Girl, 20 Page 7

  ‘You mean Sir Roy Vandervane. Doesn’t he go on television?’

  ‘Frequently. And conducts orchestras. He’s an old music friend of mine. You won’t tell anyone, will you, Viv?’

  ‘Of course not. Isn’t he married, though?’

  ‘Yes. It’s all a—’

  ‘What about his wife? Doesn’t she mind or anything?’

  ‘I suppose so. It’s hard to be sure. She must. Or she would. She probably doesn’t know. Almost certainly.’

  ‘People always know.’

  She stared at me accusingly, and I could find nothing to say, but at that moment my doorbell rang and I hurried downstairs. Of the two waiting figures I got a brief look at through the glass panel, one, which I took to be Roy, was so much larger than the other that I wondered for a moment whether, Kitty’s forecasts having fallen short, he might not have reached the child-abduction stage already. When they stepped into the hall, I saw that matters had not yet reached that pass, but, in the spirit of a bibliophile taking his time about polishing his glasses before starting to peruse some rare tome, deferred a comprehensive survey until we were all four gathered in the sitting-room.

  ‘This is Sylvia,’ said Roy, leaving us in no doubt that he would much rather have introduced her as Miss X.

  Not to be outdone in pointless mystification, I introduced Vivenne as Vivenne. The matter of the pants recurred to me as something more to the point than any number of suppressed surnames, and I felt very much like letting Roy know that, if he ever happened to take up espionage, he would in no time at all find himself asking a policeman the way to the bacterial-missile launching site. But he would have considered that fanciful, and it might have interfered with my scrutiny of Sylvia, so I kept my mouth shut while Vivienne, curiosity and disapproval bursting out of her eyes, exchanged amiabilities with him.

  Was this Roy’s great love of a few weeks back, or just something he had picked up at a party an hour before? The latter, I fervently hoped, studying face (pale, round, thin-lipped), hair (waist-length, lank), clothes (jeans, midget-fisherman’s jersey, long sleeveless leather jacket), figure (none perceptible: Vivienne’s get-up was shamelessly provocative by comparison). She exuded a curious smell, not unlike that of damp hay. I watched her looking round at the rows of books, the hi-fi, the piano, the record-racks, the typewriter, as if these objects were not only mildly strange but also virtually indistinguishable from one another. Every few seconds she scooped aside the two long hanks of hair that fell from a centre parting across most of her face, which they as regularly repossessed; troublesome for her, no doubt, but infinitely preferable to the gross humiliation of haircut or ribbon. Through it all, she put me in mind of somebody, or perhaps she had just had her picture in the papers, like most people under twenty-five.

  ‘What a terribly nice fluht,’ she said, using the then fashionable throaty vowel. Her voice was thin and clear, with the sort of accent that Roy tried to suppress in his own speech. ‘Do you live here all on your own?’

  ‘Most of the time I do.’

  ‘You seem to have an awful lot of books and records and things like thuht.’

  ‘I’ve sort of got to. It’s to do with my job.’

  ‘Roy was telling me,’ she said. Then, just as I was beginning to settle down to nothing worse than a couple of minutes of boredom, she gave a loud snigger and looked not so much at me as at my face, as one in search of imperfections there; I immediately thought of the way Penny had reacted to the lump on my forehead, though it was not she of whom Sylvia had reminded me a moment before.

  Roy broke in abruptly. ‘I’m really moce grateful to you two for doing this for us.’

  ‘Not at all. Right, Viv, let’s be on our way.’

  ‘Oh, don’t rush off.’ Roy sent me a private scowl of emphasis. ‘You can spare ten minutes. Stay and have a quick drink with us.’

  ‘What can I get you?’ I asked Sylvia.

  The girl had perhaps been doing her best to hold her mirth in check, but this last hilarity proved too much for her. She hunched her narrow shoulders and made a tearing, sneeze-like sound at the back of her nose. Repeating my question in shaking tones, she rotated slowly and unsteadily, her eyes coming to each of us in turn, but not in any very directed way. Tears or sweat lay on her pale cheeks.

