So ended my short, derivative, Roget-roughaged essay, complete with stage-directions.
‘Ye-es,’ said Mr Bellamy. ‘Which Utopias did you have in mind?’
‘Mm. Plato. More. Butler.’
He thought about this. ‘And Bacon, of course. Sherry? … or gin.’
‘Gin, please.’
‘Pink one?’
‘Probably,’ seemed a safe answer.
The church clock across the road struck six. Mr Bellamy chuckled as he made the drinks. ‘Beng on time,’ he said. ‘Yes, “utopia” in feet means “nowhere”, and Erewhon is an ene-grem of the same word. Yes, I liked thet. One of the more stylish essays I’ve heard for some time. Better, I should say, than most undergraduate essays.’
I found this unsurprising.
‘You do seem to have read a great deal, I must say.’
‘One of the advantages of being a delicate child.’
His brow puckered in genial inquiry.
‘No.’ I shrugged. ‘I spent a lot of time in bed with illness. I read a lot then. Even dictionaries.’
Mr Bellamy rocked on his heels before the marble chimney-piece. He had so many hairs sticking out of his nose that I was unconvinced, after nearly an hour in his company, that they weren’t a moustache. He sounded about fifty – he went on as if he were fifty – but he couldn’t have been more than thirty-five. I assumed he had a private income. How else could he sit about drinking gin, girdled by bound books, in a Hamilton Terrace drawing-room, pretending to teach English and wishing he were an Oxford don with real live queer undergraduates to bore?
‘Most imprissive. I think they’ll snep you up. More gin.’
He was a short-arsed little bastard – about five-five. Hirsute brown jacket, knobbled face, rusty Brillo-pad hair. Being posh and rich and unhurried, he managed to get away with it, though what he did with it then was open to doubt. He had virtually no sexual presence, didn’t look as if he could be bothered even to masturbate.
Bellamy returned with my glass. He reached out to his left and put a book in my hand.
‘Perry-dice Lost, second edish’n. It’s … viny lovely, isn’t it/ he said tremulously. ‘Yes, I believe a distant encestor of mine wrote a Utopia novel. Looking Beckwards, it was called. I’ve never rid it.’
‘Really. It’s a lovely edition,’ I said, handing back the Milton.
‘No. I should like you to hev it.’
I began shaking my head and saying things.
‘Uh-uh-uh.’ He held up his hand. ‘I insist.
‘Read it,’ he said, ‘It’s rather good.’
It was light enough to risk the walk to Kilburn. Thirty-ones were capricious buses; even so, I wasn’t due at Rachel’s until seven forty-five. There might be some time to kill. Underneath a still bright sky, Maida Vale was reassuringly well-lit against the incipient dusk.
I had been to Kilburn once before, when Geoffrey made me come with him to investigate a second-hand guitar shop. Again, it looked like a small town in wartime: beleaguered, shuttered-up, people on the streets, camaraderie after a blackout. I went into a ramshackle Victorian pub, and came out of it, very quickly. Chock-a-block with teds, micks, skinnies, and other violent minority groups. Any other day, to consolidate Bellamy’s gins, I would have chanced it. But I was wearing a three-piece charcoal suit – from school, admittedly, yet quite flash all the same. A lemonade, instead, then, with the students and au pair girls in a shadowy coffee-bar next to the cinema. There, and on the bus twenty minutes later, I leafed through my present from Bellamy, and thought about the weekend.
What, for a start, was my father’s game ? When I got back from the cinema on Wednesday, Jenny and Norman were watching television in the breakfast-room. Simultaneously, Jenny asked me if I’d like some coffee and Norman asked me if I’d like some whisky, so I had had to say that I didn’t want anything.
‘Why’, I wondered, ‘did old shitface come round? What was he after?’
‘Old shitface’s tart’, said Norman, ‘has got a ten-year-old daughter with nowhere to go this weekend because her mother’s going off with old shitface.’
‘And he wants you to baby-sit?’
Norman nodded.
‘Are you going to?’
‘Of course,’ said Jenny.