Roy swept his hand across his front as if cutting off a final chord. ‘Could I change my mind?’
‘By all means.’
‘I’d like a whole lobster, please, cold, and stuffed with, uh, a portion of caviare. And a green salad, as I said.’
‘All I’m thinking of is the time. It wouldn’t be lined up like uh, for instance, the steak and kidney pie.’
‘They’ll be lined up separately, the lobster and the caviare, and there’s no need for the chaps in the kitchen to do the actual stuffing. Get the doings brought to me and I’ll stuff it myself.’
Harold gave up at that point. He took Roy’s request for a preludial double champagne cocktail without overt demur, and made only a token stand by recommending the carafe Chablis. Roy said he found cheap white wines gave him acidity, and chose something with a long name from the wine list. All this Harold received with continuing absence of both good and bad grace, in fact with his habitual lack of reaction to events, reinforced, I fancied, with an unpropitious confidence in whatever weapon he had devised against Roy. The food and drink arrived with a speed that told either of unusual efficiency or of a long history of browbeating on Harold’s part. While Roy was ladling out his caviare, Harold gave him a look that answered for me the slightly difficult question why the parties were facing each other here rather than somewhere private. If Roy proved to be restrained by his surroundings from acting up, losing his temper, perhaps physically assaulting his much weaker adversary, well and good; if not, there were very few places where any such misbehaviour would damage Roy more severely than in the crowded dining-room of the Retrenchment Club. Against my inclination, my respect for Harold rose: he knew how false were Roy’s claims to despise the kind of society represented by what lay around us. He poured wine; then, with his eyes still on Roy, he took from his breast pocket a folded sheaf of typescript he did not at once open.
‘Let’s come to the point. You’re an unsuitable companion for my daughter and would be a more than unsuitable husband to her. I propose to end the one relationship and prevent the other. For reasons I won’t go into, my daughter’s beyond my control. As recently perhaps as ten years ago, before the final disintegration of family ties and the whole network of duties and obedience and so on that went with them, I could have stopped this nonsense by stopping her. But now, wherever I sent her she’d break out and go back to you. Thanks to what you and your kind have done. The only place she’d be safe, that’s to say comparatively safe, though God knows what with all the nitwitted boohooing about society being to blame and we mustn’t brutalize the poor dears they seem to be able to walk out whenever they . . .’
Harold pulled himself up. ‘I did seriously consider prison for her. Possession of marijuana. Nothing to it. But even if she didn’t get away with a ten-bob fine and being told not to do it again for a week or two, if it wouldn’t inconvenience her too much . . . Anyway, she’d have involved you. Medium-sized scandal. That would have injured you, which was a bloody good idea, but then the whole thing would have been out in the open and I’d have lost any hold on either of you. Therefore—’
‘I don’t get all this about my unsuitability,’ said Roy with his mouth full. ‘I can support her a bloody sight better than any of the little – any of the youngsters she was running round with when I met her. The age business doesn’t matter. You’re letting your dislike of my politics interfere with Sylvia’s happiness, and that’s—’
‘I detest your politics, or rather the half-baked mess you call your politics. In the swim and bugger the facts. Sell the country to the Russians. That’s nothing to do with it. You’re the exact opposite of what my daughter needs. Firmness, common-sense, stability, self-discipline, patience. You’re—’
‘Save it. What’s this point you said you were coming to?’
‘I have here a draft of a feature article about you which I shall publish in my newspaper if I ever hear of your having any dealings with my daughter after the lapse of forty-eight hours from this moment. Let me give you some idea of the contents.’ Harold unfolded the typescript. ‘The Generation Gap.’
‘Oh, Christ on a bloody great bicycle,’ said Roy, forking in lobster.
‘Leading figures of today as seen by their sons.’
Roy stopped chewing.
