Human Croquet Part 11

We stop-start along Chestnut Avenue, testing each lamppost, trying to work out some pattern. Are they signalling something to us? Is my body interfering with the national grid in some way? (My body electric.) Or Vinny's? I explain to Vinny that the doors of perception are hanging crazily off their hinges these days.

I am at odds with the material world every day confirms some new alienation. Perhaps I am from another planet, I think glumly, as we approach the church hall, and my alien compatriots are trying to send me morse code via the streetlamps.

The pantomime goes according to plan Jack scatters his magic beans everywhere, Mr Primrose as the Dame (naturally), dressed in what look like kitchen curtains, makes many a double entendre and Eunice and her anonymous other half hoof clumsily to the music provided by a Boy's Brigade drummer and a couple of bra.s.s band rejects who play cheerful, tinny music at such a lick that even the village lads and la.s.sies can't keep time, let alone the poor cow. (Do you keep time in the same place that you save it? If so why is it so difficult to find? It must be in a very safe place. Gordon's always doing that, going around with a puzzled expression looking for something he can't find, saying, 'But I remember putting it in a safe place.') Jack's beanstalk is pulled on a string up to the roof, its green-painted paper leaves growing and reproducing miraculously as it climbs towards the heavens where the moon and all her starry feys will be twinkling prettily in the dark to greet it.

'Look,' Charles says cautiously to Gordon who's in the middle of preparing a bottle for the baby which is propped up awkwardly in its pram uttering more variations on the basic cry than a song-thrush.

'What?' he says, looking over his shoulder. The feeding-bottle slips out of his hand when he sees the black curl, lying like a big inquisitive comma on the palm of Charles' hand. Gordon stands rigid and unmoving for several seconds and then s.n.a.t.c.hes the curl from Charles and dashes from the room.

Wearily, I pick up the bottle and plug the baby with it.

I'm lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, in a bedroom flooded with blue moonlight, wondering why sleep doesn't come (perhaps the Cats have used it all up) when I hear a soft footfall coming up the stairs. The doork.n.o.b turns gleaming in the moonlight thanks to Debbie's incessant polishing and I await expectantly. Will it be my personal phantom or the Green Lady (perhaps they are the one and the same thing)? But no the shade that stands on the darkened threshold is my father.

'Izzie?' he whispers through the dark. 'Are you awake?' He tiptoes over and sits on the end of my bed, staring at something in his hand. I struggle into a sitting position and he holds the thing in his hand up for my inspection. It's the lock of black hair, darker than black in the moonlight. 'Hers,' he says in a wretched voice. A thrill goes through my whole body, at last he's going to tell me about Eliza. About how beautiful she was, how much he loved her, how happy they were, what a terrible mistake it was when she walked off, how she always meant to come back Instead I can feel his gaze through the gloom as he says in a flat voice, 'I killed your mother.'

'Pardon?'

PAST.

THE FRUIT OF THIS COUNTRIE.

Up in the thin blue air Gordon was free, it was only when he came down to earth that the problems began. Falling to earth in flames like some metal-bound Lucifer was easier than facing the narrow future that lay ahead of him if he survived the war. Gordon didn't care much either way for his sisters but he loved his mother and he didn't want to hurt her.

He wasn't thinking about these things when he met his fate. He was slightly drunk, he'd been at some club that he didn't know the name of, the kind of place where things got out of hand after midnight. He'd been with a group of Polish airmen and left because he knew he couldn't keep up with their drinking. And he was tired, he was so tired, he just wanted to get back and put his head down. 'Spot of shut-eye,' he said, making his excuses to the Polaks. He was staying with the sister of a friend and her husband nice place, very smart in Knightsbridge, the kind the Widow would have pursed her lips at. The sister and her husband too. Too modern. Too fast. He never got there. The clanging of bells and the air full of brick-dust stopped him.

The fire brigade were already there and a lot of people standing around. Somebody said, 'There's people inside, you know.' Gordon could smell the gas from the fractured pipes but he walked into the broken house, thinking that it must have had a grand entrance before it was bombed columns lay broken across the vestibule and a length of intricate plaster cornice tripped him up. He started choking on the dust and suddenly felt very sober. She was standing there, veiled in dust so that you might have thought she was a life-sized statue fallen from a niche, but he could tell she wasn't a statue because she smiled at him and Gordon lifted her up in his arms and carried her out.

