Chapter 11 Martin #3
‘Really?’ I say, riveted. ‘That’s certain to set the cat among the pigeons.’
‘The cat and the pussy,’ Serena says and I laugh. She’s very witty when she chooses to be.
Ben continues eating his pasta. A vein in his neck pops. I wonder if – delicious realisation! – he feels left out? He used to be like this when he lost a rugby match. You wouldn’t know he was furious until, hours later, he would punch the dorm wall until his knuckles bled.
The children carry on with their nonsensical squabbling. Bear knocks against a table leg and one of the open Coke cans judders then tips over, spilling into the salad. Serena leaves to smoke another cigarette, already breaking her ‘one a week’ rule.
I watch it all from the kitchen table. I have never wanted children.
I got close with Lucy, but she had a miscarriage and I was secretly grateful for it.
When we got divorced, she cited ‘irreconcilable differences’ but we both knew that was coded legalese for what I’d never been brave enough to call by its name.
Over the years, as I came to accept my own proclivities, I’d watched as gay couples got married and had babies via surrogate and felt nothing but scorn for their stupidity.
Why try so hard to ape the worst examples of heterosexual ego?
People only ever want children as replications of themselves.
It goes awry because the children they then have are either mirror images and reflect something the parent doesn’t like about themselves, or baffling little monsters who bear no resemblance to their biological inheritance.
And they cost so much money, don’t they?
I have long believed the ultimate status symbol is not private jets or stately homes or accounts with endless overdraft facilities at Coutts, but the sheer number of progeny a couple can produce, house, feed and send to public school.
I know a wildly intimidating female hedge-fund boss who has six of the darn things.
Six children! As if she’s a Tudor monarch.
The dumpy housekeeper walks through the door.
‘Excuse me, sir, but your guests are here.’
‘Ah, Jarvis!’
Ben rises immediately, scraping his chair on the tiles.
Serena stubs her cigarette out on the patio, no doubt for the gardener to clear away in the morning, and wafts back indoors.
I remember their gardener: stringy and muscular; bad teeth but an attractive, outdoorsy face. I wonder if it’s still the same one.
‘Is your gardener still—’
I am interrupted by the housekeeper clearing away the plates.
Hector is now kicking the fridge door, Cressida is shouting at her older sister and Bear is wailing about a sore ankle.
Cosima has slunk away to the sofa with a book which, when she turns the page, I am astonished to see is The Communist Manifesto.
‘Enough!’ Serena says. ‘You can all go to your rooms.’
They scamper off, apart from Cosima who stays put. Serena links her arm through mine.
‘Let’s go through. Away from the madness,’ she says in a conspiratorial murmur. ‘I’m dying to show you some new paintings I’ve bought.’
The paintings are hung in the corridor and turn out to be pink blobby close-ups of female anatomy: navel here, earlobe there, a tongue entwined with an orchid bloom and so on.
‘Very nice,’ I lie.
She opens the door into the drawing room. The Jarvises are already installed on one of the sage-green sofas.
‘Martin,’ Jarvis says, groaning slightly as he pushes his heft upright. ‘I heard you were here. What an unexpected surprise.’
‘I suppose surprises are, by their nature, unexpected,’ I say.
He shakes my hand, drops it and turns to Serena.
‘Serena. Looking lovely as always.’
He kisses her on both cheeks. His wife stands next to him in a brown and yellow patterned skirt which resembles a pair of grandmotherly curtains.
Bitsy Jarvis is exactly as I remember her, which is to say hardly at all.
Her defining characteristic is that she is thoroughly unmemorable, as if someone has inexpertly sketched her silhouette, blurring her features with uncertain pencil lines in case it was all a mistake and had to be rubbed out and started again.
‘Bitsy, isn’t it?’ I say.
She is taken aback I know her name.
‘What? Oh. Yes. Yes.’ She proffers a hand, limp as freshly washed lettuce. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t recall our having met …?’
‘Martin,’ I say, silently listing every single occasion I’ve been forced to make painful small talk with her in corners at Fitzmaurice dinners and parties and fundraisers. Ponies and school fees and the difficulties of finding parking in the centre of town.
‘Martin Gilmour.’
‘Of course.’ Her face remains blank. ‘And what brings you to this … this …’ She waves her hand around the room.
‘Part of the world? Ben invited me. We’ve recently reconnected.’
Across the room, Serena catches my eye and gives a little moue of sympathy.
Behind her is a tall walnut bookshelf, the wood polished to a slippery sheen.
