The drive to Marge’s did not improve Gavin’s state of mind. Mrs Lamb was too excited, and as the treat, so to speak, was now over, her regrets took the form of strong criticism of Gavin for not warning her that her Ladyship was arriving, until after she had arrived, and of her husband for sticking to his ritual of the lavatory after breakfast no matter what.
‘Anybody would think you was nothing but some sort of machine,’ she scolded, ‘and what was I to do once I realized you were in there, liable to come out at any moment with the toilet flushing? I ask you!’ Mr Lamb, in the back of the car, murmured something harmlessly defensive, but this only made things what they usually became – worse – when he did that.
‘And we all know you go in there just to read the Sports pages. It’s not as though you have a Call – it’s just habit.’
‘Oh, Mum! It all went off very well. She enjoyed herself.’
But this was no good either, for the simple reason that when she was upset she was always a move ahead of them on the wrong track.
‘There you go! Taking your father’s side!’
‘He wasn’t!’
‘Wasn’t what? Who wasn’t?’
‘Him,’ enunciated Mr Lamb with ominous clarity, a sure sign that he was heating up. ‘Gavin. He wasn’t taking my side. He was merely remarking.’
‘I don’t see what he has to do with it at all. I was just remarking that when you have people to stay – whoever they may be – you don’t go locking yourself in the toilet the moment they want to say good-bye. It’s not done. People do not-usually-do-it,’ she finished.
There was a dank silence. Then she said: ‘But, if people want to be common, I suppose there’s no stopping them. Poor Lady Munday.’
Gavin said: ‘Actually, Mum, she’s not Lady Munday. She’s not married, so she must be Lady Minerva.’ This proved a happy deflection, and Gavin elaborated. Mrs Lamb, after some gallantly casual rumination, decided that Lady Minerva must be the daughter of an Earl rather than a Duke! ‘Not that there’s any difference. Earls and Dukes, they’re all of a piece, aren’t they? I must say, I was a bit surprised at her costume. I expect it’s a very different story when she’s at home. She never wore those clothes to the party, did she?’
‘No, she didn’t.’
She turned to Mr Lamb in the back as a conciliatory gesture, but she turned the wrong way and simply came face to face with the bear in his lurex sunsuit who was lolling beside her husband . . . ‘I told you, he’s too big to wrap up,’ she cried. ‘You promised you’d bring back some of that polystyrene from the works.’
‘I’m sorry about that. I didn’t understand there was a rush. Thought you were keeping him till Christmas.’
‘Christmas!’ she shrieked. ‘Now, do you think I’d be wearing my fingers to the bone trying to dress a bear with all that time ahead of me? It’s for Judy’s birthday in case you’d forgotten.’
‘She’s a big girl for a bear,’ Mr Lamb remarked.
‘No, she’s not. It’s not a bear you take to bed with you. It’s a bear you keep sitting about. She can take it to her new home when she’s married.’
‘How old is she? Nine, isn’t it?’
‘She will be nine next Tuesday. And you ought to give her something, Gavin: you are her godfather, after all, not to speak of being her uncle.’
‘I’ll give her some cash.’ He remembered how very much better cash had been than most of the things they thought of to give him.
‘Please yourself.’ But she was deflected, not to say mollified.
Marge and Ken lived at Potters Bar in a very new house. They had started married life in a flat, but with the advent of Stephen and Judy they needed more room. Ken worked for a small electronics firm: he was an engineer with political views of which Mr Lamb strongly disapproved. Marge had been a schoolteacher before she married; had given it up for five years after Stephen and then Judy were born (during which time she had fostered several children), and now worked in a small unit that taught educationally sub-normal pupils. Gavin admired his sister; she also made him feel inferior. She had such energy, and was so dedicated to helping other people; she felt, he thought, that everything was simple if only you went at it hard enough, whereas he felt that everything was so difficult that he hardly dared to move in any direction.