‘I Love Me is Father’s Slogan, says Chris Vandervane, 20, son of, well, we know all about that. Brief run-through of your musical attainments and the political stuff. Deadpan. Nothing snide. No need for it in view of what comes later. We do rather stress your involvement with the cause of youth, understanding of it, sympathy with it. But so would you. Before we go on, the lawyers have been over it. They’re a little unhappy with I think it’s three phrases, but this is only a first draft. You can take it from me that the final version will be writ-proof. Well, then we go on to your house, and its present occupants, Penny Vandervane, 23, who shares a room with West Indian writer Godfrey Alexander, 24 . . .’
‘Gilbert,’ said Roy. ‘Can I have a brandy?’
Harold made a correction on the typescript. ‘Thank you. A brandy. Yes. Yes, certainly. Later, in the coffee-room. Don’t you want cheese or a pudding?’
‘No thanks. Just a brandy.’
At the door, Roy and I waited while Harold thoroughly counted his change at the pay-desk.
‘It’s a try-on, Duggers. He wouldn’t have the nerve.’
‘I hope you’re right. I think he would have the nerve if it came to it.’
‘Lot of bloody nonsense.’
‘Which we’ve got to pay very close attention to.’
‘Little shit.’
The coffee-room was not crowded, but there were quite enough people about to deter Roy from any kind of outburst: not that he seemed so inclined in the least. We found another corner, with, this time, the life-sized statue of a long-defunct prime minister towering over us. It was done in a kind of stone that made its subject seem not so much a man as a man coated from head to foot in whitewash. Coffee arrived, also a large glass holding perhaps a tablespoonful of brandy. Roy simply drained it.
‘Now,’ said Harold, lighting a knobbly cheroot and reopening the typescript. ‘In a way, it’s not surprising my father goes for youth, because that’s what he’s like himself. Not grown up. He’s like a kid of ten or even less. I don’t know what he’s like with his music, I don’t know anything about that and I don’t want to know, but in everything else all he ever thinks about is getting his own way. He’s like little Ashley, that’s my half-brother, he’s six and absolutely diabolical. If you don’t give him what he wants straight away he screams the place down, because nobody’s tried to bring him up. Nothing in it for my father, you see. He just gives him expensive toys all the time to keep him quiet.
‘Interviewer: How does all this affect the other members of the household?
‘My sister thinks the same way as I do. He’s always let us do exactly as we like, and we liked that until we realized it was all just less trouble for him. We don’t get on much with our stepmother, but you can’t really blame her. She’s half out of her – no, that bit’s cut. He, my father hangs around young people to make himself feel young and feel he’s up with the trends. He tries to talk like them and it’s pathetic. He thinks they think he’s one of them, but they’re just waiting for him to go. He thinks they like having him around because he’s famous, but they don’t take any notice of that. And all these politics, it’s just showing off. How can you care about peasants in Vietnam when you give parties with champagne and a couple of blokes in white coats going round pouring it? I don’t see that makes you any better than the rich people in Spain and Greece and these places. I asked him about that once and he said it was different, it was the society we lived in and he had a position to keep up. It’s always different when he does it. I think rich people ought to mind their own business and leave it to students and workers to get on with changing society and the rest of it.
‘Interviewer: You’re almost saying you’d have foun
d a stern Victorian parent more to your taste.
‘No, I’m not saying that. I’m not in favour of that either. Those sort of people did a lot of harm by building up capitalism and the power structure. But they were doing it for the Empire and the ruling class and their religion, not just for themselves. Not all of it.
‘Well, that’s the core of the thing. Not very coherent or well expressed, but I think that gives it a certain—’
‘You can’t print that, Harold,’ I said. ‘Your lawyers must be—’
‘Nobody asked for your view.’
‘How much are you paying him to put his name to that?’ asked Roy.
‘Oh, we haven’t discussed a fee yet. Welcomed the chance of getting it off his chest was how he put it.’
‘I’ll take that along,’ said Roy, putting out his hand. He noticed it was shaking and lowered it to the table.
Harold gave him the typescript. ‘Yes, you’ll want to think it over. I’ve plenty of copies at the office. Time’s getting on. One warning. I was never more serious in my life. Good afternoon to you.’
