At Waterloo station, he went to a call box and rang Harry. The one thing he didn’t want to do was to go home, in case she started ringing him, since he neither felt equal to dealing with her, nor with his mother about her. Harry was in. No, he wasn’t doing anything that night, because he’d got a case of mangoes from a street market and was in the middle of making chutney. ‘And Winthrop, of course, is going to Heaven, but I’ve told him I’m damned if I’m going with him. I can’t stand the noise. You come round when you like, dear boy.’
The moment that he had settled this, he felt safer, and the situation he had escaped from seemed even more unreal than it had begun to feel in the train. On his way to Harry, he even started to try to imagine what life as Sir Gordon’s son-in-law could possibly be like. A mixture of being bullied and being bored. In a way it would add up to an endless life round tables; tables with food on them, and tables with papers on them. There would also, of course, be Minnie, who presumably was well on her way to becoming as hellishly bored as her mother had said she was. But, when he thought of Minnie, he knew that there was something much wronger with her than that . . . It was easy to say that she was off her head; but that, too, seemed now to be a rather callous way of simply writing her off. It was in the train on his way to Harry that he began to feel bad about her, which irritated and unnerved him. What on earth could he do about it, after all? He hoped that there was absolutely nothing, but his uncertainty about this nagged at him. It opened up the whole question of how responsible was he meant to be for other people? And, if at all, to whom, and how much? He hadn’t invited Minnie into his life; she had occurred and then clung like a little limpet. But then he hadn’t invited Joan, either: it was she who had done the inviting, he had simply – thank God – gone along with her. He suddenly wondered whether he was one of those craven, passive people who hung about all their lives waiting for things to happen to them – merely reserving the right to complain if they weren’t the right things.
If Harry hadn’t made him go to that party, he wouldn’t have met either Minnie or Joan. He certainly wouldn’t have gone to it without being pushed. And, if he hadn’t gone, he would have been at the opera the same night as Joan, but he wouldn’t have known her so nothing would have happened. But if he was a different sort of person not knowing her would have made no difference. He made the resolution that, when Joan returned to London, it would be he who did the inviting and felt his body give a little lurch of assent. Certainly that party had changed his life; so how many parties had he not gone to that might have done the same thing? It had altered the Ladder of Fear: once he knew people, they were off it, whereas before, everybody had some sort of position on it. Excepting Harry. He was really looking forward to seeing Harry, to having a good long talk with him about – things.
He could smell the chutney on the stairs, and when Harry opened the door he released a great blast of it – so strong it brought tears to the eyes.
‘You’ll have to bear with me because we are nearing the potting stage and it keeps sticking.’
The glass coffee table was covered with the remains of lunch for two. Harry had darted straight back into the kitchen, so Gavin followed him.
‘Winthrop’s taken some Black Magic to his mother. He’s lost interest in the culinary arts.’ He was vigorously stirring a huge cauldron from which steam was rising; the odour of boiling vinegar and spices was overpowering.
‘I know – if it was alcohol I should definitely be unable to walk straight,’ Harry said cheerfully.
Gavin went to look at the blackish-brown mixture that bubbled and periodically spat at them.
‘Put a kettle on, dear child. As soon as I’ve potted it, we can have some tea.’
Gavin put on the kettle and then went to the lavatory which was in the bathroom. The towel rail was hung with T-shirts inscribed with cheery/belligerent messages – Winthrop’s, no doubt. This reminded him that he hadn’t seen Winthrop since the night of the party, and that Winthrop had shown unmistakable signs of not liking him then. He remembered the powerful ease with which he handled people he didn’t care for – like Spiro, for instance – and began to worry about what he would be like if he came back from visiting his mother in a bad temper.
‘How is Winthrop?’ he asked when he returned to the kitchen.
‘Well, he’s all right in himself, but he’s restless. He’s working for a mini-cab company now, because he wants to save enough to go to America when I get my holiday . . . I’m glad he’s dropped the modelling because I don’t think it brought out the best in him. We’re going to San Francisco in the autumn. It’s given him some kind of goal, but on the other hand he spends a fortune on these discos, and of course he meets all kinds of people there. You have to be very patient, but I expect one day he’ll grow up and settle down. But if you’re . . . fond of someone, you have to take the rough with the smooth.’ He lifted a small amount of chutney out of the pan and put it on a saucer. ‘Just want to see if it looks done when it’s cooler. It’s not as critical as jam, but on the other hand you don’t want it slopping about in the jars.’
