Sheila's friend has written a play.
'It's in some theatre in Soho,' says Eva. 'Do you want to go?'
'Yes,' I reply.
I say yes to everything these days; another drink, a rave in Tufnell Park (which turns out to be an investment banker with decks in his sitting room and the St Paul's school chess club circa 1975, grown up and living in North London), 'optional' Karaoke for a friend's book launch which I fear will quickly become obligatory, and dinner with my ex-husband. Of these, only the last was a really bad idea. And another drink? Keep them coming.
So yes, a play what I wrote by a friend of Sheila. Why not?
'Apparently, it's about him taking up the trumpet,' elaborates Eva.
Oh my. The trumpet. I'm having second thoughts. My throat hurts. I may be coming down with something. It's about a trumpet? Chess geeks are metamorphosing into Band Geeks and I'm going to watch a man play a brass instrument in a small enclosed space in Soho, and this, this is my social life...?
In fact, it's the French Horn (ah well then, that makes it sooooo much more fun, forget I ever had reservations).
In fact, Sheila's friend has written a book called I Found my Horn about learning to play the French Horn which was a Radio 4 book of the week that has been turned into a play.
In fact, Sheila's friend, it turns out, is also an arts correspondent for big masthead newspapers and the author of several other books of boy's own adventures. And - I'll slip this, hidden here at the end of a paragraph instead of giving it one of its own - finally... Sheila's friend is also rather good looking in a choir-boy, captain of cricket, Evelyn Waughish sort-of-way.
'But apparently, he only likes really thin women,' says Eva in the bar where the four of us assemble, three lost wifes and Liz, a no-thank you, never fancied it journalist for the Evening Standard. Sheila is the only one of us who might squeeze into that category, so none of the rest of us even bother sucking in our stomachs or our cheeks. We're over it. Though more tact might have been called for Eva.
'I wasn't auditioning. I was merely commenting. He's also about twelve.' I protest (and I'm not that fat. I could lose weight.)
And succesful, I might have added. Since the Italian has gone to live in Paris where he's having 'a very very stressy life...difficult times...very difficult' (nice to know some things never change) I seem to meet only retired men who have opted out of meaningful work and already opened a bottle of red and knocked out their pipe for the long evening of the rest of their lives.
At my party last week several of the women came up to me during the course of the evening asking; 'Is that the Italian?' of my painter friend Lino who is, indeed, Italian but does not come with the prefix the. 'So what's wrong with him? He's single.'
Unfortunately he's not. Like every other man, except the retired ones, he has a girlfriend. I feel like one of those out of work actors at a Hollywood party who walks off in mid conversation every time he discovers that his interlocutor works in human resources or catering instead of being a producer or a casting director. Though in my case it's that second sentence that begins with the word 'we' and is usually followed by 'can't get a babysitter', 'live in the country' or 'have just come back from a year in Nepal' that gets me on hte move like Aslan. Unless the 'we' is called Jeremy or Klauss. Thank God for gay men. Not a popular refrain in the bible belt I guess, but if I were a country and western singer it would be my current theme tune.
Sheila's friend also has a friend. A man. Out on his own on a Friday night. But here it comes, second sentence, as regular as clockwork: 'We were both supposed to come but my wife is at home waiting for the Christmas tree to be delivered'. Now why didn't I think of that excuse?
The play, of course, was funny, witty, touching in parts (okay the parts where he's looking at old wedding photos - I have all my family albums in the attic locked up like the last strain of TB) and a great performance by actor Jonathan Guy Lewis. I smiled so much my cheeks hurt and left the theatre feeling a lot happier than I had when I went it. Though another drink was still a good idea. There is something intrinsically tragi-comic about hearing any musical instrument played badly - you laugh even though you know you really shouldn't, but you can't help it.
Once, when I was married, we went to my husband's cousin home for dinner. They lived across two apartments knocked together in the Nash Terraces overlooking Regent's Park in a palace of marble and looted Arabic treasures from Syrian palaces and Indian temples. There were ancient Moorish doors mounted on carefully reproduced mosaic walls from Tunisia that led nowhere, and other studded Turkish gates turned into coffee tables on which were silver coasters and bonbons in elaborate gilded bowls. Drink flowed and cigarettes were circulated. Food came out of the kitchen in wave upon wave of deliciousness, and in the midst, perched on one of the overstuffed sofas, of which there were about ten, sat the cousin's plastic wife, her lips that merely twitched instead of smiled ringed with dark lip-liner, her eyes elaborately made up, and her hair, like her brow, that never moved.
'Zo Marrrion, How are zee cheeldren?' She would ask every time we met.
'Fine,' I'd reply and stuff another handful of fustuk into my mouth (nuts to you and me)
'Ah good, good, very nice...' She would nod and that would be that for the rest of the night.
Until one evening the cousin announced that his wife had been taking piano lessons and sure enough, at the far and distant L of the room sat a huge glistening grand Bechstein. He also insisted she play for us.
'How wonderful,' we exclaimed, politely as she rose, smoothed her skin-tight leather skirt and tiptoed in her Jimmy Choos towards the piano, removed a hundred silver framed pictures of her husband with every tea-towel head Arab Princeling and Potentate you can think of, and then sat down.
A few scales followed and then, haltingly she began to play Fleur de Lis.
You know how it goes, hum it in your head to the end of the first phrase and then segue into Feelings by Morris Albert, and don't hit a right note more than one in every five. Repeat and continue for three years.
We were sitting at the end of the salon, out of sight of the performer, but her husband was opposite us on the Turkish divan, littered with tiny tassled cushions, oblivious to the crashing notes, the flats, the sharps, the chords in places where no chords existed, the absence of melody, and merely nodded at us, smiling proudly, God bless him.
I held my breath, willing her on, longing for her to hit her stride like the actor on the stage who finally climbed the K477 but no, she just kept slipping down the hillside and inevitably, I began to giggle. More nuts, quickly. Then my husband began to giggle with me. I swallowed some vodka, and pretended to be smiling, manically, and my husband lit a cigarette and walked to look out the window, as though in shoulder-shaking contemplation of the trees in Regent's Park. Meanwhile the cousin was still grinning and began conducting her; ' Ya habibti, b'janin, mabruk...' he called out over the massacre. (My love, it's beautiful, well done - love is deaf as well as blind.)
I stuffed more and more nuts into my mouth and thought about the things men are supposed to think about to delay sex - dead babies, goal averages (not helpful if you know nothing about football) and anyway delaying sex was not my problem, it was laughing out loud that I was worried about...that at not spraying pistachios across the table, or inhaling them and choking to death.
Mercifully it stopped and we clapped enthusiastically, and I said something inane which I pretended to find funny just to get out all the stored up laughter and my husband joined in as though he was insane.
During the play, however, the belly laughs were positively encouraged.
I have the oddest feeling that Sheila's friend was counting them.
