got the full nimbus of his smoke, as if she was the enemy from whom he needed to conceal the industrial capacity of his output as a writer. ‘Don’t they make you sick?’ she asked.
‘Not so far, my love,’ he said. ‘I smoke about seventy a week, and do you know, I was thinking the other day that if you put them end to end for length it’d make over six hundred yards, and since I’ve been puffing like billy-ho for forty years I’ve travelled nearly fourteen miles, which is just about right in my slow moving life.’
‘I suppose you worked that out when you had writer’s block?’ Barbara, a rawboned steely-eyed literary agent who hadn’t got him on her books for the simple reason that she wouldn’t go to bed with such a toad in a million years, felt able to slam him all she liked. ‘Doesn’t your wife worry that smoking will kill you?’
‘Wife?’ His roar stopped all other talk. ‘What’s one of them?’
‘It sounds as if she henpecked you.’
Was it the downing of another glass of wine that reddened his face? ‘Did you say henpecked?’
‘Stop it, Norman.’ Charlotte collected the plates, and took the roast meat out of the oven. She knew him as one of those déclassé working-class men who, thinking he had nothing to blame his parents for, or being too sentimental to know where to begin, had reduced one middle-class wife after another to suicidal misery.
‘Henpecked?’ he crowed. ‘You don’t know one half. I got carpet bombed from morning till night. Then she came out of the potting shed, thank God, and went off with a woman.’
Jo Hesborn adjusted her collar and tie. ‘I can’t say I’d blame her for that.’
‘The trouble was, she came back.’
Barbara angled away. ‘And you let her?’
He paused. ‘Wanted to get my own back, didn’t I?’
‘You mean you picked up with a man?’ Jo laughed.
Light from the afternoon sun flashed on his glasses. ‘I didn’t wear my heart on my sleeve like a patch of snot, or cry into my blotting paper. I had an affair with a girl who was too young to think of becoming a lesbian.’
‘So why isn’t your wife with you now?’ Barbara did her best to smile, and wiped the failure away with a napkin. ‘I’m sure she’d love hearing the same old patter.’
Gazing tenderly, he took her hand in his, till she snatched it free. ‘I’m glad I didn’t bring her, or we’d both been fighting over you, darling. She’s finally hopped it, I’m glad to say. Greater love hath no man than this, that he hand over his wife to the tender mercies of a woman.’
Jo Hesborn picked up her empty glass. ‘You bastard! You walking gasometer!’
The missile shattered against his forehead, but he stayed calm, not only as if such an event happened every other day, but as if his existence would be without meaning if it didn’t take place now and again. Even so, the grin barely lit the middle of his pallid face, thin lips suddenly with more curves in them.
He swabbed the flood, reddening Charlotte’s best linen, and patted Jo’s wrist as if he had injured her. ‘I don’t know why you did that. You ought to be grateful for somebody like me. I’ve probably turned more women into lesbians than any man in London. I thought somebody like you would appreciate the fact.’
Jo was disgruntled at her failure to obliterate – or at least kill – him. ‘Thanks for nothing, scum.’
‘I confess,’ Norman said, fully recovered, ‘that I’m looking for another girlfriend, though I can’t see myself handing her over to you after I’ve done with her. Every likely looking candidate I come across gets a written questionnaire, in any case, so’s there’ll be no misunderstanding. For instance, I want to know whether or not she smokes. I wouldn’t like her to live longer than me and burn all my letters and notebooks, though I expect we’d be separated long before that. I want to know if she’s married. I don’t want to get a dagger in my back from her squash-playing husband. Can she drive? Then I can get drunk at parties and she can take me home. Is she a dab hand at a word processor? That’s essential, because I’m bloody hopeless with them. Does she have a sense of humour? She’d certainly need one. Are both her parents dead? Mine are, so it’s only fair hers are too. Does she have children? I don’t want any of those puking little bastards competing for attention. In any case, little Crispin with the heavenly curls might grow up to be a yobbo and kick me in for hitting his mother. Does she have a job? – preferably with TV or in films, so that she can get my novels put on. Then, of course, will she keep thinking I’m a genius when she hears me fart in bed at night? Does she have a centrally heated flat in the middle of London? I’ve taken a shine to Pimlico. And does she have a cottage in Dorset, with no neighbours to hear the screams when we start quarrelling and I give her a good hiding? And oh yes – God-Almighty, I nearly forgot – can she unravel the mysteries of VAT? A positive response to such queries might result in a satisfactory relationship for a month or two, but in the meantime,’ he ended, with little-boy wistfulness, ‘I’ll go for any halfway personable woman who takes pity on me. Until the paragon turns up, of course, when I’d throw her aside like an old floorcloth.’
Diana noted the admiration on Tom’s face at how Bakewell had ignored the cut from Jo’s glass, and now his awe at such a horrid screed. Her face was warm with hatred, and she wanted to say something that would wither all men to pitiable stumps, though Charlotte came in before her: ‘Norman, I shan’t buy your next novel if you don’t behave to my guests.’
He swabbed his forehead again rather than quarrel with his hostess, and said mildly: ‘You’ll regret it, if you don’t. It’s called The Lovers of Burnt Oak. Bound to get onto the short list for the Windrush Prize.’ He manufactured an expression of repentance. ‘I’m sorry, though. I was feeling a bit on the dark side of bilious when I flopped out of bed this morning.’ He apologised to Barbara, who responded with silence, so he looked around for another victim. ‘Anybody want to talk about modern English literature?’
He lit a cigar when no one did. He was drunk, and Diana hoped everyone would ignore him, but he was malevolent and wouldn’t let them. ‘I’ll tell you about the new novel I’m writing.’ He looked at Tom, whose firm had beaten all competitors to get him on its list during an auction at the Groucho Club. ‘The hero’s a publisher,’ he said, beady-eyeing Tom as if to damage him for having bought him like a slave at the market, and hoping that what he was going to say would turn into a prophecy. ‘Well, his wife has a relationship – dare I call it, Jo? – with a woman. The husband’s quite happy because it takes her attention from a little bit of business he’s got on, also with a woman. Even so, the wife carries on in so shameless a way that at times he feels humiliated, but puts her affair in cold storage, as it were, to be dealt with in the future. Well, our hero publisher and his wife have a grown-up son, who he’s always suspected to be the result of an early affair of his wife’s, though we’ll let that pass. This son has an affair with the daughter of the woman his wife is passionately involved with. Are you following me? A real alligator playground, because listen: both affairs tail off, you might say, but as time goes on the husband feels slighted and his thoughts stray towards revenge. A few years later he has a relationship with the woman’s daughter that his son has by now finished with, and little by little he blasts her life, as only a swine like him can, to such an extent that she does herself in. The mother then lives unhappily ever after, as a played-out harridan.’
‘You’re sheer fucking evil,’ Jo cried, after the silence. ‘I should have pushed this carving knife into your