Books occupy a lower shelf. The higher ones are punctuated with artful trinkets and silver-framed photographs: Serena and Ben on their wedding day; the two of them windswept on a beach in the sunshine with their children; Ben arm in arm with Jarvis in black tie; Ben standing outside the Houses of Parliament with his parents; Fliss, Ben and their long-dead sibling Magnus.
None of me, naturally. I’ve been airbrushed out.
‘Ben, we forgot logs for the fire,’ Serena says.
‘A fire?’ he says. ‘In this weather?’
‘It’s for atmosphere,’ she says, signalling for him to follow her out of the room.
They leave and I am trapped by Bitsy.
‘But how do you fit in with the Fitzmaurices?’ she asks me now.
‘We were best friends at Burtonbury.’
‘Burtonbury!’ she exclaims. ‘That can’t be so.’
I wait.
‘My husband was at Burtonbury,’ she says.
‘Yes.’
She pushes her head back, so that her chin is almost entirely swallowed by her neck.
‘But you must have known each other.’
‘We did.’
My glass is empty. I wonder if I could make my way to the drinks cabinet and—
‘We were pals, weren’t we, Martin?’
Jarvis is now at his wife’s side, placing a meaty arm around her thick waist. I smell his sweat. He has always smelled like this: of fusty onions and superiority.
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ I reply. ‘But,’ I turn solicitously to Bitsy, ‘we did indeed know each other.’
‘And now here you are again, LS.’ Jarvis blinks slowly. ‘We simply can’t get rid of you.’
I stare at him.
‘Ellis?’ Bitsy says, spearing an olive with a toothpick. ‘Why are you calling him Ellis? He says his name’s Martin.’
‘LS,’ I explain. ‘My nickname used to be Little Shadow.’
‘Because he followed us around all the time,’ Jarvis adds.
‘Goodness! How strange,’ Bitsy says, spitting out bits of olive as she speaks. One of them lands between my thumb and forefinger.
‘Isn’t it?’ I say, nodding my head in a great show of agreement. ‘Such a lack of imagination. At least the nickname could have been funny, couldn’t it, Bitsy? Is Bitsy a nickname?’
‘Gracious me, no.’ She glances at me with horror. ‘It’s short for Elizabeth. That should be perfectly obvious.’ I skewer myself an olive and gesture with it like a miniature sword.
‘As it was,’ I continue, as if she hasn’t spoken, ‘it just all felt … so savagely … boring.’
I eat the olive. Jarvis’s face is pale. He tries to find something to say, chewing the air while he attempts to form a word, but he can’t do it. He closes his mouth with a popping sound, goldfish-like.
And then – praise be! – Serena is back at my side, offering me an ice-cold martini. I feel a quiet anger tremble beneath my skin. I take the drink and she leads me towards one of the sofas. We sit.
‘You looked like you needed saving,’ she says.
‘Thank you.’
I drink. The alcohol punches the back of my throat. Better.
‘Bitsy is deathly.’
‘That’s terribly unfair on death.’
Serena snorts.
‘Death would never wear that skirt,’ I continue.
She tries to swallow her laughter and the effort causes her eyes to well up.
‘Death would rather die than be married to Andrew Jarvis.’
Abruptly, the giggling stops. She sips her drink, gazing at an indeterminate point in the middle distance.
I’ve lost her. I find myself scrabbling for a morsel that will return her to me.
What did I say wrong? What misstep did I make?
And what could I now say or do or be in order to wrestle back her attention?
A great lassitude washes over me. I am reminded of every moment in the past when I was sucked into the Fitzmaurice orbit and encouraged to believe I mattered.
Lady Katherine would smile at me for helping prune the rose bushes.
George would pat me on the back after I’d made a croquet hoop.
Fliss would wink at me for laughing at her joke across the dinner table.
Ben would pass me a roll-up, the paper still damp from his lips.
Then the usual seedlings of hope would start sprouting.
It was the hope that was cruellest – relentless in its irrepressibility, despite the inevitability of the next day’s trampling, when Lady Katherine would raise her eyebrows at something stupid I said.
When George wouldn’t offer me a lift to the station.
When Fliss would slam the door to her bedroom.
When Ben would go for a beer with Jarvis and not invite me.
I would withdraw, silent, unobserved, understanding the cool, clear truth of not being cared about.
So then I, too, pretended not to care until it became a muscle I flexed so repeatedly that the pretence was part of me.
The Fitzmaurices had taught me that in order to survive, you had to pretend more and care less.
And then you had to be careless. Until there was no caring at all.
Then – and only then – you were ready to rule.
‘What are we all talking about?’ Ben says, re-entering the room right on cue with a basket of logs.