Under the Skin

by Nina Bawden

  Chapter Six

  On his way to L.S.E., Jay saw a Jewish woman with a very long nose.

  ‘At first sight I could not believe it. But I did not wish to be rude and stare. So I rushed ahead of this lady, a long way, very fast. Then I turned round and walked back towards her so I could steal another look in passing. I have never seen such a nose before.’ He fingered his own with affectionate reproof. ‘Africans have such horrible noses – small and ugly and squashed up.’

  He giggled – unlike an Englishman he could giggle without losing dignity or seeming a queer. He laughed not at jokes, or at people, but because he was happy or amused. Life had the zest and sparkle for him it had had for me those two months in Africa, only for Jay there was the added zest and sparkle of finding himself at last in his promised land.

  He thought England wonderful – even Louise was slightly taken aback by how wonderful he thought England was. There were some things that even in her most patriotically dedicated moments it would not have occurred to her to list among her country’s attractions: large noses, porridge, rush hour travel – he adored the Tube – smog, the atrocious stained glass above our front door, the weather.…

  The weather, seasonably damp and cold and dismal one day and as seasonably dry and crisp and cold the next, entranced him like a changing theatrical backdrop set up daily for his benefit. He got up at seven to listen to the forecast, heard it again at eight, read it in the morning paper, tapped the barometer whenever he passed it and peered endlessly out of the window in the hope that he would find the forecasts were wrong. He longed for snow. There was a thick fog two weeks after he arrived and he came home, hours late, bursting with the excitement of it. He had been trapped in a train that had waited for a whole hour outside Waterloo Station: the experience had astonished him.

  ‘No one spoke,’ he said incredulously. ‘We sat for a whole hour, cut off from the civilized world and no one spoke. I found this quite extraordinary. Though I am not being quite truthful. After half an hour – I had been gazing at my watch – I plucked up my courage and spoke to the gentleman on my left. I said, “Will we be stranded for the night, do you think?” I was really afraid that we might be, that we would sit all night, ten of us, never speaking. He answered me. He said, “There are always delays in this weather.” I was so pleased to hear a voice, I hoped now the ice was broken we might get into conversation to pass the time but all he said was, “Would you like to read my newspaper?” It was clear he was afraid I might want to talk. I felt I had done wrong to speak in the first place. I sat for the rest of the time and read the Evening Standard, not daring to raise my eyes.’

  Though he smiled at me, he told this story for Louise’s benefit. She took great delight in the things that interested or amused him; in anything, however obvious, that emphasized his difference, his strangeness. There was a stimulated femininity in the way she encouraged him, a kind of mild, sexual flutter to which he responded on the same level: that of an innocent, well-regulated flirtation. Like an old-fashioned beau he preened himself in front of her and brought her anecdotes, instead of flowers.

  She said, ‘English people are awfully reserved.’ Her forehead creased with the effort to discover an attractive reason for this. ‘I think it’s because we’re such a crowded country. We have to live at such awfully close quarters all the time – trains and buses at the rush hour, that sort of thing, that we can only bear it by pretending the others don’t exist. I suppose it’s a kind of respect for other people’s privacy too.’

  ‘Everyone here is very polite,’ Jay said. ‘Sometimes they are so polite that you cannot tell what they think. Though they are always asking what you think. There is one very nice old lady who sometimes has coffee with us after she has given her lecture and she is always saying, “What do you think, what is your opinion, Mr Nbola?”’ He was a good mimic and produced uncannily well the clipped, high, accented voice of the elderly female academic. ‘I cannot believe she is really so anxious to know. Except, of course, that she is very kind. She spends a great deal of time looking for suitable places for foreign students to live. It is very difficult for Africans to find lodgings in some parts of London. Do you find that your neighbours object to my living here?’

  Louise laughed. ‘I should care if they did.’

  I said, ‘Why on earth should they?’ I heard my own voice, high with affected surprise, and felt hot under the collar. Why should I want to patronize Jay by pretending a situation did not exist? It was a trap I had not wanted to fall into – and yet I had. I wanted to protect him from unpleasantness.

