Scissors, Paper, Stone (33 page)

She made a move then, attempted to get away from him, but he had blocked her into the corner of the room so that she could feel the frame of one of the paintings prodding into her back. Charles was much taller than she was, but he stooped forward so that his face was inches away from hers. His skin was almost completely smooth and colourless except for two deep wrinkles gouged out thickly in between his eyes.

‘But the thing is, Janet, that you don’t count,’ he said, and the self-conscious care with which he spoke his consonants made her realise that he was drunk. Very, very drunk. Janet had never seen him drunk before, in spite of his prodigious capacity for alcohol. He was someone who appeared incapable of losing control. Everything he did was exactly intended. Charles chose his targets with great care; he never misfired.

‘As a person, I mean,’ he continued. ‘You’re one of those people who will never make a difference.’ He waved his hand around, gesturing towards an invisible dust mote. ‘The planet is untroubled by your presence on it.’

It was the only time that Charles had managed to get to her. He saw it immediately, a chink of weakness.

‘You think that being nice is the most important thing you can be.’ His voice dropped to a slurring whisper. ‘You’re wrong, Janet. You’re wrong. Niceness gets punished. Innocence is there to be broken in. It’s better to be on the other side.’

She cleared her throat before she spoke, determined to regain composure. ‘The other side?’ she asked, not quite looking at his face.

He laughed. ‘Yes, Janet. It’s better to be nasty.’ Abruptly, he turned his back to her and left the room. Janet shivered and drew her cardigan closed across her chest.

As Charles walked away, she noticed a long blonde hair stuck on the back of his navy blue jacket. The hair ran all the way from his neckline down to a spot between his shoulder blades where it ended in an elegant curlicue. She wondered, for a moment, whose it could have been.

That had been the last time Janet spoke to him. Within weeks, he was lying in a hospital bed and she was not, if truth be told, entirely sorry about it. The exchange with Charles lodged in her mind. It became more important to her than ever to be a true friend to Anne, to offer wordless support against the tumult of conflicting emotions she must be experiencing. Although Anne had never told Janet anything about her marriage and although their conversations were mostly limited to mundane observations and occasional misunderstandings, Janet could sense that both Charlotte and Anne were struggling with something that linked them inextricably while pushing them further apart. They were two women whose growth had been stunted by the same man, whose confidence and sense of self had been warped by being planted in his shadow. But Janet could never have broached the topic with Anne directly.

She knew that the image Anne projected of herself was extremely important to her and that Anne needed to feel in control of their friendship in a way that she had never managed to stay in control of her marriage. Janet didn’t mind this. She felt she could put up with Anne’s obvious slights and unsubtle displays of irritation because she knew they were not intended for her, but for Charles. They might sometimes be hurtful, but never for long, and she was also capable of great acts of kindness. But the crux of it was that whenever Janet looked at Anne, she saw someone as lonely as she was and she wanted, more than anything, to help.

And that’s how the dinner party came about. As soon as Charlotte said yes, Janet knew that Anne would be unable to resist the excuse to see her daughter. She thought it would be good for them all to get out of their own houses, away from the hospital, and relax in each other’s company. They had been existing in a state of suspended tension ever since Charles had been knocked off his bike, and that was almost two months ago. The strain between Anne and Charlotte was palpable, even to an outsider like Janet, and she worried that Anne would end up pushing her daughter too far, especially because of her supercilious attitude towards Gabriel, who, by all accounts, sounded like a perfectly nice young chap. Divorce was so much more common now than it had been in their day, thought Janet. It didn’t mean that someone’s character was profoundly flawed. It simply meant that marriage was more disposable; that there was an easier way out. Couples no longer felt bound to stay together for the sake of it and Janet believed that, broadly, this was a good thing. It was so easy to make a mistake when you were in your twenties and unsure of the gaps that lay between what you wanted and what other people expected of you. She had been lucky with Nigel. They had both just known.