‘It’s malicious,’ I said to Roy outside.
‘Yes, that struck me, too.’
‘I mean in the legal sense. It is a try-on. He can’t hit you with that.’
‘He already has.’
I refrained from telling him he would get over it. Whether he would get over the actual publication of the article was perhaps another matter. Whether Harold would publish it as threatened was yet another. In one important sense he was free to do so: the proprietor of the paper, an elderly and ailing peer, had been living in Malta for five years and for the last two or more of these, according to Coates, had confined his daily reading to The Times. Harold was one of the very few men I had ever met with the outlook and temperament to face without hesitation the row, the publicity, the dismissal and the loss of prospects that surely must, or probably would, or easily might follow the performance of what he promised. In fact, the only other man of such a calibre I could think of for the moment was Roy.
Turning up towards the square, Roy glanced to his left, had a proper look and gave a harsh yell like a man in a film taking a spear through the chest. I saw Harold’s slight figure, neatly clad in its fawn tweed suit, begin to cross the road in our direction. We hurried on.
‘Why’s that little shit following us?’
‘I’m sure he’s not,’ I said. ‘He’s probably parked somewhere up here.’
‘If I go ahead there’ll be no point in him publishing it.’
‘Yes there will. Revenge.’
‘A moment ago you said it was a try-on.’
‘I’ve had a bit of time to think. Newspapers don’t mind libel actions unless they’re going to be the people who lose face. This one would be quite a circulation-builder. And imagine the sort of stuff that would be dragged up in court. Assuming you won, you’d be twenty thousand quid or so in pocket, which you don’t need anyway, and worse off in every other respect than if you’d just let it go by. As Harold knows very well. He might be positively hoping you would sue.’
‘That boy saying all that. Oh, Christ. Old lad, could you come up to Craggs’s for some more brandy? Or sit with me while I drink it?’
‘Of course.’
A policeman was standing on the pavement by Roy’s car. I soon saw that it was the same policeman as earlier. He was about my age, with springy tufts of whisker on each cheek. I also saw, or fancied I saw, that the car sat unnaturally close to the ground.
‘I’m afraid you’ve had a bit of trouble in your absence, Sir Roy. Somebody’s been ripping your tyres. With a knife, it looks like.’
He indicated an inch-long slit in the rubber. Over his bowed back Harold came into view, moving on a course that would bring him within fifty feet of where we stood. Roy leaned forward, bent his knees slightly and came up on his toes in the attitude of a man about to spring at another.
‘Little bastards!’ he roared. ‘Scum of the bloody earth! What a lark, eh? What a romp! Ear we are, Sid, ear’s a fuyyin grake car blongin to some fuyyin toff – gish your fuyyin knife an ow fuyyin show im! Gawf! Beezh! Hoogh! Oh, how unimprovably witty and trenchant!’
A youthful couple in a peripatetic semi-embrace, the lad wearing one of his auntie’s floppy black velours hats with one of her floral silk scarves looped round the crown, the girl in a sort of lead-foil top and patchwork trousers, had come to a halt within earshot. Harold approached the car next but one to Roy’s and took out his keys. The policeman nodded sympathetically.
‘Most annoying, Sir Roy. But these window stickers of yours, they would constitute what they call a provocation, don’t you think? Not that that’s any excuse, of course.’
Roy now noticed and glared at Harold, who was having some difficulty with the lock of his car door, wheeled round on the youngsters with a snarl and a yard-long sweep of the arm that (to my relief) got them moving again, and turned back to the policeman.
‘And where were you while this little outbreak of high spirits was going on? Checking on meters and illegal parking, no doubt.’
‘These days that kind of thing falls within the province of traffic wardens, Sir Roy. I was on my normal rounds, which brought me here only about a minute before you arrived on the scene. It’s unfortunate that I came along too late to do anything about this deplorable act of vandalism.’
