‘Gavin?’
‘Yes, Mum?’
‘Is that you?’
Of course it’s me, he thought irritably, whoever that may be. ‘Yes, Mum.’
‘Your father has been wondering where on earth you’ve been. Haven’t you, Fred?’
‘No, I haven’t . . .’ Gavin had reached the doorway to the lounge, just in time for one of his father’s inexpert winks that implied unspeakable complicity. ‘Bin out on the tiles enjoying himself,’ he suggested unhelpfully. This, as Gavin knew it wouldn’t, didn’t go down at all well.
‘Who asked you for your opinion? He’s old enough to please himself, isn’t he? It’s none of your business what he does. He can stay out all night and it’s nothing to do with you! Nasty ideas!’ she added. She was stirring something on the stove with furious energy. Mr Lamb raised his paper again to within eighteen inches of the eye he chiefly used for reading, winked at Gavin with the other eye and made a movement with his shoulders that indicated he was opting out.
‘I got the brochures for your holiday, Mum.’
‘You weren’t getting them all night.’
‘I went to the opera, Mum, and met – some friends – and had dinner and it got too late to come back. I didn’t have my bike with me, you see.’
‘There’s no call to tell me you didn’t have your bike with you. I’ve got perfectly good eyes: I could see you hadn’t got your bike with you. What’s your bike got to do with it?’
‘I meant, I missed the last train.’
‘None of these opera dinner places had phones, you’ll tell me next.’
‘By the time I thought of phoning, it was too late.’ As he said this, he wondered if it was in the least true: he hadn’t thought of it at all until going to work in the morning which was clearly so much too late that it couldn’t count. This made him wonder, fleetingly, how often people told him that sort of lie. ‘What’s for supper?’
‘It’s Chicken Mole. It’s a Mexican dish out of one of my papers. And it’ll be ready very soon,’ she threatened, as he showed signs of escaping.
‘I’ll go and wash.’
As he entered his room, he remembered – or rather he suddenly heard himself – describing it to Joan, and this rush of memory was accompanied by a longing for her so violent that for moments he leant against the door, made dizzy by the unexpected – and, to him, quite new and strange – assault. He walked unsteadily to his red sofa and sat upon it. This was, he realized, the first time in the day since he had left her that he was really alone. There had been the walk to the train, in the morning, which must have seemed so unreal, he felt, because in spirit he had not really left her. Then the train – jammed with people, none of whom seemed to have noticed what had happened to him – then the salon where he had worked so continuously that he hadn’t even got his lunch hour. Two o’clock, even, had passed before he remembered that that was the time that her plane had taken off for France. He hadn’t even remembered her then, as he had planned to do. And, in the train home, he had fallen asleep – passed out – it was a guard who shook him awake at Barnet. Then, walking back home, his thoughts had been full of what Mum would be like about his having stayed out all night, and how he was going to deal with her. He’d try and get dinner over as quickly as possible – have some time to himself.
This resolution proved to be impossible to carry out. Chicken Mole, or Underground Chicken as Gavin privately called it, proved, gastronomically speaking, to be a hurdle that not even the combined efforts of his father and himself were able either to circumnavigate or to overcome . . . Mrs Lamb was in a fine state of nerves about it; partly because she had never cooked it before, and partly (or also) because, being a foreign dish, her confidence in the recipe had proved to be less even than usual . . . Mr Lamb had tried an unwise joke about moles, and not being too sure whether he would fancy them, and been crushed.
‘Mole is Mexican for chocolate. Moles are vermin. You wouldn’t catch me serving them,’ she declared as she ladled huge steaming portions on to their plates . . .
‘What’s this, Mum?’ Gavin had unearthed what looked like a hippo’s tooth.
‘That? That is a Brazil nut, I should imagine. The recipe said to use that nasty, unsweetened chocolate, but I paid no regard to that; there’s half a pound of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut in there.’ She picked up her crochet, which experience had taught her family in no way detracted from her being able to watch their every mouthful.
Mr Lamb made the first attempt and, eyeing his expressionless face as he slowly shifted the food from one side of his face to the other, Gavin knew that the situation was pretty bad, but even then, he was unprepared for exactly how terrible the stuff was going to taste until his own first cautious forkful. Then he knew that nothing – no amount of concern for his mother’s feelings, no stringent desire for a quiet life, no strength of aversion to family scenes – was going to coerce him into swallowing this lot.
‘I’m sorry, Mum. I can’t take this.’
‘You can’t – what?’
‘This food. It doesn’t taste very nice.’
‘A lot of Mexicans would be ever so grateful for it.’
‘Well, I’m not Mexican. It tastes queer to me.’
‘Chicken’s off?’ suggested Mr Lamb with uncharacteristic brilliance. Mrs Lamb had a horror of things going off. It was also recognized as the one way out. If you ate off food, you could drop dead, according to Mrs Lamb.
‘Could be,’ Gavin took this up at once. ‘Now you come to mention it, I expect that’s what it is. It does taste distinctly queer. Try it, Mum.’
‘I had my tea over an hour ago, thank you. In any case if it’s off I have no more wish to be poisoned than I have the wish to poison you. Either of you,’ she added. She had put aside her crochet and was now poking vigorously at the casserole which still contained a frightening quantity of stew. ‘It smells perfectly all right to me. Foreign, of course, but that’s only to be expected. I’ll give that butcher a piece of my mind tomorrow. You’ll have to make do with beans on toast.’
She had given way with surprising ease, Gavin thought. Then he wondered whether this was because he had said outright what he felt about the food, instead of trying to find ways of getting out of eating it. As soon as Mrs Lamb was in the kitchen heating the beans and making toast, Mr Lamb rolled his eyes at Gavin and flapped his hand in front of his face, indicating a narrow escape.
‘Although, I expect you’ve been eating all kinds of foreign stuff in your opera dinner place. Upset yourself as likely as not . . . And dear knows when you got to bed?’ This last turned into a kind of ambushing question. He felt himself going red. ‘Late, Mum. Too late, I know . . .’
‘You’re only young once.’ Mr Lamb was always in danger of pouring oil on to banked-up fires. She turned on him.
‘Gavin’s not all that young. Old enough to know better. Better to be safe than sorry. He knows an ill wind blows nobody any good. If he doesn’t, he ought to,’ she ended rather breathlessly, dumping the baked beans on the table. ‘All I can say is I hope you’re not going to make a habit of it.’
‘Of what?’ The back of his neck prickled, as it occurred to him that she somehow knew what he had been up to.
‘Staying out all night without a word.’ It was general scolding: she didn’t really know – how could she?
‘Don’t you want to go through the holiday brochures?’
‘I’m upset. If I read when I’m upset, I get a migraine.’
‘I’ll read them to you, Mum.’ The moment he said that, he wished that he hadn’t: he wanted time to himself, and offering to discuss her holiday with her was no way to get it . . . He was really only cravenly levering himself back into her good books. This, he discovered, had to be done the hard way. When the baked beans were finished, and she had made tea for his father and coffee for himself and they were settled at the otherwise empty table with the brochures in front of him, she started in again.
