I thought of taking off my coat, but the atmosphere in the room discouraged it.
‘How’s Ali?’ I said to Rebecca.
‘Actually, she’s really well,’ Rebecca replied, having given the matter a few seconds of consideration that she gave the impression were overdue, as though she hadn’t thought about her mother’s health in weeks.
‘Has there been any news?’
‘What? Oh, that,’ she said, waving her hand dismissively in the air. ‘That’s all fine.’
Her manner was disconcerting: I wondered whether she was exercising this uncharacteristic discretion as a result of Charlie’s presence, but a moment later Charlie said, pityingly:
‘Poor Becca’s been worried sick about Ali.’
‘Thank God you were here,’ Rebecca fervently responded, grasping her friend’s hand across the table.
I said: ‘I thought someone might have started clearing away the rubble at the front.’
If I had hoped to kindle a propitiatory spark by the route of disgruntlement I was disappointed. Rebecca and Charlie looked at me as if they didn’t know what I was talking about.
‘Yes, what happened out there?’ exclaimed Charlie finally, opening her eyes very wide.
‘The balcony fell off,’ I said, because although it was improbable that Charlie hadn’t deduced this fact, she seemed to require an answer.
‘Thank God no one was on it,’ she said.
I hadn’t actually considered this possibility before. No one ever stood on the balcony. It was ornamental, and could be reached only by climbing out through the windows on the first floor.
‘I know,’ concurred Rebecca, who to my knowledge had, like me, never set foot on it.
I said: ‘I came out of the front door one morning and it fell off. I was on the second step down to the street and it crashed down behind me. It missed me by a few inches.’
To my surprise, both women laughed.
‘You’re obviously completely traumatised!’ shrieked Charlie. ‘He’s obviously completely traumatised,’ she repeated, for Rebecca’s benefit.
I had no concrete objection to Charlie, other than in her current function as a sort of wrapper or container for Rebecca, by which I could see that Rebecca intended to elude me for as long as she could. She and Rebecca had been friends at school in Bath, but for as long as I had known her Charlie had lived in London, so that it was a tenet of their association that it had never been geographically easy to sustain: they pursued it with a sort of hectic diplomacy, as though they were the representatives of two distant states endeavouring to maintain relations.
Three or four years ago I had attended Charlie’s wedding, a cold, rain-sodden event I could only remember now in the light of the fact that Charlie had left her husband a year or so after it. Rebecca used to complain that her friendship with Charlie had become one-sided and perfunctory, as though it were the victim of ill-disposed market forces: these same forces reversed their direction when Charlie began to emerge from the carapace of marriage, sweeping Rebecca up in an ecstasy of renewed importance whose unforeseen consequence was that she now often accused me of disliking Charlie, or at least regarding her with suspicion. Rebecca’s theory was that I suspected Charlie of a cultish determination to motivate her friends to leave their husbands as she had left hers; or, less stridently, that exposure to Charlie would inadvertently result in the contagion of divorce entering our midst. In fact, if my awareness of Charlie possessed a certain clarity, then it resulted from a strange association I felt with the idea not of her notoriety but of her shame. Her wedding was bombastic and strikingly conventionaclass="underline" when the music started I remember she and her husband waltzed around the mud-spattered marquee before the applauding crowd, he in a dinner jacket and she in a long white dress too modish and flattering, somehow, for sincerity or even passion. Every time I saw her I remembered with what determination she had engineered the public display of her mistake.
‘It might have fallen on any of us,’ I observed.
‘That’s what I said to mum and dad,’ said Rebecca. ‘I said, look, why all the fuss about the insurance? It’s good that it’s come down. Nothing can insure you against a balcony falling on your head. Thank God it happened, I say,’ she concluded urgently.
Charlie laughed. ‘You do put things in the funniest way, Becca. Mark says she reverses into her sentences,’ she said, to me. Mark was Charlie’s boyfriend.
‘Mark’s in Germany,’ Rebecca informed me, darkly, as though I might find myself there too if I wasn’t careful.
‘For work,’ Charlie added. ‘Not on holiday.’
She appeared to find this distinction so significant that a moment later she said: ‘Does anybody go to Germany on holiday?’
‘My parents go there every year on their way to the Salzburg festival,’ I said.
‘Do they?’ she replied, contriving to seem enthusiastic. Her manner contributed to my mounting impression that I was being humoured.
‘They like music,’ I said.
‘I didn’t realise you came from such cultivated stock.’
‘Oh, they’re obsessed with it,’ Rebecca said, as though cultivation were generally agreed to be a nuisance. ‘They made him start violin lessons when he was about three. That’s why his fingers are such funny shapes.’
‘Let’s see!’ Charlie exclaimed.
I held out my hands in front of her with the fingers splayed.
‘My God,’ she said, ‘they are. That one bends inwards.’ She pointed at the smallest finger on my left hand. ‘Look, Becca, it’s almost at a right angle to the others.’
‘I know,’ said Rebecca absently.
‘It’s the equivalent of foot-binding!’ Charlie exclaimed.
‘Not quite,’ I said.
‘Actually,’ Charlie resumed after a pause, as though to pacify me, ‘Mark says Germany’s lovely.’
Rebecca gave an astringent laugh.
‘Of all the things I can think of to say about Germany, that’s about the least convincing. “Auschwitz? Yes, it was lovely.”’
‘I think he was talking about the countryside,’ said Charlie vaguely.
‘Oh, the countryside,’ said Rebecca. ‘Where people said they never noticed anything.’
‘In fact, he did mention a few strange things,’ Charlie said. She gave the impression of continually arriving late in the conversation. It was unclear whether this was deliberate or not.
‘Like what?’
‘His German associates disapprove of his use of public swimming pools. Apparently it’s become a sort of standing joke. One of them said to him that he hoped Mark washed properly afterwards and Mark asked him why and he said because the pools are used by black people. Don’t you think that’s horrible?’
Rebecca looked stricken. ‘And what did he say?’
‘I don’t know,’ Charlie said. ‘I don’t think he said anything.’
‘I would have come home,’ Rebecca declared. ‘I wouldn’t even have hesitated.’
‘It’s funny how little we know about each other, isn’t it?’ Charlie said, to me. ‘Mark’s collating a study for the EU about the way national populations spend their time.’
‘I wouldn’t even have hesitated,’ Rebecca said again.
‘Apparently the Germans do hardly any work. That’s not what you’d think, is it? The French spend all their time grooming. I can’t remember what the English do. Could it be cooking?’
‘I never cook,’ said Rebecca dramatically. ‘Never.’
‘Mark thinks it’s interesting, anyway,’ said Charlie, shrugging her shoulders.
‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ said Rebecca. ‘He’s a man. Any chance to be dispassionate — any chance to surrender your humanity in the face of a statistic!’