In Smith's over the road I thought intently about my exams. The Tutors was plainly nothing more than a rapacious farce: loopy directress, no facilities, and apparently low on teachers, since I would have to contact the English master myself. It didn't bother me, though. A year earlier I would have wanted a real school and would have felt silly and vulnerable in anything else. Now it seemed only a detail of life, not its whole structure. Interesting. I must be getting on.
Ran into Jenny on the front doorstep. She was on her way out to have lunch with a friend. I didn't think girls did that sort of thing nowadays, and said so. Jenny laughed vivaciously, but looked not at ease. Norman was in and there was a scotch egg in the fridge we could share. I told her to be sure and have a good time.
In my room I looked out my Rachel note-pad in preparation for the telephone call. I flicked through it making notes, underlining the odd pertinent phrase, sketching personas. But my mind was wandering. Outside the window, Bina, only one of Jenny's democratic two tabby cats, her body tensed in dumb caution, snaked down the steps to the dustbins. I came across the only extant autograph MS of my first date with Rachel. I felt mournful, squelchy.
After a while she allowed me to go and get her a drink. When I returned from the kitchen she was gone. She wasn't gone. She was smooching with someone very tall in a white suit. I stood holding the glasses like a Negro waiter in Rhodesia House, Nashville, Tennessee. The ballad churned into its first middle-eight. About two minutes to go. What would she do then ? I wanted to ask my host if there were perhaps any broom-cupboards or disused lavatories he wouldn't mind me locking myself into until the party was over.
One of the glasses of wine disappeared. I looked up to see Geoffrey.
'What happened to yours?' he asked.
'Cooled me. What happened to yours?'
'Having a crap or something.' He shrugged. 'But she's coming back. Is yours coming back?'
'You never know. What's yours like?'
'Fantastic. Bi-ig tits.'
'So I saw. But what's she like?'
7 don't know. Just likes dancing and drinking. We haven't talked that much.'
And he asked me: 'What's with all this "what's she like"?'
'Yeah, sorry. Is she going to fuck you, do you think?'
He nodded, eyes closed.
The record ended. I didn't dare turn round.
'Hey,' said Geoffrey, 'yours is kissing that guy.'
'Really?'
'Yeah but... they're saying goodbye. He's pulling out.'
I looked. The white suit was backing away; Rachel swivelled on her heel and walked towards us.
'She's coming,' I whispered. 'Be flash. Say we're a group or something.'
Geoffrey was brilliant. He looked good and talked with confidence. Allusively he lowered names. He plugged me with stooge feed lines, pretended he had never heard two of (some say) my funniest anecdotes. He stole a full bottle of wine from the kitchen. And, it transpired, Rachel vaguely knew Geoffrey's sister. The dialogue was bringing regular smiles to Rachel's full brown lips - to reveal credibly flawed teeth; the top two front ones overlapped slightly, giving a sharp prow to the otherwise semicircular line of white; a felicitous touch, I always think. Everything went beautifully until the return of Geoffrey's. Geoffrey's was called Anna, and was therefore Swedish, which seemed rather to come as a bolt out of the blue as far as Geoffrey was concerned.
The general tone of the gathering was lowered at this point. Not that Anna wasn't perfectly charming, only that from Rachel's point of view it was so obviously me and my pull and Geoffrey and his pull getting together to plan a spotty removal to someone's house or flat or room to drink quarts of weak instant coffee and listen to records and be made inefficient passes at - precisely what Geoffrey and I had in mind. For the party was disintegrating quickly now. There remained only one or two drunken couples, some po-faced wankers, and the odd unattached (and so presumably pretty seriously deformed) girl.
'Look, I ought to help clear up,' said Rachel.
'Nonsense,' I said. 'Don't do that. Leave it to whoever was frivolous and conceited enough to give the party.'
Geoffrey joined in with some vehemence. 'No, fuck all this,' he argued. 'Why not come back to our place instead?" He stroked Anna's shoulder. Anna smiled.
'No, I really will clear up.'
'What the devil for?' I asked.
'Because it's my party. I live here. All right ? I hope you had a good time.'
