Charles went upstairs to Rachel’s room. It looked exactly as it had when he showed her into it twenty-five hours before. He searched methodically but without success for the note that would read: ‘How I love you – R’. Next, he kicked one of the bed’s iron legs, not quite as hard as he could, but hard enough to make him squawk with pain and surprise.
In his own room he took off the shoe. The big toenail of his right foot came away cleanly in his hand. Charles thought about this for a few seconds before resourcefully sticking it back on again with a piece of festive Sellotape.
He found his Rachel note-pad (not to be confused with the Rachel folder) and wrote some things in it. He sank down on the bed, but a minute later his head reappeared; on it was a vertiginous scowl. Now sitting, now lying, he got rid of most of his clothes. He swore every few moments, or gasped in breathless grief.
Let us leave him, then, as the scene fades: upright in the armchair, comatose; naked except for watchstrap, a single sock, and a scarlet cushion nestling on his thighs.
First thing the next morning I ran round the house telling lies about Rachel. Domestic tragedy, financial ruin, multiple bereavement, jumbo blaze horror, and so on, were responsible for her disappearance. I didn’t worry about the lies being exposed. I needed self-respect only for the weekend, and after that no one would be insensitive enough (or concerned enough) to raise the subject again.
My chief preoccupation was how to get sufficiently drunk to ring Rachel. Due to a whim of my father’s, the Sunday papers weren’t allowed in the kitchen until the afternoon -probably he thought it more amusing and civilized to loll around the sitting-room with them. But the sitting-room was where all the drink was kept, and Willie French, because of professional interest, and Sir Herbert, because of his great age, would assuredly be in there till two.
In fact, there wasn’t much problem. After a heist on the pantry, I spent the later part of the morning with half a bottle of (exquisite, it seemed to me) South African sherry. I made diagrammatic plans of the Telephone Conversation. They were fairly cocky diagrammatic plans. My behaviour of the night before now struck me as overdone. Even Rachel could not have been genuinely affected by DeForest’s grotesque theatrics. She had acted out of fatigued loyalty.
Sure, kid, I wrote, it must have been tough for you too.
But you never knew. And I had been sure last night that I would never see her again.
I went down to the sitting-room, slunk unnoticed past the dyspeptic Sir Herbert (who was grappling with the Sunday Telegraph as if it were a giant sting-ray), and scooped a bottle of port off the drinks shelf. There was an old television set in the attic ‘nursery’, where Sebastian had been billeted, and I thought it might steady me if I watched some. Sebastian had gone into Oxford to see an X film (‘any X film’, he said) and to moon round looking for girls with his spotty mates. Valentine was playing football in the garden – refereeing, and captaining both sides if his querulous whines were anything to go by. I locked myself in all the same, forced down the alcoholic syrup, and worked desultorily on the Reunion Speech.
Sunday television is a mixed bag in the provinces. University Challenge: the contestants seemed to be alarmingly well-informed but, on the other hand, reassuringly hideous. A panel-game in which a cross-section of dotards and queer celebrities tasted wines and, with diminishing coherence, talked about them. A comedy show that recounted the attempts of three beautiful girls and one ugly one to pay the electricity bill and not sleep with their boyfriends.
A sports programme followed – not the Saturday afternoon kind, where alert-looking old men lean on desks keeping you up to date, but a canned, filmic report on a tennis championship currently being disputed somewhere in the southern hemisphere. I was about to turn over when a pea-headed American gravely announced that what we were about to see was the women’s semi-finals.