Air and Angels by Annie Bullen

Author:Annie Bullen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1987-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

‘Your wife,’ said Henry, sliding his empty Guinness mug onto the thinly hammered copper bar of the Horse and Jockey, and following through so that his elbow slumped behind the glass, supporting the weight of the right hand side of his body, ‘your wife was, is still, I suppose, a very sensitive, aware sort of woman. Very aware, ‘he repeated carefully, turning to look at Philip, who found the magnification of Henry’s stare from the centre of his hollowed eye socket disconcerting.

Those little round spectacles must be very thick-lensed, thought Philip, touching his own black-rimmed glasses, pushing them back from where they had slipped to the end of his nose. He drained the last few drops from his fifth pint of bitter, made a noise that sounded like a cross between a laugh and a hiccup and tried to remember how Henry knew Petra. ‘Petra is unfulfilled,’ he said ponderously and solemnly, and he too slammed his glass on the bar and watched it gloomily as it slid a few inches along the pinkish surface before coming to rest against the squat smugness of Henry’s Guinness glass. ‘Two more of those,’ he said to Donald the barman, who was big and blond and too healthy-looking, like a member of the national rugger team. ‘Guinness in that one and a pint of rubbish for me, Don.’ God knows what I’m talking about, he thought as he tried to sort out the remark in his mind – he knew it must be true, but he couldn’t work out any specific instances from the generalization.

‘What do you mean, unfulfilled?’ Henry straightened up a little and fiddled with the bright emerald green strings at the neck of his navy blue two-piece towelling tracksuit.

Philip averted his eyes from Henry’s costume, which seemed to him to be eccentric, irrelevant and unmasculine, and tried to concentrate on the nature of his wife’s alleged discontent.

‘It’s hard to explain, really. I mean, we’ve got three children – well, you met them today. They’re all right, but Petra doesn’t really take that much notice of them. She loves them and all that, but they don’t really seem to be part of her life, if you know what I mean. She doesn’t take a lot of interest in the house or garden either, like some women seem to. She says it’s all a waste of her time. But I don’t know what she does do with her time. It’s as if … oh, I don’t know!’ Philip pushed again at his glasses, which had gradually slipped almost to the tip of his nose as his face grew hot and sweaty in the warm crowded Saturday night atmosphere of the pub. He stared at Henry.

The two of them made an odd contrast, each leaning up against the ugly, uncomfortable copper bar, each with one leg hitched up casually on the rail that ran around the outside of the counter about a foot from the floor, and each bespectacled. But Henry, with his small thick gold-rimmed glasses, was almost bald, hollow-eyed and walrus-like.

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