In fact, there wasn't much problem. After a heist on the pantry, I spent the later part of the morning with half a bottle of (exquisite, it seemed to me) South African sherry. I made diagrammatic plans of the Telephone Conversation. They were fairly cocky diagrammatic plans. My behaviour of the night before now struck me as overdone. Even Rachel could not have been genuinely affected by DeForest's grotesque theatrics. She had acted out of fatigued loyalty.
Sure, kid, I wrote, it must have been tough for you too.
But you never knew. And I had been sure last night that I would never see her again.
I went down to the sitting-room, slunk unnoticed past the dyspeptic Sir Herbert (who was grappling with the Sunday Telegraph as if it were a giant sting-ray), and scooped a bottle of port off the drinks shelf. There was an old television set in the attic 'nursery', where Sebastian had been billeted, and I thought it might steady me if I watched some. Sebastian had gone into Oxford to see an X film ('any X film', he said) and to moon round looking for girls with his spotty mates. Valentine was playing football in the garden - refereeing, and captaining both sides if his querulous whines were anything to go by. I locked myself in all the same, forced down the alcoholic syrup, and worked desultorily on the Reunion Speech.
Sunday television is a mixed bag in the provinces. University Challenge: the contestants seemed to be alarmingly well-informed but, on the other hand, reassuringly hideous. A panel-game in which a cross-section of dotards and queer celebrities tasted wines and, with diminishing coherence, talked about them. A comedy show that recounted the attempts of three beautiful girls and one ugly one to pay the electricity bill and not sleep with their boyfriends.
A sports programme followed - not the Saturday afternoon kind, where alert-looking old men lean on desks keeping you up to date, but a canned, filmic report on a tennis championship currently being disputed somewhere in the southern hemisphere. I was about to turn over when a pea-headed American gravely announced that what we were about to see was the women's semi-finals.
Now I greatly revered women tennis players. When they came on to the court, smiling in trim uniforms, they seemed plain, remote persons: yet, after an hour of sweat and malice ... A couple of years back, there had been a particularly simian little number: squat torso, arms like legs, and a face as contorted and spiteful as you could possibly wish. She had obsessed me all through the Wimbledon fortnight. Not an afternoon passed without me thinking how much I'd like to corner her after an eighty-game, four-hour final (which she had lost), wrench off - or aside - her porky shorts, bear down on her in the steamed-up dressing-room or, better, much better, in some nicotine-mantled puddle, and grind myself empty to her screams.
Neither of the present sportswomen was up to that standard. In my excitement I missed the initial roll-call, and had to sit through twenty minutes of elegant variation - 'the 28-year-old Australian', 'the young Wiltshire housewife' - before I caught the ladies' names, so intent were the unctuous commentators on concealing the fact that they had bugger-all to say. However, of the two I vastly preferred the enormous Aussie. The British Wightman Cup player made the mistake of trying to appear recognizably feminine, doubtless in order to show the older woman that you don't necessarily have to look like an orang-utan to play a damn good game of tennis. The wife of the Great Bedwin dentist skipped up to the net to volley and pirouetted when she served. The Darwin-born PT instructress, on the other hand, her glossy shoulder-muscles rippling in the ninety-degree heat, threw her bulk round the court in frank virility - as she bulleted passing-shots, as she leapt four feet to punch the shit out of last year's quarter-finalist's weedy lobs. That mother of two wailed like a tragic heroine whenever she lost a point; the ex-junior champene showed emotion only when she double-faulted (with strident bellows that brought the commentary to nervous ten-second silences) before pounding back into the match. - At last I got their names: Mrs Joyce Parky and Miss Lurleen Bone. Miss Bone took Joyce apart in the second set. Joyce, quaking at the net on match-point, love-six, got a mouthful of tennis ball from Miss Bone's top-spin drive. She limped off the court in tears, without shaking hands.
'Here's to you, Lurl,' I said, glass raised. There followed twenty minutes of one-day cricket, a makeshift eleven of boozy has-beens versus some itinerant Negroes. It left me wondering why, according to the commentators, Malcolm Sprockington, or whoever, always managed to 'turn' or 'steer' the ball between the slips, when it was all Cyprian Uwanki, or whoever, could do to 'snick' or 'chip' it through them. But it was sorry stuff after that gladiatorial combat between innocence and experience.
