‘See you later. When’ll you be back?’
‘Search me.’
I had intended to ring Rachel the minute Norman was out of the way, but it didn’t seem so easy now. I sighed. Could I be bothered to make some notes ? Perhaps some coffee to get me thinking straight. My eyes went slowly round the room. Like the rest of the house it was filled mostly with Norman’s old furniture: monstrous gauzy sofa, selection of geriatric armchairs. I could see that Jenny was sifting these out in favour of more upper-class items, with the folky bare-wood sideboards, velvet dwarf thrones, with its something-I-picked-up here and its got-it-for-thirty-bob there: tastefully timeless. In the corner, to the right of the sliding door, the grandfather clock -which, naturally, had once belonged to my grandfather -struck one. (I say ‘naturally’ because this is how it always is with me. In my world, reserved Italians, heterosexual hairdressers, clouds without silver linings, ignoble savages, hardhearted whores, advantageous ill-winds, sober Irishmen, and so on, are not permitted to exist. Nothing I can do about it.)
*
The other time I saw Norman was at the wedding – my first, by the way. The celebration took the form of a champagne party at a hotel followed by an intimate dinner at Norm’s house (in which Jenny had long been established); caterers laid on by my father handled it all. I got extremely drunk extremely early on, so I remember the evening none too well; but apparently the thing was that my father and elder brother had gone and ‘insulted’ Norman. According to his bride, what happened was this. Norman was approached by Gordon and Mark Highway. My father hailed him :
‘Ah, Norman, wonder if you’d mind settling something, wonder if you’d mind telling Mark here and myself your mother’s maiden name.’
‘Levi,’ he truthfully replied.
My father had then said to my brother as they walked away, ‘Looks like I owe you a fiver.’
However it happened, Norman took it very deeply and studiedly. As the champagne party was breaking up, under pressure from Jenny I took Norman to the hotel bar before following on to Holland Park. I suppose the idea was to get him to calm down, but I had never seen Norman as collected as he was that evening. 1 remember he told me that he had the previous afternoon been gobbled by the Scottish assistant manageress of his Tufnell Park second-hand refrigerator showrooms in his Tufnell Park second-hand refrigerator showrooms. It was clear to me, though, that he mentioned the incident merely by way of polite small-talk; this was no weary vaunt, no another-good-man-gone lament. He added conversationally that he hadn’t dared actually poke her in case she still had the clap. She had had it so long and so often that antibiotics didn’t mean shit to her any more.
Norman, or, temporarily, Bill Sikes, went into action as soon as we got back to the house. My parents’ sub-celebrity friends all tried to behave as if they thought he was drunk; the fact that he so obviously wasn’t drunk was the key to the whole performance. He asked a more-or-less dead failed philosopher how his sex-life was shaping up these days; he biffed a pancake-bosomed minor poetess on the back, whispered evilly among her jangling earrings. At dinner he abstained from the carefully chosen table-wines, fetching himself a pint beer glass which he filled with neat Benedictine. His voice went Bow Bells barrow-boy. He tucked his serviette (‘serviette, it’s called a serviette’) into his shirt-collar. He took soup by dipping his face in the bowl and sucking through pouted lips; he frayed the veal with his bare hands. He up-ended whole plates of gherkins and cashews into his mouth. He drank boiling coffee straight from the percolator, without blinking.
The post-prandial stage of the evening was little more than a swirling blank as far as I was concerned. And yet, as I lay on the floor of the upstairs bathroom, cradling the lavatory bowl tenderly in my arms, I could hear the horrible sound of Norman’s voice, a skirling whine from below. One would have expected something bawdy, wouldn’t one? However, it went like this; I couldn’t catch the words until what seemed to be the last verse: