Saturday morning found Gavin at Waterloo catching the 11.30 to Weybridge. It was a sparklingly beautiful day, but he felt gloomy. He was doing exactly what he had told his mother at breakfast, and then Minnie on the telephone, he would certainly not – not on your life – do. Go to Weybridge to have lunch with Minnie and her parents. Three telephone calls had spelled his defeat. They had begun during breakfast, which on Saturdays was a much more leisurely affair – with Minnie.
‘Gavin?’
‘Yes?’
‘You can come, can’t you?’
‘I can’t really, I – ’
‘But I’ve told them you’re coming now. Your mother said last night that she was sure you’d be pleased to come. It would be extremely rude if you didn’t.’
‘My mother didn’t know what I was doing this weekend when she said that.’
‘What are you doing, then?’
‘I’ve got a lot of things to do. Work to catch up on.’
‘Work! You don’t usually work on Saturdays. I know that.’
‘I’m very sorry, Minnie, but I’m not coming for the weekend.’
‘Why not?’ She was wailing when he said: ‘Because I’m not, that’s all,’ and put down the receiver.
He had hardly returned to his bacon and eggs, when the telephone rang again.
‘Just come for one night. I’ve got a very special reason for asking you.’
‘What?’
‘I can’t possibly tell you on the phone . . . Telephone. Oh, Gavin, do just for once do something for me when I need it so badly. Please!’
‘Sorry. I told you. I can’t come. I don’t want to come,’ he added to make weight . . . Again he put down the receiver. This time he left it off, but his mother, who did not like the milk to be left on the doorstep for a split second if she could help it in case it went bad, had heard the milkman, and, as usual, had scurried out down the path to meet him. When she came back, she said: ‘The receiver was off. You naughty boy. I don’t know where your manners have gone, I’m sure.’ So of course it rang again.
‘Look; if you’d just come for lunch. You needn’t stay long. Just come. It’s my parents, you see. I’ve told them you’re coming. I’ll meet you at the station. It’s Weybridge. Catch the 11.30.’ And then she rang off.
Anybody in their right mind, anybody with any gumption at all, would have just let her stew: meet the train and find him not on it. He hadn’t turned out to be one of those people. He had used up all his gumption sulking with his mother at breakfast. After a brief, sharp interchange about why on earth he didn’t want to go for a nice weekend when she’d cleaned his tie and spent the evening going through his socks, and he had said that he would manage his own affairs without any interference from her, and then, from the piercing glance she gave him, wondered whether he had chosen a rather unfortunate word, she had plonked his bacon and eggs back from the warmer and on to the table and gone into a general harangue about how he had changed lately – how he was secretive, always dashing about, never home till heaven knew when and what did he think his father thought of it all (this by now interspersed with the telephone calls to which he knew she listened with breathless interest), he had sulked: refused to say anything until her commentary on his life simply ran out. Mrs Lamb’s sulking, however, was a very active affair; she trembled with repression, and emitted sounds – heavy sighs, sniffs, even grinding her real teeth against the false ones in a menacing manner that implied she might erupt into words again at any moment, and only the deadest of silences with his eyes on his plate prevented it (he thought). His tacit agreement to go for lunch which she interrogated out of him – ‘So you’ve changed your mind again, have you? Well, thank someone for that!’ ‘Catching a train are you?’ – and various other questions that he did not answer, or at least deny, had informed her that he must be going and had cleared the air from pitch-black ignorance to the twilight of bare knowledge. It was details that she liked and felt baulked of.
Sitting in the sullenly dirty little railway carriage, it occurred to him that his life had changed a good deal of late. He was not, at least not exactly, the same person that he had been a few weeks ago. Was it the night with Joan that had changed everything? He could no longer be sure: the episode, for lack of any follow up – he had not heard from her and did not even know exactly where she was – had resolved itself into legend. He sometimes was not absolutely sure that it had happened, or happened the way that he remembered it. He even felt spasms of resentment, since she, he felt, had annihilated those dreams of beautiful, compliant girls – his private company for so many years – and put only this single instance of herself in their place. Recapturing something – re-running that script – was proving less and less satisfactory. In exchange for that, he felt less apprehensive about things. The trouble was that he was so accustomed to apprehension he felt its loss – almost as though it had been a pleasure, rather than an acute discomfort. It was as though, in relation to people, he didn’t have any other feeling – except those few idyllic hours with Joan. Take today, for instance. He wasn’t frightened of what it would be like, while not having the least idea what it would be like. He didn’t expect to enjoy it much: Minnie had a way of turning quite ordinary situations into something bizarre. Then he thought that probably the presence of her parents would inhibit her. He wondered briefly, and with such ignorance about them, that he soon gave it up. At least he would discover whether they did indeed live in a castle with a deer park, but at Weybridge this seemed unlikely. Her sister had the air and the voice of a lot of people who came to the salon and the likelihood was that the parents would be the same.
