Getting It Right

‘Don’t you be cheeky – this is the expensive time for phoning but I never seem to get you in the evenings.’

‘As well as can be expected . . . I didn’t have to tell her about Timmie, Gavin – she knew. That’s why she never asked about him – she knew all the time . . . The hospital says they may let her out at the weekend . . . If they do, we shall be coming back on Monday. If they don’t – we shall have to see . . . It’s the funeral tomorrow. I’ll send a wreath from you; I thought you’d like me to.’

‘Yes – everything’s all right. Don’t hurry back because of me, Mum, I’m perfectly okay.’

‘He’s laying a floor in their sun lounge. Under my feet all day. If it’s not one thing, it’s something else. Well, I’ll be saying good-bye to you now, Gavin – we’re not millionaires.’

This conversation meant that he couldn’t finish the washing-up (from the night before last) without risking being late again. He put everything to soak in the sink, shoved the empty milk bottle outside the front door and set off. If she was coming home on Monday, it meant cleaning up the house a bit; it was beginning to look dusty – not a question of specks, to each one of which she paid furious and daily attention, it was more a miasma; he had a feeling that he could write his name with his finger on the top of the telly – something that would not go down at all well.

There was another aspect to her coming home that he thought about in the train the whole way to London, which was that her return put paid to Jenny’s cultural visits. There was no way that he was going to be able to persuade his mother that having a girl in his bedroom to listen to records was because they wanted to listen to records . . . She would take an instant dislike to whoever he invited upstairs. Poor Jenny wouldn’t stand a chance. Even if he was engaged to somebody, she wouldn’t countenance it. If he did try it, she would probably keep coming up with cups of tea, but really to see how they were getting on. If she happened to come up when they weren’t actually listening to records, were perhaps simply talking, she would instantly believe the worst. And if she found out that Jenny had had an illegitimate child – well, he’d never hear the end of it. The possibilities seemed many, likely and awful. This led him to experimenting with the idea of moving out; getting a place of his own: ‘Thought I’d move out – get myself some sort of flat,’ he said to himself – as though he was telling someone about it. It sounded all right. It sounded all right, but what would it be like actually to do? He hadn’t got enough money to buy anywhere; he’d have to get a mortgage. Would that mean that he was laying cork tiles every night and having five-year plans like Peter and Hazel? No, it bloody well wouldn’t. All he wanted was one room – quite simple – and a bathroom – and, he supposed, somewhere to cook: Harry might have ideas about where to look for that – supposing that he should ever want such a thing. Anyway, he’d only been casually wondering about it: it wasn’t the kind of thing he would decide in a hurry.

Walking from the tube to work, he thought about Joan. Last night, he’d considered writing to her, but almost immediately had felt defeated about what to say. Better to ring her and sort of see how things were. An irrepressible part of him began to wonder whether things would be at all as they were last time, but he squashed that part as selfish, unpleasant, arrogant, shameful and heartless, and altogether like him. Even saying he was surprised at himself didn’t carry conviction but, once having said it, he was well away.

By the time he reached the salon, the Courts had had a field day with Gavin Lamb, who had been tried, and found wanting or guilty about practically everything. The worst thing about him was his shallowness: the moment something wasn’t in front of his nose, he stopped caring about it. Take Minnie, for instance. He’d been in a fair old state about her last night, and look at him now! A clear case of out of sight, out of mind! And his only reaction to his mother’s news had been to worry about not having the house to himself. It hadn’t occurred to him to send a wreath for Timmie. She’d had to think of that: even to send a wreath on his own seemed beyond him. And yet, when he’d heard about Timmie, he had felt deeply sad – or so it had seemed at the time. And Joan: sacrilegious to be thinking about sex when she’d just been left by the person she adored. (Here there was a vestige of stuttering defence: she had, after all, spent the night with him while she was in love with someone else. He didn’t understand why – but the fact remained that she had done so.) The summing up was that he simply didn’t seem to have enough concern to go round – even for the sort of ordinary life he led. He wished a few things would happen that he didn’t have to care about: Mr Adrian breaking a leg, for instance – both legs . . . By the time he was walking up the stairs to the salon, Mr Adrian had been in a really quite serious accident: broken his jaw (so he couldn’t speak), and got two black eyes, a broken nose and a fractured right arm as well as his legs. He was going to recover, but it was going to take a very, very long time, and suffering would radically change his nasty nature into something quite different – humility and gratitude would be to the fore. ‘I can’t thank you all enough for the loyal way in which you have kept my business going, but the least I can do is to make all four of you partners . . .’

‘Better wipe that smile off your face – the boiler went out in the night, the water’s stone cold and his Lordship’s on the warpath.’ Iris made a small throat-cutting gesture.

Daphne said: ‘He’s sending the juniors down to the basement to get buckets of hot water off the caretaker.’

Just then, the salon door was kicked open and Jenny staggered in with two brimming buckets. Gavin took one look at her: her arms – like little sticks – looked as though they would break; she was breathless and she looked more than usually like a disgruntled owl.

He relieved her of the buckets; took them over to the basins, and then – his heart hammering with rage – went to beard Mr Adrian.

He found him with his feet up in his cubicle, telephoning on his private line, ‘. . . and finally, at fifty to one, twenty each way on Nepalese Boy,’ he was saying.

‘And what can I do for you?’ he said when he had replaced the receiver. His tone implied that there couldn’t be anything.

‘Well, if water has to be carried up from the basement – we should be doing it – not the juniors. It’s too much for them.’

There was – what was meant to be, Gavin recognized – a dangerous and frightening silence. But he was too angry, fed up, to be frightened.

‘Are you suggesting that these young people are utterly unable to do any physical work at all? Are you suggesting that someone with a heart like mine should jeopardize it, solely because young people whom I am paying to train should not soil their hands with any menial job whatsoever?

‘I’m just saying that I don’t think young girls should be made to carry weights like that when there are people who are physically stronger and perfectly able to do it. That’s all. And I’m also saying that I won’t have my junior made to do it. That’s final.’

He heard Mr Adrian calling him back, but luckily for him Lady Blackwater had come in and Daphne was loyally claiming his attention at the desk. This time, though, she really wanted him.

It was Harry. ‘You wanted Joan’s telephone number. Got something to write with?’

Jenny was washing Lady Blackwater, so he went to Peter and said what he thought about the buckets. Peter agreed, but said that Hugo had varicose veins and he didn’t think carrying heavy buckets would do them much good. ‘The water should be hot in about an hour and a half: or hot enough. Iris needs water too, for washing the tints off,’ he added. ‘So I’ll do Hugo’s water, if you’ll do Iris’s.’

Mandy came through the door with steaming buckets. She was flushed, and said that the caretaker was a dirty old man and he’d pinched her bottom and she didn’t fancy going down there again.

‘You won’t have to do any more. Take a bucket through to Iris – she’s been asking for you.’

Gavin set Lady Blackwater, with Jenny handing him the rollers and pins. Lady Blackwater said how tiresome it must be for them having no hot water, and wasn’t it interesting how one took things for granted until one was without them, but that she supposed that that was simply human nature, something that she, personally, had never got to the bottom of . . .

Gavin, glancing in the mirror as he finished the last roller, saw that Jenny was looking at him. When she caught his eye, she grinned faintly and rolled her eyes. The message was something like, ‘Cor! How boring!’ and her expression so quickly reassumed its look of choirboy innocence that he wanted to laugh.

‘A net on Lady Blackwater, and put her under the dryer,’ he said, and went to collect a couple of empty buckets.

It was a hard morning – Thursdays were usually busy, and the water wasn’t hot enough to use before noon. Gavin tried ringing Joan in his – rather late – coffee break, but there was no reply.

He tried again in his lunch hour and got what he presumed was one of the Filipinos, as a voice answered and said: ‘Madam out – no answer.’

