Tiss off,' I said to the other three. They hesitated and backed away. As an afterthought, I shouted out: 'My brother's too posh to mix with the likes of you.' They might beat him up on Monday.
'Hello, Valentine,' I said, 'had a good day? Enjoy your game of football?' He stood his ground, chewing lemon chewing-gum, hand on tailored hip. 'Why'd you pick on him? What did he do?'
'I didn't hit him a lot,' said my brother. The others did, mostly.'
'Did he do anything? Why were they hitting him?' Hatred was dissipating me.
'Everyone does.'
I stared at him. I could think of nothing to say, so I caught hold of his shoulder and boxed him on the side of the head. But without much conviction.
Rachel and I lay still on my bed. It was nearly dinner-time. (The pre-twenties aren't required to socialize; apart from meals they can come and go as they please.) My room, one of the three long, low attic rooms, was okay, allowing for the fact that I hadn't had a chance to do anything to it. Faddy ephemera covered its walls: posters of Jimi Hendrix, Auden and Isherwood, Rasputin, reproductions of works by Lautrec and Cézanne. The bookcase retold my adolescence: Carry On, Jeeves, Black Mischief, The Heart of the Matter, Afternoon Men, Women in Love, Gormenghast, Cat's Cradle, L'Etranger. A chess set, a drawing by my little sister, postcards on the mantelpiece. It was straightforward enough - nothing much you could do to it. However, the one vital adjustment had been made before we arrived. That morning, before school, before I had run out to pay my graft to the legless buskers: a panicky telephone call. I got Sebastian, and bribed him with the promise of ten cigarettes to fucking go up and change the light. There had been a pink-tinted bulb in the bedside lamp, so that any village girls I lured up there would know at once how sexy I was. Seb, as instructed, had put in a normal one. A bit outré for an urbanite like Rachel.
Most of the guests were there by the time I got back with Valentine. I joined Rachel and the au pair in the kitchen, gave beefy assistance gathering chairs and shifting the dining-room table. I led Rachel to her room on the first floor, then to mine on the second. Some low-pressure necking took place, soon modulated by me to include drowsy conversation. We talked as it got dark. We talked about our fathers, pretty well agreeing that women had it harder than men :
'Women have to cope with babies and periods and things, they carry the real responsibility.' I sighed. 'If a girl sleeps around she's a slag, if a boy sleeps around he's quite a guy. Society and Nature seem to be loaded against —'
'Do you think so? I don't think I do,' mumbled Rachel to my armpit. 'You'll probably say this is rather ... pissy, but babies are the only things women can have that men can't. And they should be proud of that. It evens things out, too.'
I considered attacking this view as doctrinaire, brainwashed, sexist, etc., but I said, 'I don't think that's at all pissy. How do you mean, it evens things out?'
'Well, let's face it, women usually look pretty terrible by the time they're thirty-five. Scaly faces. Figures go, hair gets matty and dry. Men often get better. At least their faces don't get all...' she yawned and cuddled nearer, 'scaly, like women's. So it's good that they can have families. Like your mother.'
Rachel was wearing a short red dress - no stockings. I placed the palm of my hand on the back of her thigh, where it became her bum, where the rim of her silky panties was.
'Maybe,' I said, moving my crotch back to make way for the erection. To give them something to do, you mean. But my mother's really in the shit. What'll she have when Valentine's grown up?'
'Mm. Suppose so.'
'Anyway, I'm glad you could come.'
She grunted. 'Mm,' she said.
I excused myself and slipped downstairs for a hawk and a pee. For some reason, I felt neurotically high-cheek-boned as I closed the door.
My father was in the passage to the bathroom. He was wearing a fashionable black polo-neck jersey (fashionable, that is, among the weasly middle-aged) whose sleeves he was rolling down. He not only looked quite good, he looked quite nice.
'Ah, Charles,' he said, in the voice he used for ballockings. 'Now I hear from your mother that you hit Valentine earlier on. On the head. Is that correct? Well you mustn't. It's extremely dangerous. Not on the head. Is that clear? All right, ticking-off over. See you at dinner.' He smiled and began to move past me.
'I wouldn't have hit him anywhere, but he and his friends were beating up another boy.'
