The Perfect Happiness(69)

Angelica talked to Marge, a sturdy woman who liked gardening. She tried not to look at her father, whose crotch was now so close to Jennifer it was indecent.

“Did you know Trudy Trowbridge died last week?” asked Tony, dragging on a joint and handing it to Angie.

“Oh goodness,” she breathed. “How old was she?”

“Seventy-three,” said Tony.

“Too young,” said Marge. “I’ll be seventy-eight in March.”

“You’re as young as you feel,” said Alan, looking at Angie for approval.

“As young as the woman you feel,” added Denny.

Angelica rolled her eyes, then gasped as Tony gave her a squeeze.

“Then I’m very young indeed,” he chortled.

“I’m not even seventy,” Angie lied. “You can feel me anytime, darling.”

Tony released Angelica and tossed a glance down the ravine of Angie’s cleavage. In spite of her cheap hair and copper tan, her plumpness made her skin relatively wrinkle free. She could easily have passed for a sixty-year-old.

Daisy found them all intolerable and went to play the piano. Angelica remained on the sofa a while, listening. She admired her sister. Angelica hadn’t picked up her flute since leaving school. She wasn’t even sure where she’d put it and, were she to find it, if she’d remember how to play. She exchanged a glance with Daisy and smiled encouragingly. Her sister smiled back; the same complicit smile they had shared as children. But after a few pieces Angelica excused herself to check on the children, not that anybody cared, and Olivier followed her upstairs.

“Bloody hell, I can’t believe they still behave like this! They’re in their seventies!” Angelica exclaimed as they walked down the corridor towards the children’s bedroom.

“They don’t think they’re dinosaurs,” said Olivier with a grin. “They’ve all grown old together. To each other, they are the same as they’ve always been, and I know you won’t agree, but your mother was obviously very pretty in her youth.”

“I thought I was going to be swept into an orgy when Tony grabbed me.”

“I’d never let that happen.”

“The old lech.”

“I’m a young lech.” Olivier swung her around and kissed her.

“How can you feel horny when that’s going on downstairs?”

“I only have to look at you to feel horny.”

“I feel nauseous.”

“Thank you!”

“Not because of you, silly.”

“Let them get on with it. They are not you. They just brought you into the world. And I toast them for that.”

Angelica laughed. “That’s all you can toast them for. They’re an embarrassment. Thank God I’ll never have to introduce them to my friends. Can you imagine what Candace would think?”

“Her commentary would be priceless. But she’s your friend, so she would sympathize. No one who loves you would condemn you for having wacky parents.”

“I’m very grateful you don’t,” she said seriously.

He kissed her forehead. “Are you crazy? There’s nothing of your parents in you that I can see.”

“Wait until I’m seventy!”

Now she lay in bed as the children opened their stockings, taking pleasure from being just the family, away from London and all the stress Olivier seemed to bring home with him every evening. She cast a thought to Jack and wondered whether he was trying to contact her. Her mobile telephone had no reception in Fenton, unless she went down to the estuary, where, for some reason, it worked on a small and desolate bit of beach. She had warned him she might not be able to communicate, and right now she didn’t mind. Olivier had made love to her after dinner, and she had relished his attention. He had always been a sensitive lover. Afterwards, they had lain entwined, laughing about her parents and their atrocious friends. Then they had imagined how things might have gone had they not been there. Laughter had enabled her to talk about it without the usual stab of embarrassment. Once she detached, there was something very funny about Denny and Angie’s swinging scene; it was tragic only if she identified with it.

Joe and Isabel were delighted with their presents. Joe’s had been wrapped in red; Isabel’s in pale blue. Neither could understand how Father Christmas had known exactly what they wanted, but accepted that it was due to the letters they had written over half term and sent up the chimney at Candace’s house in Gloucestershire. Olivier lay half asleep in spite of the racket around him. He grunted every once in a while to prove he was awake and slipped his hand over his wife’s leg to give it a squeeze. Angelica couldn’t remember the last time they had lain in bed like that, all together. On weekends he usually slept in the spare room to get a lie-in. She smiled to herself and remembered Candace’s advice. She was absolutely right, of course. What she had was indeed precious—a fragile flame she should do everything in her power to nurture.