His eye, Gavin noticed, had faded to a livid yellow with tinges of green. ‘You’d better not buy any ashtrays when you’re in San Francisco.’
‘We always buy ashtrays, dear boy; for our collection.’ Then he got the point and, feeling the wounded side of his face, he said: ‘But, even if we didn’t, he’d find something else. Winthrop’s very resourceful when he’s angry.’
‘I got the impression he was angry with me last time I saw him.’
‘When was that?’
‘At the party. The famous party.’
‘Oh – that! It was that wretched little quean Spiro he was angry with. He likes Joan, and he can’t stand dishonesty.’ He inspected his saucer. ‘Right: I think we can go ahead.’ He turned off the gas under the chutney and opened the oven door. A batch of Kilner jars filled the small oven.
‘Why do you keep them in there?’
‘They have to be hot when the chutney goes in, or they’d crack. Winthrop’s fond of you. He’s just a bit nervous of people who’ve been educated. Well, we all are, aren’t we really? I mean, if education is relative, I suppose there’s always one lot somewhere that we’re afraid of. Winthrop really slipped through the net as far as formal education was concerned. His mother’s working hours meant she was always asleep during the hours of education, and no one else seems to have bothered about seeing what he got up to during them. It has left him at something of a disadvantage . . .’ He was pouring the chutney into the jars from a steaming jug; and standing too close to him (there wasn’t much room) Gavin jolted his arm so that some of it spilled – down the side of a jar and on to the tray.
‘Sorry!’
‘Look – you go next door; I shan’t be long. Put on a record if you like.’
He went, but he didn’t put on a record. He didn’t want to: he didn’t want to do anything, he felt suddenly and completely fed up. He’d had a really awful day so far, and he’d come all this way to see what amounted to his only friend and all he did was make chutney and talk about his boyfriend. It was no use his going home, because his mother would go on and on at him, and even if he escaped to his own room she would bring him angry trays. He had no privacy; he didn’t even have his own place – like Harry – where he could do what he liked. And what did the rest of his life amount to? He worked for a man he loathed, but who would one day retire or die, and then where would he be? Come to that, his parents would die eventually, and then where would he be? Supposing Harry stayed in San Francisco, what would he do then? By now, having deprived himself of home, job and friends, he felt considerably more than fed up – he felt frightened. This was his life, but was anybody else faring much better? Could he, if it came to it, think of anybody who would claim to be, if not happy, at least content? Obviously the Munday family weren’t; Joan, for all the marvellous things about her, could not be described as happy; his attitude to his mother, made up as it was of so much side-stepping, evasion and conciliatory gestures, was really based upon his certain, unspoken knowledge of how disappointing she had found her life; Harry was nearly always on the rack about Winthrop whose compensating features seemed to Gavin to be sketchy and unreliable – to say the least. Even his clients in the salon – God, think of them! – poor little Miss Wilming with her appalling stutter and her blatant loneliness; Mrs Blake, the one who’d been nearly, or quite, in tears all through her perm; even Mrs Courcel (what kind of life could be hers if she had nothing better to do than to come in nearly every day to have her hair fiddled about with?). And Muriel Sutton; there was somebody who wasn’t getting anything they wanted out of life! And of his colleagues Iris had her terribly ill husband to worry about; she must spend all her spare time warding off his inevitable death which would leave her with nothing to worry about but being alone. Even Peter and Hazel, he reflected morosely, were probably heading for the rocks of strife and unhappiness: either Hazel wouldn’t have a baby to please Peter and would secretly blame him for it, or she would have one, and Peter would drive her mad by replanning their economics. And so on. And what was he supposed to do with his life? Here he was, at thirty-one, tooling on in a job with no prospects, consoling himself with daydreams that he could now see had no bearing at all upon reality, stuffing himself up with reading and record-playing (and he hadn’t done much of either lately). In any case, the Arts were probably mere palliatives: a series of tricks that enabled people to get through their dreary lives. Without reason, he suddenly thought of the succession of his annual holidays; times when he had gone to places to look at them; the endless meals in small pensions or big package-tour hotels – reading, a book propped up against his carafe of wine; spending God knew how much energy on not meeting people; trying, even abroad, to evade the unknown; to remain intact – and lonely – waiting for that wonderful girl who never turned up. People had made advances to him of course, but he had become expert at choking them off. Once, though, he now remembered, he had had to go to the lengths of pretending to be ill for a whole three days – until her package tour came to an end and she was safely gone. A very ordinary girl with sunburned shoulders – nowhere near the kind of girl he had in mind . . . But then Joan was nowhere near her either. Before that party, he had been content, in a way. He’d even been smug, congratulating himself upon all his interests, his nice home, his steady job. That had been when he was getting ready to go to the party, he remembered. And that was – good Lord! – only a week ago! In one week he had changed from being somebody to whom hardly anything happened, into someone to whom things never seemed to stop happening.