‘Thank you.’ He rang off. Afterwards he thought it had been silly of him not to leave his name; next time he rang, he would.

At some point in the afternoon, Jenny said: ‘I’ve read that book.’ She paused expectantly.

‘You know: a secret garden that he could do wonderful things in. I thought it was going to be sad – about Colin, you know, but it wasn’t. If you ask me, they were very silly about him in the first place. I loved Dickon best. I had a bacon sandwich for supper last night – just like him . . . It was a lovely book. As soon as Andrew’s old enough, I’m going to get a copy and read it to him.’ She paused again – expectantly. And when he didn’t immediately say something she said: ‘When will you give me another one?’

‘Tonight, if you like,’ he found himself saying. ‘I’ll play you some Mozart and find you another book. You could come back with me, if you like. We’d have more time that way.’

‘I’d have to see whether my mum could put Andrew to bed. If she’d mind, and if she thinks he’d mind.’

She rang from the station after work and he stood outside the box. After a minute, she opened the door and said: ‘She thinks it’d be all right. She doesn’t mind at all, but she thinks she’d better have your telephone number in case Andrew starts to kick up.’

It was rather enjoyable travelling on the tube with a girl. They had to stand the first bit and he put her in a corner and stood in front of her so that she didn’t get bashed by other people. Then when they got seats – opposite each other – he played the game of pretending that he didn’t know Jenny, that she was simply a girl sitting opposite him. He decided to look at her quite dispassionately, and see whether, if he didn’t know her, he would think she was an interesting girl to know. This wasn’t as easy as it would have been if he hadn’t known her, because she kept meeting his eye, and when she did gave him one of her little grins before she resolutely read the advertisements above his head.

He started with her hair. It looked more like curly and silky fur than hair. It was the colour of darkish honey, and he thought might be much improved by adding some red highlights – Iris would do it beautifully. He tried to imagine it longer because, cut like that, her hair and her round specs dominated her appearance – had been the reasons why ages ago he had dubbed her a cross between an owl and a young choirboy and thought no more of it. He looked at the rest of her face: she certainly had a marvellous complexion – fine and fresh, she wore no make-up and there was not a blemish in sight – her best feature, really; the only other noticeable thing about her was her mouth, which turned up at the corners when she smiled – which she was doing again to him – only this time he realized that she smiled because she was excited – she was looking forward to her evening. There was something childlike in her lack of concealment about this that touched him: the reason why he’d added the choirboy to the owl; she was a very, if not completely, unsexy person who happened to be a girl. Ever since he’d reassured her that he wasn’t the dread kind of person she had worried about his possibly being, she had seemed utterly trusting: she must like him, if she could trust him as much and as easily as that. The thoughts he had had about her after the first evening dimly recurred – enough to make him feel uncomfortable, but after all he had only thought them – had no intentions: there was no law about what you thought about anyone, and in a way they had been pretty general ideas and not particularly connected with Jenny. He wondered whether she had found anything more out about her mother – to change the subject.

‘I haven’t said anything to her. But he’s gone: went yesterday evening and she didn’t mention it, so I think I was imagining things.’ She sounded almost carefree about it.

When they got home – having bought some bananas and some cream to have after Mrs Lamb’s pies – he warned her that the kitchen would be in a bit of a mess. ‘That’s something I can do,’ she said. ‘I’m always clearing up after Andrew: he can make a room look as though he’s been in it for weeks in about half an hour.’

In the narrow, stuffy little hall, she said: ‘Would you mind if I used your phone? I’d just like to make sure that Andrew has settled down all right.’

Of course he didn’t mind. While she was doing it, he got two pies out of the freezer, put them in the oven and started clearing the table. He felt light-hearted.

She helped him do the washing-up, and then they tried the remains of the wine from Tuesday. It was not bad, but not so good as it had been: still, there wasn’t anything else to drink and they agreed that it was nice to have a drink.

‘It’s lovely to go out, really,’ she said. ‘I haven’t been out since Andrew. I mean of course I go to the shops and things, and once I went to the pictures on a Saturday afternoon, but I didn’t enjoy it by myself, and my mum couldn’t come because of Andrew.’

‘Well, he has to be looked after, doesn’t he? And I’ve had ever such a lot from him. I look at him sometimes and I think: “You wouldn’t be here, my boy, if it wasn’t for me,” and I feel so proud I want to laugh and find someone to tell.’

‘What do you do in the evenings then?’ he asked casually, while he was looking to see how the pies were doing.

‘Oh, there’s always plenty to do – sometimes I have a job to get through it all. I do all the ironing, you see, and most of the washing, and I make a lot of Andrew’s clothes.

At weekends I do the cooking to give my mum a let up, and on Saturday mornings I do the big shop at Sainsbury’s. But evenings . . . I go to bed quite early. When I started as a junior I thought my feet would never hold out. I did used to find books to read, I told you, but I never found anything as good as the one you gave me.’

‘Pies not ready,’ he reported. He had been going to ask her about her friends, but now he had the feeling that there were none, and thought it better not to ask. He would hate people asking him about his friends, if it weren’t for Harry.

‘Mrs Hodgson-whatever-her-name-is has written other books, I saw. Are they all good too? She’s got a name like a client, hasn’t she? You know, double-barrelled, they call it.’

‘There’s plenty to choose from. Tell you what. We’ll go and listen to some Mozart while the pies are getting ready.’

She stumped upstairs after him. At least he’d made his bed, he remembered, although this time there were no records on it.

But she didn’t seem to mind about the records. She sat on the chaise-longue while he went through his catalogue, trying to find the right piece to start her with. In the end he selected a horn concerto – with Tuckwell playing. She listened very quietly and, when it was over, said: ‘He’s posh, isn’t he? Compared to the other man. Chopin. I like the main person playing.’

‘Well – it’s a piece of music usually written in three movements, for a solo instrument, with an orchestra.’

‘No: a concerto can be written for all kinds of instruments. Mozart wrote a lot of piano concertos, and some for the violin as well. But you can have them with almost any instrument: harps, trumpets, oboes, clarinets, violas, ‘cellos and so on.’

‘If I went to a concert, I’d see what the instruments were, wouldn’t I? I’m not fishing to get you to take me to one,’ she said starting to blush, ‘but I’d really like to know.’

‘We will go to a concert, but I’d like you to hear more music first. Concerts go on for rather a long time, and I don’t want you to get bored.’

Eating them brought up the subject of his mother, and he felt he had to warn Jenny that, once his mother was back, there couldn’t be any more evenings like this one.

‘What is it, then?’ She had her elbows on the table, her chin propped in her hands; he saw that she was asking with genuine concern rather than curiosity – none the less he felt obscurely irritated.

‘Oh it’s all kinds of things. I don’t think mothers are particularly quick at recognizing that one wants to lead some sort of independent life. She’d fuss a lot – it wouldn’t be the same.’

‘And I suppose you want to get out, but like most people, you can’t find anywhere to go. Prices are terrible nowadays, and people expect you to buy places, don’t they?’

They had their bananas and cream. ‘Andrew’s mad about bananas. Sardines and bananas – he’d live on them if I let him.’

Later, she said: ‘I should thank my lucky stars, shouldn’t I, having a place like I have to live. I don’t know what I would have done if it hadn’t been for my mum.’

‘She wouldn’t mind. I just haven’t done it. I sort of kept away from the people I’d known at school and that, when I had Andrew. Some people said some horrible things. I went off people rather and Andrew takes up so much of my time that what with work and him I don’t seem to have any over. I’ve told you all that, though, haven’t I? But I want to have more things in my life now, because if I don’t, I’ll be a terrible bore for Andrew, and when he’s older he won’t have any time for me.’

‘You mustn’t do everything you do only for Andrew,’ he said gently. ‘You must do some things for yourself, as well. Like some coffee?’

