Girl, 20 Read online

  ‘And what are you doing these days,’ I said heavily, ‘Penny?’

  ‘I wish you could see what you look like with that bloody great egg on your head.’ Her laughter sounded quite unforced, even engagingly naive. ‘It’s overdone. You know, like a false nose. As if you’re not meant to believe it.’

  Gilbert clicked his tongue and Kitty said, ‘Penny’, in torpid reproof, going on to add, ‘She’s at a domestic science college in—

  ‘I am not at any sodding domestic science college. I’ve left it, see? I don’t go there any more. I am eh drop out. Not that it’s very far to drop. I am completely idle. I . . . don’t . . . do . . . anything.’

  Her tone could have been described without either trouble or inexactitude as one of cold anger. The eyes were working hard too, though they were not looking at anybody. I decided I was not whole-heartedly enjoying my lunch, always having preferred something quick and light midday, and started to plan my leave-taking. Then I saw someone finish passing the window and go in at the glass porch, but could not make out who it was. After a moment, a man’s voice began loudly singing somewhere inside the house, the throat muscles tensed to produce the plummy effect often used in imitations of Welsh people, though this last was not evidently part of the singer’s intention.

  ‘Ah-ee last mah-ee hawrt een ahn Angleesh gawr-dan,

  Jost whahr thah rawzaz ahv Anglahnd graw . . .’

  Most musicians have a poor ear for linguistic or verbal nuances, and many for musical ones too, come to that, but it was like Roy, whom I had heard singing this song in this style more than once before, to take the trouble to substitute ‘Angleesh’ for the ‘Eengleesh’ that might have been expected, thus subtly hitting at persons who pronounce the name of our nationality as it is spelt. Indeed, the tone of the whole performance, which continued and drew nearer as we all listened at the table, was hostile, wounding, designed to humiliate, though Roy could hardly have supposed that some individual or group keen on the vocal manner he was caricaturing had stolen into the house while his back was turned. Rage at absent or largely imaginary foes, however, was a part of his life-style. A more obvious explanation of his behaviour was, of course, that he was trying to be funny, to which the objection was that he often did quite closely similar things that nobody, not even he, could have intended to be funny. Just the same cycle of reasoning applied to the notion that he was showing off. More likely, this was nothing more than a way of entertaining himself, something he might often have had to do in youth, as the child of middle-aged parents whose earlier progeny were well into their teens by the time he came on the scene. And why was he singing about Angleesh gawrdans at the present moment? To give the fact of his unexpectedly early return a chance to sink in before he actually appeared, rather as Jonas Chuzzlewit had once done after much more serious delinquency than anything Roy would have been up to.

  The door into the kitchen opened and Roy came in, a bulky figure in a wide-lapelled double-breasted jacket that, after a then recent fashion, set up uneasiness in the beholder by looking very, very nearly as much like a short overcoat, a glistening two-tone shirt and hairy trousers with widely separated stripes on them. His face was unchanged, a unified whole, I had always thought, with prominent straight nose, full lips, and pointed, slightly receding chin, a physiognomy I had often come across in photographs of public figures of the 1930s, especially actresses – a resemblance now underlined, I noticed with some concern, by the rough bob in which his thick, dark, ungreying hair had been done. There could never be anything actressy about Roy, that sort of behaviour being heavily over-subscribed hereabouts as it was, and in general he was uneffeminate to a fault; but at the sight of him today I felt a twinge of a kind of discomfort that I would have sworn he could never arouse in me. In his hand was a large brown drink.

  He, at least, seemed unreservedly glad to see me, and a moment later very, if briefly, concerned about the state of my head, though he might have been piling it on a bit as a diversion from his present moral disadvantage. Kitty and Penny heard out in staring silence his detailed account of the Brazilian’s sudden indisposition owing to an attack, he said with a wondering laugh, of some tropical bug the chap had picked up on a trip up the Amazon, of all things and rivers. I asked myself sadly if he would ever learn that to think an explanation convincing because it sounded too obvious and uninventive to be invented was the sort of typically male error most males discarded before they left school. The reappearance of Ashley, now in pyjamas and escorted by the Furry Barrel, saved him from public rout. Father and son went into a reunion scene of Neapolitan warmth, on father’s side at least; son soon started wriggling and asking about his present. This was quickly produced from one of the immense patch-pockets of the jacket-overcoat, a miniature fire-engine with, as we soon discovered, a hee-haw siren on it. The lad began playing with it on the floor under the table and round our feet. Gilbert, who had duly shown his disapproval of the fire-engine, asked Roy if he had had lunch.

