‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said my mother. ‘Of course you must eat. What’s the matter with you, Teddy? Is your liver all right?’
My liver is fine but my lights are low, Mother.
‘Nothing’s the matter. I’m quite all right. I’m not hungry, that’s all. What’s odd about that?’
‘What’s the matter with him, Jane? Where did you two go this morning?’
Blankness, blanched blankness.
‘Teddy, if you’ve been driving that car beyond the gate, you know what your father said.’
‘Oh, Mummy …’
‘What do you mean, “Oh, Mummy”?’
‘Of course I didn’t go beyond the gate.’
To go beyond the gate, to speed the three miles from Mendleton to Cartersfield, to seize Molly Simpson and carry her off in the old Ford Ten to bliss and heaven, world without end, amen. To drive at seventy-five (it couldn’t get up there, of course, poor battered old Ford) from Cartersfield to London, and there, in splendour, to dine out with Molly, and then to the theatre every night of our lives, and so to bed. Oh, bed with Molly Simpson, that endless scene for ever playing in my mind, the late late and the early early show, the morning, noon and night performance, We Never Closed, Molly Simpson and I——
But interrupted, from time to time, by newsreels, shots of racing cars, Ferraris, Maseratis, Bugattis, BRMs, the sensuous clash of gears, the high-pitched squeal of speed, panic in the pits, new goggles, four wheels changed in fourteen seconds flat, then off again, through the gear-box, Bristols, Jaguars, A.C.s and Frazer Nashes, the Lotus, the Cooper, the Climax, cars like free electrons buzzing in my head, and Saturday afternoons with the portable radio, Brands Hatch and Silverstone, and the commentator shouting above the roar of engines, the groan and snarl and rage and screech, of pistons’ hammer and brakes’ yelp and oil slicks and skids and maniacal cars, driven beyond endurance, charging the crowd like maddened bulls, snorting and spewing and bleeding fuel, into the bales of straw, against the barriers, and drivers wheeling in the air to fall flat and broken, Saturday afternoons and the race-track of life….
And there I am, with the garlands round my neck, and my arm round Molly Simpson, and the crowd is going wild, and the pits are hushed, the loudspeakers proclaim new records, new clipped seconds to add to my glory, and it’s Le Mans next, and Indianapolis and the Monte Carlo Rally, and after the race Molly and I sip Pernods by the Mediterranean, dark and blue as Molly’s night-dress….
But now there is this pudding in my stomach, and it is swelling. I am feeling not ill, exactly, but not too well, and frankly I shall have to confess, to tell her. Daddy will be furious, let her break the news to him, let her face him first, but I didn’t go beyond the gates.
‘Mummy, I’m afraid …’
‘What have you done?’
‘Arthur says it’s just a broken spring.’
‘A spring?’
‘At the back. I don’t think it’s serious.’
She stopped eating. ‘Why didn’t you tell me at once?’
Because you would be angry, because you might say I could not drive at all, not even as far as the gate, in an old beat-up Ford Ten.
‘I’m sorry.
‘Sorry? I should think you are. What do you think your father will say?’
Jesus Christ, is this why I pay for you to go to an expensive school? So that you can come home in the holidays and smash up my cars? What have I done to deserve a son who wants to drive racing cars for a living?
‘I’m really not hungry at all, Mummy. May I leave the table, please?’
‘Certainly not. How did it happen?’
‘Well, you see, we were just going along, and then there was this sort of bump, and …’
And Jane is watching me, her eyes growing rounder and rounder, and her mouth wide open to speak. Put something in it, Jane, a potato. I told you I’d kill you if you told. Eat, Jane, eat, please eat.
Jane took a mouthful and choked.
‘I don’t know what you children learn at school,’ said my mother. ‘Have you no manners at all, Jane? Don’t stuff yourself so.’
Dear Jane, the tears in your eyes, but you didn’t speak, co-driver and cohort, stuff yourself as much as you like.
‘And as for you, Teddy, I’ll have a look at the damage myself. I warned you, if you did anything to that car, you’d have to pay out of your own pocket-money.’
‘Oh, I’m sure it won’t cost much, Mummy.’
‘And we’ll have no more driving for a few days, if you don’t mind. I’m sick and tired of hearing you roar up and down the drive. There’s hardly a pebble of gravel left.’
