Free Blind Date by Frances Fyfield Page A

in
Hello
magazine. “Oooh, what a lovely pitcher! Innit big in ‘ere! S’nice, innit, Pat?” But Patsy would not meet her eye. Instead she steadfastly smiled, behaving like a visiting politician until a small dog sniffed wetly round her ankles, then grabbed her calf with two, surprisingly strong paws and began to hump at her leg until she kicked it away roughly. It scuttled and slid into a corner where it barked with loud indignation. Two light grazes appeared on Patsy’s waxed calf.
    â€œYou’ll stay to lunch, of course?” Diana Kennedy murmured.
    No cannibal would have wished to roast Elisabeth herself. She had the kind of extreme slenderness which Patsy could only associate with anorexic models, her skin like translucent china, her body like a jangle of wires, moving stiffly, all her athletic grace gone. Walking them round the garden like a tour guide, delighted to see them, grateful, attempting to be natural, she infected them all with itchy awkwardness. They were brown and she was pale, like a plant which had grown long and thin in the dark. The twisted neck reminded Patsy of a cockerel. She found herself speaking loudly, laughing a lot, out of her depth. Lunch amounted to cold ham, limp salad, and a bottle of warm-looking wine plonked in the middle of the dining table, defying anyone to take out the cork. Hazel hinted that a beer would be ever so nice: lager was produced, another following when she downed the first in one. The horrible dog examined toes under the table, and a small boy sat on Elisabeth’s left, very close to her, casting venomous looks in the direction of the strangers. As the plates were cleared, appetite depleted rather than satisfied, the boy ceased to lean against Elisabeth, arranged himself bolt upright in his fine chair, clutching the arms of it and weeping. He made no sound in this process; no-one commented, he simply wept. Elisabeth’s left hand grasped his and held it until the weeping ceased, as if she was holding him to some agreement, some mutual resolve forged long in advance. The room was cool, but Patsy sweated profusely. Diana Kennedy, dressed in her loose trousers and top, remained irritatingly serene.
    Elisabeth’sluggage was small enough to fill half the tiny boot of the car, until the boy, no longer weeping, brought her a bag of stones, double-wrapped inside pitted polythene bags which looked as if they had been used a thousand times. He placed the bag alongside hers, carefully, while his grandmother went indoors to fetch a cardigan for Elisabeth. “You might be cold,” she murmured when she came back, and then Elisabeth looked as if she might weep, too, oh Christ. The boy was steaming off into the house once his gift was delivered, possibly to hide the resurgence of tears, while the dog barked.
    â€œGet usout of here,” Hazel murmured.
    She had that slight, lunchtime indigestion, the result of a passable quantity of lager which was not quite enough to ensure either sleep or wakefulness. She got inside the car, her churlishness worsening by the second, aware that both she and Patsy had worn all the wrong things and behaved in the wrong way and this friend, who was Patsy’s rather than hers, might, just possibly, be ashamed of them. Lizzie was clasping Mummy, gingerly. The frozen old bitch wasn’t crying: she was patting her daughter’s back like someone trying to bring up wind in a baby while keeping some distance from any mess which might come out of its mouth.
    T hey set off into the green distance, Elisabeth waving frantically to a couple of indiscriminately old people outside a shop. All three of them were obscurely irritated in an understated way, two of them for having to feel sympathetic in the face of Elisabeth’s obvious frailty, the third for having to accept it. They dared not ask her questions. In the backseat by request, Elisabeth turned and looked at the sea until it disappeared from