‘She’s been perfectly silent. It appears to me that she’s bent on some destruction, as usual.’
‘Yes, I’m afraid you’re right. All part of the pattern.’
‘What can she destroy from inside a parked car?’ I was beginning to feel like one of three ennobled surgeons called in at short notice to advise on the lancing of a royal boil. ‘I suppose she could work on the upholstery a bit with her nail-scissors, if she’s got any.’
Gilbert ignored me. ‘She must suspect you’re engaged in some activity that she could somehow spoil with her presence, or the threat of her presence.’
‘Like having it off with me, you mean, in the colour-television room.’
‘Cut out your pawky, perky little sallies for the moment, Douglas, if you would.’ Roy moved aside to talk to the returning waiter.
‘Miss Vandervane,’ said Gilbert to me, ‘is totally unaware of your existence.’
‘I should have thought that, if anything, that rather strengthened my point.’
‘This is the kind of elitist environment in which one might expect to find someone of your basic attitudes.’
‘Yes, or Roy’s. It’s his club.’
‘You are against life.’
‘Oh, wrap up.’
‘Cool it, Duggers,’ said Roy. ‘We’ve got to think what’s best to do.’
‘No doubt you have.’ I looked at my watch. ‘I must go or I’ll be late.’
‘You’ve got over twenty minutes.’ Roy gave me one of his person-to-person scowls. ‘Hang on just a second and we’ll drop you. Have some more shampers.’
‘All right. Thanks.’
‘Then we can all go off together and you and I can take her to the Savoy, Gilbert. She said once she liked it there. That’s the thing.’
‘What’s the age of this building?’ Gilbert spoke with an anthropologist’s detachment.
Roy told him that and other things. A champagne glass arrived for Gilbert and a tumbler of Scotch for Roy. Both drank, while I thought about the problems of being a jobbing diluent, more vaguely about Penny, and then more specifically about how late I was going to be at the BBC. We left the Club at the point in time at which a brisk trot along King Street, followed by a rally team’s type of progress up Regent Street, would forestall any reproaches on my arrival.
‘What have you got on this afternoon?’ I asked Roy as we walked.
‘Whole pack of stuff. Buggering around here and there. One thing that should be fun. Telling a shag why I won’t do Harold in Italy for him.’
‘I suppose the viola part would be rather on the—’
‘No no, this would have been waving the stick. Because of Byron.’
‘What’s he got to do with it?’
‘Duggers, the music by Hector Berlioz, ob or dee 1869 as we both have cause to know, is based on a—’
‘God. I’m with you. God.’
‘Sorry, but these days you do rather seem to need to have stuff spelt out.’
‘What’s Byron got to do with it?’
‘Christ, he’s a Greek national hero. They’re always going on about him.’
‘So we refuse to perform a piece of music by a Frenchman inspired by a poem by an Englishman who died a hundred and fifty years ago in case it might get blokes to turn soft on the present government in Greece. I see.’
‘You can’t let it slip, you know. Got to keep at them.’
‘I’m surprised you thought it was all right for you and me to play K.481 the other week. Wasn’t Hitler an Austrian too?’
‘That’s a dead issue now. And the idea’s too far-fetched.’
‘Too what?’
‘Far-fetched,’ said Roy loudly. ‘No flag-waving sentiment in Mozart.’
Gilbert, on Roy’s other side, had been showing a respectful impatience, clearly resenting my readiness to waste Roy’s time while rather admiring his lenity. Now he settled my hash by chiming in scornfully, ‘Hell, I should just about say not.’
The car came into view, singling itself out from others by its size and splendour. Not at first sight the obvious choice for a be person, I reflected uncharitably, then considered the notion that Roy did not so much own it as fulfil his personality by means of it. Anyone else might be said to have it; it was his distinction to be the person it belonged to. Or perhaps it was just that he had not yet finished changing over from having to being.
