Part 7 (1/2)
”Wa.s.sat, luv?” the driver squawked through the intercom.
”The window!” Meredith was shouting and it felt good. Felt right. ”Please open the window before my friend pukes all over your cab.”
Both windows lowered completely and the cab was filled with rush-hour fog. Meredith was relieved to see the blood rus.h.i.+ng back into Mish's cheeks. They waited a few moments before picking up the conversation they had cut off.
”She was nice enough, I guess,” said Mish, ”but in a dangerous way. Like she was just waiting for something to lose it over. You can tell all the rumours are true-I bet she can be a total c.u.n.t.”
”Mis.h.!.+”
”What? People say that here. It's no big deal.”
”How do you know?”
”I saw it in a movie.”
”What movie?”
”Trainspotting.”
”h.e.l.lo? That was about heroin addicts, and besides, it was set in Scotland.”
”Same difference.” Mish rolled her eyes like an exasperated teenager. ”The point is, I wouldn't want to catch the woman in the wrong mood.”
Meredith hadn't bothered to tell Mish about the incident involving Swain's last stylist and the curling iron.
”And you can immediately tell she's one of those women who's super touchy about her age,” Mish went on, ”not to mention her weight. One of the wardrobe a.s.sistants was telling me they had to rip all the size-eight labels out of her dresses and sew on new ones that said size six.”
”No.”
”Supposedly.”
Somehow the driver had managed to maneuver the car out of the clogged roundabout, and they were now moving over a bridge with the rest of the traffic flow at the pace of corn syrup being poured from a pitcher. Meredith looked out the window at the river and Westminster Abbey. She marvelled at how truly enormous the clock tower was. Unlike most things in life, Meredith thought, Big Ben actually lived up to the promise of its name. The thought of that comforted her.
”You know she's desperate to have a baby,” said Mish.
”She told you that?”
”I can smell it.”
”Really.” Meredith was suddenly uncomfortable. Not just with this conversation but with the whole topic of babies in general. She thought about pregnancy so much these days that talking about it had become embarra.s.sing. Funny how the things that obsessed you privately became a matter of public shame. She felt like a person carrying a secret torch so large she could hardly bear to mention the name of her crush out loud.
”Good luck to her, I guess.”
”Yeah.” Meredith nodded, looking straight ahead. ”Good luck.”
”It's been ages!” cried the barman.
To Irma he looked as tasty as sardines on toast.
In fact it had been only a couple of weeks, but usually Irma had dinner in the club at least two-if not three-times a week.
”You know my heart, darling,” she said, giving him a wink. She searched for his name but could not find it in the clutter of her brain. Perhaps she was starting to lose her marbles. Then again, it was possible she had never known the name in the first place.
Without a pause, the young man reached under the counter and produced a bottle of Strega-the one with the label written in fancy curlicue Italian-which they kept at the club just for her. She had developed a taste for Italian liqueurs one summer while visiting her old friend Osmond Crouch at his villa near Florence. That was years ago (decades, possibly), but since then she had been religious about taking it before and after her evening meal as both aperitif and digestif. She looked at the bartender's forearms as he poured. They were smooth but textured with fine blond hair, the veins visible just below the skin. Coursing with blood, Irma thought, and felt a pang in her navel. Even now. Amazing.
She looked around the half-full barroom and nodded at several acquaintances. There was silly old Lady Viola in her dirty dungarees. Apparently she had once spent a summer in Spain s.h.a.gging Pica.s.so. That's what she told anyone who would listen, but Irma didn't believe it. Anyone who knew Pica.s.so knew he wasn't keen on redheads. Across the bar was young Barnaby Shakespeare, lost in thought and looking carelessly handsome, if second-son-ish. Poor boy, thought Irma, though she wasn't sure why.
While not the most fas.h.i.+onable destination in town, Irma's club was still considered one of the most venerable and exclusive in all of London. This was largely due to the reputation it had established for being a hub of creativity and scandal between the wars, when a group of semi-insane, semi-famous sculptors had hung out here and made the place known by hosting a series of parties in which all the guests stripped off their clothing and molested one another with plaster. Since then, occasional nudity had become a tradition. Once or twice a year, toward closing time, some member or other would get drunk enough to take off their kit and end up posing for impromptu life-drawing sessions on the billiards table. In recent years it had become a halfhearted exercise-to tell the truth, no one much enjoyed getting naked anymore-but it was a point of pride at the club, definitive proof of its status as a bohemian inst.i.tution, and so the members dutifully kept up the tradition.
