‘Darling, darling,’ David said softly. He could not have behaved more kindly, trying to soothe her, trying to press her arms to her side but very gently, and also trying to kiss her tears. At last her voice dropped and she began to weep with long low sobs, and then all of a sudden she was quite still as if she were rigid and dead on her feet. Pink was again in the corner, smoking his cigarette furiously when David helped her out of the room to the bathroom where he held her forehead while she was sick. She washed and he came back first.
Pink, with his usual technique of facing a homicidal lunatic with ‘a spot of the butcher’s itch, old man?’ said:
‘Everything sorted out all right?’
David replied:
‘She’d drunk far too much, anyway.’
But the manner of her return seemed to suggest that she had in the past months quite often been shaken as deeply as this. Her forehead looked higher because her hair was a little wet from the sponge. She still looked pale. But she made it clear at once that she wanted the incident to be forgotten. She did not apologise. She said:
‘Where are we going to eat?’
Pink’s teeth were chattering.
SIXTEEN
‘COME HOME, Jim Edwards,’ Pink said, but she sniffed and shook her head.
‘No.’ Then she put out a hand to him. ‘I’m glad that party was even bloodier. It makes us friends again.’
‘Again?’ he asked. ‘No question of that.’
‘No,’ she said uncertainly. ‘No, of course not.’
‘Mark you, you did kick out a bit.’
She brought her fingers together and nodded, firmly. ‘That’s all it was.’ Then she swept back her hair, and asked:
‘How’s Stephen?’
‘Stiffy? Much the same. My jalopy awaits at the door.’
‘No.’
‘Daddy?’ Pink seemed to have to try and remember to whom she referred.
‘Jogging along, I think, old thing,’ he said, with a frown, at last. ‘Square eyeballs. He takes the TV out shooting with him. D’you think that little tale had any truth in it?’
‘Don’t,’ she said sharply.
‘Sorry. I thought it might be better to air it. For old Pink, too.’
‘It was a stupid story.’
‘Lovey, why don’t you come home? I’d row you in, I really would.’
‘No.’
‘Your life, Lilian.’
She nodded. They were sitting on the stairs that led up to the flat door. It was about half past one in the morning. They had left David at the party where they had met all the same guests, one degree drunker. Mary sat a step higher than Pink, who for some potty reason, now lolled back, pretending that he was basking in the sun. He sifted imaginary sand through his fingers as he talked. Light from the hall shone up the lift shaft beside them but otherwise it was dark. A few minutes later, Pink said:
‘Give us a statement, guv.’
But she still sat silent. Pink looked up at a small pilot light at the top of the lift shaft.
‘That sun’, he said, is bloody hot. Very dangerous indeed, I’d say. Pass me the Ambre Solaire.’
‘God, I love you, Pink. I do. I promise I do.’
‘Thank you.’ Pink sat up. ‘Chumbo, is it always like this?’
‘What exactly?’
‘I mean all the big guns, you slamming him and that, and then him just ditching you like this.’
She nodded quickly. ‘That sort of thing. It may be a bit worse because you’re here. That’s what he’ll tell me, anyway.’
‘But why do you stay?’
She shrugged her shoulders.
‘Love?’ he suggested.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Hate?’
‘Not always.’
‘Sex?’
‘Not altogether.’
‘Fear?’
‘I’m sometimes scared. You’re awfully good at asking questions.’
‘You’re awfully bad at answering them,’ Pink said.
She apologised and he suddenly grabbed her hand. He had never had to do so before. They both noticed that.
‘No sorries to me,’ he said. ‘That’s not on at all. Why doesn’t he sack you?’
‘He says,’ she said, ‘that he loves me.’
‘Funny way to show it.’
‘No,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘It’s just that he shows it in too many ways. I really ought to be happy. I get everything. He’s practically hitting me one minute and the next he’s on his knees begging me. He’s insulting or kissing my feet.’
‘And bed?’
‘She frowned.
‘It’s probably my fault,’ she said.
