'Heavy,' murmured Geoffrey.
My stage designs for Rachel were not entirely wasted. In my room, Anastasia made for the Blake, saying 'wow' in a reverent whisper, and Sue adjusted her six-guns, knelt on the floor and opened The Poetry of Meditation. I looked over her shoulder; she was reading an essay on Herbert, rather a good one despite the fact that it was called The Plateau of Assurance'; 'Herbert Who?' she must have wanted to ask. Geoffrey, licking at cigarette papers, instructed me to put on a record. The girls being hippies, I selected the most violent and tuneless of all my American LPs, Heroin by the Velvet Underground. The immediate results ? Anastasia swayed in her chair and tapped a sandalled foot; Sue went glazed, craning her neck in figure-eight patterns. There you go.
Geoffrey lit up. 'Are we going to have some amazing orgy, or what?' No one reacted. He shrugged, gave the joint to Sue and tottered backwards on to the bed.
A peaceful quiescence followed.
The joint came my way; I drew on it, swallowing rather than inhaling the smoke, and in the high hippie manner, as if it were a normal cigarette. (Ostentatious and/or noisy intake is considered vulgar.) I repeated this several times, and waited. Golden Rain cinders showering my knuckles, yes, and I felt I could have puked my ribcage on to the carpet: apart from that, nothing. And it could not be said that I didn't respond to drugs; early last summer Geoffrey gave me my first purple heart: I got the screaming hab-jabs for two days, sweated liquid frying-pans throughout the third, awoke from a gentle coma on the fourth. Indeed, my metabolism is in many ways as much of a gullible weathercock as my mind. Geoffrey's hash didn't work; he must have been sold a wad of gumboot mud, or, if it was supposed to be grass, a matchboxful of crumbled tobacco, rosemary and aspirins.
I offered it to Geoffrey but he held up his hand with a hollow smile, all of a sudden not having a good time. I couldn't resist taking a certain fascinated pleasure in his remorse-stricken face; the usual triumvirate: pearly complexion, ruby lips, emerald tongue. His cheeks ballooned as if to contain a mouthful of prancing vomit.
'Is there anything I can get you?'
'Water.'
They dehydrate you,' Anastasia explained.
As I left the room Susan quickened my stride by saying, in an indignant monotone, 'It bugs me when these guys start trying to hang on The Temple' this kind of structuralized didactic trip when it's all the hang-ups and anxieties that make it so ... integrated.'
*
Phase two of Jenny and Norman's row. It came through the walls with high fidelity.
In the kitchen I became gradually aware of screams and shouts from above. I tiptoed up to the intermediate landing outside the bathroom. The sitting-room door was open and the light off. It was from the bedroom, then, that I could hear Jenny shriek:
'You're a murderer. Do you hear what I'm saying to you? You-are-a-MURDERER!'
A very very loud scream came next.
This didn't alarm me. It was clear from the tone that Jenny's accusation was an emotional, not a circumstantial, one, probably the crest of an imprecatory tidal wave. And that sort of scream wasn't the result of fear or anger but of drawing one's breath deep into one's lungs and thinking: I'm going to scream as loud as I can now and see what effect that has on the situation.
'You're a bastard,' Jenny resumed, 'and you don't care, because you're a murderer.'
Then Norman: 'Jennifer. You're getting yourself into a state, now bloody get out of it. You know you've got to do it, don't you? Get it through your fucking head—'
I switched off my ears.
In the bathroom I tweaked the light string and sat on the closed lavatory seat. How exciting. What a splendidly emotional day this was for everyone. 'You're a murderer' ... Perhaps, in the course of his work, Norman was called on to do the odd homicide. Perhaps he really did pull capers in his lunch-hour. Had he mown down a file of schoolboys in his Cortina, lured a blinkie into the Bayswater Road, stolen the heirlooms of a dying Jew? Had he poked a switchblade into an enlightened student (for Norman was passionately right-wing) ? Had he jumped up and down on a squealing Pakistani (for Norman was passionately xenophobic: wogs began, not at Calais, but at Barnet or Wandsworth Common, depending on what direction you took from Marble Arch)? Perhaps —
yawn - she just meant that he was ""murdering"" her love for him.