A bowed shape inside revealed itself as Penny under a cartwheel-sized hat. She was in the back seat. Why? She had moved there after arrival so as to allow her father to take his place in front. Out of the question. She had spent the journey there so as to emphasize her disaffection from mankind, as personified by Gilbert. Much more like it. But it touched the edge of my mind that she might have wanted to diffuse the impression (among a limited audience, admittedly) that the flagrantly progressive Sir Roy Vandervane kept a coloured chauffeur: a part that Gilbert, with his dark-blue suit, pale-blue shirt and black-knitted-silk tie, could plausibly have filled. To have thought of this at all made me feel humiliated in some way.
‘Right, into the car with you,’ said Roy in grim, riot-squad tones. ‘You in the back, Douglas.’
Penny moved a few inches away from me like somebody in a bus making room for a not necessarily very drunken stranger, a relatively effusive greeting. Roy half turned in the passenger’s seat in front and was very bald about dropping me at the studios and going on to the Savoy, while she looked out of the window at some nearby railings. What with this and the hat I could not see much of her, but even so I caught a strong physical reminder of Sylvia. It was gone before I could do more than decide tentatively where it had not originated: face, hair, figure, clothes, smell. In the last-named department Penny was offering a good deal of, though nothing more than, the consequences of warm female flesh; perhaps she was a secret washer as well as a secret listener to music. Excellent, but if I had glimpsed a resemblance elsewhere between the two girls, it was likely, or possible, or conceivable, that Roy had too. Perhaps an incestuous fixation had been transformed into a . . .
Vowing weakly to dig out the popular-psychology paperback I was nearly sure I still had in a cupboard at the flat, and to drop the volume unopened into the Regent’s Canal at an early opportunity, I prepared for a closer look at Penny, but had to defer this for the time being when Gilbert drove out of the parking area like an international ace leaving the pits at Le Mans (or somewhere) and snapped my head back against the cushions. More delay supervened while he took us into a tight fast semicircle that held me against the door on my side at a pressure of several Gs and sprawled Penny horizontally across my lap, which was all right.
‘Steady, Gilbert,’ said Roy in his richest tone.
‘Poor me boy! Good me do and thank-ye me get!’
I understood this utterance as a protest, perhaps not unjustified if one cared to look far enough. No time for that now. Penny pulled herself upright before I could assist her, and resettled her hat. She was wearing a mulberry-coloured skirt apparently knocked together out of an old curtain and ample enough to cover another three or four legs besides her own, bicep-height crimson fish-net gloves and a kind of low-cut suede waistcoat above which her breasts showed like the tops of a couple of ostrich eggs. She looked at me and I took in the eyes and skin.
‘Your head’s better, I see,’ she said.
‘Yes, thank you. Cleared up in no time.’
‘It’s left a little mark, but I expect that’ll fade away soon. It hardly notices now, as a matter of fact. It’s really only because I know where to look that I can see it at all.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘I’m sorry if I was rude to you that day. I was very depressed about something, and I know I do get rude when I get depressed.’
‘I see.’
‘Anyway, I’m sorry.’
‘That’s all right.’
My eyes seemed to want to go on looking at her, but I switched them round until they were looking out of the window. Was she experien
cing some fool kick or other, off on some pitiable good trip? Or was I in for a session of the sincerity-sarcasm game, in which A steps up her sincerity to the point where B must declare himself either a moron for going on taking it or a boor for telling her to stuff it? What told against this view was that the game is much better with an audience, and Penny was keeping her voice down, though admittedly she would have had to raise it a good deal to vie with the noise Gilbert was getting out of the engine as he took us hurtling up towards Piccadilly Circus. Perhaps she had simply been apologizing. Then, still quietly, and still in a face-value voice, she asked,
‘What have you and him been talking about?’
‘Oh, musical stuff. Gossip.’
‘He didn’t mention Saturday? This coming Saturday?’
‘No? What’s happening then?’
‘Are you free that evening?’
‘I can be.’ I had a lieder recital and a date with Vivienne, but the one could be missed and the other deferred. ‘Why?’
