The Birds of the Air Read Free Page B

the top of her writing pad visible above the pocket of her dress. Kate was the child anyone would wish for.
    Sam was fiddling with spools of tape. He was experimenting with crowd noise.
    ‘Sebastian.’ Barbara touched her husband’s arm anxiously. ‘They should eat now. The whisky’s nearly all gone!’
    Interrupted, Sebastian turned back to his companion. ‘According to Schwenk . . .’
    ‘Seb,’ persisted Barbara timidly.
    ‘Oh, what?’ asked Sebastian, his lips paler than his face with irritability.
    ‘The buffet,’ said Barbara. ‘They must all be starving.’
    ‘Ah,’ cried Sebastian with sudden, unreal geniality. ‘Eats. Is there enough?’ he asked in a threatening aside to his wife.
    ‘I think so,’ she said imploringly. ‘I bought so much.’
    She purposely didn’t add that she’d worked for two days getting it all ready, since that might sound like a reproach or a confession of weakness. If Seb wished to think that she did it all by magic then so he should. That version of things would reflect credit on them both – on him for being worthy of magic and on her for being capable of it.
    The older, more practised guests had already eaten the pâté and the spinach quiche, and the rest were applying themselves to the turkey and ham and the rice and potato salads. Someone had stubbed out a cigar in a quarter of tomato. None of her mother’s friends would do such a thing. These academic people were so absent-minded. She should be used to it by now, but she wasn’t. The days of preparation and anxious thought – and then they all ate it up in the gaps between conversation, or left great heaps on their plates. Perhaps it was horrid – she couldn’t tell, since she could neither eat nor taste after two days of cooking.
    She pushed her way carefully through her guests.
    A man on her right was complaining about publishers and the high price of books. ‘They do it,’ he said, ‘
pour encourager les auteurs
.’
    Barbara sympathised deeply with people who were worried about the dreadful cost of living, but she had heard Sebastian remark, smiling nastily, that many of his colleagues should count themselves fortunate: they had such a splendid excuse when their books didn’t sell.
    At last she reached the bookcase in the other room, where she had hidden the after-dinner mints away from Sam. She was just in time to see her husband placing a piece of turkey with his fork in the damp red mouth of the wife of the Professor of Music, whose own hands were taken up with her glass and her embroidered ethnic evening bag, hung with tassels and studded with bits of mirror.
    This playful, lascivious act was so uncharacteristic of Sebastian, and suited him so ill, that for a moment Barbara failed to recognise him. She felt suddenly deathly faint, and then she realised for herself what Sam had learnt at tea time and what everyone else had known for months.
    Carefully she opened the bookcase and removed a book,
Platonis Opera
. She stared at it, wondering vaguely why it contained no chocolates.
    Sebastian stepped away from his paramour and stood beside his wife. ‘What is it, darling? What are you looking for?’ he enquired with wholly unwonted solicitude.
    ‘The sweets,’ she answered him fearfully. Her husband was being kind to her in order to put himself in a good light with his lover.
    Sebastian groped in the bookcase and handed her the box. ‘Here you are, darling,’ he said, dismissing her.
    Was Sebastian then, after all, stupid, she wondered. Did he not know that she knew, or didn’t he care?
    Sam was pleased to see the box in his mother’s hands. He’d searched all the usual hiding places – she must have found somewhere different.
    ‘No, Sam,’ said Barbara, holding the box aside. ‘You can have one later when everyone else has had one.’
    She sounded funny, she looked funny. Sam temporarily lost his appetite for chocolate. Despite his own revolutionary tendencies he preferred his parents to