As the train trundled through south London past rows of little houses with well-tended back gardens he was reminded of Jenny and her request for some things that she could get into (that she might find interesting, or beautiful or extraordinary). Looking back, he realized that he had actually been touched by her asking him, in a way that had seized him up. He hadn’t really been very understanding about that: he could see that she felt trapped in a backwater and she obviously wanted to try not to be. He’d just been rather matter of fact about it all – and vague. He had said he’d make out some kind of list for her. He got his battered leather loose-leaf notebook out of his pocket. Instantly his mind became a blank. The Arts – all the branches of them and the enormous amount of everything – defied distinctions and choices. Anyway, how did he know what she knew, let alone might like? Supposing everything he thought of turned out to be like the history book that she couldn’t get into? Well, it wouldn’t, of course. He wrote down MUSIC in capitals at the head of a page. She must have heard some music, but probably didn’t know what it was. Well, if she recognized anything he suggested, she’d get some confidence – people usually enjoyed recognition, something familiar cropping up – like tunes they had heard people whistling in the street turning up in the middle of an opera. But it wouldn’t be much good suggesting operas to her. He had had the feeling that money was scarce, and he knew that juniors earned a very bare wage. She might be getting some State benefit for Andrew, and she might not. He guessed she wouldn’t have any hi-fi and he had the impression that there wasn’t even a telly. Well, they would have a radio, and if she looked in the paper, she would find things to listen to. Mozart, he wrote. Chopin, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky (always a good way in for beginners). She might take to Bach. Haydn; the B.B.C. were always making him Composer of the Week. Perhaps he’d better get her a copy of Radio Times and mark the evening music for a week: yes – that was a good idea. Really, of course, the best thing would be for him to play her carefully selected records so that he could see what she enjoyed, or didn’t, as the case might be. But he’d never invited a girl to his room before – at any time, for anything – and he had a fair idea of the effect that doing so would have upon his mother. He moved on to PICTURES. Andrew seemed a bit young to take to public galleries; not that they wouldn’t let him in, but trundling him about and worrying whether he was bored or wanted to go to the lavatory would take her mind off what she’d come to see. She needed someone to do that with. He thought the Tate was a better introduction than the National Gallery, but the great thing about taking people for the first time to galleries was not to take them for too long. He supposed she could go to some of the galleries near where they worked in her lunch hour. He’d have to choose those for her. Really, one way of starting to look at pictures was to look at them in books: he’d got a fair number at home, but there was the Mrs Lamb problem again. (It crossed his mind then, in a sneaky kind of way, that his parents would be going on holiday, and that possibly Jenny and Andrew could come over in their absence.) They could go for a picnic in Hadley Woods, and then he could take them home for tea and really show her things . . . He thought about that for a bit, and it seemed a thoroughly good idea. It would save her from getting depressed from trying composers or painters who meant nothing to her. It was very important to start right; acquire the muscles for appreciation slowly. Take poetry, for instance. It would be no good getting her books to struggle through – at least not until she had heard some poetry that moved her – once she had found something and been caught by it, more of the same could follow, and she could be left to herself. People unaccustomed to reading poetry had awful trouble with the rhythms, and often thereby lost the sense. He had never tried educating anybody before, and the thought excited him. He turned over a new page and wrote LITERATURE at the top. Perhaps the best way to start her off on that would be to choose a first-class short story and read it aloud to her. A ghost story perhaps; or one of de Maupassant’s little slivers of life, or Kipling – but not Saki. He was just settling down to considering the merits of ‘The Rocking Horse Winner’ and ‘The Maltese Cat’, when he realized, with a shock, that the train was reaching Weybridge.
She was there to meet him, of course: she could be relied upon to be reliable when he didn’t want her to be. If she hadn’t been there, he reflected morosely, he could have gone straight back to London as he hadn’t the faintest idea where her parents lived. But she was there, wearing a pair of faded and insultingly patched jeans and a T-shirt that had been put in the washing machine with some other wrong colour.
‘Hullo,’ she said, as though she was surprised and not particularly pleased to see him.
‘Hullo.’
They walked out of the station where her battered little car was parked. Her hair looked dirty to him, and she seemed even paler than he remembered.
‘I gave up the painting kick,’ she said as they got into the car. ‘You were right about that. Too much hassle.’
‘Why were you so keen to get me to come today?’
‘Oh!’ There was a long pause. ‘If you must know, my father’s furious with me. He’s threatening to stop my allowance completely. Goes on and on about my not working enough (what at, for God’s sake?) and says I have disreputable friends. So I told him a reputable friend was coming all the way from London to see me. Got it?