Outside he put her down very gently, as if she might break if he was too rough with her. When he asked her if she was all right, instead of answering, she put out a hand and fingered one of the lapels on his greatcoat and smiled again a strange smile, very inward-seeming, as if she had an amusing secret that she wasn't about to tell him.

He took his coat off and wrapped her up in it and she looked up at him, straight in his eyes in a way that strangers never did, and whispered, My hero. And the rest of the world around them may as well have disappeared because the only thing Gordon could see were her tragic, exotic eyes and the only thing he could hear was the husky notes of her peculiar voice saying, My shoe, I've lost my shoe, and Gordon laughed and dashed back into the bombed-out building and actually found the shoe. He knew it was ridiculous but he didn't care. She put a hand on his shoulder to steady herself while she put the shoe on. Her grimy naked foot was slim with a ballerina's arch and blood-red toe-nails erotic and incongruous amongst the broken limbs and wreckage that was acc.u.mulating around them. One poor chap was brought out on a stretcher past them as dead as a doornail. 'Did you know him?' Gordon asked her sympathetically but she just shook her head sadly, Never seen him before.

Gordon was afraid she was going to walk away now she had her shoe and he knew this was urgent. He knew this was an important moment in his life, perhaps the most important full of meaning that he couldn't quite decipher. He was going to have to seize the moment, it would be the end of everything if he made a mess of it. He offered her his arm, 'Can I take you for a cup of tea? There's a cafe round the corner?'

The age of chivalry is alive and well, she laughed, and took his arm and he could feel how she was shaking all over, like a leaf.

Eliza was as mysterious as the moon, waxing and waning towards him, she had her own phases sometimes generous, sometimes mean and always her dark side, unreachable, secret, hidden.

He couldn't really believe her. Couldn't believe how easily she'd given herself to him, couldn't believe how she felt. Her silk-skin, smooth and cool, pressed against his hot body made him fear that he was going to die. The way she crept up from the foot of the bed, her tongue like a cat on him, but not rough like a cat. The smell of her the strange scent that was partly perfume, partly her skin and partly something so mysterious that he'd never smelt it anywhere before.

The way she said, Of course, darling, when he asked her to marry him. Just like that, so that he was frightened because nothing this wonderful could ever last. It would drive you mad if it did. And it made him as free as being in the blue sky over this tiny green country, gave him power over his mother, over Arden, over the whole world. To begin with.

And he never did think it would last and he wasn't surprised when it didn't because someone like Eliza was never going to be happy with the meagre slice of life he ended up offering her and he hated her for that so much that his brain hurt with it sometimes. His failure with Eliza was his failure with life and her contempt and her scorn were what, in his heart, he knew he deserved. When he put his hands round her neck he felt how easy it was to stop her, to make her quiet to have power over her. It was astonishing, he could squeeze the life out of her as easily as if she was some small animal a hare or a dove and he wanted to say to her, 'There, aren't you sorry now?' but she was gone and he'd destroyed the only thing that meant anything. That was the measure of what a failure he was.

She was enchanting, spellbinding. 'Oh she doth teach the torches to burn bright,' Gordon said with a self-conscious laugh to the Widow, when he first told her about the momentous thing that had happened to him (Eliza) and watched the Widow's lip curl ever so slightly at this fancy talk. Gordon couldn't help himself, it was like being possessed. It was all he wanted to talk about at dinner and supper, and while being paraded around the neighbourhood by the Widow when he was on leave. Words about Eliza fell unbidden from his mouth. 'She's just not like other people,' he said eagerly to his mother as she folded caraway seeds into dried-egg cake mixture. 'No?' the Widow said, raising a grey caterpillar eyebrow. 'And that's good, is it?'

Eliza stopped time. She took you into some bright circle with her where everything stopped, time and fear, even war. 'Cheap glamour,' Vinny muttered over the sacks of flour in the storeroom. 'Oh no,' the Widow said balefully, 'it comes very expensive, believe me.' It clutched at the Widow's strong heart to see her own perfect manly Gordon being fooled by something as tawdry as s.e.x. How could he be so gullible? So stupid? It pained her that he couldn't look at his own mother and see the pattern of a good woman, but that instead he'd been seduced by all that knowingness.