As she was drying their plates, she said: ‘Do you only like highbrow things?’

‘I mean that what’s highbrow for one person may not be that at all for someone else.’

‘Well, I thought that, as his movies are all old ones and they keep on happening, he might be. I think he’s marvellous.’

They showed a whole lot of his films. I loved the songs too. You could remember them easily afterwards. But perhaps,’ she said, after thinking about it, ‘perhaps Art isn’t meant to be easy. Perhaps it’s meant to be hard to understand. Like Shakespeare. We did him in school and I didn’t understand him at all. Well – not much. We did a play called Julius Caesar. I couldn’t get the point at all.’ She looked at him challengingly: ‘But I expect you’d say it was good.’

‘I think you might feel differently about some of the other plays. I don’t think that was a very good one to start with.’

‘I’ve read them all. I’ve hardly seen any of them.’ Harry didn’t care so much for the theatre, and he didn’t enjoy going by himself, so much.

They went back upstairs and she asked if she could look at his books while he was choosing a record. He had just decided that it had better be more Mozart – one composer per evening seemed enough – when the telephone rang. He shut the door of his room after him, because he thought it would probably be his mother, and he didn’t want Jenny to hear him talking to her.

‘Oh. Well, the best of luck to you. Winthrop’s spending the evening with Joan, so I just wondered.’

Gavin stood in the hall a moment, wondering why Winthrop should be doing that, when he, Gavin, had not even managed to speak to Joan. It seemed odd, to him, odd, and vaguely humiliating.

‘I’ve found a book called Jane Eyre that looks quite interesting. I picked it because it was a girl’s name, but the beginning seems good. Shall I read that?’

‘Why not? Jolly good choice,’ he added absently. He was trying to remember how well Winthrop knew Joan, but he couldn’t get any further than supposing that it was because he did know her that they’d all gone to the party in the first place.

He’d decided to play Jenny part of a piano concerto, and had picked the first movement of K.491. He explained what it was. She got up from the floor and went at once to the chaise-longue, took off her sandals and lay down, as though this was the agreed way to listen to music. Not a bad idea, either, he thought, and cast himself on his bed. He came to with a start – sat up to realize that the music had stopped, which must mean that they’d had the whole concerto, two and a bit movements of which he hadn’t heard. He looked across to the chaise-longue.

Jenny lay motionless, and when he went over to her he saw that she, too, had fallen fast asleep. Quite funny, really: if it had been just her, he honestly recognized, he would have written her off as not interested, but he couldn’t, could he, because he knew he was interested, and yet he’d fallen asleep. He looked at her again. She looked rather waif-like; very small and vulnerable, even younger. She had taken off her specs and she lay with one side of her face resting in the palm of her hand, her breathing light, and even. His heart lurched; he wanted to pick her up and hold her in his arms; he felt extraordinary. The feeling went; he couldn’t possibly do that anyway. How would he feel if he was asleep and someone suddenly grabbed him? And she was frightened of people, and he knew what that was like, he had no intention of frightening her. The feeling had completely gone now, leaving him with a sense of unreality – it occurred to him that he’d just imagined feeling it. He walked away from her and called her name while he was taking the record off the turntable.

She was apologetic and embarrassed at having slept. ‘I’m not used to staying up so late,’ she said. He told her that he’d dropped off as well.

‘No. Well, we’ll have to do something about that. But we haven’t done anybody really. I’m just introducing you – starting you off. Poor old Mozart didn’t have a fair chance this evening. Mozart wrote over six hundred works – all kinds of things – including opera. You haven’t heard any opera yet.’

He glanced at her; she was staring straight ahead, but he had the impression of overwhelming disappointment. He said:

‘Tell you what. We’ll have an intensive course till then. I’m free except for probably going to see someone one evening. And, when she does come back, we’ll think of some other way.’ He couldn’t think how, but he couldn’t bear for her to feel let down.

As she got out of the car, she said: ‘Gavin, I really appreciate all the trouble you’re taking. All this driving and giving me meals and not laughing at me because I don’t know things. I really appreciate it.’ And, before he could say anything back, she had slipped out and was running up the path to her house. He watched her in, waited for her to turn and wave as she had done before, and then waited for the door to shut. ‘Just seeing her safely in,’ he said to himself. He drove home with the windows down: the damp night air was amazingly exhilarating.

In many, if not all, ways, that Friday morning was like any old weekday. He worked hard at the salon: the boiler was back in business but, on the other hand, it was a particularly busy Friday. He made several attempts to ring Joan and got put off by the Filipinos; although one of them once admitted that Madam in. He told Jenny that he would be free in the evening, and she said that she’d told her mother that they only had a few more days before his mother returned, and that her mum had said, ‘Make the most of them.’ He had faint feelings of discomfort at the idea of Jenny discussing his relationship with his mother: it would almost certainly show him up, he felt, in a rather weak and unfavourable light. Most people would think it a bit odd, surely, if, at the age of thirty-one, one’s social life was circumscribed by one’s mother? He tried taking refuge in the fact that she couldn’t know the whole story, but then honesty shoved the knife in: the whole story would simply show him up in a worse light than ever. Mrs Lamb had never tried to keep him at home, he had just gone on being there; laziness and fear of the unknown had combined to keep him a comfortable prisoner of her régime. Of course, she liked having him, but he could not recall a single thing that she had ever said or done which could be interpreted as pressure to make him stay. Which was not at all to say that she wouldn’t kick up now if, after thirty-one years, he said he was going. She was used to him being there, and she had a profound distrust of all change. But he really couldn’t stay in a place where he couldn’t even have the odd girl in to supper and to play his gramophone. Supposing he didn’t leave – simply said that that was what (from time to time) he was going to do? This was when the first of many imaginary conversations with his mother began.

He: Oh – by the way, Mum, I’m having the odd girl in to supper from time to time . . .

What do you mean ‘odd girl’? Is there something funny about her? It doesn’t sound very nice to me. However did you meet someone like that?

He: I didn’t mean that I was going to do that, Mum. I simply meant that, if I meet a girl, that’s what I might want to do.

Mum: If every single time you met somebody you brought them back here the place would be like Piccadilly Circus.

Mum: There you go. One minute it’s one girl, and the next it’s dear knows how many. What do you want to bring them back for?

Mum: Play the gramophone? That’s your room the gramophone’s in. That sort of girl who’ll go rampaging up there in that room with your bed in it will not be at all a nice type of girl, I can tell you . . .

Even this first conversation showed him that he was much better at putting his mother’s point of view than he was at putting his own; however, there it was. One of the things about his mother’s points of view upon anything was that they were definitely not subject to change. He walked out of the pub where he had been having a sandwich, and then rather aimlessly down the street to nowhere in particular. What he was actually thinking about, he discovered, was how he was going to introduce Jenny to poetry – so that she would think it neither soppy, nor incomprehensible, nor dull. ‘We haven’t done poetry’ indeed! He must also disabuse her of the idea that he knew everything: although he had to admit that, being the person in the know, relatively speaking, was an intoxicating change. He probably liked having her for these evenings for reasons of vanity.

He tested to see whether it was vanity that was conditioning his idea that, to get Jenny on to or into poetry, he would need to read some aloud to her, and decided that it wasn’t. He always found that he had to read a poem aloud, as well as just reading it: at some point he needed to hear it coming from outside himself. However, if that part of it wasn’t vanity, it was extremely probable that everything else about it was. He had caught himself smiling at her in a superior way – about the words she used to express her feelings or views about the composers: Mozart being posh, for instance. Then he thought: No, posh was her word for grand, and grand in one sense was next door to noble – and there was certainly a nobility about Mozart’s music.