‘You look tired, Gavin.’
‘I’m not tired.’
‘You look as though you’ve been up all night.’
‘Well, I haven’t.’
‘You don’t look as though you want to do a whole lot of reading.’
‘I feel fine.’
Reassured by this small pack of lies, she sat down, pulling her chair round so that she was close beside him and he could hear her breathing.
‘Start with the top one,’ she said, which meant, he knew, that she expected to go through the whole lot.
‘Every amenity – miles of unspoilt beaches in the Mediterranean sun,’ he began, and as he did so remembered that last year he’d had a terrible cold when he was reading to her, and that she’d caught it.
Mrs Lamb’s holiday plans were a prolonged and complex affair. Roughly speaking, they entailed her announcing that this year she had it in mind to go abroad for her holiday (the subject nearly always came up on Sunday lunches with Marge), and every year Mr Lamb telling her she didn’t want to do that (his opinion of abroad was a. that it was a dangerous place to go – he’d served in Normandy and Belgium at the end of the war – and b. that it wasn’t a respectable place for a family holiday – his pre-marital sex had taken place there and so far as Gavin could make out still filled him with a kind of gloomy underhand triumph). His views, however, only hardened Mrs Lamb’s resolution and her senses of justice and adventure. He had been there, so why shouldn’t she? Also, the magazines that she read were full of stories about foreign holidays; advice to people having them and advertisements telling her how cheap and easy they were. But she also collected information of a more anxious kind: she had, for instance, ruled out the whole of Spain last year because there had been some incident of food poisoning in an hotel on the Costa Brava, and France had been knocked out because of a forest fire near Ste Maxime. She did not wish to go to Italy because of the danger of being kidnapped. But these embargoes did not prevent her wanting Gavin to read about the no-go areas: ‘We might as well hear what they have to say for themselves.’
Mr Lamb, who from long practice had found it wiser to dissociate himself from his wife’s early ruminations, said he was going to pop over to Friern Barnet to see a lady about a job. His departure caused a halt in the reading, and after it Mrs Lamb reverted to personal matters that very quickly boiled down to her intense curiosity about Minnie. ‘Lady Minerva likes the opera then, does she?’ was her opening shot. Gavin said he didn’t know. As he said this, he realized that Minnie simply hadn’t even crossed his mind since he’d parted from her in Chalk Farm. This made him feel guilty, and his mother misinterpreted the guilt.
‘No need for you to be shy about her with me. You know what I thought about her. I thought she was a thoroughly nice girl. Just like anybody else.’ This last Gavin privately thought was one of the things that she wasn’t.
‘I didn’t go to the opera with her.’
‘I’ve no wish to pry,’ she answered stiffly. ‘How can I know anything about your friends? You never tell me.’
‘I’ve told you about the people at work.’
‘That’s not what I mean at all. Work!’ she said witheringly. ‘They sound a funny lot to me. You could have been a teacher!’
‘Oh, Mum – don’t let’s go into that.’ He could see that she was working herself up, and a fresh wave of tiredness assailed him. He yawned – covertly – and then decided to make a performance of it and yawned again – this time with sound effects. She pretended not to notice, but it deflected her. ‘Marge said that Portugal was nice. Read me something about there.’
So he read about the Algarve with its miles of beaches (they always went on about beaches), its magnificent seafood, its superb hotels with swimming pools and buffet luncheons, its quaint old villages, its friendly simple peasants, its night life, wines, pottery and proximity to an airport . . .
After a bit, she said: ‘They sound much the same to me. What’s so special about Portugal? It’s just that Ken likes to go to a different country every year. “You’ll run out soon,” I told Marge. Course, I suppose the languages are different. There’s bound to be a difference somewhere. I should really like to go to the Caribbean on one of those islands with palm trees. They look different, but of course they’re much dearer – I’m not sure Fred would stand for one of them. But at least on an island you’d know where you were.’
Gavin said that he hadn’t got any brochures on the West Indies and how about Norway? But he must have said it in the wrong tone of voice, because she retorted:
‘Gavin, you look tired to death. Whatever you may say, I know when you’ve been overdoing it and we all know what happens then.’
He was able to escape. Before he went upstairs, and when they were both standing by the table, he gave her a hug, stooping a little – she only came up to his shoulder. A flush, starting at the bottom of her neck, spread upwards rapidly. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.
But, alone at last, he did not know what to do with the privacy: wandered round his room – pulled out a record with the last duet of Traviata on it, remembered her sitting in the box, absorbed, with her face resting on one hand, and felt no need to play the music, and then heard her laugh and her husky voice when she said: ‘Oh, Gavin! What do you mean “anyhow”?’ and then – slowly – relived her stripping herself down to her own self until he was hard with lust, painfully imprisoned by his clothes. Which he had no sooner got rid of when there was a knock on the door.
‘Gavin?’
‘Yes, Mum – what is it?’
‘Are you asleep?’
He seized his dressing gown. ‘No, Mum.’
She came into the room. ‘I didn’t want to wake you up.’ She was carrying the painted cat tray upon which was a steaming mug of Horlicks and a plate with custard creams.
‘This is to settle your stomach,’ she said.
Feeling guilty, irritated, and slightly ridiculous, he walked away from her towards the window. ‘You needn’t have bothered.’
‘I know that. I also know what happens if I don’t bother. You remember that time when you were doing your A-levels? When Marge couldn’t go for that job in London because she got glandular fever? That time that Fred had all that trouble with the dry rot up on Hadley Common? When there was that nasty murder, too, on the Green?’
He said he did remember – it was true about the A-levels anyway, and he hadn’t got his mother’s multi-storey memory.
‘You couldn’t keep anything down then. You got overtired overworking and then you couldn’t digest your food properly. You were living on Horlicks then . . . I’m not having that again. I’ll put it by your bed and you can have it nice and cosy.
‘That was a terrible summer,’ she added, as she prepared to go. ‘I shan’t forget that in a hurry.’
‘Thanks, Mum,’ he tried not to sound surly, but that was how it came out. When she had shut the door, and after he had listened to her going down the stairs, he kicked his trousers round the room as viciously as he could, but as they neither whimpered, nor fell into a thousand pieces, they were hardly a worthy target. ‘She thinks she can come into my room any time she likes – any time – she doesn’t even let me be private in my own room! For God’s sake!’ He went on in this vein for quite a bit, until he suddenly stopped wanting to, and collapsed on his red sofa, just as he had begun telling himself that, after all, he chose to live at home, had, in fact, begun to tell himself all the things other people might say . . . If he wanted freedom and privacy, he had only to go out and get them. The thought terrified him. Finding somewhere, getting all his stuff moved, getting kitchen stuff, and then just being there every evening after work; even Harry didn’t have to do that – he had Winthrop. The particular and irremediable disadvantages of living with Winthrop only made him feel that this meant that everybody else would probably turn out to possess a different set. Like always being there when he wanted to be by himself; or never being there when he wanted them. He got into bed and decided that he might as well drink the Horlicks.
