Is Gregory on to us? (Has he said anything?) I would guess not. I would guess he has other things on his mind. Natural conceit protects him, of course, but now there are other things, and I’m pretty sure I know what they are. He looks scared (look at him! He looks scared). He looks as if the very air might turn on him in fury … When we were young, I was always the scared one, always getting fucked up and peed on at school, always getting stomped and creamed by the townies, always getting belted and hollered at by the parkies, always in tears over some trifling slight, always scared. Gregory hardly ever cried as a child — only at the distress of others (yes, that’s true). Now he goes about with the ripe, tremulous smile of someone with too much emotion in his nostrils. He is really scared.
I don’t think I need do anything about him after all. Something else is doing it for me. I think things are being taken care of very nicely.
‘Ah, hullo. Come in, Terry.’
‘… Which way?’
I stood in the sweeping drive of Mr Stanley Veale’s Fulham home, an auburn three-storey Victorian residence against whose broad husk various gleaming superstructures leaned and crouched. Veale addressed me through the slide-up window of one of these dinky little afterthoughts, what looked like an oval breakfast-room full of pink chairs and motley scatter-cushions. His great white face remained expressionless.
‘Through the car-ports.’
Oh, you have more than one car-port, do you, I thought, having already noticed the three cars lying in their ruts of gravel — the heavy Ford Granada, the van, the Mini.
‘Which car-port?’ I asked.
‘There’s only one car-ports,’ said Veale gravely. ‘I keep the Granada down the road. It’s for the runabouts. Round the side.’
Oh, you have more than one runabout, do — ‘Oh, right,’ I said, tardily realizing that Veale’s lust for the plural was a shrill result only of his posh emphasis on the terminal t (a decade ago, no doubt, he would have said car-por’ and runabar’. But then again he wouldn’t have needed to say those words a decade ago). Hence also, presumably, his fondness for the husky initial h. Veale said hello like a resolute halitotic sounding out a friendship.
I set off round the side — Veale’s head gingerly withdrawing — between the fireman’s poles of the car-port, and into an open-air vestibule where a large selection of cloaks, capes and bike-ponchos stood hooked to the wall, shrivelled prisoners in a northern camp. A heap of lopped feet, in the form of discarded wellingtons, lay on the tiled floor. A glass wall slid back: Veale turned away down a wide passage that immediately spanned out into a doublelevel sitting-room — fluffy white rugs like snow on moss, facing sofas as long as cinema rows, a fireplace the size of a back-entrance to Versailles, a kidney-shaped bar against the shelved walls of bottles.
‘Scotch?’ said Veale. ‘It had better be. That’s all there is for now. Unless you want that sweet shit,’ he added, gesturing with contempt at the bottles of Parfait Amour and Chocolate Mint Cream, ranked about him. ‘My wife drinks that sweet shits. Before lunch. You watch her.’
‘Incredible place you’ve got,’ I said. Veale took a gilt paper-knife and ground it into one of the four cases stamped WHISKY behind the bar. ‘Christ. Do you buy in bulk?’
‘You could put it that way,’ said Veale urbanely. ‘The vodka and that’s not indoors yet. Here — four cases of whisky, four vodka, four gin, four rum, four campari, four vermouth, four brandy: one-eighty cash.’
‘Really? What, you get it cheap?’
‘No, I pay extra, don’t I? I mean, you don’t have to be … Maynard Keynes to work that one out. Course I get it cheap.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Can’t remember when I last paid full for anything. Only a prick would pay full for anything these days. All cash. Up front.’
‘Really?’ I perched on a stool, accepting the largest whisky I had ever seen, heard or read about.
‘Yur. Course it’s not what it was.’
‘You used to get other stuff?’
‘Wine, sherry, ports — the lots. See the Granada in the drive? Got that less than half showroom price.’
‘How?’
He sniffed. ‘Now how do you think?’
Clamour from the direction of the far door preceded the entry of two small boys (one of them, in fairness, about twice the size of the other). In a tone of benign formality Veale asked what he could do for them.
