‘Ready?’
Five seconds of juddering wheel-spin and we catapulted down the hill.
‘Jenny tired?’ I yelped, as Norman ground us into a four-wheel skidding turn up the Bayswater Road.
‘Yeah.’ He decelerated from fifty to nought miles per hour at the traffic-lights. ‘Shouldn’t get up early now.’
At the first hint of amber Norman hurled the car forward, threading through the traffic like a skier.
‘How long to go then?’
‘Late May.’
‘Pleased about it?’
He shrugged, crunched down into second gear, parped his horn (a fruity yob’s Klaxon, which played the first four notes of ‘Here Comes the Bride’), and screamed past a lorry on the left, causing a nearby pedestrian to drop humbly to his knees in our wake.
More lights.
‘Why were you in two minds about having it?’ Norman revved challengingly and murmured threats at the driver of an adjacent milkfloat. ‘Didn’t want to get tied down, or what?’ We were off again, flattened into our seats by the g’s.
‘Have you, have you ever lucked a tart who’s had a kid?’
‘No.’ He didn’t hear and turned to me, mouth ajar. I shook my head.
‘Well I—’ he zig-zagged crazily, squeezed between a taxi and a newspaper van, and drifted two-wheeled up Queensway – ‘well I fucking have. And it’s no joke. Don’t know you’re there.’
Norman squalled to a roasted halt broadside a zebra-crossing, allowed a dumpy blonde to swank past, and whipped the car forward again, snicking the overcoat buttons and ironing the toecaps of two Siamese dotards.
‘Like waving a flag in space.’
More lights. I wanted to ask Norman if he had read Swinburne, but he continued: Their guts flop too. Jen’ll be okay for one, maybe more. No, fuck, I said she could adopt some, but – tarts like having babies! Their cunts’, he flicked off the heater, ‘turn to mush. Tits’ – we pulled away – ‘smell of bad milk. And they hang. Pancake tits.’
‘Really?’
‘Yur. Jungle tits. But I thought, fuck it. Jen’s all right. Firm. And I don’t fuck her that much now. Drop you here. When’ll you be back?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, sounding surprised. ‘Probably tonight. Tell Rachel tonight. And thanks for the lift.’
The door-handle was wrenched from my fingers. I watched Norman accelerate determinedly, torso hunched over the wheel, as a checker-board of nuns streamed into the road ahead.
During the one-hour train journey the Interview Folder lay unread upon my lap. I was shaking studiedly – and twice had to go to the lavatory to have some convulsions. Could that be the only reason he had ? I had often entertained this as a foul-minded possibility; I never dreamed that it could actually be true. And Norman – so vehement, unreflecting, and free. Are we all such emotional Yahoos? Was it strange that Norman should show a reluctance to dunk his rig into a blood-heat steak-and-kidney pudding for the rest of his life? Wouldn’t you? Going through my pockets for handkerchiefs I came across the letter from Coco. I could hardly remember who she was supposed to be. Anyhow, she apologized for confusing me with her reference to ‘Maybe Land’; it was an expression Coco and her friends used, roughly denoting the area of fantasy or human desire; in fact, the place didn’t exist. As regards my other inquiry (whether or not I’d get to fuck her when she came to England), ‘… I’m not sure that perhaps I’m ready too…’ By way of reply – first draft – I dashed off a prose paraphrase of Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’: ‘If we had all the time in the world, your becoming “modesty” would be quite acceptable. We could relax, and consider,’ etc., etc. Normally this exercise would have both calmed and stimulated me. Now, it did neither.
I walked up and down the train, smacked like a pat-ball from side to side as the carriages rocked and swayed. Discarded newspapers, bacterial cakes and rigid sandwiches, swindle-cups half full of grey tea, children, small Harry Secombes with grimed mouths and cheeks, tended by women you might mistake for retired footballers, expressionless men, alone.
I knocked and entered Dr Charles Knowd’s rooms, not even partially naked, and with my Adam’s apple on the tip of my tongue. According to the lodge notice-board the interview had begun ten minutes ago; the blazered, unsettlingly handsome porter (whom I addressed variously as ‘sir’, ‘your serene highness’, etc., like a Yank) himself escorted me to the correct staircase and told me which study to go to. I came in shouting apologies.