‘Eloise hates me smoking,’ he said. ‘She says it makes her feel like our life is in a state of crisis. If it’s a crisis –’ he tossed the cigarette butt into the dark bushes – ‘then it’s a permanent one.’
Lawrence had lost weight. He was expensively dressed and his appearance was sleeker and more groomed than it had been in the past. There was an air of faintly portentous vitality about him, almost of excitement. Despite his disavowal of crisis, standing outside his country house he did look a little like an actor in some drama of bourgeois life. There were other guests besides me, he told me before we went inside: a friend of Eloise’s from London and also a mutual friend of theirs who lived locally. The mutual friend was how he and Eloise had met and was a frequent visitor to the house.
‘We try to keep up the libations,’ Lawrence said, with a grimace-like smile.
He opened the big, gnarled front door and we passed through a dark hall to another door edged in light, from beyond which came the sounds of music and conversation. It opened on to a large, low-ceilinged room that was illuminated by so many candles it seemed for an instant to be on fire. It was very warm, and furnished with things I didn’t recognise from Lawrence’s former existence: modern, cuboid sofas; a vast glass-and-steel coffee table; a rug made of an animal’s pelt. A number of unfamiliar modern paintings hung around the walls. I wondered how Lawrence had created it all so quickly, as if it were a stage set. Eloise and two other women sat around the coffee table on the low sofas drinking champagne. At the other end of the room, a number of children were sitting and lying in a group on the floor, playing a game. An older girl was beside them, sitting on a chair. She had striking straight red hair that fell like a veil to her waist and she wore a very short sleeveless red dress that showed the whole extent of her large bare white limbs. On her feet was a pair of strappy red shoes with pointed heels so high that it would have been difficult for her to walk more than a few paces.
Eloise stood up to greet me. The other two women stayed where they were. Eloise was elegantly dressed and her face was carefully made up; her two friends also wore dresses and high heels. They looked like they were all waiting to go out to some grand party rather than remaining here for the evening in the dark, fog-bound countryside. It seemed a waste that there was no one to admire them. Eloise drew close and plucked at my clothes, tutting.
‘Always so dark,’ she said. I could smell her perfume. She herself was wearing a soft knitted dress made of cream-coloured yarn. She drew still closer, scrutinising my face. She brushed her fingertips over my cheek and then stood back to examine them. ‘I just wondered what you were wearing on your skin,’ she said. ‘You’re very pale. These –’ she plucked at my clothes again – ‘are draining you.’
She introduced me to the two women, who didn’t get up but stretched out their bare arms from the depths of the sofa to shake my hand with varnished fingers. One of them was a dark, very slender woman with a fleshy lipsticked mouth and a long, narrow, bony face. She wore a clinging leopard-print dress and a heavy gold collar-like necklace around her sinewy throat. The other had fair flossy hair and a severe Nordic beauty, accentuated by the white sheath in which she was encased. The children were becoming restive in their corner and presently a little girl with a pair of wire-and-muslin wings attached to her back extracted herself from the group and came to stand beside us. The fair woman said something to her in a foreign language and the girl replied petulantly. Then she began to clamber up on to the back of the sofa, a development the woman did her best to ignore until the little girl was behind her and threw herself down on top of her with her arms wrapped tightly around the woman’s neck.
‘Ella!’ the woman said, startled. She made an ineffectual attempt to release herself. ‘Ella, what are you doing?’
The child laughed wildly, sprawled across the woman’s back with her mouth open and her head thrown back. I could see the white stumps of her small teeth in her pink gums. Then she climbed over the woman’s shoulder and, still hanging from her neck, flung herself heavily into her lap, where she writhed and kicked her legs unconstrainedly. I saw that the woman was either unwilling or unable to take control of the situation and had therefore left herself with no alternative but to act as though it wasn’t happening.
‘Did you drive here from London?’ she asked me, with difficulty, while the child writhed in her lap.
It was hard to participate in her pretence, as the child had her arms so tightly around her neck that she was visibly throttling her. Fortunately Lawrence passed by at that moment and, easily detaching the girl, wings and all, from the woman’s lap, cheerfully carried her suddenly limp and unprotesting form back to the other end of the room. The woman put her hand to her throat, where a number of red marks remained, watching him.
‘Lawrence is so good with Ella,’ she said. She spoke mildly, almost disinterestedly, as though she had observed the scene that had just occurred rather than participated in it. She had the very slight drawl of an accent. ‘She recognises his authority without being frightened of him.’
Her name was Birgid: she told me that she had become a close student of Lawrence’s behaviour and character over the past year, since he had taken up with Eloise. Eloise was one of her oldest friends; she had wanted, she said, to make sure that Lawrence was good enough for her. At first he had bridled at her scrutiny and the way she challenged what he said and did but in the end they had grown close, and frequently stayed up and talked after Eloise had gone to bed. Eloise was often very tired, Birgid added, as her younger son had sleeping problems and woke up several times a night; the older one, meanwhile, was struggling at school. Eloise didn’t have the energy to challenge Lawrence – who liked to get his own way – herself, and so Birgid did it for her.
‘I have seen it before with Eloise,’ Birgid said. ‘Men like her because she gives the impression of independence while being in fact completely submissive. She attracts bullies,’ she added, wrinkling her small nose. ‘Her last husband was an absolute pig.’