  ‘She’ll have something soft,’ said Roy, who seemed a little embarrassed. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a Coke or a Pepsi? Never mind, tonic, bitter lemon, dry ginger, anything.’

  ‘Nothing for me, Douglas.’ Vivienne clearly thought that her censorious looks at Sylvia looked like nothing more than looks.

  ‘She’ll have something soft,’ quavered Sylvia. ‘She’ll have something soft.’

  ‘I’ll have a whisky if I may, Duggers. Let me give you a hand.’

  ‘Is she always like that?’ I asked Roy in the kitchen.

  ‘No, only sometimes. Not often, really. You know, when she’s high.’

  ‘High? Do you mean on filthy hash? Pot?’

  ‘My dear ole lad, I do wish you wouldn’t always come up with the middle-class reaction. So predictable.’

  ‘Well, she’s not going to smoke it here. And what class are you?’

  ‘Sorry. All right, I’ll see she doesn’t.’

  With a show of irrevocable decision, he drank off about half the Scotch I had given him. Even in the days when his hair had been shorter and he would speak up occasionally against rock ’n’ roll, Russia and the like, he had never diffused much confidence in any of his non-musical promises or decisions. It could do no good now to remind him that I would be breaking the law in my absence if he later failed to prevent his fearful little companion from lighting up a joint. I parenthetically wondered for a moment about the current state of his musical reliability.

  ‘Is this the one, by the way?’ I asked, pouring out a bottle of tonic water and wanting to top it up with dishwashing fluid.

  ‘The one?’

  ‘Roy. The one you said you were in love with up at your place.’

  ‘Oh yes. Yes, this is the one. Of course, that was the day I decided to give her up, wasn’t it? I remember now. Didn’t last, as you see.’

  ‘What changed your mind?’

  ‘That I can’t remember. Oh yes, Kitty put me in the wrong about something. Yes, it’s all coming back to me now. I turned up sober for a dinner-party she was giving and she took it very well. Kitty did. Considering how pissed I’d been when one of the same chaps and his wife had come along the time before. Hungarian chap who settled here after the civil war there. Very reactionary. As a matter of fact I was very nice to them both, both times, as I recall. Couldn’t have been sweeter.’

  ‘What about the pants?’

  ‘Oh, Puck-like theme! Have you been talking to Kitty again?’

  ‘She rang me up the morning after that day and I told her I hadn’t found out anything, which was true. Not a word since then.’

  ‘I prefer to keep my underwear to myself, if you don’t mind. No, actually I’ve been watching that. Laid in a whole stock of them, pants I mean, and vests and handkerchiefs as well. It would take a genius to keep track. Hang on for another few minutes if you can bear it, Duggers, to help me cool her down. Nice girl, that one of yours. What is she, twenty-eight? Do you mind if I top this up before we go back in?’

  Back in, we found Vivienne not only still alive, but listening with apparently close attention to something being explained to her by Sylvia, who sat on the couch scooping her hair off her face with the regularity of a bodily exercise.

  ‘We’re not like that. We’re different.’ Without looking anywhere near me, she put her hand up and out in my direction, fingers and thumb spread, so that I was able to fit her glass of tonic into it with the minimum of trouble and delay. ‘Uhbsolutely different. We reject money and making your way in the world and setting yourself up in life and rules. All the things they want us to use up our energies on so they can stay in power.’

  ‘The structure,’ said Roy encour
agingly, and with an air of relief, sitting down next to her on the couch.

  ‘Do you reject the fire-brigade when your house is on fire?’ asked Vivienne.

  Roy smiled indulgently and shook his head, so that his back hair waggled to and fro. ‘That’s not the same thing. Of course you use all this stuff. You use houses and telephones and shops and television sets and schools and so on. That’s quite different from being dominated by them.’

  ‘Who does the fire-brigade dominate?’