He realized that he’d got to get back to the salon; he’d walked some way without thinking where he was going. Perhaps he stuck to worrying about what poetry he would read to Jenny that evening because it was a more superable problem than others. Joan, for instance. Was he worrying enough about Joan? Perhaps she was utterly prostrated by Dmitri’s departure: perhaps he ought to stop trying to telephone her and simply go and see her? He felt he owed her a great deal, and he wanted her to know that he cared about her. Perhaps she didn’t want to talk on the telephone. Perhaps Winthrop had known this, and had simply gone to see her and she was so lonely that she was glad of anyone. Winthrop didn’t strike him as at all the person one would choose to see for comfort. He could ring Harry and find out how she was and, on the strength of what Harry said, he could make some move. Right: that was that . . . Why didn’t he feel better? Because the real problem – whether he was going to go on living at home or not – was nowhere near solved. He thought about it in little nervous spurts – for long enough in fact to feel panicky, and then of course he stopped thinking about it – until the next time.

‘My mum was wondering whether you would like to come to lunch on Sunday. She wants to cook you a meal because of all the ones you’ve given me, and you could see Andrew properly.’

‘She would’ve made it tomorrow but she’s got to go and see a friend in the country,’ she added, as though there was still some doubt about his acceptance.

They had decided to have bacon and eggs as a change from the pies, and Jenny cooked them while he laid the table. He asked her how she was getting on with Jane Eyre.

‘I’ve only just started it: in the bus this morning. She’s in an awful school. They’ve all got chilblains from being half-starved and given all the wrong food as well, I shouldn’t wonder. You feel that things like that must have happened to her – the author, I mean – or how would she know to write about them?’

‘I think things a bit like that did happen.’ He told her about the Brontës and their austere and tubercular-ridden life in Yorkshire, and she listened round-eyed.

‘No, they didn’t know about that then. Charlotte didn’t catch it though.’

‘She married her father’s curate and was very happy with him. Then she died in childbirth.’

‘They didn’t have any luck, did they? How do you know so much about everything? I hope you don’t mind me asking,’ she added.

‘I don’t know so much. I know it looks as though I do. But, you see, I’m only telling you about the things I do know – there’s tons of stuff I don’t.’

‘Well, even if that’s true, how do you know what you do know? Who told you?’

‘Well, there was a teacher at my school. He used to talk to me about books. I suppose they started it.’

‘Yes.’ Then he said: ‘You mustn’t ever pretend to like things, Jenny. And the other thing is that you can’t expect to like everything straight off – at first go. Some things take a bit of getting used to.’

‘All right.’ Probably better not to know, but his curiosity had been thoroughly aroused and he felt frustrated. There was some constraint between them after that.

In his room, he started looking through his catalogue for some music that he thought she might be taken by, and then he suddenly thought of that splendid piece of birthday music, ‘Zadok the Priest’: Handel at his best.

That went down a treat. She had started by lying on the chaise-longue which had become the routine, but when the singing began, she sat bolt upright, hands clutching her knees, shot him one look of amazement, and then remained motionless until the end, when she said it was the best piece of music she had ever heard in her life. ‘It made my hair stand on end.’

This time he lit a Wilhelm II: he wanted something to do with his hands. For one insane moment he thought of telling her that he was turning into the kind of person that she had hoped he wasn’t. Was he, though? Bloody good thing he hadn’t said that if he wasn’t even sure! ‘I like her enthusiasm,’ he said to himself. And that was not a lie – it was merely one of those ingenious half-truths that he knew he went in for.

‘It’s too late.’ Reading aloud a poem that he loved struck him now as about the second most intimate thing he could do with her. He didn’t feel equal to it.

‘. . . you mean to tell me you’re thinking of going off with a girl you’ve only known for a week!’

‘You’ll find things are different! Plunging headlong into dear-knows-what! I expect she’s trapped you. A lot of young girls will stop at nothing. Gavin, you haven’t done . . . anything silly . . . have you?’

‘Don’t you be cheeky. I’ve never known you be like this. You’ve never done anything like this before! . . .’

It could go on for ever. The trouble about these conversations was that while they made it clearer and clearer that – sooner or later – he’d have to leave home, and that whenever he did she would be very upset, they did not at all clear up his feelings about Jenny. In fact they seemed to make the whole thing more complicated: he had the feeling that his mother’s reaction to his association – of any kind with any girl – would be calculated to push him further with whoever she might be than he necessarily wanted to go. Just because Jenny enjoyed him showing her things didn’t mean that he wanted to be with her all the time. He was only spending so much time with her now because his mother was away. And, if you spent a lot of time with one girl, she would have to be pretty hideous for you never to want to touch her – or anything like that. Wouldn’t she? His mother was someone calculated to blow up molehills into mountains . . . By now he was in bed and too tired to think straight about anything. ‘I’m fed up,’ he said to himself but, because he was in the dark and nobody could see him, he smiled.

He had one more go at telephoning Joan, with the same result. By now, he was beginning to feel obscurely angry with her. He asked if the Filipino had taken his last message and was told yes. Nothing more. If that was how she felt, to hell with it.

Saturday was The Hon. Mrs Shack’s morning and he had telephoned while she was under the hair dryer (Mr Adrian never came in as early as that). A few minutes later, while he was getting a quick cup of coffee, Daphne called that he was wanted on the phone. Joan calling him back! He was surprised at how excited this made him feel.

Gavin hesitated. He could tell from Harry’s voice that something was wrong; on the other hand it was one of Jenny’s last evenings . . . While he was hesitating, Harry said:

But it must be something to do with Winthrop; nothing else would make him sound so shaky and tense.

He didn’t get a chance to tell Jenny that their evening was off until the lunch hour, and even then he had to be quick about it, as Jenny’s lunch wasn’t coinciding with his. Her face clouded, but she listened quietly and then said, ‘Never mind,’ in tones that were admonishing her not to.

Once or twice, during the afternoon, when he was cutting, he looked up to the mirror to see a client’s head, and caught her watching him: juniors were supposed to watch the hairdressers when they cut, it was one of the ways that they learned, but she wasn’t watching the cut he was doing, she was watching him. Each time he caught her eye, she gave him a little fleeting smile and hurriedly looked away.

It felt quite funny, walking to the station without her: she went home by bus, and they parted in Piccadilly. He turned back to see her joining a large bus queue – she was wearing the white mac that she’d worn in the Park, the day she’d been feeding ducks and he’d talked to her for the first time. It had taken him nearly three years to talk to her. And then he’d only done it because, in the distance, he had thought that there was the faintest chance that she might turn out to be the girl of his dreams. Which of course she wasn’t. She just somehow seemed to have got into his ordinary life.

Harry’s Entryphone was working for once but, even though he ran up the flights of stairs, Harry was waiting for him at the top. He wore his tartan pullover over a dirty white shirt, and he looked as though he hadn’t shaved. Gavin followed him in silence into the lounge which was littered with dirty coffee cups.

‘Might as well.’ He went into the kitchen, and Gavin wasn’t sure whether to follow him. Then Harry said, ‘I’ll just put the kettle on,’ so Gavin sat down and waited.

Harry came back: he seemed unable to meet Gavin’s eye, but wandered about, began stacking some cups and saucers which he picked off the coffee table and put on to a bookcase, and then abandoned. He seemed unable to keep still. Finally, with his back to Gavin, he said: ‘You might as well know. Winthrop’s gone. Went last night. Left – no warning – just said he was going, and went.’ His voice seemed to give out then, and there was a silence.

Harry turned round: he was hugging his elbows. He was trembling and his eyes were bright. ‘No. He’s gone off with Joan. They’re going to America. He won’t be back.’

Gavin said desperately: ‘There must be some mistake. She wouldn’t – ’ but he couldn’t go on because Harry made an awful dry sobbing sound and then seemed to lose his breath altogether; stood, frowning, shutting and opening his eyes, wrenching his arms round himself, seized up with agony. For a moment Gavin was paralysed with the shock of it. Then he went to Harry, put his arms round his rigid body and led him to a seat. With his arms still round Harry, he knelt by him until tears streamed from his friend’s eyes and he was able to weep.

