‘Man comes and drinks the wine and lies beneath,’ I said. -It was completely spur-of-the-moment, I promise you (Tithonus, line three.) But she wouldn’t get the reference and would simply think I was being hearty. My rescue operation ?
‘And after many a summer dies the swan,’ I added consumptively, then Tennyson said that,’ with a little more of the old satirical edge. I laughed, as if at a private joke. She looked at me, unblinking.
‘Sorry. I tend to talk crap when I’m nervous.’
‘How come you’re nervous?’
The same reason you’re not.’
‘Which is?’
I had no desire whatever to enlarge on this cryptic reply. ‘Christ, how should I know?’ Christ? Was that wise, what with her being half Jewish and all ? I held up a hand, to silence her, to call a halt. ‘Why don’t we talk about something that interests you? Make-up … clothes … babies… ? Anything you like. Let me get you a drink.’
‘How do you know they interest me?’
‘You’re a girl.’
‘So?’
‘They interest you. All girls like talking about those things, surely you must know that. It’s all all girls ever talk about. Shops … pillow-slips … hairbrushes.’
‘You can’t generalize like —’
‘Why no—’
‘ — because, there are so many exceptions.’
‘Oh really?’
She sighed. ‘I’m an exception.’
‘Then you’re the exception that makes the rule.’
Bloodcurdling, I quite agree; yet the bookish teenager will often find himself behaving in this way.
The Costa Brava was filling up now. Wild-eyed birdlike persons cruised to and fro; the coat-stand had become cluttered with crutches and white sticks; suspiciously a nearby mutant checked me over for deformities. Why didn’t I mind it here?
To my right, dentures clicking like castanets, an old man chopped through a hot-dog at insect speed. Straight ahead, a middle-aged rocker snivelled and yawned. To my left … Mad Millie herself, whose home was a wheelless 1943 Bedford van parked on the brow of Kensington’s Rackham Hill. She was at present menacing the window-pane in a tired mutter. I accidentally caught her eye. She coughed me a transient rainbow of germs, and chased it with the toneless observation: ‘You’re the foulest little creature I’ve seen on the moon.’ My expression replied, ‘You may well have something there.’ A chartreuse caterpillar of glinting phlegm crept easily down her chin. She staunched it with a wad of left-over hamburger roll and placed it primly between her lips.
In Smith’s over the road I thought intently about my exams. The Tutors was plainly nothing more than a rapacious farce: loopy directress, no facilities, and apparently low on teachers, since I would have to contact the English master myself. It didn’t bother me, though. A year earlier I would have wanted a real school and would have felt silly and vulnerable in anything else. Now it seemed only a detail of life, not its whole structure. Interesting. I must be getting on.
Ran into Jenny on the front doorstep. She was on her way out to have lunch with a friend. I didn’t think girls did that sort of thing nowadays, and said so. Jenny laughed vivaciously, but looked not at ease. Norman was in and there was a scotch egg in the fridge we could share. I told her to be sure and have a good time.
In my room I looked out my Rachel note-pad in preparation for the telephone call. I flicked through it making notes, underlining the odd pertinent phrase, sketching personas. But my mind was wandering. Outside the window, Bina, only one of Jenny’s democratic two tabby cats, her body tensed in dumb caution, snaked down the steps to the dustbins. I came across the only extant autograph MS of my first date with Rachel. I felt mournful, squelchy.
After a while she allowed me to go and get her a drink. When I returned from the kitchen she was gone. She wasn’t gone. She was smooching with someone very tall in a white suit. I stood holding the glasses like a Negro waiter in Rhodesia House, Nashville, Tennessee. The ballad churned into its first middle-eight. About two minutes to go. What would she do then ? I wanted to ask my host if there were perhaps any broom-cupboards or disused lavatories he wouldn’t mind me locking myself into until the party was over.