Spencer's List Part 27

'The eye,' said Fran, through gritted teeth.

'So when the storm blows you're always... in the middle. To cling onto. Where's the corkscrew?' He looked vaguely around the table, the second bottle in his hand.

'Ah no.' She moved swiftly to confiscate it. 'You've had plenty.'

'Strong,' he said, looking up at her admiringly.

The phone rang and she went to answer it, taking the bottle with her.

'h.e.l.lo?'

There was a pause and then a woman's voice, cool as water, said, 'Who's that?'

'Fran,' said Fran, and realized, in the microsecond it took to say the word, that she shouldn't have.

'In that case,' said the woman, 'you can tell Barry he's a lying f.u.c.kwit and he'll find his stuff all over the pavement tomorrow morning.' The line went dead.

Fran looked at the receiver for a moment before replacing it. Then, holding the bottle like a club, she went back to the kitchen.

'Hey,' said Barry, giving her what he probably imagined was a winning smile.

'That was Janette.'

The smile faded. 'Huh?'

'Janette. You gave her this number, didn't you?'

'Yeah.' The implication filtered through. 'Oh... I should have answered '

'When I said my name she said "in that case" she was throwing your stuff out. What did she mean, "in that case"?'

He looked alarmed. 'Throwing my stuff out? But I've got a guitar, I mean she can't '

'Barry!' He jumped and knocked his gla.s.s over. 'Tell me what she meant. What have you been saying to her about me?'

'I haven't said anything.'

'b.o.l.l.o.c.ks you haven't.'

'I swear,' he said, his expression so shifty that he looked like Wile Coyote. 'Not deliberately, anyway.'

'What do you mean?'

'It was accidental.'

'What was?'

'I ' He looked at her helplessly. 'You're going to be angry.'

'I'm angry now. You've got to tell me.'

'OK, OK.' He took a deep breath. 'Can I have another gla.s.s of wine?'

'No.'

'Right. You see, I'd been thinking about you. I mean, I never stopped thinking about you even when I got back with Janette, but I was thinking about you more because I'd been thinking... well, I'd just been starting to think... what it was, was that I'd started to think that you'd probably...'

Fran put the bottle on the table with a thump and sat down opposite him; he blinked at her nervously and cleared his throat.

'Right. You see, what it was, you stopped reading your letters in lunch break so I guessed you'd broken up with Duncan. If he wasn't writing to you any more.' He waited for her to say something. 'That's what I guessed,' he added, when it became clear that she wasn't going to. 'That's what I thought had probably happened.'

'Get on with it.'

'So, anyway, I... I kept thinking about you, and thinking I might be in with a chance again, and just you know working myself up, and there was one day last week when it rained and you got all wet, and you were in that black t-shirt '

'Oh G.o.d,' said Fran.

'And that night, I was with Janette and we were having s.e.x and it came to the you know '

'Oh G.o.d,' said Fran, again, with awful prescience.

'And I said I said your name. Pretty loudly really. You know, shouted it. Several times.' He laced his fingers together and looked at them. 'Janette's quite a jealous sort of a person.'

Fran's first coherent thought was a vow never again to wear the black t-shirt; her second was more nebulous a vague hope that at some time in the future she might attract someone who wasn't looking for the calm in the centre of the storm, who didn't require a lodestone, or a rock, or a compa.s.s, or a steady North Star someone, in fact, who could read maps and stand upright all by himself, but who just liked having her along for the ride.

Barry sat silent, sneaking occasional glances at her, the expression on his face somewhere between fear and pleasurable antic.i.p.ation, as if and she suddenly knew this to be the case as if he thought that she would find his confession so powerful that her defences would melt and she'd hurl herself into his arms.

'Are you still angry?' he asked, after a while.

'Depressed,' said Fran. 'Deeply, deeply depressed.'

It took her a long time to get to sleep; at first she was disturbed by the sound of Barry doing the washing-up with careless vigour and then by the long, guilty silence after something smashed onto the floor. Her senses sharp with annoyance, she was sure that the next noise was the sound of a cork being drawn.