Ken was polishing his car when they arrived and Stephen was helping him. They both stopped momentarily at the sight of the Lambs: then Ken said something to his son, and Stephen polished harder than ever. Gavin had the impression that they had arrived too early – as they usually did. Mrs Lamb was so anxious that they should leave on time that they ended up by leaving long before it.
‘Polishing your car, I see.’ Mr Lamb was not noted for the originality of his conversation.
‘That’s right . . . Stephen, say hullo to Fa-fa and Gran.’
‘Hullo, Fa-fa. Hullo, Gran.’ But he went on polishing.
‘Stephen!’
He stopped polishing and presented his sweaty little face with its beaky nose and bulging forehead to Mrs Lamb. He was a complete (though smaller) replica of his father, Gavin thought.
‘Hullo, Uncle Gavin.’
‘How are you?’
Stephen looked at him for a moment as though he was mad, and then answered: ‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t be cheeky, Stephen,’ said Mrs Lamb, but she hardly meant it.
‘You’ll find Marge in the house,’ said Ken encouragingly. He wanted to finish off the car.
The house smelled of roast pork and Marge, in a butcher’s apron, was in the kitchen emptying the washing-up machine. Judy, also in a butcher’s apron that reached her ankles, was rolling a small piece of grey and disheartened-looking pastry.
‘I’m making pastry,’ she said immediately. ‘I’m making pastry for afters for lunch today . . . I’m making it as hard as I can.’
‘Hullo, Mum. Dad. Gavin. You’re looking smart.’ Marge straightened up from the machine, with a wire tray full of cutlery, to kiss her parents. She wore her hair in a pony-tail like her daughter. Then she gave Gavin a little hug.
‘I’ll put those away for you,’ said Mrs Lamb who had taken off her outdoor coat in a twinkling.
‘No, Mum, you go into the lounge; there’s a nice fire and Ken’s put the sherry ready. And there’s a bottle of Bass for you, Dad.’
‘Mustn’t keep that waiting.’
‘Can I put lemon curd on it?’
‘I told you – it’s all gone. You’ll have to use the strawberry jam.’
‘No, I can’t! I can’t ever use that! You know what Stephen said!’
‘I’m sure he didn’t mean it.’ Marge was hunting in the cupboard and now produced a pot of jam. ‘There you are.’
‘Accident jam! It’s made of people. I can’t possibly use it!’
‘No, Judy, that’s not a nice thing to say!’ Mrs Lamb’s reproofs were diluted by her doting, and her grandchildren never took them seriously.
‘There’s jam all over the road after a bad accident. That’s what he said. He said he’d seen it! He said— ’
‘Will you have marmalade then?’ Another pot was proffered.
‘Don’t like hot marmalade. How do they scrape it up, Mum? Off of the road, how do they?’
‘Off the, Judy – not off of.’
‘Fa-fa says off of. Sometimes he says eff off to be quicker.’
‘That’s enough, now.’
Mrs Lamb, who had met Marge’s eye, added: ‘Little girls don’t use the same language as men.’
‘Course they do or they couldn’t talk. Mum, could I have ketchup in it?’
‘Don’t be silly, Judy. You’ll use this nice jam, and if you don’t get it in the oven quickly, it won’t be done for lunch.’
Judy’s brilliant pink and beaky little face (she was like her father too) went scarlet. ‘You said if Stephen was allowed to wash the car, I could cook with you. You said it!’
Marge, who had spread the jam in the middle of the grey pastry and was now rolling it up, said: ‘And, next week, Stephen will be doing the cooking, and you shall clean the car with Dad. Now wash your hands and take Uncle Gavin into the lounge for a drink.’
