The Accidental Woman by Jonathan Coe Read Free Book Online

hand, which Nigel was not ashamed to admit that he enjoyed. Only three of them need concern us here, for in only three of them was Maria allowed to have any share.
    One of Nigel’s delights was to go to the pub and drink, with his friends, and now also with Maria. Many were the evenings on which he would take her to The King’s Arms, or The White Horse, where she would like as not be the only woman among a circle of perhaps eight or nine men, all friends of Nigel’s, all loud and jovial people, heavy and noisy and smoky and dark. The satisfaction derived by Maria from these entertainments was limited. It was not that Nigel’s friends ignored her, although that would have been bad enough. Nor was it that their talk offended her, for Maria did not take offence easily, if ever. No, the sensation with which she would look back over such evenings was one of puzzlement. The friendship which bound these people together was not, she decided, of a sort which she could easily understand, and yet she tried. Of course she did not understand, for that matter, the friendship which had held her and Sarah together, but at least the comfort and the reassurance which they had found in that friendship had always been explicit, and it was its very explicitness, the delight they would take in expressing it, the delight each would take in witnessing the other’s expression of it, which had made it all worthwhile, as far as Maria could see. For where was the comfort in all this boisterous aggression, what was the point of all this drinking, joking, thumping and laughing? This was what puzzled her. But if Nigel’s friends puzzled her, then how much more, although they would never admit it, did Maria puzzle them. Are you all right, they would say. Cheer up, have another drink. It may not happen, they would joke. Maria always fell for this one. What may not happen, she invariably asked, and then the deafening roars, the yawning hilarity.
    Sometimes, when Nigel did not want to take her to the pub, he would take her to a party. Maria tagged along out of a sense of duty, or who knows, out of inclination, of a perverse sort. It would be stretching the truth, though, to suggest that she ever enjoyed the experience. Even she would admit as much to herself, sometimes. It would be hard to say which aspect of it she objected to most, there were so many. There was the heat, for example. Maria would wrap up warm, to go into the cold night, and then find, when she and Nigel arrived at the party, that the room was horribly hot, a consequence no doubt of the fact that it was crammed to the roof with people. And this also meant that Maria would find it difficult to move, or sit, or stand, without coming into closer contact with the other guests than she would have liked. And it meant, too, that the room would be extremely noisy, so that if Maria wanted to talk to one of the other guests, which, fair enough, she occasionally did, she would find it difficult to do so, so difficult, in fact, that she would be obliged to shout in order to communicate her ideas. Naturally, all the other guests would also be shouting, in order to communicate their ideas, or in some cases desires, so perhaps some exceptionally rational or level-headed person might have suggested, after calling a general silence by beating on the table with a stick, that everyone should henceforth talk, rather than shout, so that henceforth there would have been no further need for shouting. But such a person would have been misguided, for she, or he, would not have taken into account the fact that music was also playing, impossibly loud music, in order to encourage people to dance, or rather to shuffle, with as much freedom of movement as was consistent with a tolerable level of drink-spilling, and toe-treading, and knocking over onto the floor of bottles, and of people, with a crash. So not only did this make it doubly difficult for Maria to move, or sit, or stand, but it also made it doubly