Free The Beautiful Indifference by Sarah Hall

planned.
    At the first of the Saturday lunches I had been slightly shocked by the level of confession. John and I had become a self-contained unit; any upsets or difficulties were locked away, resolved internally, or not. As they skilfully deboned fish and forked their way through salads the women swapped not only old pieces of jewellery but medical histories and marital frustrations. Health scares. Stories of previously loved men. The desire for more rigorous forms of sex. Tamar spoke of an affair she’d tolerated, and her husband’s eventual recommitment.
    The thing is, he was stupidly transparent, she said, laughing and shaking her head. Edward thought I wouldn’t know exactly what it meant when he was sitting there in his chair moping. She hadn’t rung him for a week. I ended up comforting him for whatever ridiculous reason he made up, missing the dead dog or something, but I knew full well why I was really comforting him!
    Noticing my expression, she had smiled at me, waving away my sympathy and my concern.
    Oh, don’t worry, Hannah. Your John worships you. He isn’t the type. And he certainly isn’t an idiot.
    I wasn’t sure that she knew John, but her kindness and flattery touched me. Then her smile tightened a fraction.
    Women can live far more comfortably with secrets, don’t you think?
    It was Anthea who replied. Yes. And may we remain unreadable.
    She held up her wine glass and the others toasted the sentiment.
    Afterwards, as we tottered towards the taxi rank, Anthea told me that each of the women idealised another in the group, for their looks, their vivacity, or their maternal skill. I wondered whom she most admired – perhaps Lizzie, who was fifteen years younger, was a successful playwright, and had had a series of overlapping, adventurous relationships that Anthea delighted in, calling them ‘jolly friendships’. Then I wondered if she was referring to me, and the way I would often study her during our coffee mornings. There was a fascinating Englishness about her, redolent of previous generations, of grandmothers who had been in their day industrious and spirited. Her fund of cheer was immense and remarkable, even in the face of her own divorce, which she strode through dauntlessly, it seemed to me, six months after I had met her.
    Bloody men and their bloody egos, was her summary of the situation. They’d rather make love to themselves than their wives. Is it any wonder we’re driven to acts of madness?
    But there was something more to her than this gently decadent style. Early on I’d noticed an odd, recessive tilt to her personality, a watchfulness. When she was not joking or flamboyantly uncorking a bottle, she was extremely good at being dormant. She could sit at the end of the table, in almost predatory stillness, for an hour or more, while conversation went on around her. Everything seemed poised in her then, her handsome, mobile face set, and only her eyes moved as she surveyed the scene, marking, biding. She was usually the first to receive a phone call from anyone in the group having a crisis, perhaps because of her age and experience, but mostly because she never issued judgement, merely good advice. And she was discreet. Gossip about the others never really came my way through her; though once aired she was happy to speculate. I’d always felt I could talk to her about the most difficult, painful things.
    She had not given me the business card immediately. It was not issued with the air of prescription, as soon as I’d confided in her, about the discontent, the affair with John’s brother I had almost entered into. The morning she handed it to me we had been discussing something else entirely, something irrelevant – the latest atrocities in the war, or sugar in our children’s cereal. At a natural pause in the conversation she reached into her purse and took out a neat white rectangle.
    This is for you, darling, she said, passing the card to me. One shouldn’t have to go on