Gavin, who had been leaning mindlessly against the fridge during the pastry dialogue, came to with a start. He had been, as people who dislike abstraction would have said, ‘miles away’. Actually it was not very many miles or even hours. He realized that he had been wondering about Joan. Presumably alone in that huge flat littered with all the ashtrays and chicken bones and wilting flowers – or perhaps the Filipinos cleared everything up overnight? Then he had discovered that he was wondering whether it would be more lonely to wake up amid the refuse of a party, or somewhere scoured clean of any signs of one. But probably if you were lonely you regarded your scene – whatever it was – as merely ironical emphasis: tidiness would mock you, wreckage would underline it. She must be very lonely, or she wouldn’t have talked to him – of all people – like that. If the thought didn’t make him feel so frightened, he would like to have seen her again.
‘Gavin!’
‘All right, Mum.’ He followed her obediently into the lounge, where his father was standing in front of one of the picture windows with a glass of beer, staring wistfully at the blank television screen. These Sunday lunches oft en meant that he missed the football. ‘Here we are then,’ he said with an heroic attempt at sociability.
‘Like a drink, Mum?’
Mrs Lamb parked her glossy best handbag on the glass-topped coffee table and looked proudly at the cocktail cabinet.
‘A very small vermooth,’ she said, as usual. Gavin smiled to himself as he poured his mother’s drink, not forgetting the maraschino cherry from the Heinz jar and the wooden stick with which to spear it. One of Mrs Lamb’s greatest pleasures in life was these regular encounters with her daughter’s luxurious and elegant way of going on. A drinks cabinet, drinks before meals in small glasses, was to her living proof of her Marge having bettered herself; having, as her mother would most innocently have put it, taken advantage of her advantages; that who had given her, but Mrs Lamb?
‘Here you are, Mum.’
‘I’ll have a cigarette with it.’ She settled on to the hairy, tweed-covered settee, crossed her sharp little ankles and opened her handbag.
There were sounds of altercation in the kitchen followed by the fleeting sight of Judy running stampingly upstairs. Mr Lamb took his pipe out of his mouth and said, ‘Temper.’
‘None of your business,’ retorted Mrs Lamb sharply, so he put his pipe back in his mouth.
Marge came in: she still wore her butcher’s apron over what Gavin recognized as her Sunday winter dress – cream-coloured jersey with a cowl neck . . . ‘Everybody got drinks?’ she asked. ‘Gav – what about you?’
‘Let me do you first.’
‘I’ll have a sherry. She’s lost her plate: she will take it out for meals, and then she never knows where she’s put it . . . Whatever’s happened to Stephen and Ken? They’ve been out with that car for hours.’
She was restless, like her mother, but in a more sophisticated manner. Gavin saw her eyes run over the room to make sure nothing was out of place, but on the other hand there were things in it that could be; the Sunday papers neatly ranged on the table by the other picture window – as they might be in a dentist’s waiting room; her sewing, which hung in a Greek bag from the arm of her rocking chair; the plant-watering can by the Magicoal in the fireplace. She took the drink Gavin proffered and sat on the arm of the settee the other end from her mother. She had good legs and always wore rather daring stockings – webbed, or striped, or dotted – today they were sheer and dark brown. ‘We can’t have lunch yet,’ she said, ‘we’re waiting for Muriel.’ She avoided Gavin’s eye as she said this.
Mrs Lamb cast a lightning glance at Gavin, and blowing out her smoke – she never inhaled – said: ‘Is that Muriel Sutton? Your friend? Still working in that office, is she? The one who was bridesmaid at your wedding? The one who lives in New Barnet? The one whose mother had that nasty accident?’ No check could have been more thorough, Gavin thought gloomily, and of course she knew all the time.
‘That’s right, Mum. Stephen! Have you washed your hands?’
‘I couldn’t. Judy’s in the bathroom. She’s crying. She won’t come out . . .’
‘Use the downstairs one.’
‘Can’t. Dad’s in it.’
‘Gavin! That reminds me. I’ve left that B-E-A-R in the car.’
‘I’ll get it.’
As he left the room, Stephen said: ‘You got a bear in your car?’
‘You’re so sharp you’ll prick yourself,’ said Mrs Lamb adoringly.
‘I don’t mind Judy having a bear. She’s only a girl.’
