We were taken to a table in the corner farthest from the stage, where the pandemonium was lessened by about one per cent and there were coloured-glass hyacinths. Roy put Sylvia and me on a black-leather banquette against the wall with himself and Penny opposite, no doubt in further pursuance of the fiction that he was there just to be paternal to the rest of us in differing degrees. And yet, in the murk of that restaurant, which approached that of the Dug-out and was emphasized rather than relieved by the strings of fairy-lights on sweet-or liqueur-trolley, I could not believe that anyone beyond arm’s length could have recognized him – and, given the noise-level, anyone who did would have forgotten all about it before he had had time even to cry out. And what about it? What about all of it? Now that the favour was actually in progress, was (I trusted to God) a lot more than half over, it had quite lost any plausibility it might once have had. My surroundings encouraged this feeling of remoteness. Perhaps somebody had slipped a hallucinogen into that Guinness and I was having what current little slobberers called a bad trip.
Time went by as if an unlimited fund of it had suddenly been made available. A girl clad in a piece of silk measuring at least eighteen inches from top to bottom appeared through the gloaming and gave out sheets of vellum which I took to be menus. I peered hard at mine, polished my glasses on the paper napkin provided, peered again and made out phrases to do with garnishing and 4 persons and white wine sauce here and there. One day, I foresaw, eaters-out, if any, would need a more than nodding acquaintance with Braille as well as lip-reading. I took advantage of a lull in the yelling to order soup, steak and beer, my only utterance, as distinct from renewed mutters and whimpers, for quite some time. Roy and Sylvia, their foreheads almost touching across the table, were conversing in amorous roars and howls like creatures of legend, incomprehensibly to me for the most part, but still audibly; Penny was too far away, in all senses, for any sort of chat between us to be feasible: it would have been like trying to borrow money down an ear-trumpet. My steak came, and surprised me, or would have done had I still been open to surprise, by being excellent. While I was eating it, Roy broke off his tender thunderings to remonstrate with Penny for not having ordered anything and to try again to persuade her to do so. As he talked near her ear, he poured himself out some more Scotch from what had been the full bottle that had furnished his aperitifs and now, without a break, had become the source of his table wine. She shook her head and gestured to the titbits plate she had emptied of olives and radishes immediately on sitting down. Sylvia turned to me. I noticed how nearly circular her face was.
‘I can’t stuhnd all these put-ons. She made her point at the wrestling. So she’s sensitive. She wants us to sign a paper?’
‘Perhaps she’s just not hungry.’
‘Ah, bugger awff.’ (This piece of accentual grandeur, coupled with a large part of what she had said and done that evening, made me strongly suspect she was a peer’s daughter.) ‘If you’re really not hungry you get a plateful and then you just don’t eat it. That’s what you do, you see?’ She leaned diagonally across the table and hooted at Penny, ‘We’re sold, Snow White. You feel absolutely frightful. O-kay. Now let’s get on to the next thing.’
Penny looked down at her lap and shook her head again. I moved up to Sylvia.
‘What makes you such a howling bitch?’
‘I expect it’s the same thing as makes you a top-heavy red-haired four-eyes who’s never had anything to come up to being tossed off by the Captain of Boats and impotent and likes bloody symphonies and fugues and the first variation comes before the statement of the theme and give me a decent glass of British beer and dash it all Carruthers I don’t know what young people are coming to these days and a scrounger and an old woman and a failure and a hanger-on and a prig and terrified and a shower and a brisk rub-down every morning and you can’t throw yourself away on a little trollop like that Roy you must think of your wife Roy old boy old boy and I’ll come along but I don’t say I approve and bloody dead. Please delete the items in the above that do not apply. If any.’
This was delivered at top speed and without solicitude of any kind. Her upper lip was thinned to vanishing point and remained so while she stared silently at me. I found myself much impressed by the width of her vocabulary and social grasp. Roy had probably missed much of her text, but he would have caught her tone, face and so on.
‘Penny,’ he called to her rebukingly – ‘oh, balls, Sylvia. Cool it, now.’
Sylvia did two or three of her suppressed-sneeze laughs.
‘I don’t like fugues,’ I said, and might have gone on to tell her I considered the fugue the most boring artistic innovation before the adult Western if I had not been nearly sure I had once said so to Roy, if her harangue had not cowed me a little, and other ifs.
When Penny stood up, I started thinking immediately about how best to separate two girls in a combat that could have rivalled that between the Thing and the Knight, but she only told me to come and dance.
I shook my head. ‘I can’t.’
‘Oh yes you can. Come on.’