In bed, he wondered what Joan would actually be doing now. At a party probably, on some floodlit yacht that Dmitri had been decorating, dressed up in her wig and her spectacles so that nobody would know who she really was . . . This started him wondering about Dmitri, and he decided immediately that, whatever Dmitri was like, he wouldn’t like him. How on earth could he be married to someone like Joan and keep on going away and leaving her alone? How dared he, in fact, collect and accept her love without returning it? He could not answer this question – nor did he very much want to. He had eaten the custard creams without realizing it, just because they were there, and all he wanted now was to put out the light, lie in the dark and go through all the amazing things that had happened to him with Joan. He put out the light and lay down, but he had hardly reached the first moments when she had stood in the kitchen saying, ‘Oh, Gavin! What do you mean . . . ?’ when he fell suddenly and deeply asleep . . .
In the morning, he woke, wanting her, feeling, he thought, as though perhaps he was in love with her. How did one know that sort of thing? He thought that it was unlikely to be a state that the recipient was in doubt about: unless, of course, there were degrees of love as there seemed to be degrees of everything else. Degrees of fear, for instance – he was an authority, he felt, about them. But one of the things that she had done for him was to remove herself entirely off the Ladder of Fear. He couldn’t think of any other woman who had done that; so perhaps this meant love? But you couldn’t surely love somebody simply because they didn’t frighten you. In the train going to work he counted up the other things he thought about her. She was intelligent: well, Harry was that, and he certainly wasn’t in love with Harry. The idea made him smile, and he caught the eye of the girl sitting opposite and felt himself flushing. He hadn’t meant to catch her eye. If he wasn’t careful, she would think he was wanting to get off with her which of course he didn’t. Joan enjoyed opera – Harry again. He’d really got to think of some things about her that couldn’t possibly apply to Harry. She was marvellous to go to bed with, but this was a real sticking point. Since he hadn’t been to bed with anyone else, how did he know that she was particularly marvellous in that respect? Well, she just was, that’s all: if you lined up all the girls in this train, he betted she’d come out near the top. There was no way of proving this, thank God: he could hardly go up to each girl or woman and say, ‘Would you mind going to bed with me so that I can see whether the person I have been to bed with is better than you?’ She was easy, and interesting, and he just liked her very much; the charms and pleasures of her body had simply been a totally unexpected, almost a miraculous, bonus. In any case, he was beginning to see that love was not measurable stuff; approval might be, but he was considering much more than approval . . . He tried a few more tests: would he be excited if he was going to see her this evening, instead of going to dinner with Peter and Hazel? The answer to that was yes, but he wasn’t at all sure how much not wanting to go to dinner with Peter and Hazel conditioned it. Did he wish that she was not married to Dmitri? Well, yes, in a way, since it made her unhappy, but on the other hand she wanted to be married to Dmitri. He recognized, then, that in an awful way he was quite glad that she was so tied – it left him free – he wasn’t quite sure for what: but it gave him time to think, if thinking was the thing to do.
Walking from the train to the salon, he suddenly realized that the reason why he felt so confused – had descended to thoughts about feeling – was that Joan in no way conformed to his lifelong ideal of a possible love. She was not ethereal, not young, she had none of the enigmatic but total compliance with his requirements that he was familiar with. She was not, in those terms, a beauty; in no sense did she give him the impression that she had been waiting for him all her life; in many ways she seemed to him to be a remarkably self-contained woman. But, then, he had always discovered his girl in scenes of such shimmering romance, that talking to her had never really come into it, and in the end, whatever you felt about someone, you were reduced to talking to them: well, he hoped not ‘reduced’ – you wanted to talk to them. Otherwise, how could you go on with them after the first few magic encounters? There was, there must be, ordinary life to be lived with whoever it might be somehow. He trudged up the stair to the salon to his own particular brand of regular and repeated doses of that.
‘You got someone?’
Gavin simply looked at Peter: he couldn’t think what he meant.
‘For tonight. You remember I told you we’d got four of everything?’
‘Oh – yes. No, I’m afraid I haven’t.’ He didn’t feel up to telling Peter that it had totally slipped his mind . . .
‘Well, can you ask someone this morning? Hazel’s been getting everything ready for the last two evenings: I wouldn’t like to disappoint her . . .’ and he sped off from the coffee room to his first client.
It was all very well for Peter to say that, Gavin thought, as he sent Jenny off to wash his first client, but he hadn’t got anyone he could ask . . . Gloomily, he reviewed the possibilities – such as they were. Harry, apart from the state of his eye, and any other state he might be in, would simply refuse to come. Newly married people were not his style, and although Gavin knew he would refuse as nicely as possible saying he didn’t really feel up to it, or had planned a quiet evening with Winthrop – refuse he would: it was not even worth asking him. After that, the possibilities became bizarre. Minnie, who would be bound to make some kind of reckless scene; she could be relied upon to shock Peter and Hazel, no amount of briefing her beforehand could rule that out. He didn’t really know the sort of girl that Peter and Hazel would expect him to know. Muriel Sutton, for example; when he thought of what she would read into such an invitation, he wanted to laugh aloud, or scream. He didn’t have any girls about who were friends. Come to that, he had very few friends of any kind. The person who came nearest this category, really, was Joan. But taking Joan to such a thing would be a waste of her – anyway, she was miles away. Then he thought of his sister, Marge; she might be persuaded, if she was free. As soon as he’d got his client through the tricky part of timing the solution for her perm, he went and rang Marge. She was going to the pictures with Ken. She seemed surprised to be asked. ‘I always think of you as such a lone wolf, Gav,’ she said. ‘Well, I hope you find someone. Have a good time, anyway.’ A few minutes later, she rang him back and asked him why he didn’t take Muriel: ‘She’s almost sure to be free.’ He didn’t want to go into the reasons why he wouldn’t ask Muriel on the salon phone, so he just said no to that. A few minutes later, Mr Adrian summoned him across to the desk in order to inform him that this was the salon phone. Over the years, Gavin had run his gamut of responses to this kind of remark, from apology, to excuses, to dumb insolence, to breezy dismissal to apology again. The best way to deal with Mr Adrian, he’d discovered, was to use words that couldn’t be faulted but in the way most calculated to irritate the old bastard; an apology that sounded as though he was answering back. Now he said how tremendously sorry he was, and how much he hoped that Mr Adrian had not lost too much business in the minute that he had been on the phone and how he mustn’t make matters even worse by keeping his present client waiting which he was sure Mr Adrian would understand. He could hear Mr Adrian’s false teeth gnashing together, so he knew that he had scored – in a minor way.
Jenny unwound the white towel from Mrs Strathallan’s head, and he ran his fingers through her new little snakey ringlets.
‘Is it all right?’
He smiled at her in the mirror. ‘Taken very nicely. I’ll set it on fairly big rollers so that it won’t come out too tight.’
‘You didn’t get your big rollers back from Mr Peter.’
