Дональд Джеймс - The House of Eros

Her sister, almost as if she were following Mary’s thoughts, touched her arm. ‘You’re looking great today,’ she said. ‘You’ll be the prettiest geriatric at the luncheon, darling.’

Mary glanced sideways at her, grimacing. Yet Sunny was not trying to be cruel, she knew that. It was simply a category Sunny liked to place her in. Not just her elder sister. A different generation. At the age of thirty-four Sunny Stevenson still looked on Mary as more a mother than a sister.

‘Geriatric? Not very kind, Sunny,’ Mary said mildly. And by God, she thought with a guilty start, after last Thursday evening, not very true either.

Sunny slid down lazily in her seat belt and watched the rain storm clearing over the rolling downland ahead. ‘So you’ve decided to resign from the Fund committee?’

‘I was a founder member, you know,’ Mary said, her eyes on the road. ‘Nearly twenty years. It’s enough.’

‘Cy won’t be pleased.’

‘I don’t see why not.’

‘You’ve always been a loyal supporter.’

‘Not an uncritical one at times,’ Mary said with a hint of sharpness. She hated the idea of being taken for a pushover.

‘Who’s going to take your place,’ Sunny asked, not really interested.

Mary sideglanced her. ‘We need young blood. Not another geriatric.’

‘Sorry.’

Mary smiled. ‘Just evening the score. How about you?’

‘For the committee?’

‘Why not?’

‘To be candid it bores me.’

Mary drew in her breath, sharply disapproving. Sunny shrugged, reached over and patted Mary’s hand. ‘What I love about you, Mary, is that you have inherited the old Page conscience. Enough for both of us.’

Was that it? Mary wondered. Was that why she couldn’t quite feel towards her sister as she should, because of that smug, myopic certainty which made her incapable of realising that life could deliver blows, that fortunes could be lost, people she loved or at least liked mangled in car accidents? Perhaps the simple truth was, Mary told herself, that Sunny just wasn’t very bright. Or was maybe just plain lazy about the way she thought of others, about the way she took them for granted. Perhaps Mary should have handed her out a few sharp lessons years ago.

Of course it was too late now. A sharp lesson. A shock.

It would be if she knew! Mary felt a thrill of excitement pass through her as the image of that brief, improbable moment on Thursday night again invaded her thoughts. A thrill of excitement and a flush of guilt.

They drove on in silence until they breasted the last hill and the Meyerick Country Club lay below them, its low building and stone tourette set in well-kept lawns and gardens, with yew hedges discreetly surrounding shale tennis courts and swimming pools. Even from the hill the parking lot was barely visible behind the line of pine trees that acted as a shield.

Mary waved her hand towards the valley. ‘Don’t you ever feel slightly uneasy about all this, Sunny?’

Her sister’s eyes were closed. ‘About what?’ she said without opening her eyes.

A surge of anger passed through Mary. ‘About having all this. About having life so easy.’

Sunny opened one eye and grunted a negative. ‘Not when my husband’s charging them two hundred and fifty dollars a plate for this lunch.’ She struggled upright in her seat. ‘And at least that much for the tombola unless they want to look cheap.’

They drove into the parking lot and found a place beside Fin Butler’s green Jaguar.

Sunny slipped her seat belt. ‘God,’ she said, ‘I hope there are not going to be too many drunken speeches. Or too many drunks.’

‘Keep an eye on Fin for me,’ Mary said as they walked across the gravel to the striped awning.

‘Why?’ Sunny asked laconically. ‘Who will you be keeping an eye on?’

Did she mean that?

They gained the shade of the awning and were welcomed by the Irish doorman. ‘Some party today, ladies! And the prizes for the tombola are enough to make your eyes pop.’

They smiled politely and moved into the main clubroom. The long room was set with tables in a squared off U-shape. The sunlight shafts touched the glasses and cutlery and deepened the wine red upholstery of the chairs. Maids in black skirts and white blouses moved back and forth across the room. Vic Impari and his red-coated bar staff clustered round the side table from which the selected wine would be served: an old dry Amontillado sherry would accompany the lobster bisque; a Chateau Rabaut Promis, a Sauterne, was, in the new French manner, to accompany the foie gras ; and a 1982 La Lagune claret had been chosen for the quail. There would be one of the newly acquired Burgundies for the cheese and a vintage champagne to finish the lunch. None of this, Vic Impari was thinking, included the whiskies, martinis and gin and tonics which would prepare the guests for their gastronomic ordeal. Vic Impari swallowed his resentment.

As the old bell from the long demolished Meyerick court house began to toll in its new resting place high in the tourette, the club members and their guests came in to take their places. There was much banter and a mock jostle for position. What had been for deadly real were the struggles over the last few weeks of each member to make certain he or she was sitting beside someone they wanted to sit with. Now it was the time among the ladies of the club for low, whispered comment or a show of surprise as they were led to their places.

Mary, between Colonel George Savary and a New York bond salesman from the north end of the county, was content enough. Her husband, Fin, was not yet in his place. But sitting there at the top end of the table between the wife of a State senator and a modestly successful actress from New York, Cy Stevenson looked good. A handsome figure.

Other Fund committee members were placed at intervals around the table. The Reverend Hector Hand sat next to a very old lady who told him several times between the lobster bisque and the dessert that there had been less than twenty-five members when she had joined the club and that girls playing tennis wore sensible straw hats and skirts to their ankles.

The two Anderson brothers had achieved places no more than one seat between them so they could lean forward and communicate with their inscrutable smiles. The recently widowed Anita Simpson sat next to Finlay Butler, or rather the place he would occupy when he came from the locker room.

Mrs Helen Rose, deeply disapproving of a luncheon which cost two hundred and fifty dollars, however good the cause, sat frostily between Oliver Digweed and her son, Jason, counting the glasses of Amontillado the Chairman of the Fund trustees had taken while waiting for the lobster bisque.

Finlay Butler arrived just as the soup plates were being served. After twenty years of marriage to him Mary still wondered if he timed these entrances. He no longer managed to draw all eyes to him as he crossed the room, bending to shake hands with a man or kiss a woman on the cheek. Mary now saw him as an old rogue no longer with the looks to impress the girls, all his stories of Prince Charles and Windsor Castle long ago told and retold. Nice enough, but sad.

Cy Stevenson was making the rounds. It was his day and everybody recognised it. He moved along the table, shaking hands or kissing cheeks. Mrs Rose and her son Jason, Anita Simpson and her escort Dr John Harker.

‘Have you decided on the date for the special meeting yet, Cy?’ Savary asked him. ‘I see it as a matter of urgency.’

‘I’ll be calling everybody tomorrow morning,’ Cy said. ‘Don’t worry, I haven’t been idle. I’ve been checking around so that the fullest possible information can be put before the trustees.’