A Bit of a Do

‘I know. I feel terrible,’ said Ted.

‘Oh Lord. You don’t suffer from post-coital depression, do you?’

‘Liz! Please! I mean … really! Liz!’

‘Do you want to forget it happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again?’

‘You know I don’t.’

‘Well, then. Nobody’s suffered. Nobody knows.’

‘I think Laurence suspects.’

‘Well, yes, possibly. But Laurence and I have an arrangement. I do what I want, provided I’m reasonably discreet, and he doesn’t do anything.’

Ted looked round nervously. Nobody was listening. ‘Liz!’ he said. ‘I don’t regard what we did today as reasonably discreet. I’m out of my depth.’

‘You’re going to find that you’re a better swimmer than you ever believed,’ said the bride’s mother.

‘Oh heck,’ said her new lover, who had so recently promised himself that he would give her up.

The glider was barely more than a speck now, the same size as the kestrel that was hovering above the grounds in the gentle but freshening breeze.

Rita still sat in her comer, behind the urns, beside the hydrangea, protected from the breeze by the mellow brick wall, recently rather untidily repointed by employees of J. G. Frodsham and Nephew.

‘Hello! There you are!’ said Laurence, as if he’d been hunting for her for hours.

‘Yes. Here I am. Hello.’

Rita made an effort, and smiled. Despite her smile, Laurence sat beside her and rested his arm on the bench behind her, as if to suggest that, had the back of the bench not been there, he would have embraced her actual flesh.

‘You know, Rita, you and I have a lot in common,’ he said.

‘How do you make that out?’

‘Well … I may seem to you to be the happy professional man … successful society dentist, lovely house, beautiful wife, two highly satisfactory children, suave, good-looking, confident. Actually I’m a seething mass of doubts and inadequacies.’

‘Are you suggesting that I’m a seething mass of doubts and inadequacies?’

‘No! Good heavens, no!’

‘Well, why do you say we have a lot in common, then?’

The breeze brought the first faint smell of tomorrow’s rain over the warm, walled garden, stirring the shrubs. The symmetrical elegance of the place was defiled by abandoned plates, with dollops of wasted pilchard mousse and mayonnaise.

‘Why on earth should anybody think you aren’t good with people?’ said Laurence.

‘Who told you that?’ said Rita. ‘Who sent you?’

‘Oh Lord,’ said Laurence. The faint gleam in Rita’s eyes disconcerted him, and the knowledge that it was there surprised her. It was a faint indication that somewhere, beneath all the anxiety, there still remained vestiges of a sense of humour, that all might not yet be completely lost in the fragile, never-to-be-repeated adventure that was Rita Simcock’s brief life on earth.

‘People are being sent out in streams to see if I’m all right,’ she said. ‘It’s very worrying.’

‘Aren’t you going to come in? It’s cooling down.’

‘In a minute. Now, please, Laurence, leave me alone.’

‘Right. Right.’

And Laurence Rodenhurst returned to the Garden Room, not feeling quite as suave and confident as he had when he came out.

And Rita sighed with relief and stretched out her tense legs in her quiet arbour.

Enter the immaculate Neville Badger, bearing tuna fish vol-au-vents.

‘Ah! There you are,’ he said, as if he had been hunting for her for hours.

‘All right,’ said Rita. ‘Who sent you?’

At the very moment when Rita said, ‘Who sent you?’ Eva Blumenthal, in room 109, was gently rubbing unsalted Welsh butter over the genitals of her husband Fritz, in an effort to alleviate the com chandler’s pain. In the Garden Room, exactly below this touching scene, Jenny was telling her young husband that she felt sick.

‘I thought it was only in the mornings,’ said Paul.

‘It’s the tension,’ said Jenny. ‘We’ve let the baby down, pretending it doesn’t exist. Who knows what insecurities that may lead to? The science of the unborn baby is in its infancy.’

‘Love!’ said her husband of more than three hours. ‘Love!’

‘I think I might be going to be sick.’

‘Well, walk out calmly. Look natural.’

‘“What will they think?”’

‘What?’

‘They say as men get older they start to resemble their mothers.’

‘That’s a dreadful thing to say.’

Paul walked off in a huff, and immediately wished he hadn’t.

Neville Badger entered from the garden, with his plate of tuna fish vol-au-vents. He saw Jenny walking slowly away from the buffet, trying to look calm and natural while feeling sick. Suddenly it became absurdly important to him that he shouldn’t be entirely defeated in his efforts to get rid of the vol-au-vents. He hurried over to her.

‘Jenny!’ he said. ‘Have a tuna fish vol-au-vent.’

She gasped, clasped her hand over her mouth, and rushed out.

Neville Badger stared after her.