Roger takes me to the television. The Goldmans, being cultivated people, own a small and rubbishy television set which they banish to the children’s playroom. The playroom is a devastation of Lego bricks and jigsaw bits. Faded children’s drawings hang with curling edges from a pin-board alongside Rosie’s swimming certificates which announce that she has satisfied the County Education Officer that she can swim a hundred yards, five hundred yards, one mile, and that she can also save lives. The playroom chairs are those uncut moquette iniquities patterned in red and grey blobs which one expects to find abandoned by disused railway sidings. I dare say that whatever the Goldmans’ furniture says about them, it also says that they are articulate enough to contradict what it might attempt to say.
Jonathan has got to the playroom before us. Shamelessly he is reading his way through the Girls’ Crystal Annual for 1964. Roger turns on the television. This being Sunday night the line is relentless low-brow moral uplift. It offers us interviews with people whose Christian faith has made possible for them the conquest of adversity. Roger sucks uneasily at his teeth throughout a resolutely positive account of paralysis from the shoulders down.
‘Jesus, Rogsie,’ Jonathan says. ‘Switch off this bloody drivel. You really go for all this gangrene and snot disease, don’t you? No wonder you dream that your teeth fall out.’ Roger laughs, colouring a little, nervous and lovely. He fiddles with the knobs to discover alternatives. They are the Royal Ballet in Les Sylphides and Ava Gardner in an ancient safari drama.
‘We’ll have this,’ Jonathan says. ‘Let’s for God’s sake not have Culture.’ Ava Gardner’s beauty, decked out in khaki, crosses the decades to us, even on the Goldmans’ small screen.
‘I’ll bet you this is Kenya,’ Jonathan says, with his eyes on Ava Gardner’s boobs in drill cloth. ‘They’re all dressed up like boy scouts. Your clothes are going to be all wrong, Rogsie. You’ll have to ferret about in the Oxfam shop for a bush ranger’s hat.’ Roger laughs again, tossing his lank dark hair from his eyes.
‘I’m going to miss you, Jont,’ he says. ‘You’re the only person I’m going to miss. You’re the only person I know who is worth talking to, come to that.’
‘Balls,’ Jonathan says. ‘And another thing. Mother is going to have me playing the flute double time once you and your bloody fiddle are out of the way. Or is it your violin? Why did you produce all that crap at lunch time, incidentally?’ Roger shrugs.
‘I felt like it,’ he says. ‘Both Jake and that Millet get on my nerves.’