Free The Man Who Understood Women by Rosemary Friedman Page B

surrounded by a galaxy of desire.
    Outside, a long, low car and a grey-uniformed chauffeur were waiting. ‘I’ll drop you off,’ Rosita said. ‘Where?’
    I mentioned the nearest tube station from which I could get a train back home and found myself sharing a rug with Rosita, which the chauffeur tucked solicitously round our knees.
    There was a lot of traffic round the entrance to the tube station , and because I was afraid there’d be a hold-up caused by the big car, which should not really have stopped just there, I tried to get out quickly and gabble my thanks to Rosita for the lunch. But she, seeming quite oblivious to traffic problems, followed me out of the car and stood on the pavement holding both my hands.
    A man in the car stuck behind Rosita’s hooted impatiently. Rosita turned her head and smiled at him indicating that she’d be no more than a moment and he grinned back and stopped hooting.
    Rosita kissed me for the second time. ‘It was lovely, we must do it again some time,’ she said. ‘Only we won’t leave it so long.’ I was about to suggest a future date and that Rosita be my guest for a return lunch when a look into the depthless eyes told me she was no longer interested, anxious to be gone.
    I waved my glove at the car until it was swallowed upbetween two buses and I found myself standing there bidding farewell to nothing.
    There it was. I had been picked up and put down in whatever sense you liked. I walked into the draughty maw of the station.
    When he came home at six Mitchell’s first words were: ‘Well, what did she want?’
    And it was then that I realised how stupid my ideas had been about why Rosita had wanted to see me. The Rositas never needed anything from anybody; their lives were not dependent upon love or sympathy, compassion or understanding . And the material things fell from overladen trees.
    I told Mitchell about our meeting, describing Rosita, and when I’d finished he was smiling, one could almost say glowing , and offered to put the children to bed. Usually he was tired after a long day and ready to collapse into his chair with his feet up, but now he seemed revitalised. And even I, after quite a hectic day, doing my usual chores and dashing up to town to meet Rosita, was aware of an extraordinary glow of elation.
    Looking at Mitchell I marvelled that the effect of Rosita could be vicarious, too, and I thought of Monsieur Bonnard and Mr Jarvis and my aunt, and all the conductors on the number 12s, and Emilio and the people at the next table in Bellotti’s and the man who had hooted in Oxford Street, and all the people she had made happy, if only briefly, myself included. And I did not at all mind being a whim.

The Crowded Room

    1962
    My name is Susan Slade and I hate cocktail parties. Not just the weary excrescences on toast and the faceless waitresses with their inevitable offerings of mouthfuls that disintegrate at the touch or are too hot, but the very format of the things.
    The desire to turn and flee for home that comes between the ringing of the bell and the opening of the door. The self-confidence of which one is divested with one’s coat. The bitter taste of smoke and the back-to-front tape of a hundred unintelligible voices. With assimilation, a drink, exchange of pleasantries with a familiar face, things usually improve, only to turn sour when on the doorstep, whipped back to reality by comparatively unpolluted air, you realise that you are partly full, partly drunk, partly satiated with partly heard conversation.
    Drusilla’s party was on Sunday, which made it worse. It meant stepping out of the comfortable morass of unmadebeds and Sunday papers and
The Critics
, and dressing, as one did every other day.
    Informal, Drusilla said, don’t bother to dress, but of course just as much effort was needed for the ‘thrown together’ look as for the biggest gala appearance. It was just a figure of speech.
    I don’t think Drusilla would have cared for my