Girl, 20 Page 3

  It was as a composer, of the most serious sort, that Roy had tried to see himself in the days when I had known him better. But it was evident even then that he had come along a bit late in the day to make the best creative use of his taste and talent. Somebody called Vandervane would have fitted fairly neatly – by more than coincidence, I had always thought – into the era in which it had evidently been compulsory for English composers to be called something non-English: Delius, Holst, van Dieren, Moeran, Rubbra. But he had turned up a good half-generation after it ended, and, again somehow characteristically, would not have fitted into it with total neatness because of the anglicization of his surname, imposed by grandfather van der Veen upon arrival from Rotterdam a century ago. (Roy would sometimes warmly defend the change, at other times deplore and threaten to reverse it, depending simply on how he felt, not on how his countrymen seemed to be treating him.)

  Before I could start speculating on the current level of his artistic standards, Kitty came back with some beer for me and almost as much of what looked like sketchily diluted gin for her. I thought on a second view that, while still attractive in a plump, florid, not-my-cup-of-tea way, she had aged since I had last seen her. Or perhaps she was just tired and strung-up – strung-up higher and tighter than she habitually was. Certainly her torn, faded check shirt and stained jeans were indications – in one whose breakfast wear was likely to recall Mary Queen of Scots – of lowered morale. But the dry, scoured look of the skin at the outer corners of her eyes pointed to something more permanent.

  We settled down side by side on the couch vacated by Christopher and the female mute. Turned towards me with arched back, and drink and cigarette held before her in a sort of low boxer’s-guard position, Kitty started.

  ‘I checked on the pants after you telephoned. There are definitely three fewer than there were last week-end. What’s so utterly terrifying is the openness of it. He knows I deal with all the laundry and things. He must realize . . . It’s not even that he doesn’t mind if I know. He wants me to know. Flaunting it. Throwing it in my face. Using it to show how he hates me,’ she shrieked quietly, giving her usual treatment to an earlier thought of mine.

  ‘I doubt it. He’s just careless.’

  ‘Why can’t he buy a pair and change somewhere? Just answer me that – if you can,’ she challenged me challengingly. ‘What’s to stop him buying a brand-new pair at a shop and changing at his club, for instance? Come on, what’s to stop him?’

  ‘I don’t know, Kitty. Well, he just doesn’t think of it. He wouldn’t.’

  ‘I wish to God I knew who it was. Or rather I don’t. Not after that one who designed jewellery.’

  ‘Oh, there’s been one who designed jewellery, has there?’

  ‘Belts and bracelets and things. You must have heard about it. He took her to Glyndebourne and Covent Garden and Aldeburgh and everywhere. That was the only thing that saved me. It was all fixed up for them to go to Bayreuth and at the last moment she found out what it was.’

  ‘What it was about what?’

  ‘Bayreuth. Wagner. Opera. Music. Weeks of it. Really, Douglas.’

  ‘Sorry. Where is he now?’

  ‘You may well ask.’ Showing all her command of oral italics, ditto inverted commas, black-letter and illuminated capitals, she said, ‘Having a working lunch he’s not sure where because the chap hadn’t made up his mind with a chap whose name he can’t remember because it’s so unpronounceable who’s got some very vague ideas about fixing up a tour of Brazil which he thinks probably almost certainly would be a bad idea but he might as well find out more and anyway it’s a free lunch and he’s no idea how long it’ll go on.’

  ‘I see. It does rather sound like a—’

  ‘I don’t mind him just having a go occasionally. He probably needs it. Or he thinks he does. It isn’t really him taking them to bed.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ I asked as required.

  ‘Well yes of course it is. I mean I hate that like bloody poison, but I can put up with it. It’s the going off altogether thing that petrifies me.’

  ‘But there’s no sign of that at the moment, surely. This Brazilian lunch. He’s doing his best to cover up. Doing something towards it, anyway. Not like trying to take her to Bayreuth.’

  ‘That’ll come. I know the pattern, Douglas dear. I’ve been through it all myself, you see. I know it from the inside.’

  ‘Did he take you to Bayreuth?’

  ‘That kind of thing. Anyway, I went. That was how I scored. I was the best one he’d met at being told about music since his first wife. I can remember so clearly him playing the tunes over on the piano and then bits of the record, so I could follow the themes and recapitulations and things when he took me to the concert. Still, why shouldn’t I be able to remember it clearly? It’s only about ten years ago.’

  There were tears in her eyes, but then there so often were. Had Roy really married her for her docility as an audience? I said, ‘But you really do like it, don’t you, Kitty? Music, I mean.’

  ‘Oh yes, I like it all right,’ she said, making her moderate statement of the month. ‘I’m very fond of music. Always have been.’

  ‘Well, then . . . Look, what do you know about this girl? How old is she?’

  ‘I don’t know anything at all about her, but they’ve been running at about twenty to twenty-two over the last three years or so. Tending to go down. Getting younger at something like half the rate he gets older. When he’s seventy-three they’ll be ten.’

  I checked the last bit mentally and found it to be correct, given the assumptions. It seemed to me extraordinary that anyone capable of making these in the first place, and then of following them through to their ‘logical’ conclusion, should (as Kitty clearly did) see the final picture presented as nothing but tragic or repulsive. ‘And when he’s eighty-three they’ll be five,’ I said experimentally.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, glad that I had followed her reasoning.

  I gave it up. ‘Well, I was going to say, if he wants a music pupil he’s looking in the wrong place. Nobody in that sort of generation cares at all about any sort of music. Except very sober types with horses and lists of who to send Christmas cards to. Not Roy’s speed at all.’

  ‘At his age he may have decided the music-pupil thing isn’t so important,’ she said, and added incuriously, ‘Isn’t pop music music?’

  ‘No. Anyway, what can I do to help? I do want to, but I can’t see quite—’

  ‘Dearest Douglas. First find out who she is . . .’

  ‘But you said—’

  ‘. . . and how far it’s gone, and then we can sort of make a plan.’

  ‘But that’s spying. And what kind of plan?’

  ‘I don’t mind you telling him I’ve asked you to have a word with him about it. And surely you’d do anything to stop him from, that is surely you’d agree he mustn’t throw himself away on some filthy little barbarian of a teenager? It would be such a crime, so awful for everybody, for me and the children, and for him too of course when he gets fed up with her, and for people like this young ’cellist boy he’s encouraging, and there are so many people who depend on him, everybody he’s got obligations to . . .’

  Not to mention the chaps at the nuclear-disarmament talks. ‘I suppose it would. I mean of course it would, I quite see that. But I still don’t see what you or I or anyone else can do to stop him if he’s made up his mind.’

  ‘But if you found out something about it, then at least we could . . .’

  A distant but rapidly approaching disturbance had broken out on an upper floor, constituted of the wordless yelling I had heard over the wires, the Furry Barrel’s tones with full slipping-ratchet effect, Gilbert sounding annoyed, traces of a fourth voice, and variegated footfalls. Kitty got up and behaved for a few seconds like somebody about to be machine-gunned from the air, then moved as if to a prearranged spot. Here a fearful small boy in a smart suit of bottle-green velvet, after blundering through the doorway and s
tarting to yell louder and at a higher pitch, threw himself into her arms: Ashley Vandervane, I judged. Gilbert was not far behind, and an altercation ensued. It was soon clear that Ashley had not been fleeing from Gilbert so much as coming to enlist his mother’s support in gaining possession of some object, like his eleventh chocolate bar of the day or a bottle of hydrochloric acid, which Gilbert had perversely denied him. But I paid little attention, because I was looking so closely at Penny Vandervane, now also of the company, and most closely of all at her breasts.

  This was not difficult, in the sense that a good half of their total was directly visible in the wide V of a dark-brown Paisley-patterned blouse or shirt or, just as possibly, pyjama-top. They struck me as not so much large as tremendously prominent, that and high, yes, and somehow immovable, giving the impression that poking at them with a finger, say, would have no more effect than poking at somebody’s knee-caps. That was it: they were like a pair of knee-caps carefully sculpted and re-covered in Grade A skin. I saw now that they were attached to a rather tall, long-limbed frame, and finally surmounted by a shapely shorn head that included a face remarkable for the width and blueness of its eyes.

  These last turned towards me as I reached them with mine, and I got a very brief stare, with no recognition in it and slightly less curiosity than one passenger in a lift will normally show another. Never mind: I had realized that I was in the presence of the reason for my ready yielding to curiosity when Kitty had asked me to come up that day. But I was clearly going to have to wait quite a long time, if not for ever, before I would be in any position to start explaining to Penny Vandervane about her breasts.

  Ashley, twisted round in his mother’s arms, had one thumb in his mouth and the extended first two fingers of the other hand going up and down in the air, a manual combination I could not remember having seen before. He removed the thumb for a space in order to accuse Gilbert of having hit him. Gilbert denied it, and I believed him, but the Furry Barrel, growling near his ankles, took the other view. Kitty solved the matter by carrying her son from the room, the dog bustling officiously behind them.

  ‘The way you bring up that boy is decadent,’ said Gilbert.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me how he’s brought up,’ said Penny in her classless accent, or one combining the ugliest features of at least two dialects.

  ‘It seems nothing to do with anybody. Toys, presents, candies, ice-creams. Why isn’t he at school today?’

  ‘He didn’t feel like it.’

  ‘He should be forced to go. At six years of age he can’t be blamed. What do you expect of a boy who’s allowed to sleep in his parents’ bed?’

  Penny shrugged her shoulders, a movement which had good results lower down, and started to turn in my direction, but stopped and turned back again.

  ‘I’m Douglas Yandell,’ I said thinking it safest to start from scratch.

  She grinned slightly and said, ‘I know.’

  Gilbert frowned at her, holding it until she had noticed. Then he said to me, ‘I’m Gilbert Alexander’, and held out his hand, which I shook.

  After a moment’s inner toil, I said, ‘How’s your father?’

  ‘Blind drunk. Oh, don’t be a sodding idiot, Gilbert, it’s an old music-hall gag thing. He’s no more blind drunk than he always is. Quite fit, actually. Going after the birds always tones him up.’

