Stretch, 29

Three hundred grand

Half an hour after fleeing Bill Turnage I was still crammed into the corner of the cab (non-smoker, inevitably) somewhere between High St Ken and Holland Park. The meter was clicking up remorselessly, like a digital stopwatch. I was speculating on Bill’s maths. FURNITURE DESIGN & BUILD had a convincing ring to it, but there was something almost desperate-looking about Bill that made me baulk at anything above the high 40s. I tried to put him out of my mind. There was no chance of me ever getting in contact with him, no way he’d bother to write to me. We’re at the end of the twentieth century, for God’s sake, nobody has to do anything they don’t want to do. And anyway, I had more pressing concerns, namely the guests at Tom Mannion’s party and how they would bring home to me with force my irredeemable 29-ness. All of them would be my age, have, on paper at least, my background and education and all of them would have more money, nicer flats, more sex, better bodies, better jobs, faster cars, fuller diaries and fewer neuroses than me. What was worse was that they’d all know it and they’d know that I knew it. What was worse than that was that Tom and Lucy had invited some girl along they thought I might be interested in. I wasn’t at my best.

Tom, though, is a good guy, he means well, he wouldn’t hurt a fly. The only thing is, he’s different from other people. He’s sort of better than other people. He is my age. He is a public law barrister in what people describe to me as ‘a sexy set’. (What can this possibly mean?) His father is very high up in the newspaper and magazine business, and a baronet. Tom is happily married to Lucy, a beautiful woman (Varsity sweetheart) who trades bonds. He drives an Alfa Spider. He got a rowing Half-Blue at Oxford. He wrote a novel about art theft when he was 26. As I was being reminded now, as the cab came to a growling halt outside his house, he lives in a mews house in Holland Park. He’s funny, clever, charming and handsome. He speaks three languages. He’s my ‘best friend’. He scores 73. The maths in detail:

Nowadays, I have to mark him down on

He is my best friend as I say, but it is a friendship increasingly sustained by distant historical links, rather than current behaviour. I have somewhere a chart which illustrates our drifting apart. The salient points are as follows: in the first couple of years after university we saw each other on average 2.1 times a week. He moved in with Lucy, at this point, and the average over the next year went down suddenly to 1.3, but didn’t further decline over the next year, in fact it held firm at 1.4. Then things started to go wrong; a sudden dive to 0.6, and a constant decline, until here we were at the end of 1995 and I’d seen him four times all year, and not since the summer.

The reason was simple: he was changing, I was staying the same. The best example of this was in our attitude to children.

My view was concise and uncontroversial: the process of acquiring children, as it takes place in the British middle classes, is an exercise in eugenics. Both parties in the enterprise spend their early sexual career sifting and sorting prospective mates on the basis of their appearance, bloodstock, prosperity, psychology, intelligence, hair colour, etc. It is not until it is felt by both parties that a satisfactory balance is struck on these criteria that any firm agreement on procreation is made, and this agreement is usually consecrated in a formal, social context. This gathering, setting the couple off in their best light, effectively invites the others in attendance to speculate on how beautiful, intelligent and socially useful the putative offspring will be. The male attempts to inseminate the female shortly after. If at any stage of the incubation period it is determined that the child is likely to be sub-standard in any of the crucial respects, it is ‘terminated’, and you start all over again. Preferences are for obedient, outgoing, straight-backed, easy-tanning, blue-eyed blonds who are capable of propagating the genetic inheritance into the distant future. A thousand years, perhaps. You can see where this is heading.

Tom, although perhaps not quite as visionary, was, in his early twenties, sceptical. He could see that children often represent dilution rather than increase, and place intolerable restrictions on freedom, and unforeseeable destructive pressures on existing relationships. Indeed, this view seemed to be increasingly widely held. Here was a generation on the cusp of their thirties, the women with their best gestating days behind them, and the slither, thud and squeal of childbirth was as yet utterly unheard. The difference was, amongst our disparate circle, that the book was now closed on who would be first to drop. Tom and Lucy had, it was rumoured, ‘been trying’ for six months, which was interesting as I had found them trying for somewhat longer. Tom was already an authority on school fees and IQ-enhancing dietary supplements. Interleaved with The Economist and EuroMoney in their magazine rack were copies of Spawn, Your Foetus and Perineal Suture Today, or whatever those baby-zines are called. Anyway, I stood there outside their Downing Street-style door, and as soon as Lucy opened the door, the beam on her face told me everything. The master race was goosestepping into town.

