‘Well, I haven’t had much of a chance. I was going to ask you about that, actually.’
‘Oh?’ I brought my second rook into play, revealing a delightful combination with the white-square bishop.
‘I wondered if, when you’re well, you might let me have the place to myself one evening.’
‘I expect that could be arranged.’ By this time Terence’s king had been poked out of its nook and was making its usual distracted diagonal dash across the board towards me. ‘I take it she’s willing. She looks a complete pushover to me.’
‘Gregory,’ said Terence seriously, ‘will you promise me one thing?’
‘What’s that?’ I interrupted a series of brutal checks to fork and capture his queen with my knight.
‘You won’t make a pitch at her yourself.’
‘Oh don’t be so wet. And so ridiculous. I don’t fuck the lower classes. Now let’s talk about something else.’
‘All right. Let’s talk about — ’
‘Wrong play,’ I said calmly. ‘Grigoric suggests taking the pawn.’
In my view, of course, the whole idea of Ursula coming down to London like this was an utterly preposterous one, and I think Mama should have sat on Mr Dick in no uncertain manner when he first hatched his frisky little scheme. One way or another, though, a large part of life at Rivers Court has involved remoulding, intercepting or sometimes just ‘going along with’ my father’s banal whims simply in order to get things done. The family needs a holiday and we all decide on Greece: a book or pamphlet on this clime is left by his bed and the next morning he is loudly making reservations into a brandished telephone. He suddenly gets a passion for woodwork and handicraft: instead of allowing the French furniture to be cannibalized, we have him help with the retimbering of our scheduled barn, where he harmlessly makes a fool of himself among the stooped village carpenters. And so when he claimed that he’d need a secretary for this absurd book of his — I think the project has already been abandoned — it seemed cleverly opportunist at the time to offer Ursula herself as his future clerical auxiliary. At least she would gain some sort of qualification, which as we all know ‘helps’ these days, and at least the plan put paid to the intolerable notion of having some overpaid frump sitting about the place all day with nothing to do. The old boy was as easy to talk round as ever, and in fact Ursula was a good deal less keen on the idea than he was by the time she was dispatched to the Great Wen. That was six months ago …
During the semi-delirious phase of my illness I dreamed of her almost constantly, hurtful and saddening dreams that left me with a sense of irretrievable loss, as if something had gone wrong with the world while I slept which could never be put right again. Occasionally I would wake during her actual visits to my flat (she has her own key, the darling), and I would be unable to tell if she was really there and talk nonsensically — the words all in the letter A of dreams — until she hurried to my side. One morning last week, the sight of my suffering distressed her so much that she melted into tears; I held her painful, shuddering body in my great arms as her bones contracted into exhaustion and as I watched the clever new dreams marshal themselves once more on the white ceiling.
I can’t bear to dream of her small and unprotected evenings over there by the river, that lonely district of tall, set-back houses and the treacly nocturnal glaze under which the Thames seeps, that beetling drainpipe-splinted hostel, past whose yellowish windows flit the wraiths of pale factotums, dust-whorled typists and submarine stenographers. She is too small for any of that, the labelled refrigerator trays, the rooms containing three asymmetrical beds (it always looks wrong, like a ward), the scattered underthings and rubbled make-up, the pungent, towny bickering of it all.
When she used to come to me, at night (I dream this daily), in the lost world of our childhood at Rivers Court, it was with a slow tweak of the doorknob, the thin wake of the landing light playing on the alert, skeletal silhouette within her nightdress, the watchful glance over her shoulder which showed me her hair, like a Guppy-doll, the quick tiptoe through the darkness to my bed, the soft kittenish spring landing her knees first by my pillow, and the nervous burrowing slither that in one movement exchanged her nightdress for my sheets and left her warm breath and cold skin gradually osmoting with my cold breath and warm skin. ‘Success,’ she would whisper. ‘You’re a very clever girl,’ I would whisper back. Before, during, and — if less regularly — after my pubescence, and then, ultimately, through hers, did brother and sister indulge these childish pleasures, until time stood back and made way for that sudden afternoon.
Puberty for me, of course, came like some brisk and thrilling benediction. One week my voice was a piping treble, the next it had descended without incident to its present mellifluous bass; one week my genitals comprised the pouch and knobble of any young boy’s, the next my enflossed virilia were craning wantonly in bathtub and bedroom; one week my physical movements had all the natural grace of a healthy child, the next they had taken on the full authority and calm of an athletic adult. (In easy contrast, Terence’s clamber-up into manhood was the usual sprawling three-year nightmare of stubbed toes, pimples volcanic, leaping octaves and cat-flux.)