The place itself was a sprawling and shabby white-brick cottage just off King's Road. Since Irma had first joined in the sixties, the club had expanded to include a large new bar, skylights and French doors leading out onto the back garden. The barroom atmosphere was more pub than posh-plywood floor covered in squashed cigarette b.u.t.ts, cheap chrome-and-vinyl chairs of the sort you might find in any legion hall, ashtrays bearing the logo of the local football team.
Dinner was served every night at nine at a great oval table in the older, grander part. The walls of the communal dining room were hung exclusively with paintings of past members dining in the same room, creating a ghostly, reflective effect that Irma approved of. If ever you forgot where and who you were, you could just look at the walls and be reminded-without having to look in a mirror.
”Well, if it isn't our fair Irish poetess.”
Irma offered up her cheek to be kissed by a fat man upholstered in navy blue pinstripes.
”Henry. How goes public life?”
”Dull as ever,” he said, grinning in a way that suggested he thought it was anything but. ”What about you? Still mad as a hatter?”
Irma bit the inside of her lip and forced a smile. She hated jokes at her own expense but had always pretended the opposite. ”I prefer to think of it as a form of alternative sanity,” she said.
Henry roared and slapped her so heartily on the shoulder that her drink sloshed onto her shoe. Irma wished Meredith would get here so she could fob Henry off on her. He was the man she had in mind for her daughter's purposes. A prime candidate, she thought: he was handsome enough, and charming in a boorish sort of way. Not her type at all, of course-far too earnest, even though he tried to pretend to be jaded (Irma could see through it). A Tory MP, for heaven's sake. Not to mention the author of several historical biographies and father to countless illegitimate children. He was one of those men who seemed able to do the work of six, without ever appearing any the worse for wear. Yes, Irma thought, Henry would almost certainly be up for a romp with her daughter. He didn't have a reputation for being terribly picky, and there was no question about his fertility. He would do.
”Mother, you'll have a heart attack!”
”Oh, don't be such a prude, darling.”
Irma held the straw up to her nose and sniffed a line of fine white powder off her pocket mirror before handing it over. Meredith took it gingerly and frowned. Irma didn't wait for her daughter's reaction. She turned around and beetled across the room to get the attention of the barman.
”Fantastic,” Mish said with the kind of hysterical admiration that people often showed after experiencing Irma for the first time. ”Aren't you going to do some?”
”I don't know.” Meredith stared at the row of tiny ridges in her palm. The outside of the mirror, she knew, was inlaid with Irma's initials in mother-of-pearl. She had an early childhood flashback of watching her mother use it to reapply her lipstick in a restaurant.
Once again, she was shocked. How could she possibly be the offspring of this reckless cougar? Irma had taken one look at Mish and Meredith when they arrived at the club (under-slept, cranky and still reeling from the cab fare) and pulled them over to the corner table for what she called ”a little pick-me-up.” Now Meredith was trying to contend with two things: a) the realization that her elderly mother was quite possibly a c.o.kehead, as well as b) the fact that she had never in her life encountered the stuff up close.
”What does it do?” Meredith wrinkled her nose, feigning disgust to mask her fear. She had been offered c.o.ke exactly twice before. Once at the fateful Felsted wrap party and another time by a rocker boyfriend of Mish's. Both times she had refused it on the grounds that she had a tendency toward nosebleeds. The truth was, as did all drugs that you couldn't grow in a clay pot in the backyard, c.o.ke scared the wits out of her. What if she had a heart attack? Or a stroke? Or got one of those bubbles in her vein that traveled through your arteries and then exploded in your cerebral cortex? Or did that only come from needles?
Mish glanced around to see if anyone was watching. Then she extended her hand. ”Give it here,” she said. ”I don't know about you, but I'm wiped.”
”So am I!” Meredith jerked the mirror away and nearly dropped the whole thing on the floor, her hands were quivering so badly.
”Careful,” Mish hissed. ”Now, are you going to do one or not? It'll perk you up. It's like the best cup of coffee you've ever had. Hold the straw like this.”
Mish mimed the action and Meredith copied it, hoovering up a thin line. She immediately felt like a morally bankrupt teenager in a movie. If anything, her mouth felt sort of numb, like after a dentist's freezing. A funny Clorox taste dripped down the back of her throat.
”I don't think it works.” She shrugged. ”I mean, I don't feel any different.”
”Just wait,” Mish said, reapplying her lipstick in the mirror and brus.h.i.+ng off her upper lip.