‘There’s a swimming pool,’ she said as he didn’t reply. ‘And a tennis court, but I don’t suppose you play tennis.’
‘No, I don’t. I can swim though – learned in the public baths.’
‘I’ve made you cross now, haven’t I? Honestly. I don’t mean to. I love you really. I think you’re marvellous. And, if you think it’s unfair of me to make you meet my horrible parents, just think what I did for you about your mum.’
‘What did you do for me?’
‘All that pretending to be grand to please her. You remember!’
He thought of pointing out that he had not in the least wanted her to meet his mother, and then decided that a first-class row just before his lunch would be too much. Of course, if it was a bad enough row, perhaps he needn’t go to the lunch at all? He had to face (for the hundredth time) what a lot he would go through to avoid rows.
‘Just for the record,’ he said. ‘What is your father called?’
‘He’s called Sir Gordon Munday. My mother’s called Stella, but she won’t notice what you call her. She doesn’t notice much at all.’
He looked at her in some surprise when she said this, wondering what she meant, and noticed that her profile was almost beautiful if her skin hadn’t been so stretched over her bones, like silk on a model aeroplane.
‘It’s a hideous house, you’ll find.’
‘You do make it sound attractive.’
‘But there’ll be a huge lunch,’ she said, as though he hadn’t spoken.
They were driving through quiet suburban roads spasmodically edged by white gates, wrought-iron gates and sometimes just openings to the sort of drives that curved simply for the hell of it. Glimpses of mansions could be seen and the odd huge, aimless dog. Wing mirrors of motor cars glinted through privet or leylandii hedging. Just as he was wondering whether you could tell more about the architecture behind the hedge – or the class of people living there by what sort of a hedge it was – it became clear that they were arriving.
The gates had a pair of wrought-iron lanterns attached to their linch-posts; the drive was tarmac, edged with green, well-cut lawns. It curved, and a flurry of evergreens hid the house temporarily from view. When exposed it proved to be a sprawling, Tudor-type mansion on two floors, networked by silvery bleached beams and with a quantity of mean little leaded windows. Scarlet geraniums, butcher-blue lobelia and white alyssum were planted in white-painted tubs at very regular intervals. They had the sort of rigid gaiety that he associated with groups of people having their photograph taken. The front door, heavily studded with iron nails, looked like something from the set of Fidelio. It was shut. Minnie brought the car to a sputtering halt immediately in front of it.
‘Remember – I’m mad about you,’ she rather strangely (he thought) said.
He followed her through a dark hall with a tremendously loud grandfather clock in it into an enormous half-panelled room, with a stone and brick open fireplace, and a highly polished oak floor with shaggy off-white rugs on it that looked like the cast-offs from several classy polar bears. There were a number of squat sofas and armchairs – all upholstered in powder-blue Dralon – and the curtains round the formidable bay window were of the same material.
Minnie led him to a powder-blue window seat. ‘If you sit down, I’ll find them.’ And she disappeared through an oak door opposite the fireplace. He didn’t sit, but prowled cautiously. The walls were regularly hung with large oil paintings in the genre of ‘The Hay Wain’, ‘Fishing Boats off the Dutch Coast’ variety. There were one or two extremely still lifes of unlikely combinations of fruit and game juxtaposed. There was a coffee table with neatly stacked magazines and newspapers and a brass bowl full of scarlet carnations. He returned to the window seat in case Minnie came back with one or more parents. The room looked out on to a garden with a lot more neat lawns, beds of standard roses and a rock garden yelping with aubretia and something that looked like mustard, but couldn’t have been . . . He’d just got as far as noticing the large Monkey Puzzle and some more wrought-iron gates when he heard sounds of people arriving – footsteps and subdued voices – and hastily sat down.
Sir Gordon and Lady Munday, followed by Minnie, processed into the room. Sir Gordon had Lady Munday by the arm and without taking the slightest notice of Gavin steered her slowly to the largest Dralon armchair into which she subsided – considering her measured approach – rather suddenly. Minnie stood on one leg with her other foot hooked round the ankle. She had taken off her shoes. Gavin rose to his feet and waited.
‘There we are, then,’ said Sir Gordon to his wife. The remark, though not the accent, reminded Gavin of his own father. Sir Gordon straightened up and stood looking straight in front of him. His hair was white and copious, and he had a military moustache.
‘Well, Minerva, you’d better introduce your young friend,’ he said.
‘This is Gavin Lamb – I told you his name, Daddy; come on, Gavin.’
Gavin advanced and, at some point, Sir Gordon held out his hand with a gesture just short of warding him off that turned into a handshake. He wore a blazer with a great many gleaming brass buttons and a tie with sailing yachts on it. ‘Find your way here all right?’ he said. Gavin said that he’d come by train and that Minnie had met him. (Of course he’d found his way; otherwise he wouldn’t be here, would he?)
