‘I don't have a dress. '
He gave her a frank once-over, making allowances, and said, ‘But it's not evening dress, you'll do. '
And now she had to find somewhere to spend the night. She had come away without enough money: had come away, she saw now, inefficiently, in an unplanned and foolish way. It was all a bit of a haze: she remembered Father McGuire taking command. Had she been a bit sick, perhaps? Was she now? She didn't feel herself, whatever that meant, for if she was not the Doctor Sylvia everyone knew at her hospital, who was she?
She rang Sister Molly, who was in, and asked to stay the night. Sylvia took a taxi there, was welcomed, and heard a good deal of on the whole good-natured mockery of the conference on the Ethics of International Aid, and all similar conferences.
' They talk,’ said Sister Molly. ' They get paid to travel to some beauty spot and talk nonsense you' d not believe. '
‘I’d hardly call Senga a beauty spot. '
'That is true, but they are off every day to see the lions and the giraffes and the dear little monkeys and I don't think they notice that the land is perishing from the drought. '
Sylvia told Molly about the dinner, said she had only what she had on, heard that it was a pity Molly was at least four sizes larger than Sylvia, who could otherwise borrow her one and only dress but as it was she personally would see to it that the suit was cleaned and ready by six o ' clock. Having forgotten these amenities of real civilisation, Sylvia was perhaps disproportionately moved, and took off her suit, lay down on her little iron bed, just like the one she had at the Mission, and was asleep. Sister Molly stood over her for a while, the green suit folded over her arm, her face shedding beams ofbenevolent enquiry, judicious and experienced: after all, she did spend her life assessing people and situations from one end of Zimlia to the other. She did not like what she saw. Bending closer she checked up on this and that feature, sweaty brow, dry lips, flushed face, and lifted Sylvia's hand to look at the wrist where visibly pounded an intemperate pulse.
When Sylvia woke, her suit, nicely pinned and presented, hung on the door. On the chair was a selection of knickers, and a silk slip. 'I got too fat for these ages ago.' Also some smart shoes. Sylvia washed dust out of her hair, got dressed, put on the shoes, hoping she could still manage heels, and took a taxi to Butler's. She suspected she was feverish, but because it would be so inconvenient to be ill, decided she wasn't.
Outside Butler's the international crowd stood chatting, waving to each other, resuming conversations that might have been interrupted in Bogota or Benares. Andrew was waiting for Sylvia, on the steps. Mona was beside him in a pink floaty dress that made her look like one of the species tulips, jagged petals, that seemed cut out of crystallised light. Sylvia knew Andrew was anxious about how she might look, for if evening dress was not obligatory then none of the women was less smart than Mona. But his smile said, You' re all right, and he took her arm. The three went to the staircase which was grand enough for a film set, though in the best possible taste. It delivered them to a terrace where little flowering trees and a fountain filled the dusk with freshness. Lights from inside picked out a face, the dazzle of a white suit, the flash of a necklace. People greeted Andrew: how popular he was, this handsome and distinguished grey-haired gentleman, who must deserve the glamorous girl with him, since the fait accompli of the marriage proved he did.
When they went into dinner it was a private room, but large enough for the hundred or so guests, and what a delightful room it was, achieving what its designers had intended, that the privileged people who used it would not be able to say whether they were in Benares or Bogota or Senga.
Sylvia knew some faces from this morning in the café, but at others she had to look and look again... yes, Good Lord, there was Geoffrey Bone, as handsome as ever, and beside him the incendiary head, now subdued to a well-brushed russet, of Daniel, his shadow. And there was James Patton. For some people you have to wait decades before understanding what Nature has intended for them all along: in this case he had reached his culmination as man of the people, affable and amiable, comfily rotund, his right hand ever at the ready to reach out and clasp whatever flesh presented itself. There he was, a Member of Parliament in a safe Labour seat, and on this occasion a guest of Caring International, at Geoffrey's invitation. And Jill... yes, Jill, a large woman with a greyish coiffure, senior councillor in a London borough notorious for its mismanagement of funds, though the word corrupt could never, surely, be associated with this solid citizen whose police-bashing, rioting, American-Embassy-storming days were so long behind one could be pretty sure she had forgotten them or was murmuring, Oh, yes, I was a bit of a Red once.
Sylvia had not been put next to Andrew who was at the head of the table, flanked by two important South Americans, but beside Mona, some places away. Sylvia knew she was as invisible as an anonymous little brown bird next to a displaying peacock, for people looked so often at Mona whose name everyone knew if they followed fashion at all. And why was Mona here? She said to Sylvia that she was attending the conference as Andrew's personal assistant, and congratulated Sylvia, giggling, on her new status as Andrew's assistant secretary, which is how she was being described when introduced. Sylvia was able to sit quietly and observe, and imagine how Clever and Zebedee would look in these attractive uniforms, scarlet and white and so striking on the black skins of the smiling waiters. She knew, very well, how these youths had had to work, intrigue, beg for these jobs, and how their parents had sacrificed for them, so they could serve these international stars with food most of them had never heard of until coming to this hotel.
Sylvia was offered the choice ofcrocodile tails, in pink mayonnaise, and palm hearts imported from South East Asia, and all the time her heart was weeping, yes it was, a quiet wailing went on inside her, as she sat there beside Andrew's beautiful bride. It would not last, this marriage, you had only to look how they presented themselves, with the sleek complacency of well-fed cats, to know that she had said yes to Andrew probably for no better reason than she enjoyed saying, 'I have always liked older men,' to annoy younger ones, and he, who had not been married and had had to suffer the usual rumours, although he had been the 'friend' of a dozen well-known women, had finally needed to show his colours and make his statement, and he had, for here she was, his child bride.
Sylvia looked around, and despaired, and thought of her hospital, closed while people in the village were ill or had broken limbs or... there were never less than thirty or forty people a day needing help; she thought of the lack of water, the dust, the AIDS, she could not prevent all these stale old thoughts, which have been thought too often, and to no purpose. She imagined Clever and Zebedee's faces, disconsolate because they had dreamed of being doctors... how badly she had managed everything, she must have, for it all to end like this.
Mona was chatting to the man on her left about her poverty-stricken origins in a slum in Quito: she had been noticed by a visiting delate to a conference on the Costumes of the World. She was confiding to him that Zimlia was the pits, she saw too much on the streets to remind her of what she had escaped from. ' Basically, what I like is Manhattan. It has everything, hasn't it? I don't see why anyone should ever leave it. '
Now everyone was talking about the annual conference due soon, with two hundred delegates from all over the world, which would last a week, with a keynote speech on 'The Perspectives and Implications of Poverty'. Where should it be held? The delegate from India, a handsome woman in a scarlet sari, suggested Sri Lanka, though they would have to be careful because of the terrorists, but there was no more beautiful place in the world. Geoffrey Bone said he had spent three nights in Rio for a conference on the World's Threatened Ecostructure, and there was a hotel there... but, said a Japanese gentleman, the last annual conference had been in South America, and there was a fine hotel in Bali, that part of the world should have the honour. Talk about hotels and their attractions went on for most of the meal, and the consensus was it was time they favoured Europe, how about Italy, though probably strict policing would be essential, because they were all of them luscious targets for kidnappers.