‘Oh. Well, get them for me, would you?’
Jenny stumped off, and Mrs Strathallan said, ‘What a nice girl that is.’
He agreed absently; he would have appeared to agree even if he didn’t – one never knocked any of the staff to clients. But Jenny was nice: he remembered the walk with her up St James’s Street from the Park, and how he’d very nearly felt hardly nervous of her. An idea struck him; and when Mrs Strathallan was safely under the dryer, he said: ‘Peter’s asked me to bring someone to supper with him and his wife this evening. I wondered whether you’d like to come?
‘I know it’s very short notice,’ he added, as she didn’t reply.
‘I would like to,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to phone my mother to see if it would be all right . . . I’ll have to wait till my lunch hour, though.’
‘All right.’ He noticed that she had gone a very dark pink.
At two o’clock she told him that it was all right, but that she would have to go home first – to see Andrew into bed. He said he would pick her up if she liked, and if she didn’t mind riding on the back of his bike.
‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘I’d like to.’ He arranged to pick her up at seven. When, however, he told Peter that he was bringing Jenny, Peter did not seem particularly pleased. ‘She’s a junior!’ he exclaimed. ‘Oh well, if you’re mad keen to have her, I suppose it’s all right,’ he said a moment later.
‘I’m not mad keen to have her, but you said get someone, and she was the only person I could get at such short notice.’
‘It wasn’t short notice when I asked you.’
‘Well, I forgot – I told you.’
‘Okay then. Seven-fifteen to seven-thirty. Here’s the address, and here’s a sort of map I’ve made. It isn’t very easy to find till you know it.
‘Don’t be late,’ he said, as they were changing to go home. ‘Hazel gets terribly worked up if people are late.’
‘All right. I’ll try not to be.’
He looked at Peter’s map in the train going home. It was the kind of map that only included the streets that Peter felt were important and at the bottom of the map he remarked that there was a very complicated one-way system that he couldn’t really explain. It wasn’t much use, really – and he decided to use his ‘A to Z’ and trust to luck. He’d got to look up Jenny’s address, anyway – she lived in Kilburn.
It was a beautiful evening: when the train emerged into daylight, the railway banks were full of buttercups and cow parsley, and the sky was blue, with large whitish clouds. He wondered what Joan was doing. His knowledge of the South of France was scanty; he had only been there once; hadn’t enjoyed it much. It was the year of his acne being particularly virulent; he’d felt self-conscious in bathing shorts and it had been tremendously hot with mosquitoes who zoomed about biting him from dusk till dawn. It wasn’t a very good place to be alone in; everybody else seemed to be with someone. He’d headed north after a few days, and spent a much happier time looking at châteaux on the Loire. But it was probably quite a good place to be if you were rich and had friends and there was nothing wrong with your body. But Joan was rich, and she seemed to know a lot of people – and she wasn’t self-conscious about her body. Or was she, perhaps? The gear she wore was a fairly self-conscious business, and although she said she wore it because Dmitri liked it, a bit of her must surely want to look like that. He remembered in the Secrets game she had said that she was grotesque: well, he knew now that she wasn’t. Did she believe that she was, or had Dmitri somehow got her to believe it?
Trains were not a good place to think about Joan’s body, he discovered; if he thought about her for more than a second or two, he started wanting her. He started thinking resolutely about the evening ahead, and wondered what it was about him that allowed him to embark on things (like this evening) that he didn’t really in the least want to do? But, come to think about it, he never wanted to embark upon any social do. He hadn’t wanted to go to the party with Harry and Co. and, if he hadn’t gone, he would never have met Joan. Or, come to that, Minnie. But, in a way, he expected such situations to yield a heavy crop of Minnies: he had never expected a Joan – or anyone like her. It was getting more and more difficult not to think about Joan: whatever else he thought about seemed to end up with his thinking about her. Did this mean love? He was really sick of asking himself this question, because he never seemed to get any nearer answering it.
He walked quickly back from the station to his home; the air felt both warm and fresh on his skin; swifts were wheeling and streaking after the tiny flies that milled about; snatches of the six o’clock news reached him from the open windows of various houses. The scene was so familiar that he could observe the smallest changes in it; buds on the roses starting to have colour, a garden gate painted since this morning; a large oak tree thicker with its sun-encrusted unfolding leaves.
Mrs Lamb was hovering about the hall, obviously waiting his return.
‘Ah, there you are,’ she said after he had kissed her hot and downy face. ‘Somebody’s been phoning you with a very nice invitation. “So far as I know,” I said to her, “my son is free this weekend, but mark you, I’m only his mother, so I don’t know anything for certain.” She sounded ever so nice on the phone . . .’
Gavin, who for one glorious moment had envisaged Joan calling from the South of France and inviting him to join her, was brought up short by the sounding ever so nice on the phone bit. Before she said it, he knew who it was.
‘Her Ladyship herself. Asking you for the weekend in the country. To meet her parents. I got that egg off your nice tie, and I’ve cleaned your dark shoes. “Expect him back by six at the latest, Lady Munday,” I said, “because I happen to know he has an evening engagement. Would you like him to phone you as soon as he comes in,” I said, but she said no, don’t bother, she’ll be giving you a call in the morning.’
‘Thanks, Mum.’ He started to move past her to get upstairs.
‘Is that all you’ve got to say? There’s no need to give yourself airs with me, young man. I don’t know what’s come over you in the last few days! Suddenly you’re out and about and everywhere and go on acting as though nothing is happening!’
‘There’s no need to get excited, Mum. I’m not going anywhere for the weekend.’
But he could hardly have said anything worse, and they embarked upon one of those altercations made more painfully indeterminate by the fact that she could not possibly admit to him that she was dying to know how Minnie’s parents lived – let alone the more permanent ambition that she nursed about Minnie in what she thought was deadly secrecy. Gavin, who was dimly aware of both factors, refused to face her with them, and took refuge in sulking or seeming to be airily unconcerned. In the end, he shut her up by having a bath.
The prospect – even of the faintest kind – of spending the weekend with Minnie (and her parents) lowered the price of the forthcoming evening. Which was something: after all, he’d known Peter for years: he was not (presumably) going to have any kind of tête-à-tête with Hazel, and the presence of Jenny would preclude – he hoped – any embarrassing discussions about whether Hazel should embark upon motherhood or no. And one person he wasn’t frightened of was Jenny; she was a quiet, nice, amiable girl – the antithesis of Minnie – or even of Joan – who, whatever else she was, could not be described as quiet. It was no good starting to think about Joan: he couldn’t even afford a long bath – had to get changed and be off as soon as possible.
In his room, he put on some Wagner at maximum volume to discourage his mother from coming up and going on about the weekend. Then he had a good look at his ‘A to Z’, first for collecting Jenny, and then for finding Peter’s flat.
