These fucking slags,' he yelled, head thrown back. 'All they can bloody do is gorge down great fucking fry-ups and squirt ponce all over themselves.' He flicked on a tap and rolled up his sleeves, tone getting jerky with righteous sarcasm. 'You work all bloody day and they're wiggling their bums in fucking dress-shops and spending pounds in Sleazy fucking Wheezy's or whatever the fucker's name is. You're up the shop while they're on their arses doing their eyes.' His voice rose half an octave. 'Juskers they wear the tits doesn't mean -' He cut out on a long, shuddering growl of rage and frustration.
Norman finished the washing-up (with Boy-Scout meticul-ousness), put on his jacket and left the house.
But that wasn't it. If it had been it, then nothing on earth would have made him do what he had done.
My next encounter with Rachel was on the Friday, three days after the Tea Centre Incident.
It couldn't have been more spontaneous if I had planned it. All the more startling, because I had resigned myself to dumping the entire Rachel opus. Shaving on Wednesday morning I cringed and winced as I recalled the mawkishness of my thoughts the night before. At best she had felt merely sorry for me; at worst it was phase two of her and DeForest's plan. I was too scared and ashamed to ring her that evening. Perhaps tomorrow. Nothing ventured, nothing lost.
But, as I say, when I did see her it couldn't have been more spontaneous. I was quite unprepared, caught completely on the hop. Semi-shaven, dishcloth hair, duffle-coat, baggy brown Farmer-Giles corduroys. Didn't have a single note-pad on me. So I ad-libbed.
I was in the Notting Hill Gate Smith's at the time, standing with my back to the front entrance and scratching my scalp -not in puzzlement, but because it itched. Badly shaken by my fell-off-a-lorry slip the other day, I had just put down a book on Cockney slang ('Cheers, Norm, where's the trouble and strife? Up the apples and pears having a pony and trap?'), and was just picking one up on 'Criticism and Linguistics'.
She came on me from behind and poked me too hard in the ribs.
'Hello then. Wotcher reading?'
'Oh, hello,' I said, surprise borne out by the falsetto croak in my voice. But then I was off. 'Oh, you know, some tired old hack reproducing boiled-up earlier articles and pretending they form a unity.' I paused and made (three) impatient gestures with my hand. 'He says they're all about "the problem of words".' I pointed to the subtitle on the cover, rich in adrenalin as a phrase from a novel took shape at the back of my mind. 'But what they're really about is him - his taste, his poise, and how much he likes money. Just look at the price.' Rachel just looked at the price, and then back up at my face, which smiled brilliantly.
Posturing, wordy, inept, if you like - but not bad for a viva.
Again quite impetuously, we began a tour of the shop. This allowed me a wide variety of tableaux: the boyish fascination I still took in children's toys; my mischievous quizzing of a saleswoman in Stationery; how refreshing it was that I liked vulgar greetings-cards (kittens with balls of wool, dogs resembling old men). Rachel seemed to be enjoying herself, rather than the reverse, but it was hardly the response I had been banking on. For instance, she hadn't grabbed my cock once.
We ended up in the record department. There we watched a small middle-aged man (with unusually big brown ears, like tea-dunked ginger-biscuits) denouncing an equally small but much younger salesgirl. She was yawning at him a lot. He couldn't get the record he wanted in mono.
'You mean to tell me that it's only made in stereo?' he asked in a reedy voice. I couldn't believe his ears.
'Yes. but it—'
That's all very well for the people who own stereo record-players.'
'The rec—'
'What about the people who don't own stereo record-players ?'
'It says on the —'
'It makes you sick.' He said this with all the verve of discovery, as if having long been of the opinion that it didn't make you sick, or even that it made you well. He turned to address the whole store. 'It makes you sick,' he repeated, walking along the counter in an attempt to individualize his audience. 'Aren't we a lot of sheep, eh?' he said; he looked from one face to another in a you-you-and-yes-you-sir style. He approached me.
'Have you got a stereo?' he asked.
'—Sir?'
'Do you own a stereo record-player?'
'Absolutely not.'
This satisfied him in some way. He strode off.