I collected my notes, had a drop more port, and fell down the stairs to my parents' bedroom.
Rachel's mother answered. She wanted to know who it was but didn't reply when, with drunken mellifluousness, I gave my name. Now, in the fifteen seconds silence, the fear I had been hiding from all day came to find me. I saw the gormless face in the mirror. Through the window I heard the children cry. I stared down at the folder open on my lap, at my tiny, immaculate handwriting.
Rachel said hello and started telling me about the crash she and DeForest had nearly been in on the way back. I wondered what was going on, tried to interrupt, no voice. Stop all this. She stopped. But she couldn't hear me. Could I speak up? I inhaled and exhaled. Rachel wanted to know whether I was still there.
'Stop all this. What are you talking about ? Tell me —'
'I can't hear.'
'Wait.'
I put the telephone on the bed and unthinkingly took a piece of paper from my breast-pocket. It said: 'Of course you had to leave, don't worry about me. I just feel sorry for DeForest. How is he?' I accumulated twenty words' worth of breath and picked up the receiver.
'Listen. Please tell me what you're going to do. Don't tell me about... fucking car accidents, tell me - '
I had time to slap my hand over the telephone, so she didn't hear me cry. When I listened again Rachel was saying, 'Charles, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.'
Twenty-five of eleven: the Low
Now I weigh the Longman's Blake in my hand. On the inside cover, I notice, Rachel has written, in pencil: To Charles, with love from Rachel'. Between my finger and thumb I take a rubber and bounce it up and down on the desk.
Elaine, my elder brother's girlfriend, sat on the sofa with a glass of iced whisky in her hand. She really did say to me:
'Gerry, the cat I was balling before Mark, yeah?, sort of poet, free-lance lecturer, ICA, that scene, was way into this Selby-Miller-Purdy trip, like we're all children, tender sometimes and beautiful maybe, but like we kill each other and fuck each other up all the time. So Gerry gets into these doomy oppositions, God and Satan, creativity and napalm, love and thalidomide, fucking and cruelty, birth and death, youth and shit.'
'I dig,' I bluffed.
'And his pomes get doomier and doomier, and his acid experiences get more and more negative, he won't lecture any more, can't make the night-time, won't go to the bathroom alone, gets freakier and less organic, won't eat. I mean, I can dig where his head's at but 'Yeah, that's nowhere. You get all upti—'
'Right. And it was like kind of a drag too.' She laughed. 'Sometimes he'd be really into me, digging me, telling me I was beautiful' (which she was), 'and other times I could tell I was turning him right right off. He'd get the shudders in the sack.' She laughed again. 'We'd make it maybe once a week, yeah ? He could like get it together ... but he couldn't get it on.'
'I know exactly what you mean.'
Half an hour earlier, out of the bathroom window, I watched my father seeing off Sir Herbert, Willie French and the ladies (to whom he gave identical kisses). As they drove away, mother, in cerise trouser-suit with green fringe and gold buttons, joined him. My father put his arm round mother, and she responded hurriedly, putting her arm round him. They said things I couldn't hear. But I could tell from the angle of my father's head that he was being nice.
They were still outside the porch when two cars appeared at the turn
in the lane. Out of the first, Mark's MG, came Mark, all arse and smiles, plus the Elaine. Out of the second, a DeFor-est Jaguar, surfaced three handsome gangsters and a second, taller girl; up her legs, encircled by a belt-sized skirt, I caught a gout of scarlet panties. On the strength of this I had a heartless and pleasureless wank before joining them downstairs, my face still flushed, but more ambiguously so. I hawked a lot, too, because you hawk more when you cry.
My father and my brother and the rest came into the sitting-room through the frog-windows. They talked about improvements to be made to the house. Mark outlined plans for landscaping the rear plot. Then he led his friends over to the drinks shelf and gave them more gin. They laughed and bantered and seemed really to like each other, as tall, healthy people will when things are going right for them. Elaine emphasized her detachment by continuing her experiments in stream-of-con-sciousness narration.
