Herbie now propounded the toiling paradox that the ostentatious ‘unconventionality’ of youth was, in point of fact, nothing other than a different sort of conventionality. After all, was not the non-conformity of yesterday the conformity of today ? Were not these young people as orthodox, in their very different way, as the orthodoxy they purported to be subverting?
How refreshingly different, how refreshingly different.
Sir Herbert’s liquid eyes roamed the table with such twinkling conceit that even my father fell silent and frowned interestedly. Herb then consulted me, praising my eccentrically restrained dress, my weirdo good manners, my daring cleanliness. The reply I gave was far too nasty not to be quoted in full. (It reads well because I plagiarized a key paragraph from the Speech to My Father.) By way of apology I squeezed Rachel’s ankle between mine, before saying :
‘I couldn’t agree more. Sir Herbert, though I confess I’ve never looked at it from quite that angle. It occurs to me that the analogy can be taken further – moral issues, for example. The so-called new philosophy, “permissiveness” if you like, seen from the right perspective, is only a new puritanism, whereby you’re accused of being repressed or unenlightened if you happen to object to infidelity, promiscuity, and so on. You’re not allowed to mind anything any more, and so you end up denying your instincts again – moderate possessiveness, say, or moral scrupulousness – just as the puritans would have you deny the opposite instincts. Both codes are reductive, and therefore equally unrelated to how people feel: so fucking give me a scholarship,’ or words to that effect.
Willie signalled his intention of taking issue with me here by saying ‘Doe’ a lot. After a couple of minutes, Herbert suggested, ‘Don’t?’ Willie nodded.
‘Don’t you think that total puppappapermissiveness is preferable 2-2-2-2 total repressiveness, including cell-cell-self-repression?’
Sir Herbert, soon himself to be rendered unintelligible by food and drink, cruised back into the argument.
I gave my father a steely glance, and shrugged at Rachel. She was contemplating me with what seemed a mixture of emotions.
The next day, Saturday, was an epoch-maker, I now see.
Invoking the teenage prerogative, Rachel and I opted out after dinner, and went to bed, separately. I felt the hawks coming on, so I claimed tiredness.
It was one of those nights: my bed a roller-coaster, my brain a garbled switchboard of poems speeches essays plans, sheets of scrambled type the contact-lenses of my mind’s eye, coughing a kaleidoscope of commas and dots.
‘What’s the matter with you ?’ someone asked.
‘Christ. Sebastian ? What’s … I’m falling apart here.’
‘Eh?’ Sebastian put the hall light on and leaned against the door. ‘It’s three o’clock,’ he said. ‘You were shouting.’
‘Oh? Really? What?’
‘Couldn’t hear. Got my cigarettes?’
‘On the table. Don’t tell mother I got them.’
He disappeared again.
I read till seven, watched the dawn through the window as if it were television, bathed, shaved, and went downstairs. Cat’s crap on the strip-lit kitchen floor, musty wine-shop smells from the dining-room, objects tingled to flayed senses.
Then, bath-robed, I took coffee and orange-juice into Rachel’s room. She was sleeping in a foetal bundle: white cotton nightie, kneecaps for breasts, her little brown thumb planted tritely in her mouth. Quite sweet really. I parted the curtains and massaged her awake.
‘What time is it?’ she asked.
‘Practically eight thirty.’
When she finished her coffee, Rachel stretched and smiled at me. I said something like ‘Alive again,’ and moved up the narrow bed towards her.
‘Is that the birds singing ?’ she asked at one point.
‘No, it’s the radiator pipes. And while we’re on the subject, have you slept with DeForest?’
‘Mm?’
She had.
‘Only him, or others too ?’
‘Only him.’
I said: ‘Never mind.’
At mid-morning the adults tooled off in Sir Herbert’s tank-like Daimler to have lunch with some small-shots on the other side of Oxford. They were to spend the afternoon admiring the colleges. When they left I asked Rachel if she’d like to take a bus in, go punting perhaps. Rachel said she was happy here.
The house had no real garden: fields began after a stretch of lawn at the back and on either side the grass drifted into shrubby wastelands. But there was a spinney only yards from the front door and we went for a walk in that. I’ll never forget it. The wood was unspectacular; fat oaks every couple of hundred yards, a distant rank of chestnuts lining the road to the village. Otherwise it was mostly long whitened grass, frizzled bushes, and hundreds of ropey little trees, fifteen feet high. But at every turn in the path my childhood ganged up on me, and every twig and tuft seemed informative and familiar. Drugged and amazed by exhaustion, my mind fizzed with memories and anticipations (and Wordsworth) as we stumbled along in silence, like guests.