  Actually, we would never have known if anyone did object. We were on nodding terms with only a few of our neighbours; with most of them we were on no terms at all. It was that kind of street. It ran from the main suburban road – W. H. Smith’s, Boots, Sainsburys – to a dingy grey common; two short rows of tall, Victorian houses that presented a narrow, mean face to the world. Most of them were cheerfully modernized – you glimpsed through lighted windows the clean modern wallpapers, the Swedish-type furniture – but here and there like a darkened tooth in an otherwise hygienic mouth, was unregenerate brown paint, peeling, boarding-house shabbiness; rooms, let by a discreet advertisement in the paper shop, to a business lady or gentleman.

  I said, ‘I expect they think, if they think anything, that we are on to a good thing. Letting rooms for double the price to a coloured gentleman.’

  ‘Oh, Tom,’ Louise said in a shocked voice, blushing for me.

  Jay was shocked too, but for a different reason, ‘They could never say that if they knew you.’ He had a habit of making embarrassing remarks like this in a tone of such solemn sincerity that from anyone else it would have sounded ironical.

  Louise glanced at me and blushed still more deeply. ‘Don’t be silly, Jay. There’s nothing exceptional about us.’

  This was something she truly tried to believe. And yet she was proud of our friendship with Jay; she would often refer to him quite unnecessarily in conversation with other people, with heightened colour and a little toss of her head as if she wanted to make it plain to them that we were not as they were.

  Jay said, ‘Oh, but there is. Before I came to England I did not realize it, but now I do. Not many English people will invite us into their homes. Most of them are kind – but they are curious only, not friendly. They think, here is a black man, what are his opinions, what does he think on such and such a question? Never, here is a man, what is he like? Sometimes I feel like an exhibit, a sort of freak.’

  I said, ‘Weren’t you curious about white men in Kenya? Why should we be any less curious?’

  ‘Because you are not like African children, following the white people around and giggling. In Kenya, when I was a little boy, my mother used to frighten me when I was naughty by saying the Europeans would come after me. So my curiosity was a sort of fear – I laughed because I was afraid. Even with Mr Chirk, who was so kind, I was a little afraid because I did not understand why he should prefer black men to white men. But I am not afraid of you because you are my friends – that is something different. You are the first white people I have ever felt comfortable with – you, and your charming mother.’

  ‘Do you think Mother isn’t curious?’ Louise said.

  Jay frowned. ‘Why should she be? She has met Africans before, though of course things were different then. I think she is a very charming and gracious old lady.’

  There was no real reason why we should have been surprised by Julia’s attitude. Though her prejudices were real, they had always played second fiddle to her inquisitiveness. She was one of those people – they are more often women than men – who take into middle-age the frank curiosity of children. Also, she could never bear to be left out of anything. Since we were determined to have Jay live with us, she was equally determined to squeeze the utmost entertainment out of the situation, and, in fact, succeeded to an extent that I imagine she had not expected to: after one or two slightly edgy meetings, her pleasure
in Jay’s company seemed to be quite real and unnaffected. She flirted with him delicately, as she did with all young men, teased him, and gave him rather too much good advice.

  She had been visiting us frequently, partly because of the weather (it had suddenly become very cold and her all-electric flat suffered from power cuts) and partly because she had Veronica staying with her. Veronica was attending some smart secretarial college or other; she had left, at her own request, the equally smart and unacademic boarding-school Reggie had sent her to, where she seemed to have learned little except Cordon Bleu cookery (though Julia said she couldn’t boil an egg) and to talk in a high-pitched, exhausted drawl. Her reasons for wanting to come to see us were so obvious that I supposed they could not be obvious to Julia. If they had been, she would not have brought her.

  Not for the first time, where Julia was concerned, I turned out to be wrong.

  Throughout the evenings they spent with us, Veronica sat with her eyes fixed sleepily and adoringly on Jay. If anyone else said anything to her she moved her head slowly, like a waking dreamer, with a drugged, bemused, distantly surprised look as if a piece of furniture had spoken in her dream. While Jay was talking she listened raptly, her lips parted; occasionally she asked him questions in an uncharacteristically soft, meek voice. To my lecherously reminiscent eye, it seemed that even her physical appearance had changed. I did not see how she had managed it exactly, but the same clothes that had once displayed such a provocative amount of flesh and plump, nylon clad knees, were now mysteriously disposed in such a way as to give her the appearance of a modest girl brought up in an old-fashioned parsonage. She had abandoned makeup. I approved of the change in her – in theory, anyway. I supposed it must be Julia’s influence and said so.

