Girl, 20 Page 6

‘He wasn’t five minutes ago. Look, we can put it back if you want. We’ll have to lose a half-inch somewhere else, though. Have you got a carbon there? What about this bit near the end about this fellow whose name begins with J’s early style?’

  ‘Janáček. No, I need that.’

  ‘Well then . . . You can’t pop in, can you?’

  ‘No. Leave it. Leave it as it is.’

  I rang off. Over the past few days I had been telling myself now and then that if Harold cut me materially, as he had done twice before, I would do no more work for the paper. But I knew now without thinking about it that I was going to carry on. Why not? Nothing said I had to inform five million readers that Heinrich Kohler was an East German; their continuing ignorance of this fact could not damage him, only, by remote extension, his country, and it could blow itself up tomorrow for all I cared either way, on the understanding that it sent its good musicians and singers and instruments abroad first. My sole concern had always been to promote the people and the works I admired and to demote the other sort. I must positively hang on to my job with Harold, then, if only to keep out the sort of little mountebank likely to do a turn at it between a spell on the books page and the real prize spot, the restaurant column.

  Across the hall a door slammed and someone – Kitty – ran upstairs at a great rate. Another, more distant door slammed. I scratched my backside. Nothing said (did it?) that I must never do anything that those who behaved like Kitty would probably not like. Doing my best to block Elevations 9 was a higher obligation. So I was changing my mind about Roy’s favour, with its opportunities for exploration of his immediate musical intentions. That still left a problem about Penny, but I pushed it out of sight.

  On the desk, the telephone bell pinged. I thought briefly, then went back into the hall. Roy was at the telephone there. When he saw me, he gave a glance and a nod that invited me over beside him; I went; he jabbed his finger at a dog-eared directory lying before him. Its cover bore what I had always felt was a dispensable slogan about its being a great place to look up people’s telephone numbers in.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time,’ said Roy. He had a serious, dedicated look about him. ‘They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this kind of . . . Inquiries? Good afternoon. I wonder if you can help me . . . I’m sure you will. Now: the other evening, last Thursday to be precise, I met a very nice chap and his wife at a party in Chelsea somewhere. He was about forty, forty-five, running a bit to fat, dark, hair receding rather, said he worked in public relations. Uh, smoked a pipe. She was a few years younger, on the thin side I think one would say . . . Do let me finish; there isn’t much more. Yes, she was wearing a green dress with a wide belt, and earrings, they looked late eighteenth century to me, two children they had, a boy and a girl, both at school. That’s about all I can remember. I do hope it’s enough . . . For you to tell me their name, of course, so that I can look up their number in the directory. I want to telephone them, you see . . . But if I knew their name, I could look up their number, as the Post office so helpfully reminds me on the front of this foam book I have here. It’s precisely because I don’t know their name that I got on to you in the first place . . . You can’t? What bloody use are you, then?’

  He rang off with a triumphant crash. ‘Pity in a way. She sounded quite a nice girl, actually. I should have got hold of the supervisor. I can do that tomorrow. Got to keep at them. What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Nothing. I don’t think that rubbish is on the latest directories.’

  ‘That doesn’t affect the principle. Like a drink?’

  ‘No thanks. You have one.’

  ‘I most assuredly will.’

  He had walked me down the hall a few paces and now switched on a light (the house was generally rather dark), in an alcove where there was a squat refrigerator and a couple of shelves piled with glasses and bottles, most of them dirty and empty respectively. The ice compartment of the refrigerator looked like a small sample of a glacier, but Roy tugged an ice-tray out of it and put some of its contents into a presumably clean tumbler. After that he took me into the drawing-room, poured about a gill of Scotch on top of the ice, and drank a certain amount of it. He still had the intent air I had noticed at the telephone. We started speaking at the same time; he signed to me to go on.

  ‘Sorry. Roy, I’ve changed my mind about that favour you wanted me to do for you. We can fix an evening whenever you say.’

  He pointed his nose at me and did one of his rich, dependable-sounding laughs. ‘I was just going to tell you I shan’t be needing it now. The whole thing’s off.’