Half a minute later we were on a small dance floor below the stage. This was now quite bare of velvet-suited performers, but noises of the same general character and equal volume were being provided by a gramophone record. Everybody in sight was five or ten years younger than I. The majority of couples were performing at rather than with each other, making rope-climbing or gunshot-dodging motions with an air of dedication, as if all this were only by way of prelude to some vaster ordeal they must ultimately share. Before I had fully grasped how much I wanted not to join in any of it, Penny took me into a corner, put my arms round her and hers round me, and began rubbing the whole of the front of herself against me. She moved roughly in the tempo of the prevailing noises, but made no other concession to circumstance. Within a short time, and in direct defiance of everything I was saying to myself, we were both aware of a concrete result. Penny released me and stepped aside.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’
I turned my back on everybody except her. ‘I’m not going anywhere until you’ve given me a short account of the habitat, diet and main domestic uses of the Bactrian camel. And how do you mean?’
‘I wanted to thank you, and so I wanted to give you something, and there’s only one thing I’ve got that you might want, but I had to make sure you wanted it. But what’s this camel thing?’
‘The dromedary will do just as well. In fact I’m not sure it isn’t the same as the Bactrian camel. I asked you anyway before, that time up at your place.’
‘I made you then. I was depressed that day. You mean you want to think about camels for a bit.’
‘Thank me for what?’
‘At the wrestling. And not liking her.’
The Bactrian camel (or dromedary), though selected very much at random, was having its effect. I said, ‘That’s not much, not liking her. I can’t imagine anybody who would.’
‘He does. So he makes out.’
‘He’s special.’
‘He’s special all right. Can you go now?’
‘Just about. But we’ll have to see this through before we take off.’
See it through we did; take off I thought we never would. In the end, however, after a space of time sufficient for a performance of Die Meistersinger, uncut and with supper interval, all four of us stood on the pavement in Park Lane and looked out for taxis – the hired car had been dismissed, presumably to make Roy feel better about security. He worried me severely with his parade of initial incomprehension, dawning comprehension, careful consideration and final approbation when I said I thought I would take Penny off and deliver her wherever she wanted to go. Surely the whole concept of the favour could not have been evolved simply to get me off with her? The answer was that on theoretical grounds it most assuredly could, but that few people who were not canonization timber would have deliberately arranged such an evening just for another’s benefit. A taxi came and he and Sylvia
moved towards it. I thanked him and said good night, and he said good night and told me he would ring me in the morning. Neither girl spoke nor looked at anybody.
Penny’s and my taxi ride took place, after a couple of unanswered remarks from me, in total silence; in fact I was given a booster shot of the back-turning stuff I had had earlier. I foresaw trouble at the flat, but when we reached the bedroom she started undressing with the speed and conviction of someone about to go to the rescue of a swimmer in difficulties. I still foresaw the untoward – request for oddities, indifference with simulated ecstasy or just plain, last-moment refusal – but, again, all went merrily. Although the breasts were rather less hard than they looked, not having been sprayed with quick-drying cement, they were hard, and in the other sense soft. Everything else was good, too, and went on being so. I made no attempt not to compare her with Vivienne, and thought I felt or saw a difference in bodily behaviour: Vivienne (memory told me from a long way off) was unrestrained and unselfconscious, and Penny was those too, but there was an added beauty in her movements that nobody could acquire or intend. I kissed her ear and her temple and started murmuring.
‘Darling, you are the most—’
She moved away. ‘Listen, I don’t want any of that. Stuff that. I don’t want any thanks, thanks.’
‘Sorry. Think of it as just a habit. One a lot of people have. It wasn’t just thanks. Not that there’s much wrong with just thanks that I can see.’
‘I can. Anyway, I don’t want any of it. Letting you talk soft isn’t in the contract. If you try and do it again, talk soft I mean, I’m sleeping on the sofa or whatever you’ve got. Oh, and by the way, mate, so’s you won’t go and get any wrong ideas, this is it. Until breakfast I’m at your disposal, and then not any more. No phone calls, no letters, no flowers by request. Nothing about you personally, just how it is. Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘I’ll get it. You don’t know where the things are.’
‘I’ll find them. Have you got a bath-robe or something? Not a good one. I always spill things down me.’
Twenty minutes later I was in the sitting-room, playing the Weber bassoon concerto very quietly to myself on the hi-fi, when Penny came in wearing an old corduroy topcoat of mine (the best I had been able to do in the way of a bath-robe) and carrying a tray with a good deal more on it than tea for two.
‘I should have thought you’d had enough row for one evening.’
‘Row, yes. That’s why I put this on. Do you mind?’
‘As long as you don’t tell me about it. I hope it’s all right, I found some sardines and some other junk and I made some toast. I couldn’t eat at that club place. You know, her. Would you like some?’
‘No thanks. Just tea.’
‘He used to take me to hear things at concerts and play me bits on the gramophone and tell me about them till I could scream. Now he does it to his birds. Perhaps he always has. I felt quite sorry for her. In a way. Get those trombones, aren’t they thrilling? Get the way he brings back the first subject of the first movement. Get the fingering in this passage. Get him going into 6/8 time. Get stuffed.’
