As a matter of course — it being past 5.30 — we were in the pub, and, no less routinely, it being past 6.30, both utterly polluted with drink. Jan appeared to be telling me a very funny story about her younger brother Simon. Evidently Simon was in big trouble at home because, having just been given his first bank-account, he was already £10 overdrawn; after a long interrogation from Jan’s dad, this Simon admitted that he’d spent his entire term’s allowance on the boarding-school whore — and got the clap, too. (Sexy talk, this, I thought.) ‘How old is he, your brother?’ I said when I had stopped laughing. ‘Fifteen!’ said Jan, as she also completed her laugh. ‘That’s how old my sister would have been,’ I said, without volition (it isn’t even true, damn it). ‘What happened to your sister?’ said Jan. ‘My dad killed her,’ I said.
Whoosh. On the two or three occasions when I have said that in my life, I’ve always cried, inevitably, as inevitably as I wince at sudden pain or gasp at the splash of cold water. I didn’t cry now. Perhaps I planned it. (I don’t blame me.) Tears queued up. I said,
‘Yes, he killed her.’
‘Oh no,’ said Jan.
Yes, he killed Rosie. He used to hit her from the moment she was old enough to hit. You would hear her crying then, whack, him hitting her. And so of course she stops crying. That’s what babies do when you hit them. They go quiet at once, shuts them up straightaway. But she cries louder, he’s obviously on to a good thing here, plenty of reasons to go on hitting her. When she had grown up a bit, when she’d become a person instead of a thing in a crib, I thought he would stop. He didn’t stop. She was so good-natured and no trouble — you couldn’t see any reason for it. People knew. She was on the At Risk list from the age of four. But they didn’t stop him.
‘Oh God,’ said Jan.
On the last day I met her from school. I knew it was the last day, she knew it was the last day. She always knew. I saw her running across the playground clutching her satchel like some extra bit of her. She ran everywhere. We didn’t talk about it, we never did — we were too ashamed — but we both knew. I just said I’d go home first — she had somewhere else to go before she went home. She seemed cheerful, as she always did. She bit her lip for a moment, but only because she could tell I was hating it all. Then, clutching her satchel, she ran off. I felt panic for the first time. Stop running! I shouted after her. Why are you running? But she waved and went on running. That night he killed her. What sort of people do that?
‘Oh, fuck,’ said Jan.
— Then something broke and I lurched back in my chair. I stared at her with what felt from my end like pure consternation. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m going now.’ And I stumbled from the pub into the wet air, already crying, and for whom? For my lousy self. (Oh, I’ve got so little resilience in my nature. This being alive, it’s killing me. I’m just not up to it.)
I sat on a bench in the piazza. It was raining. She wouldn’t come then. Windblown newspapers got too drunk to move in the wet. She wouldn’t come. What about her hair? What about mine? The rain intensified, stroking the square in gusts.
‘I’m all fucked up,’ I said.
She put a hand on my cheek and I leant against her. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘oh God, oh fuck.’
And since then — well, she’s just been wonderfully sweet to me, is all. And I can see it’s changed now. In the office, she looks at me with such gentle concern, such protective care, that I almost gag with emotion, and have to duck quickly into my cubicle and feel the thick rotundity of the earth melting all about me. I’m so sentimental these days that I squelch when I walk. We still have our drinks together, move past each other twenty times a day without our eyes meeting, but it’s all changed now (thanks, Rosie. Is there anything I can do for you?). We’re going to have a big night out on Friday week. It’s Jan’s last day here (she’s moving on. Temps do that — they move on. Temps fugunt). They fuck, as well, sometimes, apparently. She’s agreed to come back with me to the flat after our big night out. You might say that, in some respects, it’s all fixed.
Except that Gregory has got flu — a real lulu of a flu too, I’m delighted to say. It was all quite hilarious. One morning early this month I had popped upstairs for some milk, and as I moved unseeingly past Greg’s bed I heard this long theatrical groan from behind me. I turned (wondering how good I looked, which is always the first thing I wonder when I see him). Comically, he had half-levered himself from the caress of his satin sheets, and was spasticly spreadeagled over the edge of the bed, his weak knuckles almost grazing the carpet. ‘Gug,’ he said; his shiny, downward-hanging hair swayed in the early sunlight. ‘Urgh,’ he added. ‘Echt.’