  ‘Of course not; I rushed back here as soon as I could,’ he said seriously. ‘But don’t bother about me – anything’ll do.’

  ‘How did you get here from the station?’ asked Kitty, speaking for the first time since his arrival. Her tone was distant, about ten yards more distant than where she sat.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How . . . did you get . . . here . . . from the station.’ This came out in chewy, easy-to-lip-read chunks, with churchyard-pigeon head-effects.

  ‘I walked. Glorious day. Whatever’s easiest, Gilbert, thank you. Spot of corm beef’ll do me fine. And some tim pineapple or tim peaches to follow, if they’re there. Great.’

  When I first met him, Roy had had a sort of Northern accent that disappeared into public-school English at all his frequent moments of excitement. No doubt recognizing, at some intermediate level of self-consciousness, that the disparity was too obvious even to the uncritical ears of the other prosperous socialists he spent most of his time with, he must have decided on the new slurring policy as more adaptable, better politically and like young people talked, too. I thought I saw him wondering whether I had noticed the change.

  Having said no more, the women left the room, followed, after he had laid in front of us a piece of board with cheeses on it, by Gilbert. Roy ate meat and salad with studied ferocity. Presently he said,

  ‘Can you stick around for a bit? Something I want to talk to you about. There’s, uh, a favour I’d like you to do for me if you possibly could.’

  ‘I’m already supposed to be starting on some sort of aid programme for Kitty.’

  His chair juddered as the fire-engine crashed into it. ‘Christ. Sharp,’ he seemed to say, sounding a note of warning over the bray of the siren and the Furry Barrel’s outraged barking.

  I nodded. ‘I don’t want you to think I’ve sort of come up here behind your back.’

  ‘Certainly not. Anyway, I heard you were going to be asked. Everybody knows what everybody else is doing around here, though they don’t always admit it. That didn’t go down too well, did it? That stuff about the Amazon and so on.’

  ‘Not too well, no.’

  ‘I thought it was bloody good myself. But I’m no judge. They never give you credit for anything, do they? You’d suppose that a chap who’d winged his way back to the nest for a late lunch of corm beef and the rest of the rubbish instead of stuffing himself with delicacies at his club or in Soho somewhere and rolling up pissed at half past five would thereby ingratiate himself slightly with the women. Not a bloody bit of it. I’d have been better off all round doing the other thing. You’re looking well, Duggers. Apart from that head. Nasty. Anyway, how’s your life?’

  ‘Moderate. Pushed for cash as usual.’

  ‘Someone told me you and Anne had broken up.’

  ‘She went back to her husband. For the sake of the children.’

  ‘Oh balls, I do wish people wouldn’t behave like that. So stuffy. Boring beyond words. It’s the books they read, and all these tele
vision series. Nobody would dream of “going back” if they hadn’t been told for years that it’s what you do – not even what you should do, just what you do. Most depressing. Still. Got anyone to replace her?’

  ‘Only part-time.’ I considered whether it would be in order to reach down and cuff or pinch Ashley, who was making a number of runs with his fire-engine on one of the front legs of my chair. ‘A girl who lives on the other side of the river, so I do a fair amount of commuting.’

  ‘Ashley, stop that.’

  ‘Shut your trap, you fucking monkey-face.’

  I heard this remark with hidden pleasure and anticipation. Roy was rightly famous for his way with every grade of defiance, whether offered by a world-renowned soloist with strong unacceptable ideas about rubato or by a surly waiter. But the shocking event was that he told Ashley in the mildest of tones to come and sit on his knee and be given some special chocolate he had brought for him. This order was obeyed. The Furry Barrel, now directing sultry looks at me from a nearby chair, yapped peremptorily.

