Infidelity (3 page)

4

‘. . . and the Australian said, “I once had a horse like that but I shot the bastard.” Oops, Sar's visitor has arrived, and he's not even wearing one of those funny hats with corks –
Hello!
Fill my glass, someone. Quick.'

I had been warmly greeted by Sarah at the front door of her ground-floor apartment in Vincent Square. The square itself astonished me when I stepped out of the cab. It was as big as a football field – a huge grassy haven in the midst of busy Westminster, ringed by buildings grand enough to qualify as mansions. Sarah ushered me straight to my place at a polished walnut table where her three friends were already seated and in full swing. The table was at one end of a large living area, lavishly furnished, with a chandelier hanging from the ceiling. At first glance, it looked more like an opulent club than an apartment.

‘Give it a rest, E,' Sarah said, in the manner of a schoolteacher calling her pupils to order. ‘Everybody, I want you to meet Tom. I told them you were an Australian, Tom, so E's been running us through his very limited repertoire of antipodean jokes. All terrifically vulgar.'

‘Ah. Interesting point.' This came from an attractive, rather rumpled woman sitting opposite me at the table, speaking through lips that held an unlit joint. A shock of frizzy and prematurely grey hair stood out from her head like an aura – or perhaps a cloud. She was clad in shapeless layers of black. Being dishevelled emphasised her strong face and intense gaze. I warmed to her immediately.

‘This is Roxy, Tom. We call her Fox. And this is Jelly. E has already introduced himself, in a manner of speaking.'

(E? Jelly? Though these names were eventually to become familiar to me, I thought I was mishearing them first time round.)

Roxy/Fox persisted. ‘Antipodean is a relative term, of course. For Tom,
we're
the antipodes. Does anyone have a flame-thrower? I'd like to get this thing going before the night's out.
Sar! A match!
It's something about the soles of your feet touching people on the other side of the globe. Metaphorically, of course. Anti-podes. Have I got that right? Ah, thanks, Sar.' (An aside to me: ‘Sar's
so
well-mannered.')

Fox took a quick pull at her joint and handed it to the rather gaunt man beside her, known only as E. ‘I shouldn't be smoking at all,' she said, with an elaborate cough. ‘Not in my delicate condition.'

E smiled at her and placed a reassuring arm around her shoulder. Even sitting down, E looked fragile. His long neck and sloping shoulders were accentuated by a roughly knitted grey polo-neck pullover; his agitated, almost frightened air and his deeply lined forehead suggested perpetual bewilderment, as if he might never find his way in the world.

‘But really, Tom,' this was coming from the man who, I thought, surely couldn't really be called Jelly, ‘I mean, all these Australian expats doing the stock-standard expat thing – trying to outdo us at our own game. Come over here and make a tremendous fuss about being Australian, while poking fun at the place from a safe distance. Clever and everything, but kind of tedious, what? Once the joke wore off? About thirty years ago? Such terrific smartarses, I find. What is it about fucking Australians, do you think? Come on, I mean
really
?
There's a want of humility, I should have thought. Is that part of the national character?'

Jelly was the best-dressed of the guests, but his thinning hair, smooth round face and visible paunch gave him the look of a well-fed pig in a suit. A tendency to snort when he laughed reinforced the impression.

‘No more than the Brits, surely,' I responded, unsure of the depth of Jelly's commitment to this argument, ‘or the French, or the Americans, or the Germans . . . should I go on?'

‘Fair point. You forgot the Dutch. And the Swiss, of course. Very smug, the Swiss.'

‘I think you're talking about nationalism, Jelly. A pretty universal foible, I'd have thought. Actually, we've always assumed you rather like our ex-pats. You love our cricketers when they come over here to play for your counties, don't you?'

‘They're just on loan. And they blend in. Different thing entirely. I'm talking about these fucking blow-ins who never blow out again. Act as if they own the place. Revenge, do you think it is? Speaking of cricket, I always thought there was something creepy, something vaguely Oedipal about the Australians' over-eagerness to thrash us at cricket, what?'