The sound of what could have been a forearm slam came from above, then a muffled crash, as of a body making speedy contact with the floor.
I blew my nose on some lavatory paper and thought hard about Rachel. I wished Geoffrey would get a move on and puke in my bed; then Sue and Anastasia could carry him off, and I would be alone. Nip up to the sitting-room for a glass of Norman's cherry brandy ? No: he might revive Jenny in order to beat her unconscious again. Instead, I hawked confidently into the basin, and returned with Geoffrey's water. Upstairs, all was quiet now.
Geoffrey had indeed been sick, not in my bed, but, rather, over the floor, walls, sink, towel-rail and lavatory of the next-door bathroom. Anastasia was there, an arm round his waist. Geoffrey turned to me diffidently when I joined big Sue in the doorway.
'Sorry glug,' he said, throwing his head back to accommodate a fresh mouthful which he then channelled into the bathtub.
That's all right. But, Geoffrey?'
'Yeah?'
'Remember: I'm a country slicker, you're a city bumpkin. Okay?'
'Right.'
Between the three of us we cleaned Geoffrey up and gave him, in succession, an apple, some water and a cigarette. When asked, he said he felt cool. I mentioned something about a taxi but it turned out - amazingly, I thought, for one of her youth - that Sue had a car. We put Geoffrey in it and they drove off, with me asking for the telephone number of and trying to kiss neither of the two girls.
I watched them go, shaking my head a couple of times in the normal way, and walked back to the house. In the darkening kitchen, with a few glasses of water I worked the shirt-button-sized Mandrax down my throat. It was already brightly moonlit and for a while I gazed out at the navy-blue sky. Unasked, I could feel, gradually playing on my features, a look of queasy hope. And why not? I had someone to think about, no matter how fretfully; I had a face looking over my shoulder, no matter how snottily equivocal its expression. At least it wasn't my face.
There was little to admire outside, apart from the sky: just a smooth high wall, on which glittered a thousand chips of broken glass, placed there to deter the burglars over twelve foot tall who couldn't be bothered to use the back-garden door. They looked neutral enough now, though.
As I turned I saw Jenny on the chesterfield in the adjoining room, curled up on her knees, haggardly smoking a cigarette. I stepped towards her, but as I did so she made a movement, hardly perceptible, a shrug or a wave of the hand, which told me that she was content to be alone. I closed the door behind me, and went to bed.
Thirty-five minutes past eight: The Rachel Papers, volume one
Over by the window now, I effortfully uncork the second bottle of Chateau Dysentery. Red spots fly over my twentieth-birthday present from Rachel, the new Longman's Blake. It's very dark outside, so it seems appropriate to ask out loud:
Can delight Chained in night The virgins of youth and morning bear?
On my desk, a sea of pads, folders, envelopes, napkins, notes, the complete Rachel Papers stand displayed. Four-eyed, I indent subject-headings, co-ordinate footnotes, mark cross-references in red and blue biros.
We have to begin with a tolerably even development, characterized though it is by chance meetings, botched preparations, half-successes. Referring to Conquests and Techniques: a Synthesis, I write on the inside cover of the Rachel folder itself:
Initial 2B
Compensatory A3 tendencies
Emily gambit
Marilyn variation deferred.
I erase 'deferred' and put in 'declined'. This doesn't tell me much.
The first day at school was intensely embarrassing, not for me (I felt) so much as for the
directress and her staff, unhelpful as these distinctions generally turn out to be.
On my way there, walking up attractive Addison Avenue, I took out the two letters I had received that morning. It was a clear day, and so, being morbidly early for school, I slipped between the bird-pats on a pavement bench to take a proper look at them.
The fact that my mother had in her life made any written contact whatever with the outside world was in itself a moving tribute to the British GPO. My name mis-spelt, an address which even I could make little of, four ip stamps upside down in the top left-hand corner. I put on my glasses and began worrying a few key phrases: pity missed you Sunday ... clearing up? got sick ... Your father in London two weeks but ... giving rather grand house-party ... the ? of one college is coming ... you come? ... Love to Jenny ... Norman is behaving ... Mrs Wick found vests you forgot ... My face burned. What was the point? There always was a point. Ah, sinisterly clear ending ... take care. Find out from him how many are coming. He can be reached at 01-937 2814.