Well, I’ve never been really sure how long it took Ursula to notice the difference. Our fledgling nights together had naturally often featured startling tumescences on my part, and I enjoyed many delicious preadolescent orgasms under Ursula’s inquisitive little auspices; but there had until then been nothing in the slightest bit carnal about it all. You know: we would exhaustively caress each other, inspect each other’s private parts with a kind of giggly revulsion; a lot of hair-stroking, I seem to remember, took place. We never kissed, funnily enough. In all my life I have never kissed my sister — not on the lips, not on those lips.
Gregory, she said one night, you’re getting all awful and hairy down there. You don’t like it? I asked. Well, she said, amused, I preferred it small and smooth. What other things will happen to you now you’re old? Why, I jolly well showed her, the minx. Look at all this stuff, she said: how clever. A month later her thin moist face poked up from beneath the sheets; she rested her chin on my chest and frowned. I believe it’s very nutritious, I whispered with a smile. She crinkled her nose — a gesture which in her indicated uncertainty rather than distaste. I’ll probably get used to it, she said, and added: What will you do when I go like Mama? — But I had sent my sweetheart packing down the bed again, and I lay back with my hands stitched behind my head, as the Cinderella birds encouraged the dawn to peep in past the frayed edges of the window, and as my sister salted my stomach with her sacramental tears.
Why does she cry so much now? What else can she be crying for but the lost world of our childhood, when it didn’t seem to matter what we did?
Uproarious scenes on my return to the gallery. How these good plain people do without me for a millisecond is a complete and enduring marvel.
Eventually, I suppose, it was sheer boredom rather than any dramatic recuperation that lifted me from my sick-bed. Also the impertinent Styles woman had been agitating in the most unforgivable fashion — braying telephone calls, facetious get-well-soon cards of a predictably vulgar stamp, and I believe there has even been some suggestion of docking my handsome salary if I don’t return forthwith! In addition, Terence — dour, attentive, heavy-breathing Terence — has been tenderly nagging me to get well on account of his wonderfully comic bid to seduce that tarty June of his, in accordance with which I have provisionally agreed to stay on late at Torka’s one night towards the end of next week. Fair’s fair, I do see the boy’s point — from the sublime to the ridiculous and so forth.
I elected to return to work on the Friday, in order to give myself the weekend to recover. Putting on all my clothes so early felt strange, exemplary, like getting dressed up for some mythic ball or hunt, or like preparing, at an impossibly tiny hour, to begin a holiday. For the moment I found it pleasurable, and was excited by the touch of my expensive and unfamiliar
clothes. It looked hot outside. I stood up, amazed, alive again.
‘Good morning, sir, good morning!’ fluted the toadies in lift and hallway. ‘It’s good to see you on your feet again, sir,’ said the porter, deferentially holding the doors open for me as I cruised past.
… My, but the world changes quickly these days. How long can I have been away? Where am I — Munich, Florence, Calcutta? Among the snorting buses and the thronged porches of the sudden hotels, whole races, entire cultures, seem to gather and disperse. As I walk, like a foreigner, like Rip Van Winkle, down the diasporadic Moscow Road, I weave through boisterous peninsulae of Pakistanis, step aside for vast cohorts of panting, flaxen Scandinavians, negotiate Jumbo-loads of torpid, Italianate trudgers, forge through great continents of Middle-Eastern immigrant workers. Up-ended dustbins and capsized vegetable barrows are being sick all over the pavement; rubbish bags slump like tramps against shop windows; rabid pigeons, too fat to fly, squawk among the filth. I turn into Queensway and it could be anywhere. A shock-haired nig-nog is selling fresh orange-juice from a colourful, two-wheeled refrigerator. Across the road, the stickered visage of a new building announces CAMBIO — WECHSEL — CHANGE — 24 HOURS (I look around for a sign saying ENGLISH SPOKEN HERE). Everyone in the street but me is clutching a map.
After this the underground is almost a haven: I complete the shunting, frangible journey pressed flat in the crushed carriage, wondering with amused detachment whether these people can really be my kind (there are so many of you all. What will become of you? How will you cope?). The better-kept precincts of Mayfair, with their tub-like Americans, costly women and velvety window displays, are the theme of some reassurance as I purchase my tulip and saunter up Albemarle Street to Berkeley Square. There is the gallery, the Odette and Jason Styles Gallery, the place where I work.
