Death of a Salesperson (23 page)

‘Come on in,' called Judith, genially hectoring. ‘We're discussing Cruise missiles.'

‘Solving the world's problems,' said Jonathan.

‘No, really,' said Davina, rather attractively shy, some of them thought, ‘I don't think I have very much to say about Cruise missiles. I just wanted a 50p. Mike doesn't seem to have one.'

Several eyes flickered at that. Mike already!

‘Sit down, sit down,' said Mike, gesturing to the floor with his big, pullovered arm. ‘Say your say or hold your peace, but join the mob. We're going to have chilli or something eventually.'

‘Oh, are we?' said Cybella, and disappeared into the kitchen.

‘What I don't like about the peace campaign,' said Gabriel, starting up the discussion again, ‘is the way it isolates just that one aspect, at the expense of a holistic approach. Basically, getting rid of nuclear weapons is only part of the larger struggle to recreate a sane environment and a sane living-style.'

So Davina got a fair taste, that evening, of the Originals' concerns. She noted how Pam took Judith's hand to try to stop her losing her cool. She saw Jonathan imitating Judith behind her back, and her growing, angry consciousness of it. She noted Lottie's flailing style of debate, and Nicholas's quiet fastidiousness. And she saw that Mike—big, genial, tolerant Mike—was the hub or lynch-pin of the group.

After a time the discussion petered out. Mike's two elder boys arrived back from the swimming pool, Cybella brought in the chilli, everyone fetched themselves wine from the winebox on the sideboard, and then everyone began to tuck
in and to become more human. Cybella had to go to work (she was a receptionist at the local Trust House hotel, and she was on the night shift), and soon Lottie announced she'd better take her ‘littlies' home. Davina took the hint and left then. Lottie muttered to Mike that she was a common little thing, and Pam said she hadn't got an idea in her head about Cruise missiles.

None of them expected to see her again, except to pass the time of day in the street.

So Lottie was a bit surprised, over the next few weeks, to find Davina so often in and out of Mike's house. Lottie would drop in to borrow rice, or brown sugar, or wholemeal flour, and there Davina would be. Eventually she said to Pam: ‘At last the penny's dropped. She saw Mike—you know how he comes and goes at all hours—found him attractive, and invented the 50p as an excuse. Why come next door, after all? There are at least five bedsitters and flats in her own house. And she went off quite happily without one. She's soft on Mike!'

Eventually Lottie conceived another suspicion. She thought that Davina watched her comings and goings from her window, and made sure she arrived at Mike's five or ten minutes later. ‘As if Mike and I aren't the oldest of friends!' said Lottie: ‘I've been in his bed in my time, and it's a bit ridiculous to start getting jealous of me now!' She added: ‘She's practically a member of Mike's household, you know.'

And so she was. She cooked quite often for the family, displacing Cybella—though Cybella was such a busy girl that she seemed quite glad of the rest, and certainly showed no resentment. Davina took Annetta's clothes in hand, bought new socks for the boys, and on one occasion—a spectacular triumph, but bitter for the rest—actually got Mike into a suit to take her out to dinner.

They had been so accustomed to living in and out of each other's houses that this affected them all. They felt they
could no longer call Mike's house their own. Naturally they discussed the new order, in as charitable a manner as each could muster. One day Nicholas and Jonathan were round at Lottie's, trying some clothes on Beth, her youngest (Nicholas designed clothes, in a small way) when he happened to mention that he was using Davina to model some things in a fashion parade he was putting on for the Westbury Toc H and their wives.

‘She does it quite well,' he said. ‘Moves well. Has a certain . . . air. Remote, somehow.'

‘Oh, she's more than just a pretty face,' said Jonathan. ‘Mind you, not
much
more . . .'

‘As to her
mind
, the least said the better,' said Lottie. ‘She's given no evidence of having a brain in her head.'

‘Such a relief,' said Jonathan, ‘after all the rest of you. It's nice at last to have someone around with whom one has something in common.'