‘Oh, Goderooni,’ Pink said. ‘Not another Stiffy?’
‘Oh no,’ she shook her head. ‘Not that a bit.’
‘But you don’t like it?’
She, too, had begun to play with Pink’s sand. She passed it from hand to hand.
‘Very clean sand.’
‘Trust St Andrews,’ Pink replied.
‘I do at the time,’ she said. ‘I like it very much indeed at the time.’
‘Afterwards, big guilt?’
‘She nodded. Then, at last, went on:
‘What’s awful is that I sometimes think I stay just for it.’ She stopped and shook her head. ‘That really can’t be true. It’s not guilt because of Stephen, mind. It’s something else.’
‘A little bit of sin.’
‘Well, it can’t be, can it, Pink? I mean we’ve never had anything to do with all that, you and me. If you say “Stuff Moo”, Moo really can’t worry you, can he? I mean that’s not fair at all.’
‘Deepers,’ Pink announced. ‘We’ve got an awful lot of Moo tucked away. Could be a throw-back to Moo. What’s the feeling? Just, shouldn’t be doing it at all?’
‘No,’ she said steadily. ‘It’s just a bit of a sham. D’you want to know?’
‘You want to tell?’
‘Yes. Give me some more sand. I’m going to need it.’
‘Come home, Jim,’ Pink said, but she ignored that. She frowned as if she were collecting herself to take a big hurdle.
‘I’m pretty dim, but I think it works like this. We do everything in the book you see and yet in an odd, awful sort of way he’s never slept with me, nor me with him. I told you about that country girl of mine on the bridge – well, like that, only different. And I’m sure it’s worse for him than me. He’s always somebody else in bed. I don’t think he sees how different he is. And I either lie there a bit bewildered, you know, because that’s really how I feel, or else I kind of whip up an act as well. When we’re both bluffing we’re capable of big thrills and we can say “nobody’s like us” and all the things everybody says, I’m sure. But you see it’s a sham, Pink. I know it’s a sham. I don’t know who he is, and I don’t really think he knows who he is. Look at him even tonight, charming at his own party, wily and all kind of cruel when you were talking about Daddy, then arrogant and womanising at this last do. Yet sometimes, in fact quite often, he’s the child. I don’t know how he’s the energy to keep it up.’
She stopped and looked up.
She said, ‘Do you understand any of that lot?’
‘You bet,’ Pink said. ‘Why d’you have to pick the weird ones?’
‘There’s a question,’ she said. ‘Why do they hunt me?’
‘Because, my love,’ Pink said, ‘You’re the most vulnerable thing on two legs.’
She shook her head, then swept back her hair, again. She wore it longer, now.
‘Watch that sand,’ Pink said.
‘Not now,’ she said. ‘Not vulnerable now. You should try being a girl.’
‘It could be arranged,’ he replied. ‘This Modern Age.’
‘I’ll tell you. Now life’s getting sorted out. I know now I’m either very soft and breasts and that, or else I’m just a hard little triangle of hair. It’s about as simple as that. Only I think I wanted to b
e soft more than anything …’
‘What’s to stop you?’
‘Me. Once you’ve started being the other sort of girl, it doesn’t seem to be so easy to go back. All girls are rakes, so some Pope said, and that’s the truth of it. I used to think I’d get fat. But I’ll probably end up like a piece of chewed string.’
She paused again, then said:
‘Very chewed. Tarts do … There’s not much of me left.’
‘Oh yes there is,’ Pink said very quietly, and she seized and squeezed his hands. ‘Chumbo, you’d better come home.’
‘No.’ She looked disturbed as if she wondered why she was so sure. Then very suddenly she said:
‘Lovely, we could talk forever, but I’m tired now. You go home. I’m going to bed.’
She stirred and her clothes rustled. Pink sat upright and when she switched on the light, at the top, by the flat door, he rubbed his eyes.
‘Are you going to stick to him?’ Pink asked.
Again she frowned, deeply this time, and looked down at her shoes. She had one hand on the flat door.
