Anne Billson - Suckers

She led me up to a spare room where the bed was half-buried beneath a mound of coats, and perched on the window-ledge while I flopped on to someone's fake fur and finished my cigarette. 'Give us one,' Ruth begged. I held out the packet, but grudgingly. This was typical; Ruth said she was a non-smoker, but she was always cadging from other people. She took a couple of shallow but showy puffs and asked, 'What's going on?'

'How should I know? It's your party.'

'Don't tell me you haven't noticed. Something's happening.'

'Like what?' I laughed, but she didn't laugh back — she puffed on her cigarette and looked anxious. This wasn't like Ruth at all.

She chose her words carefully. 'Everyone is sort of… highly strung,' she said. 'It's like the week before Christmas, when everyone's desperate to have a good time, and the harder they try, the worse it gets.' She kept fiddling with her fringe, brushing it forward and then back from her face. There were surprisingly deep lines etched into her forehead. 'You know what my grandad says? He says it reminds him of the Weimar Republic.'

I'd met Ruth's grandfather once. He had struck me as a senile old codger, but before the war, apparently, he had been something of a mover and shaker in artistic circles. Then the Brownshirts had come along and put a stop to his career by smashing his Stradivarius and most of the bones in his right hand. Friends and colleagues had urged him to leave Germany, and so he had, but he had not gone far enough. He had survived, but only just; his wife, parents, sister, and three out of four of his children had not been so fortunate.

I didn't like the turn our conversation was taking. 'What do you mean, highly strung?'

Ruth continued to play with her hair. 'You know what I mean. You always know a lot more than you let on, Dora. People are changing.'

'Like who?'

'Like Lulu. When I saw her the other night, she acted like she hardly knew me. It was like she was a different person.'

'Maybe she'd had her nose done.'

This was a low blow, and Ruth ignored it. 'She was sort of… blank.'

I relaxed. 'Well, that's nothing new. Lulu's always been a bit of a bungalow, in case you hadn't noticed. Not an awful lot upstairs there.'

'No, it wasn't like that at all ,' Ruth said. I realized she was blinking back tears, and for a horrible moment I thought she was going to cry on my shoulder. Ruth snivelling all over me was the last thing I needed. But she shook it off and got a grip on herself. 'Some of the people here tonight are good friends, people I've known for years , but they're different, too. Like they're all caught up in something exciting, and they're not telling me about it.'

'Invasion of the Body Snatchers ,' I cackled. 'It's the Pod People!'

Ruth suddenly looked very cunning. It was the expression she wore whenever she was about to get someone else to pay for the cab they'd been sharing. 'I think you know more than you're letting on again. I think maybe it's not entirely unconnected with what happened to you and Duncan when we were at college.' She looked meaningfully at my little finger. 'You never did tell me how you lost that.'

'Yes I did,' I sighed. Ruth had tried this ploy on a number of occasions. Normally I didn't rise to it, but now I was getting impatient. 'I told you, I was chopping paper.'

'Ha!' Ruth exclaimed. 'That wasn't what you said at all. You told me you'd shut it in a car door. And you told Jack you'd caught it in the spokes of someone's motorbike. You told someone else it was an accident with a blender, and only last year you were telling Maureen it was a genetic defect common to descendants of an ancient Cornish tribe. You've got a different story for every occasion, haven't you, Dora?'

I didn't much care for the idea of them all comparing notes behind my back. 'Ruth,' I said, 'have you any idea how boring it is to get asked the same bloody question over and over again? Oooh, what happened to your little finger? It drives me nuts.'

'I know it does. That's why I stopped asking about it. But I'm asking you now — what really happened?'

'You wouldn't believe me if I told you.'

'Try me. It was Duncan, wasn't it? What did he do to you?'

She'd missed the target completely.

'I know you both changed,' she persisted. 'Something happened, something really big. Duncan went to pieces, he just dropped out. And you… you went all religious.' She paused and stared at me. 'Like now. You've gone religious again, haven't you? I really like your earrings , Dora. And what about all that junk around your neck?'

I looked down and saw I'd been threading a rosary between my fingers, winding it round and round, like a set of worry beads. 'This is a fashion statement,' I said. 'I'm going through one of my neo-Gothic phases.'

'Like hell you are.'

I took a deep breath. 'All right, I admit it. Duncan and I had an affair.'.

'Oh, we all know that,' cried Ruth. 'Tell me something I don't already know.' She slid the window open, threw what was left of her cigarette into the street, and then, without asking, helped herself to another.

'Let me tell you about my grandfather,' she said, settling down again with a Once upon a time sort of voice. 'He used to be a ladies' man, he used to be very romantic. I've seen photos, he was quite good looking. And during the twenties, he fell in love with this movie actress (this was silent movies, of course). She was never very nice to him, in fact I think she was rather a bitch, but he was nuts about her, and later on, after the war, when he was on his own, he hired some detectives to track her down. He thought maybe she'd gone to America and changed her name. I think perhaps he was hoping they would get married or something, that she would finally recognize him as her soulmate and fall into his arms. Anyway, he paid for all these investigators, and do you know what they found out?'

'I have no idea.' I tried to suppress a yawn. This was turning into a mini-series.

'Nothing!' exclaimed Ruth. 'He stopped looking for her. I think he'd resigned himself to never seeing her again, he thought she was dead, but then one day — completely by accident — he ran into her. In Paris.'

'Well!' I said, glancing at my watch and wondering when-she was going to get to the point. I wanted to go back downstairs and check on Duncan. 'It's a small world.'

'But, the funny thing was,' said Ruth, 'it couldn't have been the same woman, because she looked exactly the same, even after all those years. Or perhaps it was her daughter or something, because when Grandpa introduced himself, she froze him out. Said she'd never heard of him.'

'So he made a mistake.'

Ruth shook her head. 'Grandpa didn't think so. He thought it was the same woman.'

'Yes, but that was… what? Twenty-five, thirty years later? He's an old man. The war messed up his head.'

I wondered where all this was leading. Then Ruth said something which made me sit up and pay attention. 'The thing is,' she said, 'he had film of her.'

'He did? '

'He was besotted. Just one reel — he stole it from the studio. And after the war, he tried tracking down the rest, but it was all lost or destroyed.'

'So what was the movie?' I asked, trying not to sound too interested.

'Oh, nothing famous. It wasn't even finished — she had an argument with the director. The same guy who did Pandora's Box — have you heard of that?'

I said yes, I'd heard of Pandora's Box . Quite a lot of people had.

'Well,' she said, 'he wanted her for the main role in that too, but she was still mad at him, so he hired that American actress instead, the one with the hair. Anyway, the reel Grandpa stole was from this film called Rotnacht .'