Jonathan affected, on occasion, the pose of being The Man in the Street. It was a pose that didn't become him, Lottie thought, especially as most real Men in the Street would have died rather than acknowledge any affinity. What really marked Jonathan off from the rest (Lottie told anyone who would listen) was that he was not really a thinker. Where they cared passionately about this planet and its future, Jonathan was essentially frivolous, a mocker, a free agent.

Opinions on Davina were divided in Pam and Judith's household too. Lottie was round there one Saturday, having an impromptu lunch of Cornish Pasty and a glass of lager, and she became aware (as she later told the Superintendent) of
tension
—something she had never felt between them before. For some time she could not pin it down to anything specific, but the root of it became obvious when Davina's name came up.

‘I wonder she doesn't just move in,' said Pam, merely toying with her food. ‘She might just as well.'

‘If I was her I wouldn't want the responsibility,' said Lottie. ‘By her account she's only twenty-one herself.'

‘But it rather depends on what she's after,' said Pam.

‘Perhaps she's not
after
anything,' said Judith.

It was said magisterially. The other two cast a covert glance at each other, and remained silent. It was Judith who spoke next.

‘She strikes me as totally fresh, quite without guile,' she said.

Pam gave a bitter little laugh.

‘On the other hand, Mike
is
in television,' Lottie said.

‘Quite,' snapped Pam. ‘And Nicholas is in clothes. I'm in radio, but she can't cultivate both Judith and me, and Judith is the better bet. So there's three members of the Originals worth cultivating, if you're a schoolgirl with ambitions. And does she cultivate them! If she finds Mike's clout as a technician doesn't get her far, she'll turn the full glare of her ambitions on to someone else.'

Pam's eyes swerved sideways to Judith. Judith had been looking stonily ahead of her, with an expression that could only be described as mulish. It was obvious she was smitten.

‘In point of fact,' said Lottie, ‘I'm not sure her ambitions are theatrical at all . . .'

Lottie heard Cybella's reactions to the new order when she met her coming out of the hotel where she worked, at the end of a shift.

‘Long time no see,' Lottie greeted her.

‘That's right. I just don't seem to have the time. And Mike's kids don't need me now. They've got Davina.'

‘She hasn't quite moved in,' Lottie protested.

‘Still, she's around if they need anything.'

‘Mike's an awfully good parent
any
way,' Lottie said.

‘Oh sure. Still, he tends to forget things, and he's at his job all hours. Davina is a good backstop.'

‘You're just too
nice,'
muttered Lottie.

Really, Lottie meditated, you'd think Cybella would take her dislodgement from Mike's household harder than that. Didn't she see that Davina had designs?

Life in the group, at this point, went on pretty much as normal. They were in and out of each other's houses, they lobbied for this cause or that, they sat on the floor with fork meals and put the world to rights. They still went to Mike's house, though Lottie for one felt less free there, and none of them, naturally, brought up the subject of Davina there, even if she did not happen to be present. When she was there she sat with them quietly, apparently listening to the talk, whether it was of Peace, the environment, true Socialism, or the next step forward for women. Occasionally she would go with one or other of them to a meeting—a peace meeting with Judith, a feminist meeting with Pam, or to Mike's splinter Trotskyite group, which she openly laughed at afterwards. She also laughed when Nicholas gave her a cod invitation to a ‘More Gays in Local Government' meeting. She soon lost her shyness, and began contributing to the discussions—in a very negative, reductive and anti-idealistic way, Lottie thought. She was horrified when Gabriel—up for the weekend to see
I Capuleti e i Montecchi
—actually described her as an intelligent girl.

‘Intelligent?' Lottie said, louder than was necessary. Gabriel, who was very involved with himself, and the environment, did not catch the warning note.

‘Yes. Awfully bright. And nice too. You're lucky to have her around.'

Another one who's been taken in, Lottie thought.

It was a day or two after this conversation that there was a further incident that made Lottie see that there were great changes coming in her world. She had gone over to Mike's, Beth clinging to one hand, Eve to the other. But when she pushed Mike's front door she found it was locked. She stood staring in disbelief. Mike's door was
never
locked in the evening! There was always someone around then, and Mike
said that to lock it was so bourgeois and property-conscious. But now she actually had to ring the doorbell.