‘I don’t know till I find him, really,’ she said. Then she told Pink to go away. He went, waving up from each landing, all the way down to the hall.
At the last moment, he decided to leave his jalopy where it was, and take a taxi as far as Piccadilly. Then he decided to walk about a bit. Paddling through Belgrave Square, only a couple of hundred yards away from base, he was accosted by a tart on wheels. He did not know that a modern habit was for prostitutes to ride in well-appointed cars and her arrival at the kerb beside him left him speechless. He looked at her dejectedly, and thought what a plain little woman she was. Any colour she might have had by day was washed away by the street light. She managed a very uncertain smile for a professional as she said:
‘Hullo, saucy.’
Pink replied only with a faint aspirant as he climbed into the car. ‘Winded,’ he said to himself, ‘I’m winded, not windy.’ For the first mile no words passed between them until at last she asked:
‘Where do you come from then?’
Pink replied very loudly, ‘France!’
When they arrived at the house, which was large and condemned somewhere in the no-man’s-land west of the Edgware Road, Pink looked round the room. He had to go through all the business with the homely maid (two and six will do very nicely) and the welcome-home poodle (he’s from France, too), and then the girl closed the door behind her.
‘I say,’ Pink said, sociably, spotting the electrical stimu-lator nearby. ‘The old Vibro on the couch, what?’ and she gave him a look that made him unbutton his trousers, at once.
SEVENTEEN
‘THE LAST DAYS of Pompey …’ Your girlish quote. From one of your long letters, which then I dismissed and now wish I’d kept. I can’t remember all you said in it, but I remember it was full of apologies, saying you didn’t know what came over you to make you bolt at that of all times. You devoted a paragraph to ‘good friends’ and I was reminded of that tie you were always going to buy for Stephen. You never mentioned my bloodinesses – from the letter one would have guessed that it had been a sunny affair. I can see your upright writing and I remember thinking that it looked as if you had drawn pencil lines across the page, then rubbed them out afterwards. It often struck me as odd that your hands, which usually moved so quickly and competently, produced such childlike writing. But everything was neat and correct. I think you had even checked the spelling, and I’m almost certain you wrote the letter twice. There wasn’t a single blot, or scoring out.
I knew much better than you why you left, and at that time I remember telling myself, even if I didn’t believe it, that I’d won. Nor was it a surprise when you went. I saw it coming days before. And I knew you wouldn’t go home with Pink, cousin. To my eternal shame, I’d fixed that. You frowned whenever I mentioned his name. You may have let him take you back from a party, but you weren’t going to go home with him. Not until you’d sorted things out in your mind. I was quite sure of that.
There seem to be only two ways in which the immature – and I am talking of myself, not you – can display a little of their true identity: first in loving someone so much that they forget their own masks and defences, but if they do this successfully they pass out of the category; they are not of the permanently immature. The other way is to fail. And that’s really what happened, on a small scale. And apart from that, in the end, after the thrill of the most damnable act of all, namely upsetting you and Pink, the workman was too tired and sad and sorry for himself to lift the spade. The otter approached with safety.
I remember in the kitchen we managed the sort of conversation that only goes with very grown-up people. I didn’t quite believe in it, afterwards, but at the time it was genuine enough. I told you all about the experiment that had gone wrong in this lab, on or about the very bench on which I write this now. You never quite understood, but you frowned (which is to say you tried), and I for my part took lots of trouble trying to explain it all to you. One day I’ll write it down carefully for you, because I never quite got it across. I gave you a parallel in communication engineering but you didn’t understand what communication engineering was so I suppose that only muddled you more. (I can still see the frown as you tried so hard.) In complicated signal and response systems engineers have proved it’s more efficient to duplicate some of the signals; to send the telephone message along two lines, because in this way inefficiencies through outside interference are usually eliminated. Still with me? Read it twice. All I was trying to do was show that this happened in animals as well. I got myself a cat most days from the animal house downstairs and carved out bits of its mid-brain through which I knew certain signals were passed. Things called ‘righting reflexes’, in fact, which means sticking out a leg to stop yourself falling over, or in the case of a cat, if you put it on its back, trying to get on all fours again. If it did get on all fours, or at least tried to do so, after I’d sliced the one telephone line which everybody knows about, then I’d prove that there was duplication in the system.
