The Taxi Queue (7 page)

‘I am counting to ten.' It was Bethany's voice above the squealing. ‘Starting from now. One. Two. Three. Four . . .'

The squeals changed to shrill screams. One little girl was already down on the ground with the older boy lying on top of her, apparently strangling her. Another had crashed into a tree, trying to escape, and was sobbing.

‘Probably time for chocolate,' Paula said. She put the whistle to her lips and gave a long blast. ‘Right, guys. Easter egg hunt. All stand up. When I blow the whistle again, all you little kids start hunting for eggs round the patio. Try not to hurt the daffodils. Conrad and Bethany, there are two
special
eggs in the front garden. Go and wait by the side gate. I'll let you through in a minute.'

‘Brilliant,' Richard said. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. The wine was making him sweat.

The children were all on their feet. Conrad, flushed and
panting, looked as though he regretted abandoning the fleshly sin of strangling for the uncertain promise of egg collecting. The child who had banged her nose stopped crying. Martha, at the far end of the garden, bent down and untangled her feet from the pashmina. She picked it up and wrapped it round her head, flipping the ends behind her with an elegant flourish. She sped across the garden, as if energised by the confinement of her head – the concealment of her hair – and disappeared indoors. Paula blew the whistle again. The young children ran towards the house and started to scrabble in the pots and raised beds. Bethany walked past Paula and Richard towards the gate in a self-important way. She didn't acknowledge her father. ‘Hurry up, Conrad,' she called over her shoulder.

‘Darling.' Paula turned to Richard. ‘Be an angel and keep an eye on the tiddlers while I go through to the front. There should be three eggies each. Something like that.' She put her hand into her coat pocket and, having pulled it out again, grasped Richard's hand and filled it with foil-wrapped eggs. ‘Make sure no one gets left out,' she said, moving away.

‘
Are
there special ones in the front garden,' Richard asked.

‘Any minute now there will be,' Paula replied. ‘Richard, you are such a
boy
.'

Was he? Vivienne often looked at him as if she discerned arrested development and he didn't necessarily disagree with that. He had a core that had remained the same since he was, say, eight or nine, possibly younger. Yet he knew from observing children, his own and other people's, that he was no longer the same person. He was hurt and pleased, as the children were – as he had once been – and those feelings of hurt and pleasure tapped straight into parts of him that were like old underground watercourses. But the rise and fall of his moods was different. Flatter, certainly, if they could be plotted – shot through by surprise but not by outrage. He sometimes wondered if his children were genuinely outraged.
Their reaction was so extreme. They relished outrage for its own sake, putting on astonished faces and, in Bethany's case, more often than not, planting her hands on her hips as if she were about to begin line dancing.

Richard, nursing his empty glass, glanced back at the house to see if Poppy was in evidence. Having started on the wine he didn't want to stop. The numbing effect was welcome. He saw through the window that Vivienne was still trapped by Petit Mal. She seemed younger than the other adults, a slight figure in a simple sweater dress, with the look of a girl who has borrowed her mother's high-heeled shoes. Petit Mal towered over her. Richard recognised her expression; the well-mannered passivity. She was too polite to move away and talk to someone else, but he could tell that she wasn't actually listening. Getting around at parties was a skill. He wasn't sure he had acquired it. Naturally, no one expected you to stay talking to them until a substitute turned up, but sometimes at these gatherings he felt as if he were simply standing to attention and longing for the Changing of the Guard. He tended to stick it for as long as he could and then bolt.

One of the catering girls had wriggled through the crowd and was proffering an oversized tray. Petit Mal was picking up a little mound and holding it as if he thought it might fall apart. He was conveying the morsel towards Vivienne's mouth, which opened into a reluctant O. Richard turned back towards the garden, glad to have been given a task that allowed him to be unsociable. Easter was a funny time of year. The March sky was grey as an old sheet, behind the extravaganza of blossoms – flower on flower bursting from wood. Who could have thought of that combination? It was a way of throwing nature into maximum relief; an excess of excess which he didn't know what to do with – perhaps no one knew. The children didn't look up into the branches. They were happy, picking off bits of coloured foil from the eggs they had found and placidly munching chocolate.

‘You're young. Perhaps you can answer this question,' Richard said when Poppy stepped outside and came towards him with the bottle.

