selfish sod, isn’t he?’

I said, ‘What are they? I’ll try and make sure he remembers them.’ But that was quite the wrong thing to say of course, because Madeleine burst into a mocking exclamation of, ‘Oh, tut-tut, tut
-tut!
’ and waggled her forefinger at Rob with teasing severity. ‘Make sure you do what the little woman tells you.’ She turned away to answer someone who had called out to her and Rob said to me apologetically, ‘Pissed already.’

‘Rob!’ Jean said behind us. ‘Alison. What can I get you to drink?’

Since our disagreement over the baby food and another difference of opinion about militaristic toys, Jean has made little effort to hide her disapproval of me, which is a pity because, before that, she was the one with whom I got on best, I thought. She is very bustling of course and no nonsense – being half a publishing company and organizing all the things she does for women. But despite her short manner and her air of self-sufficiency, I thought that underneath she must have some secret fondness for shameful old-fashioned aspirations, to have set up such a relatively
traditional household and to have had a baby. I thought she liked me because, before the business over the baby food, she used to make a point of singling me out for conversation, not letting me get by as an appendage of Rob’s, but perhaps it was only as a point of principle because I am a woman.

Now when she speaks to me she uses manners, which she – they all – dispense with when they talk to each other.

‘How are things at the museum, Alison?’

‘Fine, thanks, Jean, fine.’

‘Preparations for your big exhibition coming along OK?’

‘Yes. It’s awfully hard work though.’

‘I bet, I bet.’

‘It’s a lovely book, Jean.’

‘Oh, thank you very much, Alison.’

Poor Adam rescued me by choking on a sneeze. Jean had to pick him up and comfort him, although someone said that he was old enough to learn to suffer and if Jean always picked him up when he had a problem, he would not know how to cope in later life.

Rob told me once that, when they were younger, they had all of them been in love with Jean at some time. It is true that she is serenely fleshy and has a Renoir’s peachy skin, but I was still surprised when he told me. Jean behaves as if she would laugh out of countenance anyone who declared his feelings for her. I was even more surprised when Rob added, grinning, that they had all of them slept with her too. How can she bear to have them all together at her parties? What surprised me most though was Rob’s conclusion: ‘I suppose that’s why we’re all so dotty about Adam. We feel that we
all
fathered him. OK, it was Eddy in the event, but it could just as easily have been Andy or Clive or me.’

I can’t help remembering this every time I see Jean, the fleshy shared figurehead of the group. Last night, I looked around the party and I imagined various of the men there knowingly eyeing Eddy and Jean and violating their intimacy with their knowledge. For the first time, it occurred to me that Eddy was probably the one to be pitied. He did seem small and insignificant and almost arbitrarily chosen out of
the crowd, and baby Adam the sticky fruit of a collective fantasy.

Jean and Eddy had laid out dinner on the kitchen table. People helped themselves and ate wherever they were comfortable. Rob had gone off to talk to a man who might be going to produce a drama workshop version of his last play and I found myself sitting on the floor beside Andy Ellis who is, I suppose, Rob’s best friend, although the term ‘best friend’ is far too sentimental for the way they vigorously run each other down. Physically, Andy is the opposite of Rob: thin and blond and jittery. Rob call him a self-destructive nutcase. He calls Rob a compromised materialist. They have been friends since university.

Andy said, ‘Mm, Jean’s a really good cook, isn’t she?’

I thought of how things might have been when it was his turn to have Jean. I agreed: ‘Tremendous! I wish I could make ratatouille like this.’

I observed carefully what Jean and Eddy had done and what dishes they had cooked, to see if I could do likewise in my turn. I was conscious that since I came to live with Rob nearly nine months ago, we have not given any parties. I can think of a number of explanations for this and one or two of them are worrying. At the end of November, though, it is Rob’s thirty-fifth birthday and I am determined to overcome my nerves and hold a birthday party for him.