  She laughed. ‘My dear, Tom, it’s nothing at all to do with me. She’s smitten with your young man. He’s very high-minded and she wants him to approve of her. All girls of that age are chameleons. When I was eighteen, I remember, I was infatuated with a Welsh Nationalist music teacher we had. I went about dressed in daffodil yellow and chanting bits out of the Mabinogion.’

  I said grimly, ‘I wonder who she was trying to impress before.’

  ‘Oh, no one in particular, I should think. It was probably that frightful school, where they all sat about doing their nails.’ She gave me a bright, wicked look. ‘Unless she was trying to impress you.’

  This didn’t seem to reflect very favourably on me, I thought. Tom the bottom-pincher, the jolly, sex-mad uncle?

  Having made her point, Julia went on thoughtfully, ‘It’s an improvement, I think. She’s very empty-headed. An interest in other people is good for her – she’s shown quite an intelligent interest in my bridge club’s War on Want Committee for example. She’s started to make some table mats for our bazaar. She wouldn’t have cared a hoot about it if Jay hadn’t taken her fancy.’ She frowned judiciously. ‘I think he’s having rather a good effect on her, on the whole,’ she said in a surprised tone.

  Though I thought Julia’s process of reasoning vulgar and loathed the idea of her particular War on Want Committee, (fat, complacent women in mink coats who would scream blue murder if you told them another sixpence on their husband’s income tax would serve the same purpose more effectively), I supposed I agreed.

  I wondered if Reggie would.

  Jay saw his first snow. It came unseasonably early, obliterated the dirty streets, stopped the trains, burst the pipes, created a national crisis and entranced him utterly. Wearing a rather strange felt hat – green, with a purple feather – and a scarlet muffler Julia had knitted for him, he went for long walks in the parks, looking like an exotic organ-grinder off duty.

  One Sunday, we drove into Surrey through a Nordic fairyland of white, silent skies and trees bristling with frost. We were to fetch Philip from his school and take him to lunch with Augustus and Georgiana; a rare invitation, since Augustus preferred to meet even his relations in town, over enormous lunches in stifling, expensive restaurants where even the smell gave me indigestion. Once he had told us that entertaining was ‘too much’for Georgiana, but it was probably simply a habit he had fallen into during the early days of their ménage to avoid, for he was a conventionally thoughtful man, any snub that might come her way. I suspect that thoughtfulness had happily accorded with his own inclination which was naturally undomestic; he looked most at ease in bars or clubs, in the company of men. (Perhaps, too, there was something in Julia’s idea of the Abode of Love. Augustus was a shy man and shy men are often romantic. Perhaps he preferred to keep his mistress shut away in the fastness of his Surrey mansion – heated to eighty degrees and hung about with horse brasses – safely isolated from the indifferent world.)

  The reason for this invitation was apparent as soon as we arrived. Veronica was there – the new Veronica – all maidenly smiles and lowered eyelids, wearing a white sweater and a full skirt of dark red wool. She had invited herself for the week-end. ‘I told Grandfather he simply had to ask all of you, too. The country looks so marvellous in this weather. I wanted Jay to see it. Doesn’t everything look absolutely stupendous, Jay?’

  ‘Stupendous,’ he agreed, smiling at her.

  Georgiana, too, seemed glad we had come. She never talked much, as if afraid that the things she said were not worth other people wasting their time listening to, but she sat happily on the sofa with her puffy little feet in laced-up, old lady’s shoes riding clear of the floor and smiled her pretty, powdery old lady’s smile and blushed whenever anyone spoke to her. And she did talk to Philip – children and animals never frightened her – while Augustus poured drinks in rather an unhandy way like a man unaccustomed to the exercise.

  Philip had changed in the weeks he had been at school. In the car, I had seen him look at his father covertly and with a slightly surprised expression. (Did he, too, look like that?) His manners were charming in a confident, old-fashioned way; he called me, and Augustus, sir. His voice had acquired that clear, high, carrying tone which is the hall mark of the English prep school boy; his speech was largely a vehicle for two adjectives: squalid and super.

  ‘Oh, super,’ he cried after lunch when Georgiana asked him if he would like to skate on the small lake at the bottom of the garden. ‘Oh, how absolutely super.’

  ‘But he hasn’t got any skates, Aunty dear,’ Louise said gently.

  Georgiana blushed like a faded rose. ‘I think I might… shall we see, Philip?’ She took his small paw and they went hand in hand – she was not much taller than he – out of the room.