'Hello, people,' said my brother, sitting creakily on the coffee-table before us. 'What's the matter with you, Charlie? You look like shit. I mean it.'
'I feel like shit, too,' I said.
Elaine sucked on an ice-cube, so Mark took her glass and refilled it.
'Elaine. I have to talk big-business with Dad. So Tracy and everyone's staying for dinner, okay ? We'll drive back —'
'Look, I told you, I've gotta be —'
'Yeah. You told me.' He dropped a bunch of keys in her lap. As he withdrew his hand he playfully tousled my hair. 'Keep at it, little-britches.' He coasted off to join the others by the window.
'Why do you go out with that fat shit?' I wondered out loud.
'You got me,' said Elaine.
I asked if she could give me a lift back to London and she said she could.
Elaine kept her eyes on Mark, who, one leg wiggling in his trousers, exchanged tall stories with his Dad about how quickly they had been known to get from London to the house, and back again.
'That motherfucking ..." She hesitated. 'Christ. Sorry.'
'Oh. Oh, that's okay.'
So begins a stage in my descent to manhood which retrospectively seems avoidable, without significance, second rate, not worth it. The following three weeks form what might be called my Low, or the conventional nadir period. The only claim I have to originality here is that I didn't fall behind with my work. Of course, I stopped going to school, but, without fail, I did some Maths in the morning and always an hour of Virgil in the afternoon. On top of this I conscientiously read the literature of nausea, melancholy and absurdity - Sartre, Camus, Joyce. I strolled the frosted symmetries of Graeco-Roman tragedy in Penguin translation. I unfurled myself once more to Lear and, not Hamlet, but Timon. I clocked up the jejune libidos of Shelley and Keats, and took Hardy's Befuddled Will into account. I did my research.
Otherwise, I was careful not to wash, encouraged insomnia, failed to clean my teeth, smoked twenty Capstan Full Strength a day. I fidgeted with matchsticks to grime up my fingernails; I consigned my feet to cheesy death; I nourished ray-gun halitosis. I went for walks, wearing too little, sat in tube stations for hours lapping the soot, went to films in the sullen afternoons, coughed into dimly lit shop windows. I sipped whisky and played three-card brag with Norman most nights. I rang no one and no one rang me. I went to bed drunk, slept in my clothes and woke up every morning, terrified; I grew old painfully.
To pay back Norman (prick-fees and gambling debts), I even got a job, not on the railroad, but licking plates in a Shepherd's Bush restaurant, just for a week, in the evenings, quid a night. The restaurant was such an immobile concern that all I really did was sit smoking fags in the well-equipped kitchen and listen to the grumbles of Joe, the cook. Joe, a young and ambitious cook, was fed up to the teeth with cooking steak and chips for the odd Pakki, would far rather have been cooking exotic dishes in a flash restaurant. Accordingly, when people ordered steak and chips, and soup, Joe tended to hawk in it, to show his contempt for such an unimaginative choice, and also because he had heard that flash cooks always hawked in the soup if given the chance. I washed up after him.
On my last night, we had only one order: steak and chips, and soup. After mature consideration, Joe offered to let me hawk in it, as a treat. I did so, with enthusiasm.
Joe looked at it and looked at me. 'We can't give them that,' he said.
The turning-point, the cognito or anagnorisis, was hardly less corny than the Low itself.
I was joy-riding on the Circle Line one Monday afternoon. At High Street Kensington a youthful but hunchbacked tramp I knew got on. (I had seen him in the Gate - so often that we were virtually on nodding terms.) Because his legs were all gone to hell he disported himself about town by means of two second-hand crutches. These exertions caused him to sweat and smell a fair amount, enough, at any rate, to earn him the nickname of Mobile Armpit.
Mobile levered his way into the carriage and nose-dived on a greasy sweet-wrapper. I helped him to the seat opposite. He seemed to be in difficulty - sniffing, snorting, rifling through his damp pockets. Then he took a newspaper from the floor and was evidently about to offer its entertainments page up to his nose. Always well stocked with handkerchiefs, it appeared the least I could do to give him one, and I did.