Needless to say, Gavin had just levered the purple-clad bear from the car and was trudging up the crazy paving with it in his arms when he heard Muriel behind him.
‘Yoo hoo!’ she said. It was a greeting on a par with musical chimes at the front door, Gavin thought: utterly maddening and in this case unanswerable.
‘Hullo,’ he said. He had to turn round to say it. Muriel was dressed in electric blue with fuchsia trim and high heels.
‘Aren’t you the wonderful uncle? What a lovely teddy!’
‘It’s my mother’s present for Judy.’
‘Well – I didn’t think it was for you. You’re just a little bit old for teddies, aren’t you? I hope I’m not late. I couldn’t catch the first bus that came along for reasons which I’ll unfold later. Oh dear!’ She gave an operatic shiver, but Gavin was close enough to her now to see that she was actually much too hot. ‘I got some chockies for her,’ she said. Gavin was close enough to her now to realize that she smelled partly of Evening in Paris.
‘After you.’
‘Thanks.’ She tripped ahead of him, reiterating her version of a Red Indian, or was it a cowboy? Fortunately, Ken emerged from the Gents off the hall and, while she was greeting him, Gavin was able to escape ahead of her to the lounge to deposit the bear. This meant, however, that, as self-imposed barman, he was bound to offer Muriel a drink (Ken had mysteriously not come into the lounge – what on earth could he be doing?). Anyway . . .
‘What would you like to drink?’ he said to Muriel, not looking at her which didn’t help, because she teetered across the Afghan rug until she was not shoulder to shoulder exactly, more bosom to shoulder blade.
‘Let me see,’ she said. The others, Gavin heard, had begun to talk about gardening, and although he knew it was paranoid of him there seemed to be something conspiratorial about that: as though they were throwing him and Muriel together.
‘You can have sherry, or gin, or red Cinzano,’ he began tonelessly; ‘or any combination of those that you feel like.’
‘I’d like a tiny little gin and tonic, Gavin, please!’
And, while he was pouring it out wondering irritably what she meant by tiny, she said – and now she was being conspiratorial: ‘I can’t wait for you to tell me about the party.’
‘What party?’
‘The party. The one you went to last night. The one that was the reason why you couldn’t come to dinner.’
‘Oh, that. It was okay. Nothing much.’ Two pictures – one of Spiro astride Winthrop in Joan’s bathroom, and one of Minnie sitting up naked in Joan’s bed – shot on to his mind’s screen, and he blinked them out as he added: ‘It went on rather late.’
She gave a knowing laugh. ‘Got a bit of a hangover, have you? I thought you looked a mite peaky.’
Then he was saved by Ken who helped himself to a glass of cider: he played games and never drank spirits. Muriel went over to Mrs Lamb who was levering the bear’s joints in an attempt to get him to sit upright instead of lolling which had always been his wont. She kissed Marge, who was so anxious about her size and single state that she responded – for her – with undue warmth, and said ‘Good morning’ to Mr Lamb who took his pipe out of his mouth to say ‘Pleased to meet you’ although he did not look it. Stephen came in and said:
‘Mum, it’s in the goldfish tank and she can’t get it out.’
‘Why can’t she?’
‘She’s afraid of the catfish. She’s only a girl,’ he explained to his mother.
‘Well – you get it out for her and tell her to come on down for lunch, if she wants any. And, Stephen! I’ve had enough of this “only a girl” business. And wash your hands ! Little male chauvinist!’ she exclaimed after he had left the room.
‘It’s only a phase,’ said Mrs Lamb. She did not know in the least what Marge meant, but felt bound to defend her beloved grandson. ‘He is a boy, after all,’ she reminded her daughter.
‘Men are all the same,’ declared Muriel. She looked challengingly round the room for opposition to this remark and Marge instantly said: ‘Ken isn’t like that, are you, Ken? You believe in equality between the sexes, don’t you? You don’t think women are inferior to men, do you? I mean, you think that we should do jobs just like men, and men should do their share of domestic chores?’