He escaped his mother by literally running out of the house, shouting that he was late; then caught himself having to pretend he was late in order to circumnavigate dishonesty . . . All the time he was fixing his pillion and strapping another helmet to it for Jenny, he ruminated about honesty – how everyone made aggrieved or bland assumptions about it and went to tortuous lengths to preserve their own image of themselves – why was he saying ‘everyone’? He meant himself. He liked to think of himself as honest, but let there be any kind of confrontation with anyone, and he fell back upon twisting with the best of them. He wanted people – even those he didn’t like, in fact often especially those he didn’t like – to approve of him. On top of that, he would go to almost any lengths to give the impression that he was honest as well as likeable, when everything that he was now thinking showed only too clearly that he was neither . . . As he sped through the back streets up to the main road he wondered what would happen if he had a go at being honest for the evening. Nobody would notice probably. But he would notice, and he was the person he was going to go home with at the end of the evening. For some reason, he felt suddenly light-hearted about the prospect ahead; it was as if he’d decided to go with somebody whom he both liked and felt was something of a challenge: there were uncertainties attached to such an idea, but they were of a kind that he felt he might take charge of.
He found Jenny’s street quite easily: she lived in a semi-detached Victorian house. The door was answered by Jenny’s mother who looked rather young for the part – largely, he quickly realized, because she didn’t look in the least like his own mother. She wore jeans and an Indian smock, but he knew that she was Jenny’s mother because she had the same, rather round eyes and specs, but horn-rimmed, not gold like Jenny’s specs.
‘I’m Jenny’s mother,’ she said. ‘Would you like to come in? She’s nearly ready.’
He followed her along the passage to a room at the back which turned out to be a sitting room with the kitchen at one end of it. There was an ironing board out and a basket full of washing, but Gavin did not notice very much else, because sitting at the table wearing a pale blue T-shirt and eating a bowl of Puffed Wheat was Jenny’s child. When he saw Gavin, he stopped eating with spoon in mid-air and favoured him with a stare of the most penetrating impartiality.
Jenny’s mother said: ‘That’s Andrew. Put your spoon down, Andrew, and say hullo.’
Andrew shut his eyes very slowly and then lowered his head.
He was the most beautiful child – well, almost the most beautiful person – Gavin had ever seen in his life. His hair was a riot of silvery curls, his eyes, when open (and he opened them almost at once to continue his appraisal), were the colour of aquamarine, a wonderful greeny blue, and his skin was a faintly flushed, translucent white.
‘He’s inclined to be shy,’ Jenny’s mother said. ‘Eat up your supper, Andrew. I’ll go and tell Jenny!’
Andrew put down his spoon, seized his bowl with both hands and began drinking from it, making a surprising amount of noise and watching Gavin over the rim of the bowl – judging to a nicety when Gavin’s attention would falter, as, the same second that it did, he blew an astonishing amount of milk and Puffed Wheat back from his mouth into the bowl . . . Then he put his hands over his face and shrieked with laughter. Then he upset the bowl, and Gavin, who had been infected by the joke, rushed to find a cloth to clear things up. He was in the middle of this when Jenny’s mother returned.
‘She won’t be a minute – oh, Andrew! Don’t you bother: I’ll do it. You were showing off, weren’t you? Don’t take any notice of him: he’s usually as good as gold . . .’
‘He’s a marvellous little boy, isn’t he.’ Even as he said this, it sounded a lame way of describing Andrew.
‘He’s marvellous, all right. Quite a handful. It’s very nice that Jenny is getting a chance to get out. She hasn’t been out in the evening for I don’t know how long: must be before Christmas – oh no, Andrew had a chill then, and at the last minute she didn’t go. Anyway, it’s nice for her.’ By now she had mopped up the table, Andrew’s face and most of his chair.
‘Sorry to keep you waiting.’ It was Jenny. She wore a bright blue cotton boiler suit and she looked excited. Andrew held out his arms to her and, in a wonderfully husky voice shouted, ‘Cheese!’
‘You can’t have cheese at this time of night! I mashed him some banana, Mum, would you give him that? I’m off now, Andrew. Sleep well, see you in the morning.’ She bent down to kiss him which ended in her hugging him. ‘I’m coming back soon,’ she said, almost as though she was reassuring herself. She gave Gavin a look which implied that she wanted to go at once.
‘Thanks,’ he said to Jenny’s mother. ‘Good-bye, Andrew.’ Andrew, he could see, was working up to intense disapproval of the situation; his face was suffusing, his mouth becoming square. He rejected the plate of banana offered utterly and it fell to the floor. Jenny’s mother said: ‘Go on, love – I’ll look after him. He knows me.’ And Jenny, with one backward glance, as her son finally expelled his breath in a roar of despair, almost ran out of the room. In the passage she said:
‘It’s just that he’s not used to me going out in the evening. I told him I was when I was bathing him, but I can see now he didn’t believe me.’
She looked so worried, that Gavin said: ‘Do you want to stay with him?’
‘Oh no. I want to go. He’ll be all right.’
By the time they reached his bike propped against the privet hedge, the wails had stopped. Gavin gave her the helmet. ‘You been on a bike before?’
‘Once. A long time ago.’ She took off her specs and put them in her shoulder bag. The helmet made her look like a little Action Man.
‘I won’t go fast.’
‘Is it all right if I put my arms round your waist?’
It seemed to be quite all right. In any case, Gavin reminded himself, if she had only been on a bike once before, there wasn’t much else she could do . . . ‘We may have a bit of a job finding Peter’s flat,’ he warned, and they set off.
Conversation was so difficult during the ride, that he didn’t try to have any. After he’d asked her once if she was all right (he could feel she was nervous from the way she gripped him round the waist) and she’d said something that he’d not heard but taken for an assent, they concentrated upon getting to wherever it was Peter and Hazel lived. This proved to be not far, but after asking two Poles, one American and finally a policewoman, they discovered Greenwood Close, a gaunt block of flats set between a car park for a supermarket and a bus depot.
‘Have you been here before?’ Jenny asked in the lift.
‘No. I’ve no idea what it will be like.’
‘It’s funny, isn’t it? Meeting people you work with away from work. You expect them to be different in ways that they aren’t.’ She stopped at this, and Gavin noticed – or rather realized that he’d noticed before but not remarked on it – that away from work Jenny seemed to blush quite often. At work, she rolled her eyes and stumped about, but stayed the same colour. She had put on her specs again, and run her fingers through her hair – en brosse as usual. She had a very small pearl in each ear: at work she wore tiny little thin gold rings.
‘Is it okay if I call you Gavin? I mean just this evening.’
‘Course it is.’ He felt both embarrassed and touched.