  ‘Off?’

  ‘I’m giving her up. Cleam break. Best thing for everybody. You’d probably agree, wouldn’t you? I had the whole thing out with Kitty just now.’

  ‘It didn’t sound as if it went down too well. I couldn’t help hearing . . .’

  ‘Oh, that was just a minor point. I think I rather over-stressed the attractions of, uh, what I’ve been up to. It’ll blow over in no time. The great stroke is that I’ve told her the full story from the word go.’

  ‘With what object?’

  ‘Oh, Christian gentleman! What object would you expect? So that I can stop feeling guilty and she can stop feeling insecure. You know.’

  ‘And clear the air and wipe the slate and square the account. Yes, I know. You must be off your head. I thought you were supposed to be in love with this girl. Or have you wiped that clean too?’

  ‘Do you imagine I can’t see how difficult it’s going to be?’

  ‘Indeed I do, despite your past experience, and when you find you’re starting again, or trying to, you’ll realize that all you’ve done is create fresh difficulties for yourself. Once you start making with the pants again, Kitty’s bound to—’

  ‘Bugger the pants! You and Kitty are obsessed with the bloody things. She even brought them up just now. It seems such a trivial point to me.’ He was quietening down, preparing to pull out of the whole topic. ‘Why don’t you stay to dinner, Duggers? We’re having a few locals in, nothing very spectacular . . .’

  ‘Thanks, but I’ve got a concert. You’ve just erected a permanent obstacle in your own path without doing anybody else any good.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. What is your concert? I might come along.’

  ‘But what about your . . . ? Oh, London Handel Players under Matheson. To have heard all the details isn’t going to make Kitty the slightest bi—’

  ‘It’s not a formal party. People just drop in. They’ve come on a lot since Matheson took over. What are they playing?’

  ‘Even if you never touch another girl in your life you’ll suffer because of it. Bach and Handel. The First Suite. A concerto grosso, one of the op. 6, I forget which. Some other stuff. Why can’t you ever keep it to yourself? You—’

  ‘I can’t get that kind of thing better performed on my hi-fi. No, I think I’ll stay after all. Kitty would like me to be here.’

  Having now to contend with Kitty herself, Ashley, the Furry Barrel, Gilbert and Penny, who had started infiltrating the room, as well as Roy in top evading trim, I gave up. A headache had spread out from the place I had hit on the door frame. The best part of an hour’s journey by Tube lay ahead of me. I said my goodbyes, receiving from Penny a wordless grin and a glance at my forehead. Gilbert drove me to the station in unbroken silence. A train had just left. The one I took stopped for a quarter of an hour under the river. I hurried to the concert hall and arrived exactly on time. There was a ten-minute delay in starting. The concertino violin broke a string in the Handel. Afterwards I walked nearly a mile in a light drizzle before I reached shelter. Vivienne, at the best of times an undistinguished dresser, was wearing a fearful trouser-suit that looked as if it had been made out of the seat-covers of some excitingly new motor-coach. She was mildly sullen and preoccupied, but would not say about what. At the restaurant, her omelette was dry and too salt, and I spilled most of a glass of wine over the tablecloth. It wa
s a little better in bed. Not much, not nearly as much as I had had solid grounds for expecting. I saw next morning that the paper had transposed two lines in my piece and misspelt Kohler’s name. After such a promising plunge into the bush, life seemed to have returned to its old beaten path.

  Two: Something Soft

  I heard nothing of Roy for five or six weeks. Nothing direct, that is. But his name remained before me and the rest of the public. With others, he signed a letter to The Times calling for an ultimatum to the Smith Government in Rhodesia to hand over all power to black leaders within forty-eight hours or face an airborne invasion. He gave an interview to a Sunday newspaper, in which he developed the ideas about youth he had dimly outlined to me in his garden, saying, in part, that it – youth – was in the process of discovering something as momentous as Christianity, and that those who resisted the free sale of hashish and other drugs did so out of guilt. He appeared in a television discussion on the future of the arts, no doubt forgetting the troubles that such exposure had allegedly brought him not so long before. I missed the programme, but heard that it was political in tendency, the views represented ranging from Roy’s to those of an American sculptor who, it seemed, had demanded an end to all art not directly destructive of society. I was relieved to see a paragraph on some cultural chit-chat page saying that ebullient conductor Sir Roy Vandervane was preparing with the New London Symphony Orchestra to give a series of concerts of the symphonies of Mahler. Trendy, true, I thought to myself, but far, far better that than such as Elevations 9.