After an unknown amount of time, Harry said: ‘I thought I’d got through that bit.’ His voice was husky. ‘It was telling you. It was like telling myself again.’

‘When he went – I looked at the time. I sort of collapsed for a bit. When I came to – he’d been gone half an hour.

I thought, “That’s not much: you’ve spent a lot of half-hours in your life without him – whole evenings often.” But they came to an end; he’d come back. This half-hour’s just the beginning of forever.’ He looked at Gavin. ‘I loved him. He can’t have known, can he?’

Harry said: ‘He’s been going out every night this week. He told me he was going to see her one evening. I thought he was just sorry for her; he said she’d had a bad shock. Everybody knew she cared about Dmitri. I said: “Give her my love.” I wish I hadn’t said that now.’

‘You know what I think? I think she’s bought him. He’s very impressionable and he always was attracted to excitement and high life. She bought Dmitri really.’

‘It won’t make any difference. He won’t come back.’ There was a short silence, and then he said, ‘They must have been planning it all this week. When I got back from work last night, he was all packed up – waiting. “I’m off,” he said. I thought it was a joke at first – no, I didn’t – it never really felt like one – I sort of knew it was true, but I couldn’t take it in.’

Fragments of post-mortem, attempts at analysis, pieces of anecdote, fresh, but more articulate outbursts of grief; his distress, like water, found any way that it could to pour out of him, and Gavin, who began by feeling helpless in the face of such misery, ended by recognizing that all he could do was to be there. He discovered, bit by bit, that Harry had not slept, nor gone to work, nor eaten since Winthrop had left, although he seemed very unclear about how he had spent the time. He had had coffee, he said; he had sat on the balcony for a while; he had got terribly cold; he hadn’t been able to face the bedroom; Winthrop had left one of his records on the turntable, he had played that; he thought he had played it several times – he’d never liked that sort of music, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to put it away; he thought he’d leave the flat because they’d always been in it together; he’d run a bath at some time or other, but there hadn’t seemed to be any point in having it – it must be stone cold by now . . .

Gavin made him some tea, and ran him another bath, and, by saying he was hungry himself, persuaded Harry to consider some food. He found the remains of a stew in a pudding basin in the fridge, but decided that even that might have unhappy associations, so he scrambled some eggs for them both, and Harry ate some of that. But, during all this, he was wondering what on earth to do next: he couldn’t leave Harry like this; should he take him back to Barnet for the night? And then what about tomorrow? He couldn’t take him to lunch with Jenny’s family. At least, perhaps he could from their point of view, but he didn’t think Harry would be able to cope. This problem was solved for him most unexpectedly, by Stephen ringing up: he’d heard the news and was deeply concerned. He and Noel would come and fetch Harry in the morning and take him away for the rest of the weekend. He seemed to have the right touch, because Harry agreed to go: it would get him out of the flat, he said, and he thought he’d be better out of the flat. Gavin offered to stay the night with him, but Harry, who seemed stronger for the hot bath and the food, said that he could manage. ‘I’ve got to start some time. And if I know they’re coming in the morning, I’ll be all right.’ He still wouldn’t go into the bedroom, so Gavin fetched a couple of blankets off the bed and made him comfortable on the chesterfield. He could see that he was worn out. He made him a hot drink and gave him a couple of aspirin.

Harry agreed to this; he was past arguing about anything; he tried to thank Gavin, but this made him cry. Gavin said he was his friend, and gratitude wasn’t in order, and Harry, recognizing his own phraseology, actually smiled. Then he lay down – passed out, more like, Gavin thought, watching his poor ravaged face stilled in sleep. He waited until he felt sure that it was sleep, then he wrote a note saying: ‘Gone home; ring if you want me any time of night,’ put the note on the floor where Harry would be sure to see it, and left.

It wasn’t until he’d got home, and he realized that he, too, was exhausted, that anger with Joan manifested. He felt so angry that, briefly, the idea of killing her occurred – and went. He was too tired to think about it then, but he knew that he couldn’t leave it at that: he had got to do something.

He had gone to bed with his door open in case Harry rang, and, in fact, was woken up by him next morning. His watch said quarter-past nine: he’d overslept. Harry said he was all right: Stephen and Noel had come for him and he was going off to have breakfast with them. ‘In view of your very kind note, I thought I’d just tell you I was off. In case you rang me.’

‘You deserved it. Thanks, Gavin. I don’t know what I would have done without you, last night.’

He had a bath and made himself some coffee: the feeling that he’d had last night about having to do something about Joan hadn’t changed, in fact he felt clearer about it. It occurred to him now that perhaps Joan didn’t know what she was doing in taking Winthrop away from Harry. He felt that, if this was true, and he told her, there was a fair chance that she would desist. He went out to the hall to the telephone – noticing that the table on which it stood was now very dusty. He’d have to spend at least one evening cleaning things up.

All that week he had tried to ring Joan, but the line was either engaged or the bell simply rang unanswered. But on the morning of his lunch with Jenny he struck lucky. He got through, as usual, to a Filipino, but this time he simply said, ‘Get Madam. You just go and get her. Important. Danger,’ he added for good measure. That worked. After a pause, there she was; sounding rather guarded, but there.

‘Oh – Gavin,’ she said: she did not sound enthusiastic. ‘I’m afraid I’m going abroad.’

‘Well then, I’ll come round this evening. At six o’clock.’ He rang off before she could reply. Of course, she might just not be there but somehow he felt she would. She would want to know what he thought was so important. Years of working with women had taught him some things about them.

That Sunday was like early summer: sunny and windless. People were wearing summer clothes; dogs basked on doorsteps, and cats crouched prosperously on garden walls. He’d taken the car, in case Andrew and Jenny wanted to go to a park after lunch. He drove slowly through the back streets – the way he had come that evening – which seemed such a long time ago now – when Minnie had chased him in her car. An awful lot seemed to have been happening lately: not only things outside him – but events within. He didn’t feel the same. He didn’t feel up to analysing the difference, but he knew it was there. For instance, he was looking forward to this lunch, which was managing to be a new experience without being nerve-wracking. He saw a barrow at a street corner, and stopped to buy two bunches of pink and white striped tulips for Jenny’s mother. There was a newsagent’s shop just behind the barrow, and he went in to see if he could find something for Andrew. There was a large card with little toy cars attached to it, and he chose a fire engine because that was what he would himself once have liked best from the selection. Then he felt bad about having nothing for Jenny. It was the kind of shop that had a little of everything, and he found a Penguin copy of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie. The front of the book had faded a bit from being displayed in the sun, but it was far the best choice. In the car, he got out his pen and wrote ‘To Jenny’. Then he thought for a bit and put ‘from Gavin’. It didn’t seem quite right, but he couldn’t think of anything righter. Then he bought two packets of Wilhelm II for himself.

Jenny opened the door to him, wearing an apron over a sleeveless yellow dress. She had the pearl studs in her ears and looked excited. ‘We thought we could have lunch in the garden,’ she said, ‘if you could help get the table out.’

He put his presents on the draining board and helped her with the table. Andrew was sitting in the middle of a very small sandpit. He wore a pair of scarlet shorts and a toy wristwatch strapped sloppily round his wrist. Jenny’s mother was picking him dandelions which he was planting on a turned-out sandcastle. Gavin said: ‘I’ve got something for him.’ He wanted to give the flowers and everything at once – when he met them. Jenny followed him back to the kitchen, so he gave her her book. ‘I’m sorry it’s faded a bit,’ he said, ‘but it is a lovely book: the next one for you to read. The flowers are for your mother.’ The fire engine was in a weak paper bag, and the ladder had already punctured it, so he took it out. ‘I’ll just give it to him like this.’