‘Gregory!’ I said.
He looked up at me like an old man in a film about the pitilessness of the jungle. ‘Terence … What’s happening to me?’
I helped him back into his cot (what silkily bisexual skin he has) and obeyed his croaked request to call a doctor. I called the surgery of Willie Miller, the facetious private practitioner who handles both of us (I’m quite posh when I’m ill) and who promised Gregory a visit that day. Then, in a likeable onset of frank and sudden greed, my foster-brother blandly asked me to make him some breakfast before I left for the office. Quite flattering, I thought, affectionately explaining that I would be late if I did (Greg generally has some faggot mixture of yoghurt, prunes, saffron, perfume, etc., but he’s too broke for that now and has resorted to a slice of toast and a ‘coddled’ egg. About as faggot as you can get with eggs, this dish involves skilful use of a wet dishcloth and takes about fifteen baffling minutes to prepare).
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Are you sure you’ll be okay?’
‘Sure? I’ve no idea. I haven’t a clue.’
I offered to make him a cup of instant coffee, but he flailed his arms at the very mention. ‘I’m really sorry,’ I said. ‘I have to go.’ I held my breath for a moment. ‘But if you really need something in the middle of the day, ring me, and I’ll come back from the office at lunchtime.’ He frowned, not unkindly. The room gradually went red. ‘Prescriptions or something you might need,’ I added.
‘That’s very sweet of you,’ said Gregory.
I love it when he’s ill. Watch the way he treats me. His looks, impressive for their testimony to good health as much as for their formal beauty and proportion, recede to the back-benches of his presence, and the wistful, white-lying, weak, incestuous, decadent, hopelessly impractical self edges out like an alien into the strange air. My looks suddenly seem sensible and hard-wearing. From a faltering, sparse-feathered vulture I am transformed into a game and stalwart sparrow, with my efficient short legs, heavy-duty trunk and no-nonsense face. Not only do I feel quite good, I feel quite nice — and tremendously reassured, of course, that he still likes me sometimes, that I still have a handclasp with a family, that there are still some people on the planet who would prefer me not to be a tramp.
I seem, anyway, to be behaving quite flashly with him these days, partly out of genuine high spirits. What is it that makes us want to see our loved ones done down? That day, as cool as you like, I did not ring Gregory from work, but what I did do was ring Ursula and tell her to ring him. (Ursula sounded all right, by the way, apart from appearing to be out of her fucking mind with every second thing she said. I’ve got to talk to that girl, or talk to someone about her.) Jan was away that day as it was, and I could hardly contain my eagerness to be out of the office and home. In addition, John Hain was in hiding, and the officious Wark had been taken to the Dental Hospital (practically on a stretcher) to have the horrifying and deeply mysterious condition of his mouth attended to, so it was quite simple for me to strut nervously away at five.
I had entered the flat and was taking off my coat and reorganizing my hair when Gregory called piteously down the stairs,
‘Terry — is that you …?’
‘You bet,’ I said.
‘Come up,’ he moaned.
I expected him to be splayed dramatically on the be
d, or clawing for that last vital pill, but he was reclining drolly on what he calls his chaise-longue, his arms folded across the poof-pageboy ruffles of his kaftan, and looking, as they say, thoroughly sorry for himself. It was a spotless evening, and many aeroplanes strained cheerfully through the empty sky.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘How are you? How was your day?’
‘What day?’ he asked.
‘That bad, eh?’
‘Perfectly frightful. This morning seems as far away as childhood. I’m so weak I can’t do anything to pass the time. And so the time won’t pass.’
