12. Parties
From 'Passages' by Jean de Lier
Ruth was fashionable and pretty, excitable and rich, the sort of North Londoner who in New York would have counted as a ‘Princess’. She was the younger sister of Jonathan’s closest childhood friend; Jonathan was William’s young assistant. She flounced excitedly into their office one Monday lunch to demand that everyone looked out of the window. There, happily before the days of parking meters, parked in the street, was a brand new white Aston Martin. it was certainly a beautiful car and all of the young men were dutifully envious. But William also knew, as his partner knew, that an Aston Martin went considerably beyond the spending powers of 22 year old Ruth, spoiled brat though she was.
That story was extraordinary enough. She had met an extremely attractive young man at a party on the previous Saturday night, but not till nearly the end. He had quickly brought up the subject of cars, mentioned idly that he had a white Aston, but could not take her home in it because she had come in her own car. In the banter he had insisted on swapping his car keys for hers – I nice enough Mini-Cooper, but not at all the same thing. “You can’t do that” she had said but he absolutely insisted she drive his car home, and he would take hers. He did take her phone number. On the Sunday he had not phoned and by lunch on Monday he had not phoned either, hence her appearance at William’s office. Amaze.
The story continued. By Wednesday she was getting a bit disturbed and so were her parents. She knew nothing about the man except that he had appeared late at a party on Saturday night, given her his car keys and taken hers. She rang the police but could elicit only that the car had not been reported stolen. Another ten days were to pass, two weeks in all, before he indeed rang, politely asked if she was well, and yes he did ask if his car was alright (yes) and would the young lady like to have dinner with him and swap cars back? Yes, of course. She was of course dying to see him, but also to rid herself of the responsibility of the car. It was a clever start.
She fell in love. Totally and blindly. It turned out that he had too, on that night at the party, had fallen for her but he was leaving for two weeks business in the Middle East, the following morning. In those days before mobiles, almost without hope of communication, he feared that even if she fancied him now, she would have forgotten, after so brief an encounter, two weeks later. On the other hand he had reckoned she would look after the car, that he could leave hers at the car park at the airport as he might not like to leave the Aston, but above all that she would certainly remember him and give him a chance of a date after driving his car for a fortnight. It worked, but he also had more good reasons to worry. He had rightly guessed she was Jewish, not that her family were strictly Orthodox. He was an extremely urbane, pale skinned, well spoken Arab, Christian in fact but Arab nevertheless. Their turbulent affair lasted a couple of years to the horror of both families, but eventually they separated as good friends – that affair is not the subject of this tale.
In fact the young man travelled quite a lot, so she was alone quite a lot without wishing to go on other dates. And so it was that she waltzed into William’s office one Friday, just before going home for Sabbath, to discuss whether she should go to ‘the party’ of a mutual friend of hers and William’s assistant. Should she go? Who would be there? How would she get there? And then she asked William, who was freshly divorcing, separated, depressed whether, if he was alone, he might not like to take her. William felt that if there was one thing he did not want to do, it was to go to a pretentious black tie party of her friends somewhere miles in the country full of people he did not know, with whom he was unlikely to have much in common, and with a girl with whom he felt little empathy at the best of times and certainly he would stand no chance of ‘getting off’ with her. He politely declined. “Oh well, if you change you mind give me a ring” she said as she left.
William woke on Saturday morning and faced the prospect of a lonely weekend. His wife had left him, the flat was empty, cheerless, foodless. He could get drunk alone or find someone in a pub but that seemed rather a depressing prospect, on Saturday morning. Two things happened in succession but in the wrong order. On an impulse he called Ruth and asked if the offer was still open. Yes, and collect me at 7.30 in North London. The Party was in Suffolk. OK. Ten minutes later a friend rang to remind him (he had not been told but that was common in that family) to come to a party at which lots of friends, families he knew and acquaintances would be present, also in North London, informal and free. He had been to their annual party for years but now he accepted the other and was too cowardly to change it. Damn. In the event he put on his black tie and went to the jolly party of friends first, a bit early and stayed a bit too long because he met Charlotte. In truth he had known Charlotte’s mother when he was a child and he had known Charlotte herself as a child but now at eighteen she had grown up, blossomed and was radiating sexuality and fun. He fell for her as Ruth had fallen for the Arab. Probably he looked quite grand to her in his black suit, and in minutes the were canoodling under the stairs, he a little embarrassed in the presence, distantly, of her mother. Only years later was he to discover that the mother had indeed noticed and thoroughly approved.