‘Thank you very much,’ Jenny said. She had read the inscription, and for the second time he felt that it wasn’t quite right, but it was too late now. ‘You go and give them their presents,’ Jenny said. ‘I’ll just have a look at the meat.’

In the distance, Jenny’s mother looked extraordinarily like Jenny. She wore a blue denim skirt and paler blue shirt – sleeveless, like Jenny’s dress. They had the same arms, long, and thin, and capable. Her hair was darker, brindled with grey and tied back in a ponytail. She was delighted with the tulips. ‘How lovely,’ she said. ‘I don’t know when I was last given flowers. Is that for Andrew? He’ll like that. He loves fire engines. We go on a walk to look at them: it’s his favourite walk.’

Andrew received the fire engine with majestic gravity – it was rather like bringing tribute to a king, Gavin thought. He grasped it and put it very close to his face – almost as though he was smelling the colour – and then, holding it with both hands, he perched it on top of his silvery head. Jenny’s mother said: ‘Say thank you, Andrew,’ but he merely looked at her sorrowfully – as though she had committed a grave breach of etiquette. The engine fell off his head, and he gathered it up, muttering: ‘enchin enchin enchin’. Gavin felt he could take it that the gift had been well received.

Before lunch, a brand new half-bottle of gin was produced together with tonic water. They all had a gin. Gavin and Jenny’s mother smoked, and when Gavin lit her cigarette for her, she asked him to call her Anne, as people calling her Mrs Fisher made her feel over a hundred.

For lunch they had roast stuffed breast of lamb with spring greens and carrots and very good roast potatoes. Andrew was strapped into his high chair and given a bowl of chopped-up food which he ate with his fore-finger and thumb. He spent a lot of time staring at Gavin in a penetrating but impassive manner, but except for putting all his carrots in his mug of water, he was unobtrusive. The sun was quite hot: Jenny produced some cider to drink with the lamb, and Gavin began to feel pleasantly relaxed if not sleepy.

When they were eating apple pie with custard, Jenny’s mother, or Anne, said: ‘Jenny tells me you’re finding it very difficult to get yourself a place to live. We’ve got two rooms on the top floor here that our last lodger has just left. I wondered if you’d like to see them after the meal?’

A quantity of conflicting feelings hit him. The first was that it served him right for telling Jenny that glib lie about leaving home if only he could find somewhere to live. Then he thought that something that he had thought very difficult was turning out to be easy – or perhaps difficult in a different way. Then he wondered what Jenny thought, or felt, but she was eating with her eyes fixed on her plate. He couldn’t refuse to see the rooms. At least he had to do that. He said he’d like to see them.

‘Don’t feel that you’ve got to take them because you know us. Just have a look at them and think about it.’

Jenny said: ‘We’ve only got one bathroom.’ But he couldn’t tell from the way she said it whether she meant, ‘Don’t come,’ or, ‘Sorry about one bathroom.’

Anne said: ‘That’s one reason why we have to choose our lodger pretty carefully. There is a little kitchenette up there though. Anyway, you can have a look.’

So, after mugs of coffee and Andrew going back to his sandpit, Anne said she would do the washing-up while Jenny showed him.

There was a large front room with a fireplace and two windows, and a smaller back one with a basin in it, that looked on to the garden. On the landing there was a small sink, and cooker. The rooms were very barely furnished with linoleum on the floors, but the large one had a real fireplace with cupboards each side of it. Jenny showed them to him in a silence that became oppressive . . . He said they were nice, and when she didn’t say anything, he asked her how she would feel supposing that he did come and live there.

He gave up: he didn’t believe her, which also meant that he didn’t at all understand her. He felt piqued by her lack of enthusiasm for the enterprise. In the kitchen he told Anne that he would think it over. ‘Did Jenny tell you the rent?’

‘It used to be fifteen, but I’ve had to put it up to seventeen fifty. We let them to cover the rates, you see. I know there’s not much furniture up there, but Jenny said you had some lovely things. Of course you could bring anything you like. I have to let them as furnished in case I ever have to get anybody out.’

It all seemed very simple and straightforward, but it wasn’t. He didn’t feel he knew Anne well enough to mention Jenny’s reluctance, and anyway, it was a big decision, and he needed time to think about it. He said again that he would think it over. Jenny had gone straight into the garden and was playing with Andrew.

Jenny had made a house for Andrew out of two chairs and the tablecloth. Andrew was inside it, and Jenny was ringing the bell and asking if Andrew was at home. She stopped when Gavin approached, and he saw her face close up in the same way that it had when they’d been upstairs . . .

‘I’m sorry Jenny, that I didn’t tell you before, but I can’t manage this evening. I’ve got to go and see someone. To do with the friend I saw last night,’ he added.

‘That’s all right. You never said we were doing anything this evening, anyway.’

‘I’ve got to clean the house up a bit before my parents get back. Shall I ring you up when I’ve done that?’

But she answered violently: ‘Nothing’s the matter.’ She picked Andrew up in her arms and gave him a fierce hug. ‘Come on, Andrew. Let’s see Gavin off, shall we?’

He said good-bye to Anne who was arranging his tulips in a jar and Jenny walked to the door with him with Andrew. He picked up Andrew’s hand and gave it a little, friendly shake, whereupon Andrew shut his eyes and buried his face in Jenny’s neck. ‘Thank you for lunch,’ he said, ‘it was great.’

‘It was nothing.’ She sounded a shade – but not very much – more friendly.

In the car, he realized that it was only just after four: he had nearly two hours before his appointment with Joan. So he drove across Hyde Park, stopped the car by the Serpentine and went and sat in the sun for a bit. What was the matter with Jenny? It was irritating of her to keep saying nothing, when there clearly was something. The lunch had been thoroughly enjoyable; they’d talked about all sorts of things; he’d learned quite a bit about Jenny’s childhood – in Buckinghamshire when her father had been alive. They’d talked about different parts of the country, the animals that Jenny used to have – she took after her father, Anne had said: good with animals and children. He’d liked her mother: she seemed very young to be a widow, and he gathered obliquely that the last few years had been far from easy. Everything had been fine until when? When Anne had mentioned the rooms to let – that was it. Jenny had changed then, and she certainly hadn’t changed back. Perhaps she really didn’t want him to have them, but felt she couldn’t say so. That might be it. But, since he was far from sure himself whether he did want them, he felt that she was coming on rather strong too soon about that. And perhaps she’d been more upset than she’d let on at his not seeing her for the second night running. She probably had been banking on tonight. This made him think of Harry, and wonder how he was getting through the day. Then he started worrying about the meeting with Joan, and whether he would handle it right, and get her to see about Harry. Well, all he could do was try, and he was glad that he hadn’t told Harry he was going to, because it would then be doubly awful if he failed.

He was shown into the library by a Filipino who invited him to sit down and then vanished. He didn’t sit: by now his mouth was dry and he felt extremely nervous. He looked round the room, which looked exactly the same as it had when he had played the Secrets game with her such a long time ago. He wandered about: the picture of Dmitri was still on the vast desk. This was also the room where Winthrop had beaten up Spiro and there was the painful piece of the mantelpiece that had nearly knocked him out. The artificial logs were back in their studiedly casual positions. And that was the door through to her bedroom. As he recognized this, it opened and Joan came through it. She was in full regalia; orange wig, a white face, a dark green satin tube dress with dark green satin sandals, and a brighter, dark green nail varnish.

‘Why – hullo,’ she said, as though he wasn’t the person she expected to see but never mind – a kind of genial indifference that he found chilling.

‘Yes: well, we’d better have a drink. Whatever you’ve come about, it’s bound to make things easier.’ She went over to the drinks table and picked up the brandy bottle. ‘I’m having my usual. Will that do you?’

