Parineeta Singh: An Invitation to Dinner

Summary

Today when my wife announced that she had invited Miss Fulton to dinner a spark of joy electrocuted me. I was flipping through the letters which had arrived with the morning post when I was startled by my wife's voice. She had a way of moving as if her feet didn't touch the ground and could enter a room without sound. This was something I liked about her when we first met, but recently this characteristic had been making me cagey. ‘You don't mind, do you? Having another guest?’ she asked. I shook my head and circled my arm about her waist. I felt her relaxing and she nuzzled my ear. I had long ago told her that our marriage was going to be more of a friendship, but she still initiated small intimacies.

I told her that I had to get to the office early, so I didn't want breakfast; but the truth was that I just wanted to get out of the house and be alone with my thoughts. Outside the trees were dazzling, splendid in all their bloom; a carnival of countless multi-coloured flowers. It was a radiant morning, cool and bracing, and there was an expectant feeling in the air. As if the air was holding itself still, waiting for something to happen. Some pre-ordained culmination, beautiful and divine; something which could simply not be otherwise.

The first time I had seen Miss Fulton was at the club. She was sitting with my wife and shone out shimmering in a sapphire blue dress. As I wove my way through the crowds to this mermaid-like creature, she turned her glowing cat-like eyes suddenly upon me as if marking me out from all the other men in the lounge. I exerted myself quite a bit in the conversation that day so that she might see me as a sophisticated, cultured man being witty for her benefit. But though I managed to move my wife to delighted laughter more than a few times, Miss Fulton did no more than smile.

When she got up to leave, the melusine with the half-shut eyes, she forgot the white silk scarf that she had unknotted from her neck earlier in the evening. She was almost at the door when I noticed it lying beside the chair she had just vacated.