Isn’t it odd, how I go into all that again? I desperately want to get it across to you now because you were right, in a way, about the schoolmaster. In those moments I found patience. I showed, for a few seconds, anything that’s nice about me.
You know I always used to tell you that everybody and especially those mixed-up characters, the children of the angelic, are six people at once? Haunted perhaps, by a lot of ghosts of their fathers who have committed no sins except sins of omission, all saying ‘Go on, take everything, we never did!’? I don’t really think the haunted idea bears examination, but I know I feel now, at a moment of peace (although not through the storm like you), most like a rather nice uncle of mine who was once Chief Constable in Forfar. He was patient and steady, he ate too many cookies and buns, and maybe he was on the dull side, but he was a much better teacher than his brother, my father, who was headmaster for twenty years. It’s not that I’m cast more in his mould than anybody else in the family. It’s just that somehow he arrived, and arriving showed effortlessly, I suppose, all that’s best about a Dow, and therefore all that’s true about a Dow.
That was what you saw, my darling, in the kitchen. I was weary of bullying you, and I was weary of making simple practical experimental mistakes with those cats. (Isn’t it significant that I’ve never been a good experimentalist in the practical sense? That needs a steady physical touch.) You found Dow. Just for a few moments. And I can see your eyes now, not at all steady and loving but suddenly, very wary indeed, this way and that, as you fidgeted around. Two days later, amazed at yourself, because these were the best two days we had together, even if we never went to bed, you slipped away, not even leaving a note.
Even then, though I see it so clearly now, I deceived myself. It astonishes me that someone (forty was I? Forty-one?) could have been so blind to himself when he was given such clear clues. I saw you funked love, I saw it the minute, the very secon
d you did. (It’s the actual bat of an eyelid that I remember, as if it were yesterday and, at once, I fabricated a whole load of lies.) I swore I felt triumphant. When you had gone, and I wandered through the flat alone, from room to room, I whistled. I kept saying, ‘You won, David, you won, she loved you in the end. She proved it so. She ran away, otter that she is, but the victory, Davie boy, is yours alone.’
For a day or two I was hopelessly restless, beginning things, as one does, but I made no effort whatever to find you. I was really glad that you had gone – that was the one true thing. And then I rang Phyllis, the wife that was, who I often see, and saw while you were with me, but was damned careful to make sure that she never met you. The ex-wife’s life, selling hats in Regent Street, has put pounds of flesh on her. She’s Scottish, too, as you know. I’m as cagey as that. Sleeping with her is a little like having a hot bath, and even to me she tends to quote Shelley before she puts on her clothes again.
I remember saying on the phone:
‘The most awful thing’s happened.’
‘Yes?’ Very coyly, from her.
‘I’m inconsolable,’ I said and explained.
She asked, ‘Did she say something nasty?’
And I laughed.
‘Worse,’ I said. ‘If she said anything, I’m sure it was nice.’
She promised to try to look in. She always makes it sound difficult. Everything in her life, she’s sure, goes wrong and isn’t easy.
‘At once,’ I hear another man’s voice that is my own persuade her. ‘That’s very sweet of you.’ She was there within the hour. We even had an expensive meal afterwards with myself at my most gay.
There’s the picture, distant cousin, of a man in defeat.
EIGHTEEN
PINK WAS BACK in Edinburgh by now, at the bar downstairs in the Café Royal doing his best to sum things up. He did so to a young man who had been with him at private school and who was now one of the grey-suited young men in a brewery which was a subsidiary of the Distillers Companies. He was doing very well. Pink confessed to feeling very shaky. Not really expecting to be understood he said, finishing one pink gin and ordering the next:
Household Ghosts Page 31