Quite bucked enough by this agreeably rehearsed-sounding plaint, I nearly dropped my Wine Mart bag when Gregory then said, with an interrogative lilt,
‘Terry, stay up here this evening and cheer me up. Go on. I can’t tell you how depressed I am. Tell me about your day, for instance. How was it? Now get yourself a drink and sit down properly. Tell me everything about your day from the moment you walked out of the door to the moment you walked in again. Right. You walked out of the door. What happened next? God, this is better already. Tell me — ’
So I tell him about the day, obedient to my usual policy of making everything sound slightly more humiliating and prospectless than it actually is (for ironic purposes, and so as not to dispirit him about his own job, which sounds really awful despite Greg’s terrifying hints that he might, at any moment, inherit the entire concern), recounting my modest vicissitudes, unpeeling this segment of my life to his oblique and only half-curious gaze, opening up the hackneyed trials of my life to amuse a sick prince for an hour at evening. Then we played backgammon (I won, natch — £2.40 — but he never pays and I don’t mind), ate the kebabs I went out to buy (I treated him), watched television, talked.
‘When you’re well again, Gregory,’ I said, uncapping my second litre of Château Alcoholic, ‘will you do me a favour? Will you let me have the flat to myself one evening?’
‘And to what end?’ he asked, rather grandly, sipping his Perrier water. It was late, and by this time we were friends again.
‘Well, as a matter of fact, I was thinking of entertaining a young ladyfriend here.’
‘Ah. Whom? Young Joan?’
‘Not Joan, you fool. Jan.’
‘Yes, she is rather fine, I must say. Have you not … already?’
‘Have you gone out of your mind? I mean, no, I haven’t. Where could I, anyway? She lives with her parents in the sticks somewhere.’
‘Yes, I do see. But she’s given you reason to believe you could have your way with her, granted an enclosed space and something to lie down on? I must say, she doesn’t look like the sort of girl you’d have to take to the opera too many times.’
‘What do you mean?’
Then he said, ‘She won’t give you any trouble. She’s been playing hide-the-salami since she was five. You can always tell. My God, that night you brought her back here and I was lying on the bed? I’ve never seen anything so brazen. You could smell it. I tell you, Terry, she was absolutely dripping.’
And for a moment he was the one who looked ugly and mad, and if I could have rendered him dead at that moment I would have done so with a snap of my fingers. ‘Christ, Gregory,’ I said, ‘what the hell are you talking about?’
‘Just stop pussyfooting, you ass. There’s no problem with girls like that. Just get there before somebody else does.’
‘It won’t be you, will it,’ I said quickly. ‘Promise me.’
‘Oh don’t be so wet.’
‘Promise me.’
‘Oh all right. Now let’s talk about something else.’
‘Ursula.’
He turned away. ‘I don’t want to talk about Ursula,’ said Gregory.
(ii) What other things will happen
to you now you’re old? — GREGORY
Summer is well and truly on its way, it bores me to report. A span of trite sun heats me awake each morning in my vast bed. The empty afternoons fill the world with beach fatigue as the sun completes its slow lob across the sky. At evening, in the thin final glow, the skyline takes forever to become itself, as if the vapidly grinning day had drained it of all life, all secrets. Cities are winter things.
And I’ve got the flu which I think is bloody unfair considering I took all my vitamins throughout the winter and successfully spurned the foul ethnic bugs that kept poleaxing Terence and everyone else I know. It is, moreover, a vicious little weapon of a flu, the most resourceful and tenacious flu ever to have made me its home. Five days ago I awoke with a body full of heavy water, as if my internal mass had condensed overnight. At first, staked out there among the satin cushions, I rather halfheartedly put it down to the alcoholic and hallucinogenic excesses of the previous evening (Muscadet and mescalin too freely quaffed). Likewise the intensified aura of lassitude and disgust which was the last guest to leave my memory of the night before (Adrian and the redhead too freely indulged). But when I tried to hoist my body out of bed, a great dark hand reached out from behind and tugged me back on to the pillows. I couldn’t move! Providentially Terence was busy in the kitchen — doubtless it was his transit that woke me — so I cried out to him, and got him to ring the doctor at once, cook me my breakfast, dash out for the papers, fetch me the card table and generally make me comfortable. I had to ring the gallery myself: the Styles woman groaned rudely on, and kept saying how ‘inconvenient’ it all was. Bitch. (Willie, our London GP, was on the other hand very sweet and reassuring, and gave me lots of those strong sleeping-pills I like.) And since then I’ve been absolutely out! I just haven’t any strength! Mountains crack as I bear the cup to my lips. The building holds its breath when I reach for my dressing-gown. The walk to the lavatory is an insomniac hike through ulterior corridors and runic rooms.