‘That’s right,’ said Ken stoutly, but he looked bored, or rather, Gavin thought, he looked as though he was afraid he might be going to be bored . . .
‘That’s all right then. I’ll go and dish up.’
There was a silence after she left the room, but Mr Lamb’s mind was almost audibly ticking over, and eventually he said:
‘You don’t get many women bricklayers.’
‘Of course you don’t,’ exclaimed Muriel soothingly. ‘The idea!’
‘And you don’t get many masons, either.’
‘We know that!’ said Mrs Lamb sharply, she wasn’t quite sure which way the conversation was going now, but she’d had great practice at putting Mr Lamb in his place.
‘And, between you and me, I’d be surprised if I met a woman plasterer.’
‘I should – jolly – well – think you – would,’ said Muriel almost as though she was humouring a mad child.
‘That’s not the point, though, is it really? I mean women haven’t had a chance to do those jobs – up to now. In the Soviet Union they do. In the Soviet Union they do all the same jobs as men.’
‘They don’t get to be President, do they?’ said Mrs Lamb with unexpected acumen. ‘They don’t get a chance at the top jobs – oh dear me, no, I don’t suppose there are many Russian women Admirals or Bishops or . . . or Heads of Firms. Name me a Russian woman Admiral!’ she demanded. Mr Lamb was not deflected.
‘And joiners now. You don’t get many women joiners, I wouldn’t say.’
‘Lunch is ready!’ called Marge.
They went into the dining room for lunch.
They had finished the pork, and were demolishing damson pie with double cream (Marge was a great bottler of fruit). Conversation had been – not exactly sticky – but exhaustive. Mr Lamb, once wound up, was hard to stop: he had run through every conceivable job in the building trade where it would be funny if you found a woman. Mrs Lamb who sensed that she was on to a good thing with the Russians had retaliated: in her case, she was not bound by a trade, but able to range over every profession she could muster, and they had been many. Gavin had mentally gone through all the Arts and surprised himself by finding how few women painters, sculptors or composers – even poets – resulted. He had just got to Berthe Morisot, and on to the notion that the Impressionists painted a good deal from a woman’s point of view – take Vuillard’s interiors for instance – but before he could give them as examples he was jolted out of his private mind by an entirely new hazard: Ken had made some scathing reference to the English class system. Usually, this salvo – shot across Mrs Lamb’s bows as it were – would have resulted in her fiery defence of the Royal Family, with Gavin broadening the argument into popular myth, and the concept of most people requiring a figurehead, anyone from a god to a pop star, etc. (there were several well-worn jungle paths trodden each Sunday by different combinations of protagonists), but this time Ken had gone too far, or rather had gone exactly the right distance, to provide Mrs Lamb with the opening that Gavin immediately realized she had been waiting for ever since they’d got out of the car.
‘It might interest you to know,’ she said, ‘that there’s no difference between Them and Us at all. As I happen to know. At first hand,’ she paused grandly.
Everybody looked at her. ‘That nice girl you brought home last night, Gavin. Lady – what was her name – ever so nice she was – Lady Minerva Munday!’
There was a satisfactory silence spoiled by Mr Lamb saying:
‘You wouldn’t catch her doing any making good.’
‘We’re not talking about the building trade, now, Fred. That subject is closed. We’re on to something else.’
Marge said: ‘Goodness me, Gavin, what have you been up to?’
It was her nature and practice to defuse any situation that she felt was becoming what she called ‘personal’, but this time there was a touch of genuine curiosity in her voice.
‘Nothing much.’ Gavin felt peevish – he would have said bored, but his face was heating up – particularly as he felt Muriel’s currant eyes on his face . . .
‘Gavin wasn’t up to anything,’ Mrs Lamb retorted sharply: ‘he simply brought a friend home from a party – in this case an Earl’s daughter – and she was just like anybody else. There-was-not-the smallest difference. Of course she was very young; Gavin put her in the lounge and she slept on the settee with her parrot.’