After that she drifted into a long and irritating dream, in which she was sitting in the Hagwood staffroom, reading a letter from Duncan. The letter was only three sentences long, but she could sense Barry watching her, so she sat with her eyes glued to the paper, reading the words over and over again. 'Dear Fran, I hear you are looking for lodgers. h.e.l.la and I are moving to England and would love to move in. She is expecting twins in October. Love Duncan.'

She was woken instantly, completely, by a hoa.r.s.e eldritch screech, followed by a couple of staccato footfalls, an indefinable rending sound, and a final enormous thud. As she leapt for the light switch there was a galloping noise that ended just outside her door and she opened it to see Mr Tibbs, more alert than she had ever seen him, sides heaving, tail cracking back and forth like a whip.

Barry was lying ghost-pale on the hall floor, dressed only in a pair of Tom and Jerry boxer shorts, his limbs flung outwards as if trying to acquire a tan. As Fran hurtled downstairs towards him she could see his chest jerking irregularly, ominously, his mouth searching for air, his head lolling. The sound he was making only registered as she knelt beside him, her face cold with fear. He was laughing.

'Shtood on the cat,' he said. 'Ur her her her her her.'

Fran sat back on her heels, and looked at the stairs. Halfway down, just below the step that Mr Tibbs liked to think of as home, the banisters were bowed outwards as if an elephant had casually leaned on them.

'Shorry,' said Barry. 'I wash coming to shay shorry.' The heady bouquet of Istanbul white filled the air.

'Do you hurt anywhere?' asked Fran, voice like a stone.

'Dunno.' He heaved himself into a sitting position. 'No.' He put one hand on the radiator and one hand on Fran's shoulder and tried to stand up. He sat down again with a thump. 'Ankle,' he said. 'Ow.'

18.

At the time, the discovery of a cache of biscuit cutters at the back of her father's pan cupboard was merely a nice little moment, a pinch of sweet serendipity; in retrospect it was the undisputed best bit of the entire day of the surprise party. It was mid-afternoon. Her father had left for his indoor bowls match, all unsuspecting and Tammy McHugh was scouring the shops of Stoke Newington for liquorice wheels; Iris, meanwhile, was meditatively mixing a batch of dough in the quiet kitchen. A fine rain pattered on the window and she could hear the regular chunking of a spade coming from Mr Hickey's garden. His head bobbed intermittently above the Leylandii but he kept his face resolutely turned away, and ignored a couple of tentative waves that she'd aimed in his direction. In surgery, he was always stiffly polite to her, but here, on his own ground, she was obviously viewed as an enemy consort.

After rolling out the dough, she rooted around for a baking tray. Her father used the same two pans for everything but behind them in the cupboard, amongst the ca.s.seroles and double boilers, were items unused unthought of since the fifties: milk strainers, measuring funnels, egg poachers with twirly wire handles, bain-mairies, Swiss Roll tins and a jingling cl.u.s.ter of nozzles for squeezing icing onto fancy cakes. She found the yellowed muslin bag of cutters nestling in the bottom of a jelly mould, and the touch of it was instantly familiar, the same mysterious bundle of jagged yet hollow shapes that she had pulled from her stocking when she was seven. She lifted it out and tipped the contents onto the table a Christmas tree, a teddy bear, a crown, a hexagon and a star, now all splotched with rust and possessing the sort of lethal edges that had seemed standard in post-war children's toys. Fingering the sharp angles of the star, she thought she could remember the last time she'd used them, another rainy day when the boys were toddlers and she had been desperate to find some activity to contain their bursting energy, to distract them even momentarily from their favourite game of clambering up the first two stairs and then jumping off them onto the hall floor, again and again and again. She had lured them into the kitchen and then hovered nervously as they'd squeezed and thumped the greying dough, envisaging at any moment a cry of pain and a severed finger rolling across the counter top.

She ran the star-shaped cutter under the tap and gave it a rub with a brillo pad; to her surprise, bright tin showed beneath the rust and it took only a couple of minutes to restore it to a usable state. She dried it carefully, and had just resumed her search for a baking tray when the doorbell rang.

