27. Guest v. Finbow Day Five #2
Toward the back of the garden, there was a large grill spitting meat juices and, to the right of it, a long table, which a number of the guests were sitting around.
They were a mixture of young and old, all dressed in colorful clothes, big smiles pasted across their faces.
Anna stood at the far end, a drink and cigarette in hand.
Like Bonamy, who was wearing an orange waistcoat with a Nehru collar, Anna was wearing vaguely ethnic items of clothing: a long skirt made of a red and black wax material, a matching bra top which showed off her ageless waist. Her dark hair was plaited into two long braids, and there were big gold hoops in her ears.
On her forehead was a piece of paper which read Anna Finbow .
“Do you know the name game?” a man next to me whispered as I slipped into the nearest seat.
He wore mirrored aviators, but his face was familiar, and, moments later, I realized I knew him from a famous television show about life on a Cornish farm.
Before long, a tumbler of milky punch was placed in front of me, clinking with ice.
Next, a plate of grilled meat, served with a heap of grains, and a minty dressing.
I drank fast, wanting to catch up with the party around me.
It was exhilarating to be there among all those famous faces, to sit back in the Finbows’ magical garden and just bask in the belonging.
I had to remind myself my stay here was only temporary.
Once I told them the truth about what I had concealed, my role on the inside of this family would be over.
“You’re all laughing,” Anna said, smiling coyly around the table at her guests. The piece of paper was fixed in the middle of her eyebrows like a bindi. “Am I very bloody difficult?”
That provoked more laughter. She took a final drag from her cigarette and stubbed it out on the empty dinner plate of a young boy who was sitting on his mother’s lap, sucking his thumb. “Okay!” she shouted. “Who’s on the clock?”
“Me,” shouted a man over in the corner. My heart froze at his voice. Scottish. Frighteningly familiar. I looked over. There were his ridiculous round glasses, his thick painter’s hands, a blue paisley shirt which strained at his chest.
Lawrence.
Fury coursed through me. The sheer guile of that bastard turning up here. Then my anger shifted to fear. He wouldn’t remember me now, or would he? I turned my head to face away.
“Go!” Lawrence shouted.
“Am I male?” asked Anna.
“No!” everyone called.
“Am I on the television?”
“Yes,” they chorused.
“Am I an actress?”
There was a pause. “A drama queen,” piped Bonamy, who was now standing to the side. Anna laughed along and stroked her chin.
“On the television,” she mused, “but not an actress… am I in reality TV?”
“Sort of,” said a gamine girl about my age, wearing a thin white vest and a Jamaican hair scrunchie. And, when half the table disagreed, she protested. “Well, she sort of is!”
“Okay, then,” said Anna. “Half reality.” She hesitated. “Is my family famous?”
That question quieted all of us, many of the guests looking away.
Anna sensed the change in mood and narrowed her eyes, letting the question linger and studying the expressions of those around the table.
She hadn’t greeted or acknowledged me, and that was thrilling, how readily I’d been absorbed into the retinue.
“Yup,” my neighbor’s voice boomed. “You are well-known.”
“Sounds scurrilous,” Anna said. “I must be a politician. Do I belong to a political species?”
“Only when it suits you,” someone said. “Otherwise, you act as if you hate us.”
Everyone laughed heartily to dissipate the tension. Anna’s lips moved as if she was remembering her previous questions. “On the television…” she began again. “Oh! Do I present things?”
“Yes!” everyone roared, relieved that the family question had been forgotten.
“Am I popular?”
A burst of hilarity at that. A blond woman with taut, beautiful skin lifted her wineglass and said, “You’re adored, darling.”
“By kids or adults or both?”
“Too many words!” someone protested.
But Anna fixed me in her gaze, and tilted her head in exaggerated supplication.
“Help me out here, Gussie, will you?”
Her sudden address startled me. The guests turned and stared, including—I was sure of it—Lawrence.
I clutched my glass tightly, feeling my cheeks burn with terror at the thought of him calling me out in front of everyone.
Not now, I thought, my heart thudding as I pictured the scene that would follow. Not here. He cannot expose me here.
Anna clapped her hands and turned her attention away. I had dithered for too long. “I don’t trust these drunk goons,” she said, pouting. “Am I for grown-ups, or do children love me?”
“They all love you,” my neighbor piped up. “All ages. Even if the kids don’t know you, they still somehow love you, if you get what I mean. You’re sort of everywhere.”