We watched her go.
'How fucking funny,' said Geoffrey. 'Charles, you're well away there.'
Suddenly Norman bellowed down the stairs.
'Hey, Charles, are you in?'
'Yeah,' I shouted, standing.
'Oh,' he roared back, but didn't say anything.
'I'll come up.'
Norman was in the kitchen fighting a cardboard box.
'What's in it?'
'Cider,' Norman gasped.
Eventually he wrestled all the string and paper into an armful-sized bundle and forced it down the Aga, stirring the coals with a broom-handle so that the box burned up with a deep and satisfying roar.
'Where'd you get it?'
'Fell off a lorry.'
'Christ,' I said. 'Surprised it didn't smash open. Did you -'
'No, cunt,' said Norman, now crouching in front of the keg and filling two pub-style pint-glasses. 'Stolen. Got it off a mate. Two quid. Retails at four thirty-five.'
I coughed and took off my spectacles. 'Does it make you extra pissed?'
Norman handed me my glass, drank his in one, and crouched again to refill it.
'Where's Jenny gone?' I asked.
'Up west, shopping, with some foreign tart from Bristol.'
'When'll she be back? Any idea?'
'Don't ask me.'
I watched my brother-in-law, his fat nose inches from the tap, his eyes eager, expectant. Norman was wearing what he always wore: dowdy blue business suit, boyish shirt open at the neck (the tip of a spangled red tie hung out of his side pocket); his trousers, python-tight from the knee down, came to an end a good two or three inches from some really utterly preposterous black fur shoes. Amazing. I wouldn't get ten yards dressed like that. Norman straightened up, looked with hostility at my glass, and went through the sliding doorway into the adjoining room. 'Yeah, it does make you quite pissed.' He lobbed himself on to the chesterfield by the window. 'Friend of mine', he continued monotonously, 'had three pints of this, fell out a bedroom window and smashed his head open on the railings.'
I sat down too. 'Christ.' There was a pause. I said, 'I've got to ring this girl up in a minute so I'd better be quite pissed.'
'Woy?' asked Norman in a challenging tone.
'I don't know, really. I find her sort of scaring.'
Tucked her yet?'
'No. Nowhere near.'
'Well, no wonder.'
No wonder I feel scared, not having fucked her, or no wonder I haven't fucked her if I'm weedy enough to feel scared ?
'Does she fuck? How old is she?' Norman asked, frowning.
'Nineteen, I think, same age as me. I don't know. You know Geoffrey? - mate of mine - well, his sister knows her. She's supposed to have fucked some American guy, but apparently he was her first.'
'Yeah, and what happened to him? Still around?'
'Don't know. She came out to a film with me last month so she must be more or less available.'
Norman burped. 'Did you try her then?'
'No.'
He contemplated me unhappily. Embarrassed, I finished my drink and got up to get a refill. But Norman beat me to it.
Walking over he drained his own glass and coughed disgustedly.
'It's bloody diabolical this stuff,' he said, fondling the plastic tap.
The hedonistic schoolboy just liked playing with it. He filled his own glass and began to empty it so fast that he would get to fill it again after mine. His eyes bulged; cider ran down his chin. Did he ever go to work or anything, I wondered. Did
he still have other girls? Either it never occurred to him, or it never occurred to him not to.
I thought about his set-up here with my sister. Mother, who corresponded regularly with Jenny, always used to portray him as prince of the pigs - filthy, ignorant, drunken, vicious -but that was nothing more than female solidarity. Both my parents habitually and unworriedly referred to Norman as a 'bastard', but, again, in such contexts this generally means someone who has stopped idolizing his wife. Norman wasn't, however, what's known as a 'right', or a 'real' bastard, for the simple reason that he made money; real bastards are penniless bastards. This was the first time I had seen them together, except for the wedding. They had seemed okay last night.
Did it matter, for instance, that Jenny had had over five years of higher education and that Norman would probably be all thumbs with the Daily Mail? And there was no point in forgetting the class difference - or at least there was no point in forgetting it where married couples were concerned. Jenny couldn't really see much of her own friends; she must bitch about it. And, as in any class battle, the social inferior tends to feel a bit of a crusading visionary and thinks he can therefore be as shitty as he likes.
