I clenched my teeth. 'Not really sure. I feel a bit, I don't know, strange.'
Rachel gulped. 'Charles, what is it?'
'I'm sorry. The interview was a bit harrowing. Not a bit what I expected.'
'But you did get in?'
'Oh yeah. Have you heard from your mother yet?'
'Yes, she rang this morning. She almost apologized. Archie's coming round to get me this afternoon. I suppose I'd better go back. Shall I?'
'Oh, yes, definitely. Far the best thing. Look, sorry I'm being so awful. Don't worry about anything, I'll most likely be back tomorrow. Ring you if I'm not. Okay? I love you. Right. Bye!'
And I felt next to nothing as I walked to the village; I paid my respects to the countryside yet was unable to detect solemn sympathy in its quiet or reproach in its stillness. Usually that road brought me miles of footage from the past: the bright-faced ten-year-old running for the Oxford bus; the lardy pubescent, out on soul-rambles (i.e. sulks), or off for a wank in the woods; the youth, handsomely reading Tennyson on summer evenings, or trying to kill birds with feeble, rusted slug-guns, or behind the hedge smoking fags with Geoffrey, then hawking in the ditch. But now I strode it vacantly, my childhood nowhere to be found.
The drinks were on Mr Bladderby when he heard the happy news, and I stayed chatting to him and his wife for twenty minutes with the letters still in my pocket. That landlord had imploded a few more blood-vessels, Mrs Bladderby had lost her mother, two front teeth, and about a third of her hair, but all in all I was surprised how little they had changed. It seemed I had been away for years. No, not years. Days? No, nor days. It seemed I had been away for three months.
On my return, however, after a visit to the post office, the hollow feeling began to be displaced. So the trees obliged me by wringing their hands when I approached the lane, and the wind booed me as I made my way to the house, slowly, in frightened tears.
The Letter to My Father - what a remarkable document it is. Lucid yet subtle, persistent without being querulous, sensible but not unimaginative, elegant? yes, florid? no. Ah, if Knowd-all could have read this. The only question is: what do I do with it?
The old rogue didn't in fact turn up until Tuesday, this mom-ing. I took the Letter along when I went to see him in his study, on the off-chance.
'I've been for the interview. I got in.'
My father appeared to be genuinely delighted. He came up and cuffed me on the shoulder. It was the first time we had touched for years. It made me blush.
'Pity we're too early for a drink,' he said.
'Yes. The thing is - not all that important - but I wondered whether I couldn't go to my second-choice college. I know it's not as good, but I didn't much like the don who interviewed me. He's got a lot of crappy ideas. And he says "hopefully".'
'Hopefully? But—'
'No, he says the word "hopefully". I'm in all right.'
He smiled, as he had smiled on Norman's stairs, and in the bathroom passage here, and a hundred times before: at my moods, my opinions, the letters I made him sign explaining my unwillingness to do PT, at each show of eccentricity. I didn't care now.
'Well,' he said. 'Is he giving you a scholarship?'
I said I wasn't sure.
'If he is it may well mean another college is after you and he wants to get you before they do, so to speak.' My father laughed, so I thought I might as well laugh.
'He did say that if he didn't take me someone else would.'
Then perhaps he is going to give you an award, in which case I'll ring old Sir Herbert and see what he suggests. Yes ?'
'Yes, fine.'
There followed a silence, quite a relaxed one.
'Uh, father, don't think I'm getting hostile again - I'm not asking this petulantly - but what do you think's going to happen with you and mother ? I'm not challenging - just want to know. I realize I've been ... but I think I understand these things better now.'
My father sat down and motioned me to do the same. He crossed his little legs and stitched his fingers; he looked alert, as if trying to evaluate my sincerity. Then, throwing his head back, Gordon Highway said:
'I expect I shall stay with your mother at least until Valentine is grown up, possibly ... probably longer. It's highly likely that we'll never separate.'
'You're not considering divorce?'
'Not at this moment in time. As you know, it's an extremely expensive and ... messy business, not to be undertaken without desperately serious thought. As you know. And marriage is always something of a compromise, as I'm sure you're now aware. Any long-term relationship is - and one does have to see it in the long term, Charles. No, I expect your mother and myself will never divorce.' He shrugged his self-effacement. 'It's uneconomic and, at my age, usually unnecessary.'
This may be bluffing, but I think that one of the dowdiest things about being young is the vague pressure you feel to be constantly subversive, to sneer at oldster evasions, to shun compromise, to seek the hard way out, etc., when really you know that idealism is worse than useless without example, and that you're no better. The teenager can normally detach his own behaviour from his views on the behaviour of others; but I had no moral energy left.
And besides. Twenty tomorrow. Get my hair cut, get my trousers taken out and tum-ups put on them, buy some fawn cardigans, wool socks, brogues.