‘You a Freudian, Jelly?' (This was the second time I'd felt obliged to ask that question in the space of a few days. I don't mind Freudians, though I'm not one myself. Freud might have been a scientific fraud, but he was a brilliant storyteller and quite possibly a genius.) ‘Anyway, why pick on the handful of ex-pats who draw such attention to themselves? Rupert Murdoch owns vast tracts of your media landscape and you've got Aussies running half your arts organisations and staffing some of your tonier private schools – which you rather quaintly call public, of course. These things get reported back home with far too much relish, needless to say.'

‘Oh well. We love your wine. I grant you that. Sar will drink nothing else. It's her mother, you know.'

‘Yes, I've met Mrs Delacour. We come from the same part of Sydney.'

Jelly seemed displeased by the prospect of our conversation descending into banalities. He looked like the sort of man who wanted to be egged on.

‘You used to love our beer, too,' I said. ‘Has that changed?'

‘See, there's another case in point. Your beer.' He held up his can of Foster's. ‘Not content with successfully launching this stuff over here, you go over the top. Arrogance, what? The Fosterisation of England, or was it the entire fucking world? See what I mean?'

‘Jelly, I'll make a deal with you. Suppose I say nothing about whingeing Poms or warm beer, and you lay off these quaint generalisations about us.' (I decided to keep cold pork pies, spotted dick, Margaret Thatcher, personal hygiene and the British car industry in reserve.) ‘Unlike Britannia, we've never claimed to rule the waves. We've never claimed God was on our side. We're just the descendants of a bunch of convicts and colonials . . .'

Jelly appeared mildly discomforted by these self-deprecations, but Fox and E were nodding their encouragement, so I pressed on.

‘. . . enriched, I may say, by millions of immigrants from everywhere . . . gosh, they even keep arriving from the UK. Can't imagine why. Anyhow, more than half of us either weren't born there or have a parent who wasn't, so I wouldn't be inclined to make too many generalisations about Australia or Aussie culture myself. There's a bit of the mongrel, the hybrid, about us. Same with the English, these days, surely?'

‘Well said, Tom.' Sarah was clearly relishing our little contest. ‘Ignore Jelly. He's terrifically good at his job, but his job certainly isn't social analysis. Or diplomacy, thank God.'

‘What is your job?' I asked Jelly.

‘I'm going to pay close attention to this, I can tell you,' E said, leaning forward with exaggerated attentiveness. ‘Go on, Jell. Tell him. What
is
your job?'

‘I'm a headhunter.'

Hoots of derision erupted around the table. E blew a puff of smoke in Jelly's direction and raised his eyebrows. ‘Go on, Jellykins,' he said. ‘Tell him the last time you went to work. Tom means what do you actually
do
all day.'

Jelly leant towards me and said, as if confidentially, ‘Ignore this riffraff, Tom, especially E. I am indeed in the headhunting business. Really, I am. Recruitment. Personnel selection. All of that. Know what I mean?'

‘Absolutely. Believe it or not, we have recruitment companies in Australia. We're quite a civilised little outpost of empire.'

More hoots and hollers from around the table.

‘Don't be fooled, Tom,' said E. ‘This is a man who doesn't actually go to work at all. Don't imagine you're talking to a fellow professional.'

Puzzled, I looked to Sarah for enlightenment.

‘Jell owns two of London's hottest recruitment firms, an internet job-search site, plus a boutique headhunting firm, Tom. So, yes, he's in recruitment and, no, he doesn't go to work the way the rest of us go to work.'

‘Fucking hell, Sar, don't we acknowledge the role of capital in the modern economy? I'm a capitalist. That's what I should have said to you, Tom. I'm a fucking capitalist.'

‘Right on both counts,' said E, twinkling with pleasure. ‘Double trouble.'

While Jelly and E bantered, Sarah left the room and went into the adjoining kitchen. Within moments she returned, bearing two large dishes and announcing it was time to eat. ‘Don't praise me, by the way. Every morsel comes from Ahmed's. I think he feeds half the square.'

Everyone helped themselves and fell to the business of eating. The conversation stopped, then gradually resumed in a more mellow register. I caught E winking at Jelly.

Later, in a silence, E said: ‘Don't mind us, Tom. We always give Sar's new pets a rough time at first, don't we, Sar?'