  Boredom again seemed entrenched, so firmly that I felt I could well do with another bout of sniggers from Sylvia, now quite impassive apart from blinking hard and biting at her thin lower lip. Roy told Vivienne that she had chosen a bad example, and that he was talking about what lay behind the fire-brigade. Vivienne asked who the we was that rejected money and the fire-brigade, and, on learning from him that it was broadly speaking youth, said she considered herself still part of broadly speaking that, or had done until quite recently. At this, Sylvia sniggered in a way that showed how wrong I had been a moment before, and whispered into Roy’s ear, putting one arm round his shoulders and the other hand on his knee.

  ‘No no,’ said Roy. ‘No.’

  Vivienne pursued her point. ‘And you won’t catch me doing any rejecting.’

  ‘Why not,’ said Sylvia, giggling hard, ‘why not make a start with that blouse? If that’s what you call it.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Why do you wear such awful clothes? And so many of them. Doesn’t he tell you? And those earrings. Are those birds in them?’

  ‘That’s enough, Sylvia,’ said Roy without emphasis.

  ‘Really, the things some people think they can say.’ There was only a little indignation in Vivienne’s tone and her cheek remained its usual light pink, unexpectedly in a girl who blushed almost as readily as she breathed.

  Roy turned expository. ‘I suppose the real division comes between those who want to have and those who want to be. What the have ones want to have can be a lot of different things, not all of them bad in themselves. Some are, of course, like power in all its forms, which is what politicians obviously exiss for, and I don’t just mean fascist dictators, I mean anybody who wages politics. Then there are, well, businessmen and priests and administrators and all that lot, but I’m talking about personal power too, by one person over another person, like in most marriages and so on. Or it can be possessions, cars and washing-machines and furniture and collections of china and things. The people who want to be can be a lot of different things too, like artists and mystics and philosophers and revolutionaries, some sorts anyway, and just people who live and feel and see. You’ve got to make up your mind whether you’re a have person or a be person.’

  Outside the concert hall, I had never admired Roy more than during the couple of minutes it took him to get through to the end of this speech. As early as ‘real division’ Sylvia had started stroking the back of his neck; by ‘politicians’ she was stroking his thigh fairly near the knee and nuzzling his ear; at ‘personal power’ she fell to stroking one cheek and kissing the other. Up to this point Roy had pretended, carrying what conviction he could, that she was not there, but then he had changed his policy to one of non-violent resistance, crossing his legs and canting his head over as near as possible to his farther shoulder. When ‘collections of china’ saw her moving round towards his front, trying to undo a shirt button and pushing her hand between his thighs, he caught her by the wrists, and immediately after ‘philosophers’ had cast her at his feet, trying energetically to uncross his legs, he crossed them tighter and bent forward until belly met upper thigh, intensifying his grasp on her wrists. So matters stood for the moment.

  ‘We really must be going,’ I said.

  There was a testing interval while Vivienne looked for and found her cigarettes and lighter and put them in her handbag, but the two of us had gained the door only an instant after hearing, from the direction of the couch, a double thud which told that the heels of the shoes on the feet at the end of Roy’s finally uncrossed legs had struck the floor. I called to him over my shoulder that I would telephone in the morning.

  ‘What was she going to do?’ asked Vivienne during dinner at Biagi’s.

  I allowed time for the waiter to finish pouring out Valpolicella and go away before indicating what I had seen as the choice before Sylvia and saying which alternative I thought the more likely.

  Vivienne blushed. ‘Not with you and me there. She wouldn’t have done that with us there.’

  ‘Oh, I think especially with us there. That was the whole point. Or most of it. Demonstrating her liberation from such-and-such and her contempt for this, that and the other.’

  ‘For what? Why?’

  ‘Oh, God. To go against what she thinks we think is decent. To show she’s a be person. It’s not worth finding out. That girl’s a puzzle you’d have to be out of your mind with curiosity even to consider finding the answer to. Viv, why weren’t you cross when she . . . had a go at you?’

  ‘Well, I was a bit, of course, but I know what you mean. I could see she was annoyed at your nice place and us getting on all right together. And it being all right for us to get on. Was she stoned? you know.’

  ‘I think she must have been.’

  ‘Well, you can’t really be cross with someone in that state, can you? They’re not themselves. At least, they’re . . .’