‘We put it all back, honestly.’
‘So you were going too fast.’
Well, I didn’t mean to, for heaven’s sake, I didn’t want to go off the drive, you can’t think that, I was trying to break the record, that’s all, it’s perfectly simple and obviously I wouldn’t be able to break the record if I skidded off into the field, would I, so I didn’t mean to, and I’m sorry, but what can I do about it now? But no, all they can see is the gravel off the drive, and the tracks in the field, and they don’t know what it’s like, coming into that corner just a little too fast, they’d never dream of doing such a thing, of course not, they don’t understand what it’s like not being allowed to drive on main roads, but the pudding is going away, thank God, and it won’t be back till tonight, because Daddy’s away at the office and I wish I had an idea of how much he gets paid, because I’m sure he could easily afford to give me an Aston Martin for my birthday, my seventeenth birthday. How long will that be? Another five months and then I can take my driving-test, and then I’ll be free, in my Aston Martin, and zoom … But he’d never give me an Aston Martin, not in a million years, no, never, never, never.
*
So an explosion that evening when Father returns, like some furious giant, from London, and then it’s forgotten, but no driving for a few days, you hear me? So, what shall I do? And Molly is coming tomorrow, with her parents, for drinks, so I read all her letters, they’re on pink paper, and I think of the mornings at school when they used to come, Tuesday mornings, always Tuesdays. I’d be up and shaved a few minutes early, knowing a letter was coming, then wait, elaborately casual, for the post, and seize my letter before anyone could see the pink envelope or guess at the faint scent of the sheets, and off to my study to read it quietly and quickly, then in to roll-call and breakfast, heart fluttering, to kippers (this was Tuesday, Molly and kippers), and then after breakfast to read it more slowly in the lavatory, because now the study wasn’t safe, Jackson would be there, who shared it with me, Jackson with the tuft of red hair and pale eyes from whom no secrets were hid, who jeered and gibed, coarse humorist that he was, no sensitivity, none whatsoever, and no sense of privacy, opened my letters quite shamelessly, Jackson who made such lewd comments about my photo of Molly, I had to take it down. What a picture that was! Molly on Shylock, her pony, soaring over a gate at the Cartersfield gymkhana. Oh, my Molly! What earnest endeavour in that photograph (courtesy of the local paper, the nerve of them, to print my Molly without so much as a by-your-leave, and then to charge me for her!), what black-and-white attention to the matter in hand, though your hands reach forward, giving Shylock his head, just resting against his neck, ready to pull him up, to steady him, and your knees gripping him, squeezing him, one with the saddle, one with the pony. Oh, Molly, my Amazon, my pony-club heroine, we’ll have you co-driver before we’re done.
*
I walk beneath the yews, the avenue supposed to be haunted by a medieval lady. The branches meet. It is quiet and dark, smells rich and mysterious. I raise my head from the roots like anatomy lessons. You walk towards me, slowly and seriously, gentleness in your face.
But that is tomorrow. She must find me here, and we will stroll, watching the sun as it sets at the end of the avenue. (Does it really set there? It must.) The house looks fine from here, from the sunrise end (and will we be found here
at sunrise?) it looks old and mellowed and English (all that’s best in Britain) and the old part, the Elizabethan part, with its one fine wide window, reflects the day, dying expansively in pale green and blue, one vapour trail, shaped like the whisker of a crab, orange across the sky.
*
They come at six and drink in the drawing-room. Molly and I go out to play croquet. Oh, the games we could be playing! What shots through what hoops, Molly, dear Molly! And then we stroll off the lawn and round the garden, past the roses, past the sweet peas, past the herbaceous border, and we have nothing to say. Yes, I was in the second eleven, and next year, perhaps, I will be in the first. No, she hadn’t done anything worth talking about. And here we are under the yews, their great thick trunks like the feet of some vast ancient animal, gnarled and wrinkled, rhinoceros-coloured, and the long sweeping branches of dark hard green. Did I know that yew was poisonous to horses? And how is Shylock? How many gymkhanas this summer? And she is rather bored with riding, it seems, because she doesn’t answer. She walks slowly beside me, and I listen to her skirt against her calves and think of the sea hushing itself in a golden cove in Scotland. We are going to Scotland in September—September the first—and are the Simpsons going anywhere?
