But Rachel was taking on that look of modest distress customary whenever her father was under discussion.
‘Or wouldn’t that work? Look, come on, I’ll just tell them that you’d rather stay with me. We’re living in the 1970s, for Christ’s sake. Don’t they realize that parents aren’t allowed to mind about all that any more?’
Although my tone was rousing enough, I was fairly relieved when Rachel shook her head. You never know, I might have been able to handle it. During my second dinner there I had acquitted myself well, merely by seeming as dull and ugly as possible. Because if there’s one thing girls’ parents don’t want to see in you it’s whatever it is their daughters see in you. All my demeanour had had to say, in effect, was: Look folks – no cock! They didn’t like me, true, but Harry was far too keen on seeing his name in print on my father’s law page, and anyway, for Christ’s sake, what did they think when they looked at Archie, who went from catatonia to manic garrulity just as the mood took him, and why –
‘There’s always Nanny.’
‘How do you mean, there’s always Nanny,’ I asked cautiously. She might have been setting up another visit. I had got out of it twice already.
‘I could pretend I was staying with her. She’d back me up.’
‘In that one room ?’
‘I used to stay with her when she had a flat in Bloomsbury. And Mummy’s never been to Fulham.’
I wondered how Mummy made it to Putney and Roehamp-ton to see her trendy friends, if not via Fulham.
‘Really? Then it might just work.’
We planned it all out. Afterwards, I said :
Think what a lovely time we’ll have.’
But, even then, as Memo-pad 3A quite clearly states, part of me wasn’t thinking that. Part of me was thinking how well I’d do in my exams with Rachel in France (automatic Fellowship? telegram from the PM?) and what florid letters I could write to her there.
Must have spent too much time alone. For I needed my secret bathroom hours, and I certainly didn’t want Rachel to view me pinned and wriggling on its soiled lino. How could I explain my 200-minute baths, my marathon craps? Why, some of my most peaceful afternoons had been spent slumped on the lavatory, fat tears flopping occasionally on to my thighs. (Only there was I possessed by a truly radical vision of life; only there did I really feel, in my heart, that, somehow, we were all guilty.) With Rachel there I would no longer be able to go to sleep on a pillow of tissues, or bark into the special coffee-cup beneath my bed, or ever cough the night away, my throat applauding the silent dawn. Ah, those fourteen-hour reads, the vegetable delirium, the drug of exhaustion, the repose of loneliness. And exams in two weeks.
After briefly wanking myself off on top of her (a layer of lav paper tucked down my strides) and after a neat coke with her parents, I left Rachel’s early that evening. She said that I had better stay out of sight for a while if she was going to work the Nanny ploy. I was to ask Jenny and Norman if it was all right by them.
And I would have done, too, only they were having a row when I got back.
I was drinking tea in the kitchen. My sister, a swirl of red-checked nightie, flew through the doorway.
‘Hi,’ I said.
Knocking back tears, splendid with indignation and rectitude, she went to the chest-of-drawers in the breakfast-room and hauled out the folder in which all her documents and certificates were kept. Jenny found what she was looking for. As she turned, Norman entered, a sceptical businessman come to see an appliance he knew wouldn’t work and didn’t want anyway.
‘Hi,’ I said.
She ran over to him, seeming very small, and waggled the bit of paper in front of Norman’s nose.
‘Look. Look. It’s true. Can’t you see? You great… huge yob, it’s true.’
As if on a cinema screen, I watched Norman lean forward, remove the piece of paper, curl it up in his fist, and drop it to the floor. Jenny stared at the crumpled ball for a few seconds in what looked like incredulous grief. Then, in a sudden movement, her palm had come to a deafening halt on Norman’s cheek. Oh no, I thought; now he’s really going to knock her block off. Jenny froze, hand resting flat on Norman’s whitened face. He waited for her to take it away.