Idling over his Weetabix that morning, Tom had predicted that half the guests would turn up much too early: 'You know old people, they always give themselves an extra nine days to get somewhere just in case a volcano erupts and destroys the bus depot.' And here on the doorstep, two and a half hours before the invited time, stood Leslie Peake, sporting a waterproof bush-hat, and carrying a bottle of wine with an ominously home-made label.

'Not too early, am I?' he asked, in his whistling North Welsh accent that broke the words into their const.i.tuent syllables and left clear air between each one, 'only I took an earlier train just in case the later one was cancelled. Wouldn't want to miss the start of the party.' He shook the rain off his mac and followed her into the kitchen.

'Cup of tea, Leslie?'

'Luffly.'

She averted her eyes as he removed the hat and adjusted his hair. Leslie's fringe ended just above his eyebrows, but it began somewhere at the nape of his neck, and several times an hour he would reposition the entire headful over the bald expanse beneath, with the action of someone settling an antimaca.s.sar.

'So are you still in Dalston then, Iris?'

'That's right.'

'Still at the surgery?'

'Yes, still there.'

'Not married yet?'

'No, not yet.' Poised with the kettle in her hand, she realized that the same demoralizing exchange would be repeated with almost every guest at the party. Iris's life, summed up in three questions.

'Don't mind me if you've got to get on.'

She pulled herself together. 'Thanks. I've still got a few things to do.' All the sandwiches, to begin with. She decided to postpone the biscuits and get on with the egg mayonnaise.

'It's potato wine,' said Leslie. 'Home-made.'

'Lovely.'

'Very potent. I thought it would bring back a memory or two for your dad.'

'Oh yes?'

'Catterick.' He tapped the side of his nose and gave a wink. 'It was supposed to be a dry barracks. Enough said.'

If only, thought Iris. She thought she could probably write an entire book on Ian and Leslie The War Years. She checked in the oven to see how the quiches were coming on, and then delved into the fridge for the eggs.

'You know, they used to call Block "The Still".'

'Really?'

'Oh yes. And do you know why?'

'Because it had a still in it?'

'No!' He was triumphant. 'Because there were three brothers bunking there, and you know what their surname was?'

'No what?'

'Ginn. Harry, Si and Ronnie Ginn.'

She managed a laugh. 'Oh, I see. I get it.' She poured his tea and put it in front of him, and then turned back to the stove.

'Of course, Harry was killed in Tripoli.'

'Oh dear, was he?'

'You know, Iris, I'm not as sweet as you must think I am.'

'Sorry?' She was thrown by the sudden change of subject.

'I said I'm not as sweet as you must think I am.' He mimed stirring a teaspoon.

'Oh of course. Sorry.' She placed the sugar bowl on the table.

'You've just got white, have you?'

'Oh... er.' She turned down the heat under the pan and started to hunt around in the dry goods cupboard, wary of disarranging her father's careful storage system.

'Doesn't matter,' he said, easily, after a couple of minutes. 'Don't want to put you to any trouble. You get on.' At least thirty seconds of silence ensued, during which Iris put the eggs into the pan and started to slice cuc.u.mber into a colander. She could feel Leslie's eyes following her.

'Haven't got a biscuit, have you?' he asked. The doorbell rang again.

'Ginn,' said Leslie. 'Harry, Si and Ronnie Ginn.' There was a chuckle round the table, and a relaxed post-anecdotal easing back of chairs, narrowing still further the tiny gangway that Iris had been left to work in. It was a quarter to five, and there were now half a dozen premature guests sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea and listening to Leslie Peake's war stories. Only one, Auntie Kath, had offered to help Iris, but the vague air with which she was peeling the eggs, the wandering hand which hovered between the two bowls one supposedly containing bits of sh.e.l.l, the other denuded eggs, the occasional cries of 'Whoops-a-daisy' and 'Now, what's that doing in there?', augured badly for the texture of the sandwiches.

'The Still...' repeated the senior church warden, appreciatively.

'So Iris ' Leslie turned to her with the benign air of a successful host ' what time is your father expected?'

'Quarter to six,' she said, spooning mushrooms into a vol-au-vent casing.

'Oh, we're here in good time then,' said Auntie Kath, complacently. 'And when's Tammy coming?'