‘He told me he was thinking of giving a sort of little dinner-party somewhere. In a restaurant. He wanted me to come, and you, and then this girl.’
The favour! So Gilbert’s instincts had not been altogether wrong, and Penny had managed to prevent Roy from putting the proposition to me in his own time. How he had been going to do this with Gilbert within range I could not envisage, but Roy’s resources had always been large and varied.
I asked mechanically, ‘What girl?’
‘She’s called Sylvia. You must have met her. She’s got long hair.’
‘Yes. Indeed she has. When did you meet her?’
‘Oh, I’ve never met her. He told me about her. What’s she really like?’
‘She’s . . . not my kind of person,’ I said with an effort.
‘Yes, he said she was young. Is she pretty?’
‘Not to me. But of course different people—’
‘You are going to come to the dinner, though?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Oh come on, it’ll be fun. You said you were free.’
‘Fun?’ I tried not to sound too airy and gay. ‘I can’t really see it being much of that, given the . . . given her. But, uh, it would be fun for you, would it, to go out on the town with your dad and his bird and another bloke to make up the number?’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
I drew in my breath to tell her that if, on grounds of some mouldering old thing like taste, she could see nothing wrong with the proposed outing, I would have to join in with my fellow deacons and churchwardens and not be able to answer her question. Then I held my breath for a moment, realizing, to my vexation or uneasiness or something, that I was no longer sure whether there was much wrong with it after all. Then I let all my breath out at once when the car stopped as dead as if it had run into a brick wall and I bounded forward and hit the top of my forehead against the edge of the back of the seat in which Roy was sitting. The car had not been going very fast, and the line of contact was not as sharp as the lintel of the Vandervane kitchen door had been; nevertheless, the effect felt remarkably similar, and must have looked similar too, at any rate to Penny, who broke out into similar laughter.
I took in facts. The car had run into not a brick wall but the back of a bus, and had dented it somewhat, while itself seeming unharmed. My three fellow-passengers were likewise whole, had no doubt seen the bump coming. Gilbert had his head out of his window, Roy had opened his door, Penny went on laughing without giving any impression of artificiality. Some crossing pedestrians stopped and stared and stayed stopped. We were at the corner of Conduit Street. It was exactly twelve fifteen. A policeman came into view on the far side of the road.
I told Roy I would be in touch, got out of the car and gained the pavement. Lines of stationary traffic stretched unbroken as far as Oxford Circus. I set off at light-infantry speed, opting for arrival at my destination twenty or so minutes late in fair condition rather than something less than a quarter of an hour in a pulp. I negotiated family groups moving at toddlers’ pace, ladies with dogs on yard-long leads, arm-in-arm trios, suddenly becalmed old men, a phalanx of schoolchildren, two girls halted in serious conversation, an approaching Sikh with his eyes on an open street plan. What had been chiefly unwelcome about Penny’s laughter was that I knew I would be able to see a very good case for it tomorrow without being able to see any particle of that case now. It was the obliteration of this time-lag, not, or not nearly so much, any revelling in others’ misfortunes from a safe distance, that made funny stories enjoyable. After my recording I would go along to the George and have a pint of bitter and a round of cheese-and-pickle and a round of ham with too much mustard. Then, at the flat, the new Walter Klien of K.415 and K.467.
I had crossed Oxford Street when I heard my name being called from behind, and it was nobody else but Penny, carrying her hat in her hand. I stopped. Everybody she ran past turned to stare after her. I felt all at once that I had been awake for seven hours, that I had rather liked the rug that had had an accident, that a social diluent ought to have a clause written into his contract saying his duties did not include being put in the wrong about everything from his presence in a club to Mozart’s lack of flag-waving sentiment, that I was hot and my head hurt.
She came up, showing less sign of exertion than might have been expected in such a committed idler, but quite enough to draw my eyes to the top of her waistcoat. She must have them propped up, I thought. On supports of some kind. Rolled-up tissue-paper, perhaps.