9-3-7, W-E-S, Western: Kensington area; must be his slag's place. Why didn't she ring him at the office ? Or was this some wily show of uninterest? The whole thing would have depressed me, but I happened to be having tea with Rachel that afternoon - d deux. And the telephone number might come in useful.
The second letter was airmail, garishly stamped. It was from Coco.
'Coco' was the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Lebanese economics professor (cultivated by my father when he was visiting lecturer at Cambridge the year before last). Towards the end of the summer the family had come out for three weekends. Coco was tanned, minx-like, exotic; she was, furthermore, a girl, and I was just old enough and rude enough to seem quite unimprovable to her. The first weekend I kissed Coco on the landing. The second I smoothed her shy breasts in the greenhouse. The third I persuaded her to come to my room at 12 p.m. - a perfect night, though intercourse did not take place. She was barely fifteen then and I didn't want to come out of jail when she was barely twenty-one. Besides, she wouldn't let me. I kept up our correspondence because it made me feel sexually active and in demand, and because I like showing off (doubtless to myself only) in letters. I read:
Dear Charles,
Thank you for your letter - at last! Shame on you for not writing to me sooner! I am very pleased that you did so well in your exams. My o levels were not so good! ?
I skimmed for the bits about how handsome I was. The final paragraph went:
I always hope I might come to England soon. Mummy says may-be (?) next year. I think often about meeting you again and that you will not like me any more. If I come next year you will be at University and I at Drama-school ! ? But this belongs to Maybe Land. Well! I must go to bed now, I am so tired out! Write to me soon. Love Coco XXX
This required immediate attention. Taking out a memo-pad I began to draft my reply:
My Sweet,
Thank you for your long-awaited letter. I was particularly intrigued to hear of 'Maybe Land'. Could you tell me more about this strange clime? What, for example, is its capital, its geographical situation, its type of government? What, say, are its climatic features, its territorial boundaries, its chief industries? Moreover, you neglected for the second time to tell me whether on your next visit you are going to let me go to bed...
I stood up, stretching like a starfish. It was nearly nine thirty. I gathered my papers and trotted off.
The school looked more like a Victorian police station than I had really bargained for. Flanked by spindly terraced houses, cordoned off with mauve railings, the building crouched inset from the road, its sooty bricks having nothing to do with the available sunshine. I sidled down the path to the rear basement entrance. The door was open.
No one seemed to be about, apart from the directress. Mrs Tauber was in her office drinking cups of coffee and smoking cigarettes, about three of each. She was surprised but on the whole delighted to see me.
We said good morning, and, after an eery silence, I asked whether I might perhaps be 'a bit early', a real misgiving since the place was empty and it was possible I had got the times wrong.
'Certainly not,' she said, gesturing to the electric clock behind her. It was nine thirty-five. 'Can't you see the time ?' She seemed genuinely to want an answer.
This dislocated me. The one strictly logical reply was: 'I'm awfully sorry - I do beg your pardon - but ... this is the Tauber Lunatic Asylum, isn't it ?' Instead I asked where everyone else was.
She said, exasperatedly, 'They're late.'
I slapped my thigh and shook my head.
'Ah. Um, is there anywhere I can go until "things get started"?'
At this point her previous geniality returned, and I was led with paraded bustle to the 'library', a dirty boxroom furnished by three chairs, a split blackboard, and at least a dozen raddled textbooks forming a knee-high stack in the far corner. It was into this arena of liberal scholarship that my colleagues wandered over the next hour and a half; there were four of them, two girls, one not bad, though twice my height.
By the middle of the week Tauber Tutors held no surprises for me. The school turned out to have a second floor, the upper one consisting of a large hall/gym/cafeteria/classroom plus two small offices. The school turned out also to be a nursery school, or mostly that. There were just the five of us in the O-Level-and-after age group, and getting on for ten times that many in the Eleven-Plus-and-Common-Entrance-and-before age group. Not that age was a helpful grouping criterion, the elder lot ranging as they did from fifteen (a delinquent ghoul studying for RSAs) to nineteen (myself), and the younger lot ranging from sphincter-free toddlers to the occasional pillow-faced, taller-than-me mongol, who could have been anything from eight to thirty-eight. A high proportion of the children were obviously insane.