  Gilbert made a disgusted noise and went out.

  ‘Dead funny, aren’t they?’ Penny began giving me quite a lot of her attention. ‘You know, Victorian. He’s even a bit Victorian in bed. He was when I first met him, anyway. Speeded up a lot since. Well, he’s got the equipment, you see. That’s all true, all that.’

  It interested me a little that she had taken the trouble to drive Gilbert from the room and then at once switched to what was, for someone like myself, an in-depth anti-pass move, though I quite saw that another might take it as a come-on. I wondered whether chance or a sure instinct had guided her. A look at the width of those blue eyes firmly decided me for instinct.

  ‘Jolly good for you,’ I said heartily. ‘What sort of bird is it this time?’

  ‘No idea. Young. She got you up here to, you know, get on to him about it?’

  I took this to refer to Kitty. ‘She’s worried.’

  ‘Listen, did you ever see her when she wasn’t worried? It’s her life. Her bloody life, mate. I think she had sodding Ashley to give herself something new to go on about. Crisis on tap. No wonder he does all this bird stuff,’ she went on in her pronominal style. ‘But then he lets her know about it and we’re off again. You needn’t think it’s any different from today. This is pretty quiet, actually.’

  ‘Do you live here?’

  ‘It’s free,’ she said, answering my thought.

  ‘What about Gilbert? Is he a resident, or just passing through?’

  ‘Oh, he thinks he’s a resident.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  She gave another shrug, saw my look, and came an inch or two nearer. ‘Where do you live, then?’

  ‘Maida Vale. I’ve got a flat there.’

  ‘Anyone else in it?’

  ‘Not at the moment, I’m sorry to say.’

  ‘Oh.’ She lowered her green-painted eyelids.

  Even without taking into account her earlier praise of Gilbert’s physique, I knew what I was in for at this stage, but there are situations in which a lancer must charge an armoured car. I could hear somebody approaching the doorway across the uncarpeted wooden floor of the hall. ‘Can I show you the place some time?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said, grinning and shaking her head. ‘No,’ she added.

  Kitty came in with the face and carriage and then voice of one just released after a secret-police interrogation. She told us we might as well have lunch now, and we trooped off. I wondered why Penny should dislike me so much: not, surely, because of my breasts-fumble of a couple of years previously. She, or they, must long have been hardened to that kind of thing. And I sensed there was more to it than simple suspicion of any presumptive ally of her stepmother. Perhaps it was just the sight and sound of me she found unpleasant. Then I cheered myself up by reflecting that it was overridingly important to have renewed my assault, even verbally and vainly, on the tested principle that every minute a girl is allowed to spend in official ignorance of a man’s intentions means two extra minutes of build-up when the time comes.

  I followed the women through a small room full of boilers, tanks, pipes and associated machinery, and into another doorway. ‘Mind your head, Douglas,’ said Kitty as I gave myself a smart crack across the hairline with the edge of the lintel. It hurt like hell. I stumbled down two or three steps into what I came by degrees to see was a large, lofty kitchen looking on to the courtyard. Most of those present reacted to my misfortune, Kitty by repeatedly crying out and pressing a wet tea-towel against the place, Gilbert by sending me glances of satisfaction while he transferred a number of bottles of sauce and jars of chutney and pickles from a wall-cupboard to a laid dining-table, an elderly domestic with sympathetic concern, Ruth and Penny with smothered and open laughter respectively. Only Christopher was unmoved, going on rapidly and noisily loading a tray with materials for two. This, a minute later, he carried out of the room, followed by Ruth, and the domestic soon went too, urged on with some dismissive gratitude from Kitty. So it was only she and I and Gilbert and Penny who sat down at table.

  Gilbert took charge, doling out bowls of soup, distributing cold meats and salad, fetching tinned beer from a larder that diffused an Arctic breath. He asked the women whether they wanted this or that by the use of words, me by raising his eyebrows or chin, sometimes both. Ordered by Kitty to tell me what he did, he conceded with what in the circumstances was quite good grace that he was connected with the stage (by moving pieces of scenery on to and off it, I guessed) and had nearly finished a book about West Indians in London.

  ‘A novel?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no. The culture that produced it
is dying. Something much freer from narrow traditions, more adventurous altogether in form. It bears analogies to music and the visual arts. I’ve got into the habit of thinking of it as my London Suite in three movements and three colours.’

  This, if indeed an ingrained habit, was one I considered he should set about breaking while there was still time, but did not like to say so. ‘Is it very autobiographical?’

  ‘That question has no meaning. We can all only re-create what we have felt and experienced and suffered in our lives.’

  While I tried, not very conscientiously, to apply his dictum to Suppé’s Poet and Peasant overture, Kitty asked, ‘But it’s got a story?’

  ‘Story. Rhythm. Characters. Plasticity. Shape. Melody. Frame. Plot,’ said Gilbert, so oratorically that I could not tell whether he was ridiculing these concepts or claiming that the London Suite had as much of all of them as anybody could possibly want. Kitty seemed to be in a similar difficulty. At my other side, Penny showed no sign of ever having been in a difficulty in all her born days.