‘Gregory! How do you spell “Metamorphosis”?’
The poor dears wonder how they kept going without me. As I sit at my desk, trying to suppress an uncontrollable fit of giggles, I wonder how they got started without me.
‘M, e, t, a …’ I manage to blurt.
Do you know what they’ve gone and done while I’ve been away with my flu? Only commissioned, set up and hung the most ghastly, hideous —
‘Gregory! How do you spell “Euthanasia”?’
‘E, u, t …’ I gasp.
— one-man show from an interior decorator in Bond Street. I walked in here to find the walls vandalized by abstracts of what I call the Perforce School (‘I paint in abstracts, perforce, so that no one, not even me, can tell I can’t paint’), dreadful kaleidoscopic slap-ups in brown and ochre, with a kind of —
‘Gregory! How do you spell “Extraterrestrial”?’
‘E, x, t …’ I moan.
— simple-minded oriental motif, inducing in the fit viewer a tendency to think he needs his eyes fixed or his stomach seen to, a gust of existential nausea, a deranged insult to all one’s —
‘Gregory! How do you spell “Embryonic”?’
‘E, m, b …’ I plead.
— most intimate hopes and dreams. Reeling through the gallery towards the Styleses’ fetid grotto, I saw that the Creator, the First Author himself, was present, hunched worriedly over the catalogue draft; Old Ma Styles stood in hirsute attendance while Jason fumbled with the coffee cups behind them. Apparently the fraudulent little oik was very anxious about the catalogue, partly because he couldn’t dream up any ‘titles’ for the oblongs of homogeneous drivel which now smothered the gallery walls. ‘Less think,’ he says. ‘What about “Sensuality” for this one. Or for that one. Or for that one.’ I crept away to my desk, suffering Madame Styles to give me a bellow if —
‘Gregory! How do you spell “Schizophrenia”?’
‘Oh, you’ll have to look that one up,’ I said wearily.
The show is a flop, of course. Throughout the following week the gallery remains deserted, save for the odd mad-eyed Nipponese, in whom the canvasses seem to awaken a momentary, tribal pang. Odette and Jason are depressed. They are losing more money than they usually lose. They stay in their pit all day, and I can hear their morbid whispers. The interior decorator comes in less often now; nobody tries to look cheerful when he does.
But the week is slow. I have nothing to do. I sit at my glass desk here as the afternoons stretch and yawn, and by the time I get home I feel tired and wretched and don’t go out. The dreams have not gone. Once I awoke with a jolt to find that I was in the gallery, which seemed shrill and hollow, like another kind of dream. So I just sit here with the feverish taste of rust in my mouth, sickening again, fading and fading, until the week stops.
6: June
(i) Busy busy busy. I don’t know
why I make all this fuss, I’m
sure — TERRY
Twenty-four hours to go. Now let me see.
Gregory doesn’t want to talk about Ursula. I don’t blame him. If she were my sister I wouldn’t want to talk about her either. It looks as though she has started to go mad, I’m afraid. And she knows, too, just as my sister always knew.
Of course, in his family there’s a lot of it about. (There must be some in mine as well, I suppose, but I feel so unimplicated by that part of it: my stuff all comes from without.) Greg’s father, for instance, is, by almost anybody’s standards, off his head — though in an entirely benign and comic way (he is, I should say, a manic depressive who never gets depressed. Everything about him is light-hearted — even his occasional heart-attacks. I like him: he has always tried hard to make things okay for me). Greg’s mother is, in my view, quite mad also — though try telling her that (she is, I should say, slightly paranoid, tending to delusions of pride rather than of persecution. I don’t like her much: she has always been dutiful and correct with me, but no more). And now Greg’s sister Ursula is going mad too: she is ‘getting’ schizophrenia, rather in the way that other people get hay fever, or get rich quick, or get fucked up. I love her (and she loves me, I think, which is some claim to uniqueness), but I have no idea what to do about her.
Gregory himself has always been very cavalier on the subject, playfully tending to rattle the skeletons in the family cupboard rather than board them up. He has always enjoyed chronicling the tonto exploits of his ancestors, particularly those of his great-grandfather, who, among other idiosyncracies, used to like sleeping in the stables and once tore down two rooms of the house and dug up large parts of the garden in search of a mislaid marble, which was later discovered in his shoe. Brilliant. I further suspect that Gregory finds madness posh, like gout or incest. If you’re sufficiently protected by family and cash (the argument runs) you might as well be mad, since nothing you do is ever going to matter a bugger anyway. Well, things aren’t like that any longer, bub. The world is changing. You are not protected, your father is not rich any more, and what you do suddenly counts. Madness doesn’t mean maybe these days.