I managed a hurried, ‘Oh, you clever girl!’ and an awkward hug and air kiss before unconvincingly bolting up the stairs for their toilet to avoid unnecessary kerfuffle. When I reappeared I hailed Tom, who was unloading wine from a case.

‘Well done, you grubby little fucker. I knew you’d muster a chubby eventually.’

Tom and Lucy were moving between the sitting room and the doll’s house kitchen, laying out bottles and decanting snack foods, mainly those gnarled and weighty crisps that are about four quid a bag, and some sweaty-looking black olives.

Lucy walked over and gave me another hug. ‘Aren’t you happy for us?’

Happy, no. Nauseated, yes. I avoided eye contact as she withdrew.

‘Cnava drink?’

‘Oh, Frank, you’re such a charmer.’ She tried to make it sound jovial, but there was an undercurrent of exasperation. Or hurt.

‘Leave him alone, Luce. What do you want, Frank?’

‘Champagne. Can I throw my coat somewhere?’

‘Yeah, chuck it in our room but come down quickly, we want to ask you something.’

I went upstairs, feeling a little scared. They were obviously going to give me some duty to perform, and to be honest I just don’t do duties, as a rule, they’re a bit too close to responsibilities.

I had always found their house unsettling. It was, effectively, a miniature replica of both their family homes, perhaps an acknowledgement that their parents had been right about most things after all. Every wall that wasn’t cream was magnolia and the doorframes and skirting boards were an unrealistic icing-sugar white. In fact the entire house was a cake, a three-hundred-grand cake: from the outside, it was pastel-pink with three big sash windows again painted pure white, all of which suggested Battenburg. Their tiny bedroom where I was now dumping my coat was baby-blue, with a snowdrift of duvet swathing the wrought-iron bed. The curtains were pale blue and white gingham. There was a Renoir print. The whole thing whispered ‘fondant fancy’. I understood the frisson that burglars must feel when they crap in the houses they burgle as I draped my disgraceful brackish overcoat on the bed.

Back downstairs Tom and Lucy were standing parentally by their glacier-white christening-cake mantelpiece, swirling their champagne in their glasses. The huge brass-framed mirror behind them held me in its placid stare. Tom looked conspiratorially at his wife, who nodded at him.

‘Well, Frank, we got you here early because we’d really like you to be godfather to our baby.’

He was beaming like a maniac. She was grinning at me with her eyebrows raised. I panicked.

‘Oh, my God. I don’t have to do anything, do I?’

They both thought about it for a moment and then looked at each other quizzically.

‘I think you have to renounce Satan, but not much else.’

‘No, I mean, if anything happens to you two, do I have to do anything?’

‘Well, that’s a bit of a negative thought, Frank. We hadn’t really got that far.’

‘No, of course not, I’m sorry, I just don’t want to let anyone down.’

Tom’s brow creased. ‘For Christ’s sake, Frank. Come on! We’re trying to tell you that we like you and we want you to be our child’s godfather. Ey? Ey?’

He was prodding me in the stomach now.

‘Yeah, I know, I’m sorry. Yes, yes, OK – “I’d love to be your child’s godfather”, or whatever you’re supposed to say.’

This was as gracious as could be expected in the circumstances, and I dived for a snout to see me straight. Lucy looked at me a little ruefully and then at Tom. ‘Er, Frank, sorry to be a pain, but would you mind if you didn’t? It’s not for us, of course, but you know what they say, “We’ve got someone else to think about now”, and …’ Lucy couldn’t bring herself to look at me. There was a tiny, important pause as I fought myself like a lion, lighter in one hand, fag cocked in the other. To my amazement, and to that of Tom and Lucy, I got all reasonable out of nowhere.

‘Sure, no problem, mate. Do you mind if I slip into the garden and have one?’ Or are there some particularly sensitive fucking lupins you’re worried about? I saw myself out thank you and sat in their stony high-walled courtyard really getting stuck in to my Lucky. I had undoubtedly scored valuable points with this charmingly executed act of selflessness, but wondered whether they would compensate me adequately for the damage I was doing myself by holding it all in. Already that comma of protein in Lucy’s guts was exerting so much power, and not even sensate yet.

