‘What for?’
‘The poor little thing’s got nowhere else to stay.’
‘So?’
The television crackled. Jenny let out a short, sharp scream.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ asked Norman.
‘Oh, nothing. I was just wondering what the dickens was going on.’
‘Thass funny. I was wondering what the fuck was going on, myself.’
I sat at my desk for an hour, shaking my head, working on the Letter to My Father. At midnight I crossed out ‘Letter’ and put in, above, ‘Speech’.
I alighted at Swiss Cottage and turned left up the hill into Arch Hampstead itself. In a nearby side-turning, two streets from Rachel’s, I tried to lose in advance the evening’s phlegm, expectorating two puddles of assorted greenery. I rested against a brick wall and watched a man clean his car.
Richardson Crescent – and the house Geoffrey and I had broken and entered eight weeks before. This time, I stalked up to the door and rapped, with an upper-crust rap, on the knocker.
A young princess disguised as a maid opens the door, stows my coat, leads me upstairs. I am shown, unannounced, into a room full of people. Rachel, in white, a monochrome blur, appears, takes my arm. I am urged to come and meet Mummy. Together we weave through elongated finery to reach hunched-up finery. Probably three women among all that jewellery and hair-do. Two dinner-jackets? A big silver lady receives my hand. ‘Highway Mummy this.’ Mummy, however, looks over my shoulder as I bow towards her. She replies: ‘Minnie, you came. Whatever happened?’ With a tomato-juice smile I relinquish her pud and back off to let Minnie close in. Make a run for it. Two minutes later, somehow alone in the middle of the room, hiding, there is a glass in my hand and a hand on my shoulder. ‘Haaay there … great to see you again, Charles,’ said DeForest Hoeniger, through his nose.
Only at dinner did it first strike me that I might not be going to faint. By then I was drunk and very left-wing. DeForest couldn’t have been nicer, or more welcome, in some ways. And since Americans can’t help being good cinema, he wasn’t even all that boring. Finally, every time I emptied my glass, he took it, put more whisky in it, and gave it back to me, saying ‘No problem’, again through his nose.
In the dining-room I was shown by another incognito princess to the ‘dud-seat’, or, alternatively, ‘the inferior guest’s seat’.
Thank you, thank you,’ I said, sitting down between Rachel’s aunt and Rachel’s step-brother, Archie. There were fourteen people at the table. I was at the quiet end, Harry’s end. Rachel was up the noisy end with her mother, and Deforest.
Harry, I now saw, was a very tall, Anglo-Jewish-looking man, with a forehead the size of a buttock and fat, glistening lips. He wore a trendily cut grey suit, and matching shirt and tie. To look at him, you’d think he was posh and stupid. In actuality, he was common and stupid, having obviously trained his loud, pompous voice to affect an upper-class accent while in his twenties (a fixture probably contemporaneous with ‘Seth —’). Thirty years on, he had just as obviously forgotten it. Luckily he was too smug to notice his twanging ‘cows’ and ‘ois’. Old Harry had a strange figure, but quite symmetrical really. From ankle to knee he was thin. From knee to thigh he was fat. From thigh to waist he was very fat. From waist to ribs he was very very fat. From ribs to shoulder he was very fat. He had a fat neck. His face, apart from his watermelon lips, was thin.
Harry sat down and began to swap reactionary pedantries with the handsome undertaker on his right. Between them quailed an equine young woman. The aunt, Rachel’s aunt rather than Archie’s I later gathered, sat to my right, Harry’s left. She fingered her napkin and listened to Harry. Harry peered at me from time to time. He seemed to think I was a friend of Archie’s.
The room was dark – thatched walls and a low ceiling – lit only by a few intimate candles. I looked up the other end of the table. Rachel was next to DeForest. DeForest was next to Rachel’s mother, whom he was arousing with freckled whispers. Why hadn’t she told me he’d be here? He was looking very places-to-go, people-to-see. Perhaps he’d fuck off after dinner.