‘And that’s my mother.’
Lady Munday, on closer inspection, looked rather like a raddled version of Claudette Colbert, with a wispy fringe, pencilled eyebrows, a mouth the colour of the carnations beside her, smudged, but liberal mascara and a chalky face. She was dressed entirely in beige with a double string of pearls. She looked at Gavin without interest and said: ‘What about a drink, Gordon?’ Sir Gordon turned towards an enormous oak cupboard carved with monks praying. They had pained expressions, probably, Gavin thought, because they had stiff necks as their bodies were in profile and their heads were facing. The open cupboard doors revealed a battery of bottles and glasses.
‘I’d like my usual, Gordon.’
Sir Gordon took a tumbler which he filled in turns with Rose’s Lime Juice and Gordon’s gin. He gave this mixture a perfunctory stir and then moved slowly towards the armchair. ‘Get your mother a table. Go on, girl, make yourself useful, for once.’
Minnie pulled out the smallest of a nest of tables and carried it over to her mother. The drink was placed on it. Sir Gordon surveyed it for a moment and then turned back to the cupboard. His movements were measured and ponderous – rather like an elephant’s: it would be a mistake to get in his way once he had embarked upon going anywhere.
‘Now then. Let me see. I suppose you drink, young man?’
‘I do sometimes.’
‘You do sometimes. And I take it that this is one of those times. Eh?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘I don’t imagine you expect us to have got the champagne out for you.’
‘Oh no. A gin and tonic would do nicely.’
‘A gin and tonic would do nicely.’ He unscrewed a bottle of tonic with which he three-quarters filled a tumbler and then added a dash of gin. After contemplating the glass for a moment, he added another, equal, dash of gin. ‘Minerva! You can give your young friend his drink.
‘And what can I do for you?’ he went on after she had given Gavin his tumbler.
‘A Coke. I’d like a Coke.’
‘Disgusting stuff.’ He produced a tin and a tumbler and handed them to her. Gavin sipped his drink. It tasted as though it had spent the night in the linen cupboard.
Nobody said anything for quite a long time. Lady Munday got a rather long cigarette holder out of her beige bag, fitted a Silk Cut into it, and made several ineffectual attempts to light it with a gold lighter. Sir Gordon, who had poured himself a half-tumbler of Scotch to which he had added two dashes of water, turned to observe her efforts.
‘Your mother needs a light,’ he said.
Minerva went to the stone fireplace and collected a box of matches which she gave to her mother.
Gavin now noticed that there was not a single book in the room.
Lady Munday, who seemed to have drunk a surprising amount of her drink, said: ‘When’s Sheila coming?’
‘Sheila,’ pronounced Sir Gordon, ‘is in London. She will not be coming to lunch. She is entertaining for her husband. It was not convenient for her.’
‘I didn’t say I wanted her to come to lunch. I simply asked. I think she’s stuffy. Do you know what I mean by stuffy?’ She turned to Gavin.
‘Pompous?’ he suggested. ‘Boring?’
‘There, you see. I’m not the only one!’
Gavin realized the trap he had fallen into just as he fell into it. Lady Munday drank deeply, put down her empty glass with a flourish and said: ‘Other people find Sheila stuffy. If it was just poor old me, we might take no notice, but it isn’t, is it?’
Gavin said: ‘Um – what I meant, Lady Munday, was that I thought I knew what you meant by stuffy. I – I didn’t mean that your daughter – ’
‘She’s not my daughter . . .’ She pointed to Minnie who throughout this time, Gavin noticed, had sat on the arm of a chair scuffing the polar bear rug with her foot. ‘That’s my daughter. She’s pretty awful, but it’s a different kind of awful to Sheila. She may not be spotless as the driven snow, but she isn’t smug. Or bossy,’ she added after thinking about it and holding out her glass for another drink.
Sir Gordon moved over to take the glass. ‘There is nothing wrong with Sheila,’ he pronounced. ‘Sheila is a wonderful girl. Our young friend has not come here to talk about Sheila. I should prefer the subject of Sheila to be closed . . .’
It was. But no alternative subject was opened up. Gavin tried to catch Minnie’s eye, but she remained wilfully apathetic – staring at her foot. So he took refuge in some futile remark about the nice garden.
‘And where do you hail from – Mr – Lamb, is it?’
‘Yes. And I live in New Barnet.’
‘New Barnet. And do you propose to continue there?’
‘I think so, yes.’
Sir Gordon occupied the next minute by returning a full glass to his wife. ‘I see,’ he finally said, as though Gavin had fallen into some other trap. It was a relief when a subdued man in a white coat announced that luncheon was served.
