Rachel’s tutorial establishment was one of those dreary pastel Regency houses so popular in this part of London. With my back to the two papier-mache pillars guarding the double-doored entrance, I practised smiles and hellos. I didn’t feel dramatic enough, ought really to have lodged a milk-bottle down my trousers before coming out. Although I had crawled the last 150 yards, as if I were an expert on pavements and were studying this one, there was still three minutes to go.
To the right of the doorway was a dimly lit, curtainless classroom with male students in it. They stared broodingly at the road. I knew the kind of punks that went to this kind of place. Cuntish public-school drop-outs, dropped out for being too thick, having long hair or dirty boaters, unseaming new boys in multiple buggery, getting caught too many times with an impermissible number of hockey sticks up their bums. Would they all run out now and debag me, shouting ‘Let’s teach the little squit some manners’? Hobo-like I wandered back and forth. One of the boys was asleep, his head on the desk, pillowed by a twisted copy of the Financial Times. As I watched, there was a stir in the classroom; a cruel-faced bearded man in a pinstripe suit strode into camera. He approached his student from behind, loomed above him for a few seconds, then lustily rapped his crown with what looked like a spectacles-case. This set off a chain-reaction of twitches and snorts; the puffy young gentleman awoke blinking to the world. Loud reproaches could be heard from the pinstripe man; excuses were mouthed by the other. Teach the little turd for being so rich and lazy and for eating and drinking himself sick at lunch. Teach the fat, mindless —
The doors opened. A tall ginger-haired boy in green tweed moved gracefully down the steps. He looked at me as if I were a gang of skinheads: not with fear (because the fellows are quite tractable really) but with disapproval. Behind him at a trot came two Ian tern-jawed girls, calling ‘Jamie … Jamie.’ Jamie swivelled elegantly.
‘Angelica, I’m not going to the Imbenkment. Gregory shall have to take you.’
‘But Gregory’s in Scotland,’ one said.
‘I can’t help thet.’ The ginger boy disappeared into an old-fashioned sports-car.
The students were pouring out steadily now. Each and every one of them was shouting. ‘Casper, yah, Ormonde Gate, not possibly, super, Freddie, five o’clock, rather, tea?, Bubble, later, race you there, beast, at Oswald’s.’ Double-parked Alfa Romeos, Morgans and MGs jostled and revved; those on foot moved up the slope towards Notting Hill. Where was Rachel ? Ashamed to join me in front of all these bright young people ? Had I got the place wrong? Apart from the catnapper, who I was pleased to see had been detained, there seemed to be no one left inside.
Rachel, again, was in a party of four, two boys and another girl. Make a run for it, I thought, as they came down the steps chatting contrapuntally. One of the boys and the other girl broke off in a pair. Rachel and the other boy approached me. I recognized him. Although now in sports-jacket and twills, the white-suited nance at the party. Rachel was smiling. She said:
‘DeForest, this is Charles … Byway?’ She laughed. ‘I’m sorry…’
‘Highway, please.’ I laughed, too.
‘Highway. Charles, this is DeForest Hoeniger.’
‘Great to meet you, Charles,’ said Deforest, breathing heavily through his nose. He was American. You could tell that at once, because, in common with every American over eight and under twenty-five, he looked like a middle-aged American sports-writer: freckled pinhead, cropped salt-and-pepper hair.
The American ? Obviously.
‘How do you do,’ I said, hands shaking, shaking hands.
‘We thought we’d have tea at the Tea Centre,’ said Rachel.
I nodded lively assent to this imaginative plan. We stepped into file: tall Deforest in the middle, Rachel on the inside, me short-arsing around on the curb, one foot in the gutter, dodging trees.
The other couple had come to a halt a few yards ahead in order to go through the motions of mutual arousal. The boy, who had diagonal hair and a long pocked face, had wrested from the girl some article – a book, a letter – which she would fain recover. He stood facing her, holding whatever it was behind him with both hands; she pawed infatuatedly at his elbows.