'I see,' I said, 'Well, that seems reasonable.'
'And what about you?'
'Eh?'
'How are you getting on with your young lady ?'
There was a pause between 'with' and 'your'; even so I was surprised, almost moved, not by his question but by the fact that he had asked it.
'It's all over. I lost interest. For a number of reasons.'
He rubbed his cheeks. 'Yes, that's always a shame, of course, but don't be got down by it. These things come and go. It's all experience.'
'You're telling me. It's experience all right. And why—' I felt the uneasiness of a good actor with bad lines - 'why does it take so long coming and so little time going ?'
My father laughed wealthily. 'My dear boy, if I knew the answer to that question I should be a happy man.' He slapped his hands on his thighs. 'Well! I'm glad we've had this chat. It's cleared the air. See you at dinner ?'
'Possibly. I might have something early. Letters to write, and so on.'
'Of course.'
My penultimate teenage experience occurred at 6.30 p.m., nearly five and a half hours ago. I had been to the pub and was struggling with the front door, a bottle of plonk in both pockets. I waited. Gradually, as though it were the least I could expect, I heard the sound of wheels on gravel. I turned: headlights at the corner of the drive.
The red Jaguar pulled up. Rachel's dark glasses stared straight at me. DeForest was so keen not to stare straight at me that he scraped against one of the stone urns in the porch.
'Hello,' I said.
DeForest chose to stay in the car.
I led Rachel to my room in businesslike silence. She sat on the bed and dug a cigarette from the handbag on her lap, taking her eyes off me for a moment. I found I was unsurprised and unfrightened. I pretended to be both.
'Did you get my letter?'
'Yes, I did.' She was trying to be officious, as if my letter had threatened imminent legal proceedings and she wasn't about to be fucked with. 'Yes, I did, and that's why I've come here to see you. Do you think you can —'
But she soon faltered. Her head dipped and she lifted a hand with a crumpled Kleenex in it to steady her sunglasses. Her shape seemed to recede before my eyes.
Now I go over and pick out the single cigarette-end from the wastepaper basket. It has a brown smudge. In an experimental spirit I lick the brown smudge. It tastes of ashtrays and I chuck it back. All the same, I think that that was quite a sensual and adventurous thing to have done.
I waited patiently for her to start crying, so that I could move in out of the painful, full-on gaze.
'Why ...' She swallowed. 'Why do you want to?'
/> Her nose shone.
'I don't know. But I do. I'm sorry.'
'And that —' She flicked off her sunglasses to get at her eyes. She was crying. I closed in. Rachel cried into her tissue, then on my shoulder, then into her tissue again. 'That horrible letter.' She shuddered.
And I stirred.
'What was so horrible about it? It wasn't meant to be horrible. What was it?'
She shook her head.
'The content or the style ? I realize it might have seemed a bit short, even brusque perhaps. But that was because it made me very unhappy to write it.'
'So cold,' she said, as if recalling an Icelandic holiday.
I resumed: 'Well, probably anything would have seemed "cold" after' - I coughed - 'what we've had.'
Three minutes to go. I return to the wastepaper basket and find Rachel's mascara-ed ball beneath the layers of tissue steeped in my own snot and tears. I examine it, then let it fall
noiselessly from my hand. I cover it now with the Letter to My Father.
'But, Rachel. I've been thinking and I'm sure that I can't give you what you want and need. I don't know, perhaps DeForest can.'
If only he didn't have quite such a preposterous name.
Rachel gave me a fierce glance over her tissue, and it occurred to me that I had better start crying too. But that would create more problems than it would solve.
'What can I say?' I asked.
I wished she would go. I couldn't feel anything with her there. I wished she would go and let me mourn in peace.
Five minutes later, she did. She left without telling me a thing or two about myself, without asking if I knew what my trouble was, without providing any sort of come-uppance at all. She left a present, though, and a fairly significant one. The Annotated Blake.
Which reminds me - I never did give her anything, did I ?
Six fifty to six fifty-five I had convulsions and I saw stars: vomitless retching, tearless heaves; I thought, I'm having convulsions and I'm watching stars.
By seven I felt fine. I considered Oxford, and I began to give the short-story competition some thought.
Now I go over to my desk and take a fresh quarto pad from the drawer. I wonder what sort of person I can be. I write:
In the dressing-table mirror Ruth saw her idiot teddybear and her idiot golliwog propped against the pillows, staring from behind. She put the letter back in the envelope and put the envelope back in the drawer. She looked down at the rubble of hopeless, pointless make-up, and up again. She leaned forward, fingering the barely perceptible lump on her chin. She smiled. If that wasn't a premenstrual spot, she thought... what was?
I read the paragraph through. Twice. It isn't really convincing.
I walk towards the window and I notice that it has gone twelve. I sit on the chair and dangle a leg over the arm. I refill my pen.
Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers
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