‘Orange, please, Dad,’ said the smaller, in unreclaimed Cockney.
‘Pepsi, please, Dad,’ said the larger, in comparatively courtly accents.
Veale served his sons.
‘Thanks, Dad.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’
‘That’s one thing I do pay full for,’ said Veale when they had gone. ‘Costs me a grand-and-a-half to send that little bugger to school.’
‘What, he goes to a sort of private school, does he?’
‘No, it all goes on bus-fares. It’s the bus-fares to the Comprehensive that’s really crippling. I don’t know why I bother with you, sometimes, Terry. I mean, it doesn’t take … Maffyou Arnold to work that one out.’
‘Sorry. I’m drunk.’
‘So am I, mate. Drunk Friday night to Monday morning — always am.’
‘This private school bit. Isn’t that all rather’ — I coughed — ‘against your principles?’
‘No. It’s nots. It’s not against my principles at all. What do you think we’re after, eh? Steakhouses, transistors, Costa Brava holidays? That ratcrap?
‘Now listen. Have you seen the Branch man yet?’
‘Yup.’
‘Good. So have I. He’s friendly, but he says you’ve got to do the Course.’
‘Damn. I thought he would. Which Course?’
‘Four nights a week for a month. No trouble. At the City College. It’s just protection.’
‘What will it cost.’
‘That’ll come from funds, don’t worry. Here.’ He rebrimmed my glass. ‘Anything going at the office?’
‘Nah. They wouldn’t get organized even if they could. It’s not in them.’
Veale gazed neutrally at me. ‘Cunts,’ he said.
The session ended soon after the beguiling entrance of Veale’s wife, a rather marvellously tarty woman called Meg — Miggie? Mags? — something ridiculous like that. She wore astonishing white trousers. The bits of them that weren’t already halfway up her bum were as transparent as polythene: you could see the line of her panties, and their tender blue check. A woman with tremendously large breasts, she paid me a terrifying amount of attention, all of it under Veale’s pensive, grey-eyed stare. (I think he must think I’m posh.) I probably drank, oh, I don’t know — about three-quarters of a bottle?
‘Stay for lunch next time,’ said Mags.
‘Cheers,’ said Veale.
I walked happily in the sun to Fulham Broadway Underground. I thought:
I want all that and I want all that. And I want all that and I want all that. And I want all that and I want all that. I don’t want what he has. But I want what he wants.
‘Why, hello there, fair sir. Hello there, sweet prince,’ I said forty minutes later (all these new people I know).
The fucked-up hippie lay roasting in the small car park behind The Intrepid Fox. He was spreadeagled hellishly on the hot macadam, as if he had been staked out there by Indians. Most of his teeth were gone now, and his skin was old rope. ‘How the hell are things?’ I asked.
‘I don’t talk to shits like you,’ said the fucked-up hippie.
‘I love all this about me being a shit. How do you know, brilliant?’
‘I don’t talk to shits.’
‘You’re the real Fool on the Hill, aren’t you? You show the shits what the hell it’s all about.’
‘Fuck off, shit.’
‘Yup. Well! Everything looks okay here. Everything seems hunky-dory with you. Nice place you got, nice long winter to look forward to — lots of happy-go-lucky months ahead.’
‘Don?
??t worry about me, shit. I do all right.’
‘Oh, you do, you do, you certainly do. No, I can tell that. Better than us fat boys, who have to sit in a nice office all day, and come home and cuddle up nights. You bring your chicks back here?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Put on the hi-fi, out comes the scotch, and so on. Mm, I bet they’re suckers for someone like you, a heartbreaker like you. For a start you look about eighty, no teeth and so on, and we all know they go for that. Plus you crap in your clothes, also very popular I believe. And — ’
‘Go back to work, you little shit.’
‘Look at you, you dumb hippie. You could go to jail for smelling like you smell. Look at you, you dumb tramp.’
