No one would understand what a bad moment this was. Belinda was not the sort of person who bursts into tears. In times of stress, she simply increased adrenaline production while Neville ran a three-ring circus. She didn’t cry. Stefan hated cry-babies. His imitation of his first wife’s cry-baby mode (‘Wah, wah! I’m so unhappy, Stefan!’) was quite enough to put anybody off.
‘Perhaps you would like some time?’ Graham persisted. ‘I can tell you don’t have time right now.’
‘No, I don’t have any time,’ whimpered Belinda.
‘Shall I give you a couple of days?’
Silence. A sniffle.
‘Mrs Johnson, would you like a couple of days?’
At which point, Belinda sank to the floor again, to sit flat on her bum and sob. ‘Would I like [sniff] a couple of—?’ A loud, helpless wah-wah was coming down the phone.
‘Have you got a tissue, Mrs Johnson?’ Graham asked, gently.
‘Jo-hansson!’ she sobbed.
‘I’ll give you a couple of days.’
Belinda struggled to her feet, dragging her bowling ball towards her.
‘Give me three pure and rounded pearls, Graham. What I want’ – she sniffed noisily – ‘is three pure and rounded pearls.’
You shouldn’t dislike Belinda. She had a great many redeeming features. She knew lots of jokes about animals going into bars, for example. But clearly she had a big problem negotiating the routine pitfalls of everyday existence.
‘It’s a control thing,’ her friend Maggie said (Maggie, an actress, had done therapy for thirteen years). ‘You want total control. You somehow think an empty life is the ideal life, and a full life means it’s been stolen by other people. You think deep down that everything in the universe – including your friends, actually – exists with the sole malevolent purpose of stealing your time.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Belinda. ‘And is this the five-minute insult or the full half-hour?’ But secretly she was aghast. The description was spot-on. Mags was right: even this short conversation now required to be added to the day’s total of sadly unavoided interruptions.
The first thing she’d noticed about Stefan was that he smiled a lot, especially for a Scandinavian. He was solemn, and said rather peculiar things, like ‘A nod is as good as a wink’ and ‘That’s all my eye and Betty Martin’, when first introduced, but he smiled even at jokes about animals in bars, which was encouraging. They had met three years ago in Putney at her friend Viv’s, at a Sunday lunch, where they had been seated adjacently by their hostess, with an obvious match-making intent. Belinda resented this at first, and almost changed places. Viv had an intolerable weakness for match-making. In a world ruled by Vivs, happy single people would be rounded up and shot.
But she took to Stefan. He was recently divorced, and recently arrived in London to teach genetics at Imperial College. He was solvent, which counted for a lot more than it ought to. Tall, blond, slender and a bit vain, he wore surprisingly fashionable spectacles for a man of his age (forty-eight at the time). Of course, he wasn’t perfect. For a start, middle-of-the-road music was a passion of his life, and he would not hear a word spoken against Abba. He idolized Monty Python, played golf as if it were a respectable thing to talk about, and was proud of driving a fast car. A couple of times he told stories about his mentally ill first wife, which struck Belinda as cruel. Also, he was condescending when he explained his work on pseudogenes. Like most specialists, she decided, he muddled reasonable ignorance with stupidity.
But basically, Belinda fancied him straight away, and had an unprecedented urge to get him outside and push him against a wall. In the one truly Lawrentian moment of her life, she felt her bowel leap, her thighs sing and her bra-straps strain to snapping. Having been single for seven years at this point, she knew all too well that she must act quickly – a specimen of unattached manhood as exotic and presentable as Stefan Johansson would have an availability period in 1990s SW15 of just under two and a half weeks. Her biological clock, long reduced to a muffled tick, started making urgent ‘Parp! Parp!’ noises, so loud and insistent that she had to resist the impulse to evacuate the building.
The lunch was half bliss, half agony, with Stefan dividing his attention between Maggie and Belinda, and finding out whose biological clock could ‘Parp’ the loudest. Perhaps his understanding of natural selection contributed to this ploy. Either way, Belinda – who had never competed for a man – was so overwhelmed by the physical attraction that she contrived to get drunk, make eyes at him, and (the clincher) ruthlessly outdo Maggie at remembering every single word of ‘Thank You for the Music’ and the Pet Shop Sketch.
‘Lift home, Miss Patch?’ he’d asked her breezily, when this long repast finally ended at four thirty. She’d known him only four hours, and already he’d given her a nickname – something no one had done before. True, he called her ‘Patch’ for the unromantic reason of her nicotine plasters; and true, it made her sound like a collie. But she loved it. ‘Miss Patch’ made her feel young and adorable, like Audrey Hepburn; it made her feel (even more unaccountably) like she’d never heard of sexual politics. ‘Lift home, Miss Patch?’ was, to Belinda, the most exciting question in the language. Soon after it, she’d had her tongue down his throat, and his hands up her jumper, with her nipples strenuously erect precisely in the manner of chapel hat-pegs – as Stefan had whispered in her ear so astonishingly at the time.
And now here they were, married, and Belinda was having this silly problem with the El Ratto indoor circus; and Maggie could decipher plainly all the selfish secrets of her soul, and she’d burst into tears like a madwoman talking to a complete stranger on the phone because he offered her big fat pearls but didn’t mean it. However, Stefan was still smiling because (as she had soon discovered) he always smiled, whatever his mood. He had told her that he was known in academic circles as the Genial Geneticist from Gothenburg.
‘So what did your masters think of Verity’s Rosette?’ he asked. It was Monday evening, and they were loading the dishwasher to the accompaniment of ‘Voulez Vous’.
‘A Rosette for Verity? They’ll let me know. We discussed the idea that she might break her neck in the next book and be all brave about it, but I said, “No, let’s do that to Camilla.” Six Months in Traction for Camilla – what do you think?’
He smiled uncertainly. ‘You are yoking?’
‘A bit, yes.’
‘You remember we visit Viv and Yago tomorrow?’
‘We do?’ she said. ‘Damn. I mean, great.’
‘Maggie will be there, too. Maggie is a good egg, for sure. I want to tell her she was de luxe in the play by Harold Pinter. Mind you, no one could ever accuse Pinter of gilding the lily, I think.’
‘Shall we watch telly tonight? The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is on.’
Although she was really desperate to get on with some work, she felt guilty about Stefan, and regularly made pretences of this sort. Hey, let’s just curl up on the sofa and watch TV like normal people! She fooled nobody, but felt better for the attempt. The trouble was, whenever she felt under pressure, she had the awful sensation that Stefan was turning into a species of accusatory sock. Besides which, it was nice watching television with him, and cuddling. She always enjoyed those interludes with Stefan when they didn’t feel the need to speak.
‘Don’t you want to work?’
‘Well, I—’
He smiled.
‘You have been Patsy Sullivan today, all day?’ (Patsy Sullivan was her horsy pseudonym.) ‘Then you must work yourself tonight.’
‘Are