Having given me my tea, she settled down on the couch with the tray beside her and began eating; quietly, I thought. I pulled down my copy of Music Ho! and pretended to read it, so that if she wanted to listen to Weber she could do so without fear of being spotted in the act. I found myself sympathizing with Roy and his tendency to tell birds about trombones. It was faintly comic, and yet not undignified, that he still tried to share or give art, still had not arrived at the sad fact that to listen to a musical work can never be other than a solitary experience. Then, at the start of the middle section of the concerto’s slow movement, I noticed that Penny’s gentle chewing of her toast had stopped in mid-mouthful. A glance round the edge of my glasses showed her sitting quite still with a half-eaten slice in her hand. Something I took at first to be a tear, but which soon turned out to be a blob of marmalade, fell on to the corduroy coat. The bassoon returned to its opening melody and munching began again. Nothing being more strongly inherited than musical talent, I felt I knew that, if Roy and Penny’s mother and Penny and everybody had been born twenty years earlier, Penny would now be near the front of the first violins in a decent orchestra, if not in a string quartet. Anyway, even the back desk of the seconds in some grimy provincial city would be a better place for her than anywhere she was likely to find herself in twenty years’ time. These thoughts ruffled me.
The record ended. It was ten minutes to three. My eyelids felt like tattered canvas, but Penny sat on and looked at the floor. I said experimentally,
‘Curious evening, one way and another.’
‘Sodding grotesque.’
‘Why did you come?’
‘Why did you? I wanted not to be in the house. And I wanted to talk. To try and explain. I didn’t but I wanted to then.’
‘Explain now.’
‘You can’t. I can’t. I couldn’t.’
‘Why don’t you go and live with your mother for a bit?’
She lit a cigarette. ‘I screwed it up with her. I thought it was her fault, the divorce. It was his really, of course, but I didn’t know then. And anyway her husband won’t have me in the house. He’s an estate agent.’
‘Why don’t you and Gilbert go off somewhere?’
‘No thanks. I’d be gone on at all the time. It’s bad enough when there are other people around. And I’d worry if I wasn’t there.’
‘What about?’
‘For instance you know he’s talking of going off with this little slag for good, do you?’
‘Oh, God. He can’t.’ I felt as if I had been told my dinner had been poisoned. Questions formed in my mind and disintegrated again. ‘He’s off his rocker,’ I said finally. ‘Does Kitty know?’
‘I haven’t seen her. He only mentioned it the other day. But he’ll leak it, the way he always does, and then we’ll be off. And when we’ve all had plenty of that, he’ll move out, I reckon.’
‘That’s the time for you to go too, isn’t it? Or earlier. Anywhere at all. Abroad. Drop out properly. You’d be mad to say around up there, with Kitty doing her stuff from morning to night.’
‘She’d come and find me. And there’s Ashley, and Chris. He’ll go berserk when he finds out. Burn the place down. He hates him. He won’t mind much really, the thing itself, but he’ll have an excuse then, see. And I don’t want to not know what’s going on. That’s what I didn’t like about last time. Keeping it from the children. A bloody scream, that was.’
I said nothing. She moved on the couch so that everything about her was pointing directly at me.
‘He takes a bit of notice of you. Will you try and stop him?’
If I had not still been disconcerted by her news, and had not perhaps been suffering from her ability to take any number of years off my emotional age, I might have prevented myself from saying, ‘So that was the help you wanted.’
‘You and me tonight was nothing to do with that,’ she said angrily. ‘That was separate. I told you it’s not going to happen again. Not after I go. And that wasn’t to show you it was separate. It all just is.’
‘I’m sorry.’ I took in what flushing had done for the whites and irises of her eyes. ‘I’d like to help about everything. Take you on.’
‘Nobody gets to take me on. Sorry. I told you it isn’t you. I quite like you. You’re a bit pompous, but you’re all right really.’ Her faint grin at this reminded me of our reintroduction six or seven weeks before. Then she went urgent again. ‘Will you talk to him?’
‘I don’t know what good you think it’ll do. You know what he’s—’
‘But will you?’
‘Yes. Yes, I will. I’ll have to. I was going to anyway. I’ll tell him.’
‘Thanks.’
Penny got up, turned her back, and looked down in the general direction of the tray. I could not think of anything to say that had not been vetoed in advance. After over a minute she
shifted half round towards me.
‘I’d like to be asleep now.’
Four: Great Wag
‘How can a Japanese write music?’ asked Harold Meers. ‘I mean real music, not bloody pots and pans.’
‘No trouble. I mean, of course it’s trouble, but not any—’
‘Totally alien culture, food, drink, dress, art, ways of thought, the whole lot.’
‘Originally, no doubt, but there’s been a certain amount of Western music in Japan for quite some time now, and in any case he’s—’
‘You can’t change a whole culture overnight.’
‘Possibly not, but this chap went to the USA in 1950, when he was eight, so he must know quite a bit about the West these days. And this concerto of his just is very interesting. Not great, but interesting.’
Harold looked down at my copy. ‘You say here he’s spent most of his life in California.’
‘Yes, I do, don’t I?’
‘But there must be traces of Nip stuff in his work. Bells and so on.’
‘None that I could hear.’
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