  Nothing much happened to me over this period. The Record-Player, having tried all the reviewers senior to me and been rebuffed, sent along a huge box with a couple of dozen early Haydn symphonies and a small library inside it: eight long-playing yards, or about ten hours, of perfunctory periwiggery, not to speak of all those words, which provided a frightening amount of information on the composer’s life and times without descending to any particulars at all about the symphonies concerned. That week I had Haydn coming out of my ears, or rather out of the other ear than the one he went in at. Harold Meers behaved himself on the whole, vetoing only a passing reference to the successful tour a string quartet had had in Poland. I finally winkled Weber out of Salzburg and established him in Vienna. I got the laundry to render up a shirt of mine they had been sitting on, if not wearing, for a couple of months, and had my piano tuned. Vivienne’s sullenness-cum-preoccupation, never so marked as to sour any occasion, continued to fluctuate in a regular pattern: deepening as the week-end approached, vanished by Saturday afternoon, when I usually drove her out somewhere in a hired car, beginning to stir faintly again by Sunday evening. It was one Sunday about eight o’clock that I decided to change my usual policy of sitting (or, in this case, lying) about and waiting for female moods to go away.

  ‘Has this other bloke been acting up, or what?’

  ‘No,’ said Vivienne.

  This reply illustrated one of the best things in her character. Although the other bloke had been on the scene since Christmas or so, and took up all her free time and half her bed every Tuesday and Friday, and although she knew I knew about him, he had not been made conversational flesh until now. It was a relief not to have to machete my way through a jungle of what-are-you-talking-aboutery before I could get at him. Admittedly, this readiness to concede facts went with a reluctance to volunteer them, so that the process of finding out from her what, for instance, her father did for a living (it transpired that he was the lay secretary of an ecclesiastical body) was too much like one of those yes-or-no guessing games. But one cannot, and in this sort of case probably should not, have everything.

  ‘Is he rich?’

  ‘No. About the same as you.’

  ‘I see. Married?’

  ‘No.’ She spoke with some heat.

  ‘Well, a lot of people are, you know. Is he nice?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go with him if he wasn’t nice, would I? He’s fairly nice. No, a bit nicer than that. Say about halfway between fairly nice and really nice. He’s rather small, you see, only about an inch taller than me. And then he’s got this beard. Without a moustache. It goes all the way round his face without him having a moustache.’

  ‘He doesn’t sound anything like as nice as me.’

  ‘He isn’t. Not in that sort of way. But he’s very kind and thoughtful. Oh, I mean you’re kind when you think of it, but he always is. It’s a big thing with him. And he’s dependable. I can rely on him no matter what it is.’

  ‘Don’t mind me saying it, will you? but I think you’re making him out to be rather dull.’

  ‘There is a touch of that,’ said Vivienne.

  After a pause, I said, ‘Does he know about me?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘How did he find out?’

  ‘He asked me and I told him.’

  ‘Yes. Does he mind sharing you?’

  ‘He’d far sooner not, but he says it’s better than not having me at all, and it’s up to me, he says. He leaves all that side of things up to me.’

  ‘Do you mind being shared? Have you done it before?’

  ‘I’m usually shared, actually, and once I tried three for a bit, so I suppose I can’t really mind. And I know you don’t mind, in fact you’d sooner, wouldn’t you? because it means I can’t get serious. It sort of looks as though it ought to be wrong, doesn’t it, sharing? I mean it’s just exactly the kind of thing that is. I can’t see why it isn’t, but I went over it all in my mind before I started it, and I couldn’t find anything that said I shouldn’t, as long as I stuck to the rules, telling the truth and no married men.’

  ‘Why no married men?’