There was another, short, silence, then Marge, looking anxiously at Muriel, said: ‘Well I never!’
Muriel, who had just discovered that she had eight damson stones on her plate (Gavin knew this because he had quietly counted them too), said: ‘You can get a nasty disease from parrots: I’m surprised Lady What’s-her-name ‘s family allow that sort of goings-on. It sounds distinctly funny to me, don’t you think so, Marge?’
‘Of course her family have a deer park and estates to keep up, and naturally they’re finding that things are not what they used to be.’
‘You don’t catch me having trouble with my deer park.’
Marge cast a look at her husband that was a marital compound of telegram and gramophone record. Gavin translated it roughly as: ‘Watch out! You know you’ve always promised to shut up about politics with Mum and Dad. It’s only once a fortnight, after all. You can’t expect them to change their ways at their age . . . Please, Ken . . .’
‘Anyway, speak as you find and I found her a nice, natural, young lady – just like anybody else.’
Ken winked at his wife so that part of it was going to be all right, but Mr Lamb, who was nettled at being made to change the subject, said: ‘You don’t like everyone. I’ve known you be quite sharp with some people I could mention – ’ but Judy interrupted with:
‘Does she live in a castle, Gran?’
‘I don’t know, dear, I didn’t think to ask her. I expect she does.’
Muriel, in whom a variety of emotions had been raging, said:
‘Well, Gavin, I think you’re a very dark horse – I really do. No wonder you said you weren’t free. We had a little plan,’ she explained to the table, ‘we were going to go to the pictures and have a little supper afterwards, but I quite see now why it all fell through.’
Gavin was so incensed by this version of his arrangements that all pity for Muriel deserted him and he said: ‘I had a previous engagement. A party with my friend Harry in London. I just happened to meet this girl at it – ’
‘Mrs Wilkinson at number 92. I’ve never heard you say a good word about her.’
This deflected Mrs Lamb, which was both a good and a bad thing. She would not in the least mind Mrs Wilkinson only she was common, fed her family on tins and dyed her hair. And she had gone to Majorca leaving Ginger to fend for himself – not at all a nice thing to do. Marge went to make coffee and tea; the children got down and mercifully Mrs Lamb remembered the bear in the lounge. Gavin decided to go and help Marge as a way of escaping from Muriel, who had begun to stack plates. Mr Lamb and Ken were left. Gavin heard his father say ‘Women!’ as he left the room.
Marge was putting cups and saucers on a tray. ‘You’re not going to marry this girl, are you?’
‘Of course not! I only met her last night. All this fuss!’
‘I thought not.’ She looked relieved. ‘I could see that Muriel was ever so upset.’
‘Look, Marge, I’m not going to marry her either. I wish you’d stop trying to make something out of her and me. It’s a non-starter.’
‘She said you were wonderful to her when you did her hair.’
‘It’s my job to be wonderful. With hair, I mean. I don’t want to marry anyone.’
‘Oh well – ’ She gave way so easily that he had a nasty feeling that they were back to square one (in this case Muriel) and he was right, because almost immediately she went on: ‘I mean – if you don’t particularly fancy anyone in particular, you might as well consider Muriel. I mean, Gav dear, you can’t spend all your life living with Mum and Dad. It’s not as though you’re a homosexual.’
‘If I was, I’d be out on my own in a flat, you bet.’
‘A home – kids, surely you’d like all that. It would make all the difference to you.’
‘I don’t want all the difference made to me. I’m happy as I am. Just because married life suits you so well, you think everyone ought to have it.’
‘Of course it isn’t always easy.’
‘It isn’t a question of ease,’ he said, and immediately started wondering whether perhaps it wasn’t – just that. He watched her pouring boiling water on to instant coffee and a pot of tea and thought: Perhaps I haven’t got the energy to be bothered enough with people; the other idea of being too easily bothered by them instantly redressed the balance. It was as though everything about him was designed to keep him inanimate – poised for ever up a tree, on the brink . . . ‘I don’t find things particularly easy,’ he said to Marge, ‘but I just don’t feel like marrying anyone. And of course,’ he finished shrewdly, ‘I can’t marry someone if I don’t love them.’
