Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [215]
The Toxique is different at night. The lights are dimmer, and squat candles in red glass holders flicker on the tables; the outfits of the waiters and waitresses are subtly more outrageous. There are a few men in suits, having dinner; businessmen, Tony guesses, though with their mistresses rather than their wives. She likes to think that such men might still have mistresses, though probably they don’t call them that. Lovers. Main squeezes. Special friends. The Toxique is where you would take a special friend, but maybe not a wife. Though how would Tony know? It’s not a world she moves in. There are more men in leather jackets than there are in the daytime. There’s a subdued buzz.
She checks her big-numbers wristwatch: the rock band doesn’t come on till eleven, and she hopes she’ll be out of there by then. She’s had enough noise at home; today she had to listen to a full thirty minutes of aural torture, put together by West and played to her at full volume, with considerable arm-waving and expressions of glee. “I think I’ve done it,” was West’s comment. What could she say? “That’s good,” was what she came out with. It’s an all-occasion phrase, and appeared to suffice.
Tony is the first one here. She’s never had dinner at the Toxique before, only lunch. This dinner is last-minute: Roz phoned in a state of breathlessness and said there was something she really needed to tell. At first she suggested that Tony and Charis should come over to her place, but Tony pointed out that such a thing was difficult without a car.
She’s not that keen on going to Roz’s anyway, though Roz’s twins are – in theory – favourites of hers. She used to regret not having had children, though she wasn’t sure she would have been all that good at it, considering Anthea. But being a godmother has suited her better than being a mother – for one thing it’s more intermittent – and the twins have done her proud. They have a fine glittering edge to them, and so does her other goddaughter, Augusta. None of them is what you would call self-effacing – all three would be at home on horses, riding astride, hair flying, scouring the plains, giving no quarter. Tony isn’t sure how they’ve come by their confidence, their straight-ahead level gazes, their humorous but remorseless mouths. They have none of the timidity that used to be so built in, for women. She hopes they will gallop through the world in style, more style than she herself has been able to scrape together. They have her blessing; but from a distance, because close up Augusta is faintly chilling – she’s so intent on success – and the twins have become gigantic; gigantic, and also careless. Tony is slightly afraid of them. They might step on her by mistake.
So it was Tony who suggested the Toxique, this time. Roz may have something to tell, but Tony has something to tell also and it’s fitting that it should be told here. She has requested their usual table, the one in the corner by the smoked mirror. From the young woman, or possibly man, who appears beside her, dressed in a black cat-suit with a wide leather stud-covered belt and five silver earrings in each ear, she orders a bottle of white wine and a bottle of Evian.
Charis arrives at the same time as the bottles, looking strangely pale. Well, thinks Tony, she always looks strangely pale, but tonight she’s even more so. “Something weird happened to me today,” she tells Tony, shedding her damp woollen sweater-coat and her fuzzy knitted hat. But this is not an unusual thing for Charis to say, so Tony merely nods and pours her a glass of Evian. Sooner or later they will get the story of the dream about shiny people sitting in trees, or the odd coincidence involving street numbers or cats that look just like other cats that used to belong to someone Charis once knew and doesn’t any more, but Tony would rather have it wait till Roz gets here. Roz is more tolerant of such intellectual wispiness, and better at changing the subject.
Roz comes in, waving and yoo-hooing and wearing a flame-red trench coat and matching