Peter met them at the door. ‘I thought you were going to be late,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘Hazel!’ he called. ‘It’s all right; they’ve come!’ He was wearing a scarf tucked into his neck – like Gavin, but there was nothing casual about his demeanour. He led the way along a passage that smelled very strongly of paint into a narrow room with picture windows at each end. Everything in it was various shades of brown: after Gavin had been there for some hours, he could see that this was not entirely true, but the first, overall, impression was of brownness: biscuit, coffee, caramel, oatmeal, treacle, peat, chocolate, cow dung (and others) were all toning to such an effect that it was a bit like being inside a very old and heavily varnished picture – even the air felt thick and coloured. At first there was no sign of Hazel, and he wondered whether she was also in brown and therefore temporarily invisible until the eye could pick her out, but then he saw the top half of her through a hatch: her hair was brown and cut in a rather unadventurous fringe and she was putting peanuts into a brown pottery bowl. Peter said:
‘That’s Hazel. Hazel, this is Gavin. And Jenny.’
Everybody said hullo. Then there was a pause until Hazel left the hatch and came into the room. On a coffee-coloured coffee table stood a jug and four amber-tinted glasses. Peter said:
‘Do you want us to have our drinks yet, Haze?’
‘I think we should. Peter’s made a special brew.’ She indicated that they should all sit, and they did: Jenny and Gavin on the chesterfield upholstered in near-brown leather; she and Peter on severely architectural pine chairs. There was a short silence. Then Hazel said:
‘What do you think of it? We only finished it last night.’
‘Oh! Drinks!’ Peter started to deal with that.
Jenny said: ‘Did you do everything yourselves?’
‘Oh – we had to. Couldn’t afford anything else. But it does mean that in the end you get exactly what you wanted. It’s the only room we have finished as a matter of fact. Do you know, that if you have paint mixed by those paint shops, they charge you for it? We found that out the hard way with the loo!’
While talking, he had poured out four drinks from the pottery jug, and now handed them round. Gavin sipped his: all he could say about it was that he hadn’t the slightest idea what it was. He wanted to know, so he asked.
‘Ah!’ said Peter: ‘It’s a speciality of the house. What do you think of it?’
Hazel said: ‘It’s a bit sweeter than last time you made it, Peter.’
‘Don’t you like it then?’
‘I didn’t say that. I said it was a bit sweeter.’
‘Oh well, I didn’t have a measure: I just chucked things in.’
Jenny said: ‘It’s got lemonade in it, hasn’t it? I mean that fizzy kind.’
‘Right. What else?’ He looked challengingly round. Gavin took another sip. As a drink, it wasn’t growing on him. At random, he said, ‘Guinness? Red Cinzano? A dash of Angostura bitters?’
‘You might have been there! When I was mixing it! You’ve left one or two things out, though.’
‘I can’t guess them.’ He put his glass down and took a peanut.
Hazel said: ‘Oh! I forgot the crisps.’
Peter called: ‘What’s the timing on dinner, Haze?’
‘It’ll be about half an hour; I think. The cooker’s been a bit funny.’
‘We got one of those re-conditioned ones. They have some bargains, if you’re prepared to wait and keep going to look every week. The one we got would have cost a hundred and ninety-four pounds if we’d got it new. Hazel’s parents said why didn’t we get one on the H.P. I had to explain to them that that would have cost even more. Then I saw this place from the top of a bus. In the end we paid seventy-five, wasn’t it, Haze?’
‘Seventy-six fifty – including delivery and fixing.’
‘That’s right. She’s amazing about figures: it must come from working for an accountant.’
Hazel re-appeared with another pottery bowl full of potato crisps.
‘You’ll have to eat all these, and the nuts,’ she said, ‘because we need the bowls for the sweet.’ Everybody had some of both. There was a brief silence, during which Gavin could see Hazel sizing up Jenny, and, he thought, deciding to like her. Then Peter said: ‘Tell you what. We’ll do our tour of the flat now, Haze, while you’re popping the first course under the grill.’
They toured the flat. It consisted of a bedroom in which Hazel and Peter slept, which was going to be done in shades of lilac, Peter explained, although at the moment it had bare plaster, what looked like a concrete floor and no curtains – in fact contained a double bed with bright brass rails each end, and a lilac candlewick coverlet and a fitted cupboard covered with primer that Peter said he’d made. When he had showed them everything about the cupboard and said that it had taken him four weekends and three weeks’ worth of evenings to make, he told them that they had plumped for lilac because an aunt of Hazel’s had given them the bedcover. ‘It meant changing duvet covers and pillowcases, but we thought it was worth it.’ Then they saw the bathroom, that had a cork-tiled floor – a very recent piece of work – but not the tiles round the bath yet because they’d put them on with the wrong stuff and had to take the whole lot off, and in taking them off they’d broken some; ‘and then when we went back to the place where we’d got them, they’d run out, so then we swopped what we’d got left (and I had an awful job getting the wrong glue off the backs), and what we got – well, I’ll show you when we get to the spare room.’
In the passage, Jenny suddenly winked at him, and Gavin stopped minding about being shown everything so much, and winked back.
They stood in the doorway of the lavatory about which even Peter could not say very much since its size precluded it being anything more than strictly, not to say uncomfortably, functional.
‘You mustn’t mind the state of our spare room. We aren’t planning to have anyone to stay until the end of the year. We keep all our decorating gear in it.’ He opened the door and they saw what could only be described as a very single room indeed filled with plastic buckets, and rollers and pots of paint. Peter edged his way round most of these and opened a cardboard box out of which he proceeded to take a succession of perfectly white tiles. ‘The point is they’re not all like this – ah, here we are!’ And he held up a less white tile with the picture of a courgette on it. ‘And each one is different, you see. It was Hazel’s idea – she does have the odd brainwave – ’
‘Dinner’s ready!’
A moment later, Hazel appeared at the spare room door; ‘Dinner’s ready,’ she said more quietly but with greater urgency.
Peter bundled the tiles back into the box saying: ‘Right; we’re coming; we’ll be right with you.’
At the car park end of the sitting room, a small, round table covered with brown Formica was laid. There were brown paper napkins, brown candles in amber glass holders, brown pottery plates amorphously decorated in a paler brown, and cutlery with wooden handles. On the plates were four steaming grapefruit.
Everybody sat down, and Hazel explained that the grapefruit was hot.
‘I put brown sugar on it,’ she said, ‘but there’s more if anyone wants it.’
Peter, who had fetched their unfinished drinks from the coffee table, lifted his glass. ‘This is our first sit-down meal here,’ he said, ‘quite an occasion, really.’ And he smiled at his wife. He had an engaging smile which relieved his face of the stern anxiety that was his usual expression, Gavin thought, whether he was cutting someone’s hair, or worrying about his home.
Jenny said: ‘Goodness! You have done a lot. I don’t think I’d have the patience.’
‘You will when you get married. Hazel used to go out every night, before we got engaged, but now I only let her out for her lampshade classes. This is jolly good!’ he prompted, and Gavin, honesty deserting him, murmured assent.
