A Natural Curiosity Read Free Page A

her,’ said Susie.
    That’s hardly
your
fault,’ said dynamic thirty-eight-year-old Clive Enderby, with a shade of his usual briskness.
    ‘Though as a matter of fact,’ said Susie, ominously changing position in the corner of the settee, ‘though as a matter of
fact
, I don’t quite see
why
we were all so upset. By what Janice said. After all, it was probably true.’
    Clive gazed at his bouncy chestnut-haired wife in alarm. She couldn’t want to talk about it, could she? He couldn’t face it. No, he couldn’t face it. There are some things one just can’t talk about. Janice had cheated. She had broken the rules. Was every wife in Hansborough, Breasborough and Northam, was every wife in Yorkshire, about to start cheating too?
    Susie smiled, edgily.
    ‘Actually,
I
blame Edward,’ she said.
    ‘I don’t see why we have to blame anyone,’ said Clive. ‘It’s not Edward’s fault that he’s married to a neurotic bitch on the verge of a nervous breakdown.’
    ‘How do you know it isn’t?’ asked Susie.
    Feminism had reached South Yorkshire with a vengeance, in the 1980s. Or at least that is one interpretation of the scene at Edward Enderby’s on New Year’s Day, and of Susie’s reaction to that scene.
    I suppose, thought Clive, we may live to find it funny. But it hadn’t been funny at the time. And Susie was right, the whole thing was probably Edward’s fault. Edward had always been a bully, with a sadistic sense of humour: where he got it from, his younger brother Clive couldn’t imagine. Early ill health, perhaps. Quick-tempered Edward, always ready to put people down. Thin, even gaunt, now, in his early forties. Pushing and pushing. Teasing beyond the limit. Ambition disappointed. He’d always taken it out on Clive, but Clive, so brightly prosperous, had learned to fight back amiably, without hurting, without being hurt. Why quarrel with one’s one-and-only brother? That had been Clive’s attitude.
    But last night had been over the top. Right over the top. Drink, was it? Edward never seemed to drink much, to be drunk, but you could never tell. He’d started at the beginning of dinner, teasing Susie about her new hair colour, teasing Clive about his posh new premises, asking uncomfortable questions of Derek and Alice Newton about their son who’d dropped out of the sixth form at King Henry’s, embarking on a whole run of risky jokes about AIDS. Janice had looked uncomfortable through a lot of this, though whether that was because she didn’t like the chat, or because her mind was elsewhere, you couldn’t really tell. She was a very nervous hostess, was Janice, a bit of a perfectionist who managed to make everyone feel slightly uncomfortable as she dished up not-quite-perfect meals. She kept apologizing because the beef was a little overdone. They all assured her they liked it overdone. And anyway, in Clive’s view it wasn’t overdone at all, it was practically raw, so what was the woman talking about? Not that he minded, he liked it red, himself, he really didn’t like it overdone. He caught Susie’s eye and smiled, as he tucked in. He hated cringing and apologies. He liked people to be sure of themselves. Like Susie.
    It was over the second helpings of beef (second helpings they all felt obliged to accept) that Edward really got going. Reminiscing about meals of the past, cooked by their mother. Not a very good topic, in Clive’s view, as the Newtons were new to the district and had never met the colourful quaint old Mrs Enderby, but less dangerous, it proved, than reminiscences about Janice’s early days of cooking. ‘And you’d never believe this, from this
excellent
meal we’ve just eaten tonight,’ said Edward Enderby, smiling a little manically, gesticulating with the carving knife, ‘but Janice, when I first met her, was an
atrocious
cook.
Atrocious
. Couldn’t boil an egg, could you, darling?’ Janice stared at her husband with loathing, while the others politely laughed.