So why was he so fed up? Because – apart from the night with Joan – it had been seriously suggested (by Marge) that he should consider marrying Muriel Sutton. It had been more pressingly suggested (by Sir Gordon) that he should marry Minnie and become an industrial stooge. That was what the week had consisted of (apart from the night with Joan). And it was typical of Life that she had immediately gone off to another country. He might never hear from her again, and if one sexual (and romantic) encounter in thirty-one years was his ration, he was just about due for one more night before he dropped dead . . .
‘Sorry to be so long – one of the jars cracked – made a terrible mess – hey, what’s up?’
He took his head out of his hands: ‘Nothing much.’
Harry put the tea tray on the floor and started to clear off the lunch plates. ‘I know what that means.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘It means, “I’m not going to tell you unless you take me seriously.”’ He took the dirty plates into the kitchen, and came back with a J-cloth. ‘Can’t have all these crumbs. Winthrop will make crumbs of anything.’
‘Oh, do shut up about Winthrop!’
‘Okay,’ said Harry equably. ‘Let’s have a serious conversation about Gavin.’ He poured tea into two mugs that Gavin noted irritably as being highbrow pottery, and started opening a packet of biscuits.
‘Now you’re probably having a panic about how much to tell me,’ he observed. ‘Well, I’ll tell you one thing. Everything you say here to me will be strictly private. I’m very discreet. And you’d be surprised at what people do tell me.’
Gavin felt himself blushing: Harry was dead right; he had been trying to decide whether to tell him or not about Joan, and had just about decided not to. ‘I’m not sure where to begin,’ he said. ‘It’s not exactly just what’s been happening – it’s how what’s been happening has made me feel. I’ve been thinking about it, while you were in the kitchen, and I suppose it all started with that party. It seems ages ago, but it was only last week. You know I’m not much good at parties.’ Then he remembered how Harry had been feeling by the end of it. ‘Perhaps you don’t want to think about the party,’ he said.
‘I don’t mind. It had its awkward moments, I admit, but otherwise it seemed to me more or less what they’re usually like.’
‘You mean Joan’s parties?’
‘I mean large unknown parties. They’re always a bit of a risk. That’s what most people like about them.’
‘Oh.’
‘Not you – I can see that. You’re not one of the world’s risk-takers, are you?’ He said it so nicely, that Gavin found that he didn’t mind someone else knowing that about him.
‘I suppose not.’
‘Anyway – you were at the party.’
‘Yes. Well, I don’t know whether you remember but when we went down in the lift there was a girl with me? She was wearing a red dress.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Well, I could not get rid of her! She gave me a lift in her car – I thought she was just taking me to the station, but she took me all the way to here – where I’d left my bike – and then she followed me all the way home. Said she had nowhere to sleep.’
‘Your mother must have had something to say about that.’
‘She didn’t know till next morning.’ He could tell Harry this bit; Harry understood about mothers. ‘At breakfast she pretended to be the daughter of an Earl or a Duke or something and Mum enjoyed that. Anyway, after breakfast I got rid of her, and I thought, “That’s that.” Not a bit of it. She turned up at the salon . . .’ And he told Harry all about that bit: the basement flat in Chalk Farm and the silly picture she’d made. ‘But that’s not the worst of it.’ And he told Harry all about going to Weybridge and the awful house – Harry was fascinated by that and kept asking for more detail – and the lunch and then Sir Gordon’s duologue with him in his study (which also didn’t have a single book in it, he remembered, except for the telephone directories in mock leather folders), and finally about his running away. When he had finished, he waited for Harry to say something. Eventually, Harry said: ‘And then what?’
‘That’s all.’
‘What’s worrying you then, Gavin?’
