Injury Time by Beryl Bainbridge Page B

ready, should Helen notice the wound, to tell her he feared he was becoming increasingly knock-kneed as the years advanced.
    ‘I do admire those cushions,’ Muriel said. She would have liked to go somewhere and attend to her wet hair.
    ‘Have one,’ said Binny. ‘Have one.’ And she placed a cushion on a chair at the table and told everybody to sit down. She couldn’t concentrate on the cooking with the Simpsons standing about looking uncomfortable. Edward opened a bottle of wine.
    The guests perched on the damaged chairs and put their elbows on the table to steady themselves.
    Muriel frowned at her husband. He was bent sideways, dragging the cloth with his stomach, doing something out of sight. ‘The traffic,’ she said. ‘It was simply chaotic. We thought we’d never get here, didn’t we, George?’
    ‘Don’t tell me,’ protested Edward. He walked backward and forward in front of the mirror, holding a glass in his hand.
    ‘No trouble with parking though,’ said Simpson. ‘Not here at any rate.’
    ‘Never any trouble here,’ Edward agreed.
    ‘You don’t do any parking here,’ said Binny.

6
    T hey began dinner at a quarter past nine. Edward wondered agitatedly how he could possibly manage to eat, help with the washing up, and be out of the house by half past ten at the latest. It would seem fearfully abrupt.
    There was grapefruit to start with.
    ‘Excellent, excellent,’ Simpson said, gouging the fruit from its skin with a spoon that had buckled, without warning, in his hand.
    ‘The reason the loaf looks funny,’ explained Binny, ‘is because one of my children was hungry.’ Her voice quivered slightly. Recovering, she handed the sugar bowl to Muriel. ‘You’ve got four, haven’t you? All boys. Edward told me.’
    ‘Two, actually,’ interrupted Simpson.
    ‘Two girls,’ Muriel said. ‘We’re quite pleased with them. Of course, I never went out to work or anything like that, and I didn’t have a nanny when they were younger. I think it’s important to give them one’s undivided attention, don’t you? And I’m glad now that I had them all to myself.’
    ‘I’m glad I didn’t have a weapon in the house,’ said Binny. ‘I’d have murdered mine years ago.’
    ‘My father,’ Edward told them, ‘had a nanny who hanged herself.’
    ‘No,’ screamed Muriel.
    ‘Yes, she did. It’s as true as I’m sitting here. My father was grown up of course, but he heard about it. It seemed her mind snapped under the strain. One by one, losing her babies in the mud. Master Charles, Master Guy—’
    ‘In the mud?’ said Binny. ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘The trenches,’ explained Simpson. ‘In France.’ He shook his head sombrely from side to side.
    Anxious to change the subject, Muriel confided that her daughters were musically inclined; she hinted that they were fairly competent on the recorder.
    ‘My girls have frightful voices,’ said Binny, thinking of tape machines. ‘And their language—’ Her eyes filled with tears.
    She put down her spoon and stared distressed at a segment of grapefruit on her plate. Nobody noticed. Edward was telling the Simpsons that houses like these were a jolly sensible investment. Gilt-edged in fact. With inflation and so forth, and the cutting back of the government building programme, superior properties in London would eventually be unobtainable. ‘We’ve seen the end of the downward spiral in prices,’ he said. ‘The slump is over.’
    ‘How many floors are there?’ asked Simpson. The house didn’t seem particularly superior, what little he could see of it. He wondered if the place was divided into flats. There was certainly something wrong with the electricity supply; the room was full of shadows. He sought with his foot for the table leg and gently worked at removing his shoe.
    ‘Three,’ said Edward.
    ‘Four with the basement,’ Binny said. ‘I’ve let it at the moment.’ She tried not to look at Simpson. Edward had told her that