‘To the ground,’ I explained.
I went on watching him for a few seconds, then walked up to the front door and rang the bell. The door was about to open when I heard a wrenching noise – as of the splitting of wood – followed by a loud crash. I turned round. Norman was already on his feet, brushing himself down like someone covered in lice.
‘Christmas,’ said Jennifer Entwistle, my sister.
We kissed, blushing, as we always did when we kissed, and on the way into the kitchen Jenny gave me a formulaic ballock-ing for not alerting her of my premature arrival.
‘What’s Norman up to?’ I then asked.
‘Oh, just sawing down a dead branch.’
I assumed I was interrupting the denouement of some kind of row. Probably Jenny had wondered out loud when Norman was going to get round to cutting down the dead branch and Norman had raced out and cut it down straightway, thus putting her in the wrong. There you go.
I sat not being a nuisance at the kitchen table, put on my glasses and watched her make tea. She looked all right. In the role of elder sister she had seemed to me merely graceless and sulky. None of my friends (for instance) had ever asked to be told what her tits were like. Even on her vacation visits from Bristol, when I was especially sensitive to this sort of thing, I never masturbated about her once. However, I did masturbate about her – electrically – all through last Christmas holidays. That voluptuous languor, those invigorating, slow, easy movements: what a transformation, real physical deliverance. To quote my elder brother Mark, who sports-carred up on Christmas Eve and down again on Boxing Day, she looked ‘spunk-drunk’. And it was evidently Norman’s she was carousing on, because she never went back to Bristol to complete her B. Litt., and by April they were married.
Now, she seemed somewhat hungover, but wholesome enough. In particular, her hair was long, shiny, and quite thick for a Highway; and, remarkably, even though she was mousy-blonde, big-boned, full-breasted, wide-hipped and generally slightly sallow, there was no reason to believe that with her clothes off she would smell of boiled eggs and dead babies.
Norman himself came in now. He nodded in my direction and sat down opposite me at the table, briskly flattening a dogeared Sunday Mirror on to its artificial surface. He read with concentration, his nose perhaps six inches above the page, mouthwashing with tea from a pint-sized mug which Jenny had time and again to refill. She stood by her husband, one hand resting awkwardly on his shoulder, as she and I chatted about home, and my plans.
Norman spoke only once on that occasion. I mentioned that Gloria would probably be stopping by later on.
Jenny had asked, ‘Will she be wanting dinner?”
‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘she won’t be here till about nine, nine thirty.’
Norman looked up from his paper and said, with scorn but without disapproval:
‘Fuck and coffee, is it ? Just fuck and coffee.’
After tea I went to unpack. My bedroom was in the front basement, commanding a view of the dustbins and redundant coalshed. Jen had clearly done some work on it: matching curtain and bedcover, Expo ’59 coffee-table, serviceable desk and chair. I lowered myself on to the bed before starting to unpack. The room wouldn’t, after all, need much preparation for Gloria – record-sleeves scattered negligently about the room, certain low-brow paperbacks displayed advantageously on table and desk, and the colour supplements, open at suitable pages, on the floor. Gloria probably had no very fixed conception of me so there wasn’t much point in going into detail.
I wondered if there were any important lies I had told her which it would be worth reacquainting myself with, but could think of none. But … ah yes, I was twenty-three and an adopted orphan, that was all. (She was an undemanding girl.) Instead, I got out a note-pad and drafted a short list of topics with which to amuse her for the duration of the walk back from the station and the pre-pass half-hour. I could enlarge on my guardians busting me about last summer, which she would enjoy, and thereby explain why I hadn’t contacted her for a month. Also, there was the continuing story of Gloria’s driving lessons (given by her father, a twenty-stone carpet-layer), of which she would certainly welcome the chance to keep me abreast. Otherwise, there was always pop-music. — Which reminded me; there was another lie: I was friendly with Mick Jagger. But before I did anything else I went upstairs to make a telephone call. Not to Gloria; to Rachel.