‘Yes, quite. Why can’t they just say their lines? There’s a sort of Shakespearean delivery, which is so irritating. Ah, here we are. I’m starving.’
They handed their coats to the ma?tre d’, who bowed slightly while draping them over his arm and then hung them in a wardrobe. Their table was broad and round and the spotlights twinkled off the glasses and highlighted bright circles on the starchy white tablecloth. Miriam felt happy with her very cold glass of something dry and Argentinian (Ian being the wine expert). She watched him across the table, feeling in his breast pocket and taking out a pair of reading glasses with leopard-print frames – a pair she’d bought for ￡4.99 at Ritz Pharmacy on Heath Street. He put them on the end of his nose in order to read the menu, while Roger talked away at him and Ian laughed at something Rog was saying. The glasses were small and feminine on his patrician face.
‘Darling,’ she said to him, reaching an arm across the table, but with her head turned to Patty, who was talking about the play.
‘Oh yes, sorry,’ he said and took off the glasses to pass them to her so she could read her menu. ‘Come on, everyone, are we ready to order? Nothing will come of nothing, after all.’
And everyone laughed.
Xanthie told the table she’d been re-reading Boccaccio’s Decameron. ‘It’s so witty! I mean, really, I’ve been laughing out loud on the bus.’ And the way she said ‘bus’ was like some glorious egalitarian experiment. Their laughter around the table had the tinkle of money in it.
Now Miriam is peeling off her rubber gloves as her thoughts return to her daughter, as if to a favourite refrain – her beloved topic. Yes, she hopes for more for her daughter than the things she anticipates for her. Now she frowns. It doesn’t make any sense. She wants Edith to fulfil her daughterly duties (thoughtful Christmas presents, regular phone calls, eventually home-cooked meals when Miriam’s in her dotage) yet at the same time she wants to liberate her; she wants for her total professional freedom and a truly feminist husband who empties the dishwasher without being asked. And mingled in, she wants her daughter to share in her suffering, the same sacrifices, and she doesn’t know why. Is it a hunger for fellow feeling or a fear that Edith might succeed where she failed? That Edith might actually throw off the shackles when Miriam … well, she’s spent thirty years effectively wiping the kitchen surfaces and doling out antibiotics for cystitis. It’s so complicated.
She reaches into the cupboard under the sink for a dishwasher tablet, thinking about her beautiful daughter who is still young, who has a flat belly and tight little arms, who can still carry off a bikini, who has yet to fall in love, and she feels pricked with envy. Oh, Will Carter is all right, but he’s a bit up himself and she suspects he isn’t The One. Edith still has that ahead of her – all the pleasure and pain of it. Lucky thing. The older you get, the less choppy life becomes. But Miriam misses it too – the lurching outer edges of feeling that accompany youth. Nothing is exciting any more, though to listen to Xanthie, you’d think reading Boccaccio’s Decameron on the bus was euphoric. Perhaps it is only Miriam for whom life has become duller and sadder, like the silver hair on her head.
‘Where’ve you been? I woke up and you weren’t here,’ she says, smiling at Ian who is coming through the kitchen doorway carrying an orange Sainsbury’s bag and bringing the cold in with him. He is wearing his polo-neck sweater and tracksuit bottoms. He has that curious inability that the upper classes have to wear casual clothes convincingly. She wonders if he emerged from his mother’s vagina in a sports jacket.
He comes over to her at the kitchen counter, kisses her cheek and she smells the winter on him. ‘Got up early and went to the office – I’ve got a ton of paperwork hanging over me.’
‘Poor you,’ she says. ‘Shall I warm you up some stew?’
‘No, no. I’m fine.’
‘I can microwave it; it’s no trouble.’
‘No, I had a sandwich. Edie call yet?’
‘Not yet, no.’