  ‘Making someone else unhappy. Same with a man who’s got a girl he’d marry if he could, but his wife won’t divorce him. You don’t mind, do you? Me quite liking being shared?’

  ‘Fine with me.’

  ‘Because it’s so enjoyable. Oh, darling,’ she said, moving up against me and in other directions as well, and immediately, in fact simultaneously, breathing hard. It was easy for me to do something about that, since we were in bed together in my flat at the time. Doing something adequate about it was, as always, a matter of a good deal more than a couple of minutes. Vivienne was quick off the mark all right, but she was equally quick off a more or less indefinite successive series of marks. It was really very practical of her, quite liking being shared.

  There was a different side of things that I, and in all probability the other bloke too, left up to her: the moment when the gentleman should come into his own. That evening, as always, she picked it admirably. Very soon afterwards she said, ‘Good heavens, is that really the time?’, jumped out of bed and ran into the bathroom. I lay on my back, put my glasses on to aid thought, and decided slowly that the sullenness-cum-preoccupation must be derived from the unflattering uninterest I had formerly shown in the question of the other bloke. I would have to remember to inquire about his welfare every so often, without at the same time letting it be known what hell I thought he sounded.

  When Vivienne came out of the bathroom I went in there, returning to find her dressing. She kept her back to me, but this was standard; indeed, I had only recently, and after constant pressure, been able to stop her going into the bathroom to dress. Her underclothes had their familiar look of being both new and old, as if she had that afternoon come across a hermetically sealed unused set from her mother’s trousseau behind a secret panel. On top of them went a variegated shiny silk shirt in lilac, flame, mustard and navy blue, a thick, rather long skirt with a black hound’s tooth pattern on pinkish beige, pale green stockings and brown shoes. A chain belt, amber beads, a charm bracelet constructed for maximum noise-level, and earrings featuring little gold birdcages with painted parrots inside – these were added as I put my clothes on. Apart from intrinsic qualities, the ensemble abolished the substantial breasts, narrow waist and curving hips beneath it. She had brought her abundant and (literally) coal-black hair into disservice by piling it u
p into a roughly rectangular wedge across the top of her head, and now smeared mauve grease-paint over the firm outlines of her lips. But even she had not been able to muddy the brown of her eyes, pock her skin, skew her nose, unwhiten or snaggle her teeth. These failures were what had led me to her that first morning in the airline office, together with what the olive uniform she wore there had not concealed. (She had told me once, without making any evident deduction from it, that it was funny how men only tried to pick her up in the office.)

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ I asked.

  She looked at her watch, which had a spaceman’s head depicted in pop-art style on its considerable face. ‘We mustn’t be too long, Doug. I don’t want to be late back. Could I have a small bianco and soda?’

  I prepared a couple of these, and we were drinking them in the sitting-room when the telephone rang. After the idiot periodic tweet, signalling a call from a public box, I heard Roy’s voice.

  ‘May I speak to Mr Yandell, please?’ (He had not yet learnt to bring his telephone manners up to date by baldly naming the person he wanted.)

  ‘Yes, Roy, speaking.’

  ‘Duggers. Marvellous. How are you? Look, old lad, I’m clutching at straws. Have you got anybody with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, sporting spirit. Oh, that’s it, then.’ He sounded in some distress. ‘Oh well, never—’

  ‘We’re going out soon to have dinner.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, I see. Well, look, I’ve got somebody with me too. We’ve been sort of let down. I wonder if I could possibly—’

  ‘Where are you now?’

  High-pitched female giggling came from the other end, then some muffled words from Roy, remonstrative in tone. Soon he said, ‘What? Just round the corner from you. Carlton Hill.’

  ‘Come along straight away. I’ll let you in and we’ll disappear.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  I convinced him I was, rang off, and did some explaining to Vivienne. Without surprise or delay, as expected, she took in the situation and agreed that, should it prove necessary, I could later share her bed, which she insisted on occupying on Sunday nights anyway, so as to begin her working week on her own ground, as she put it – and incidentally, as I had discovered, at six a.m. Then I told her which Roy it was who was coming.