‘Go to bed, Jennifer.’
After her rapid footfalls came the fading cry, ‘You’re a murdere-e-e-er.’
Norman picked up the ball of paper with a sigh, put his hands in his pockets, and sank back against the wall.
I wondered if he knew I was there.
‘Have a game of brag,’ he said.
I was, of course, much too scared to refuse.
Two down, one up,’ he continued monotonously, ‘table stakes, black twos wild.’
Your guess would have been as good as mine. However, the teenager’s ignorance about such oldster issues encourages an insensitivity to them – and I was resolved, despite my ambivalence, to ask about Rachel that night, to get things fixed up, before some anxiety could put its foot down.
After an hour of brag, I said: ‘Hang on. Just going to have a quick crap. Be a sec. Don’t fix the cards.’
Upstairs, I knocked on the bedroom door. ‘Jenny?’
‘I’m here.’
In the sitting-room, aglow as usual with moody street-light, Jenny had turned one of the armchairs round to face the window. I went and crouched by her side. In a soft voice I told my sister about the possibility of Rachel coming to stay for a while. She looked straight ahead, down the square.
‘That’s okay,’ she said.
‘I don’t think it’ll be much extra trouble. She’d help with things.’
‘No, that’s fine.’
‘And you do get on quite well.’
‘Mm.’
‘And I thought you might actually like having her around, to talk to. Another girl – you know how I’m always going on about girls needing other girls to talk about perms and babies and things. Because you seem a bit low.’
‘Have you told him yet?’
‘Norman? No.’
‘Don’t, please, not yet. Tell him before she comes, but not yet.’
‘Okay. Why, though?’
‘Oh I don’t know, but please don’t tell him yet.’
I laid my hand on her wrist. I laid my hand on her wrist as a collector might touch a piece of marble to see that it was the required number of degrees below room temperature.
‘All right,’ I said.
‘Fine. She can stay as long as she wants.’
‘937 2814? … Oh God.’ I hung up and redialled. ‘Hello ? Now look here, this has —’ I hung up and redialled.
Engaged.
I hung up.
The Letter to My Father, onetime the Speech to My Father, was now some thirty foolscap pages. It lay on my desk downstairs, in a manilla envelope, stamped and addressed. Last-minute corrections and revisions kept me from posting it.
I saw Rachel only twice in the six days before she was due to come and stay. Just as well, really: there were still some texts I had to read for the exams, and a good deal of clerking was necessary to keep The Rachel Papers up to date, what with all these new emotions to be catalogued and filed away. First Love, you understand.
I have very little new to say on this subject. And yet, if I may quote from The Rachel Papers? ‘As though normal life (Jen + Norm, school) taking place on a parallel dimension in which I can participate or not participate as the whim takes me. Want R. to witness and experience everything I do, looking over my shoulder, want to be permanently in her presence (not the same as with her); but there she always is.’
And I partly realized this by acting as though she were. If she really had been watching me those two weeks I would have had nothing to hide. I felt myself alone only when I closed the bathroom door behind me. I was still at the stage when you feel you are carrying round a barrel of poignancy in your diaphragm; when you feel you could cry at the drop of a hat; when any bugger could show you fear in a handful of dust. But all this is well documented elsewhere.
Lots of whisky and brag on Tuesday night, the eve of Rachel’s stay. And I still hadn’t told Norman she was coming.
About eight o’clock, accompanied for some reason by his younger brother Tom, Geoffrey floated in. They were hailed with drunken bonhomie by Norman, who immediately convened a seminar on three-card brag.