But Suffolk called and Ruth called and he dragged himself away from the girl and found Ruth and had to wait fifty minutes while she got ready (he could have been with Charlotte). And Ruth was rude on the way to the party, about his car, about his driving and they got lost because she did not know the way and he did not even have the address and they were dreadfully late at the party which was as bad as he had feared. Half the county was there but the wrong half, the builders and farmers, property developers and a sprinkling of London expatriates, adverting experts who had second homes in the area. His nibs, the host, a newly appointed knight now believed that he had arrived with the Norman Conquest and that he had won the second world war in the desert single handed (with just a little help from Montgomery) – he had in fact been a perfectly competent (we presume) Major who had seen relatively little action. His main claim to military fame was that in one of the few sorties under his direct command they had attacked and overpowered an Italian storage site. The few guards had fled or surrendered and the store turned out to contain not much except a few cases of wine (hooray) and 1 million bottles of S. Pellegrino water. Most welcome in the desert. He was later put in charge of victualling the Officers Mess Bar in Alexandria, a post of considerable scope for patronage, if not quite corruption.
Ruth was unmoved by the party. Her life had already been upset and it got worse before it got better. She allowed William to drive her home again at some inconvenience. William’s partner Jonathan, who was there with his fiancé, broke of the engagement and had a year’s affair with the most beautiful girl in the world. She really was beautiful, a model, tall and slim (so was he) but what we would today call anorexic. She could only react to brute force and ignorance, whereas he was delicate and sensitive. After a year she left him for a man who brutalised her, beat her up and left her with a disabled illegitimate baby. But she made the “50 most beautiful women in the world” book. Jonathan’s former fiancé took him back and they married unsatisfactorily.
William danced like a demon, which was not his wont. Partly he was annoyed at being there, partly he was uninhibited as he knew almost no one and did not care what they thought of him. He was not looking for a date and he only had little Charlotte in mind. He wished he were dancing with her, kissing her, holding her hand, maybe just looking into her eyes. In the end he thought he ought to dance with the hostess of the actual party. It was in fact her 21st and she fell for him. He did not even realise how strange it was that in a mood of total rejection of women, disgust for his (still) wife and mood close to depression he seemed to be acting as magnet for young women. He accepted that he must take her to lunch for inviting him unannounced to her party. They arranged a lunch and then a dinner and the affair had several consequences which can be recounted at another time. But the first consequence was that sweet little Charlotte was postponed and postponed and ultimately banished from his mind. Not from his mind but from his active life. They have in consequence a life long love and affection for each other because of what each knows of what might have been, nearly was – what the philosophers call ‘counter-factuals’. Her children are adult now.
William did in fact meet Charlotte almost annually thereafter, because the party he had been to that night was annual and he liked to attend. Liked it because the same people came year after year, getting older, with fiancés and spouses (including his own second wife – he had been there with his first). The food served was the same, the great house got shabbier and shabbier but was essentially unchanged. Children even grand children but while the old Matriarch Winifred was alive the tea came in a huge metal kettle, the beer in barrels. The first generation of children had introduced wine in bottles and a particularly nasty brand of sausage roll. But what brought William every year, apart from the obvious joy of meeting old friends he liked and family members whom he never saw for the rest of the year, was the feeling of dejà vue. It could have been any year; he would walk into the house like a time warp, through a black hole and the same people, same food, same smell of the once beautiful house. The same warm welcome. He never again went in a black tie but dress down as he might he never quite achieved the relaxed untidiness of the family members, though others were well turned out enough and there were always a few newcomers, who tended to dress up too much for the occasion. It was not possible to dress down too much. There were always a few newcomers but they never stayed the course unless they married in. There were a lot of them marrieds-in but the family ethic was so strong that they all became like the matriarch, though it was an insult to say so. They also pretended to hate her.
William very occasionally met Charlotte elsewhere too, always with the greatest warmth, He was very fond of her, of her husband too as a matter of fact, an exceptionally nice kind man and good father to their children. For William it was the great unconsummated affair of his life though as for that they had only kissed once, on the stair, in public thirty years earlier.