‘Hang on a minute,’ she said.
‘I can’t, I’m due at the BBC. Late already.’
‘So? They’ll wait.’
‘Penny: I have to go.’
A man in overalls coming from behind me barged into her hard enough to swing her half round, but she showed no resentment, as Vivienne or I would have done. ‘You coming to the dinner on Saturday?’
‘I can’t, sorry.’
‘What do you mean you can’t? You said you were free.’
‘I can’t, I won’t, I’m not going to.’
‘Listen, you sixty or something? You go on like you were older than him, twice his age. You’re sodding dead, you are.’
I leaned over her. ‘I’m not coming because one of the girls who are coming is an exact replica of you and the other one is you. I’d need a good half-hour to go into all the things I object to about you, so I’ll just tell you that helping him on with this thing of his is being nasty to Kitty, and don’t tell me she knows about it and doesn’t mind. She’s taken you on and she puts up with you, God help her, and I don’t want anything to do with someone who thinks it’s all right or funny or why-not or groovy or wild to behave in that way. Now clear off.’
The clock in the BH foyer stood at twelve thirty-nine when I pushed my way in through the swing door. The producer of the programme I was on, standing by the reception desk, saw me and hurried forward.
‘Sorry, Philip. Got hung up.’
‘And beaten up, it seems.’ He looked at my forehead. ‘Are you all right? Good, now not to worry, we’ve got the studio until one. If you can—’
He looked past my shoulder in muted consternation. It was Penny again.
‘I’m sorry I laughed in the car.’
‘That’s all right. Now just—’
‘Help me.’
There is no other injunction like this, in that you have to heed it but cannot, by the fact of its being put, hope to do what it says. I pressed my hand against my head.
‘All right. I’ll be back here in about twenty minutes, so . . . Or you can telephone me.’
We got through the recording without a single fluff. By the time I had hurried back to the foyer, Penny had gone.
Three: The Night of the Favour
Helping Penny became a less daunting prospect as the day advanced and as I considered the possibilities and ethics of stretching it, or confining it, to helping her off with her suede waistcoat, out of her pyjama-top, etc. I felt p
artly protected on my Vivienne flank by the open and tolerated existence of the other bloke – only partly, so to speak internally: that gnome about the transferability of sauce is far too obviously the result of a consensus of ganders to make any useful impression on the average goose. When it came to Penny herself, matters seemed less clear-cut. The kind of help she might have been asking for ranged presumably from adopting her as my daughter to saying I would come on Saturday after all, with agreeing to be prick-teased by her coming somewhere in the middle, or off to one side. I felt this last as a kind of moral counterpoise to the implications, if any, of throwing a pass at somebody in a state. Yes, and whatever sort of state it might or might not reveal itself to be, it was not that of innocence, in any sense of the term. All this was good self-justifying stuff, and available in fully sufficient quantity to be going on with.
Anyway, when Roy rang me up that same evening, ostensibly to ask if the new rug had arrived (which it had) and if I liked it (which I quite did), and then went on to say casually that he gathered Penny had mentioned to me a very vague sort of thought he had happened to have had about a possible minor jaunt on the approaching Saturday, I agreed that she had, and told him I thought it was rather a good idea.
‘A good idea? You didn’t say that the last time we discussed it.’
It was no use reminding him that on that occasion I had ended up by saying something to that very effect. I remembered that, although a great one for making other people do what he wanted them to do, he tended to turn suspicious if they showed signs of wanting to do it on their own account. I came back with something about approving only conditionally, in the abstract, and put in a vigilant request for details. This, carrying the bonus of giving him ample scope for mystification, went down a treat. Under pressure, he finally disclosed the name of the pub in Islington where we were to start the evening, and even threw in the time. After that, he said in the tone of a full and inflexible planner, we would see how things went.
‘How’s Penny?’ I asked.
‘Penny?’ He sounded puzzled. ‘Fine. Why?’
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