Their lips talk of misch.., p.12
Their Lips Talk of Mischief, page 12
Rhys turned to me as we walked. He might have been having problems with my accent because he enunciated as if to a complete non-English speaker, ‘Do, you, like, The Stones?’
I nodded, ‘Yeah. Some of their stuff. ‘Playing with Fire’, ‘Citadel’, Beggar’s Banquet.’
He jabbed out the camera toward the junction. ‘Just round there’s where The Stones started out in the early sixties, when it was Ealing Blues Club.’
‘Right.’ I was genuinely interested but it came out sounding rude.
‘Lou was saying you’re doing a book with Marko Morrell of Fear Taker? I was a big fan.’
‘Yeah, maybe. Looks like it. We’re both doing it.’
He nodded very seriously and thoughtful. ‘Maybe you can get my albums signed?’ I thought he was going to ask more, but instead he squinted up at the sky suspiciously and suddenly put the ghetto blaster down on the pavement and he was left behind as he adjusted a switch on his camera.
Then something happened I liked very much indeed. Everyone crossed at the traffic lights and we all went into a pub. I thought it was tremendous and wonderfully English. There we all were, including three generations of the Smiths and shouting Flo. Rhys, Lou’s gran and Flo sat in against the wall, guarding the baby at the top of the table – still in her buggy – while Aoife, her sister and Abby sat across.
Lou and I loomed in a proprietary manner at the bar end, smoking, and money was passed up to us very pleasingly as the guests fought to pay for a round. Mrs Smith won out and all deferred to her, so Lou was ordering drinks from the landlord, who knew his gran anyway and turned a blind eye to Lily’s presence.
Lou and I passed these drinks down very efficiently. Myrtle Smith drank gin and ginger, Abby and Aoife, gin and limes, Rhys drank London Pride and though his bulk in its tight suit was pressed in against his gran – in a childlike and protected way – there was nothing infantile about the way he downed his pint. To this day, I’ve a real suspicion Aoife’s sister took something non-alcoholic. Another round was ordered up, this time paid for by Rhys, waving around a twenty, still with the bride’s lipstick upon his cheek and somehow easily looking as if he was having a better time than anybody. He’d offered to buy the round the split second he finished his own first beer. At that rate I thought there was going to be a jolly old cockney knees-up and sing-along, but suddenly, in a very un-Scottish way, they were all up again and that was it. We were flowing out the pub underneath hanging flower baskets of withered cusps back into excessive light.
Flo, with Lily in her buggy, Rhys carrying his ghetto blaster and Lou’s gran actually went to wait for a bus in the shelter. Aoife and Lou kneeled to kiss Lily goodbye. There was great hullabaloo made by Flo as I liberated the champagne from the nappy bag. As I removed it I also managed to drag out Llewellyn’s other emptied hip flask, which jangled down nervily onto the concrete pavement. Lou raised his eyes to heaven and I thrust it back in the bag.
‘Dutch courage. Not surprised,’ Lou’s gran said and let her painted eyes drift swiftly across kneeling Aoife’s body, moving freely in the silk dress while she stroked her daughter’s hair. The old lady craned to see if an approaching bus served her needs, then she told us all, ‘I’ll make it back for my mid-afternoons.’
Aoife’s sister was escaping us too. I hoisted the champagne bottle and indicated Haven Green, opposite Ealing Broadway station, but she didn’t respond, so we said our farewells.
Abby, Lou and I stood at a small distance from the two sisters as they hugged and muttered in their Midland accents, talking about internal matters, their parents and the fractious politics of the whole marriage. The talk went on and on as if they were cramming into a few moments matters unsaid for two years, so Lou and I – politely followed by Abby – drifted across the road.
Lou nodded glumly, then his bride came smiling across the zebra crossing and all four of us stood shivering in the small grass parkland of Haven Green with the bottle of champagne.
Abby had unfolded a grey overcoat with huge rounded lapels and gave it over to Lou, who draped it protectively upon Aoife’s shoulders.
‘Bloody hell.’ Lou shook his head, gazing in Aoife’s face. She nodded knowingly.