For the rest of the dinner, aubergines stuffed with something or other, Peter talked to Gavin about how terrible Mr Adrian was, and would he be likely to give them a rise in the autumn – not he, mean old ponce – and Hazel asked Jenny where she lived, and whether she liked working in the salon, and whether she worked for Peter much and what was that like? But after Jenny said that no, she worked nearly all the time for Gavin, Hazel said – confidentially, but Gavin, who only needed half an ear to listen to Peter, heard her quite clearly: ‘Are you walking out with him then?’ And, even if he’d been in any doubt, the colour of Jenny’s face – a very pale scarlet – would have left none. The colour of Jenny’s face seemed a confirmation to Hazel too, but of a different sort. She said: ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry. I think he’s lovely,’ and went to fetch their sweet – over which there was some delay as the crisp and nut bowls (not emptied) had to be cleaned out to make way for the crème caramel.
‘To be quite frank with you,’ Peter said as though this would be an innovation, ‘this whole dinner’s a kind of dry run for having Haze’s parents. So what I thought we’d do, over coffee, is give everything marks – you know marks out of ten, and then add it all up and see whether we need to make any changes. We’ve got a week before they’re coming, so Haze and I could test out any alternatives. You see, we don’t want them to feel that we’re laying on a particularly terrific feast; on the other hand we don’t want them to think we haven’t tried . . . Also, Haze gets so nervous cooking in front of her mother, who’s pretty good at that sort of thing in an old-fashioned English way, that I want her to feel she can do her recipes blindfold.’
‘I’m not sure that Dad’s going to take to the aubergines much,’ Hazel said, ‘he really prefers plain food.’
‘I dare say he does! But look at what it costs! On our budget, it’s a roast once a week, and then there wouldn’t be enough for outsiders!’
‘The pudding’s very good,’ Jenny said. ‘I love crème caramel.’
‘It doesn’t matter so much about the sweet,’ Hazel said. ‘Mum doesn’t eat sweets because of her figure.’
‘But there has to be a sweet,’ Peter pointed out. ‘We don’t want them to think we didn’t know there ought to be one.’
With any luck, Gavin hoped he could be deflected from the marking system, and it seemed to work out that way, because Peter offered to make the coffee, and suggested that Hazel move them back to the bus station end of the room. This meant moving two of the chairs, and Gavin did that. He watched Hazel and Jenny settle themselves on the chesterfield, which Hazel told Jenny had been a wedding present from Peter’s parents – ‘of course we chose it – really we did the whole room round it.’ Gavin noticed that Hazel’s face looked smudged with fatigue and it briefly occurred to him how tiring it must be being married to such a dedicated homemaker. He decided to leave the girls to talk and go and help Peter who was surreptitiously clearing up plates and things.
‘Haze gets so worn out,’ he confided to Gavin. ‘I don’t know what it is! It isn’t as though we go anywhere or do anything.’
‘Perhaps you do too much work on the flat?’
‘Oh, she loves doing that! She’s hell bent on getting everything done: even the spare room. She’s even keener than I am on finishing that.’
He was rinsing plates and putting them into a plastic rack. ‘She wants to do it all in pale pink with a frieze of bunnies all round. It seems extraordinary to me. She didn’t even call them rabbits. Anyway, she’s bought the frieze so now we’re committed. Where’s the coffee now? It isn’t in a tin yet, because we’re buying one of them a month and we haven’t got to one for coffee.’ He felt his beard with his hand, a nervous gesture that Gavin recognized as the prelude to some more confiding confidence. ‘I say – you remember what I talked to you about when I asked you if you’d come to dinner? You remember. It was something she suddenly wanted to do that isn’t commercially feasible. You remember,’ he urged, so urgently that Gavin had to say that he did.
‘Well – she hasn’t dropped it. Far from it. She brings it up every time we – well at night-time mostly. Do you think it would be all right if we had a frank talk about it in spite of – you know’ – he dropped his voice even more – ‘Jenny being here?’
‘I don’t honestly see that it would be much use. I mean – it’s a private matter between you two, isn’t it? Nothing to do with anyone else.’
Peter had measured the coffee and he now poured boiling water over it without replying. Then he said: ‘She’s not rational on the subject. So, when it’s between the two of us, I don’t feel she listens to my point of view at all. Last night, she accused me of not loving her. That shows she’s mad.’ He put the coffee on a black glass tray. ‘Of course I love her,’ he said, as though Gavin had asked him. ‘She’s the only girl I’ve ever felt like this about. I tell you what,’ he decided suddenly, ‘let’s play it by ear.’
This was not a soothing suggestion to Gavin as he didn’t feel very sure of Peter’s ear, but there didn’t seem much that he could do about it . . . Peter took the coffee tray into the part of the room where the girls were, and Hazel poured it out. Nobody said anything for a bit, and then Hazel asked Gavin where he was going for his holidays. Gavin said he’d been thinking of Greece, but, even as he said it, he suddenly felt sure he wasn’t going to go there, nor did he mind, which was even more strange.
‘How lovely for you,’ Hazel said. ‘We’ve had our holiday getting married. Not that we went for one.’
‘We’ll go one day though, won’t we, Haze?’
‘You always say that we’re going to do things. I’d like something to be going to happen now! It’s the same thing about a family,’ she explained to the others. ‘Peter wants to wait for years and years, but I think one should have one’s family when one’s young.’
‘Hazel – we’ve been over and over – ’
‘No, you be quiet for a moment. I want to hear what the others think. Just talking to you about it makes me feel I’m unusual or something, and it’s not true. Most girls get married to have babies. And, anyway, I don’t think it’s the sort of thing you ought to plan. I think it ought to just happen. What do you think?’ It was a direct appeal to Gavin who muttered something about it being a joint decision, he supposed, but then, it wasn’t the kind of thing he knew about – when Jenny interrupted him.
‘Couldn’t you sort of compromise?’ Everybody looked at her, and she started blushing. ‘I mean – get the flat straight, and then start one?’
‘That’s the whole point! We can’t get the flat straight without Haze working, and obviously she can’t work if she has a baby! You’re not married, so you wouldn’t have thought of all that,’ he said as kindly as he could manage to Jenny, ‘but babies have to be looked after, you know. You don’t just have them, and that’s that: with respect, Jenny, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Gavin saw Jenny open her mouth and shut it again. She wasn’t going to tell them about Andrew, because of Mr Adrian . . . The whole evening was becoming unenjoyable in a completely different way. Up till now, he’d been bored – really the whole time, except for that moment when Jenny had winked at him – now, he felt, anything might happen; well, not anything, but one of a large number of uncomfortable things, the most immediate of which was that Hazel was going to cry. And, whatever did happen, he and Jenny were only captive spectators: they weren’t involved, and there was nothing they could do. All this time, Peter was holding forth – much in the vein that he had employed with Gavin in the salon (probably in his only vein), about money and time, and mortgages and hire purchase, and Hazel sat biting her finger and trembling and clearly about to explode in one way or another at any moment. Then he saw Jenny looking at him.
‘My God!’ he said. ‘I’ve just noticed the time! I promised Jenny’s mother to get her back. Afraid we’ll have to go.’
Hazel burst into tears and ran out of the room.
Peter got to his feet with alacrity: ‘Don’t let us keep you. I’m afraid Hazel’s a bit upset,’ he explained. ‘It’ll take me hours to bring her round. Thank God it’s Friday. Sorry about all that, but I warned you it was a problem.’ He was conducting them to the door. Jenny said:
‘Would you thank her for the nice dinner? And for having me – and everything?’