In the end, after an endless leafing through recipe books, she decided against the soup. Instead, she made a roast chicken with all the trimmings: parsnips, potatoes, bread sauce and lemon thyme stuffing. She got dressed in loose brown trousers and a beige knee-length cardigan. Although she looked like the sort of woman who didn’t bother much with clothes, she was actually very particular about the quality. Janet liked maximum coverage to conceal her almost spherical body shape and had next to no interest in fashion, but she favoured items that lasted – cashmere and fine knits – and spent far more on clothes than anyone else might expect her to.

As the salty aroma of crisping skin started to fill the kitchen, Janet heard the doorbell ring. It was 8.15 p.m. They were on time.

Janet; Anne; Charlotte

When she opened the front door, she saw all three of them huddled together in an unlikely triptych underneath the porch awning. They stood side by side and yet not touching, and Janet noticed that Gabriel’s hand hovered protectively against Charlotte’s lower back, as if guiding her forwards.

Janet beamed. ‘Hello, hello, come in.’ She bustled around nervously, her gaze focusing on the mid-point between her guests’ feet and knees so that she did not have to make eye contact. She abhorred being the centre of attention. ‘Come on through. It shouldn’t be too much longer.’

‘It smells delicious, Janet,’ said Charlotte as she took off her coat and hung it over the banister. She was wearing a blue jersey wraparound dress and high heels. Janet had never seen her looking so smart: she supposed Charlotte had come straight from work. ‘Can I do anything to help?’

‘Not at all. It’s all under control. Now, you must be Gabriel.’ Janet extended her hand to shake his and noticed that he had long, elegant fingers like a piano player.

‘I am. It’s so nice of you to invite me,’ he said, smiling. ‘Thank you.’

‘Nonsense,’ she said, making a swatting motion and immediately feeling her face flush. Janet stole a quick glance at him as he made his way through to the drawing room. She liked his face – open and sincere – and the way that he always checked to see where Charlotte was or whether she needed anything. He held the door open for Anne, she noted. He seemed very kind, the sort of man who attracted attention without ever demanding it; a comfortable person to be around.

She went into the kitchen to make the drinks and, after a few seconds, she heard Anne’s footsteps behind her.

‘Let me do something, Janet.’ The way Anne spoke it sounded less an offer of help than a command, so Janet frantically searched her mind for a suitable task to keep her occupied. Anne always had this effect on her – she made Janet feel nervous and not quite impressive enough. She did not want Anne examining her kitchen and her cooking methods because it would set her on edge and she would fumble and do something silly with the gravy, but she was either too polite or too intimidated to say so.

‘Now, let’s see. Oh yes, it would be great if you could get some ice cubes from the freezer, Anne, thank you.’

She looked at her friend as she opened the fridge door. Anne had lost weight in recent weeks, so that her natural slenderness had become more pronounced and her collarbone now jutted out from beneath a silver-grey blouse. Janet had always been envious of Anne’s figure, the smoothness of her flesh and the casual ease with which she still moved. She was the type of woman whose beauty was accentuated by her wrinkles, as if the faintest imperfection simply served to highlight the flawlessness of the whole. In comparison, Janet felt like a red-cheeked blob of un-sophistication.

A sigh escaped before she could stop it. Janet was mortified. She scrabbled around, desperate for something to say to mask her discomfort. She twisted her hands together and felt the reassuring nub of her knuckles.

‘How are things, Anne?’

It was just the sort of open-ended and essentially meaningless question that Anne usually hated, but today she seemed to be in a more expansive mood than normal.

‘Things are . . .’ Anne paused with the ice tray in mid-air. ‘Things are good, actually.’ Anne seemed startled by her own admission. She let it drift, unelaborated, and began extracting the ice cubes, pressing each one out by bending the edges of the Tupperware tray towards her.

‘Oh,’ said Janet, taken aback by Anne’s atypical good cheer. ‘That’s nice to hear.’ Then she stopped speaking quite deliberately to allow the space for Anne to fill. She opened the oven to baste the chicken with its own juices and, then, Anne spoke.