‘Very droll,' said Sarah. Did I only imagine that the others were staring fixedly into their plates? I looked into E's face. He had drunk enough to be a little glazed.

After an awkward pause, he said, ‘Oh, have I said something indiscreet?'

No one responded.

When we'd emptied the bowls of food and Sarah had refreshed our drinks, she said briskly: ‘Charity time, everyone. Come on, Jelly. What's the latest from the front?'

Jelly fished in his pocket and came out with a leaflet from which he read us a long and searing account of child mortality in Somalia and a letter of gratitude from Oxfam for the long-term support of Sarah and her friends. The letter described water and sanitation projects apparently being entirely funded by their donations.

In the silence that followed, I noticed Fox shedding some silent tears. Only when she placed both her hands on the curve of her abdomen did I understand the nature of her ‘delicate condition'.

E kept a fixed smile on his face, as if determined to keep his emotional distance from the problems of the world. After a few more moments of silence, he produced a sheaf of music.

‘Song time, Tom,' Sarah said to me, as an aside. ‘Not you, unless you feel inclined to join in.'

On cue, the four of them hummed a single note, before breaking into the simple harmonies of a choral warm-up exercise.

The pages of manuscript were distributed and E led the group into a wonderful fugue, still humming, based on a familiar, evocative melody I couldn't quite place – perhaps a folk song.

Several more pieces followed – mostly jazz standards – with startlingly original harmonies,
novel syncopations and decorations. Unprepared for such an extraordinary performance, I was overwhelmed – not only by the sudden change in the character of the evening, but by the sheer musicality of it. These were not mere amateurs. E, clearly in charge, occasionally interrupted the flow to correct a passage or suggest more sympathetic dynamics. With an eyebrow raised in my direction, he led the four voices through such an elegant arrangement of ‘The Wild Colonial Boy' it took me a moment to recognise the melody in the complex harmony.

The sheets of music were laid on the table and, again taking their lead from E, the group glided easily through some traditional English folk songs and madrigals, sung from memory and wonderfully anchored by the resonant bass of Jelly. They finished with a contemporary setting of ‘Matthew, Mark, Luke and John'
in which Sarah herself sang a soaring soprano solo over the dense harmonies of the other three. The sound was rich and effortless. An hour passed swiftly. We were clearly into the deeper layers of a well-established ritual.

The four friends, rambunctious and even combative at dinner, now concluded their evening by standing and singing, so softly as to be barely audible, ‘Since First I Saw Your Face',
familiar to me from my own brief membership of an undergraduate madrigal group, twenty years earlier. Thomas Ford's words engulfed me:
I resolved to honour and renown ye . . . My heart is fast and cannot disentangle . . . Where beauty moves and wit delights and signs of kindness bind me . . . where'er I go I leave my heart behind me.
I could feel a knot in my stomach untangling as I stood silently with them.

A moment's pause, followed by enthusiastic and noisy kisses all round, including warm hugs for me from the other three guests. Sarah led us all into her vestibule where coats, scarves and hats were donned and umbrellas sorted. She motioned me to wait while she saw the others out into the winter's drizzle.

For the first time since I had been plunged into the deep water of this quartet's intimacy, its eddies and swirls all strange to me, I had a more relaxed opportunity to take in my surroundings. The ceilings were high, the living area vast, the carpet deep, the furnishings exquisite. There was no sign of television. The pictures close to me were originals. Sarah clearly lived as stylishly as she dressed (tonight in figure-hugging grey wool with a silk scarf at her throat).

‘A nightcap before you go?'

I took my coat off, accepted another glass of wine, and we sat opposite each other across a marble coffee table. My armchair enfolded me in downy comfort. I looked at Sarah and was startled by how familiar she already seemed to me: I had known her for one day short of a fortnight, and this was only our fourth encounter, yet there was an ease between us – a sense of having fallen into step with each other – that felt strangely reassuring.

She kicked off her shoes and looked at me over the rim of her glass. ‘I rather assumed you'd like a debrief. I'm sorry if that felt like being thrown in at the deep end. It's generally best to experience these things first and have them explained later, don't you think? Nothing makes sense till you've done it.'