Eventually even old Winifred had to pass away and die she did to sadness and hilarity. Her eldest son, now some seventy years old took on the role of King like Edward VII after being Prince of Wales for fifty years. And like King Edward he misruled with aplomb in what he imaged to have been his mother’s style. And like the King he got close to causing a world war within the family. Even he died at last of drink and boredom and annoyance. And so the family at last got together, buried many of the mutual hates and grievances, asserted their common love and union and interest and decided to sell the house, all the property and divide the spoils. And have one last party there as of old.
NO – not as of old but in black tie. They did all don glad rags and as a matter of record William (not strictly a family member) was probably the only one to have attended in black tie before. But they couldn’t do it. The wine was better, large cigars were provided but the finger food, better admittedly, but not much, was still essentially the same and the house, though marginally decorated for sale, was still the charming Victorian pile it had ever been. It looked like a film set for a horror movie. Above all the family were still the same ragged, rough, self-confidant, vulgar, refined, intellectual, artistic, intelligent, bright, muddled and totally unconventional assembly of lateral thinking individualistic odd-balls William had ever met in his life. A few members had dropped out over they years, unable to tolerate the high breeding irreverence, most had four or more children so the gene has perpetuated. So now, with black tie as fancy dress, they still looked the same as ever.
The time came to honour the matriarch, old Winifred and the youngest living son, about the same age as William, proceeded to make something close to a formal speech. He stood on a wooden chair, pointed to her ashes, in a red faux-marble urn on the mantle beside him, which had once held stem ginger. He referred to the party that she had arranged for them all annually, which they were attending for the last time. He praised the family of eight children she had brought up without a husband. He mentioned that part of the reason why there was no husband was because she had never had one, they were all bastards. The father had had another family of eight before he started on this one, which meant that there was a whole family of siblings, if living, older than the recently deceased Prince of Wales. He mentioned some of her strange ways, tapping the urn with her ashes familiarly, as if she were inside listening. Maybe she was.
And then, as was surely planned, though it looked spontaneous, he picked up the urn, embraced it in his left hand like an old fashioned Biblical sower, and sprinkled some of the contents in the general direction of his attentive audience. No one flinched at this irreverence, a kind of eucharist. And then, the urn still under his arm, he got down, momentarily solemn and went over to the balcony and stepped out of the glass door. He burst into song, then dance like a Dionysian beckoning the maenads to follow. And follow they all did. It was a warm night and the family joined shoulders in the manner of a conga, singing the while a mock serious dirge, chanting her name and jigging as he went down the outside stairs ‘sowing’ his mothers ashes to the four corners of the house, into the fish pond, around the garden and back through the French windows downstairs.
William remembered the fish pond from his earliest youth when he tried to catch a gold fish with a pin and was rebuked by Winifred for cruelty to the ladybird he had impaled on it. “Ash is bad for the fish”. someone said. “But water is good for Winifred” several voices echoed, as if she had been an alcoholic. “Baptise her in the water of eternity” The pond was not more than five feet diameter and 12 inches deep. And so her ashes were sprinkled irreverently round her house, inside and out, where she had lived for some eighty years and brought up a family and mothered a dynasty. Sensible and broadminded about everything, cultivated and kind except to her own children, generous to grandchildren and visitors, her own children vented a lifetime of rage and frustration, at the Victorian martinet Winifred had been. Everyone had always called her Winifred which was odd actually. Now the tired and evaporating memories and battles lost to her were being atoned and revenged by pagan ritual of fun and laughter of her dead ashes.
As they danced round the house and into all the untidy rooms. William remembered her once declaring that she was keeping all her goods till she died. “When I am gone you can throw this broken teapot without a lid onto the rubbish heap with every thing I possess” “Ha, ha, there goes her old teapot, you can say. But till I die it is mine, and I shall continue to wear white cotton socks and baggy clothes and do as I please. Would you like another cup of tea or something stronger, a whisky perhaps”
So they threw her teapot onto the heap with her ashes, and I don’t suppose she cared. To William, who was by nature more conventional and who had lost his own parents long before, it was slightly shocking, but not, he mused, necessarily wrong or immoral. Next to him in the line of celebrating mourners, he kissed Charlotte fervently on the lips at the bottom of the stairs, roughly where he had kissed her (if memory served him right) on the first occasion.
Ashes to ashes.
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