The most unattractive thing about him, or at any rate one of the most unattractive things about him, is that he gets fitter as he gets older. The minute he started to get rich (a mysterious process this, dating back some eight or nine years) he started also to take an increasingly lively interest in his health. He played tennis at weekends and squash three times a week at the Hurlingham. He gave up smoking and abstained from whisky and other harmful liquors. I correctly took this as a vulgar admission on my father’s part that now he was richer he had every intention of living longer. A few months ago I caught the old turd doing press-ups in his room.
He looks sweaty, too. Due no doubt to delayed shock, his hair began pouring out soon after the money began pouring in. For a while he tried things like combing the seaweed curls forward, practically from the nape of his neck, to form a Brylcreemed cap which any sudden movement would gash with etiolated scalp. But eventually he realized it wasn’t on and let his hair go its own way, which it did, teasing itself into two grey-coloured wiry wings on either side of his else hair-free head. It was a great improvement, I’m sorry to say, combining with his large, pointed face and short-shanked body to give him a certain ferrety sexual presence.
For some time now, his ferrety favours have been the preserve of his mistress, as I was assured at the age of thirteen by my elder brother. Mark was raffishly mature about it and had no patience with my falsetto disgust. Gordon Highway, he explained, was still a healthy and vigorous man; his wife, on the other hand, was – well, look for yourself.
And I looked. What a heap. The skin had shrunken over her skull, to accentuate her jaw and to provide commodious cellarage for the gloomy pools that were her eyes; her breasts had long forsaken their native home and now flanked her navel; and her buttocks, when she wore stretch-slacks, would dance behind her knees like punch-balls. The gnomic literature she was reading empowered her to give up on her appearance. Off came her hair, on came the butch jeans and fisherman’s jerseys. In her gardening clothes she resembled a slightly effeminate, though perfectly lusty, farm labourer.
Anyhow I rampaged enthusiastically about all this, largely I think as a reaction against my brother’s greasy permissiveness. Also, I had never thought of my father as being particularly vigorous nor of mother as being particularly unattractive or of either of them as being anything but quietly, and asexually, content with each other. And I didn’t want to see them this way, in sexual terms. I was too young.
Even this, though, you see, even this failed to put any bite, any real spunk, into family life.
The Highway kitchen, nine o’clock, any Monday morning:
‘Are you off now, dear?’
My father pushes his grapefruit aside, swipes his mouth with a napkin. ‘In a minute.’
‘Shall I be able to reach you at the flat, or at the Kensington number?’
‘Uh, the flat tonight and,’ narrowing his eyes, ‘I think on Wednesday. So the Kensington number Tuesday and probably’ – flexing his forehead – ‘probably Thursday. If in doubt, ring the office.’
I always tried to avoid these exchanges and felt like peeing in my trousers whenever I accidentally witnessed one. But in fairness it wasn’t the sort of thing you could actually get yourself into a state about. If only mother minded more. Surely, I felt, she must spend some time wondering when he would start arriving on Saturday morning instead of Friday night, start leaving on Sunday night instead of Monday morning, when his weekend with the family would suddenly and irreversibly become his day with the children.
I packed – crucial juvenilia, plenty of paperbacks, and some clothes – then looked round the house for people to say goodbye to.
Mother was still asleep, and Samantha had gone to stay with a friend of hers. The study was empty so I wandered through the dusky passages calling out to my father, but there was no reply. Sebastian, being fifteen, was probably making eyes at his bedroom ceiling. There remained one brother.