Gordon had to feel sorry for his mother because it was obvious that she'd never experienced anything like this, not that he wanted for one minute to think of his mother like this and even if he wanted to think about it he would have been incapable of imagining it. His mother may have been young once (although he couldn't imagine that either) but she had surely never been like Eliza.

Eliza was a miracle, her human geography sublime the long curve of body, the hills and vales, her face buried in the pillow so that all he could see was the forest of black curls on her head. The matching copse of hair between her thin legs, the extraordinary cupolas with their dark-brown aureoles the kind of b.r.e.a.s.t.s that Englishwomen would have been embarra.s.sed by, the kind of b.r.e.a.s.t.s that Gordon had only previously seen on foreign prost.i.tutes.

The look of her the seed-pearls of sweat that glistened on her pale apricot-fruit skin, the damp tendrils of hair sticking to the back of her long neck, the faint down on her thin, round arms, the perfect white half moons of her fingernails (rarely glimpsed except when she was removing her nail varnish), the lazy smile. The smell of her perfume and tobacco and s.e.x. The taste of her perfume and tobacco and s.e.x and salt-sweat.

Sometimes he lay awake half the night just watching her sleeping, pulling back the sheets and studying the different parts of her body, the neglected inner crease behind a knee, a perfect clavicle thin like a hare-bone, the fragrant inside of her wrist with its vulnerable dark blue veins. Once he took her nail scissors and clipped a curl from her hair without her knowing and felt strangely guilty for days afterwards.

You wouldn't find her match anywhere in Glebelands, in the whole of the north ('Not outside of a brothel anyway,' Vinny wrote to Madge).

Even the crudest bodily functions took on a kind of sublime meaning. The Widow would have been disgusted. 'I worship you,' he whispered in her ear and she rolled over and gave her strange laugh, burying her head in the crook of his arm. Gordon wondered if he sounded ridiculous. She was sublime, transcendent, not an earth-bound creature at all. 'You can't put your wife on a pedestal, Gordon,' the Widow warned, chopping cabbage with her enormous knife. 'There's more to marriage than the physical side,' and Gordon blushed at the idea that his mother could even begin to imagine the things he did with Eliza.

Mothers and their sons, Eliza laughed (rather spitefully), how they want them.

'I don't know what you mean.'

Don't you? No, I don't suppose you do.

And in her room the Widow took off her layers of strict underwear and viewed her saggy, baggy wrinkled body with her ancient dugs and her chicken neck and cursed Eliza.

Eventually, inevitably everything that was once new and precious became everyday and familiar. 'No honey in that hive any more,' Vinny wrote, 'only a nest of hornets.' Why couldn't Eliza settle for the ordinary and the familiar, for the daily round of meals and work, the comfort of children? Gordon craved ordinariness now. He wanted her to be normal, like everyone else. He didn't want other men looking at her because he knew every man that looked at her was thinking about what she would be like in the bedroom and he knew what she was like and that made it worse.

Not that she was like that any more, not with Gordon at any rate.

Gordon remembered some things he remembered putting his hands round her thin neck, he remembered her ridiculous laugh, gurgling and bubbling in her throat, he remembered how he felt when he hit her head against the tree, shaking the life out of her exultant, triumphant at his victory over her. He wanted to say, 'See? See you can't win every fight, you can't always have your own way, you can't drive me to madness and get away with it.' But it was no good because she couldn't hear him. His triumph melted into nothingness, without her there was nothing. And then nothing. He had no idea what he'd done all night, he must have wandered round the wood, everything forgotten, even his children. In the cold light of day it was beyond belief.

'I have to go to the police,' he said as soon as the Widow had given the children breakfast ('First things first') and got them to bed. 'Stuff and nonsense,' the Widow said. 'You're not going to hang over her.' But Gordon didn't care. They could have erected the gibbet right there in the kitchen of Arden and he would have mounted the scaffold. 'No, Gordon,' the Widow said grimly, 'absolutely, definitely not.'

'The best thing', the Widow said (for she was completely in charge now), 'would be for you to go away for a bit. Maybe abroad.'

'Abroad?' said Vinny, who'd never been further than Bradford, of course.

'Abroad,' the Widow said firmly.