  ‘You are a silly old His Majesty King Charles the Second cavalier-spaniel dog,’ said Roy, and added to me, ‘You’ve got the cheese by you, you see. Could you give her some of that Cheddar? Not too much and cut up small and see that she sits when you give it to her. You ridiculous old hound.’

  The dog ate with head nodding and eyes still fixed on mine, the child like a gluttonous ogre. After some suspiciously paraded rumination, Roy said,

  ‘Of course, you and I have always differed fundamentally about, uh, well, people like Anne and so on. You never get invawved, do you?’ (This is as near as I can get to representing the curious gliding sound he made, a valuable and popular accent-worsener of the period.)

  ‘You mean you are involved.’

  ‘He’s always invawved with somebody,’ said Ashley thickly. ‘Mummy says she’d give a hundred quid to know who it is this time.’

  ‘I was talking about Mr Yandell, darling.’

  ‘Yeah.’ The boy said it as his half-sister might have done.

  ‘Perhaps we’d better—’ I began.

  ‘No no, it’s all right. Anyway, you don’t, do you? Get invawved.’

  I wanted to say that, whether through natural virtue, constitutional prudence, coldness of heart, cowardice or luck, I felt I had so far managed to avoid some of the grosser symptoms, at any rate, of invawvement. But Roy was pushing on regardless, still ruminatively.

  ‘I’ve never been able to make out what chaps like you are really looking for.’

  ‘I’m not looking for anything. At least, nothing that can’t be fairly easily found if you’re a bachelor with a bit of energy and a place of your own.’

  ‘You don’t want to get married.’

  ‘No. Not at the moment, anyway.’

  ‘Perhaps not ever.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t want the responsibility.’

  ‘If you like. It’s expensive, too.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s just a matter of a physical type.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘That you’re looking for.’

  Still talking, he grasped both of Ashley’s wrists in one hand, just in time to prevent a lot of chocolate being wiped on to his clothing, and bore him off to the kitchen sink, where he set to work on him with the very tea-towel used earlier on my head. Doing all this, he was under no obligation to meet my eye.

  ‘I mean, Duggers, it’s always struck me that you do seem to cast about pretty bloody widely in your choice of, you know. Moce people—’

  ‘You talk as if I collect them like butterflies. I just grab what’s going past. It’s all luck, availability . . .’

  ‘I know, I know. I only meant what you’ll admit is true if you’ll just bring yourself to consider it for a moment, that moce chaps seem to prefer one particular type of . . .’

  ‘Bird,’ said Ashley, efficiently maintaining tempo and sound-quality.

  ‘Belt up, you little bastard,’ said Roy, restoring something of the respect he had lost. ‘No, uh, you know perfectly well that some chaps go for tall ones or short-arsed ones or blondes or . . . you know. But you don’t. I’ve never been able to see any consistency in your tastes at all.’ He made it sound grave, and looked it himself. ‘I don’t even know what your sort of basic standard is, absolutely basic.’ He finished polishing Ashley’s mouth with a preoccupied flourish. ‘For instance, how would you rate, say, well, young Penny? I mean, she’s—’

  ‘No, Roy. I’ve no idea what it is, but no. Whatever it is, no.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said coldly. ‘I asked you a simple question. However. Well, my little tough guy’ – he swept his son up into his arms – ‘my little bruiser, what are we going to do with you, eh? Let’s go and find your mummy, shall we?’

  Mummy was easily found in the drawing-room, listening to, or apparently keeping quiet during, a Miles Davis record. Gilbert presided at the gramophone, which faithfully rendered that tiny, elementary universe of despair and hatred. Penny was eating chocolates, a good antiquarian touch, and reading a paperback book of what looked like poems, or at least non-prose. Roy dumped Ashley, who seemed drugged with chocolate to the point at which he had forgotten about his fire-engine for the time being, and took me and the Furry Barrel out into the garden.

  ‘Changing-huts,’ he said, gesturing towards some loose-boxes.