‘Well – ’ he felt himself beginning to flounder. ‘I mean, there’s obviously something wrong with her; I mean, look at all those lies! Telling her father we were engaged without even mentioning it to me!’
‘She sounds demented. So what’s your problem?’
‘You sound as though you think I haven’t got one.’
‘No, I don’t. I just sound as though I want to know what it is.’
‘Well – apart from the fact that I bet that’s not the last of her, I feel – sort of – well, responsible in a way.’
‘What way?’
‘Well, she’s sick, isn’t she? I mean, it’s not only the lies – she looks ill. And she never seems to eat anything. And she’s always trying to shock people.’
‘Trying to get attention, I expect. Wouldn’t you, with parents like that?’
‘Yes, but so what? Those are the parents she’s got. I can’t help feeling she needs help.’
‘Do you want to help her?’
‘I’ve told you, I don’t want anything to do with her . . .’
‘Well, there you are then.’
‘No – I’m not! I’m sure there isn’t anybody else to help her, and she needs help.’
‘But you wouldn’t be any good at it, if you really don’t want anything to do with her. You can’t help people you don’t like. It doesn’t work.’
‘I can’t just abandon her. One reason I’m feeling so bad now is because I ran away from her this afternoon. Just left her to it.’
‘Listen, Gavin, I won’t pry, but you sound as though you’ve been to bed with this girl and that’s made you feel guilty about her.’
‘Oh no! Nothing like that!’
‘All right. If you’re really feeling bad about her, you’d better see her when she’s in London. Tell her it’s no go with you – absolutely nix – but tell her she ought to get some help because she’s screwed up, and after meeting her parents you don’t blame her. She might take that from you.’
‘And she might not.’
‘Well, that’s up to her, isn’t it? You’ll have done your bit.’
‘It seems a pretty feeble bit.’
‘Well, your feelings for her are on the frail side, aren’t they? For God’s sake, Gavin, you’re not Jesus Christ. It’s difficult enough to give the right things to one person if you love them; don’t think you can do the right thing by anyone you meet. You live in a dream world, dear boy.’
‘I don’t think waiting for the right person to turn up is living in a dream world.’
‘How right they are is relative, isn’t it? You think someone completely perfect will one day put in an appearance and that’ll be it. They won’t. And it wouldn’t be if they did. Because they wouldn’t stay like that. Nobody ever stays like anything. The most you can hope for is that with any luck you’ll both want to move in approximately the same direction.’
There was a short silence. Harry drank tea.
‘But, on your basis, how do you ever find anyone? I mean, why would one person be any better than another?’
Harry gave his sly smile. ‘Chemistry, dear child. That’s always working for you – you just have to keep tuned.’ He tried the teapot but it was empty. ‘I expect you’re still suffering the after-effects of her father’s proposition.’
‘I don’t think so. I mean, I didn’t have any doubts about turning that down.’
‘No – but it’s always a trifle unsettling to be presented with an entirely different way of life. It presents one with a choice which one would like to think one didn’t have.’
‘Why wouldn’t one like having a choice?’
‘One might like having one from time to time, I suppose, but broadly speaking one likes to feel that one enjoys one’s work, or that one has to do it. In the latter respect, a choice is rather undermining. Mark you. I’m speaking from Number One the groove.’
‘You mean, however awful an alternative seems, you go on feeling that it might have been better than you thought it would be when you turned it down.’
‘Right. Want more tea?’
Gavin shook his head. ‘I think being offered something like that does make me look at how things are,’ he said. ‘I mean, things like my still living at home.’
‘Ah! I agree with you there. I think that is something you should possibly review . . .’
He was interrupted by hearing the key in the door, and a moment later Winthrop appeared.
‘Oh hullo, Gavin,’ he said, amiably enough. ‘Just the person I wanted to see.’ He unzipped his windcheater on the black leather chesterfield. ‘There’s a fair pong in here.’
‘I told you, I was making the chutney. He wants you to cut his hair,’ Harry added, as Winthrop went into the kitchen.
‘I haven’t got my scissors.’
‘We’ve got some.’
People never understood, Gavin thought, resigned to it, that you didn’t cut hair with any old scissors. Still . . .
‘How was your mother?’ Harry called to the kitchen.
