King of the World Read online

  But it was necessary to concentrate. Norah was launching, now, on the harrowing story of her marriage: the violence, the threats of worse violence: the knives, the lighted matches, the drunken assaults …

  “He’s an alcoholic, then, is he?” enquired Diana, alert with professional interest. “You could have gone to Alcoholics Anonymous, you know. They have a special section for the relatives of alcoholics … We did a programme on them once, and it seems they are very helpful and supportive. If you like, I could give you an address …”

  “Oh, please! Oh no!” Norah’s hands, folded neatly in her lap, could be seen, if you looked closely, to be trembling slightly. “Oh no, I wouldn’t dare do anything like that! Mervyn would kill me if he found out. And he would find out. He’s always found out everything … that’s why, in the end, I had to run away, there was nothing else I could do …

  “And so that’s how I ended up in this hostel for Battered Wives … I was that desperate … It seemed to be my only hope. But – you know what happened? Mervyn traced me! I don’t know how he did it, I’ll never know. He’s a Consultant, you know, at a mental hospital; he has his ways. Anyway, there he was, early one morning, I saw him out of the window. So I snatched up the few things I’d brought, and climbed out of the window into the garden, and over the back fence into the road …”

  “But, my dear, you didn’t need to go to those sort of lengths,” interposed Diana. “These refuges are specially planned, you know, to protect women from husbands who turn up like like that. They’d have kept him away from you, really they would. Actually, I’ve been involved in a bit of research about the battering syndrome, and I can promise you that …”

  The quivering hands had grown still, brown and dry as dead leaves, and clutched together so tightly that they seemed no bigger than a cricket-ball. And now tears were beginning to trickle embarrassingly down the sallow cheeks.

  Embarrassingly, because tears are embarrassing when you don’t know the person well enough to put your arms round her. Or so it seemed to Bridget, who, in any case, was by now feeling a slight physical revulsion for the sad little creature cowering in the big chair.

  Pretend not to have noticed the tears. Change the subject.

  “Let me get you another drink” was the best she could manage, and headed for the kitchen, on the pretext of needing more ice.

  Deliberately, she dawdled over her errand, gazing longingly at the lamb chops still languishing in the fridge. By now, she and Diana should have been enjoying them, together with mushrooms, tomatoes, cauliflower and mashed potatoes. Now it had all been spoiled; first by bloody Alistair, and now by this intrusive woman. A born victim-type, no wonder her husband beat her up – but before Bridget had time to examine this uncharitable and wholly unjustified assumption, she was interrupted.

  “Bridget! What on earth have you been doing? Leaving me to cope single-handed all this time!”

  Diana’s hissed reproaches were justified, Bridget had indeed been dodging out of an awkward situation, and was ready – almost – to admit it.

  “Sorry. I was thinking about those chops. I’m starving, aren’t you? Why don’t I start cooking while you get rid of the woman? Or, better still, get Alistair to do it. Time he did something useful about the place.”

  “Oh, but Bridget, no! It’s Alistair that’s the problem. He’s saying things like: haven’t I any compassion for a fellow-creature in distress? You know how he was going on about it even before she arrived, and it’s worse than ever now she’s started crying. Out loud, like a baby, and he’s got her in a great compassionate bear-hug on purpose, just to show me how uncompassionate I’m being. I know that’s why he’s doing it, I can see his eyes peering at me triumphantly through those dried-up gingery wisps of her hair. He knows he’s winning, he knows he’s making me feel awful, he’s doing it on purpose!”

  Bridget agreed that he probably was.

  “But, Di, you don’t have to take any notice, you know how he is. He loves to tease you, and anyway everything’s just a game to him: I think that’s why I get so fed up with him, and you should, too. Just take a firm line. Get him to give her a lift to wherever she wants to go. That’ll exercise his compassion all right, especially if it’s somewhere in South London.”