He thought he’d said yes, but she couldn’t have heard him, because she turned round holding the bottle as a query: he nodded. She gave him his glass and, taking her own, sat in a large, high-backed chair, indicating that he should sit on the sofa . . . ‘Well, cheers,’ she said. ‘You’ve been calling me up quite a bit, haven’t you?’

There was a silence. Then he said: ‘I wanted to tell you that I knew that was very important to you and I was sorry.’

‘It was bad luck, wasn’t it? I thought he’d stay because of my money, but he managed to find someone even richer than me. I hadn’t bargained on that.’

‘It is really what I thought. But it’s not all that I really thought.’ A spasm of what he guessed might be pain crossed her face, leaving it hard and bland. Then she said: ‘But I don’t think that’s all you wanted to see me about. I have a feeling you may have come to see if the coast was clear?’

He opened his mouth to say, ‘No,’ but then he remembered that it had crossed his mind that comfort might have taken the form of another extraordinary night with her, and felt trapped.

‘I have to tell you that it isn’t,’ she said – she had been watching him – ‘or perhaps it would be more true to say that there is no coast.’

‘You would be surprised at the number of people who have wanted to take Dmitri’s place. I had to leave France to escape some of them, and I’m leaving England to escape a whole lot more.’

‘I’m not one of those people,’ he said, surprised at discovering this, and certainty about it making him suddenly very clear.

‘I thought that. But then you are somebody who’d make the stakes so high, you’d never play.’

‘Love. You’re all for love, aren’t you? And that’s so difficult and precious and important, that it lets you out of being for anything.’ The way in which she said it made it unpainfully acceptable – simply true.

‘Yes,’ he said, and found he was smiling at her. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

But, while she was getting them, he remembered what he was really here for, and the feeling of ease which he associated with any length of time spent with her began to evaporate.

‘You know about Harry? Well then, why are you taking Winthrop away?’ As she sat motionless, regarding him but not saying, he plunged on: ‘Harry loves Winthrop. He really loves him! It’s breaking his heart. Perhaps you didn’t know that. I expect Winthrop played that part of it down. I expect he’s just so keen on the excitement and living it up with you – America and all that – he didn’t bother to tell you about Harry.’

‘My point is,’ he was beginning to feel angry, ‘that surely, once you know that you’re breaking up somebody else’s life like this, you surely won’t go on with it. You aren’t in love with Winthrop, are you?’

‘What else is there? What else could you find to say to me? And what difference would it make anyway, whatever you said? As a matter of fact,’ she went on, ‘I’m not particularly keen on pity. Pity takes something away from grief. People think they’re sharing it, but really they’re just taking some. I prefer to keep my grief intact.’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘you said that Dmitri had managed to find someone even richer than you. That’s what you said.’ He felt uncomfortable about repeating it, it sounded so hard on her. ‘Well, don’t you see that you’re doing exactly the same thing to Winthrop? Providing him with someone much richer than Harry who can give him a more exciting time?’

‘Yes – that’s perfectly true. But you seem to have forgotten one very important thing.’

‘What’s that?’ He didn’t know, and he didn’t want to know, because already he had the sense that it would be annihilating.

‘You’ve left Winthrop out of it. You haven’t counted him at all. You haven’t, for instance, considered that he must want to go. That if it wasn’t me, it would be somebody else. The result would be the same for Harry. People usually find what they seek, if they really search for it. But they also often start by knowing what they don’t want. Dmitri didn’t want me. Winthrop doesn’t want Harry. You see? It’s quite simple, really – devastating but simple.’

There was a long silence. Then, he said hesitantly: ‘But is it going to make you happier to take Winthrop away with you?’

She had been staring into her empty glass. Now, without lifting her eyes she said:

‘They flee from me, that sometime did me seek

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild, and do not remember

That sometime they put themselves in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range

Busily seeking with a continual change.

‘I can’t get it out of my mind. That’s just the first verse. I don’t think I shall be happy with Winthrop, but I think that with him, or perhaps through him, I shall know a little of what it feels like to be Dmitri. That’s as near as I can get now, you see.’

She was looking at him and, although nothing about her seemed in the least like him, he was reminded of Harry.

She went with him through the large hall to the door. At the door, she said: ‘I admire you for coming. I hadn’t forgotten you. Read the second verse of that poem sometime.’

He pressed her hand, and, on second thoughts, kissed it. ‘Good luck,’ he said. It seemed a hopeless, but the only, thing to say.

In a second, the door was shut gently between them, and he turned to walk slowly down the stairs.

He sat in the car for some time without thinking of anything very much at all. Feelings for Joan – of nearly every possible kind – were uppermost, but they were in such confusion that he could not use them with his mind. Most of all, he felt that he was not going to see her again, and knowing that something was over was different to discovering later that it had ended. He had only met her three times, but each time she had affected him deeply. He felt a kind of love for her for that.

He started to drive northwards. Coming out of the Park he thought that he would like to go and see Jenny: he now had the evening free, and he wanted to get things right with her, or, at least, find out what was wrong. Then he thought, no, they might think that he wanted supper when he’d already had lunch with them, and he didn’t want an evening with Jenny’s mother as well. He began aiming for home; then he thought that perhaps he’d better pass by Harry’s, in case he was back and by himself. He was aware of half-hoping that Harry wouldn’t be there, but when, in fact, he stopped outside Havergal Heights and saw that all Harry’s windows had no lights, he felt both relieved – and depressed.

The house was getting rather dirty – even he could see that. He didn’t feel hungry, so he made himself a cup of coffee and went upstairs to find Joan’s poem. Wyatt – he knew he had it in an anthology somewhere. He found it and read the second verse aloud to himself.

‘Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise

Twenty times better; but once, in special,

In thin array, after a pleasant guise,

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

And she caught me in her arms both long and small,

Therewith all sweetly did me kiss

And softly said, “Dear heart how like you this?”’

He was back in the firelit room with her in her loose, grey-green robe. She hadn’t forgotten him. He felt tears come to his eyes, and he read the verse again. The poem was called ‘Remembrance’. He had to read the rest of it.

‘It was no dream; I lay broad waking:

But all is turned, through my gentleness,

Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

And I have leave to go of her goodness,

And she also to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindly am served,

I would fain know what she hath deserved.’

It was odd, he thought, how moved he could be by something that he did not thoroughly understand: for the end of it seemed to him almost deliberately enigmatic – could be taken as profound bitterness, or as some kind of fatal resignation. All he could be sure of was that it touched him; conjured the mystery and passion of a long dead poet’s long dead love.

He shut the book and, as he did so, it occurred to him that he would one day read that poem to Jenny. Then, without any warning, and almost reluctantly, he supposed that he must love Jenny. He stopped at this: in some ways the idea was not credible; he had none of the feelings about her that he had read about or imagined having; she was quite an ordinary person really, not particularly anything; in fact he couldn’t think of anybody who was so not particularly anything as she.

When he arrived at her house and rang the bell, he had made up his mind to say that he wanted to take her out – to dinner, or to a pub, or somewhere. He’d manage to sweep her off somehow.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘Come in. I’m afraid Jenny’s out,’ she said as they went into the kitchen.

‘Yes; it is funny, isn’t it? But she said she wanted to see a French film. She hardly ever does that kind of thing, but I wanted to be in anyway because of a telephone call so it didn’t matter.’

They sat down each side of the kitchen table which he now remembered he hadn’t offered to help carry back into the house.

‘I know: I’m chain-smoking. It’s very bad. Shall we finish the gin? There’s not much left, and we don’t usually drink it, but one way and another I feel like one tonight.’

‘It’ll be a small one for both of us: never mind.’ She found the bottle and poured them drinks. ‘As a matter of fact, Gavin, there’s so little left because I don’t mind telling you I’ve had one already. I’m trying to make up my mind about something – and it’s impossible: I don’t seem to . . . be able to.’