‘She was very low.’ Winthrop appeared at the door; he was stirring Nescafé and milk together in a mug. ‘That place gets worse and worse, and none of the old bags in it dares to complain. I saw the supper trays as I was leaving. I had to ask one of the staff what the hell it was. And do you know what it was?’
‘What was it then?’
‘A nut cutlet! And some tinned Russian salad. “You’ve got a nerve giving them that,” I told them. Full of nourishment, they said. My mum’s not interested in nourishment, she wants something she can fancy. But I didn’t like to make too much trouble.’ He disappeared as the kettle whistled and returned with a steaming mug. ‘Those places would get anyone down. The television’s lousy – always going off and it’s not even colour. She liked the Black Magic. Scoffed the lot. Said she didn’t want to hand them round. I took her a miniature Drambuie as well. She liked that all right. She says they can’t even make a decent cup of tea. She asked me to take her to the pub.’ He looked really sad, Gavin realized. ‘I couldn’t,’ he said. ‘She’s still got that ulcer on her leg and she’s on antibiotics. “I’ve had more men than I’ve had hot dinners in this place,” she said; she couldn’t keep off the food and how awful it was – nothing else to think about, and she says all the others do is talk about all the things they used to do in their past lives. She can’t do that. “You should have sold your story to a Sunday newspaper,” I told her – that made her smile, but she said she has her pride.’
‘I expect she was very pleased to see you,’ Harry said gently.
‘It’s not much, though, is it? An hour or so once a fortnight.’ He yawned. ‘Christ! It’s no good being old. I’m just not going in for it.’
‘You’ll have me.’
‘You! You’ll be old too! Even older!’ Gavin didn’t know whether Winthrop noticed the look on Harry’s face or not because he was on his way to the kitchen again. ‘Chutney’s good – fucking hot, though.’ He came back sucking his finger. Then, with unexpected, and therefore even more charming, charm, he asked Gavin if he would give his hair a bit of a tidy-up, and Gavin, more to please Harry than anything else, said that he would. It was agreed that it should be cut wet, and Winthrop retired to have a bath. He was a long time having it, and Gavin helped Harry wash up the chutney-making apparatus; they talked about music and everything got calmer.
Winthrop finally emerged with a scarlet towel wrapped round his waist, his auburn curls standing out all over his head in glistening corkscrews. Harry fetched a dust-sheet, and the scissors, which were not good, but not impossible, and Gavin seated his client on a kitchen stool which was just about the right height.
‘Don’t want too much off, but it’s too long at the back.’ His shoulders were milk white, and smooth as silk.
‘I need a comb.’
‘Fetch him a comb.’
‘You two going to have a nice highbrow evening?’ he inquired when Harry came back with it.
‘We hadn’t made any particular plan. Why don’t you change your mind and join us? We could find a good movie. Have some curry at the Standard.’
‘I told you – I’m off to Heaven.’
‘I know you told me – I just thought you might change your mind.’
‘Well, you just thought – wrong. I’m off for a little bleeding fun.’
‘Okay, Winthrop – I only asked.’
‘It’s when you only do things that you get on my wick.’
‘What’s Heaven like?’ Gavin asked, to fill a rather black silence.
‘It’s just a disco.’ Gavin had realized that. After a pause, Winthrop added: ‘It’s where you meet people; it’s very good for that – isn’t it, Harry?’
‘If you want to meet people, yes, it is. Some of us do, some of us don’t.’
‘Oh – fascinating! The trouble with you is you’re jealous!’
Harry said steadily: ‘That’s what it is.’
Winthrop seemed slightly taken aback at this because he was silent for a bit before repeating, more or less to himself: ‘That’s it. You’re jealous.’
It was almost, Gavin thought, as though they had found a solution. The atmosphere lightened; Harry said he was going to write the chutney labels and went to find them in the kitchen. Winthrop in tones of affection said: ‘He’s never liked cruising – I can’t think why not. After all, that’s how he met me.’
Gavin said: ‘He’s very fond of you.’ He had wanted to say ‘loves you’ but felt a bit shy.
‘I’m fond of him. He knows that, really. But Harry believes in love, you know – it makes him narrow-minded. He has fixed ideas.’
‘I think that’s the lot.’ He brushed the loose hair from Winthrop’s shoulders. He didn’t want to go on talking about Harry when he was only in the kitchen.
