Past Imperfect

Joa

‘I suppose you can,’ he said and nodded her through.

I was within earshot when Joa

‘Just wait. It’ll be all over the evening papers tonight, never mind tomorrow morning.’ Her mother spoke in short, sharp, chirrupy bursts, like a hungry bird in a hedgerow.

‘I think it was a bloody embarrassment,’ said a large man in a thick northern accent.

‘That’s because you don’t know anything.’ Mrs Langley always treated the man I came to know as her husband and Joa

‘I quite agree. Now, come and buy me some champagne.’ Joa

We watched them go. ‘Do you want a drink?’ I wondered.

Mi

It may have been because she heard these words, even if I hope not, but Joa

‘We’re meeting my father in White’s at four,’ said Mi

‘I’m sure we can do both if we want to.’ We drifted up the steps into that long, faintly lavatorial tu

Actually, unlike many modern, sartorial adjustments, this was an improvement, as between the church and the reception there was hardly a moment to wear it and one always ending up leaving it in a pile behind a curtain, where it was liable to be taken in error, leaving you with an even worse one. The hat did, however, remain compulsory for race meetings and here there was a complication, because there came a point when they stopped making proper silk hats, I imagine for some politically correct, ecological reason, so the struggle was on to get hold of one before they either vanished completely or soared into the thousands to buy. As a result, you could tell the smart people as half the men were wearing hats that had clearly not been either made or bought for them, and were instead relics of dead fathers or grandfathers, or discards from uncles or cousins of their mothers, slightly bashed, slightly rubbed and either too big or too small. My own, courtesy of my dear old dad, balanced on the top of my head like a wobbly 1950s cocktail hat, but I made do.

‘Goodness,’ I said by way of greeting. ‘Wherever I go, there you are.’

‘Then you must go to all the right places.’ He laughed, as his companion turned at the sound of my voice. It was Serena.

There are few markers of small-mindedness so clear as when people resent their friends becoming friendly with each other. But I am sorry to say that you see it often, a slight biting of the lip when they hear that this couple has met up with that couple and, despite their making the original introduction, they have not been invited. ‘We’re just so grateful to you for giving us the Coopers,’ say the happy ones, and they are greeted with a cold smile and a murmured acknowledgement, but nothing more than this. Of course, some people pay no attention to the new amity that has been born over their own di

If it is bad enough with friends, it is much worse with lovers, or rather with would-be but never-were lovers. To witness someone you have adored unsuccessfully from afar actually fall in love with another of your so-called friends, so that you must watch this warm, well-suited, reciprocal, relationship bloom, in such sharp contrast to the withered, one-sided, bitter thing you cherished in the darkness of your secret thoughts, to stand by and watch all this is very hard. Particularly as you know you demean yourself by giving so much as a tiny clue as to your true feelings. But you lie in the bath or wait in a queue at the post office, and your i

That arm, so casually laid across the back of her pink Christian Dior suit, his hand lightly resting on the curve where her hip swelled softly down from her waist, that arm was a grotesque, violating betrayal. I’d touched her arm in greeting as people do; I had taken her hand, even brushed her cheek with mine, but all these privileges were available to anyone she had met more than twice. I had never touched her in any way that might imply intimacy. I had touched her as a friendly human being, but never as a man. I found myself wondering what the texture of her skirt must feel like. Was the slight roughness of the weave in the cotton imprinting itself on the edge of his palm and tantalising his fingertips with the almost undetectable movement of her body beneath? Could he feel its warmth? In my mind I could feel it and yet, unlike Damian, I could not feel it.