‘Don’t talk to me, shit. Find another shit to talk to. Why d’you talk to me?’
‘Because I love it,’ I said. ‘I … love it.’
To the careless observer, at least, the night of September 30th would have looked like any typical U and I evening. Everything quite normal and under control: my prompt return from work, Ursula knitting and pondering while I changed and boozed, Gregory’s incurious roam through our rooms (he goes to wash off the taint of other people’s air), the meal at the three-time-losers’ wine bar, the walk home — no hands — along Queensway (loud shop windows but it’s dark behind, the odd tramp or spinning, gesticulating drunk — all nice and nasty for Ursula), then the reassuring dimness of our suite: the little fan-heater belching rhythmically in the corner, the thick curtains shut, the dividing door wide open until it is time to go to bed. I visit the bathroom second (where I catch my eye in the mirror. I pee, by the way, in the basin these days; it’s quieter like that, plus which it reminds you to wash your cock). ‘Come soon,’ I say, on the way back, as usual.
Ah, but things are different tonight and I think she knows it (I hope she does). For my manner has changed — subtly yet radically my manner has changed. No longer am I the shrugging, grateful, ironic foster-brother, the cowed denizen of a changing city, the young man who is just about holding on. No, tonight he is calm. His words are few and far between. He listens to Ursula’s directionless and interminable commentary on her day (the one that can only end: Then I came here. Now I’m talking to you about it) with the air of a preoccupied parent. He is authoritative, even rather cold perhaps, in the dark restaurant, ordering straightaway for this young girl he has brought with him; he settles the bill and stands to leave, his gaze elsewhere. And when he escorts her down the overlit shaft of Queensway, his demeanour and stride have something of the epic serenity of the child murderer — the assumed prerogative of adulthood, nothing bad can happen if you stay at my side, the offer of toffees through his whisky breath, come with me little one — tickled and thrilled by the audacity of his needs, the ravenous applause in his brain.
She is beside him, in her nightdress.
Take if off, he says.
I’m cold.
Take it off.
I’m cold, Ginger.
Don’t call me Ginger.
You said I could.
I was lying. You can’t. Take it off.
Oh …
That’s better. No. No, not yet. Wait … Be still.
… No, don’t do that.
Why not?
Please.
Why not?
Just don’t.
Why not?
Oh please don’t.
That’s very childish, Ursula. And extremely unnatural. Why don’t you want me to do to you what you do to me? Eh? Eh?
I just don’t.
That’s the way a child answers, Ursula. And that’s the way a child behaves.
Oh, I’m going back to bed.
You certainly are not! Now that’s what I mean. Ursula, how do you expect people to love and protect you when you behave like this? Tell me, Ursula, please — I’d really like to know. There are people who will look after you, and I am one of them, but if you go on behaving like this we will all go away. We will all go away because you are behaving unnaturally, because you are tonto … Now, yes … that’s right, that’s all you have to do — see? — just lie back, no need to cry now, just want you to — ah-ah-ah, tonto, Ursula, tonto … Yes that’s right, that’s right, that’s right.
He is down there feeling like an exultant gargoyle, probing, sniffing, staring, feasting, when Ursula shudders and jerks, half-crossing her legs (and dealing him a mighty crack on the chin with her bony kneecap), as if she has heard someone coming in the distance. He is about to spit some crudely high-minded rebuke — when he hears it too. Snap. In a spurt of clumsy terror, he has wriggled galvanically from the bed. The light comes on like a flashbulb and the dirty boy crouches stranded in the middle of the room as the door swings open.
(ii) I used to love the man I
would become — GREGORY
Who’d have thought it?