It turned out to be impossible to shift Lady Munday until she had finished her second drink. Sir Gordon bent down and got hold of her upper arm, but she twitched him away and settled further into the armchair, the drink slopping dangerously in her hand.
‘You wish to finish your drink,’ he pronounced.
For an answer, she tipped the glass to her mouth and drank in steady gulps with her eyes fixed upon him like a child drinking milk. They all stood about – waiting, while she did this. Gavin moved over to the uncharacteristically silent Minnie, who met his eye blankly.
‘All gone!’ Lady Munday announced in nursery tones, whereupon Sir Gordon renewed his attack upon her upper arm and they all processed slowly through yet another door hardly observable because of the panelling.
The dining room was very full of beams and black, glistening oak. There was a huge silver épergne with carnations and smilax in it, and the chairs were upholstered in tapestry that reminded Gavin of the Battle of Hastings, since armoured men seemed to be staggering about bristling with arrows, and the chap on his chair actually had one in the eye. The table was long and rectangular, and their four places were set like points of the compass. They were going to have to shout at one another, Gavin thought, which would make conversation (if there was any) pretty difficult. Minnie’s parents sat at either end, and he and she faced each other. After a pause, the man in the white coat brought in four plates which he set in front of each of them. There was a longish pause, and then he returned with a silver dish with what looked like a green and pink blancmange on it. He served Lady Munday and her daughter, and by the time it got to Gavin he could see it was some kind of mousse. He waited for the others to start eating, which was just as well because they didn’t, just sat in silence until the man re-appeared with a silver tray and sauce-boat – also handed round. Gavin then picked up his fork and realized too late that he was still premature. The white-coated man went away and returned with a flagon of what turned out to be a rather nasty white wine. When everybody had been given some of that, he went away again (he must walk miles, Gavin thought, like a postman) and they all began to eat. When this had gone on for a bit, Sir Gordon cleared his throat in a way that made it clear that he was going to speak:
‘My daughter tells me that you er – well, not to put too fine a point on it, that you mess about with people’s hair.’
‘I’m a hairdresser, yes.’
‘Do you own an establishment, or do you merely work in one?’
‘I work in one.’
‘I’m forced to commend your frankness.’
‘There was a gel,’ announced Lady Munday, ‘who went orf with a hairdresser. Once. It was in the papers.’
‘Quite right, Stella. There was. Turned out badly, of course. But what would you expect?’
He turned his pale blue marble eyes on each of them in turn; when they got to Gavin, he said: ‘I don’t know what I’d expect.’
‘You don’t know what you would expect.’
‘Well, not really, no.’
‘We know what you mean, Gordon. You mean you think hairdressers are a poovy lot. That’s what he thinks,’ she told Gavin.
Minnie suddenly said: ‘But you’d have to go miles for a gay seat-belt manufacturer. Daddy’s a seat-belt manufacturer,’ she explained – started to giggle – and choked.
Both parents looked at her without expression, which, as she went on choking, congealed to a lack of concern that Gavin found rather horrible. He got up and walked round the table to Minnie, to bang her on the back and get her some water if she wanted any.
There didn’t seem to be any water in sight, so after a few thumps he offered her her wine. When she seemed to be through the worst of it, he went back to his place. The silence round the table was oppressive, and he realized that the Mundays were both waiting for him to finish what had turned out to be fish mousse. Although she hadn’t said anything, Minnie’s eyes had brimmed with tears when she nodded to accept the wine. She left her fish.
The second that Gavin put down his fork, Sir Gordon reached under the table and rang a bell. The white-coated man appeared and cleared their plates one by one. He then set fresh ones before them. During all the time – and there seemed to Gavin to be a hell of a lot of it – that it took him to serve them with a dish of sliced roast lamb, peas, carrots and new potatoes, mint sauce and redcurrant jelly, and finally red wine in a second glass, silence prevailed. After positively his last appearance, however, everybody started to eat what Gavin recognized as very good food, although he no longer felt hungry.
‘You must tell us more about yourself,’ Sir Gordon announced, after he had loaded his fork with some of everything on his plate. His tone was not inviting, and it was difficult to know precisely what he meant.
‘There’s not much to tell, really.’
‘Are your parents living?’
‘Yes.’
‘Both of them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you the only child?’
‘Oh, Gordon, what difference could that make?’
Sir Gordon waved his heavily laden fork dismissively at her and a pea fell on to the table. ‘Please don’t interrupt, Stella. I am talking to Mr Lane.’
‘Lamb.’
‘I am talking to Mr Lamb.’
‘I have a sister. She’s married.’ Lady Munday, he noticed, had different eating habits. She had speared up all her peas and was now popping bits of carrot into her scarlet mouth. He glanced at Minnie who seemed simply to be re-arranging the food on her plate.