I’m so bored. I’ve read all the readable books in the flat — including some from Terence’s lurid shelves — and playing patience is far too effortful. I look all day at the telephone but it just beams and beams, its arms smugly folded. Skimmer is abroad, and Kane is working away at that merchant bank of his. I rang Adrian, who said it served me right and gloated idiotically about the whole thing. Susannah said she didn’t want to catch it herself, and of course I couldn’t imperil the distinguished Torka. Yesterday afternoon, when I was feeling particularly sorry for myself, I rang Mama, who naturally offered to come to London on the next train; but after a long chat about her foolish husband — it’s potholing now — I felt up to going it alone. One boon. With that weird prevision, with that almost supernatural empathy which she and I have always enjoyed, Ursula rang me on the very morning that the flu struck. She has been coming in every day to cook me my lunch, tidy my room, fatten my cushions and whatnot. She is in marvellous form, and sometimes, if she happens to be pottering round my bed and I happen to be feeling rather frisky, I clutch at her tiny hips and we tumble about giggling and grappling as of old. For the rest of these slow spring days, however, it is just me and the windows, a pale, affectless world of ceilings, skies, and my heartbeat.
It is perhaps, then, in the spirit of false humility that illness and isolation produce that I have started allowing Terence up here in the evenings.
It is six o’clock. I am finished with any dozing that the afternoon might have let slip, and now stare moonily out of the penthouse window. At ninety-second intervals, tinselly aeroplanes wobble upwards through the bland air. The room darkens and I make no move for the light. The world curls up and dies. Only sad memories linger. The silence is climbing, climbing — as if at any moment it might burst into harsh laughter.
Terence comes home — with a sigh of the lift, the determined approach of his footsteps, the hello of his key in the door, the arc of light that comes up the stairs as he flicks on the hall lamp and noisily divests himself of duffle-coat, brolly, satchel.
‘Greg, are you awake?’ he’ll call.
‘I think so,’ I reply.
‘Hi. How are you? How are you feeling?’
‘Come up.’
br /> Rather touching, this. My illness seems to make it easier for Terry to express his full concern for me. All the other things that clutter up our dealings, all the envy, awe and hero-worship, have taken a back seat for a while.
‘How was your day?’ he asks, chugging up the stairs so that he enters my vision like a figure being wound on to a film reel. The creased ginger hair, the face (which at least looks quite honest and decent, apart from those disgustingly fizzy eyes), the boxy shoulders and upper torso, the sovereign of pee-stain on the crotch of his jeans, the incredibly short legs (I’m amazed they reach the ground), the ‘shoes’.
‘Dull and long. How was yours?’
‘Dull and long. Except there was this quite funny bit in the afternoon when — ’
And then he’s off — off on some hectic anecdote about one or other of the cretins, louts and pseuds who work in that frightful dump of his. Terence really does catch them all quite well, and often amuses me with scarcely credible tales of the resentment and obstructiveness that characterize his strange little life (the firm is joining Yobs’ United: it all sounds risibly squalid). He drinks his undrinkable wine and gets me my Tio Pepe or Abroja with crushed ice, I make him cook me an omelette — or send him running, as fast as his legs will carry him, to the take-home bistros and kebab-houses in Queensway — we watch television on my powerful Grundig, I take a few pounds off him at backgammon (my game is fast, fluent and aggressive, his paranoid and cramped), he drinks on, we play chess, we talk.
‘Tell me,’ I asked him the other night, ‘have you made any progress with young Joan.’
‘It’s not Joan. It’s June.’
‘June then,’ I murmured. I was building up a witty attack on Terence’s left flank. He had fianchettoed, and as usual all his pieces were clustered inertly round his king.