  “But that’s the whole point, Bridget. She hasn’t got anywhere to go. That’s why she’s here. She thought, you see, that anyone advertising a room to let would at least have a spare room, and could let her stay in it for a night or two, just until they got a proper tenant. And of course we could do that. As Alistair says …”

  “To hell with what Alistair says! It’s what we say that counts. And so long as we back each other up saying ‘No’ …”

  “She wants to pay us,” Diana interposed tentatively. “She’s not asking for charity, she says. She just wants … just for a night or two …”

  “It won’t be just a night or two! You know that as well as I do. Once she’s here, there’ll be no way of getting her out. There are actual laws we’d be breaking if we put her out on the street, never mind Alistair and his compassion. Talking of compassion, what about all those dozens of applicants he says phoned up this afternoon? Haven’t they any rights, having applied before she did? And how does he know they aren’t all cripples or mental defectives or something, and even more deserving of his precious compassion than she is?” She was being really nasty, she knew; but, Hell, she was so hungry.

  “There weren’t dozens, actually” Diana now admitted. “He says now that there were only two – and neither of them in the least bit crippled. One was an American fast-food executive wanting a pied-a-terre in London for the next six months while he organises a merger, or something. The other was a Yuppie sort of a fellow who wanted to make sure there would be parking space for both his cars. Besides, as Alistair says …”

  Bridget felt that if she heard even one more thing that Alistair had said, she might actually scream.

  “Look,” she said, “Let’s just throw them out – both of them – and have our meal in peace. Neither of them have been invited – Alistair wasn’t supposed to be coming again until Sunday, I thought you said.”

  She slammed on the gas, noisily filled a pan with water and set it to boil, then bent to light up the grill. Only now did she notice that Diana still hadn’t responded to this tirade. Turning round, she saw her friend fiddling uneasily with the egg whisk and not looking up.

  “Ye-es” Diana began guiltily, “I did say that, I know. But what’s happened, you see, Bridget – I was at the clinic for my test results this afternoon, and they took my temperature – they do that, you know, it’s routine – and it turned out to be a little bit up. Ninety-nine, that’s all, nothing much, but enough to show that I must be ovulating right now, three days early. So I rang Alistair straight away to see if he could come tonight instead of Sunday. But I only meant the night, Bridget, honestly. It never occurred to me that he’d turn up early like this, in time for a meal and everything …”

  Why hadn’t it occurred to her? She’d known Alistair for six or seven years now, and for three of them they’d been lovers, surely by now she should be familiar with his wayward, self-centred ways? If it was convenient to him to arrive at the flat early, in time for an evening meal, then early he would arrive, serenely confident that a meal of sorts would be forthcoming.

  It was Diana’s fault entirely. How could a man not come to expect something that was invariably forthcoming? Even the Pavlov dogs had had that much intelligence.

  What had the Pavlov dogs done when, on occasion, the expected meal wasn’t forthcoming? This must surely have formed part of the experiment – Pavlov had been a painstaking and thorough researcher. Indeed, Bridget had a vague recollection of having read somewhere that the dogs had gone on salivating for a surprising number of minutes – 27.4 or something like that. Which meant (she glanced at her watch) that Alistair would still be salivating when everything was ready, the cutlets done to a turn.

  He wasn’t going
to have any. He just wasn’t. How could four cutlets be divided between three people? Bridget was the cook tonight, and the cook, always and everywhere, is the one with power. The power to inspire friendship, peace and contentment for a whole evening; also the power to wreck everything.

  All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Disagreeable though she was feeling, Bridget did not fancy the idea of being corrupted absolutely, and so she sought a compromise. Couldn’t they get Alistair to take this Norah woman out for a meal, dump her back wherever she came from, and then, if he had to, return to the flat?

  Yes, he did have to. That was already clear from Diana’s fraught expression and the increasingly nervous gyrations of the egg-whisk. The tiresome drama surrounding Diana’s ovulation cropped up month after month: the arithmetic – the calculation of the exact night, almost the exact hour, when love-making (if one could still call it that) would have the maximum chance of making Diana pregnant. Then there were the calculations – all the unpredictable variables – the hasty summoning of Alistair when the moment seemed ripe. It was irritating, but Bridget bore it as best she could. After all, Diana was thirty-seven, she couldn’t afford to wait much longer for Mr Right to turn up; wiser, no doubt, to settle for Mr Wrong while she still had him. “Striking while the iron was hot”, as Alistair himself would doubtless have put it, had he known what was going on.