Winthrop went to get dressed and Harry painstakingly wrote out Mango Chutney on twelve labels. Gavin had a look at Time Out to see whether there were any enticing films, but he couldn’t find one that they both wanted to see. When Winthrop emerged in his white jeans and a black T-shirt, Harry started talking about Truffaut to Gavin while Winthrop got into his windcheater, and in the end it was he who went over to Harry and kissed him. ‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘Thanks for doing my barnet, Gavin. Have a highbrow old time. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’ And he went.
Harry’s narrow nose was quivering slightly. Gavin said: ‘Shall we have a beer?’
‘Yes, let’s.’
Gavin got his Wilhelm IIs out of his pocket. ‘Like one of these?’
‘No thanks – yes, I will.’
Gavin said: ‘We could go and get an Indian take-away and play records?’
‘Yes. Right. We’ll do that.’
After a minute, he said: ‘We could play something now. Something heartening.’
So they played Mozart’s clarinet quintet, and that did the trick, as always, Gavin thought afterwards.
‘It’s very marvellous, isn’t it?’ Harry said, and Gavin felt a surge of comfort about them feeling the same.
They went together to the Indian, and got dhal, and chicken biriani and okra in a dry sauce and some plain parathas. When they got back, Harry put it all in the oven while they sliced an onion, and put the smallest new pot of chutney on the tray with two more cans of beer.
‘We were talking about you setting up on your own.’
‘We’d begun to talk about it. The thing is, I know in some ways it would be a good thing, but I feel rather daunted about how to start.’ (I might as well talk about it, he thought; just to feel what it feels like to take it seriously.)
Harry fetched the food and set it on the table. They were both hungry, and concentrated for a while on eating. Then Harry said:
‘I have the feeling that you’ve only told me the tip of the iceberg. Your week, I mean.’
Gavin had a moment’s panic. Did Harry know, or guess about Joan? What nonsense, how could he? To gain time, and because he felt he should have said it before, he said: ‘Chutney’s marvellous.’ Then he thought, Harry’s my friend: he won’t let me down. So he told Harry about meeting Joan at the opera, and said that he had had dinner with her, and added, rather lamely, that he had liked her very much.
‘Yes: she’s an unusual type of person. Winthrop says she would be very powerful if she wasn’t so hooked on that layabout.’
‘Does Winthrop know her well, then?’
‘He knows her.’ He finished his beer. ‘Winthrop has instinct about people. He’s hardly ever wrong. Of course it makes him rather dashing. And, of course, he’s quite different when you’re alone with him.’
Why ‘of course’? Gavin wondered. But then he thought that, in some senses, most people were. Before he could reply, Harry said:
‘People confide in him. She told him that her father was homo – but he never came out with it.’
‘Joan did?’
‘We were talking about her,’ Harry pointed out. ‘Have you met Dmitri?’
‘No. Have you?’
‘Briefly.’
‘What’s he like?’
Harry thought for a bit. ‘Stunning to look at,’ he said at last. ‘And full of charm. You know, the kind you like to think you’re impervious to until you actually meet it face to face – and then you find you’re just like everyone else. He’s perfectly conscious of it, of course – uses it all the time to get what he wants. He’s like a very experienced ruthless child.’
‘Does he love Joan?’
‘You must be joking. He loves Dmitri; that’s who he loves.’
‘But she loves him?’
‘She’s mad about him,’ Harry said absently. ‘Like some coffee?’
‘I would.’
While they were clearing things up and Harry was making coffee, he said: ‘I have a feeling that a certain party has rather cleverly sidestepped the main issue. We were talking about you – remember?’
‘I thought we’d finished that.’
‘Just as you like. But I wouldn’t have thought that your little excursion to darkest Weybridge was entirely responsible for how you were feeling when you arrived.’
He thought back to how he had been feeling when he arrived. Guilty about the present, and hopeless about the future; or something like that. He’d got over the salient feature of the Joan bit without telling Harry about it, but in any case that hadn’t been what had been making him feel awful. It was much more to do with seeing people in traps – Minnie’s awful mother and Minnie herself, and Peter and Hazel in a different sort of trap, and even Jenny, he supposed, and then realizing that he felt trapped himself – by Mr Adrian and Mum. He tried to explain some of this to Harry.
‘Well, you have remedies there, haven’t you?’ Harry remarked. ‘I mean you could leave the salon and work for someone else, and you could leave home and set up on your own.’
‘But how do I know that the someone else wouldn’t turn out to be just like Mr Adrian?’
