‘Or do you?’ Suzy was saying.
‘Or do I what? I’m sorry. I was miles away.’
Suzy flashed him an unguarded glance from under those fluffy nylon lashes as if she knew exactly where his dirty little mind had travelled to.
‘Prefer blondes?’
What was the woman talking about?
‘Er. No. No-no-no. Far, far from it.’
He toasted them ineptly with his half of lager. Suzy sipped at her pineapple juice, eyelashes working overtime. Then she tossed her head back and laughed, showing those pretty white teeth. It was the pose from the matchbook: the pose of a woman having the time of her life. Jane stored the move away for future reference and opted to lean forward and work the conspiratory giggles.
Jane didn’t really like rice, she discovered. Not without jam on it, anyway. The food was all chopped up – God knew what meat was in it – and you ate it out of little blue and white sugar bowls. Michael appeared to be putting some kind of brown sauce on his but it tasted nothing like the normal kind. Jane was managing the chopsticks rather well – better than Michael actually – but the unfamiliar grip was giving her a pain in her hand.
The restaurant was quite full – not many places opened on a Sunday – and there were quite a lot of Chinese people which Michael seemed to think was a good sign although they’d probably eat any old rubbish. There was an English couple at the next table arguing half-heartedly about where to put the garden shed. She was all for putting it down at the end next to the dustbins with a bit of trellis in front. He wanted it bang next to the house (in case of bad weather). That was what marriage did to people. He was wrestling with a big plate of slippery fat noodles and she was eating roast chicken and chips and holding her knife like a pen.
Shed Woman was wearing home-made tan crêpe with powder-blue piping and she kept checking the banquette beside her to make sure her bag was safe. Nasty plastic thing. Navy blue. Didn’t go with the dress at all. She looked sidelong and sulky at Jane’s larky little get-up. She probably had a 22-inch waist when she got married.
Jane carried on pecking at the meat – chicken? She hoped so. And giggled obligingly at Michael who was boring on about some book he’d been reading. Never let him know you’re bored! He might be all right for humping suitcases but he was a bit of a wash-out conversationally. It was all very highbrow. Disarmament. Cyprus. But there was nothing intellectual about the way he stared at her bust. Suzy was marvellous, playing with him, pretending to know all about it – or maybe she did know all about it? Maybe it was in the Sunday Times. Seemed a bit daft, really, just sitting there quoting the newspapers at each other.
Would they like to go to a jazz club later? And wasn’t Kenneth Tynan right about jazz being a post-mortem on a dissected melody? Tosser. Did she look like a girl who read Kenneth fucking Tynan? Of course she bloody didn’t. She looked like a girl who read True Romance and Romeo. So what was all that nonsense about? He was either taking the mick – which, given those hungry green eyes glued to the tilt of her bust, seemed unlikely – or he thought she’d be impressed.
Film their table and frame by frame Jane and Suzy would seem to be having the time of their lives, like an ad for king-size cigarettes. Envious glances flashed across the room: some, like the waiter, trying to work out how this chinless wonder had managed to swing such a five-star double date, others just wondering why their evening wasn’t turning out that well.
An old bloke at the corner table by the window was staring at them while his chopsticked hand ferried rice from his bowl to his moustache. Jane batted her eyelashes some more. The nylon filaments were strange and scratchy against her eyelids.
The old bloke by the window was actually Michael Woodrose’s boss from the department. He could only see the back of Woodrose’s tweed jacket but he could see both girls: young, laughing, confiding, teasing, hanging on Woodrose’s every word. He’d never thought of Woodrose as a ladykiller. False hope dawned. Maybe they were his sisters? No, he remembered now. Woodrose had brought his sister into the office once. Joyce? Jenny? Geraldine? Jill. That was it: wan little blonde in horn-rims and very pronounced views on pronunciation. Only she pronounced it pronounciation. Amazing how many people did that.
What could Woodrose possibly be saying that entertained them so thoroughly? The last ‘conversation’ his boss had had with him was a Woodrose monologue on the theatre of the absurd. Woodrose had just discovered Beckett at the Royal Court and would bore anyone who would listen with the ins and outs of Beckett and Ionesco. Parker, the other junior assistant, told him exactly where he could stick it but the department secretary had let herself get cornered for a good ten minutes while Woodrose showed off his new knowledge – most of it stolen from an article in some egg-headed weekly. She wasn’t rescued until the Brain of Britain producer had rung to check the pronunciation of Ottoline Morrell. Philistine. Michael’s boss sneaked another look at the table. Woodrose could hardly be regaling these lovely young things with N.F. Simpson’s greatest hits. They didn’t look like the women who went to the Royal Court. Far too clean for a start.
Finally, after what seemed like days of self-glorifying claptrap, the waiter brought the bill and Michael spent an embarrassing few minutes checking the maths. Jane reckoned that if you weren’t one of those people who could add up columns of figures in their head – like Uncle George – you should just pay whatever it said. They’d probably done most of the cheating when they priced the bloody menu in the first place – it was only a few scraps and some rice, after all, not a proper dinner. Woodrose had obviously undertipped the waiter and they had to wait for their coats which he then fumbled them into before they walked out into the night. Where next?
‘Are you going to take us dancing, Mr Woodrose?’
He winced like a salted slug.
Michael Woodrose couldn’t dance. His mother had insisted on lessons after watching him sneering on the sidelines of a birthday party when he was thirteen. Spotty, boring but peculiarly arrogant, the teenage Michael’s only interests were wanking and the wireless.
He was not a hit with the (mostly female) dancing class. They complained about his sweaty hands, his big feet, the way he stared dumbly at their cardiganed chests. Mummy relented and he was too vain and proud to try again. Which meant that dances – the one time you were actually licensed to grope girls – were terrible ordeals spent loafing on the touchline with half a pint of bitter trying to talk smart while better men foxtrotted their way over the stocking tops.
‘I don’t dance.’ He used to practise saying it in the mirror: world-weary, a little contemptuous, a tiny bit reproachful – how could they talk of dancing with so much sadness and uncertainty in the world? It never had cut much ice and Jane and Suzy were no different. Jane knew he’d say no to dancing. He just wasn’t the type.
He took a deep breath. Would they like to come back to his flat for a nightcap?
‘Your flat?’ Suzy was surprised – and impressed. He looked more like the type that lived at home.
‘It belongs to my uncle but he’s down in Sussex most of the time.’
Michael’s ‘uncle in Sussex’ was a bit like Jane’s ‘aunt in Surrey’. Uncle Jack ran a chain of gents’ outfitters in the Bexhill area but there was no need to dwell on that. Gents took a lot of fitting out in the Bexhill area and Uncle Jack had spent much of the proceeds on a West End bolt hole where he could entertain willing young boys without endangering trade. He popped up about once a fortnight and Michael would doss down on a friend’s sofa or go home to his mother’s in Sevenoaks until the coast was clear.