Yesterday morning I happened to stroll past the Underground station on my way to the bus-stop. I was looking in superb form, with my cape fanned out behind me like Superman’s, wearing some crackly new snakeskin boots, my hair spruced high by an expensive haircut. On an impulse, I paused and peered into the black and yellow grot of paper-stalls and ticket machines. A big-shouldered Scandinavian hitch-hikerette, crippled by a lumpy green knapsack the size of a rolled double-mattress (no doubt housing a kitchen range and a three-storey tent), gazed at me with listless desire. A middle-aged American couple — they had to be American: how else the matching Pickwickian check of their trousers? — wheeled about arm in arm, looking for a sign … — Why not? I thought. I marched straight in, purchased a ticket and a Times, entered the half-full lift (some monkey checking my ticket over), and descended without incident to the platform, into which the silvery bullet at once exploded. I got in — and read a quite shrewd leader on the economic collapse as the train zipped beneath the city. When I emerged into a great wash of sunlight at Green Park, and stood bantering with the deliciously sideburnt flower-boy (who gave me my Camberwell rose for free), I turned and looked into the pit of harm from which I had triumphantly climbed. Well, I thought, that’s put paid to that.
Recognize the style (I suppose I’d better change that too now)?
If you believed it, you’ll believe anything. It was a lie. The very entrance to the Underground makes me want to pee with dread. I cross the street to avoid it, as one might to avoid a boring friend, or a foaming dog, or a flailing drunk. I’m not going back there ever again. Ever.
It was a lie. I tell lies. I’m a liar. I always have been. I’m sorry. Here come the secrets.
My job, for instance, is, and always has been (to put it mildly), fucking awful. It is a round of boredom and humiliation, with no prospects and no rewards. I have to make the tea now (I always did have to, actually), and clean the lavatory on my knees. I spend two hours a day polishing frames in the stock-room. I have to deliver paintings all over London (I haven’t told the Styleses about the Underground and me. It takes hours: the stacked buses are late and go nowhere I need to go. They get very angry with me and there’s nothing I can say). I sweep up. They never let me do any selling. They treat me like a nasty schoolboy. They don’t even fancy me, not any longer. They pay me exactly half the nationalaverage wage, less than anyone I know or have ever heard about. And they say that this will soon be cut, because they are going under too.
I worry about money all the time — I feel like the buckled L of a pound sign or like a note on a thin rippling banner. I daren’t open letters any more. I’ve sold whatever I had that I could sell. That ‘expensive’ green car of mine (absent, you’ll have noticed, for some while now) went long ago: I hoped they might give me perhaps £100 for it, but the village idiot at the Garage of Thieves said that I’d be lucky to sell it for scrap (the brute was quite right of course: it was a worthless car, barely capable of getting you down the street). I haven’t bought any new clothes since March; I go on about the bounty of my wardrobe, but indeed it is sorrily threadbare now (and most of my clothes are ridiculous —
I can’t wear them to work). Buying anything non-essential makes me feel furtive, criminal, a counterfeiter. Damn it, any exchange of money for goods fills me with inordinate fear. Inordinate? I cannot live on the money I am paid. Nobody could. I cannot get to and from work every day and eat and not quite go mad. I cannot stay alive on what I earn. My overdraft grows in lines of figures and print, spawning bank charges, interest payments. I can no longer read a book or even watch television without this other drama rearing up inside my mind, mangling page and screen. I cannot do anything without money leering over my shoulder. I think about money all the time. Money has robbed me of everything I had.
And there is no more where I came from. Oh, we’re posh all right, and I really do hate the yobs (as they hate me — I can see that now. They will turn on me soon. They are waiting. I am waiting. I live in perpetual fear of violence. A young man approached me abruptly in the square last week and I veered away with my arms protectively raised. The young man looked puzzled, concerned; he only wanted to know where the Underground was. Any scuffle or disturbance in the street — and there are plenty these days: the world is boiling up; everyone is getting nastier; everyone is drunk; everyone is desperate — makes me sweat and makes me run. I don’t walk out at night if I can help it. People are waiting there to break my teeth. People are waiting there to do me harm), but we never had much money, and my father has nearly spent it all, that mad fuck (my language will be the next to go). It lasted his time. It won’t last mine. Thanks. I wish now that I had studied more, and done all that. But I didn’t do anything. I thought proper people didn’t need to. They do now.