'My baby!' the Widow thought out loud. She always knew Eliza was trouble, would drag him down into the mire with her. She was better off dead. Poor Gordon, under the spell of a s.l.u.t. Who was going to miss her? (They're all dead, darling.) n.o.body, that was who. Gordon could go abroad and they would say he'd died dreadful accident or something. Asthma. Something. And the Widow would never see him again, but at least he would be safe. Anything was better than the noose. 'My baby!'

Vinny was more annoyed than she'd ever been in her life. She'd spent most of the night wandering in the wood, having taken the wrong path after going off to do you-know-what and, all in all, had probably had the worst time of her life, even counting her wedding-night.

The wood had been so much more than a wood for Vinny, it had been an ordeal by twig and bramble, spectre and will-o'-the-wisp and for this she entirely blamed Eliza. If she hadn't finally stumbled into Gordon after hours of wandering and weeping she would have undoubtedly gone mad. Although, of course, what happened then was almost as bad.

Vinny was glad she was dead. That's what she said to herself anyway, but she couldn't forget the sight of Eliza's rag-doll body under that tree. Vinny had touched the blood on her hair, felt the ice on her skin. Vinny had done something she never thought she would do she'd felt sorry for Eliza.

Vinny would very much like to forget these things. She would like to forget Gordon clutching her arm as if she was a life-belt, dragging her over to the tree, tears streaming down his face and sobbing, 'What am I going to do, Vin? What am I going to do?' I never wanted to go on a b.l.o.o.d.y picnic anyway, Vinny thought crossly.

Eliza had been trouble, right from the beginning. Trouble with her big eyes and her thin ankles and her stupid voice, Oh Vinny, darling, could you possibly ... always laughing at poor Vinny as if she was stupid. But that didn't matter now, they must all save themselves as best they could.

And Gordon went. Walked out, left everything behind, even the murder of his wife. And he put it all away in some dark place that he never threw light on and he'd gone on and worked hard and grown weather-beaten and become a different person, had met Debbie at a dance, courted her, quickly married her she couldn't have been more willing even though 'Mum and Dad' didn't really approve after all he was a divorced man. That's what he told them, that's what he told everyone, 'divorced' with such a sadness in his eyes that no-one wanted to probe further, except for Debbie, of course, for whom Eliza was a dark and unknown rival, the first Mrs Fairfax.

And then suddenly he had to go back. He had to see his children. His mother. He had to go back to England and find the old Gordon. He didn't realize that none of these things were the same any more.

He'd got what he'd so stupidly wished for. He'd got an ordinary life. He didn't need to go to prison for murder, didn't need to hang for killing Eliza, he had his punishment every day. He'd lost his treasure, greater than a king's ransom. He'd lost Eliza.

PRESENT.

EXPERIMENTS WITH ALIENS (Contd.) 'You killed my mother?' I repeat in disbelief. This isn't how it's supposed to go at all.

Gordon sits slumped on my bed with his head in his hands.

'You killed my mother?' I prompt him. He looks up at me. In the dark his eyes are like black holes. When he opens his mouth another black hole. He shakes himself like a dog, pulls himself together. 'Well, what I mean ...' He stumbles then visibly pulls himself together. 'What I mean is I killed her spirit.' He shrugs. 'I wanted her for what she was, but when I got her I wanted her to change.'

That's an old familiar tale, but it's all I'm going to get. Gordon pats my leg under the eiderdown 'Sorry if I woke you, old thing,' and disappears back into the night. The Dog follows him as far as the doorway, and then flops down on the threshold with a sigh of exquisite misery.

THE ART OF SUCCESSFUL ENTERTAINING.

On Christmas Eve I wake up slowly from a bizarre Ovidian dream in which Eunice had been in the act of turning into a cow a real one as opposed to a pantomime one, lowing mournfully at me for help. Her lower half (gymslip and white ankle socks) was still recognizably Eunice but her head was completely bovine. The metamorphosis had just reached her arms and she already had hooves where her hands had been, but (thankfully) no udders yet. I was just thinking that Eunice gave a whole new meaning to the word 'cowgirl' when I wake up.

It's a cold, sunny morning. I can hear the baby gurning and carols being sung on a radio somewhere in the house. Charles bursts into my room without knocking and asks irritably if I've got any wrapping-paper, 'I've only got one present left to wrap and I've run out.' I mutter something negative and put my head back under the covers. It's the middle of the afternoon when I wake up again and outside it's already growing dark. Blink and you miss the daylight at this time of the year. So much for saving it.