‘Hello,' said Davina, smiling very sweetly, but standing plumb in the doorway.

‘It was locked,' said Lottie, starting in.

‘That's right,' said Davina, not moving. ‘Mike's busy.'

‘Busy?'

‘Yes. He's got a shooting schedule to organize, and it's proving a bit of a problem.'

And since she actually went on standing there, Lottie had to turn round and go away. She was boiling. The incident summed up (she told Pam, to whom she resorted in her outrage) the difference one person could make to a group—even a happy, caring, fruitfully inter-relating group like theirs.

‘Of course I realize it's only a matter of time before she moves in,' she concluded.

And she was quite right. However, the announcement of it took a form rather different from what she had expected.

They were all at Mike's except Gabriel, who was back at his commune. They were having a good evening, planning a big protest against the Channel Tunnel. Mike had sent his eldest out for pizzas from the Italian takeaway (they were using the various takeaways in the area more often these days, since Cybella was around less often), and everything was going with a swing until the pizzas had been cut up, and they had all collected glasses and gone along to the statutory winebox on the sideboard.

‘Wait!' said Mike. ‘We're having something special tonight. Fetch the champagne, Davina.'

It's coming, Lottie thought. She said:

‘Champagne with pizzas?'

Three bottles of it, ready chilled in the 'fridge. Davina put them on the sideboard, and began getting out the cut-glass hock glasses.

‘The fact is, we've got a bit of an announcement to make.'
Mike grinned at them—his most charming grin. ‘You've probably guessed it already, but here goes: Davina and I are going to be married.'

Everyone but Lottie gave an amused groan.

‘I hope you mean shacked up,' said Jonathan.

‘Well, actually no,' Mike admitted. ‘We mean married.'

That really shocked some of them.

‘But you can't!' Lottie wailed. ‘After all you've said about marriage as a male-instituted vehicle for female slavery! We've all been agreed about that—always. And what about your own experience of it? You can't, Mike. It would be a travesty of all you've ever believed in! It would be a betrayal!'

‘It will be a registry office do,' said Mike, but hardly shamefaced.

‘You might as well have gone the whole hog and hired St Margaret's, Westminster,' said Judith scornfully.

‘Davina wanted a proper ceremony,' said Mike, still good-humoured.

‘Oh, we never doubted who was behind it,' said Lottie. ‘After all this pretence of being one of us—to entrap you into
marriage
!'

‘I do agree with a lot of your ideas,' protested Davina. ‘Quite a lot of them. But if we're going to live together, I want us to go into it intending it to be for good. You've got to face it, my generation sees things differently from yours. We're just not as radical as you were.'

Outraged middle-aged faces stared at her, pop-eyed. They had been put in the past tense!

‘What poisonous rubbish!' Lottie said. ‘Of course young people are radical. That's why we feel so close to them—we've retained our ideals.'

Davina shook her head. Marriage was making her determined.

‘You're wrong. Young people have seen through a lot of your ideas. I think you just haven't noticed.'

‘She's right,' said Terry, Mike's eldest, who hardly ever spoke when they were all round there. ‘You're still living back in the 'sixties, you lot. It's pathetic.'

The way he said it, he could have been talking about the eighteen-sixties. It hit them like a wet towel. Tears of mortification stung Lottie's eyes, and she sat silent for several minutes. When she began to recover her self-possession, she was struck a second blow: the others seemed to have come round. Even Judith (who perhaps had never had any very serious hopes of getting an act together with Davina) was being rather jolly, and before long they were all laughing and chaffing and drinking toasts to Benedick the married man.

Lottie tried to drink, but she couldn't get a sip down.

‘I'm sorry, it'd choke me,' she said, and walked from the room. She did not extinguish the merriment. As she shut the front door she heard laughter from the sitting-room. Well, at least she'd made it clear that she was one person who wouldn't compromise her principles.