‘Well, let’s face it, women usually look pretty terrible by the time they’re thirty-five. Scaly faces. Figures go, hair gets matty and dry. Men often get better. At least their faces don’t get all…’ she yawned and cuddled nearer, ‘scaly, like women’s. So it’s good that they can have families. Like your mother.’
Rachel was wearing a short red dress – no stockings. I placed the palm of my hand on the back of her thigh, where it became her bum, where the rim of her silky panties was.
‘Maybe,’ I said, moving my crotch back to make way for the erection. To give them something to do, you mean. But my mother’s really in the shit. What’ll she have when Valentine’s grown up?’
‘Mm. Suppose so.’
‘Anyway, I’m glad you could come.’
She grunted. ‘Mm,’ she said.
I excused myself and slipped downstairs for a hawk and a pee. For some reason, I felt neurotically high-cheek-boned as I closed the door.
My father was in the passage to the bathroom. He was wearing a fashionable black polo-neck jersey (fashionable, that is, among the weasly middle-aged) whose sleeves he was rolling down. He not only looked quite good, he looked quite nice.
‘Ah, Charles,’ he said, in the voice he used for ballockings. ‘Now I hear from your mother that you hit Valentine earlier on. On the head. Is that correct? Well you mustn’t. It’s extremely dangerous. Not on the head. Is that clear? All right, ticking-off over. See you at dinner.’ He smiled and began to move past me.
‘I wouldn’t have hit him anywhere, but he and his friends were beating up another boy.’
He fiddled with his sleeves, in order not to meet my eye. ‘I dare say they were, but your mother and myself—’
‘Fine. Next time I catch him at it I’ll just break his arm. And what do you mean, “your mother and myself” ? When was the last —’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’ He allowed a few seconds to pass. He looked puzzled, amused, like the time at Norman’s. ‘Charles, are you seriously going to claim that you didn’t behave badly when you were his age?’ He took a chain-mail watch from his trouser pocket. ‘Perhaps, when you’re older, you’ll see that the – that the wrong that’s committed to make a right, the second wrong, is invariably shabbier than the first.’ He finished putting on his watch. ‘Perhaps when you’re older you’ll see that.’
‘Great copy,’ I said. ‘And that’s quite meaningless coming from you. You may be old, but my mother hasn’t —’
‘What do you care?’
My father paused, and continued in a softer voice. ‘I can see there’s little point in discussing this.’ He put his hands in his pockets and waggled a bunch of keys. ‘We only say things we regret. Charles…’
‘Nothing, sorry.’ I weaved past, erasing with my hand any further reply or question. ‘Don’t worry, won’t say a thing. Mum’s the word.’
In the bathroom I peed, hawked, steadied myself by chanting ‘don’t get full of yourself, don’t get full of yourself,’ and tried not to cry.
The room was dark when I returned; Rachel was asleep. I went over to the window and watched the woods. Gradually my chest stopped heaving. There was nothing to tell Rachel anyway. I lay down beside her, chest-first to dull my lungs, and waited until someone called upstairs for dinner, which wasn’t long.
I kept an eye on the old goat all through the meal, but with little to show for it. He was too busy being worldly socialite Gordon, lavish house-party-thrower Gordon, to have much time for erring husband or wily philanderer Gordon. Nevertheless, he sat between his tart and her (twin) sister, while at the other end my mother coped with Sir Herbert and the journalist, who honestly was called Willie French. Rachel and I sat opposite each other half-way down the table. She was being self-possessed enough; all the same I found I had to intercept and remould pretty well everything she said.
However, a brilliant argument was taking place between Sir Herbert and Willie, all about youth. I couldn’t for the life of me make up my mind which one I disliked more. Dismissive cameos. Sir Herbert resembled nothing so much as a pools-winning dustman. Snouty open-pored face (itself topped by a sprig of sinister golden hair) clashed with his Savile Row suit and stiff collar. Shaving-cream bubbled inside the nearer of his question-mark ears. In stockinged feet. Sir Herbert stood four foot eight inches tall. To look at Willie, on the other hand, you’d place money on the fact that he had just dismounted from a motorbike on which he had spent his entire life at high speed. His ginger hair was driven back to form a curving mane from brow to nape of neck; he had inside-out lips, as if most of them took place within his mouth; speckly red eyes. For all this, he appeared to be losing the exchange, which served him right for having – in order to show how simpatico he was – a machine-gun stutter. Sir Herbert only ever let him get as far as saying ‘I’ or ‘Wha’ a few times.