I struggle out of bed, feeling exhausted, it's as if I haven't slept at all. My party dress is hanging on the wardrobe door but it's too early to put it on, that would be like asking an accident to happen. Despite what Hilary said about not bringing a present I have bought her a boxed set of Bronnley lemon soaps which are sitting gift-wrapped ready on my bedside table. I think it is best to smooth my pa.s.sage into this sophisticated milieu of the Walshes. Although, of course, the only reason I want to be at this party is to steal away Malcolm Lovat from under Hilary's little nose.

I come downstairs still in my dressing-gown. Debbie and Gordon are both in the kitchen, Gordon at the sink wrestling with tomorrow's turkey, a small frozen b.u.t.terball, lethal enough to fling from a catapult and destroy an entire castle and its occupants. The relation of dead poultry to male genitalia is still something of a puzzle to me but it's hardly something I can discuss with Gordon, heroically delivering the turkey of a b.l.o.o.d.y plastic bag of giblets. We would be better off with a roasted suckling baby at our festive table, at least then there might be enough white meat to go round.

Gordon sees me and smiles. He seems to be completely ignoring his mad wife who appears to have turned into a mince pie factory there must be a hundred of them piled on the kitchen table. I hope she's not planning some kind of Christmas party. 'You're not planning a party, are you?'

'No. Should I be?' she asks, attacking a helpless rectangle of pastry with a fluted cutter like a little hollow crown. I decide to leave her to it.

In the hall Vinny is wheeling the baby up and down in its pram. The baby regards Vinny with a glum expression as if it had been expecting something better from life. Who can blame it? Vinny seems to be disappearing before my eyes, so thin and insubstantial that she's more like a cloud of dense ectoplasm than a human being. She's drying up, desiccating like a dead beetle and she's developing a strange aura, a cross-hatching of cobwebs around her outline as if she's fraying at the edges (it could be her nerves). Perhaps the baby's sucking the life out of her.

The baby has a name at last, I suppose if it had been left much longer Vinny, the Keeper of Cat Names, would have ended up christening it Tibbles or something. Although Tibbles might suit it better than the new-fashioned name it's been given Jodi.

'I'll do that,' I offer reluctantly, taking over the pram handle from Vinny who staggers off gratefully to her room, followed by several Cats who have been prowling around jealously.

Perhaps we could take the baby and leave it on someone else's doorstep, they might be fooled into thinking it was an anonymous Christmas present. They might even think it's a manifestation of the second coming Jesus come back to earth as a girl. (Now that would be something.) But the baby doesn't look like it wants to save the world, it looks as if it would settle for what we all crave in Arden a good night's sleep.

It's quite a peaceful activity walking up and down the hall with the pram, rocking up and down on the handle occasionally. There's no hurry anyway 'Don't go too early,' is Mrs Baxter's advice, 'there's nothing worse than being first at a party,' well, except perhaps for never being at parties at all.

'I thought you had a party to go to?' Debbie says, breaking into my reverie. I look at my watch in amazement it's several hours later than I thought it was. How can that be? I must have completely lost track of time. Again.

'Time playing tricks, eh?' Gordon laughs (almost) as I pa.s.s him on the stairs.

So. I have the shoes (white stilettos that I can hardly walk in) and the frock, of course, but what about the rest of me? I need my mother, I need my mother to turn me into a real woman, but in her absence I do the best I can, damping down the frizzled snakes of my hair with Vitapointe so that I end up smelling well basted, like Christmas dinner. Not to mind, I think, putting on the fur tippet which curls comfortably round my neck.

I am going to walk into the party and Malcolm Lovat will catch a glimpse of me, walk towards me in a dream, we'll melt (yes, melt) into each other's arms, he'll peel the pink dress off me and inflamed by so much naked flesh we'll swoon into why don't I have a mother advising me against such a rash course of action? (I'm sixteen, for heaven's sake, I'm a child.) Why isn't my father asking me where I'm going as I fly so eagerly down the stairs?

'Where are you going?' Gordon asks.