'Look, I'll tell you,' began Norman, handing me my second pint and sipping on his fourth. 'Say she's you, right? And you're her. Say this tart was ringing you up. You'd got a lot of tarts on so you're not worried, so you play it easy. What would she say that would get you interested, make you drop all the others and pull her? Now if she wanted to get you going, she wouldn't say "Oh Charles, fuck me," she'd say "Oh Charles, fuck you, fuck off," wouldn't she? Wouldn't she, to get you going?'
I thought for a moment. 'What, I ring Rachel up and tell her to fuck off?' I asked, genuinely wanting to know.
Norman looked at me askance, as who should say 'Do you want your head kicked in?' What he actually said was, 'No. Just be flash. I see you —' he made up-and-down motions with his hand - 'wankers, tripping on your cocks, falling over backwards, makes me sick. They don't like it either. Be flash - act like you couldn't give a fuck and she'll ... be ... begging for it.'
He finished his yawn, then leapt up, stretched, and, mouth sleepily ajar, consulted his saucer-sized, many-dialled watch (of the kind favoured by scuba divers, pot-holers, etc.).
'I'm going up Chalk Farm.'
'Shall I tell Jen?'
'If you want.'
'See you later. When'll you be back?'
'Search me.'
I had intended to ring Rachel the minute Norman was out of the way, but it didn't seem so easy now. I sighed. Could I be bothered to make some notes ? Perhaps some coffee to get me thinking straight. My eyes went slowly round the room. Like the rest of the house it was filled mostly with Norman's old furniture: monstrous gauzy sofa, selection of geriatric armchairs. I could see that Jenny was sifting these out in favour of more upper-class items, with the folky bare-wood sideboards, velvet dwarf thrones, with its something-I-picked-up here and its got-it-for-thirty-bob there: tastefully timeless. In the corner, to the right of the sliding door, the grandfather clock -which, naturally, had once belonged to my grandfather -struck one. (I say 'naturally' because this is how it always is with me. In my world, reserved Italians, heterosexual hairdressers, clouds without silver linings, ignoble savages, hardhearted whores, advantageous ill-winds, sober Irishmen, and so on, are not permitted to exist. Nothing I can do about it.)
*
The other time I saw Norman was at the wedding - my first, by the way. The celebration took the form of a champagne party at a hotel followed by an intimate dinner at Norm's house (in which Jenny had long been established); caterers laid on by my father handled it all. I got extremely drunk extremely early on, so I remember the evening none too well; but apparently the thing was that my father and elder brother had gone and 'insulted' Norman. According to his bride, what happened was this. Norman was approached by Gordon and Mark Highway. My father hailed him :
'Ah, Norman, wonder if you'd mind settling something, wonder if you'd mind telling Mark here and myself your mother's maiden name.'
'Levi,' he truthfully replied.
My father had then said to my brother as they walked away, 'Looks like I owe you a fiver.'
However it happened, Norman took it very deeply and studiedly. As the champagne party was breaking up, under pressure from Jenny I took Norman to the hotel bar before following on to Holland Park. I suppose the idea was to get him to calm down, but I had never seen Norman as collected as he was that evening. 1 remember he told me that he had the previous afternoon been gobbled by the Scottish assistant manageress of his Tufnell Park second-hand refrigerator showrooms in his Tufnell Park second-hand refrigerator showrooms. It was clear to me, though, that he mentioned the incident merely by way of polite small-talk; this was no weary vaunt, no another-good-man-gone lament. He added conversationally that he hadn't dared actually poke her in case she still had the clap. She had had it so long and so often that antibiotics didn't mean shit to her any more.