And alas they are, and all too soon, on August the sixteenth the Simpsons are going to France, to the Loire valley.
We stop beneath the yews, and my arm, which has been fidgeting all this while against my side, reaches across, volitionless, and touches her shoulder, hovers there a moment, hesitates, then moves slowly to her waist, curls itself round it, settles down, holding her lightly, feeling her relax against it. And she says: ‘Then we won’t see much of each other, will we?’
‘No.’
And we stand there in silence, and my arm shifts, holds her more firmly against our absence from each other. We walk slowly on.
I say: ‘We could run away together. We could drive off somewhere and they wouldn’t find us for ages.’
She smiles, a little sad, says nothing.
‘We did Romeo and Juliet last term,’ she says, suddenly. We are near the end of the avenue, the sunset end, but the sun is still quite high, it won’t set for an hour or more, and she will be gone by then.
‘I played Mercutio.’
‘Romeo,’ I say, murmur rather. ‘Alfa Romeo.’
‘What?’
I’ll be your Alfa Romeo, sleek and fast, and we will go together all over Europe, across the Bosphorus to Turkey, and then on and on, at a hundred and fifty, to Syria, Persia, India, Siam, Indo-China …
‘Nothing.’
‘You’re funny, Teddy,’ she says, and she slips away from me and leans against one of the prehistoric trunks and looks across the small dip which we call a valley to where the spire of Cartersfield church is like a finely sharpened pencil against the horizon.
‘I’ll be your Alfa Romeo,’ I say.
Do you love me, Teddy? Oh, but I do, just ask me, please ask me, but she doesn’t move, her brown hair is curly and soft at the back of her neck, and her mouth is a serious straight line. The longest distance between two points, so I define our kisses, never yet kissed. And her eyes are hazel, and they look out across the water-meadow, with the cows strung out like amber beads from one of my mother’s old necklaces, and the sky is like the cyclorama in the school theatre, and she has been Mercutio and I am Alfa Romeo, and I want to say: ‘I love you with my whole heart and soul, Molly,’ but I don’t.
And we wander together again, holding hands, away from the avenue, into the beech wood that skirts the meadow, and high above us an aeroplane drones like a mosquito, and then we can’t be seen and I kiss her, the first kiss this holidays or ever, and her lips feel very soft and slippery, and my wrists feel weak again, and I tell her about how I skidded two days ago.
And then we walk slowly back again, because the Simpsons will be going soon, they can’t stay to dinner, they’re so sorry, they have to get back, but it was a lovely drink and so nice to see us again. And as they go, the car moving very slowly away, careful of the gravel on the drive, I see her face, turned back over her shoulder, watching me, grave as ever, and not so much as a smile, though I stand and watch the dust settle for five minutes, trying to pluck one from the air.
*
August the twelfth, grouse season opens, my diary informs me, it is a Saturday, there is a gymkhana.
There is a small crowd, local people only, watching their children compete. They sit on rugs and move picnic baskets about with an air of authority. The shells of hard-boiled eggs are snatched into paper bags. Apple-cores, of course, go to the ponies. The sun blinds from a hundred windscreens.
I sit in the car. My father is scornfully angry because I am listening to the radio. At Silverstone the Ferraris are leading. On the twenty-fifth lap Stirling Moss is in trouble. He pulls in at the pits, he withdraws from the race. I switch off, grief gnawing my hero-worshipping heart.
A single full-bellied cloud drifts majestically above the bending races. Next is the jumping. Already Molly has won a blue rosette. Shylock wears it on his bridle, not sure whether to ignore it or treat it as an excuse to misbehave. At first I had enjoyed myself, strolling among the cars, noting two Bentleys, a Hudson and Cartersfield’s only really interesting car, an Atalanta. Then I reached the Simpsons’ Rover. Molly was sitting down, picking at the grass by the rug, her jockey cap hiding most of her hair, though the soft curly down on her neck was visible, slightly ragged, like the first drifting seaweed that promises land. Shylock pawed at the ground near by, occasionally lifting his head to watch in astonishment as other horses minced and snorted by.
‘I hope you do very well.’
‘Thank you.’ The hand—I had held it how many times now? Still single figures—went on scrabbling at the dry short grass by the rug, a red-and-green tartan.
‘How are you doing so far?’
‘One second in the potato race.’
‘Terrific!’