  But Alistair didn’t know – or so Diana insisted. But was he really so stupid, Bridget sometimes wondered, as not to have put two-and-two together in respect of these periodic, urgent summonses to Diana’s bed, especially considering the low-key, lackadaisical nature of their normal relationship. Or, on the other hand, perhaps he wasn’t stupid at all, but fully aware of Diana’s frantic manoeuvreing of their love-life, and secretly flattered by it? After all, for someone to be going to all this trouble to create a replica of oneself – it must surely be flattering on some level?

  Whatever his attitude, Diana seemed undeterred by the problems.

  “Men are funny about babies, you see,” she’d explained one night when she and Bridget had both arrived home after midnight, and had sat talking in the kitchen instead of going to bed, “The human race would have died out long ago if it had depended on men agreeing to have a baby. So women have to take it into their own hands – since the invention of birth-control, that is. Men always want to put it off. Not now, dear, not till I’ve passed my exams…. settled into my new job … got the business back on its feet … got my promotion. And what about our lovely holidays abroad, darling, wandering free as air to any part of the world we like – how could we do that if we were lumbered with a baby?

  “And finally, when maybe, in the end, he’s come round to it – by that time the woman is too old. So, like I’m telling you Bridget, the survival of the human race from now on depends on women. It’s a grave responsibility.”

  Grave indeed; and dependent, according to Diana, on women pretending to have taken the Pill when they hadn’t … pricking holes in their female condoms … “A11 sorts of dodges” as Diana put it; and Bridget would listen, slightly perturbed, but in no position to argue. After all, she wasn’t thirty-seven, and had so far experienced no maternal urges whatsoever. On the contrary, her feelings on the subject were virtually identical with those of the male sex as described by Diana. Not now. Not yet. I want to get on with my career. I want to enjoy my freedom.

  Anyway, this was no time to get involved in such discussions. Prodding the potatoes with a fork, Bridget judged that they were just about done. The cutlets under the grill were beginning to smell delicious, and she was just nerving herself to march into the sitting-room and explain (as pleasantly as such a thing can be explained) that neither of the unexpected visitors were going to get anything to eat, when Alistair sidled into the kitchen with a plan of his own.

  “We’re going out for a takeaway,” he said. “I’ve explained to our guest that in dealing with such a stingy, inhospitable pair as you two, it’s the only –”

  “Inhospitable! Oh, that’s not fair!” cried Diana, cut to the quick. “Look at all the times when I’ve …”

  “I wouldn’t dream of looking at them” Alistair replied haughtily. “That would be looking at the past, wouldn’t it? Only the Oldies look back at the past. I’m a Now-person. I live in the present. The Present is all we have, and if the present consists of two greedy, sef-indulgent harridans refusing to share their delicious meal …”

  By now, just a little too late, Diana realised that he was joking, and she gave an appropriate little laugh.

  Then, suddenly, she tensed up again and became serious.

  “You are coming back, aren’t you, Ali? For the night, I mean? It doesn’t matter how late …”

  He laughed, amiably enough, and chucked her under the chin.

  “Of course I am, chicken! Wouldn’t miss it for anything!” He laughed again, and winked mischievously at Bridget; making her wonder, yet again, if, perhaps, he did know what Diana was up to, after all? And was keeping quiet about it in order that, whatever happened, no one could possibly say it was his fault?

  Chapter 4

  It was after midnight when Alistair and his protegé returned. Bridget had been on the point of falling asleep when she was roused by the furtive opening and shutting of the front door, followed by the hushed and unnerving tumult that is characteristic of people trying to be quiet.