Now that’s passed some time. Twenty-three hours to go. I expect I’ll give madness a try myself, if things don’t work out tomorrow. It all seems to be fixed still. Keep your fingers crossed for me.
My foster-brother is up and about again, if rather groggily so. A week ago today, when I saw him before going off to work, he looked as complacently poorly as ever, crying out when I started to draw his curtains and fluttering a wristless hand at the mug of Cona coffee I had laboriously prepared. But what happens when I get home that evening? There he is, pallid and overdressed, feebly pacing his room. I expressed surprise, which annoyed him, and then lamely asked if he felt better. Greg said that he wasn’t better so much as too bored with illness to go on countenancing it. He added something to the effect that the gallery ‘couldn’t do without’ him any longer, and made it clear that he planned to attend work the next day. In fact he seemed so incredibly fucked up that I assumed Mr and Mrs Styles (both of whose mothers, so far as I can gather and guess, suck cocks in hell — I mean, they don’t sound terribly nice) had been nagging him to return. This evening I went upsta
irs and, after a bit of nervous fawning, asked him if our plan was still intact. What plan? he asked. I rehearsed my dream that he might stay out until at least twelve o’clock the following night. Oh, and don’t come into my room when you get back. He agreed again, shaking his head in friendly bemusement. Christ he looked rocky, but we’re almost there now and I’m pretty sure he will keep his promise to me.
It’s all fixed.
Ever since the epoch-making, Rosie-induced crying-jag, there had been a lot of breezy, offhand banter between Jan and me in the office about our ‘big night out’, our ‘night on the razzle’, our ‘spree’. There would be expensive drinks, a posh dinner — ‘hell, we might even take in a show’, the Trainee had cracked in response to Jan’s ironic cooing. Then, once, in the pub, I plucked up the bottle to say, ‘And I’ll make sure Gregory is out of the way so we can have the place to ourselves …’ And then, instead of walking out of the pub, instead of slapping the sick grin off my face, instead of shouting, ‘You’ve made sure of what? Why do you think I’m coming back there, fat boy?’, instead, she leaned forward and whispered, ‘And I’ll fix with my folks to stay with a mate in Chelsea, so there’ll be none of that last-train bit.’ I was shocked, I don’t mind telling you. Perhaps Gregory was right, perhaps she does fuck everyone. Perhaps all you’ve got to do is ask her and she will. (‘Will you?’ ‘Yup.’) Or perhaps she really likes me. Do you think that’s at all possible?
Twenty-two hours to go. For the time being cleanliness preoccupies me. I shall need to have a marathon soak, obviously — and I even toy with the idea of actually sleeping in the bath. Jan and I are swanning straight out after work (we happen to be having cocktails at the Bar Royale — a wallet-thinner, true, but it’s a tremendously sexy place, I’m told), so there will be no time for pedantic, nitpicking ablutions immediately beforehand. Maybe I’ll take some sort of kit with me to work and have some sort of session with it in the nasty lavatories there (and they’re very nasty lavatories. The two cubicles are separated by partitions no bigger than cowboy-saloon swing doors, so not only do you hear the awful farting, plopping and grunting of your co-crapper, and he yours, with especially high fidelity, but also, on preparing to leave, it’s quite possible to pull up his trousers instead of your own. It is even more horrible if you know who’s next door. Wark always has a particularly bad time in there). The morale of my cock, incidentally, which was suavely sporting an erection this morning, albeit of a piss-proud, bladder-bolstered variety, is surprisingly good considering it’s been lying very low these days and, well, we haven’t been on what G. would call ‘speakers’ for some weeks now. I have given it, in all kinds of senses, a free hand, as a gesture, hoping that the trust I am so plainly reposing in it will spur it on to greater efforts on the night. No more henpecking: all right, you say you can handle the job, young fella — go ahead and handle it. I think my cock has fallen for the ruse. (I’m keeping my voice down here, so to speak — it might get wise. But the response so far has been encouraging. After all, it has a lot of prestige riding on tomorrow night.) My room is in superb shape since I aimed my wastepaper-basket. I even own a double-bed I see.