My time was (theoretically) to be split up between brief morning sessions in the offices with the two on-campus teachers (Maths and Latin), evening sessions with an English master in St John's Wood, and 'general study' in the spacious hall.
In practice ?
Arrive ten to ten thirty. Twenty-minute Maths lesson with Mr Greenchurch. Vacuum-chamber office redolent of dead man's feet; hairless, cysty-eared octogenarian sucking noisily and ceaselessly on his greying false teeth (I thought at first he had a mouthful of boiled sweets; on the Wednesday he allows the coltish dentures to spew out half-way down his chin before drinking them back into place); mind like a broken cuckoo-clock, often forgets you're there. Ten minutes in the hall, talking to Sarah, the less ugly girl. Eleven thirty to noon with Mrs Marigold Tregear, the enormous though well-proportioned Latin widow, up whose stockingless adamantine legs it was my constant endeavour to peer; expedients included: rolling pencils off the end of the table at which we sit side by side and going round to pick them up; crouching opposite her on entry to the room and double-bowing my shoelaces; loitering beneath the iron staircase, on the off-chance: Mrs Tregear was over thirty, and I suppose very unattractive, yet she wore quite short skirts.
Another five minutes with Sarah. Brisk walk home. Light lunch and an attempted chat with whoever was there - Jenny, or Norman, sometimes neither, never both. Perhaps half an hour in the hall, cooling my three contemporaries (Sarah was mornings only). Here I attempted a few minutes' work, not easy because the fifty bawling sprogs had classes there in the afternoon, normally acting classes, or singing classes, or self-expression classes.
This, then, was the humdrum background to the fecundities of my nocturnal reading. For I had begun to explore the literary grotesque, in particular the writings of Charles Dickens and Franz Kafka, to find a world full of the bizarre surfaces and sneaky tensions with which I was always trying to invest my own life. I did my real study at home, of course, mostly on Rachel, and on English Literature and Language, which, or so it seemed to me, I was really fucking good at.
Since the night of the punch-up things were quieter between Jenny and Norman. But on the rare occasions they were together the room was muggy. It wasn't day-
to-day aggro, nor the drooped, guilty, somehow sexless disgruntlement I had seen overtake many relationships, where the tension never tries to become articulate. No, there was definitely something at stake, some issue, and I felt I ought to be able to see what it was.
Predictably, Norman's behaviour was more illustrative than that of his wife. Now, in the early evenings, he would moon over the kitchen table, toying with his car keys or staring, glaucous-eyed, at the wall. At some point he'd slope off headlong towards the door - but he was going out just to get out; he had lost that air of breezy purpose.
After my first morning at school, I was in the kitchen, enjoying - rather sweetly, I thought - a sandwich and a glass of milk for lunch. I hardly noticed Norman's entrance. He came in - again, not to the traditional manic flurry of crashes and shouts, but with hesitation, uncertainty, as if only on reaching the kitchen would he be sure he was in the right house. 'Oh, hello,' he said. 'Jennifer around?' ('Jennifer', in Norman's parlance, tended to mean 'that bitch Jenny'.) I said I supposed she was out. We both shrugged. Nodding to himself, as if in thought, he opened the door of the fridge. 'Any food?" he asked, his eyes quartering the room. Norman's eyes saw: a sinkful of crockery, a soiled cat-tray, a basket of fetid sheets, knitting kit splayed on the table, a cooker like a tinker's stall.
The odd thing about what followed was that I had never seen Norman take any interest whatever in domestic affairs, behaving usually as if he were living in a tent or semi-permanent pre-fab - chucking newspapers on the floor, undressing on the stairs, pasting his beetle-crushers over clean upholstery.
He took a step forward and booted the rubbish bin beneath the sink; he sent a pot slithering up the draining-board with the flat of his hand.