‘Actually, Charlotte and I had a little talk the other day.’

Janet looked up and found that her glasses had fogged up from the heat. ‘Oh blast,’ she muttered, taking them off and wiping them on her cardigan. When she slid them on again, the kitchen returned to its clear-edged clarity and she noticed that Anne was smiling, the edges of her lips twitching uncertainly.

‘That’s wonderful,’ Janet said, because she could see immediately how important their ‘little talk’ must have been. It was the first time she had seen Anne look so relaxed in ages. The faded wrinkles that ran the length of her forehead like stretched washing lines seemed to have lifted, so that her face no longer looked as though it were in the grip of a perpetual frown. She wondered what they had talked about and then she realised that the content didn’t really matter: it was the fact that it had happened at all that seemed important.

Janet mulled over what to do next. She didn’t want to say something stupid or thoughtless that would cause the frown to return and yet she wanted to reach out to her friend, to touch her arm gently and let her know how pleased she was for her. But theirs had never been an especially physical friendship and she felt awkward at the thought of it.

The silence was broken by Anne. ‘We cleared the air,’ she said. ‘There were things I needed to apologise for,’ she added more quietly. ‘Things I should have said before now, but . . .’ Anne shrugged her shoulders. She stared into space for a few seconds, a forlorn expression creeping in at the corners of her eyes, and then she seemed to shake herself out of it. ‘But I didn’t and now I’m glad I have.’

She smiled briskly at Janet. ‘Oh goodness, this ice is melting.’

‘Don’t worry about that, Anne.’ Janet started to walk towards her and then changed her mind so that instead she simply jiggled slightly on the spot. ‘I’ll open the wine,’ she said, to cover her indecision. She started humming softly to herself. It was an infuriating habit she had, a sort of nervous tic that she couldn’t control.

And then, just as Janet was beginning to feel she should say something without knowing what, Anne did something entirely unexpected. She walked across to Janet and hugged her for a few brief seconds. The hug was so out of the blue that Janet didn’t have time to put down the corkscrew and found that she was holding it awkwardly so as to avoid jabbing Anne in the back with it. The two of them stood clasping each other for a few seconds, neither of them accustomed to the warm physical proximity of it. Then Anne drew away, patting Janet on the back as she did so, their eyes not meeting.

Wordlessly, they each went back to their practical tasks at opposite corners of the kitchen. The air was thick with unspoken conclusions.

After a few moments, an ice cube thudded on to the worktop as Anne pressed it out too rapidly and it skidded across the floor, leaving a slug-like shimmer across the linoleum. Anne bent over to pick it up but it kept slipping away from her as she tried to grab hold of it. ‘Oh come on,’ said Anne impatiently. Janet glanced at her and saw that the frown had re-appeared, a thin, dissatisfied crinkle just beneath her hairline. There was, she noticed, a stiffness to Anne’s movements, a slight slowness as she bent down, an almost audible creak of the joints, a jarring of vertebrae clicking and unfolding into place.

She saw that Anne was growing older, and that she was now so accustomed to the inevitability of disappointment that she would probably never fundamentally change. But she saw something new too: she saw a glimmer of hopefulness, a smoky wisp of fragile optimism. Janet felt an overwhelming affection for her friend, for her brave attempt to change what she had become for the sake of her daughter. And even though Anne would never manage it completely, Janet knew that she would spend the rest of her life trying and that, perhaps, was enough.

Janet’s eyes filled with tears. She had to pretend the cork was stuck in the wine bottle so that Anne would not notice.

The roast chicken was an unqualified success. Janet was surprised how well it all went, how easy it was for the conversation to flow. She had been worried that it might be stilted, given the recent distance between Anne and Charlotte and the appearance of Gabriel at the dinner table. But, in fact, it was Gabriel’s presence that made the evening go so pleasantly. He was polite and witty company, never once seeking to dominate the proceedings but able to step in when the silence lasted a beat too long.