  ‘Yeah.’

  After efficiently throwing down some more of her escaloppe di vitello alla Biagis for a minute or two, Vivienne said, ‘Doug, is this blouse awful? And the earrings? You’ve got to say.’

  ‘You dress in your own style. What you’ve chosen yourself. That’s just the sort of thing she’d resent. Somebody who won’t conform.’

  ‘Conform? She doesn’t exactly dress like they tell you.’

  ‘No, well I don’t mean what the magazines say. Her own crowd. All rejecting everything. Including very much King’s Road or wherever the hell it is now.’

  ‘But you do like the blouse? And the earrings?’

  ‘You know I do.’

  ‘She could talk, the way she’d flung on any old dirty thing she’d happened to pick up. All tatty.’

  ‘She was awful.’

  ‘I just hope your flat’s all right,’ said Vivienne.

  So did I, especially when I telephoned Roy there the next morning as promised and found him vague, uncommunicative. Sylvia had left; he would wait until I returned; we might have a chat if I could spare the time. I said I could, even though I had used up a good deal of it already that day, notably between five thirty, when Vivienne had woken me, and six o’clock, when, right on schedule, she had got out of bed. More time had elapsed while she bustled about putting clothes into and taking other clothes out of cupboards and drawers, and more yet while she vacuum-cleaned the flat in its entirety, paying special attention, I thought, to the area immediately round the bed in which I still lay, but out of which she turned me soon after seven so that she could pack up the sheets for the laundry. A lot of bacon and eggs and coffee, prepared by me according to custom, acted as a temporary reviver; indeed, she looked so appealing in her office uniform that I would have been tempted to get her to take it off again, if time had not gone into short supply at that stage. We left and parted to our respective buses, having confirmed our usual arrangement to get in touch on Wednesday; Monday evening was the one on which she went to see her father in Highgate, and Tuesday was the property of the other bloke. There was a tinge of sullenness-cum-preoccupation in her farewell, rather less than normal for this point in the week. I dismissed it from my mind without trouble.

  Smells of a strange breakfast hung about the Maida Vale building, or at least its ground floor, where there lived a Pakistani (employed, so he said, in some radio service of the BBC) and his fat Welsh wife. I climbed the stairs and confronted Roy, who appeared unshaven, though patches of dried blood on his cheeks and chin testified to some sort of struggle with my razor.<
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  ‘You look a bit shagged,’ he said.

  ‘So would you if you’d been awake as long as I have. And so you do, anyway.’

  ‘I bet I do. A heavy night, one way and another.’

  ‘I can well imagine.’

  ‘I doubt it, old lad.’

  My eye fell on a patch of bare floor in front of the sitting-room couch. ‘What’s happened to my rug?’

  ‘I’m sorry about that, Duggers. It had an accident.’

  ‘Which destroyed every fibre of it.’

  ‘No, I got Sylvia to take it away with her. That was no mean achievement on my part, I can assure you.’

  ‘I’m convinced. What happened to it?’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been any use to you after, uh, what happened to it. I’ll find you another one and have it sent up to you today.’

  Roy’s practice in matters of this sort was such that I knew a rug would indeed arrive and that it would be better than the one I had had, without being absurdly better. The rest of the sitting-room appeared unchanged. I wondered what the other rooms were like, especially the bedroom.

  ‘There’s nothing else much,’ said Roy, who had followed my glance. ‘A couple of plates and a cup. Also I gave your Scotch a bit of a pasting. I’ll see to all that as well, of course.’

  ‘No, the Scotch is on me.’

  ‘Thank you, that’s very nice of you. Look, I’m sorry about, uh, the way she went on last night. She’s not as bad as that as a rule.’

  ‘Oh, good. Never mind, it was a laugh of a sort. I’m going to shave now, if you’ve left me any blades. You put some more coffee on.’

  The bedroom was in no worse a state than usual, the bed even rather carefully made: a waste of Roy’s labour, because this bed was another bed that was going to have its sheets changed, not on his account. I deferred the operation, out of returning fatigue and the thought that to catch me in the act might dash him slightly.