As I blasted away, I fixated on it marinading away with its proxy ASH membership, and plotted future godfatherly daytrips to Longleat, the two of us locked inside my car, me chaining my way to emphysema: ‘No, I’m sorry, Jemima/Hugo/Candia/Alexia/Moon Unit, you can’t open the doors in a safari park, or you’ll get your face ripped off by a mandrill. We’ll stretch our legs in an hour or two. Would you like one while we wait?’

This thought gave me sufficient succour to re-enter the house without a scowl on my face, but I knew that I wasn’t going to be particularly perky that evening.

By seven-thirty there were about sixteen to twenty people gathered there, almost all of whom I’d met before. Six or seven were in fact veterans of the university parties. I no longer saw any of them apart from at Tom’s. They certainly didn’t stop by at O’Hare’s that often. The remainder were Tom and Lucy’s workmates, but indistinguishable in outer appearance from the old guard; tall, with a money sheen rising quietly from their hair and skin and clothes, like vapour from an oil puddle.

I wandered over to Lucy and asked her which girl was the one they’d set aside for me. ‘Sadie, over there by the stereo.’

There was a glamorous girl in black with Italianate hair and make-up. I was fearful but excited.

‘What, with the black dress?’

‘Nononono. The girl next but one to her – in the jeans. Sadie, she’s my cousin, down from Gloucestershire to do teacher training. My uncle’s a farmer and she was bored with the rural grind. She’s fun, I think you’ll really like her.’

She was wrong on three counts. Firstly as she was ginger, there was absolutely no way I could fancy her. Not a chance. I can’t stress to you strongly enough how far off my radar gingers are. Secondly, she was a public sector worker. This is a big problem for me. I don’t gel with the vocational mentality. Mainly it’s because they’re all left-wing and skint, which just won’t do at all. Thirdly, I didn’t deserve her. One look was enough to establish that.

I turned to Lucy. ‘I’m not sure she’s quite right.’

‘Don’t be so negative, Frank. Also, she wants a Christmas job, and I said you might be able to get her in at the restaurant. What do you think?’

‘Fuck. I probably could actually.’

‘Brilliant! Let’s go and let her know.’

‘OK then.’

My heart wasn’t really in it, but we went over. Sadie was in a group of five or so by the stereo. She looked bored and restless. She was about eighty per cent scruffier than everyone else, which made her about twenty per cent sprucer than me.

‘Sadie, this is Frank I was telling you about.’

‘Hi.’

Uninterested, now she’d actually seen me.

‘Yes, he thinks he can get you a couple of weeks at his restaurant.’

‘Oh really! Great!’

I shuffled around uneasily and stared at the carpet. It was the colour of marzipan.

‘Yerr, we get pretty busy over the holidays. Have you got any experience?’

‘A bit.’

‘More than enough.’

‘When shall I turn up?’

‘Dunno. Can you do tomorrow?’

‘Yes!’

‘You won’t get paid much.’

‘As long as I get something, I’m not that arsed.’

‘You’ll get something.’

‘Sorted, then.’

We were on the fringes of the stereo group. I was too sober as yet to join the conversation. Whitney Houston was doing her airbrushed Brünnhilde act from the speakers. I scanned the CD rack. Opera highlights, U2, Motown’s Greatest Hits, the odd jazz sampler. Music for people who don’t like music. I felt a soft jab in the ribs. God, ginger, a public employee and sexually voracious, what a nightmare.

‘Hello, Frank.’ Friendly and open, but maybe with a whiff of patronising irony.

It wasn’t Sadie.

‘Oh, hi, Sophie.’

A power Sloane from Oxford days. She moved to mwah me, but I evaded. A tanned man I didn’t know in a sharp cornflower blue shirt was holding court. Sadie and the other two were maintaining shit-eating smiles. If he was boring this lot, he obviously had some special talent for awfulness.

Sophie put a bony arm gently round my back.

‘I don’t think you know anyone.’

Don’t remind me.

‘This is Nick and Flora …’ The shit-eaters mouthed silent hellos.

‘This is Sadie …’ I couldn’t bring myself to look at her, but kept my head high to prevent my double chin pouching too badly.

‘And this is my husband Colin,’ indicating the cornflower ponce.

‘Oh, Colin. Like Colin Bell, the footballer,’ I said mock-brightly as we shook on it.

He scowled a little. ‘Yes, I suppose so. It’s a family name, actually – Scottish.’

‘You don’t have much of an accent. What part of Scotland are you from? Govan?’

Nick and Flora snickered. I still hadn’t looked at Sadie, so couldn’t judge her reaction.