‘And what does your father do? Is he also concerned with hair?’
‘According to you, Gordon, he couldn’t be. Poovy people don’t have kiddies, do they? According to you.’
‘He has his own business. He’s a builder.’
‘His own business.’
‘I can’t see what difference it would make anyway. I mean,’ she explained to nobody in particular, ‘he might be a poove and working for someone else. Or he might be poovy and have his own business. Or normal and not. My husband’s idea of normal is another matter; no more of that. I’m sick of that subject. Do you go to the theatre, Mr Lamb?’
Relieved that the subject looked like changing, Gavin said that he did.
‘And what do you think of it? Nowadays?’
This gave him a fair idea of what she thought of it, but he said mildly: ‘Well, we’ve always had marvellous actors, haven’t we? But we seem to be a bit short on playwrights.’
‘I used to be in the theatre and I couldn’t agree with you more . . . No spectacle. No tunes you can sing in the bath.’
‘If he has his own business, why did you not go into it?’
‘I didn’t want to.’
‘Seven thousand sequins sewn on to my dress for one little number! I sang it on a swing: the ropes were made of ostrich feathers. The whole thing only took four minutes. That was the sort of trouble they took. Now everything’s as drab as can be.’
‘Am I to assume that you are one of those people who believe in pleasing themselves?’
Gavin looked desperately at Minnie, but she, most surprisingly, was positively gobbling her meal; eyes fixed on plate, and shovelling the stuff in as hard as she could go . . .
‘I believe in trying to,’ he said; ‘but it’s not all that easy, is it? I mean, there are so many other things you find you’re doing instead.’ (Like having this amazingly boring lunch with you. Why had Minnie asked him?)
‘The old-fashioned virtues such as duty to others, a sense of responsibility and unselfishness mean absolutely nothing to you?’
‘I can’t imagine what on earth they mean to you, Gordon. I’ve never known you to do the teeniest thing for anybody else in your life. You always used to tell me how you knew how to look after Number One. And I soon found out who that was.’
‘Stella, I am trying to hold a conversation with Mr Ram.’
‘I don’t call cross-examining someone a conversation. We don’t usually have conversations at meals . . . We usually eat them in silence. It isn’t a question of “pas devant les domestiques” it’s pas devant any bloody body. I married beneath me,’ she explained more directly to Gavin, ‘and that’s saying something, if you saw where I came from.’
And, before the silence could become ungovernably awful, she went on: ‘He’s a self-made man, and quite frankly I don’t think he’s made a very good job of it. I think anyone else would have done better.’
Minnie quite suddenly slid off her chair and almost ran out of the room.
‘You will observe, Stella, that your thoughtless rambling has upset the girl.’
‘I expect she just wanted to go to the lavatory. And by the way, his,’ she pointed a scarlet-tipped finger at Gavin, ‘name is not Mr Lane. We all know that.’
‘I am perfectly aware of Mr Ram’s name,’ said Sir Gordon heavily. His face which had suffused to the colour of a ripening plum during the last few minutes was now draining to the mauve twilit dusk of far-off hills. Unexpectedly (to Gavin) he offered his wife another gin, and unsurprisingly she accepted. When he had gone to get it, Lady Munday threw back her head and made a little rocketing raucous noise that Gavin recognized as being her way of laughing. He had been feeling as though he was in some vehicle whose brakes had failed careering downhill towards some – as yet unseen – dangerous corner: he felt frightened and irresponsible. He looked at his companion warily. He was beginning to see where Minnie got her capacity for embarrassing people from.
She said: ‘Don’t mind me. I must have a little fun sometimes. I am so hellishly bored. If it wasn’t for that wretched girl I wouldn’t be here – would never have married him.’
In spite of not wanting to, he went on looking at her: she was looking straight at him in just the way that Minnie did when she was telling him something unlikely – except that these same round eyes were spikey with blue mascara. Also, he had the feeling that she was not lying.
‘For goodness’ sake, don’t marry her whatever you do. You’d have an awful time.’
Before he could say anything to this, Minnie came back into the room. Her face was chalky, but she looked relieved – even managed a little smile at him as she slid back into her seat. She was immediately followed by her father, whose measured tread and concentration upon the tumbler that he held precluded anything else happening while he was walking about with a drink. Then, when he had set it before his wife, he went to his seat and rang the bell, so conversation was further suspended.
By the time their meat plates had been cleared and they had all been served with apple pie and a choice of cream or custard, Lady Munday had practically finished her new drink, but Gavin realized that it had had the effect of shutting her up, since, when conversation was again due to break out she remained silent, picking pieces of apple out of her pastry with her fork. It was Sir Gordon who returned to the charge.
