But, as I say, when I did see her it couldn’t have been more spontaneous. I was quite unprepared, caught completely on the hop. Semi-shaven, dishcloth hair, duffle-coat, baggy brown Farmer-Giles corduroys. Didn’t have a single note-pad on me. So I ad-libbed.
I was in the Notting Hill Gate Smith’s at the time, standing with my back to the front entrance and scratching my scalp -not in puzzlement, but because it itched. Badly shaken by my fell-off-a-lorry slip the other day, I had just put down a book on Cockney slang (‘Cheers, Norm, where’s the trouble and strife? Up the apples and pears having a pony and trap?’), and was just picking one up on ‘Criticism and Linguistics’.
She came on me from behind and poked me too hard in the ribs.
‘Hello then. Wotcher reading?’
‘Oh, hello,’ I said, surprise borne out by the falsetto croak in my voice. But then I was off. ‘Oh, you know, some tired old hack reproducing boiled-up earlier articles and pretending they form a unity.’ I paused and made (three) impatient gestures with my hand. ‘He says they’re all about “the problem of words”.’ I pointed to the subtitle on the cover, rich in adrenalin as a phrase from a novel took shape at the back of my mind. ‘But what they’re really about is him – his taste, his poise, and how much he likes money. Just look at the price.’ Rachel just looked at the price, and then back up at my face, which smiled brilliantly.
Posturing, wordy, inept, if you like – but not bad for a viva.
Again quite impetuously, we began a tour of the shop. This allowed me a wide variety of tableaux: the boyish fascination I still took in children’s toys; my mischievous quizzing of a saleswoman in Stationery; how refreshing it was that I liked vulgar greetings-cards (kittens with balls of wool, dogs resembling old men). Rachel seemed to be enjoying herself, rather than the reverse, but it was hardly the response I had been banking on. For instance, she hadn’t grabbed my cock once.
We ended up in the record department. There we watched a small middle-aged man (with unusually big brown ears, like tea-dunked ginger-biscuits) denouncing an equally small but much younger salesgirl. She was yawning at him a lot. He couldn’t get the record he wanted in mono.
‘You mean to tell me that it’s only made in stereo?’ he asked in a reedy voice. I couldn’t believe his ears.
‘Yes. but it—’
That’s all very well for the people who own stereo record-players.’
‘The rec—’
‘What about the people who don’t own stereo record-players ?’
‘It says on the —’
‘It makes you sick.’ He said this with all the verve of discovery, as if having long been of the opinion that it didn’t make you sick, or even that it made you well. He turned to address the whole store. ‘It makes you sick,’ he repeated, walking along the counter in an attempt to individualize his audience. ‘Aren’t we a lot of sheep, eh?’ he said; he looked from one face to another in a you-you-and-yes-you-sir style. He approached me.
‘Have you got a stereo?’ he asked.
‘—Sir?’
‘Do you own a stereo record-player?’
‘Absolutely not.’
This satisfied him in some way. He strode off.
I had intended to buy a new LP, but didn’t, being as yet ignorant of Rachel’s musical tastes. Instead, I suggested coffee. Rachel agreed, after consulting her watch, and with the proviso that she had to be back at the Tutors in a quarter of an hour. This caused my smile, originally welcoming, to become derisive, shitty – eloquent, I should have thought, of great sexual menace.
On our way to the door I had a brainwave.
I halted suddenly as we stepped on to the pavement. I was frightfully sorry – it had almost slipped my mind – but I’d promised Cecilia Nottingham that I would ride with her in Hyde Park that afternoon. Did she mind?
‘But Rachel,’ I said. ‘How about Monday ? Do you think we could have tea together?’
She thought about this. ‘All right,’ she said.
‘Really? Four fifteen, then.’ I hailed a cab. ‘At the Tea Centre?’