  ‘When you build the swimming-pool.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Roy, what’s this favour?’

  ‘Favour?’

  ‘You said you wanted me to do you a favour.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, just bearing with me when I maunder on. Sympathetic ear. There’s nobody much round the place I can talk to.’

  ‘I see. Not a very arduous favour.’

  He led me into a barn full of empty cardboard boxes and pieces of wood shaped for some now superseded purpose. ‘I was thinking of turning this shack into a music laboratory.’

  ‘Before or after the swimming-pool?’

  ‘Oh, Duggers, I do wish you’d try not to be such an ole square. Times are changing whether you like it or not. Weber’s bloody good, I agree, but he’s hardly as relevant as Webern. That chap might have produced something that would make even you sit up if the Yanks hadn’t murdered him.’

  ‘To hell with relevance, and it was an accident, and he was sixty-three, and sit up—’

  ‘Verdi was over eighty when he—’

  ‘And sit up and lean over slightly to one side in order to fart briefly. Don’t let’s go into all that again, Roy.’

  ‘No, sorry.’

  We came out of the gloom of the barn and walked down a modest avenue littered with fallen wood. Bars of soft shadow lay across it. The Furry Barrel, nose to the ground and tail wagging at half tempo but full stretch, hurried aside into some laurel bushes.

  ‘How are you on the ivories these days?’ asked Roy.

  ‘Hardly concert standard, but I usually spend most of one day a week at the instrument.’

  ‘I thought we might tackle a snarter together later on.’

  ‘Tackle . . . Oh, yes. Yes, that would be fine.’

  ‘Do you feel up to the Brahms D minor?’

  ‘You’d have to be in a pretty tolerant mood.’

  ‘In thack case we might be better advised to go for something a little less demanding. Any objection to Mozart?’

  ‘On the contrary. While I remember, for God’s sake let up on those pants of yours’, and I went on to explain at once and in full to save the time he would have wasted on very slowly dawning comprehension and the rest of it.

  ‘Bloody Gestapo,’ he said when I had finished.

  ‘Kitty wonders why you don’t buy a pair somewhere and I must say I agree with her. You could save yourself so much—’

  ‘Yeah, and have the bloody shopman say, “And will there be anything further, Sir Roy? Some deodorant, or a packet of horn pills?” It’s that bastard telly. Honestly, half m
y troubles come from never knowing when some bugger isn’t going to recognize me. Only the other evening I was sneaking into a block of flats in, well, never mind where, and the bloody porter stuck his head out of his window and yelled, “The lift’s not working, Sir Roy, I’m afraid you’ll have to use the stairs.” If you don’t bleeding well mind. It was those concerts I did last year for LCM Television. Them and that ballocking silly panel game. I wish I’d never let them talk me into it.’

  I wished the same thing, though for different and perhaps priggish reasons, but I said, ‘If you think buying one pair’s such a give-away, and I can’t see it matters, buy a dozen. Or are you afraid the bloke’d think you were taking on a dozen birds one after the other? What if he did? I can’t understand why you’re so sensitive about it.’

  ‘I’m not going to carry a dozen pairs of pants with me everywhere I go.’

  ‘No need to. Leave them at your club.’

  ‘Out of the question.’

  ‘But just by—’

  ‘I don’t want to discuss it any further.’

  The avenue petered out at a five-barred gate, beyond which was a field with two inexpensive-looking horses in it. Roy seemed to think it would diminish him politically if I were allowed to take away the impression that the animals belonged to him. He explained at length that they did not and whose they were. I was wondering whether Kitty’s flaunting theory about the pants might not have something in it after all. Guilty alarm lightly dusted with embarrassment was what anybody who knew him would have predicted as his response to my warning, the dead opposite of the evasive-defiant mixture I had been handed. The thought of the favour, too, was worrying me. Presumably I was not at the moment in a fit state of mind for its nature to be broached, and Roy was waiting for my wits to become impaired by lust, alcohol or fear of imminent extinction, especially lust: it must be here that the Penny thing fitted in. I decided to try to take him near enough to the favour for him not to be able to resist asking it, and pushed forward my first pawn.