Her face cleared. Marge believed in love quite as much as she believed in marriage . . . ‘I’ve told her she should cut down on her starches,’ she remarked with apparent irrelevance . . . She gave him a quick little pat on the shoulder. ‘Anyway, I don’t know what Ken would do without you on these Sunday jamborees. He does find it difficult to associate with people who are politically unaware; and it’s too early for him to show Dad his vegetables.’
He picked up the now heavily laden tray for her and carried it into the lounge; a scene packed with the familiar discomforts. Mr Lamb and Stephen were crouched before the television which contained its usual quota of steaming men trotting about and periodically hugging one another; Mrs Lamb was sulking because the chocolates had taken precedence over the bear. ‘Poor Teddy, then,’ she was saying. ‘Who doesn’t love you then? Oh, turn that thing down, Fred, for goodness’ sake!’ Marge began pouring tea and coffee on these troubled waters, and her sheer good nature prevailed. Presently she sent Gavin in search of Ken whom he found in his workshop repairing a portable radio.
‘Hullo, mate.’
‘She told me to bring you some coffee. Are those your new speakers?’
‘Yup. Like to hear them?’
‘I would.’ They settled down to a delightful demonstration of Ken’s equipment.
Going home was not as usual because they had to give Muriel a lift. Mrs Lamb, who was wound up by the excitements of the day, seemed to have taken against Muriel, who was, or seemed to be, quite unaware of this. Her jealousy took a masochistic form: she plied Mrs Lamb with questions about her aristocratic guest. Gavin, like his father, remained safely silent.
‘If she stayed the night suddenly without any warning I suppose she was still in her party clothes? She must have felt ever so funny at breakfast.’
‘She was not funny at breakfast. Naturally she brought a change of clothing with her. What an idea!’ she added.
‘Which Earl did you say she was the daughter of?’
‘I didn’t say.’
‘I expect Gavin knows, don’t you, Gavin?’
‘Naturally, Gavin wouldn’t go about asking her!’
‘On the skinny side – she seemed to me.’
Nobody had expected Mr Lamb to speak and at first nobody answered him. Then Muriel remarked: ‘Oh well, these very young girls think it’s fashionable to be skinny, don’t they? For some reason they seem to think it makes them attractive.’
Gavin, who was driving, thanked God she wasn’t in front with him, and as an afterthought thanked Him even more fervently for not making him have to drive her home alone. If he’d been driving her home alone . . .
At peace, at last, in his room, he cast himself on his bed and allowed depression – like a sea fog – to approach and envelop him. He was absolutely no good at life: either he was scared stiff, or he was depressed. Or else he was just chugging along, doing what was expected of him – like at work. Other people were always urging him to change – to do something different. Instinct and behaviour patterns were what people admired in other forms of life – in their own, it seemed, that instinct was minimal, and you were supposed to discover your own behaviour patterns simply in order to change them. He remembered Evelyn Waugh in a television interview saying that he preferred people he knew well – they were totally predictable and therefore boring, but it meant that he didn’t have to listen to them. Then he thought of Sartre saying, ‘Hell is other people.’ Amazing: he remembered that he had thought at the time that Sartre should have said, ‘Hell could be other people.’ But of course, as a remark, that didn’t sound anything like so interesting: it hadn’t got that sweeping, devastating neatness about it that would catch people who would then feel it must be true because they could remember it. It occurred to him that other people urged him to change in their direction whatever that might be: Marge’s was marriage and a family, Harry’s was queerdom and a steady alliance with another chap. ‘Be like me so that I can understand you better’ stuff. Or perhaps it was in order that he should understand them better? He started thinking about Minnie – wondering about her, where on earth she had driven off to. She had written his number on the bonnet of her car – it would have to rain an awful lot for that to be erased. Anyway, she knew where he lived; she could find him if she wanted to, whether he wanted her to or not.