He realized that she was very near tears: Oh, God, he thought, this is all I need, and then felt ashamed.

‘You know what I mean. You may think it’s none of my business to ask you, but I’ve a very good reason.’

‘I – I care about her – what happens to her, I mean. I’m sort of getting to know her – finding out – ’

Instantly, she became more serious, as he noticed people usually did about their own affairs. ‘Someone’s asked me to marry them. Chap I used to know when we were in Wendover. He was a policeman then: now he’s in the Army. That means living wherever he happens to be stationed.’ There was a pause, and then she added: ‘He’s given me a month to make up my mind.’

She nodded miserably. ‘I know I will be. She can’t bring up Andrew and get a decent job; at least not until he’s older. She can’t come with me. And I don’t think she’d hear of my taking Andrew, even supposing George was willing.’

She said: ‘I never thought I’d want anything as much again.’ She took off her glasses and fumbled for a handkerchief.

‘She’s had such a hard time! We shouldn’t ever have let her go off on that holiday so young! But I thought it was a kind of school thing. Of course it wasn’t. And then she got knocked up in one go! She only went with him the once. “You don’t want to have it,” I said, “not at your age,” but she wouldn’t budge. I thought she’d get him adopted, but not she! And of course, once he was there, we wouldn’t either of us have parted with him . . . She’s had no youth, really. When we moved to London, it meant she lost all her friends, and anyway she’s never had the time for herself; it’s been nothing but work and looking after the boy . . .’ She blew her nose furiously several times and groped for her cigarettes.

When he had lit one for her, he said: ‘Is that why you offered me the rooms? So that there would be someone around?’

‘Well, it did seem an idea. But it’s upset her; I don’t know why. That’s why she’s gone out actually; we nearly had a row about it.’

‘I can’t make her out. She thinks the world of you. I don’t know what’s got into her. Of course, she’s very nervous about men. I expect you knew that.’

She looked at him and then, with a mixture of defeat and exasperation in her voice, said: ‘I really don’t know.’

She got up then, and started slicing bread and opening a tin of beans which she put into a saucepan.

He sat and watched her. He had the sense that events, other people, life generally were all combining to corral him into a decision, that, whatever else it might turn out to be, should surely initially be a matter of private free will . . .

‘Jenny would have the house,’ she was now saying, ‘and there’s a little money that her father left me. I could let her have that; or at least the income from it till Andrew’s older. With the rooms let, she should just about manage.’

‘You’ve made up your mind to go, haven’t you really? You really know you’re going to go.’

‘She knows. She told me about it several days ago, when your chap was staying here. But then she thought you didn’t mean it, because you didn’t say anything after he left.’

She put his plate of baked beans in front of him and sat down with hers. ‘Why didn’t she say something?’

‘I expect she was waiting for you. When you mentioned the rooms at lunch, she guessed you were thinking of going after all.’

‘Oh dear.’ But she went on eyeing him; as though she was willing him to find a solution.

He didn’t want to eat: he’d come to see Jenny; now he wasn’t sure that he could face her – not tonight, anyway, he decided; he felt confused, obstinate, and out of sorts; he was sorry for Jenny’s mother and he wanted to blame her for everything going wrong . . . He said that he thought he’d go, and added that he would ring Jenny in the morning. ‘Sorry about the baked beans,’ he said, ‘but I’m not hungry.’

She came to the door with him, apologizing in a general sort of way, and, now he was leaving her, he felt able to be more generous.

‘It’s not your fault,’ he said, ‘I see you have a difficult decision to make . . . Don’t worry: something will work out.’

He drove a little way down the street towards the main road, and then stopped. He couldn’t leave things like this. He stopped the car and waited for Jenny to return.

He had nearly fallen asleep, and had just got out a cigar to keep him awake when he saw her, walking quickly on the opposite side of the road towards him. He honked the horn, once, gently; saw her look towards him, square her shoulders and walk faster. He wound down his window and called her.

‘Get in for a moment, will you, Jenny? There’s something I want to say to you.’

He opened the door for her and she slipped into the front seat beside him. She was wearing a heavy knitted jacket over her dress, and her hands were plunged in its pockets.

‘I know why you were upset today. You thought your mother had decided to go, and was trying to get me to rent the rooms so that she would feel all right about going. Right?’

‘Well, now – listen. What I’m going to say is a bit difficult, but I want to tell you exactly what I mean, and I really want you to hear what I say. Exactly what I say,’ he repeated. She looked at him then, her eyes solemn and attentive.

‘I care about you very much, I think I’ve fallen in love with you. But I wanted more time to be sure. I feel we’re sort of being pushed into things, and that makes me unsure about whether I’ll ever be able to find out. Also, I’ve no idea how you feel about me. I know you like me and we get on well when I’m showing you things – and working together, but I don’t mean just that. What I feel is – if we sort of knew how each other felt, we could sort out the rest; or even if we knew how each other didn’t feel,’ he added, and then he couldn’t think of any more to say. There was a silence.

Then she said: ‘I feel a bit like you. Well, really, quite like. And I thought that about Mum and the rooms. I felt she was pushing us and it made me feel so angry – and sad. I mean, how can we know?’

‘Three years,’ she reminded him, ‘but I suppose you can’t really count most of that.’

‘No. I didn’t meet you properly until that day when you were talking to the ducks.’

‘Was I? You were in your white mac: I remember that. In some ways we’ve only known each other about a week.’

‘I mean – deciding who you’re going to spend your life with is a terrible decision.’

‘Oh – well, I sort of took that for granted. If we found we liked each other – got on generally – it might lead to that. It might. Probably take a long time though,’ he added: he wished she’d say something positive.

‘You see – it’s not just a question of liking – it’s far more than that in the long run.’

‘It’s a question of love,’ he said cautiously, ‘total commitment – of one kind or another.’

She said, ‘I don’t believe in people being unfaithful to each other. If that’s what you mean,’ and started blushing. ‘I don’t believe in that, either. But ideally, of course, one shouldn’t even want to look at anyone else. And people seem to find that quite difficult. The other thing, of course, is that the love should be mutual – ’

‘Why do you keep saying “of course”? Is it because you think I won’t agree with you, or aren’t you sure whether you mean whatever you’re saying?’

‘It’s because I want us both to agree with me,’ he said, and suddenly felt – a fraction more – light-hearted.

That didn’t last. She turned to him, and laid a hand on his sleeve. ‘Listen, Gavin. I’m not at all sure that I’m up to it: your idea of love, I mean. After all you’ve been saying, I still don’t know how you feel about me – so I sort of feel I don’t know where I am. It all sounds a bit calculating to me.’

‘That’s it,’ she said. She spoke slowly, as though she was trying herself to find out what she meant. ‘But I don’t think loving somebody works like that. I only know about Andrew. But I couldn’t plan how marvellous he was going to be before I had him. I just had to take the risk. And that really meant loving him whatever he was.’

As always, when she spoke of Andrew, her maturity struck him, in this case to silence. She knew far more about love than he did. Perhaps she loved Andrew so much that she didn’t need anybody else.

‘It sounds as though we shouldn’t do anything. Until you’ve made up your mind.’

She said: ‘Do you know what you sound like? You sound like Peter – with Hazel. A Five-Year Plan for everything.

Plan, plan, plan and never leave anything to chance. They made us both laugh – do you remember? If we never take a chance, we’ll never know, will we?’

She turned deliberately to face him, took off her glasses and rolled her eyes, shrugging with the mock-comic gesture he knew so well. Then she put her thin arms round his neck and gave him two kisses – a short firm one, and a much longer one. She drew a little away; her eyes, luminous and warm, looking into his, and the rest of her trembling. ‘How did you like that, then?’ she said.

TWELVE