'Just out,' I say airily and a little frown pinches his brow. 'I'd give you a lift,' he says, 'but 'and he indicates the kitchen at his back, now so full of mince pies that they're rolling out of the door. 'It's OK, I'll get the bus,' I rea.s.sure him hastily.

He reaches out and straightens my coat collar. But I have no time now for such tendresse, I am away to forgo my virtue and the clock's upbraiding me with the waste of time. 'How are you going to get back?' Gordon shouts after me. 'There'll only be a skeleton bus service tonight.'

'It's OK. I'm getting a lift off Malcolm Lovat,' (there's nothing like being optimistic). Although the idea of a skeleton bus service has a certain novel if somewhat ghoulish attraction.

The Walshes' house turns out to be a gracious Georgian affair with pillars and a portico. My chest is tight with party antic.i.p.ation. I pause for a second at the gate to savour the air of excitement, all the lights are on in the rooms and a tree in the garden has been strung, not with the garish coloured lights of the seaside prom, but with tasteful white globes like bright little moons. The wrought-iron gates at the foot of the driveway are wide open and on one of them is hung a large holly wreath, embellished with a red ribbon bow, a badge of cheer and festivity to welcome us partygoers. I walk up the path, dress rustling, take a deep breath, and ring the doorbell.

The door is flung open as soon as my finger touches the bell, as if someone has been standing behind it waiting for me. Taking the role of footman is a frog-faced boy I have never seen before who smiles breezily at me and says, 'h.e.l.lo there whoever you are.'

I certainly haven't arrived too early, the house is buzzing with chatter and excitement and svelte girls all of them spilling over with self-confidence and spilling out of expensive dresses which are definitely not hand-made. 'Go in the living-room!' the boy at the door bellows cheerfully at me above the noise, pointing at a doorway on the left from which The Shadows are tw.a.n.ging loudly.

Inside the living-room Hilary's parents 'John and Tessa' stand smiling, as if they're part of a wedding reception party, only they have their outdoor clothes on. Dorothy, Hilary's older sister, is hovering around next to them, a vision in lemon tulle.

'We're going to leave it to you now,' Mrs Walsh laughs gaily, 'you young things all together, while we have to go to the boring old Taylor-Wests' do, I really rather envy you.' Who this statement is addressed to isn't entirely clear but as the nearest person I feel a duty to laugh and nod sociably as if I know just what she means. Mr Walsh gives me a funny look and, turning to Dorothy, says, 'Now, Dotty, you've got the Taylor-Wests' phone number if you need us. Just remember, don't turn the music up too loud and make sure you give all these poor fellows a Christmas kiss.'

'Dotty' laughs graciously and says, 'Don't you worry about us, Daddy, you get yourselves off and have a wonderful time!'

So this is how normal families behave, I always knew it! (Why, they might even be happy.) Oh, how I love John and Tessa and Dotty and Hilary. Where is Hilary? Not that I'm really interested in Hilary, but she is the thread that will lead me to the object of my heart's desire (Prince Malcolm). 'Where's Hilary?' I ask in my politest voice and Dorothy turns to look at me and smiles indulgently as if I'm a quaint but backward relative. 'I think she's in the kitchen with the fruit punch,' she answers and then laughs uproariously at this 'joke'. 'That didn't sound right, did it?' and Mr and Mrs Walsh laugh as well, bright, tinny laughter that could set my teeth on edge if I wasn't in such a festive mood.

Mrs Walsh pulls her mink coat (the foxes at my neck flinch in distress) closer around her body and kisses Dorothy's cheek goodbye. I'm half-expecting her to do the same to me but her eyes gloss over me as she turns to Mr Walsh and trills, 'Come on then, Johnny, we'd better leave them to it.'

Hilary is indeed in the kitchen with the fruit punch, doling it out with a gla.s.s ladle in a very ladylike way, like an aristocratic WVS woman. 'There you are, Isobel,' she says, giving me a charitable kind of smile. The gla.s.s punch cups have tiny gla.s.s handles that are impossible to hold. I hand over the gift-wrapped soaps, 'I brought you a present,' which she takes cautiously, as if the box might contain something venomous. She puts it down without unwrapping it, turns her back and starts fiddling with a plate of Ritz crackers that have been given sophisticated party toppings that Debbie would envy bits of Gouda and c.o.c.ktail onions, stuffed green olives and tiny shiny black fish eggs like fleas.