‘That’s it, then. Mr and Mrs,’ Abby declared.
Using my skean-dhu, I peeled the foil, put the knife back in my sock and unscrewed the wire on the champagne. I used my thumbs and groaned to make the fat-ended cork pop, fly and smack down invisibly in the brown leaves nearby. As the bottle frothed over, Lou took it and stepped backward, holding it out before him to let it settle and avoid the creeping spillage on its flanks slavering down upon his polished shoes.
The girls had let out high brittle calls into that iced air.
‘Ladies and wives first.’ Lou handed the bottle of champagne to his wife. She passed the bottle on to me from her own lips and I put the sliding glass into my mouth which filled with the jumping, crackling liquid.
Lou said, ‘Let’s not start bitching about all the others, including your parents’ – and he nodded to Aoife – ‘until we’re sat down with a hot meal in front of us.’
I said, ‘What are our intentions?’
‘Well. I can tell you what my intentions are, boyo. To inspect under here if these are real stockings.’ Aoife screeched as he tugged a little at the hem of her short dress.
‘Course they are, sausage,’ Abby screamed.
I turned to Abby and made a face. ‘Should we?’
‘Now. D’you think?’
‘Tell them. Cause I feel I’m messing them around.’
Lou and Aoife were looking upon us.
‘Tell us what? What? What is it?’
Lou sneered between Abby and me and said, ‘Are you both about to announce your engagement?’
Abby put down her shoulder bag on the metalled pathway and kneeled, her dress came way up over her knee so you could see her lovely but goose-bumped leg. I noticed both their little bouquets had been stowed in the bag. She stood and handed them across a fancy envelope. ‘This is from Douglas and me to both of you.’
The married couple stood side by side as they opened the envelope.
‘Victoria Station Hotel. Tonight,’ Lou said in a forensic tone. Then he seemed to wake up. ‘Bloody hell. Victoria Station Hotel. Thank you. Good stuff. So this is what you and Abby were scheming at her place, Cunningham, rather than the how’s-your-father.’
‘Lou. It’s our wedding day and you’re making it sound like every other day.’
‘We know it’s not Browns Hotel.’ Abby’s voice rose encouragingly, ‘But it’s a nice room. Not the biggest but nice, the man said. We explained it was your wedding night.’
‘Bet they don’t get many of those,’ Lou said, a bit cruelly. ‘And what’s this?’
Aoife said, ‘They’re return train tickets to Brighton for tomorrow. Goodness.’
She seemed genuinely thrilled. The English have an oddly persistent and over-reliant belief in the seaside; from the Prince Regent to kiss-me-quick, a day in Eastbourne or Clacton-on-Sea with a pier is the cure for everything.
‘We’ll come back later, get Lily off your gran,’ I volunteered. ‘Flo knows about it and Abby can always stay over at Bollo Lane if Lily’s difficult with me. You two go to the hotel and then off for a day in Brighton tomorrow.’
Lou actually looked touched. ‘Hey, you two lunatics, this is really good of you.’
‘You’ll have to wear your wedding dress tomorrow. Like an elopement. Just wear your hair down,’ Abby said.
I encouraged them. ‘You’ll be like the Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin of Acton. You already are.’
‘Or Richard and Mimi Fariña?’ Lou suggested to me, more excited by this.
Abby predicted, ‘Now we’ll have a boozy grill-up for you carnivores, or one of Eeef’s curries somewhere awful.’ She looked very sour.
Aoife was concerned. ‘Are you sure you two will be okay with Lily, though?’
Abby had turned to me. ‘You’re absolutely brilliant with Lily, Aoife tells me.’
‘We’ll be fine. I’ve never been alone with her overnight but I’ll manage.’
Lou paused in swigging from the bottle. ‘You mean with Lily or with Abby?’ and he chuckled, passing the champagne on.
Aoife nodded. ‘I’ll phone, or you could always ring this hotel tonight if you’re worried.’ She looked down at the document.
Lou said, ‘What! And interrupt a genius at work?’
‘Lou. You’re embarrassing me.’
