Jane had only skim-read the Sunday Times that morning but luckily John’s mother (who was a Telegraph reader – The man’s newspaper intelligent women read) preferred talking about the Queen’s latest baby to the nuclear threat so it was a piece of cake. Johnny sat watching the pair of them, practically burping with pride, before announcing that it was really time to be making a move.
Jane slipped away to give her nose a thorough powdering while Johnny got the green light from Mummy. Marjorie thought John had made a Very Wise Choice: young, pretty, sweet-tempered, mouldable. He could certainly do a lot worse. Amanda was a lot worse, Mummy thought Amanda was Fast (if she only knew) and, almost more to the point, she loathed Amanda’s ritzy bloody mother who saw right through the façade and tended to patronise ‘poor Marjorie and her doilies’. The only good in-law was a dead in-law, Marjorie had decided.
The pilgrimage to Putney was followed by a dinner party in Roehampton or somewhere (it was dark, there was definitely a bridge involved). Getting dressed had been a nightmare.
‘It’ll be black tie but Nick and Daphne are very relaxed,’ said Johnny, who thought he was being helpful.
Jane knew the type. They used to come into Drayke’s. ‘Very relaxed’ just meant that the women’s clothes would be two seasons old and the men would be wearing their fathers’ dinner jackets and never dry clean them. Practically everything in the entire flat was too flash – Annie’s uniform included.
Suzy told her to stop worrying.
‘The women will all be fat and thirty and passée so they’re bound to hate you anyway. Just wear something Johnny likes.’ She settled on a rather pretty old crimson chiffon number of Glenda’s with a folded satin waist and spent twelve and six at a hairdresser’s in Berkeley Square being groomed to a standstill (Terry had gone to Brighton to do the hair for a swimwear catalogue. The poor cows were going to freeze to death).
It was a big, ugly red-brick house. There was a pram in the hall and a nasty familiar smell of burned toast and baby lotion. Jane was herded into a group of half a dozen women by Daphne. She’d flicked through a handful of Suzy’s magazines the day before but nothing prepared her for the rubbish she was supposed to talk about. Recipes (Keesh? What the fuck was that?); marrow moussaka; natural childbirth; breastfeeding; child psychology. Most of them were doing a course in something. Daphne left her up to her armpits in spermicidal jelly and then tore back to the kitchen to stir something. Whatever it was, she didn’t stir it enough.
Daphne claimed to have spent most of the day locked up in the kitchen with Elizabeth David but the food was still absolutely disgusting. After two months of West End dinner dates it wasn’t just smoked salmon and sole grillée any more. Jane had pretty much eaten the lot: snails; frog’s legs; brains; calves’ liver. It might not always stay eaten but she’d got to quite like most of it. Daphne was giving them cheese soufflé and ‘her’ coq au vin: ‘hers’ in the sense that nobody else’s was made with half a bottle of sweet cider and burned to a crisp.
The wine was rotten too (Nick had been at school with someone in the wine trade). This was a pity because the glasses were really lovely. There used to be a shop near the Arcade that sold crystal like that. It made a lovely noise if you dipped your finger in the wine and skimmed it round the rim.
‘Lovely, aren’t they? Waterford, I think.’ Some bloke. She couldn’t remember all their names: Gerald? Jeremy? He had unbelievably bad teeth whoever he was and rather dirty yellow fingernails.
‘I’m no expert but they look more like Baccarat to me.’
He thought not. He started pinging annoyingly at the rim with his fingernail before finally deferring to Our Host in a loud, prove-me-right-will-you sort of way. What an idiot, honestly, as if anybody cared. Only they did care and they were all terribly surprised and impressed that she knew and he didn’t and all looked at her differently even though she was the same.
The funny thing about all but one of the couples was that you didn’t seem to get two good ones in any one pair. If you quite liked the wife, the husband was sure to be a complete git. Jane had been having an almost pleasant chat with a woman called Linda – about the Ideal bloody Home Exhibition but she meant well. As she was speaking to Jane, Linda waved across the room at the last couple to arrive but her face was being monitored by her husband who was standing on the other side of the bay window: ‘Don’t smile in that insincere way, darling.’ Her face looked like someone had pulled the plug on it: all the life, all the confidence draining away.
Lavinia and Wossname were the exception. They were a perfectly matched pair. Lavinia, seeking vengeance for her husband’s cock-up about the glasses, waited until there was a lull in the conversation before asking Jane, good and loud, what she thought about Penguin publishing Lady Chatterley in the summer. It was like falling off a log. None of them had actually read it anyway but Henry had smuggled a copy back from Paris and made her and Suzy read the rude bits out loud. There was an expectant silence around the table.
‘Lawrence isn’t really me, I’m afraid. He’s so sentimental and all that terrible sex just makes me laugh. It’s such English sex.’
That stumped them. They’d only ever had English sex and while there was always the outside chance that they’d already read that month’s Encounter she couldn’t see it somehow. They’d done all their serious reading at Somerville or somewhere. It was just keesh and Kingsley Amis from now on.
Some old trout called Felicity in what looked like a short-sleeved stair carpet had another go a bit later on, as if she were dragging the conversation down to Jane’s level.
‘So what should we all be wearing next season, Janey?’ As if that shabby fat cow would be in the market for a flocked organza overskirt or a gingham bikini. Never mind, Jane knew a good answer to this one.
‘I haven’t the faintest idea, I’m afraid. I just put on whatever’s on the rail and try not to fall over. I put on a garment bag by mistake once.’
Mirthless laughter. Approving glances.
The men were much, much more straightforward.
Lavinia’s husband cornered her in the hall on the way back down the stairs from the loo. He stank of cheap brandy and his face was flushed and sticky-looking. She was a very pretty little thing, apparently, so pretty that he felt he must take her hand and press it against the lump in his gravy-stained trousers. She slapped his face so hard that he lurched sideways into Johnny who had just come out of the dining room. Whatsisname looked very, very surprised and horribly, horribly excited.
‘Take me away from here. Now.’ Why should she sit down and pretend nothing had happened? Why spare poor Lavinia’s feelings? Fuck Lavinia. Luckily for Johnny, it was time to go in any case.
All in all it had been an impressive performance: pretty, clever and virginal. Amanda wasn’t any of those. Never had been. Poor Amanda. Amanda was thirty next summer. She had lowered her sights a good long way since she first came out. Not that she could swank about being presented at court any more, not since the new Queen put a stop to it. It showed your age. But Johnny would definitely do. The Gloucester Road flat wasn’t too bad and they could sell that ghastly Putney villa as soon as the old bag died and buy somewhere decent. The friends would have to go, obviously. Those suburban bluestockings and their ghastly grammar-school husbands. Johnny had been to the right school, knew the right tailor, drank in the right bars, even if his mother was a bit common. She couldn’t live for ever.