  On a shelf in a cupboard in the hall were several pairs of rather ancient looking skates and boots, carefully vaselined.

  Georgiana looked at us anxiously. ‘They’re all different sizes. Of course they may not fit anyone though.’

  ‘Who on earth do they all belong to?’ Louise said.

  Georgiana blinked. ‘Well – nobody. I mean, they’re mine. I bought them at a Red Cross jumble sale in the summer. I happened to see them and I thought – well, suppose we had a hard winter, there’s the lake and it would be nice to have them, just in case. Young people like to skate. So – so I put them away in vaseline and then, when I knew you were all coming, I got them out, just in case.’

  What young people? The times Louise and I had come here in the last ten years could have been counted on the fingers of one hand. And, to my knowledge, this was Veronica’s first visit since she was a child. I thought of Georgiana, plump and hot and lonely, walking past the stalls and seeing the skates and thinking of the young people who just might come, one winter, and want to use them. And then buying the skates and taking them home and putting them away in vase line and rags.…

  ‘Oh, Aunty, you are an ass,’ Louise said. Her eyes were shining. ‘Let’s see if they fit, shall we? Philip – here’s a small pair, do you think they’ll fit you?’

  There were four pairs of adult skates, none big enough for me, but Jay and Louise and Veronica were fitted out with varying degrees of comfort. Philip se
ized the smallest and rushed excitedly into the garden. There was one pair left over, elegant skates with white kid boots.

  ‘Actually,’ Georgiana said, ‘actually that pair is mine. I mean they belonged to me.’

  ‘Georgie was a good skater,’ Augustus said unexpectedly. ‘Used to skate in competitions – got a lot of medals to prove it.’

  His eyes twinkled; he had known this would astonish, as it did. We looked at Georgiana. Small and square in her good cashmere sweater and tweed skirt she looked, as she did in whatever clothes she wore, rather like Mrs Tiggy Winkle.

  ‘Then you must skate too,’ Louise said. ‘Of course you must – you can show us how.’

  Georgiana shook her head doubtfully, shyly pleased.

  ‘Oh, come on, Aunty,’ Veronica said. ‘You know you’re just aching to.…’

  It was a good day, still, with a small, round, declining sun that reflected pink on the snow. Philip, with his black face and thin black legs looked strange – ridiculous, almost – against the white ice. He tottered like a crazy dancer, shrieking with excitement. Georgiana, a round, fur-coated bundle on tiny, efficient feet, took his hands and guided him round the lake. While the others struggled with their skates, Augustus and I stamped along the edge of the lake, clapping our arms for warmth. Augustus looked across at Georgiana, his pale eyes watering, his face red with frost and the sun’s glow.

  ‘D’you know, she used to be really good?’ he said suddenly. ‘Took it dead seriously – or, rather, her mother did.’ He laughed – an odd sound, short and deep and throaty, like a dog’s cough. ‘She was mad – a real madwoman, now. She’d taken Georgie to the rink since she was a child, two, three times a week. Proper sessions with an instructor – she was having her trained for competitions, championships, that sort of thing. Like – like some kind of performing animal.’ He pursed his mouth. ‘Georgie hated it. Not the skating, she enjoyed that, but the competition side of it. Wrong sort of temperament altogether. She used to turn up at the bank sometimes looking like death. Stage fright, d’you see – it was always before one of these things her mother had made her put in for. One day I asked her what the matter was – she was acting as my secretary at the time because mine was away ill – and she broke down. It made me laugh at first – I’d no idea people took that sort of thing seriously – then I saw it wasn’t a thing to laugh at. So I asked her mother up to the office – interfering of me, I suppose, but we liked to think we took care of our staff at the bank and it was clear she couldn’t put a stop to the nonsense herself. Couldn’t say boo to a goose, that sort of girl. Well – the mother came and we had a great row. She was mad, stark staring mad. She said, what was I trying to do, ruin her daughter’s career? I said – a bit pompous, I suppose, but I’d just been made a director and took myself seriously – that I’d thought her career was with us and the skating wasn’t doing that any good, and she picked up her glass of sherry – I’d tried to keep the thing on a nice, sociable level – and chucked it straight in my face.’ He laughed his queer laugh again. ‘D’you know, I’d almost forgotten that? Funny how you forget things.…’