Abby said, ‘We’ll be fine. You stay at the hotel. A bride can’t return on her wedding night to a grotty Acton flat, getting her garter took off with a Scotsman next door, listening through the wall.’
Lou yelled out in joy and clapped his hands.
‘I don’t listen.’
Aoife had gone bright red too.
Lou said, ‘Well, if you two are all alone and Lily’s sleeping, no shagging on the kitchen table. I have to chop the vegetables up there. Use our bed.’
I replied with a dirty frown.
Aoife snapped, ‘Lou. When do you ever chop the veg?’
I remember when I tossed the empty champagne bottle into the public wastepaper basket of that small park, it looked wrong – a kind of pillage – the thick round base of green glass jammed in there with sandwich wrappers. This expensive luxury item binned, in a city where old tramps were starting to vanish and young homeless appear on the streets – where the newspapers showed miners’ families being made Dickensian, where famine was first being reported out in Ethiopia. Then I thought of the big houses I’d gazed up at in Holland Park. I surmised that both guilt and charity should be exclusive to Holland Park residents.
They say London’s an unfriendly place, but different people talked to Aoife and Lou as we four rode up to the West End on the Tube that afternoon. My jacket sleeve was pushed flatly up next to Abby’s bare arm. A man in a business suit asked if they’d just been married and he reached out and shook Lou’s hand. And two separate West Indian ladies – who were always the friendliest folk in London – chatted away to them, asking detailed questions.
We got off somewhere at the back of Piccadilly and into a small pub with lattice windows, answering many of the specifics Lou had demanded as he stumbled through the streets in clouds of his own cigarette smoke, hand in hand with his bride, dismissing one hostelry after another. He described many of these pubs as establishments that ‘would sell champagne in a can’.
Aoife was drinking vodka with different mixers. I’d never seen her drink so much. She even smoked a cigarette. When we rose and departed from the pub, I remember how shocked I was that it was night outside in the high narrow street where passing taxis sounded so loud. It was even colder as well. Then we crammed into a cab, laughing inside as I tried to hold down my kilt on the flip seat whilst the girls pretended to cover their eyes.
We stepped out alongside a huge restaurant called Mowgli & Kim’s. Its frontage was sleek black with one strip of lime-green neon.
‘Did Kipling eat here?’ I asked Lou, though I was having trouble getting my words out.
‘No. But Baloo did. They think it sounds very grand. Fortnum & Mason, Derry & Toms, Mowgli & Kim’s. It’s quite ridiculous.’ He claimed this loudly inside. ‘It’s popular for lunches so I thought it’d be quiet for dinner.’
It was. We stood by two tills which formed a sort of entrance to a two-acre gated community of brazenly unoccupied tables. Everything was low lighting and black with polished fake marble. Several smallish woven carpets were under our feet, on the dark tiles. I was drunk and my head had drooped down, so I was staring at my leaky brogues – hating them – on the soft oriental carpet. The place was so large that at first I thought I was looking into mirrors but then I perceived the long front windows did stretch far away to a second set of identical main doors – with two more tills.
Abby immediately told the waiter it was the couple’s wedding day. The waiter had been nodding and I felt he’d looked at my kilt with great admiration. He became quite animated and led us across the vast floor, past huge decorative urns, empty tables and unoccupied booths, to a corner table for six with very, very low lighting.
The restaurant was extremely dark and the nearest occupied table was very far away which came as a relief since Lou was loud and objectionable in most of his comments by then. You didn’t see that other table with its diners, you just heard them raise the odd, cautious word somewhere in the moody distance, and you had to move position to glimpse them through the screens, fake creepers and the odd fountain here and there which babbled like peeing dwarfs.
Aoife and Lou sat next to each other and actually held hands for a while, just on the edge of the cloth, where Abby and I faced them across that big round table with a set place between us – so it looked like some kind of interview was taking place in a police station or immigration authority, with Abby and me as the interrogators.
Lou kicked off controversy straight away, looking down at the menu and asking the waiter if they sold champagne by the magnum. ‘It tastes better that way,’ he told the girls. ‘Doesn’t it, Cunningham?’ he raised his eyebrows, implicating me.