‘I don’t suppose it’ll do much good, but I’ll tell her, of course. So long, Gavin. Sorry about all that – but I did warn you.’
Gavin said good-bye, and the door was shut . . . Jenny and Gavin looked at each other and then made for the lift. In the lift, Jenny said: ‘Cor!’
‘I’m really sorry – ’ Gavin began, but she interrupted him: ‘Don’t you be. It wasn’t your fault. Not exactly fault, at all, really.’
‘What I meant was, it was intended to be a nice evening out for you: your mother said you didn’t go out much.’
‘Well, you couldn’t have known.’ There was something both sturdy and forlorn about the way she said this that made him feel really sorry she’d had such a dud evening . . . They walked to the bike, and he almost wished they were going back by tube: at least they could have talked a bit. But, as they were putting on their helmets, she said: ‘Would you like to come back and have a coffee or a tea?’ And he said, yes he would.
Her mother had gone to bed, and the kitchen, without Andrew in it, was completely tidy . . . It had obviously been a back sitting room: there were French windows looking on to the back garden and there was an old marble fireplace behind the cooker . . . Jenny had filled a kettle and lit the gas. ‘I got some biscuits,’ she said. ‘Have a chair.’
There were two kitchen chairs pushed against the table which was scrubbed wood and had a small standard lamp upon it – which reminded Gavin of a restaurant. ‘Sorry if I wasn’t good on the bike,’ she said. ‘It’s exciting, isn’t it? But I felt a bit nervous going round corners.’
‘You were fine. It takes some getting used to.’
She put some assorted biscuits on a plate and switched on the lamp. ‘I’ll turn off the other,’ she said, ‘we only use it for cooking.’
‘Have you lived here long?’
‘Ever since my dad died. My mum bought this with the insurance money, but we only live on two floors. She lets the rest. I sleep next door with Andrew. Do you mind if I go and see he’s all right? He will be, of course, but I like to see.’
‘Course not.’
While she was away, the kettle boiled, and seeing that she had decided they would have tea, he poured some into the pot to warm it.
She returned almost at once and said: ‘I never asked you! Which you wanted.’
‘Tea’s fine.’
While she was making it she said: ‘It’s interesting how other people live, isn’t it? I don’t see much of that. It was a funny meal, wasn’t it? I didn’t care for that main course. They have a funny old time together, don’t they? Like a couple of kids playing houses.’
‘Pretty depressing.’
‘I expect they like it really.’
‘Why do you think that?’
‘Well, he’s always getting ready for occasions, isn’t he, and she wants to have them.’
‘You mean, he’s a nest-maker, and she just wants to get on with laying eggs?’
She started to laugh, and clapped her hand over her mouth. ‘I mustn’t wake Andrew. But he’s like that in the salon as well: I wasn’t surprised.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘When he’s cutting, he gets obsessional. Goes on and on and on. Getting slower and slower. Not like you at all.’ There was a pause and then she said: ‘You can learn a lot about people watching them cut hair.’
She sipped her tea, staring ahead of her over the cup. Then she asked: ‘Do you think everyone who gets married is a bit like Peter and Hazel? Not entirely like them – but a bit?’
‘You mean sort of enclosed?’
She nodded, and waited with an expression that looked as though she thought he was going to be very interesting about it all. ‘I don’t know,’ he said and, as he heard himself saying it, he wondered how many times he’d said that just this evening. He always felt as though he didn’t know about almost anything that came up. ‘I don’t see a lot of married couples.’
‘Nor do I,’ she said. ‘In fact, outside the salon, I don’t see people. Andrew and my mum and that’s it. I wanted to know, because I kept feeling like laughing tonight, and then I thought no, it’s really sad. All the girls at the salon – well, you know, all the juniors, and I’ve been there longest so I’ve seen quite a few – all of them waiting to find the right chap and setting up house and that. If that’s what it all adds up to – I mean is all it adds up to – it is sad, isn’t it?’
‘It would be if you’re right. I don’t think you are, though.’
‘Tell me some people who aren’t like that.’
‘It wouldn’t make any difference – you wouldn’t know them.’
‘It would help. I’d believe you,’ she added.
‘My sister. I don’t think they’re like that. They’re very close, but I think they have a good life with their friends and their children. I think they enjoy themselves. Will that do?’
She shrugged. ‘Have to. It doesn’t sound – much like an adventure, though.’
‘Is that what you think it ought to be?’
‘You know what you said about art and that?’
As he just looked at her, trying to remember what exactly he had said about that, she went on: ‘About art being for recognizing things. For showing people what a lot there is about life that they don’t know?’
‘I remember now.’
‘Well, I feel all the time as though I’m living just outside everything. In a kind of backwater. All I ever do is work in the salon and look after Andrew . . . There doesn’t seem time for anything else to happen. It’s not that I don’t want to work, or don’t like looking after Andrew – ’ she stopped suddenly. After a moment she said: ‘I don’t want to bore him, you see. End up being one of those mums you can rely on if things are tough, but you don’t want to be with them in between. I mean, when he goes to school. I did try one thing. Went to the library and asked them for a history book. But it was all about fighting and Acts of Parliament and I couldn’t get into it. When you said that about art, I thought it might be a bit easier for me to take in.’ She looked at him so earnestly that he felt completely stuck for an adequate response. He finished his tea to give himself time, and she immediately poured him some more, and then remained with her trusting owl eyes fixed upon his face. It shot through his mind that on the Ladder of Fear this was supposed by him to be pretty high up and he didn’t feel frightened – a whole lot of things, but not that.
‘I don’t know what you like,’ he said at last, ‘I mean – it has to start with you. Well, you finding something interesting, or beautiful, or extraordinary.’
‘Well, couldn’t you tell me some things, and then I could see whether they seem like that to me?’
‘I could. I could try. Tell you what. I’ll make out a sort of list of different things and you could try some of them.’
‘Okay.’ She sounded defeated in some way, he didn’t know why. There suddenly didn’t seem to be anything to say, so he said he thought he ought to be going.
‘Okay.’
As they walked down the passage to the door, he did think of something.
‘What are you going to do when you finish your apprenticeship?’
‘I don’t know. Try and get a job nearer home. My mother wanted to sell this house and start a small business so that we could live where we work because of Andrew, but I don’t think there’ll be enough money. I’ll have to get a job first, and save a bit before that.’ She sounded dispirited at the prospect. ‘I’m just tired,’ she said. ‘It’ll all seem easier in the morning.’
‘Good night, Jenny.’
‘Good night, Gavin.’
She stood at the door while he put on his helmet and mounted his bike.
‘Thanks for the evening,’ she called.
‘I’ll try and make it a better one next time.’
She smiled then, and rolled her eyes like she did in the salon.
On the way home, he thought that it must be the night with Joan that had made so many things (with other people) seem so much easier.