New Year's Eve, and the end of a decade. A portentous
moment, for those who pay attention to portents. Guests were invited
for nine. Some are already on their way, travelling towards Harley
Street from outlying districts, from Oxford and Tonbridge and
Wantage, worried already about the drive home. Others are dining,
on the cautious assumption that a nine-o'clock party might not
provide adequate food. Some are uncertainly eating a sandwich or a
slice of toast. In front of mirrors women try on dresses, men select
ties. As it is a night of many parties, the more social, the more
gregarious, the more invited of the guests are wondering whether to
go to Harley Street first, or whether to arrive there later, after
sampling other offerings. A few are wondering whether to go at all,
whether the festive season has not after all been too tiring, whether a
night in slippers in front of the television with a bowl of soup might
not be a wiser choice than the doubtful prospect of a crowded room.
Most of them will go: the communal celebration draws them, they
need to gather together to bid farewell to the 1970s, they need to
reinforce their own expectations by witnessing those of others, by
observing who is in, who is out, who is up, who is down. They need
one another. Liz and Charles Headleand have invited them, and
obediently, expectantly, they will go, dragging along their tired flat
feet,
their aching heads, their over-fed bellies and complaining livers, their
exhausted opinions, their weary small talk, their professional and
personal deformities, their doubts and enmities, their blurring vision
and thickening ankles, in the hope of a miracle, in the hope of a
midnight transformation, in the hop of a new self, a new life, a new,
redeemed decade.
Alix Bowen has always know that she will have to go to the party, because she is one of Liz Headleand's two closest friends, and she has pledged her support, for what it is worth. She has promised, even, to go early, but cannot persuade her husband, Brian, to go early with her. A couple of hours of any party is enough for me, Brian had said, and we'll have to stay until midnight, so I'm certainly not turning up before ten. All right, I'll go alone, said Alix. She thought Brian was quite reasonable not to want to go early. She herself is not a reasonable person, she suspects, a suspicion confirmed that evening in the bathroom as she tries, out of respect to Liz's party, to apply a little of a substance called Fluid Foundation to the winter-dry skin of her face. This is what people do before parties. She has seen them doing it on television: indeed, she used to do it herself when she was young, when she had no need of such substances, before she reverted so inexorably to her ancestral type.
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