He thought he wanted to sleep, but as soon as he had drawn some curtains, pulled his pillow out from under the Persian coverlet and shut his eyes he realized that he hadn’t taken out his lenses; then, having removed them, he had the nasty feeling that his mind’s eye was simply lying in wait with a whole lot of pictures to unnerve him. He’d have to go through the awful scene in the bathroom, and then the row with Spiro in Joan’s flat – then Joan finding her bed in disarray . . . In view of how her party had ended, he decided that he wanted to write to Joan. He sat up, put his lenses back and started hunting through his pack of picture postcards for the ingeniously appropriate one. He realized that, away from her, her physical appearance predominated. The cards kept being cruelly wrong. The Duke of Urbino, Soutine at his most freakishly grotesque, Lautrec, and somehow worse – Renoir, Ramsay, Gainsborough, all depicting their fashionable norm . . . He selected a Vuillard interior – a pot of primula poised or posed by Vuillard in what looked like his studio. It was one of those pictures where the composition was so pleasing that you didn’t bother to dissect it. ‘Dear Joan,’ he wrote: then he paused for a long time – selecting and discarding things he wanted to say to her. In the end he wrote: ‘Thank you for the party. Meeting you was far the best bit.’ Then he had to think about whether he had ever told her his name – decided that she knew it anyway, and, if she did not, she would still know that it was him writing to her, and signed the postcard, Gavin. His writing was small and very neat and clear but the lines always sloped downwards however hard he tried to keep them level. While he was writing the card, he knew that he would like to see her again, but he didn’t feel he could possibly put his address or telephone number on it as that would look as though he wanted to see her again. He would have to get the address from Harry, but he didn’t feel like ringing Harry up, in case Winthrop had walked out and Harry would want him to go round to hear about it. Because then, of course, he’d have to go. If you spent most of your life on other people’s terms, naturally you had to cut down on the life, or too many things would happen to you that you didn’t want. He decided to play the Somervell ‘Maud’ cycle; then, after one side, he decided to read Tennyson at the same time; then he couldn’t find his Tennyson. This led him to the beginning of a vast new rearrangement of his books, and then it was time for cold tongue and salad and ‘Mastermind’. By eleven o’clock, the books looked as though they were in a worse muddle than ever – partly because it was impossible to move them around as much as he’d decided to do without reading any of them. He popped down to the kitchen and made himself a cup of verbena and peppermint tea (somebody had told him that it helped clear the blood).
He had a bath; all through it he was looking forward to being in bed: in a bout of delicious fantasy where everything happened as he chose, before he lapsed into unconsciousness. But when he finally settled himself between the sheets and put out his lamp things simply wouldn’t go right, as they usually did. It was as though he was trapped in some awful maze: he could hear her voice, a little, unknown way ahead of him – sometimes even catch a glimpse of her bare ankle, some gossamer shreds of her Pre-Raphaelite dress vanishing round a corner ahead of him, but round the corner turned into a dead end, and behind him scuttled Minnie or pounded Muriel – he was always having to double back faster to new turnings in order to lose them. Then, in a silence that several times he thought was perhaps the beginning of the real dream he sought, he would hear her distant laugh and in the (more magic) silence afterwards would imagine her chiselled mouth curving in secret, benign amusement – would hear birds calling in the high dark hedges, but he could not tell her name. If only he could see over the hedges, he would find her, and so with each step he took he began to leave the ground – with each leaping movement he began to fly a little and, in the middle of each flight, he could see over the hedge – once, look down upon her gold red hair streaming out behind her as she ran, and then to see the centre of the maze – a fountain with a marble seat round it. She was there, tall and quite still and holding out her small, white hand – as smooth and as cool as marble to his lips. ‘I am not seventeen,’ she said sedately.
He took her hand again and she glided a little ahead of him in the dissolving dusk until, together with her, he was no more.