The everyday response to this incident would be shamefaced reappraisal; comparatively, it was all right for me, etc. But what I found disturbing about my trite and rather appalled gesture of charity was an even triter and more appalled one of kinship. We'll be underneath the Arches together, you and me, I felt I could have said, as Mobile yelped into bunched fists.
I got off at the next stop, Notting Hill, went home, had a bath, gargled with after-shave, changed my clothes, spring-cleaned my room, and rang my doctor and dentist making appointments for the next day but one. That night, Norman sat alone at the breakfast-table, shuffling the cards and glancing uncertainly at me. However, I plucked up the courage to say I was too tired, and so he went to his room and had a row with Jenny instead.
On the Tuesday I put in an appearance at school. Everyone behaved either as if I had never been away or as if I had never enrolled there in the first place. Dead Feet tied himself up in knots trying to explain why x to the power of zero always equals one. The clay-thighed Mrs Tregear told me why she thought it was Dido's own fault that Aeneas cooled her. Derek forgot to beat me up. I signed forms enabling me to take Oxford Entrance on November 21st and 22nd. This was some four weeks away now.
Later, I sat at my desk with a cup of tea. The sun found its way into the room about this time, and, drugged by its warmth on my shirt, I used often to stare at the coalshed wall and railings. Occasionally my mind would go quite blank for as long as ninety seconds or two minutes and I would close my eyes and almost sigh with gratitude.
I wondered why I felt saddest about Rachel at early evening. I couldn't muster much jealousy for DeForest and I was unconvinced that Rachel had behaved cruelly. If she had, and if DeForest were some snarling fat-cock, then I would have known what to do: there'd be some well-charted escape-route. Impartially, shrewdly, I considered suicide, though not in my worst moments. The bottle of pills. The note: 'No hard feelings, everyone, but I've thought about it and it's just not on, is it? It's nearly on, but not quite. No? Anyway, all the best, C.' Only it might be a bore for Jenny and Norm. And where would I find a responsible literary executor for the Notebooks ?
I tried writing letters to Rachel but although elegant and conscientious they made no sense to me and I merely filed them away. I seemed incapable of using words without stylizing myself. And the telephone was out. I wanted to send her vials of my tears at dusk, Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, Keats's 'Bright Star', a videotape of me getting into bed and coughing and going on being here alone.
Kensington Town Hall seemed a reasonable enough place. I didn't dare go in, but when a stray Nigerian staggered out of it at five fifteen or so, having no doubt fucked up some O Level, I assumed an American accent and questioned him about supervision, seating arrangements, and so on.
I drank an or
angeade, rather solemnly, in the High Street Bar-B-Q Lounge, and thought about ringing Gloria. During the first week of the Low I had gone to see the queer doctor and he had let it slip out that I was all clean and needn't come and get touched up by him again. (I probably flatter myself; my rig was too shrunken with fright to arouse much more than laughter.) Yes, Gloria. For old times' sake.
I did ring her, too, as soon as I got back. I had to keep it down to a sexy whisper because there were voices corning from the breakfast-room - principally Norman's. First, I waited while the urchin who usually answered Gloria's (neighbour's) telephone ran down the street to get her. Then, when she came on, I wisecracked for a bit, got her laughing, and wondered what she was doing later. Gloria switched from breathlessness to gravity. She told the foul-mouthed little oik to stop pinching her arse and bugger off. 'How about it,' I said. In a lowered voice Gloria informed me that she was sorry but she just so happened to be 'courting' (really) - Terry Tricho-monas, what's more - and therefore had no wish to endanger her happiness at this moment in time. She was convinced I'd understand.
Sweating with shame I crept into the kitchen and steadied myself against the table.
'Do please come in and meet someone,' called Norman.
Blotchy head between the half-closed sliding doors: Norman was on the sofa with two girls, an arm around each of them. The girls were Jenny and Rachel.
'Christ.'
'Come on, wanker, get a cup.'
'There's one here,' said Jenny.
'So there is.' Norman went on: 'Met her down the road. Went out for a News - there she was. She told me she had to get home' - he squeezed Rachel's shoulders - 'but I told her she had to come and have some tea.'