He fiddled with his sleeves, in order not to meet my eye. 'I dare say they were, but your mother and myself—'
'Fine. Next time I catch him at it I'll just break his arm. And what do you mean, "your mother and myself" ? When was the last —'
'Oh, for Christ's sake.' He allowed a few seconds to pass. He looked puzzled, amused, like the time at Norman's. 'Charles, are you seriously going to claim that you didn't behave badly when you were his age?' He took a chain-mail watch from his trouser pocket. 'Perhaps, when you're older, you'll see that the - that the wrong that's committed to make a right, the second wrong, is invariably shabbier than the first.' He finished putting on his watch. 'Perhaps when you're older you'll see that.'
'Great copy,' I said. 'And that's quite meaningless coming from you. You may be old, but my mother hasn't —'
'What do you care?'
My father paused, and continued in a softer voice. 'I can see there's little point in discussing this.' He put his hands in his pockets and waggled a bunch of keys. 'We only say things we regret. Charles...'
'Nothing, sorry.' I weaved past, erasing with my hand any further reply or question. 'Don't worry, won't say a thing. Mum's the word.'
In the bathroom I peed, hawked, steadied myself by chanting 'don't get full of yourself, don't get full of yourself,' and tried not to cry.
The room was dark when I returned; Rachel was asleep. I went over to the window and watched the woods. Gradually my chest stopped heaving. There was nothing to tell Rachel anyway. I lay down beside her, chest-first to dull my lungs, and waited until someone called upstairs for dinner, which wasn't long.
I kept an eye on the old goat all through the meal, but with little to show for it. He was too busy being worldly socialite Gordon, lavish house-party-thrower Gordon, to have much time for erring husband or wily philanderer Gordon. Nevertheless, he sat between his tart and her (twin) sister, while at the other end my mother coped with Sir Herbert and the journalist, who honestly was called Willie French. Rachel and I sat opposite each other half-way down the table. She was being self-possessed enough; all the same I found I had to intercept and remould pretty well everything she said.
However, a brilliant argument was taking place between Sir Herbert and Willie, all about youth. I couldn't for the life of me make up my mind which one I disliked more. Dismissive cameos. Sir Herbert resembled nothing so much as a pools-winning dustman. Snouty open-pored face (itself topped by a sprig of sinister golden hair) clashed with his Savile Row suit and stiff collar. Shaving-cream bubbled inside the nearer of his question-mark ears. In stockinged feet. Sir Herbert stood four foot eight inches tall. To look at Willie, on the other hand, you'd place money on the fact that he had just dismounted from a motorbike on which he had spent his entire life at high speed. His ginger hair was driven back to form a curving mane from brow to nape of neck; he had inside-out lips, as if most of them took place within his mouth; speckly red eyes. For all this, he appeared to be losing the exchange, which served him right for having - in order to show how simpatico he was - a machine-gun stutter. Sir Herbert only ever let him get as far as saying 'I' or 'Wha' a few times.
Herbie now propounded the toiling paradox that the ostentatious 'unconventionality' of youth was, in point of fact, nothing other than a different sort of conventionality. After all, was not the non-conformity of yesterday the conformity of today ? Were not these young people as orthodox, in their very different way, as the orthodoxy they purported to be subverting?
How refreshingly different, how refreshingly different.
&nb
sp; Sir Herbert's liquid eyes roamed the table with such twinkling conceit that even my father fell silent and frowned interestedly. Herb then consulted me, praising my eccentrically restrained dress, my weirdo good manners, my daring cleanliness. The reply I gave was far too nasty not to be quoted in full. (It reads well because I plagiarized a key paragraph from the Speech to My Father.) By way of apology I squeezed Rachel's ankle between mine, before saying :
'I couldn't agree more. Sir Herbert, though I confess I've never looked at it from quite that angle. It occurs to me that the analogy can be taken further - moral issues, for example. The so-called new philosophy, "permissiveness" if you like, seen from the right perspective, is only a new puritanism, whereby you're accused of being repressed or unenlightened if you happen to object to infidelity, promiscuity, and so on. You're not allowed to mind anything any more, and so you end up denying your instincts again - moderate possessiveness, say, or moral scrupulousness - just as the puritans would have you deny the opposite instincts. Both codes are reductive, and therefore equally unrelated to how people feel: so fucking give me a scholarship,' or words to that effect.