I had jumped in alarm. The restaurant was close enough to the so-called Square Mile financial district for them to indulge in just such vanities. But the waiter walked away to check with the manager.
‘Don’t be so silly,’ Aoife slurred. ‘Enough champagne; don’t go spoil it now.’
Lou shook his head and patted his jacket. ‘Only the best for you, my love. And you, my good friends. You don’t know what Gran gave me,’ he said. ‘In cash.’
‘Then we should save it.’
‘I’ll pay,’ Abby volunteered.
‘Not. At. All.’ Lou shook his head several times, decisively, like Oliver Hardy.
The waiter returned to explain there was only French pink champagne by magnum. This was immediately ordered. Then Lou pointed violently at me. ‘And a bottle of Tiger beer for my Scottish batman; fine wine is wasted on such a pursing and scurvy lip.’
Rapidly a team of small waiters appeared from nowhere, slashing tall glass flutes down before us and pouring out this maidens’ blush in a desperate hurry to encourage us on to the next bottle. Lou eyed the waiters angrily, moving his pupils from side to side. To distract him I called out across the table, ‘Rhys seems like an interesting guy.’
‘He’s a chump,’ Lou blurted; he dropped Aoife’s hand and placed both of his flat on the table in defence. ‘He’s a weed with the dreary necessity to tolerate him.’
‘He’s a genius. Like you,’ said Aoife, looking slightly up at his profile admiringly.
‘I’m not a genius and he is certainly not. Just because he scored highest in the London Civil Service exam, doesn’t make him a genius. The standard was piss poor back then. Hell, I did that exam too and almost beat him, just to annoy him.’
This went on for some time until I asked exactly what Rhys did in the Civil Service.
‘He says it’s all secret,’ said Aoife cautiously.
‘Bollocks!’ Llewellyn shouted.
I heard the conversation at the distant table switch off. In the quality of their anxious silence, I somehow formed an impression that the far table was listening out not to overhear the specifics of domestic quarrels but instead to discern if Lou was yelling a general warning about the cuisine. When their conversation slowly resumed – across there – it was hesitant and filled with listening gaps.
‘He’s just a damn number cruncher. A woozy statistician. Though I’ll say one thing in his defence.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Wise man. Never had a girlfriend.’
‘Oh, Lou.’
I grabbed my enpinkened glass and lifted it. ‘To the bride and groom.’
‘The bride and groom,’ Abby called.
Lou looked very drunk by now. He lifted his glass. ‘Pavese wrote in his diaries, that the only women worth marrying are the ones that can’t be trusted.’
I was grinding my teeth but then Lou turned to his beautiful wife and added, ‘And you have proved him wrong.’
‘Awwww,’ went Abby.
I didn’t know who poor Pavese was in those days, but I still silently placed a pointless oath against him.
‘And what about men?’ Abby called out, trying to get a lively debate going.
But thankfully Tuscan soil and gnarled olive trees had now entered Lou’s mind and taken root; he launched into a long panegyric about his projected Italian holidays over coming years in which sometimes I or sometimes Abby were to be included – depending what way he faced across the table. He was crossing and re-crossing his legs furiously – a symptom I recognised.
‘You need the toilet,’ I warned.
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘You need the toilet.’
‘So I do. Mr Silence, Exile and Cunningham, my trusty bladder squeezer.’ But he wasn’t shifting till he’d lorded it over ordering our food. And he ordered tracts of it, veering madly from the conventional and tested curry routes to other things; he demanded monkfish in batter, clay oven something, lime lassis.
With an amazed relief I saw him curl his nose at the wine list and say, ‘Perhaps we’re all right for conversation juice right at this precise moment,’ and he softly closed the menu then made off to the toilets.
My relief was short-lived. When Lou returned with a burning fag in the corner of his mouth, I was badly mauled to see him intricately cradling two large wobbling tumblers of whisky.
‘Where did you get those?’ Aoife whispered.
‘There’s a bloody full working bar somewhere way over there in Andhra Pradesh.’