‘And what are your ambitions? If you have any.’
Gavin, after thinking for a moment, said that he thought he’d like to travel more.
‘You would like to travel more. And what do you intend to do on your travels?’
‘Well – just see things. Look at things.’
‘See things? See things,’ he repeated heavily. After – presumably – further thought, he said: ‘I fail to see what looking at things can have to do with hair . . .’
Gavin, who failed to see that too, remained silent.
‘I was, after all, inquiring about your ambitions.’
‘I thought you were asking me what I was interested in. I don’t think I’ve got any ambition in the way you mean.’
‘No ambition,’ reported Sir Gordon in a tone that balanced incredulity with disapproval. He looked round the table in a chairman-like manner to gain backing for this decree, but his wife and daughter were engaged upon eating and not eating their apple pie. ‘I think we will adjourn this discussion until after lunch. We can resume it in my study.’
Which is what happened. Sir Gordon dispatched the women – Lady Munday to a sitting room where she could watch the tennis on television, and Minnie to the swimming pool by herself, after she had said that she was going to take Gavin for a swim. He then conducted Gavin to a smaller, and intensely dark, room whose walls were upholstered in what looked like dark brown leather. There was a stupendous desk and Sir Gordon seated himself behind it with his back to the small leaded window. Gavin, who he indicated should sit in an extremely uncomfortable chair facing him, could see Minnie’s diminishing figure as she wandered aimlessly across the lawn towards the Monkey Puzzle and the wrought-iron gates.
There was a silence, during which Gavin wondered why Sir Gordon, who did not seem to like him, should want to go on talking to him, and secondly, why he, Gavin, who did not even want to be here at all, was putting up with it.
‘Well, young man. Now we are alone, what have you to say for yourself?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Don’t come that one on me. I wasn’t born yesterday.’ He gave a rather nasty smile, as though there was something obscene in the notion that he might have been, waited, and as Gavin said nothing – simply stared at him – leaned forward, put his elbows on the desk. ‘I’m waiting,’ he said. The brass buttons on his cuffs were angled and winking like a flarepath. Then he said: ‘I can understand your not wanting to bring up the subject in front of the women. But we’re alone now!’
‘Bring up what subject?’ In spite of himself, Gavin began to feel vaguely frightened. Here he was, miles from anywhere, shut up with this ghastly old tyrant –
‘It’s no use trying to brazen it out. I have information. I am perfectly aware of what you have been up to.’
This made Gavin feel momentarily better: so far as he knew or could think, he hadn’t been up to anything – didn’t lead that sort of life . . .
‘I happen to know that you have designs on my daughter. Have actually, in fact, the confounded cheek to get engaged to her without my permission, and we all know what getting engaged means in these modern times. Don’t interrupt me. I also know the motives you must have for such behaviour. You think you’re on to a good thing. You think Daddy will pay anything to get you safely married and you’ll live the life of Riley ever after. Don’t interrupt me. But you’ve made one serious mistake. My daughter hasn’t a penny of her own. Not – one – single – penny.’ Here he leaned back in his chair again and folded his arms. ‘And finally,’ he announced, ‘if you were thinking of running away with her or anything silly of the sort, let me tell you it won’t make a blind bit of difference. Now you may speak. If you can find anything to say.’
It ought to have been easy, but it wasn’t. Really, he didn’t know where to begin, and almost before the words were out of his mouth he realized that he’d begun in the wrong place.
‘I don’t want to marry her at all,’ he said . . .
‘You don’t want to marry her! Well, you young hound, you may have to! I’m not having my daughter interfered with for nothing.’
‘I haven’t done anything to her! I don’t know what she’s told you, but I’m just a sort of friend. I hardly know her!’
With some trepidation, he noticed that Sir Gordon’s face was slowly suffusing again to plum, but he felt pretty hot himself. He remembered Minnie’s voice on the telephone – ‘I’ve got a very special reason for asking you’ – and felt himself blushing with rage. This, he soon realized, was misinterpreted by Minnie’s father who leaned forward suddenly and stabbing a podgy finger at him said: ‘You can’t quite bring yourself to say that without shame, can you? When you know all the time the girl’s pregnant. I suppose you’ll tell me next that you had nothing to do with that?’
‘Yes. I will be telling you that. I mean I am telling you. But I don’t believe that either. She tells lies. She’s always told them,’ he added, discovering this clearly for the first time. ‘You must know that. She’s neurotic, or something.’
‘Oh – we’ve spent a fortune on that nonsense. If we find someone for her to go to, she doesn’t stay with them. No expense has been spared, believe me. But the fact remains, that she is pregnant; can’t keep her food down, been fainting, all that sort of thing; dammit, she must be pregnant!’
