When I asked what the letter had said Rachel stared out of the window at the Reading suburbs for a full half-minute before telling me that it was too awful to repeat. I decided to let it go at that, giving her the scene with good grace. To fill in time, and to offer her some indirect comfort, I told a few rather vague lies about parental atrocities I had suffered, featuring my father in the role of Bacchic hooligan, moody night-owl, au pair-buggerer, and so on.
We were the first to arrive.
Mother appeared to have contracted hydrophobia at some point in the afternoon. She was in such a blind frenzy that, before hellos or introductions, Rachel and I asked immediately if there was anything we could possibly do – while there was still time, still hope. It seemed that what Rachel could do was help the (quite fetching) au pair peel potatoes. What I could do, indeed what I simply had to do, was drive into Oxford and fetch Valentine.
‘But I can’t drive,’ I said.
‘But you had lessons ?’
‘I know.’ (Driving-lessons were the statutory seventeenth-birthday present in the mobile Highway family.)
‘And you took the test?’
‘I know. But I failed it.’
‘But you took it again ?’
‘I know. And I failed it again.’
‘Well, it’s too late now. Where did I put the keys?’
I went in mother’s Mini, and nearly got old woman all over the bonnet, too.
After going through an affected little toll-bridge – the toll was the twee sum of three and a half pence -I got up to forty miles per hour as the road straightened out. At this kind of speed it was advisable to place the stiletto-heeled shoe, kept in a side-pocket for this purpose, over the gear-stick to prevent it jiggering like a pump-drill. As I did so. I noticed a scrawny figure two hundred yards ahead, motionless in the right-hand half of the road. To break her reverie I parped the horn. Instantly, she flew into a spastic life-or-death dash across my path, abandoning her hat, her shopping and a single brown slipper in a galvanized frog-march to the opposite curb. I changed down, slowed, and drifted to a lazy halt beside her.
‘It was all right,’ I said, returning her accoutrements, ‘you could have just stepped back on to the pavement. Are you okay?’
She stared unseeingly before her, thinking: I’m fucked if I’m going out again.
I parked the car in front of Valentine’s school, one of the better Oxford primaries, which nevertheless resembled a cluster of Monopoly hotels greatly enlarged, dirtier red, and with windows. Valentine, or his silly name, had been ‘put down’ for a second-rate public school but my father had decided not to send him to a prep school also. I searched for damaging significance in this policy as I walked up the lane dividing the school from the playing-field in which Valentine was supposed to be having his game of football. I warmly looked forward to interrupting it. My pace slowed.
Had I got over my obsessions about Valentine ? More or less. Those days were gone. Watching him marshal his hosts of friends, being asked to tick off the Harrods toy catalogue on December ist, dressed up by his mother like a spruce three-foot adult (he and I had switched from short to long trousers the same year: I was thirteen, he was four); on that spring day, eighteen months before – I was there, when Val rode his drop-handle racing bike down a schoolgirl-packed street, no hands, singing ‘Hey Jude’. And that mad, wonderful summer: I sabotaged his bicycle, spiked his Lucozade with steaming urine, spat in his stew – I went as far as contemplating one ruse involving, well, a portion of vanilla junket, actually, but felt that I had already made my point. (As a rule, I too would deplore such behaviour. But this was – how shall I put it? -this was family.)
In the right-hand corner of the playing-field, about twenty yards away, four boys, one of them my brother, stood in a semicircle round a fifth. The fifth was a Fatty. He cringed against a shed-like pavilion. I crept up behind the goal-posts, and watched.