“Okay and, um, am I very beautiful?”
“The most heavenly creature to have walked this earth,” called Bonamy, leaning against a tree.
“Hang on a minute,” Anna said, in a voice like a detective. She drummed her fingers against her cheek. “Am I at this table?”
“Five seconds!” shouted Lawrence over the laughter, as he counted down.
“Oh, bloody hell I am !” Anna laughed. “I’m not Anna Finbow, am I?”
“Yes!” we all shouted as an alarm began to ring loudly and Lawrence called for time, slapping his huge hand down onto the table.
Anna wiggled her hips with triumph as Bonamy kissed her on the mouth.
When they pulled away, her face shone with affection, her eyes twinkling and thickly outlined in mascara.
She laughed heartily at something someone said behind her, then sucked on her cigarette.
Bonamy was right, she did look beautiful. Beneath that beauty was Mary.
I thought back to the time Mary had told me about Anna’s affair with the MP.
Despite the horror of their circumstances, Bonamy and Anna had found the depths of reserve to love each other again.
Their resilience shamed me, as I turned away to fill my glass.
I had hidden so much from them and in search of what?
These flashes of Mary’s expressions in their faces?
Or was it the affection she had withheld?
These were all excuses, I knew. I had been guided by a darker, sadistic comfort: the pleasure of witnessing Mary’s parents suffer her absence, to observe them in deeper sadness than my own.
I turned toward the television presenter and pretended to listen to a long story he was telling, all the while keeping track of Lawrence’s movements and interactions. After ten minutes or so, I rose quietly from the table, ready with the excuse of wanting to help tidy up. But no one saw me leave.
Gradually, the guests departed while I cleaned dishes at the sink.
Still, there were a hardened few, perhaps a dozen, who stayed on drinking.
An art dealer tried to engage me in conversation while I rinsed glasses.
I asked polite questions about his business, but then he slumped sideways onto a window seat, his drink slopping out of his glass and onto the cushion.
All the time, Bonamy and Anna were clattering in and out of the garden, retrieving old records from the living room upstairs, dancing together and getting in the way.
I kept sight of Lawrence through the kitchen window as he sat on a striped garden swing smoking Silk Cuts, talking to the television presenter.
I tracked him as he meandered past me and into the house.
I’d got away with it, I realized then. Lawrence hadn’t noticed me.
Quill was lying in his bed in the corner, happily settled.
The party was winding down. For some moments, I considered it.
If I left now, there would be no rupture and no great scene.
I should tell them on a different day, because the Finbows were too drunk, too occupied to hear my confession.
What compelled me to stay where it was dangerous?
There was somewhere I had to see. Just once.
Only briefly, then I would go. Wiping my hands on a tea towel and checking over my shoulder, I crept quietly upstairs.
The ceramic letters on her bedroom door were wonky.
I paused to straighten the M as I pushed it open and took in the dim stillness of Mary’s bedroom.
The space was a museum to Finbow textiles as much as it was a temple to Mary’s girlhood.
The drawn curtains were upholstered in the same Finbow fabric as the little armchair, the headboard, the lampshade.
It was a familiar print: rows of pale pink ballerinas, entwined with roses.
On a pinboard was a collection of Mary’s old riding rosettes, and tacked on the walls were faded posters of rabbits and watercolors of her houses in Scotland or Greece.
Next to me, on the wall by the bed, I noticed the grubby smudge marks that her fingers had once made.
The sight of them made my stomach curl with guilt; how had I just sat there at the table, avoiding Lawrence’s gaze?
I found myself going over to Mary’s desk, where I knew I could hurt myself.
I opened drawers, searching for evidence of us: a photograph, a little sketch, anything that would prove I’d meant something to her.
And then a sudden sound close by. A toilet flushing. In the corner of the room, a disguised door which had been wallpapered over opened abruptly. Anna appeared.
I froze. Desk drawer open. Chest fallen into the pit of my stomach. Pulse hammering my neck, my fingertips. She jumped when she saw me, then recovered herself.
“Gussie!” she scolded playfully, wagging a finger. I noticed that in her other hand, she was gripping something. “You know, guests aren’t supposed to be up here!”
“I’m just—” I stammered as she walked over and tried to bustle me from the room. “Leaving. Someone took my coat. I wondered if—”