Willie signalled his intention of taking issue with me here by saying 'Doe' a lot. After a couple of minutes, Herbert suggested, 'Don't?' Willie nodded.
'Don't you think that total puppappapermissiveness is preferable 2-2-2-2 total repressiveness, including cell-cell-self-repression?'
Sir Herbert, soon himself to be rendered unintelligible by food and drink, cruised back into the argument.
I gave my father a steely glance, and shrugged at Rachel. She was contemplating me with what seemed a mixture of emotions.
The next day, Saturday, was an epoch-maker, I now see.
Invoking the teenage prerogative, Rachel and I opted out after dinner, and went to bed, separately. I felt the hawks coming on, so I claimed tiredness.
It was one of those nights: my bed a roller-coaster, my brain a garbled switchboard of poems speeches essays plans, sheets of scrambled type the contact-lenses of my mind's eye, coughing a kaleidoscope of commas and dots.
'What's the matter with you ?' someone asked.
'Christ. Sebastian ? What's ... I'm falling apart here.'
'Eh?' Sebastian put the hall light on and leaned against the door. 'It's three o'clock,' he said. 'You were shouting.'
'Oh? Really? What?'
'Couldn't hear. Got my cigarettes?'
'On the table. Don't tell mother I got them.'
He disappeared again.
I read till seven, watched the dawn through the window as if it were television, bathed, shaved, and went downstairs. Cat's crap on the strip-lit kitchen floor, musty wine-shop smells from the dining-room, objects tingled to flayed senses.
Then, bath-robed, I took coffee and orange-juice into Rachel's room. She was sleeping in a foetal bundle: white cotton nightie, kneecaps for breasts, her little brown thumb planted tritely in her mouth. Quite sweet really. I parted the curtains and massaged her awake.
'What time is it?' she asked.
'Practically eight thirty.'
When she finished her coffee, Rachel stretched and smiled at me. I said something like 'Alive again,' and moved up the narrow bed towards her.
'Is that the birds singing ?' she asked at one point.
'No, it's the radiator pipes. And while we're on the subject, have you slept with DeForest?'
'Mm?'
She had.
'Only him, or others too ?'
'Only him.'
I said: 'Never mind.'
At mid-morning the adults tooled off in Sir Herbert's tank-like Daimler to have lunch with some small-shots on the other side of Oxford. They were to spend the afternoon admiring the colleges. When they left I asked Rachel if she'd like to take a bus in, go punting perhaps. Rachel said she was happy here.
The house had no real garden: fields began after a stretch of lawn at the back and on either side the grass drifted into shrubby wastelands. But there was a spinney only yards from the front door and we went for a walk in that. I'll never forget it. The wood was unspectacular; fat oaks every couple of hundred yards, a distant rank of chestnuts lining the road to the village. Otherwise it was mostly long whitened grass, frizzled bushes, and hundreds of ropey little trees, fifteen feet high. But at every turn in the path my childhood ganged up on me, and every twig and tuft seemed informative and familiar. Drugged and amazed by exhaustion, my mind fizzed with memories and anticipations (and Wordsworth) as we stumbled along in silence, like guests.
There was a place where a hazel had keeled over between two clapped-out rhododendrons, sheltered from the wind but not from the sun. We sat. I took Rachel's hand and lay back, thinking that there was a lot to be said for going without sleep, letting the rays boil up images on my closed eyelids, toying parenthetically with the idea of telling Rachel I loved her. The setting was good. Girls never minded so long as you pressed for no reply. Enjoy the moment a moment longer.
I opened my eyes and let them swim around, declining to focus them on the curled leaves and blades of grass.
'Come and look here. There's a sort of hollow in the bush where I used to come and smoke fags when I was young.'
I stood up, walked forward, and knelt to part the foliage and branches. Rachel looked over my shoulder. Inside the tent of leaves we saw: beer bottles, a tin can, trodden newspaper, grey tissues, shrivelled condoms like dead baby jellyfish.
Rachel groaned.