‘You don’t, but you could take some steps to avoid it. I mean, you are, or you ought to be, an expert on Mr Adrian, so you ought to recognize any likeness to him in anyone else who interviewed you. You could give that a try. After all, you’ve got a lot of experience, and anybody would take notice of you if you’d been in the same place so long.’ Then he added rather irritatingly: ‘That’s what Winthrop’s so good at. Spotting bastards.’
‘He was wrong about Spiro,’ Gavin pointed out.
‘I grant you he got a bit carried away by Spiro . . . Sex does rather go to his head from time to time.’
It seemed to Gavin to go to everywhere where Winthrop was concerned, but he didn’t want to hurt Harry’s feelings, so he picked up the coffee tray and carried it back to the living room.
Then he said: ‘It’s all very well to talk about me getting out, but where to? I’ve managed to save five thousand, but that’s the lot. That’s not going to get me very far with a flat.’
‘It would. You could get a mortgage with that much to put down.’
‘Then I’d have to be in a good job and not leave Adrian and wander about unemployed.’
‘Who said you’d be unemployed? You’re just the right age with the right experience to get another job. Probably pick and choose one.’
‘In my work, you have to be able to say roughly how many clients you’ll bring to the new place. I mean how many from the old one who’ll follow you.’
‘Well?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it. There’s nothing very special about me.’
‘Well, you’d start by counting up how many clients always ask for you – won’t have anyone else – wouldn’t you? It’s probably a percentage of them.’
It all seemed to make sense, and Gavin began to feel quite frightened.
‘I’ll have to think about it.’
‘You do that. I agree you’d be better off tackling one problem at a time. But nothing venture, nothing win as the saying goes.’
Gavin recognized that the cliché – or maddeningly right old saying – was one of Harry’s ways of closing conversations. After it, they played a Lipatti record of Bach and Scarlatti, and then Gavin said that, as he hadn’t got his bike, he’d better be getting home.
On the train back to Barnet he started worrying about whether Minnie would have called, and what his mother would be like about all that, or as much of all that as she knew. This relieved him from worrying about his conversation with Harry, but he knew that that, too, was lying in wait for him. He told himself he was extremely tired, and by the time he got out at Barnet and started to walk down Meadway he had the beginnings of a headache and was longing to take his lenses out.
The moment that he was in the house he knew that something was wrong. There were sounds of tremendous activity coming from the kitchen and the television was switched off.
‘Is that you, Gavin?’
‘Yes, Mum.’
He went into the kitchen, where she was mashing an enormous quantity of potato.
‘I’ve had some very bad news,’ she said; she stopped mashing and looked straight at him. ‘It’s your Aunty Sylvia. She’s been in a terrible accident! Terrible,’ she repeated, her voice shaking. Gavin went and put his arm round her. In spite of seldom seeing her, she was devoted to this sister.
‘Oh, Gavin!’ she cried and began to weep. ‘She might never have taken that bus! She usually caught the earlier one. It was Timmie’s music lesson!’
‘Timmie was with her?’
‘Oh, Gavin – he’s dead! He didn’t live a minute. They found him with his little arms round his violin. She’s in hospital. She hasn’t come round – in a coma – of course she doesn’t know. I’m going down first thing in the morning. To see to the other children – and sit with Sylve a bit. Phil wants me to tell her. If she does come round.’
He hugged her – she was rocking herself against him in his arms.
‘Come and sit down, Mum: it’s all right, I’ll come with you.’
He led her to the battered chair in which his father watched telly and felt for and found his handkerchief. He sat on the arm of the chair while she wiped her eyes and furiously blew her nose.
‘Where’s Dad?’
‘He’s off to see Lennie to tell him to look after the business. He’s coming with me. That poor little boy! What did he ever do to deserve that!’
‘Is she hurt very badly?’
‘She’s got concussion and her leg’s broken, but there’s something wrong with her back – that’s the worst of it – she’s in intensive care, Phil says they don’t say – oh, Gavin – he was her only son!’ She clutched him. ‘I know what I would feel like if – ’
‘It’s all right, Mum, I’m here. Would you like me to make you a nice cup of tea?’
‘I would, dear. I must get on with my pies.’
‘You’re not taking pies with you?’
‘Of course not! They’re for you. I don’t know when I’ll be back, but it won’t be for at least a week, I shouldn’t wonder, so I’m making you six pies for the freezer; three fish and three shepherds.’
