The Party: The thrilling Richard & Judy Book Club Pick 2018. Elizabeth Day
isn’t stupid, Lucy.
It was as I was looking at her that Lucy’s expression changed. Her eyes – brown, lively – acquired a liquid quality, as though their brownness could seep out if left unguarded. I realised, too late, that what I was seeing in those darkened pupils, was lust. She leaned in, clasping her hands behind my neck and I succumbed because it was easier than anything else. And would it do so very much harm?
Her lips were soft and doughy. The kiss became moister and more enthused. I could hear a faint moaning sound coming from Lucy’s throat and then I pulled away, hands on her shoulders, a firm, paternal, ‘We shouldn’t be doing this.’
She looked at me sadly.
‘Why not?’
‘I … well, look …’
‘We get on well, don’t we? I mean, I like you.’ A meaningful little lacuna. ‘I really like you. Can’t we just … see where it goes? I’m lonely. I know you’re lonely …’ This came as news to me. The truth was, I did feel alone but I thought I had masked it sufficiently well from prying eyes in the office. At that stage, Ben was getting more serious with Serena and I was increasingly at a loose end in the evenings. Whereas, previously, the two of us had frequently gone drinking in Soho, starting off in a private members’ club before graduating to dinner at Quo Vadis and a nightcap at the Atlantic, these days Ben was more likely to stay in cooking pasta and watching films with Serena. He had asked me to find my own place so that she could move into the mews house I had shared with him since we graduated.
‘Time to grow up, mate,’ he had said, slapping me on the back. Touch came so easily to Ben. It was something I both hated and loved about him.
So perhaps I was particularly vulnerable to attention when Lucy came along. I realise now that is not an excuse.
I walked her home that evening. She lived in a surprisingly nice flat off the North End Road. I say surprisingly because I had assumed, from the dowdiness of her clothing and her penchant for buying men’s jackets from charity shops, that money was tight. It turned out I was wrong about that. Lucy’s parents were quite well off, in a hearty, middle-class kind of way. They had sent their children to private school and lived in a red-brick farmhouse in Gloucestershire. At Christmas-time, they attended the carol concert at Tewkesbury Cathedral.
I deposited her at the door.
‘Come up,’ Lucy said, tugging at the sleeve of my coat.
I shook my head, feigning regret.
‘No,’ I said, trailing my fingers down her cheek. ‘That wouldn’t be right. Next time.’
I kissed the top of her head, inhaling Timotei and light sweat, and walked away, raising one arm aloft as I went.
‘See you tomorrow,’ she called out to my retreating form.
For whatever reason, the evening with Lucy had left me experiencing an uncomfortable surge of different emotions. I thought of my mother, of the way she looked at me when I told her, when I was back from school one Easter holiday, that she shouldn’t say ‘settee’ but ‘sofa’ and that the way she pronounced ‘cinema’ without elongating the final ‘a’ was embarrassing.
I found myself walking towards Brompton Cemetery and although it was late and I knew the main gates would be closed, I also knew from previous visits that there was a point in the wall on the Lillie Road where the stones had come loose and you could crawl through quite easily on your hands and knees.
This I did, the palms of my hands gathering up bits of twig and pine cone and leaving a latticed indentation of dirt across my skin. I stood, brushing myself clean. A piece of lichen had lodged itself in my hair. I shook it out.
The cemetery stood in the gloom of night, half lit here and there by a weak streetlamp. Gravestones and silhouetted stone angels loomed out of the shadows. Some notable historical figures were buried nearby although I’d never tried to seek out their graves. My favourite gravestone (if one can have such a thing) was to mark the passing of a young man called Horace Brass who died at the age of sixteen in 1910. His name was carved in looped art nouveau cursive.
I started walking towards it, hands in my pockets. A man fell into step beside me. I glanced to one side and saw that, no, this was not a man but a boy. A teenage boy, like Horace Brass, pale and thin as a silver birch. He had greasy hair and spots around his mouth.
‘Looking for company?’ he said.
‘No,’ I said too loudly. ‘No I don’t … I mean, I’m not.’
A fizz of anger in my solar plexus. I doubled up my pace and walked swiftly back the way I had come.
The next day, I was late into the office. I had a migraine, I recall, and with every step I took, the ground felt too far away for my feet to make contact with it. I sat at my desk, shading my eyes from the sunlight spooling through the windows, and flicked through the latest issue of the Art Newspaper, pretending to concentrate on the words. When Lucy came in, she smiled at me and I remember this internal surge of relief that she still liked me. In Lucy’s mind, I was still the man she had kissed outside her front door, the man she had wanted to come upstairs, the man she respected and liked and enjoyed spending time with. In her mind, I was the nice Martin Gilmour. I was the Martin Gilmour I wanted to be.
I smiled back at her. That day, we went again for lunch together, taking our supermarket sandwiches to sit on our coats in Kensington Gardens. I kissed her, taking her face in both my hands, conveying a tenderness I almost felt. She tasted of prawns and mayonnaise. I felt no stirring, no passion, no love. But there was affection there, and fondness too. And there was an understanding of sorts. I am sure of that. I did not pull the wool over her eyes, as my mother might have said. Lucy knew what I was. Really, she can’t complain.
Of course, nothing is as easy as it first appears. I used to like Lucy so much, truly I did. Over the years, that like has been dulled: brass left unpolished. The same qualities that drew me to her: an uncomplicated view of the world, her mild eccentricity, her un-groomed refusal to make the best of herself and above all, her adoration of me, now set me on edge. And then there’s the children thing, naturally. I’d always told her I didn’t want any of my own and she accepted it in the beginning. But that was before her friends started popping them out with alacrity, posting twelve-week scans and pictures of bleary-eyed newborns on Facebook with humdrum frequency. Our socialising changed – it was no longer nights in the pub but picnics in the park surrounded by screaming toddlers, or early-evening barbecues, the timing of everything defined by when babysitters could be relied upon to arrive and leave or when Isadora or Humphrey or Matilda could be put down for their naps.
Oh, and isn’t Lucy wonderful with kids? Look at how she plays with them! Forever kneeling down to meet their eyes; taking them by the hand; running after them in a game of tag, her floral dress breezing round her knees. She had six godchildren. But every time she went to Tiffany to buy a silver charm bracelet or engraved tankard for yet another christening, something within her hardened. She lost that yielding softness she once had.
I suppose it didn’t help that Ben and I were so close. Difficult for any woman to come into that situation and hope to get my undivided attention. But, as I often told her, that’s the way it had always been. Ben and I went way back. Best friends from school. So close we had, at one stage, been informally christened by his mother as ‘Starsky and Hutch’. Later, Ben’s wife Serena had coined a different phrase.
‘You’re always there, aren’t you, Martin?’ she had said. ‘Ben’s little shadow.’
For whatever reason, the moniker had stuck. Little shadow. Even Ben calls me it now. I’m in his phone under ‘LS’.
The real reason we weren’t staying at the house on the night of the party was that Ben hadn’t asked. Lucy was right: there were more than enough rooms to accommodate a small army of guests even on the night of his fortieth birthday. And, yes, I had been offended by this omission. I’d left it too late to book anywhere decent. Their new house was in Tipworth,