But it was high time someone asked me what I thought I was doing here, and ‘Search me’ was the only possible answer. It clearly wasn’t enough to go on sitting here eating bread and seeming nice. Archie sipped wine, elbows on table. I studied him with distaste. Prosperous cowboy’s fringed suede jacket, chocolate velvet trousers swaying as he tapped a snakeskin boot. Archie had a car, a Mini-Moke.
This won’t be difficult.
‘Hi,’ I said, with a stoned, heavy-eyed smile and a noble-hippie accent. ‘Jesus, do you know all these curious people? How long will it go on for, would you say ?’ I took an ironic slug of wine. ‘At least there’s plenty of lush.’
Archie regarded me with frank consternation, like an attentive but slow-minded schoolboy. He raised his eyebrows, then turned to speak to his other neighbour, who, I now saw, was a fabulously beautiful girl. Cooled. As I bowed my head to the floor, an elegant hand appeared high up on Archie’s leg and trailed its fingertips between his thighs.
Arnold Seth-Smith was seventeen years of age.
Rachel’s aunt, then, as the only comparably unattractive person in the room, became the object of my attentions. Once the food arrived Harry and his friend were too busy sweating and eating to talk much, so our conversation could be heard by anyone bored enough to listen. We covered a good range of topics, in this order: avocado pears, oil-tankers, Mauritius, tailoring terms, the size of the room, the price of London property, candles, tablecloths, forks, coffee-spoons. Surely we must have something in common. At one point I wanted to ask: ‘How do you spell “homo sapiens” ?’
‘What about the weekend, then ?’ I asked my young hostess, downstairs in the kitchen, feet from the baby’s-crap-coloured rubbish bin, where I had tried to kiss her the night we met. I was kissing her now. ‘Did I do all right?’
This wasn’t as preposterous a question as it might sound. Half the guests, including DeForest (after a minute of sweet-nuthins with Rachel), had wisely got the hell out as soon as dinner was over. I had then had a brief audience with Rachel’s guardians. I merely sat there while they talked to each other about where they might or might not be going that winter. I didn’t hawk or fart once.
‘I think it’ll be okay. Harry’s worked for your father, and he thinks very highly of him.’
(Nothing would thrill me more, by the way, than to be able to say that my father was an ad-man or a PRO. But, among other things, he was the editor of a business-law fortnightly magazine. This sounds promising, I know, but the paper has an excellent arts section, with the best cinema critic, and the book page had recently won outspoken praise from a forum of distinguished academics.)
‘… so there’s not much she can say.’
‘Incredible. Does Deforest know yet?’ Rachel shook her head. ‘Hang on,’ I said, before she could get rueful, ‘I’ve got a present for you.’
I went out to the passage and back again. ‘Here. I should like you to have it. No, I insist.’
‘But it must of—’
‘Read it,’ I said. ‘It’s rather good.’
Outside, I looked up at the drawing-room windows. Harry, drinking brandy from a glass like a coffee-percolator, was bearing down on the equine young woman. I felt I ought to shout out something defamatory, or lob a brick at them -make a gesture of conclusive disgust.
‘Yes, you’re left-wing, all right,’ I said, hailing a taxi.
The next morning I ran down the square and gave twenty pence each to the legless buskers.
Thank you, sir, thank you. Gob less.’
‘I’ll try,’ I said.
I was keyed up all day. The feeling was so unfamiliar, and made me so light-headed, that I got my head whomped in (almost) by one of the boys at school.
My maths lesson with Dead Feet, or ‘Mr Greenchurch’ as some called him, had been postponed until the afternoon. (A major irritant because I had planned to get away straight after the morning session, to wash, perfume myself, etc.) What happened was this. The Feet, alighting from his Morris 1000 (what else?), flings his head against the top of the door-jamb. Happily, he is so old that he doesn’t feel a thing, doesn’t, in fact, notice. With blood trickling down the side of his face, forming a delta around his snaggled ear, and splattering his shirt and cardigan, he shuffles cheerfully into the school. Eventually alerted by the gasps of Mrs Tauber and the screams of the children, he puts a hand to his head, examines its contents, and keels over backwards on to a straight-backed chair, which keels over backwards under him. He is rushed to the casualty ward of the local hospital, there to receive three stitches on his lucent crown. I assumed that, if he didn’t actually die, he’d at least be on his back for a few weeks. Not a bit of it. He made a greedy telephone call direct from the hospital, telling Mrs Tauber that he wasn’t going to lose a day’s tuition fees after all.