‘You really needn’t bother. It’ll do me good to fend for myself.’
‘Since when have you done any cooking? I don’t want to come back and find you laid low with food poisoning. They’ll all be in the freezer and all you’ll have to do is take them out and put them in the oven and warm them up . . . I must do something,’ she added, and he saw the point of that.
So he made the tea and she topped her pies, and quite soon his father came in.
‘Terrible business,’ he said to Gavin.
‘How did it happen, do you know?’
He shook his head. ‘It was a lorry jack-knifed at a roundabout – I don’t know. First Phil knew about it was when they rang him to go to the hospital. The little boy died at once. Terrible thing. Tell your mother you want biscuits: she hasn’t eaten anything for her tea.’
They had the tea – and biscuits – although she only started one, put it down, forgot about it, telling Gavin to be sure to take the milk in in the mornings and to lock up properly before he went to work, and to ring Marge from his work in the morning to tell her what had happened – ‘I daresay she’d give you a nice meal one evening, only mind you put the lights on before you go out’ – and that she’d put clean sheets on his bed that ought to last him, but if they didn’t, he was to take the bottom left hand pair from the pile in the linen cupboard. She would ring him tomorrow evening to tell him how poor Sylvia was. After a good deal of this, she ran out of injunctions and things to say generally, and began to look very unhappy again.
Gavin said: ‘Perhaps you ought to go to bed, Mum. Get a good night’s rest before the journey.’
‘I shan’t be able to sleep for thinking of that poor little boy – and my own sister!’ Her tears began again, but she took out Gavin’s handkerchief and blew her nose with repressive violence. ‘You’re quite right, dear. I shan’t be any use to them if I keep breaking down. I’ll just lay up for breakfast, and then I’ll be off.’
‘I’ll do that, Mum. I’d like to,’ he added.
For once, she let him. He gave her a good-night hug and a kiss, and she didn’t tell him not to be silly. Mr Lamb gave Gavin a lugubrious wink before departing: he had a remarkable range of winks.
When he had finished downstairs and was in his room, the shock of what had happened impinged. Timmie was his youngest cousin: he had hardly known him – in fact had only met him twice when Sylvia had brought her children up to London. Sylvia was very much younger than his mother, and she, unlike her sister, had married late; his cousins had not been contemporaries, and the last time he had seen Timmie had been two years ago, when he had been nine. Now he was eleven – and dead. No life at all; a young child. The fearful impartiality of life appalled him. He remembered that, egged on by his mother, Timmie had said that he wanted to be a violinist when he grew up, if he was good enough, he had added. Then his mother’s phrase about little arms round the violin recurred, and he remembered that when he was a boy – not so very much older than Timmie – he had heard of the French violinist, Ginette Neveu, dying in an air crash. It had struck him at the time, because he had just bought a record of hers. She, too, had died cradling her instrument, in a vain effort to protect it. This made him cry – for both of them.
Afterwards, when he lay in bed with hot eyes and a much lighter feeling in his chest, he thought of Timmie’s sisters, Molly and Barbara, having lost their brother, and wondering whether their mother was going to recover: or not. He felt he ought to send up some sort of prayer that she should, but he hadn’t much hope of God (if He was there) taking much notice of somebody who didn’t pray the rest of the time. ‘I just hope she gets better,’ he said – whispered – in the dark. As he was falling asleep he remembered that tomorrow he was going to be on his own here; funny – after that talk with Harry about leaving and setting up somewhere. Well, he could look on the next week as a sort of practice. No dreams: he couldn’t take anything more in, but as though his subconscious was some kind of salesman, it produced a flickering catalogue of what was in stock: lunch with the Mundays but he was the only one without clothes; himself running – from something to Joan; riding his bike and trying to explain how wonderful Mozart was to an owl who could not fly fast enough to keep up; standing on the edge of a cliff and having to jump because there was someone lying hurt on the roundabout below; standing in a pool of water, unable to move because all the people round him couldn’t decide what he was, ‘Hello, Froggy; we’re not glad to see you’re back’; swimming with his feet horribly tangled in all the red hair, and it was raining, each drop slamming on the water making such a noise he couldn’t hear himself speak until he was on a small, round island where he couldn’t hear Harry warning him – he couldn’t hear anyone if he didn’t want to . . .