  Diana, as Bridget well knew, wasn’t a deep sleeper at the best of times, insomnia was more her style; and on this night in particular, with thermometer, stopwatch and menstrual chart all at the ready, she most certainly wouldn’t be sleeping.

  So Bridget calculated; and swiftly following on this thought came its comforting corollary; namely, that Diana should be the one to get out of bed and cope with whatever needed coping with. Organising the spare bed (for at this hour there was no option but to allow the woman to stay the night). Clean sheets, towels, pillow-cases; making her a mug of something or other; asking her what she liked for breakfast, and when she wanted to be woken. Bridget lay very still, determined to do absolutely nothing.

  It was fair enough. The whole thing was Alistair’s fault; he was Diana’s boy-friend, not hers. Snuggling down under the duvet, feeling deliciously un-guilty about sloughing off all responsibility for what was happening, Bridget was soon asleep. It wasn’t until morning that she realised there was a price to be paid for this sloughing-off of responsibility. There always was.

  For by leaving the whole awkward predicament to Diana, she had been, in effect, leaving it to Alistair, and ensuring that his impractical decisions would prevail. Diana would be sure to go along with whatever he recommended; and this, while Bridget slept, was exactly what came to pass.

  Norah was to stay. Not just for this one night, but “Until she’s got herself sorted out.”

  “And look, she’s even paid a week’s rent in advance!” proclaimed Diana, flourishing in front of Bridget’s face a little clutch of bank-notes, for all the world as if they were a symbol of victory: when, in fact, as Bridget could see at once, they were a symbol of abject defeat.

  Norah had won. She now had a right to be here. Not just for the one week, but for all the foreseeable weeks while the intricate and time-consuming legal complications of getting her out dragged on, and on, and on …

  Bridget tried to convey her dismay and apprehensions to Diana, but with only partial success; for Diana was already in a hurry, pouring soya milk onto her muesli with one eye on the clock.

  “Oh, but Bridget, she’s not like that, I’m sure she isn’t. She knows she’s only filling in until we get a proper permanent tenant – and, let’s face it, we haven’t got one yet, have we? There’s no harm in getting a little money while we wait – and in cash, too. I can’t possibly get to the bank this week, and you know what a bore it is queuing up outside those cash-dispensers, and half the time they don’t work anyway. Here, you have half!” – and she proffered the handful of notes spread out in a fan, like a deck o
f cards.

  Bridget was about to refuse indignantly; then changed her mind and accepted. These notes, added to the contents of her own wallet, would enable her to return the whole sum to Norah, in cash, this very morning. That way, the whole transaction would be rendered null and void; surely it would? The thing would have to be done nicely, of course; no point in causing offence, and perhaps further fuss …

  It was mid-morning, and the others had long left for work, when Norah, wearing the over-large flowered housecoat that Diana had lent her, made her way into the kitchen. The first thing she saw was Bridget’s note, propped up against the electric kettle, so that she couldn’t even make herself a cup of tea before reading it.

  It was a nice enough note: “… welcome you here as our guest for a day or two … Couldn’t possibly accept any money … Must have a proper talk this evening …”

  Slowly, Norah put the letter back into the envelope, together with the spurned bank notes. She no longer felt like having a cup of tea, and so she wandered out of the kitchen, still clutching the letter and the money in a trembling sweaty hand. Catching sight of the winter sun pouring in through the big windows of the room where they had all been sitting last night, she moved into its quiet glow and settled herself in one of the deep armchairs that faced towards the windows. An expanse of sky confronted her, and a criss-cross of black twigs belonging to a tall tree.

  She turned the envelope over in her hands once or twice, but didn’t re-read Bridget’s note. She knew well enough what it said. It said that she couldn’t stay; not for more than a few days, anyway; at most, a week or two. Would a week – two weeks – be enough for her purposes? She must think … think.

  The important thing was that they mustn’t discover why she had come, nor where she had just come from. Insanity frightened everyone, and with reason – no one knew that better than Norah herself, which was why she must think so hard, and so rapidly. Before they all got back this evening, she must have decided exactly what she was going to tell them.