‘I'll try,' Poppy said brightly. Her face was nursery-fresh, at odds with her height and the breasts, under the thin white shirt, that were straining against the cloth and an inner layer of white lace.

‘It's about music,' he said.

‘OK.' Poppy refilled his glass.

‘Have you heard of
Ba-roque
?' Richard asked, leaving a hint of a pause between the two syllables with a degree of self-consciousness.

‘Yes, of course,' Poppy answered.

‘Would I like them? Give me an album name.'

‘Vivaldi?' she suggested. ‘
The Four Seasons
?'

‘Really? Nothing more recent? Are you sure?' Richard tried to catch hold of her arm but she disappeared with her bottle and napkin, through the patio doors and into the crowd, her ponytail swinging as she went. Richard followed.

He was hoping for food, but before he reached the table he was importuned by the woman in the delphinium-blue jacket. ‘You're Richard, aren't you?' she said, planting a foot in front of his. He nodded. ‘I'm Isobel – but everyone calls me Bellsie.' Her earrings jangled like wind chimes as she moved her head. ‘What stage are your girls at?' she asked.

‘Early,' Richard said.

The woman laughed. ‘You've obviously been asked the question several times already.'

‘Some of the time they're grown-up.'

‘And do they get
on
?' she asked, emphasising the last word as if it were something significant.

‘Bethany's quite bossy but otherwise, yes.' Richard felt extraordinarily tired.

‘A phase, I expect. My Hugh is thirteen. He's in a curious one at the moment.'

Richard waited but Bellsie didn't elaborate. ‘My father has a theory about phases,' he said. ‘Says that it's important not to get stuck in them. Keep moving on. For instance, if you're wondering whether to marry, change jobs, have a child – do the thing, get on with it. Life's all in the future.' He was aware that he had attempted too many sentences at a stretch. His speech was blurring. Or was it his thoughts? Father, with his thumbs tucked into the belt loops of his grey flannel trousers, would have been more assured.

‘He sounds rather unusual,' Bellsie said. ‘Alternative.'

‘No. No, he isn't. A very ordinary, mild-mannered man. The phase he got stuck in began when he was about twenty-eight. There's been nothing new since then. Nothing.'

‘Oh de-ar,' Bellsie said.

Robbie Patterson sang a creamy tenor. And Jennifer Patterson played the piano. Jennifer Patterson was obliging and sat down to play whenever she was asked, without nerves or interventions of the ego. St Dunstan's made various demands on her and she rose to the occasion every time, playing by ear, sight-reading, making an attempt on the organ when the organist was away for his summer break. She was a good sort and always wore the right shoes for pedalling. At about four o'clock Paula and Hartley's guests, tired of standing, were becoming soporific with lunchtime drinking. They started to move up to the ground floor and the comforts of sofas and armchairs. Hartley asked Robbie if he would sing. He said he would give it a go. Somebody went to find Jennifer.

Richard remained in the basement, failing to join the guests who were making their way up the stairs, talking and laughing as they went. Because he was feeling lethargic, Richard sat down at the kitchen table. Among the used plates, glasses and platters, two bottles of wine stood, half finished. The catering girls had abandoned the dishes and were occupied with making coffee and tea at the other end of the kitchen. Richard helped himself to the wine, filling up his
glass, thinking, cloudily, how pleasant it was to smell coffee and drink alcohol. Better than the opposite, which brought back memories of childhood holidays with his mother and father – car journeys on A roads and the ritual of stopping off for morning coffee in pubs. Morning coffee. The words – the concept – encapsulated those holidays. Always the feeling of prissy isolation, sitting round a small polished table overcrowded with cups and saucers, while the regulars stood at ease by the bar, drinking pints. Afterwards, there was the drama of asking the barman if he would fill up the dog bowl with tap water.
Tap
water, in case the barman decided on another kind, maybe from the soda siphon. His mother would produce the brown earthenware bowl from her bag and hand it over. Once they had been given the water, out they'd all troop, two grown-ups, one boy and a slopping dog bowl. No question of slipping out unobtrusively. The dogs would start to bark as they approached the car, then fall out of the hatchback, wagging their tails, as soon as Father raised the door.