As he said this, he caught my eye for the first and only time. His demeanour throughout, and his expression now, were not quite incompatible with full understanding of the negative demonstration, nor with a desire to tease Roy by suggesting that the law had looked impassively on while a well-known foe of authority was having his tyres slashed. In a slightly more wooden tone than before, the policeman added,
‘Mind you, this is a rather special area. London Library, Junior Carlton Club. You can never be quite certain of the sort of people you’re going to get.’
Harold’s car started. At no stage had he paid the least visible attention to our group. Roy looked up and his frame seemed to sag; I knew what he was remembering. Then he said to the policeman,
‘Do you want anything? Like a statement in triplicate or a look at my medical history or . . .’
‘No, sir. I was only wondering if I could be of some—’
‘Well, you can’t. Not of any.’
The policeman touched his helmet respectfully, and went.
‘What do we do now?’ I asked.
‘Christ. What do we do. Well, we go back up to Craggs’s and get the porter to sort out this bloody shambles. Then we have some brandy, as advertised. Or I do. Though you’re very welcome if you feel like it. Actually, if you look at it in the right way, this business with the tyres is very encouraging. I said it would make chaps angry, didn’t I? It just shows that even in the most ruling-class areas there’s a real spirit of . . . Taxi!’
Seven: Copes’s Fork
‘How old is he, for instance?’ I asked Vivienne that evening.
‘You know, it’s funny, but he’ll never say. Never has. But I suppose he must be sixtyish, something like that.’
‘And he lives alone.’
‘Ever since my mother died, that’s nine years ago now. But my brothers and I, we all go and see him every week. Separately, to spread it out for him. He has lunch at the pub and a woman comes in every week-morning and cooks things for him to warm up at night. She cleans the place as well.’
‘What does he so to speak do all the time?’
‘Well, this job he has with the religious people takes up the mornings and the odd afternoon. Then he likes music. At least he likes Gilbert and Sullivan and Viennese waltzes and the man who wrote The Merry Widow and things. Though I suppose that isn’t music according to you.’
‘Of course it is. A lot of it’s very good.’
‘On its level. Isn’t that what you say?’
I found this an uncharacteristic remark. ‘All right, if you like. But why shouldn’t it be music at all according to me?’
‘Just the way almost everything everybody else thinks is music you don’t think is.’
Except in the bedroom of my flat an hour and more earlier, Vivienne had been allowing rather more sullenness-cum-preoccupation to show than was normal for a Monday. I sensed, however, that she had been genuinely trying to reduce its intensity, instead of having it there and letting me take it or leave it. This was new. But the bus we were on, the third in a fearful series, stopped at the stop we wanted before I could take up the point, and I forgot it altogether at the familiar (but always enlivening) sight of her vigorous march along the pavement and the unfamiliar sight of the attractive tobacco-silk trouser-suit she was wearing.
‘It’s only a couple of minutes’ walk from here.’
‘What a nice suit that is, Viv. New, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, I got it today. Do you realize that’s the very first time you’ve ever said you liked any of my clothes?’
‘Sorry. I just . . .’
‘That’s all right.’ She took my arm. ‘I always feel a bit, you know, hoping everything’s going to go off smoothly the first time I bring somebody along. It always does, but you always think it might not.’
Here it would have been natural for me to ask her reason for bringing me along, but, as on all the previous occasions when the problem had come up in my mind, I could think of no way of putting the question that would not seem to carry a why-the-hell initial flavour and a for-God’s-sake aftertaste. So I just said, ‘Have you ever brought the other bloke along?’
‘Who?’
‘The other bloke. You know.’
‘Oh, not for a long time.’
‘A long time before you decided to bring me along, in fact.’
‘Yes. He was more – he was keener on the idea than I thought you’d be.’
‘I think I see.’
We were walking past a terrace of small houses with thickly hedged front gardens and stained-glass panels in the front doors. Vivienne led me up to one of them and rang the bell.
‘I take it he knows we sleep together?’ I suddenly asked.