Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [7]
The girls hadn’t understood it then, and they never would. Everything was different now: Bridget had got her eight-place dinner service overnight – it was all itemised like an inventory on her wedding list. He’d spent fifteen thousand pounds on a wedding, she’d gone off on a three thousand pound honeymoon and come home to a hallway full of a ready-made life, carefully packaged by John Lewis. They laughed at him, gently, when he told them that the things you had to work for were worth more to you.
‘War baby,’ Susannah called him, not unkindly.
Which, of course, was true. Born the year before war had broken out, to a mother struggling already with four other children, and a father who had gone away in 1939 and not come home for six years. Maybe they were right.
But Bridget had been married only three years, and she’d already had to replace a glass and two side plates.
Another New Year’s Eve. Nicholas felt very old and tired. The three couples next door were the same six people he and Anna had spent New Year’s Eve with for the last twenty-two years. Four of them they only saw on this one night in the year.
He ran one finger along his collar. Anna always required them to wear black tie. She said it made the evening more special. And more uncomfortable. He probably needed a sixteen and a half collar, these days, and his shirt was old and tight. In private Anna said she was damned if she was going to slave over a five-course dinner only to have people eat it dressed in jeans. They went to each other’s houses in rotation. At Brian and Margaret’s it was always curry, ordered by Margaret from the restaurant on the roundabout and collected by Brian early, so that he could drink, and served from the Formica breakfast bar, still in its cartons. They had holidayed with Brian and Margaret a few times when their boys had been friendly as teenagers with the girls, and Margaret had often gone braless, well into her forties, long past the age when it might have been a good idea. Nicholas supposed it was the same sort of thing with the food. Free and easy. At Shaun and Lindsay’s there was always a theme. Thai, Scottish, cowboy. Lindsay dressed up, and Shaun matched the alcohol. Nicholas remembered the year Lindsay had appeared in a full kimono, bowing and scraping theatrically, and Shaun had served sake in eggcups. They’d been made to sit on the floor, which had played havoc with his knees. Clive and Vicky were more conventional, but they ate in the kitchen and Clive always wore jeans.
He wondered what the others had talked about, getting dressed in their penguin suits to come here tonight. Maybe they liked it. They were all chatting away happily enough next door in the living room – Anna would be handing round the mini Yorkshire puddings with tiny strips of rare roast beef. He heard Clive and Shaun laugh their hearty male laughs.
Nicholas wanted to go upstairs, lay his head on the pillow, go to sleep and maybe never wake up. Or, at least, not until this endless night was long over. More than anything he didn’t want to go back in there with them and start smiling his plastic company smile. He didn’t want to eat his fiddly five-course meal, and watch his expensive red wine being poured down the throats of people who would have happily drunk Blue Nun. And, most of all, he had no wish and no energy to pretend that he was happy. To survey all that he owned smugly, and carry on this unbearable, pointless charade.
He almost jumped when the door opened behind him. Anna was backing out of the room, saying something sing-songy. The others laughed. When she turned to him, with her empty tray, her face changed; the smile faded instantly and her eyes narrowed. ‘What the hell are you doing