‘She might just be ill. I don’t mean “just”,’ he amended hastily, ‘but if she’s told you she’s pregnant and it’s me, ten to one she’s making it all up.’
‘You’ve had nothing like that to do with her?’
‘Nothing like that – no.’
Sir Gordon was palpably taken aback. ‘I stopped her allowance,’ he said at last. ‘To try and flush out whoever it was. I thought it had worked because she asked if you could come down, and I said why, and then she told me. All that. Naturally, I thought you were after her money.’
‘How could I be when she hasn’t got any?’
‘You must have known I was well heeled. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that.’
‘She told me you were a Lord and lived in a castle with a deer park.’ As he said this, he was conscious of treachery to the wretched Minnie. She had said all that to please his mother; she was maddening, of course, but she looked ill and was probably off her rocker, and here he was almost colluding with this awful man – getting himself off the hook by vilifying her. ‘It was just a harmless joke,’ he said weakly.
‘I don’t know about that – course, she was exaggerating a bit. After all, I’ve a title, and this isn’t the only property I own, you know – not by a long chalk.’
It was almost as though he’d tried to be appeasing – as though the mention of the deer park was a kind of sucking up.
‘Well – it would seem that you’re not after my money, and that’s one up to you. I’ll make you a proposition. If you marry her and make a success of it, I’ll give you a real job with prospects. Meanwhile, I’ll pay you a lump sum (to be decided at some later date) to get out of this hairdressing caper on condition that you put the money down for a house – or a flat if that’s what you turn out to afford. I’ve given up any hopes of her turning out like my Sheila: she’s not going to better herself and I’m no snob. Mind you, there’s nothing like a wife and child to give a chap a nudge up the ladder. And, if you feel discouraged at times, ’cos mind you, I’ll work you hard, make no mistake about that, remember I did it. Think of me. Left school when I was fifteen and worked my way up from making the tea.’ Self-satisfaction was making him sweat, and he pulled out a huge silk handkerchief with bull terriers on it to wipe his face. ‘I’ve her interests at heart,’ he finished, ‘and there’s no more I can do for her. Won’t be sorry to have her off my hands!’ He smiled as though this was a little joke that he knew Gavin would understand.
The enormity of this suggestion left Gavin momentarily speechless. Then he thought, of course, it was all quite simple – all he had to do was to say that he wanted no part of it, backing up this general statement with the salient point of not wanting to marry Minnie: that would do it. But it didn’t. To his horror, Sir Gordon simply raised the price of the bribe: he’d buy them a house. Gavin explained all over again how much he didn’t want any of it. Sir Gordon congratulated him on his shrewdness. ‘We’ll make a business man of you yet,’ and added more financial inducements. At the end of what seemed to Gavin like about half an hour, but was probably only a few minutes, his future – married to Minnie – contained two houses, a three months honeymoon in the West Indies, a directorship of one of Sir Gordon’s subsidiary companies and an account of up to £500 a month at Harrods. ‘My word, you’re a sharp operator.’ As the price went up, so did Sir Gordon’s estimation of him: he seemed to admire greed almost as much as he admired dishonesty.
At his wits’ end, Gavin said he would have to think it all over: he felt craven saying it, but it seemed to be, and in fact was, a possible way out.
‘Take your time, my boy!’ he cried. (He had completely stopped repeating Gavin’s words after him: Gavin thought that that must be because he had – most unfortunately – stopped disapproving of him.) It also became clear to Gavin that his saying that he wanted to think it over was regarded as merely a form: he felt the tentacles of bonhomie closing in when Sir Gordon clapped him painfully on the back. ‘One little point,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘I shouldn’t pass on any of this to the girl: not now, anyway. Savvy?’ Gavin, who’d thought people only said that in books, said he wouldn’t dream of it and he must be going.
‘Enjoy your swim. We can have another talk before dinner.’ Just then, the telephone rang, he walked with ponderous speed back to his desk, and his attention was deflected. He picked up the receiver and then made elaborate mime to Gavin about having to talk on it. Gavin escaped.
Into the hall. The front door was before him at the other end. He wasn’t going swimming; not he – not on your life. He opened the door, shut it as softly as he could behind him and ran lightly down the drive. Reaching the road, he turned left and continued running. He had the fear – possibly irrational – that Minnie would discover he was no longer with her father and that then she would give chase in her car, and he simply did not feel equal to her tenacity. Twice he hid behind hedges when he heard a car but neither of them was hers. His luck held when he got to the station too; there was a train drawing in as he arrived and in spite of the crabbed and slow-motion efforts of the man in the ticket office he managed to catch it. He flung himself in an empty second-class compartment just as the train moved off. His heart was pounding from running. He was pouring with sweat and he was almost sobbing with the effort to get his breath back – and from relief.