I sip my fruit punch awkwardly, trying to stop the little cup slipping out of my big hand. It tastes, rather disgustingly, of orange squash and Ribena. Just then the captain of the football team, a loutishly handsome boy called Paul Jackson, comes into the kitchen, winks at me and pours an entire bottle of vodka into the fruit punch. When Hilary turns round he stuffs the bottle into his jacket pocket and smiles at her. She smiles back and says, 'Canape, Paul?'

Hilary and Paul seem very interested in each other and not very interested in me and so I help myself to some of the newly fortified punch (which now tastes of orange squash and Ribena, with a hint of nail varnish remover a slight improvement) and slope off to try and find somebody who might be interested in me, like Malcolm Lovat, for example.

Everyone at this party seems to know everyone else and yet I know n.o.body I've certainly never seen any of these people in school, where have they all come from?

The Walshes' house has many mansions and I wander through the different rooms, each one alive with chattering party-goers, each one presenting a different tableau of conviviality. Trying to infiltrate these hard knots of people is like trying to get into a rugby scrum. Emboldened by anonymity, I try varying social tactics. 'h.e.l.lo, I'm Isobel,' I say shyly on the outskirts of one group and am completely ignored. Perhaps I've accidentally put on my cloak of invisibility.

'h.e.l.lo, my name's Isobel, what's yours?' I try, more loudly, on the edge of another group and everyone turns round to look at me as if I'm an unwelcome imbecile. There's no sign of Malcolm Lovat anywhere.

I overhear someone say, 'G.o.d, have you seen that dress, what does she look like?' and the other person replies, 'A strawberry tart,' and hoots with laughter. Do they mean me? Surely not. I slink back to the kitchen. Hilary has disappeared (if only) and been replaced by her brother Graham who's grinning at me in an odd way. 'h.e.l.lo, Is...o...b..l,' he says in an affected kind of way.

Graham's with a group of his college friends, all dressed in sweaters and corduroy jackets and stripy scarves just in case anyone mistakes them for anything else. To my horror I suddenly realize that one of them is Richard Primrose.

'Surprise,' he says, snarf-snarfing.

'Why are you here?'

'Graham, my good friend here,' he says, draping his extra-long arm around Graham's shoulder in a drunken way, 'invited me, of course. And I told him to invite you,' he laughs, jabbing in my direction with his finger. He can hardly stand, he's so drunk. 'This,' he says, gesturing to the rest of the group, 'is my kid sister's friend,' his voice drops to an artificial whisper, 'the one I was telling you about.' They all look at me as if I'm an exhibit in the zoo and I feel myself blushing to a shade that probably accessorises quite well with my dress.

They crowd around me, one of them says, 'h.e.l.lo, Is-obel, my name's Clive,' and another one says, 'Hi, I'm Geoff.' This is amazing, to be the focus of so much male attention and for a deluded second I imagine the dress must be weaving its magic and I've been transfigured into a magnetically attractive person. They are so close that I can smell the alcohol fumes coming off them, more beerily pungent than just vodka-laced punch. One of them puts his arm round my waist and laughing and smirking, says, 'Well, Is...o...b..l, we've all heard what a goer you are. How about giving me a try?'

'Goer?' I repeat, mystified, wriggling out of his unpleasant embrace. 'Goer? What do you mean?' In my mildly befuddled brain I wonder if a 'goer' isn't some kind of snake or is it an island? 'Goer?' I puzzle to the nearest boy? (Clive, I think, but they're indistinguishable really with their little beards you can just tell they're all jazz fans.) 'Yeah,' he says, fingering the edge of one of my cap sleeves, 'we've heard how accommodating you are, Is...o...b..l. Izzie-Wizzie, let's get busy.'

'Old d.i.c.k here,' another one of them says, nodding his head in Richard's direction, Richard sn.i.g.g.e.rs, 'has been telling us that you do anything, Is...o...b..l.' He snorts with laughter. 'Things that nice girls don't do.' 'Nice girls,' another one chuckles and mimes being sick.

'Not like Ding-Dong here,' another one, possibly Geoff, says (they're as numerous as mince pies). 'We've all heard what d.i.c.k gets up to with you, Ding-Dong.'

'Yeah, p.u.s.s.y's in the well,' another one of them leers. The foxes at my neck growl protectively.