I had intended to buy a new LP, but didn't, being as yet ignorant of Rachel's musical tastes. Instead, I suggested coffee. Rachel agreed, after consulting her watch, and with the proviso that she had to be back at the Tutors in a quarter of an hour. This caused my smile, originally welcoming, to become derisive, shitty - eloquent, I should have thought, of great sexual menace.
On our way to the door I had a brainwave.
I halted suddenly as we stepped on to the pavement. I was frightfully sorry - it had almost slipped my mind - but I'd promised Cecilia Nottingham that I would ride with her in Hyde Park that afternoon. Did she mind?
'But Rachel,' I said. 'How about Monday ? Do you think we could have tea together?'
She thought about this. 'All right,' she said.
'Really? Four fifteen, then.' I hailed a cab. 'At the Tea Centre?'
'All right.'
'Marvellous. The Dorchester, please. See you then.'
A smarmy ploy, this: and its shrewdest reproach was Rachel herself. She seemed less posh, less assured, altogether less formidable. She seemed physically smaller, too, and emphasized this by pouting a lot, playing dumb, deliberately mispronouncing long words - the whole routine. I didn't mind, even when she crinkled her nose in girly indecision, or popped her eyes in cute astonishment. If she's stupid, boring, ugly and affected, I thought, it's all right by me.
Anyway, I had had to show some independence, counter-pointing my abjectness of the Tuesday. And I needed a breather, time for more research. And my face was in no condition to take the Centre's somewhat unkind neon. And the ludicrous business about going riding at least explained my wrecky clothes. And there was nothing I could do about it; my conceit is an unmanned canoe, leaping imaginary rapids.
I think it was that afternoon I began work on the Letter to My Father, a project which was to take up many a spare moment over the following weeks.
Now, I thought, assembling fountain-pen, inkpot and notes, I'm really going to hit the bastard with everything. Forty minutes later I had written:
Dear Father,
This has not been an easy letter to write.
When I went upstairs for some tea. Jenny was in the kitchen bathing the half-faded shiner Norman had given her on Tuesday night.
'How is it?'I asked.
'Not too bad now. That flipping doorknob.'
Jenny, these days, was silent, but her silence had plenty to say. In the days immediately after the punch-up she went on As Normal: Don't worry about me I'm perfectly ... all right, patrolling the house at two miles per hour in search of extra-gruelling chores, every time she bent over or began to climb the stairs letting slip - for all her courage - a groan of exhaustion or a pained sigh.
Towards the end of the week, certainly by Smith's Friday, she had taken to her bed, becoming a spectral, ever-dressing-gowned figure, occasionally to be glimpsed on the staircase or preparing starchy snacks in the kitchen. Sometimes you could hear her cruising round the top floor and making descents to the bathroom. Sometimes, in the early evenings, when Norman was out, she would come down and have a cup of something with me. On these occasions I always tried to look tranquil, approachable, full of dear-Marje wisdom; with no results.
Saturday week, nearly a fortnight after my arrival, six days after Norman's great pots-and-pans speech, I was off to the Tate Gallery, and had gone upstairs for a quick tup in the sitting-room (just to keep the cold out). I stood looking down the square, shivering as the mouthfuls of warm gin began their priestlike task. Jenny's voice, both languid and anxious, came from the bedroom next door: 'Noorman ... ?' So I po
pped my head brightly into the room and said that it wasn't in fact Norman, but me, and asked if I could get her anything.
Five minutes later I was trying to slot a tea-mug in among the rubble on her bedside tray. The room smelled of make-up and breasts: half-full coffee-cups, overflowing ashtrays, dank eiderdown; a collapsed pile of magazines on the floor; beneath the dressing-table Bina and Tiki batted empty lipstick tubes. However, Jenny, in red cotton nightie, bloomed - warm-cheeked, nice greasy skin, lustrous hair, bringing to my notice once again the fact that I would not be averse to seeing her in the nude.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and tried asking her how she was. Jenny drew her knees up into a supine crouch.
'Fine,' she mouthed, as a mascara tear welled up out of her puffy right eye. She sniffed, and reached for her mug with an apologetic smile.