Richard cradled the glass in his hands. The sound of the piano vibrated through the floorboards – the scrape of chairs and thumps made by people shifting about. Robbie's voice was less ample from a distance, but still reverberant. The medley began with ‘Sweet By and By', and moved on through ‘Amazing Grace' and ‘My Shepherd Will Supply My Need'. Richard enjoyed listening from below, happy to suffer the imbalance of instrument and voice for the benefit of not being part of the crowd and, if he were honest, not having to look at the Pattersons. He reached across the table and, although he didn't particularly like hard-boiled quails' eggs, picked up a couple that had been left on a plate and munched them. After a moment's break, Jennifer began playing again. Her hands came down on the keys and – unexpectedly, but as if in response – Richard's head sank down on to the table. Richard, tasting egg in his mouth, heard Robbie's voice through the inebriated roar in his ears.

The catering girls, on the far side of the kitchen, started humming along. They stopped when they noticed Richard, resting on the table, and looked at each other with concern. Then the coffee machine reached its climax and they shrugged their shoulders and got on with counting cups.

THE PHASE THAT
Richard hadn't got stuck in was his youthful affair with Jamie Nevis. It had only lasted a few months. Jamie had been different from Richard, less self-conscious, less cautious. Jamie wore sleeveless T-shirts, army trousers and charity shop jackets. He tied a narrow strip of velvet round his right wrist. Richard wore what he considered to be normal clothes – cords and neutral shirts bought from department stores – not actually chosen by his mother, but with her in mind. Richard never told Jamie that he loved him. He believed that he needed to keep checks in place for the sake of his long-term happiness. Richard's parents didn't talk of sexuality, or – much – of love. ‘So and so's an attractive woman' was the nearest his father came to it, accompanied by a mild clearing of the throat and a quick glance at his wife, as if the adjective had been an unwise choice. Not everyone was in step, every step of the way, with the prevailing sexual freedoms. There was slippage between social history and personal history, especially in the Epworth family.

Richard was twenty-one and Jamie nineteen when they met. Boys, both of them. Jamie the more clued-up of the two. The meeting took place on the Oxford-to-London bus. Richard had gone home to Abingdon for his mother's birthday – an unavoidable engagement that required him, by custom and practice, to give presents to the two dogs as well as to Mother. He was on his way back to London. He
boarded the bus from Oxford bus station at six o'clock on the Sunday evening. The aisle of the bus was crammed with people. Richard waited while individuals in front of him in the queue inserted themselves into the high-backed seats. He found a single space towards the back next to someone with a book open on his knee. Books were generally a good protection against conversation but a short way along the M40 the person – Jamie Nevis – spoke to him. He asked Richard if he knew that Wilde's half-sisters had caught fire. Richard had no idea what he was talking about. He had met people before who suddenly passed on random information. They were usually hoping to make a short art film or had recently started writing a novel. Richard was doped by Sunday lunch, his brain befuddled. Twenty-four hours was the usual recovery period after a home visit. ‘I can't believe it,' Jamie said. ‘Everyone knows about Reading gaol but no one knows about the sisters. They're getting ready to go to a party, twirling round in front of the fireplace; first one's set alight, then the next.'

‘I don't suppose they had a fire extinguisher handy,' Richard said.

Jamie laughed. ‘No. They died. I've got half-sisters – in Essex.'

Richard was confused. He looked out of the window across the aisle and beyond the next set of seats. In the dim light he could make out the chalk sides of the hill that the motorway sliced through. No sign of girls carelessly dancing by a log fire. No sign of Reading. He realised who Wilde was, Wilde with an ‘e', but it was too late. When he turned back, Jamie's eyes were closed and he had fallen asleep. Richard must have slept too because, apart from odd moments of consciousness when his chin jerked down on to his chest, he didn't wake up until they reached Grosvenor Gardens in Victoria. The bus staggered to a stop. People began to stand up and move forward down the aisle. Richard looked out on to the dark drizzly evening. By nine o'clock on Monday morning he had
to have answered a revision question on bounded rationality. ‘Short answers will suffice for the micro-economics paper,' his tutor had said. ‘But make sure they're spot on.' Richard thought of his room in the student house near the Oval, the dismal programming of Sunday evening television, the lack of beer and clean shirts. He patted the backpack that rested in his lap and, through the canvas, felt the brick-shaped package of foil-wrapped leftovers that had been pressed on him by his mother. Eventually he and Jamie Nevis were the only two left on the bus. The driver began locking up the cash box and operating the winder that changed the bus destination back to Oxford. ‘Shall we go somewhere for a drink?' Jamie said.