‘We could have been first, but Shylock got so excited. He prances about so much as soon as we get in the ring.’
‘But second is jolly good.’
‘We could have been first, though.’
I squatted down beside her and said: ‘I’m sorry.’
‘There’s no need to be sorry,’ she said. ‘It was my fault for not controlling him properly. But he can be such a pig.’
Molly nervous, plucking at the hard white dry grass, her cap on tears hovering about her face, eyes cloudy.
‘Can I do anything?’
‘No, thanks awfully.’
‘Well, good luck. I shall be watching you.’
No response, she missed her cue, eyes on Shylock, Molly in a world of horses, who wants horses? Silverstone starts in two minutes. I must be off. I get up.
‘I’m sure you’ll win.’
‘That’s me,’ she said, listening to an announcement, not to me. She jumped up—Molly in jodhpurs!—untied Shylock, led him away from the cars, put one foot in the stirrup, and then she was up. Molly vaulting, one leg flinging up and over, be careful, Molly, avoid violence, treat your body with tenderness, don’t do the splits, don’t have a fall.
And she was off to the parade ring. I went to the car, to the radio, to Stirling Moss. It could have been a big day for the BRM. Molly nearly fell off in the bending, fell dangling a-straddle Shylock’s neck, and I was out of the car before she’d grabbed his mane and slithered, me watching in outrage, back to the saddle. Such litheness, such a supple slither. Back in the car it was the nineteenth lap and the BRM was doing well, very well. But then the fatal twenty-fifth, and Moss retired. I got out of the car and stretched.
‘Is it over at last?’ said my mother.
‘Moss has been forced to retire.’
They looked at me as though I was mad. They understood an exact and perfect circle of nothing.
‘At least it’s better than listening to cricket,’ said the traitor Jane.
‘I suppose tennis is exciting,’ I said
. ‘Bang-bang, bang-bang, love-fifteen, bang, fifteen all, bang-bang, bang-bang, thirty-fifteen, bang-bang——’
‘Oh, be quiet, Teddy, for heaven’s sake,’ said my mother.
Jane had developed a passion for some ludicrous tennis player. I sat as far from her as possible to watch the jumping. She stuck out her tongue at me. I ignored her, superbly.
At last came Molly, trotting out of the parade ring, making a neat turn before breaking into a canter and heading Shylock into the first jump. As she went over, the white number tied round her waist (what a salmon-thin, salmon-sprung waist!), her body flat along Shylock’s withers and reaching neck, my right leg jumped with them, sympathetic magic. Oh witchcraft in white numbers, the girl jumped over the horse, and the moon shone for ever on Molly Simpson and Edward Gilchrist as they walked out into an eternal blaze of dawn and dusk, all midday and midnight vanished and banished, only the early morning and the evening left for our endless enjoyment of each other….
But now she had completed one side of the course, and she made the turn and came down towards the gate opposite our car—that gate over which she perpetually soars in my imagination, the same gate as last year, when the paper had caught her in mid-flight–and now she was over the brush fence and coming to the gate, and Shylock was cantering easily, easily, all in control, and heading now into the jump and over she—— No! Oh, Molly! Shylock refused, stopped dead, put on the brakes and skidded the last six feet and into the gate, carrying it forward on his chest, till he stopped and it fell, plunk, red and white, on the grass of the ring. But Molly stays on, she backs him out of the shambles, he is snorting now and picking his feet up high and his eyes are rolling, and men run out and put the jump together again, and here she comes again, those knees so tight against the leather of the saddle (such soapings, such tender polishings, to produce that burnish, as though it was a wedding-gown and every pearl had to be separately shone) and——Oh no! Humiliation squared and cubed! Shylock runs out, runs swerving away from the red-and-white monster he has suddenly found in the five-barred gate. Oh you coward and traitor, you animal, you despicable, insensate thing, you ingrate, you horse! But Molly has one more attempt, a final try, and she gathers him up, and she calms him down, she halts him and strokes his neck and speaks sweet nothings into his flat-back felt-like ears, and then she comes back, try again, Molly Simpson, and he prances a little as he walks, walks edgily, warily, and she talks to him all the time, too low to be heard, some magic incantation, no doubt, some witchcraft, and here they come again, up to the jump, oh please get over it, Shylock, for Molly and me, listen to what she is saying.
A Disturbing Influence Page 6