‘Evening. I’ll have…’ A cranberry martini? A pink champagne cocktail? He ran his eye along the labelled pumps. ‘…ah, a pint of Adnam’s.’
‘Coming up,’ the barman nodded. The conversation to Colin’s left resumed, being something to do with reality television.
‘If they will pick monkeys, they’ll get gibberish, won’t they?’ the older man observed.
‘Do better yourself, Ken, could you?’ one of the others laughed.
‘I could,’ Ken said flatly. He drank, then stuck out his lower lip and removed a margin of beer froth from the underside of his moustache.
Colin carried his drink to a table facing the dartboard. He centred the straight glass on a circular beer mat, drew out a chair and sat down. He was very tired, not just because of the drive to Meddlett. He resisted the urge to tip his head back against the dado rail and close his eyes on the saloon bar. Instead he took a mouthful of beer. A man in checkered trousers, white jacket and neckerchief looked in through the door. He was dark, eastern European, perhaps Turkish, Colin guessed. The chef briefly met his eye, then withdrew.
There was a laminated menu slotted into a small wooden block on the table in front of him. Colin studied it.
‘Why not try our delicious smoked haddock hotpot?’ it queried. ‘Served with chips and salad.’
He wondered, if he were going to eat here, whether he would choose the hotpot over the Moroccan-style lamb tagine or the hot and spicy Thai noodles. There wasn’t much hope of getting away from the chips. He wondered how life would be if he didn’t move forwards or backwards but took a room right here at the Griffin, eavesdropping on the conversations of strangers and submerging himself in a lake of Adnam’s.
Miranda and Polly and the others would come looking for him. However he tried to evade them they would search him out and take him by the arm, kindly but unstoppably, and lead him to Mead. In his present directionless state this thought was vaguely comforting. He didn’t want not to be at Mead any more strongly than he wanted not to be anywhere else. He would occupy one of Miranda’s several spare bedrooms, listen to the conversations of his old friends, and his external inertia would secretly mirror the other lack of function that he had yet to come to terms with.
Miranda had been a bright, unsteady flame when he first knew her.
He could see her as she had been, as vividly as if that early version of her had just danced into the room. She wore her black hair in thick ropes, pinned up anyhow, and the tangled, reckless volume of it made her thin arms and legs and narrow waist seem all the more elegantly fragile. She had appeared like some newborn quadruped, all unsteady limbs and wet eyelashes, but with a healthy young animal’s instinctive hold on life. Miranda had been at all the parties, all the Hunger Lunches and demos and concerts and poetry readings, dressed in her tiny skirts and suede jerkins and velvet cloaks and dippy hats. He didn’t think she had been to all that many lectures, but that wouldn’t have mattered because Miranda was going to be an actress. She had scaled the university’s various social ladders, hand over hand, and perched near the top rung of all of them. She had been, decidedly, a success.
Colin was almost sure that he could remember the actual party where they had all joked about their commune-to-be.
There had been a small room, probably somewhere up Divinity Road, every wall and hard surface painted purple, filled with mattresses and candles and joss sticks, the reek of joints and half-cured Afghan coats.
Amos had definitely been there. Amos was a somewhat marginal figure in those days. He had been to a public school, while the rest of them took pride in the fact that they had not. He played rugby and would disappear slightly shame-facedly on weekday afternoons to train at the university sports ground, often vanishing on Saturdays as well to play in college matches. Like the rest of them he wore loons and tie-dyed vests, but his hair never seemed to grow quite long enough to eradicate the school prefect’s neat side-parting and razor-clipped neck. Amos was loudly a member of the University Communist Club. When he got drunk he liked to link arms with his friends and zigzag home chanting ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’.
Selwyn had been there too, laughing and skinning up, all red mouth and lean, flat belly. Selwyn’s little jumpers and shrunken vests tended to ride up and away from the tops of his velvet pants to expose disconcerting, lickable expanses of his smooth skin. It was Selwyn who would have been responsible for the music, most probably at that time precisely on the groovy cusp between the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin. Colin acknowledged to himself that he had no real idea; even in those days he had preferred Verdi. But Selwyn would have known. Selwyn ran a mobile disco called Blue Peony out of his Dormobile van. He often played at student balls and big parties, standing at the decks in headphones, dappled by the bloom of strobe lights and enclosed within a three-deep ring of girls.
Polly had been there too, talking hard and gesticulating and prodding the air to make a point. Not Katherine, though. Katherine came along later.
And Miranda of course. Wherever Selwyn was, in those days, Miranda went. Miranda had got up to dance between the tangle of legs. She made vine-tendril twisting motions with her small white hands, swaying with her eyes closed, hair falling down her back in a thick dark river. Colin watched Selwyn who watched Miranda who was wandering happily in her own universe.
‘It’s not going to happen,’ Polly said. ‘Not to us. Never. We’ve got the Pill now, they’ll have developed a magic medicine bullet by the time we’re fifty. We’ll all take it, we’re going to stay young and beautiful.’
‘If you want to be loved,’ Colin hummed, but nobody heard him.
‘That’s rubbish,’ Amos scoffed. ‘Medical and technological advances haven’t quite got to the point where they can stop you hitting fifty, Polly, and then sixty and seventy, and then you’ll die. But we’re young now, that’s what counts. We’re going to start making a difference as soon as we can.’
‘What difference?’ someone yawned.
‘We’ll bring down the old order, establish the new. Attack the morbid old institutions, the BBC, the party political system, the monarchy…’
This was not a previously unheard speech of Amos’s.
‘The class system, the public schools…’ Polly patiently and amusedly listed for him.
Colin stirred himself. He had smoked enough of Amos’s hash to realize that he knew secrets and understood mysteries, and should concentrate on those insights instead of dissipating precious energy on worrying about his clothes and the exams.
‘Listen, man. Before long, Americans will be standing on the moon. Think of that. Why can’t there be a cure for old age?’
‘There is. It’s called death,’ Amos snapped.
Miranda had gyrated to the window. She leaned her hot forehead against the cool glass and then gave a little cry.
‘Look. Oh, look. Everyone.’
Heads turned. The moon was a pale, perfect disc sailing through streamers of cloud.
Miranda breathed, ‘Imagine it. Men on the moon. How…beautiful. Their footprints will be up there in the dust, you know, for ever and ever. I’m envious. I’d like that to be my epitaph.’
‘If Polly and Colin are right, you won’t be needing an epitaph. You’ll still be here, cluttering the place up.’
‘Oh, I don’t think I want that at all. What I’d like when the time comes is to be a magnificent old lady. With a brilliant, scandalous history. Frail of course, rather grand, greatly loved. Deeply mourned, when I go.’ She lifted her arm, the trumpet sleeve of her velvet dress falling back to leave her wrist bare. ‘You know what? I’ve got the most amazing idea. When we are all old, if it has to happen,