I felt a lump in my throat - of grief, I was pretty sure, not phlegm. I opened my mouth to speak, but there was nothing there.
'Just tired,' said Jenny.
We had both wanted to talk, I think; I don't know why we didn't.
Spent a whole day getting ready for my Monday tea date with Rachel. I shouldn't think I'm being very representative here. Indeed, such deadpan contingency-meeting must largely be the preserve of the over-thirties. Yet, given the frail, heapy, anxious teenager...
Press-ups, knee-bends, and further sexual callisthenics. Complete body-service (sorry about all this): pits clipped, toes manicured, pubic hair permed and styled, each tooth brushed, tongue scraped, nose pruned. (The next day I would have time only to run back after school and scorch my rig under the hot tap.) I read two early Edna O'Briens and annotated my sex-technique handbooks. Horlicks at nine o'clock.
Nor did Rachel stand me up.
That afternoon, over boiling pink tea, ruddered by perceptive questions, encouraging smiles and apt generalizations from myself, Rachel Noyes told the story of her life.
It read like dingily enlightened 'sixties fiction. She wasn't Jewish at all (thereby cutting out any You-marry-white-boy? gambits). Born in Paris nineteen years earlier (one month older than me). Of course, her father had dutifully 'gone off' when Rachel was ten ('He just couldn't be bothered any more, I suppose'), and her mother (who 'had some money of her own', let's be thankful for small mercies) moved to London almost straightway.
For what it's worth:
'I spent most of the time with Nanny Rees when I wasn't away at school. She was lovely. I still go and see her in Fulham. Mummy had to let her go when I was sixteen. Huh, I cried for a week. Then Mummy married Harry, which was probably a good thing because he's sweet and she was getting terribly lonely by herself. She knew him for ages before, and I suppose they were lovers for quite a long time. He's so sweet -you'd love him, everyone does. He's a very steady ... sane sort of person, and Mummy needs that because she's a bit neurotic about some things. She can get herself into awful states. I don't think she ever quite got over Daddy. He was such a bastard to her. Then they [her mum and sponger Harry] got the house in Hampstead and I left Lawnglades and here I am.'
I asked about her real father.
'I see him every now and then. He's an artist, still lives in Paris, in le seizième [full accent] with his "mistress". They haven't married. I stayed with him for two weeks this summer. She was there. I liked her. She's a sculptress, much younger than him. I can't see why he still insists on seeing me, he's only beastly to me whenever I do see him. He keeps on ringing up home when he's drunk and shouts at me.'
I asked what sort of thing he shouted.
'Oh - why haven't I written, when am I coming over again, am I getting my A Levels out of the way. And he says nasty things about Mummy, that she's a liar and things. But that's only natural, isn't it? - for divorced parents to be at each other's throats over the children. There's bound to be rivalry ... don't you think?'
I did.
'He rang last week, actually. Wanted to know whether I was on the pill or not, can you believe. I said, "Look, mate, if I get pregnant I won't come running to you!" That shut him up.'
I betted that it had. The pill. How sexy.
'We never mention him at home. No point. That's one of the sweetest things about Harry. Never mentions him. We're all very lucky to have him [Harry], stops us all from going crazy. His wife left him, too, so they're rather a. good pair. She left him with Arnold, when he [Arnold] was fourteen, which is a terribly difficult age to leave a boy. Have you met Archie?'
'No, I haven't.' I didn't say that I had seen 'Archie' at the party and already nourished much hatred for him.
She looked at me as if in reappraisal, almost certainly the result of being allowed to talk about herself for so long.
'You must come up and meet them.'
I fluttered my eyelashes.
'Shall we go?' she asked.
I thought for a second that this was a gentle, rather Whit-manesque invitation to come and meet them right away. But it wasn't. I picked up the tab. Meanwhile Rachel blew her nose into a ragged tissue and put on some camp round sunglasses: both actions made her nose look big and red.
As we left the café and idled over the road to the bus-stop I felt a listless bewilderment come over me. Rachel's character was about as high-powered as her syntax. Where had I got the idea she was clever? Geoffrey? No. Geoffrey's sister? No. Me? Yes. What sort of mumbo-jumbo world, I asked myself, do you think you're living in, bub?
