Weekend Read Free Page A

would just be giving himself an excuse for not trying to connect. She hadn’t come in with those men. The man she had come in with was looking as if the stomach pump might have to be summoned at any moment. He knew him as a friend of Dan Galbraith. Alec Something he was called. Maybe his connection with Mary Sue was casual.
    He had to do something. He suspected that if he tiptoed away from the talking man, the absence might not be noticed. The man was so busy listening to himself, he didn’t need anybody else.
    Maybe he had shut down his reception system automatically as a mode of self-protection, but he could no longer follow the lawyer’s monologue in detail. It had degenerated in his ears into a babble of soundbites in contemporary non-speak – stopping bucks and care in the community and final analyses and, bizarrely zooming in from outer space, the trial of Oscar Wilde.
    ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I’m just going over to the table here.’ (It’s either that or suicide.) ‘Maybe we’ll connect with each other later.’ (Say, if you’ve got a lasso.)
    ‘Hold on a minute,’ the man said, putting his hand on his arm. ‘I don’t think you’ve got my point at all.’
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you got mine. The main thing I was saying in the piece was that a democracy functions on consensus. Mutual goodwill. Take that away and it caves in on itself. If you’ve got one of our crucial institutions skulking round the premises of another for profit, and one that happens to be the most important one in our lives, you’ve got consensus disintegrating. Every dingo dog for himself. I admire the NHS. Apart from women’s emancipation, I think it’s the single most important piece of legislation we had in the twentieth century. You haven’t confronted any of that.’
    ‘No, no, no. Listen.’
    ‘I’ve listened. Two things. Take your hand off my arm. And – as Oscar Wilde probably didn’t say – piss off.’
    He went over to the table which had been set up as an improvised bar. He was angry at himself for getting angry. This was Dan’s party. Once at the table, he loitered, waiting to calm down. He was also waiting for an amazing plan to arrive. All he could think of was that she drank gin and tonic. That was what Dan had given her. He made one carefully, turned and walked towards her group.
     
     
     
     
    She noticed him as he came towards her. She smiled at him and was about to say something. Anything. Maybe ‘Hello again.’ But he took the almost empty glass she was nursingand replaced it with a full one. He looked at her and turned and walked away. The men around her had gone silent. She took a tentative sip from the glass. It was gin and tonic. She was impressed that he had remembered. The voices started up around her again.
    ‘What was that all about?’
    ‘Is he the part-time barman?’
    ‘Who is he anyway?’
    ‘Harry Beck,’ she said.
    They obviously had never heard of him. She was remembering the sudden darkness of his eyes. They were intense. She liked that.
    ‘Anyway,’ the one called John said. ‘Then we started on the champagne. And it was Moët. That was a party.’
    She watched him cross to the table and mix himself a drink. Whisky and water he took. Dan Galbraith called to him and he went over and sat on the floor beside Dan’s chair, leaning his back against the wall. She enjoyed the way he moved. She wondered what they were talking about.
     
     
     
     
    ‘I need a bit of company tonight,’ Dan was saying. ‘I don’t want to go into my fifties alone.’
    ‘You’ve got plenty of that, then.’
    ‘I don’t know about Sylvia’s insistence on the long dresses, though. A bit formal, isn’t it?’
    ‘I like it. I like seeing women like that. I don’t know. It makes me imagine a more romantic time.
Fin de siècle
or something. End of the nineteenth century.’
    ‘In a way it’s quite a good wake, I suppose,’ Dan said.‘Burying your forties. That was a nice