Norman, or, temporarily, Bill Sikes, went into action as soon as we got back to the house. My parents' sub-celebrity friends all tried to behave as if they thought he was drunk; the fact that he so obviously wasn't drunk was the key to the whole performance. He asked a more-or-less dead failed philosopher how his sex-life was shaping up these days; he biffed a pancake-bosomed minor poetess on the back, whispered evilly among her jangling earrings. At dinner he abstained from the carefully chosen table-wines, fetching himself a pint beer glass which he filled with neat Benedictine. His voice went Bow Bells barrow-boy. He tucked his serviette ('serviette, it's called a serviette') into his shirt-collar. He took soup by dipping his face in the bowl and sucking through pouted lips; he frayed the veal with his bare hands. He up-ended whole plates of gherkins and cashews into his mouth. He drank boiling coffee straight from the percolator, without blinking.
The post-prandial stage of the evening was little more than a swirling blank as far as I was concerned. And yet, as I lay on the floor of the upstairs bathroom, cradling the lavatory bowl tenderly in my arms, I could hear the horrible sound of Norman's voice, a skirling whine from below. One would have expected something bawdy, wouldn't one? However, it went like this; I couldn't catch the words until what seemed to be the last verse:
This owd yowe was whetting her pegs, She run at the butcher and broke both his legs ...
slowing down
This owd yowe went to fight for the prince ...
to a funereal decrescendo:
And no living man has ... heard ... of ... her ... since.
The sound of hesitant applause could be heard. But Norman was off again, with a
ooooooooooooHHHHHHHHHH,
there was an owd yowe wi' only one horn,
Fifty naw me nonny.
And she picked up her living among the green com,
So turn the wheel so bonny.
The nine-stanza cycle was repeated five times. Then there were some shuffling noises and banging of doors. When I came out half an hour later Norman was on the landing, patiently waiting to use the bathroom. He came forward and put his hands on my shoulders, as if in order to steady me.
'Your father's gone so I've made up a bed for you on the couch.'
He stared at my face and suddenly threw his head back in a roar of black, anarchical laughter. I groaned halitotically at him.
'773 4417.'
'Hello, good morning, I mean afternoon. May I speak to Rachel Noyes, please?'
Silence.
'Hello, Rachel ? Ah. My name is Charles Highway. You may remember we met at a party you gave last month. Then, some days later, we —'
'Yes, I remember.'
I gave her time to whoop with delight and say, 'And I don't mind telling you it's fucking great to hear your voice.'
'Well!' I said. 'And what are you up to these days ?'
As if to an elderly relation, she said, 'I'm cramming for A Levels.'
'What a fantastic coincidence. I'm cramming for Oxfo
rd! Where's yours?'
'Bayswater Road.'
'NO.' So's mine! Whereabouts?'
'The Holland Park side.'
'Oh, huh, the right side of the Bayswater Road.'
'No it's not. It's on the left.'
'No, no.' I chortled uncomfortably. 'I meant right side as opposed to wrong side. The "correct" side.'
'What?'
Hangup?
No. Get flash.
'Er, listen, forget it, forget it. Say, are you going to be there tomorrow afternoon? Fine, then why don't I pick you up when they close, which is what? four-thirty? ... Four? So okay. I'll come pick you up and we could maybe have some tea together.'
There was a pause. My armpits hummed. 'What do you say?'
Normally I would have given an easy-refusal clause, such as 'unless of course you're working', or have fixed on a day further ahead which she could plausibly be evasive about. But I wanted another chance. All the homework I had done on her. Then she spoke.
'All right ...Why not.'
Why not. She would probably insist on paying for her own tea. 'I haven't a clue why not. You'll be there at four, right?'
'Yes, and —'
'Right. See you then.' I slammed down the telephone and stood there tensed, almost crouching. How had my final abruptness gone down ? Applying Norman's Law, what would I feel if someone had just said that to me ? Stand the rude little oaf up, obviously. But you never knew.
Noon, Tuesday. I lay immobile in the bath, like a dirty old alligator - not washing, just steaming and planning.
What clothes would I wear? Blue madras shirt, black boots, and the old black cord suit with those touching leather elbow-patches. What persona would I wear? On the two occasions I had seen her last August I underwent several complete identity-reorganizations, settling finally somewhere between the pained, laconic, inscrutable type and the knowing, garrulous, cynical, laugh a minute, yet something demonic about him, something nihilistic, muted death-wish type. Revamp those, or start again?