Seemingly, in one afternoon, the entire Rachel Papers rendered defunct. All that scholarship ... wasted, utterly wasted.
'Don't you even like Blake?' I complained.
'What?'
'I was wondering if you liked Blake, because if you do I thought we might go and look at his paintings at the Tate next Sunday, if you haven't already seen them.'
I had, of course, planned to say this. But it sounded very flat now. I wasn't stroking her shoulder, nor was I staring at her in the compelling way outlined in my hip-pocket note-pad. I wasn't even looking at her. I said, 'I just thought you might like to ... I'm not...'
Her bus appeared round the corner. I stayed where I was while Rachel edged forward with the queue. I wasn't going to get anywhere. My disappointment and fatigue seemed to prompt a loud groan, and I would have uttered it too, if Rachel hadn't suddenly been saying:
'Oh Charles, I'd love to, really, but ... things are so complicated.'
She glanced accusingly at the bus. She looked fretful, importunate, almost bouncing up and down, like a little girl wanting to pee. It seemed totally spontaneous. I moved closer, intending to seize her hand with involuntary earnestness. But they were both in her pockets.
'It's DeForest. He's coming to lunch. He might stay.'
'Oh well.'
'But ring me. No do. Will you?'
A stocky old woman with what looked like a triangular polythene bag on her head shouldered me brutally out of the way at this point and joined Rachel on the crowded platform.
'You never know,' I shouted. Irony and blood returned to my features.
Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Bayswater Road.
Very well: demonically mechanical cars; potent solid living trees; unreal distant-seeming buildings; blotchy extraterrestrial wayfarers; Intense Consciousness of Being; pathetic fallacy plus omnipresent déjà vu, cosmic angst, metaphysical fear, a feeling both claustrophobic and agoraphobic, the teenager's religion. The Rev. Northrop Frye fetchingly terms it 'queasy apocalyptic foreboding'. An Angus Wilson character terms it 'adolescent egotism', thereby driving me almost to suicide last Christmas. Is that all it fucking is, I thought. For the question that interested me about this feeling was not 'What is it?' so much as 'Does it matter? Is it worth anything?' Because if there isn't a grain of genuine humility there, it's the electrodes for me. Does it simply get weaker and weaker, like one's sense of uniqueness? Or do some of us hang on to it? Then, I suppose, I'd have to throw in my lot with all those twitchy twenty-five-year-
olds I had noticed about the place, the characters who find egocentricity numinous in itself. Intermittently articulate, something held back, a third eye hovering above their heads, intrigued and forever gripped by the contrast between them and everything else. Look round: everything, except you, is (wait for it) quite unlike what you are, altogether dissimilar, a totally different kettle of fish. Yet this is what interests them most about the observable world. Well, I'll have to make up my mind at midnight, twenty and all, one way or the other. How about you ?
I telephoned Rachel the next evening. We chatted like friends.
When I brought up Blake she spoke of that engraver with enthusiasm and surprising familiarity. Obviously, if we did go, I would have to mug up on him.
'Yes, but there's at least as much blank fear in the Milton paintings as there is spiritual afflatus.' I paused, counted down from three. 'And the point is, will you be able to come?'
'Charles, I feel—'
'Hang on, you'll have to speak up. I've got some people here.' I slammed the door, so that the sounds of the radio-play on the kitchen wireless were reduced to an underground rumble. That's better. Yes?'
Her tone was no less firm. 'Charles, I feel rather uneasy about the whole thing. DeForest is coming on Sunday and I can't just ... you know.'
'You do want to come, don't you ? Well then, don't worry about that. I'll think up some amazing lie for you to tell him.'
That's just it. I won't... tell him a lie.'
Oh, for Christ's sake. 'Oh, I see. Couldn't you just sort of say you were going to the Blake and not with who ?'
'Well, we went together not long ago. And it would be unlikely that I'd get it into my head to go again.'
Surely there was no telling what could get into that battered hold-all. I went hang-dog.
'I suppose I could say I wanted to see the Gray Illustrations,' she said.
'Which are the grey illustrations?'
'The illustrations to Gray's poems.'