‘What, the nannies?’ said Bridget giggling. ‘Anyway, what if you have a girl?’
Nicholas looked at her sternly.
‘I guess that putting things down is your speciality,’ said Anne to Nicholas.
‘Oh, I know it’s an unfashionable view to hold these days,’ Nicholas went on complacently, ‘but in my opinion nothing that happens to you as a child really matters.’
‘If we’re getting down to things that don’t really matter,’ said Anne, ‘you’re top of my list.’
‘Oh, my word,’ said Nicholas, in his sports commentator’s voice, ‘a ferocious backhand from the young American woman, but the line judge rules it out.’
‘From what you’ve told me,’ said Bridget, still elated by the thought of nannies in tailcoats, ‘nothing much that happened in your childhood did matter: you just did what everyone expected.’ Feeling a vague pressure on her right thigh, she glanced round at David, but he seemed to be staring ahead, organizing a sceptical expression on his face. The pressure stopped. On her other side, Victor peeled a nectarine with hurried precision.
‘It’s true,’ said Nicholas, making a visible effort at equanimity, ‘that my childhood was uneventful. People never remember happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering. I remember stroking my cheek against the velvet collar of my overcoat. Asking my grandfather for pennies to throw into that golden pool at the Ritz. Big lawns. Buckets and spades. That sort of thing.’
Bridget could not concentrate on what Nicholas was saying. She felt cold metal against her knee. Looking down, she saw David lifting the edge of her dress with a small silver knife and running it along her thigh. What the fuck did he think he was doing? She frowned at him reproachfully. He merely pressed the point a little more firmly into her thigh, without looking at her.
Victor wiped the tips of his fingers with his napkin, while answering a question which Bridget had missed. He sounded a little bored and not surprisingly, when she heard what he had to say. ‘Certainly if the degree of psychological connectedness and psychological continuity have become sufficiently weakened, it would be true to say that a person should look upon his childhood with no more than charitable curiosity.’
Bridget’s mind flashed back to her father’s foolish conjuring tricks, and her mother’s ghastly floral-print dresses, but charitable curiosity was not what she felt.
‘Would you like one of these?’ said David, lifting a fig from the bowl in the middle of the table. ‘They’re at their best at this time of year.’
‘No, thanks,’ she said.
David pinched the fig firmly between his fingers and pushed it towards Bridget’s mouth, ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I know how much you like them.’
Bridget opened her mouth obediently and took the fig between her teeth. She blushed because the table had fallen silent and she knew that everyone was watching her. As soon as she could she took the fig from her mouth and asked David if she could borrow his knife to peel it with. David admired her for the speed and stealth of this tactic and handed over the knife.
Eleanor watched Bridget take the fig with a familiar sense of doom. She could never see David impose his will on anyone without considering how often he had imposed it on her.
At the root of her dread was the fragmented memory of the night when Patrick was conceived. Against her will, she pictured the Cornish house on its narrow headland, always damp, always grey, more Atlantic than earth. He had pushed the hollow base of her skull against the corner of the marble table. When she had broken free he had punched the back of her knees and made her fall on the stairs and raped her there, with her arms twisted back. She had hated him like a stranger and hated him like a traitor. God, how she had loathed him, but when she had become pregnant she had said she would stay if he never, never touched her again.
Bridget chewed the fig unenthusiastically. As Anne watched her, she could not help thinking of the age-old question which every woman asks herself at some time or other: do I have to swallow it? She wondered whether to picture Bridget as a collared slave draped over the feet of an oriental bully, or as a rebellious schoolgirl being forced to eat the apple pie she tried to leave behind at lunch. She suddenly felt quite detached from the company around her.
Nicholas struck Anne as more pathetic than he had before. He was just one of those Englishmen who was always saying silly things to sound less pompous, and pompous things to sound less silly. They turned into self-parodies without going to the trouble of acquiring a self first. David, who thought he was the Creature from the Black Lagoon, was just a higher species of this involuted failure. She looked at Victor slumped round-shouldered over the remains of his nectarine. He had not kept up the half-clever banter which he usually felt it his duty to provide. She could remember him earlier in the summer saying, ‘I may spend my days doubting doubting, but when it comes to gossip I like hard facts.’ From then on it had been nothing but hard facts. Today he was different. Perhaps he really wanted to do some work again.
Eleanor’s crushed expression no longer moved her either. The only thing that made Anne’s detachment falter was the thought of Patrick waiting on the stairs, his disappointment widening as he waited, but it only spurred her on to the same conclusion: that she wanted nothing more to do with these people, that it was time to leave, even if Victor would be embarrassed by leaving early. She looked over to Victor, raising her eyebrows and darting her eyes towards the door. Instead of the little frown she had expected from him, Victor nodded his head discreetly as if agreeing with the pepper mill. Anne let a few moments go by then leaned over to Eleanor and said, ‘It’s sad, but I think we really must leave. It’s been a long day, you must be tired too.’
‘Yes,’ said Victor firmly, ‘I must get up early tomorrow morning and make some progress with my work.’ He heaved himself up and started to thank Eleanor and David before they had time to organize the usual protests.
In fact, David hardly looked up. He continued to run his thumbnail around the sealed end of his cigar, ‘You know the way out,’ he said, in response to their thanks, ‘I hope you’ll forgive me for not coming to wave goodbye.’
‘Never,’ said Anne, more seriously than she had intended.
Eleanor knew there was a formula everybody used in these situations, but she searched for it in vain. Whenever she thought of what she was meant to say, it seemed to dash around the corner, and lose itself in the crowd of things she should not say. The most successful fugitives were often the dullest, the sentences that nobody notices until they are not spoken: ‘How nice to see you … won’t you stay a little longer … what a good idea…’
Victor closed the dining room door behind him carefully, like a man who does not want to wake a sleeping sentry. He smiled at Anne and she smiled back, and they were suddenly conscious of how relieved they were to be leaving the Melroses. They started to laugh silently and to tiptoe towards the hall.
‘I’ll just check if Patrick is still here,’ Anne whispered.
‘Why are we whispering?’ Victor whispered.
‘I don’t know,’ Anne whispered back. She looked up the staircase. It was empty. He had obviously grown tired of waiting and gone back to bed. ‘I guess he’s asleep,’ she said to Victor.
They went out of the front door and up the wide steps towards their car. The moon was bruised by thin cloud and surrounded by a ring of dispersed light.
‘You can’t say I didn’t try,’ said Anne, ‘I was hanging right in there until Nicholas and David started outlining their educational programme. If some big-deal friend of theirs, like George, was feeling sad and lonely they would fly back to England and personally mix the dry martinis and load the shotguns, but when David’s own son is feeling sad and lonely in the room next door, they fight every attempt to make him less miserable.’