'Popular spot,' I said. I let go of her hand when I straightened up. She followed me as we started back to the house.
Early evening. On the sitting-room sofa, we lay snogging, as teenagers will. Very mild stuff, on the whole. Occasionally, of course, I would go all sinewy and urgent in her arms, or halt her in mid-sentence with a (probably absurd) demonic glare. I, for one, was beginning to find it a bit unreal - but what could a poor boy do ?
So. Let me describe the way DeForest looked when he came in.
There was the noise of a car. The oldsters' return? We separated, not far. The front knocker sounded and we heard someone go to answer it. A tap on the sitting-room door preceded DeForest's entry. He gave a smile of furtive recognition and came over towards the sofa, all the time staring straight at the mantelpiece, as if tolerantly giving us time to get dressed. I remember I almost let out a shriek of terrified laughter when I noticed he was wearing plus-fours.
No one spoke.
Still staring at the mantelpiece, DeForest lowered himself on to the edge of an armchair, little feet together, hands on lap. I glanced at Rachel, as if to say, Is it all right if I hide under the sofa until he goes ? Then, DeForest put his head in his hands for perhaps five seconds, took it out again, and looked up at Rachel: mischievous but ashamed, like a schoolboy caught stealing.
'What is it?' Rachel asked in a frightened voice.
'Are you okay?' I joined in. 'Can I get you anything?'
A brave child can bear anything but commiseration, and DeForest's tiny square head jerked backwards suddenly and his chest trembled, searching for air. He started to cry.
Rachel moved forwards and knelt in front of him, her breasts on his thighs, her arm round his knees, her free hand stroking his face and hair.
'DeForest, DeForest, shsh, shshsh, DeForest, shshsh,' she whispered.
Incredulously I suggested out loud to myself: 'I'll go into the kitchen.'
Ten minutes later Rachel followed me. I asked how DeForest was and Rachel said he was all right now. She said she thought she had better go back to London with him. I said I wished she wouldn't do that. She said she had to.
As a juke-box turntable moves along the row of upright records before picking one out, so I prowled my mind's filing cabinets. But all I said in the end was, staring into space:
'Oh no. I know what's going to happen. You're going to walk out of here in a minute and I'll never see you again.'
Who can say how I got through the weekend? My heart really goes out to me there.
Char
les listened to the car drive away and walked up the stairs like a senile heavyweight. 'Seven o'clock,' his watch told him. In the master bedroom he rifled through drawers, examining bottles of pills. Back in the sitting-room, he washed down a fistful of hypnotics with a quarter of lukewarm vodka. He complained to the mirror that this only made him feel worse.
Charles went upstairs to Rachel's room. It looked exactly as it had when he showed her into it twenty-five hours before. He searched methodically but without success for the note that would read: 'How I love you - R'. Next, he kicked one of the bed's iron legs, not quite as hard as he could, but hard enough to make him squawk with pain and surprise.
In his own room he took off the shoe. The big toenail of his right foot came away cleanly in his hand. Charles thought about this for a few seconds before resourcefully sticking it back on again with a piece of festive Sellotape.
He found his Rachel note-pad (not to be confused with the Rachel folder) and wrote some things in it. He sank down on the bed, but a minute later his head reappeared; on it was a vertiginous scowl. Now sitting, now lying, he got rid of most of his clothes. He swore every few moments, or gasped in breathless grief.
Let us leave him, then, as the scene fades: upright in the armchair, comatose; naked except for watchstrap, a single sock, and a scarlet cushion nestling on his thighs.
First thing the next morning I ran round the house telling lies about Rachel. Domestic tragedy, financial ruin, multiple bereavement, jumbo blaze horror, and so on, were responsible for her disappearance. I didn't worry about the lies being exposed. I needed self-respect only for the weekend, and after that no one would be insensitive enough (or concerned enough) to raise the subject again.
My chief preoccupation was how to get sufficiently drunk to ring Rachel. Due to a whim of my father's, the Sunday papers weren't allowed in the kitchen until the afternoon -probably he thought it more amusing and civilized to loll around the sitting-room with them. But the sitting-room was where all the drink was kept, and Willie French, because of professional interest, and Sir Herbert, because of his great age, would assuredly be in there till two.