The Japanese Girl & Other Stories

  That Boduel had made one mistake – in spite of his claim – did not become apparent until months afterwards, until well into the following summer. Philippa, who just never will allow things to rest, eventually located his wife, now living as Mrs Trelowarren in South Africa, where she had fled with a man who in his spare time still writes Celtic poetry.

  The Wigwam

  Business was bad when the young man came in. There’d been two customers all morning and there was nobody in either of the chairs. The young man sat in one of them and Bristow came across and met the other’s eyes in the big mirror.

  ‘Haircut?’

  ‘Not a cut. Hardly even a trim. But there’s one or two ragged edges. See here. And this. Then I’ll have a shampoo.’

  Bristow tucked in the none-too-clean sheet round the young man’s neck and fitted a strand of cotton wool between his neck and his collar. He began to snip, but warily, because the young man’s dark hair was the length that a girl’s used to be at the time when Bristow learned his trade. Bristow was forty-nine, a stocky rather stolid man who had none of the superficial chatter that successful barbers are supposed to have.

  So there was not much talk for a time, except about the way the young man wanted his hair done, and when that was finished it stopped altogether during the shampoo. Bristow rubbed the hair dry with a couple of small towels and then began to comb it out.

  ‘Thanks,’ said the young man, whose name was Morgan, ‘I’ll do that myself.’ Bristow stepped back resentfully and watched him.

  ‘Stranger round here?’ It was the best he could do in small-talk.

  ‘Yeah. Never been in Crowchester before. Pretty quiet, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, quiet.’

  ‘I suppose it’s the time of day.’

  ‘No, it’s quiet most times.’

  ‘Town seems pretty busy.’

  ‘Town may be. This is the wrong trade.’

  The young man was carefully and skilfully parting his hair, a hand and a comb flicking the heavy, still-damp hair into place, patting it and pressing it so that the natural slight wave was encouraged and moulded.

  ‘You know how to do that,’ said Bristow grudgingly.

  ‘Yeah?’ The young man was examining his reflection.

  ‘Like something on it?’

  They discussed sprays and pomades for a minute or two. The young man chose a spray. After the mist had died down and he had used his comb again he said: ‘Ought to know how to do this. It’s my trade too.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Hairdressing. Or one of ’em. I’ve been out of it for a couple of years.’

  ‘Where did you work?’

  ‘Brighton.’

  Bristow shook out the sheet. ‘You got out the right time.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. What makes you say that?’

  ‘All these …’ Bristow hesitated in time to avoid insulting young men who grew their hair long. ‘Fashion. Nobody has their hair cut any more.’

  ‘Maybe not. Or not in the same way. Chap I worked for in Brighton seems to be doing all right still.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What made you leave, then?’

  ‘I got a better job. Or thought it was.’

  ‘And wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was for a year or so. Then it folded. Some ways I’m sorry I left Brighton.’

  ‘Why don’t you go back?’

  ‘Someone else has my job. You’re right on that. They’re not taking on any more assistants.’

  ‘I sacked mine six months gone.’

  Morgan looked speculatively out of the window. ‘ There’s plenty of people about. Like I said. In a country town like this, fair buzzing with life …’

  ‘I can tell you the truth,’ said Bristow, shaking the sheet again. ‘And the truth is I’m thinking of giving up myself.’

  ‘Many others in the town?’

  ‘There’s Cowland’s at the other end. That’s all. But it don’t pay. My rates’ve doubled in four years. You don’t get it back. I tell you, when I moved here fifteen years ago there was queues on Fridays and Saturdays. No young fellow in those days thought he was properly turned out until he’d had a short-back and sides. Now you’re damn lucky if they come in for a trim-up twice a year. More often than not they do it at home!’

  Morgan said: ‘How much you going to charge me for that?’

  ‘Forty pence.’

  ‘Forty! Isn’t that something!’

  ‘Well, it was a trim and a shampoo,’ Bristow said belligerently.

  ‘Forty! It’s too cheap.’

  Bristow stared and then shrugged and dug for a cigarette in his pocket. ‘Your fancy Brighton shop can maybe get away with it, but you try asking more here.’

  ‘Have you tried?’

  ‘What? Well, no. But I know from what folk say. That’s what Cowland’s charge, and if I put my prices up, the few customers I’ve got would go up the hill.’

  Morgan stood up and went for his coat, put it on, passed a fifty piece. ‘That’s O.K.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  The young man had a green velvet jacket and tight corduroy slacks and yellow sandals. He stood in the centre of the shop with his hands in his pockets staring about him.

  ‘Cigarette?’ said Bristow.

  ‘No, I don’t. What’s the population of Crowchester?’

  ‘About 30,000.’

  ‘And plenty of villages around?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose. They come in here market days looking like a lot of damned gypsies.’

  ‘And two barbers. Look …’

  Bristow lit up and waited but the other didn’t speak. ‘What were you going to say?’

  ‘I was going to say did you want a partner?’

  Bristow threw the match through the open shop door. ‘You out of your senses?’

  ‘No. Not that I know. What lease have you got of this place?’

  ‘Oh. it’s not a lease. It’s the wife’s. Her father owned a bit of property and this was her share. But it’s only a lock-up. We’re thinking of selling it for what it’ll fetch.’

  ‘What about taking me as a partner instead? I’ll take no pay but we’ll halve the profits.’

  ‘Profits! You’re out of your mind, man!’

  ‘Well, it depends how you run it, don’t it. It all depends how you run it. I’d like to get back into the trade. Maybe we could talk it over sometime …’

  ‘Talk! There’s nothing to talk about! I shall count myself bloody lucky if I’m still in business by this Christmas!’

  The dark young man in the green velvet jacket sat down in one of the empty chairs and swivelled it round. He looked speculatively up at the ceiling.

  ‘The trouble with you, Mr Brais – what’s your name – Mr Bristow, is you’re out of date. Nothing else. Sorry to say so, but it’s true. You got to move with the times. Know what I should do if I was your partner here? Know what I should do?’

  Bristow looked at his watch and then decided to humour his customer. ‘No. You tell me then.’

  ‘Well, first of all, I’d divide this off so that instead of being one shop it was two compartments, like. And I’d put you in the first and I’d put me in the second. First, though – first I’d change the name of the shop. It wouldn’t be Bristow, Gent’s Hairdresser, with a pole outside. For crying out loud, a pole! I’d call it The Wig-Wam, or some such name. Men’s Hair Stylist. And I’d change the window altogether. Look at it now! It’s a dead loss. You’d be better without a window. All you got now is a skating rink for flies! I’d change it all, put a sort of backcloth in so that people couldn’t see into the shop. Then I’d dress the window with pictures of pop stars. Not the very way-out ones but the ones with good hair styling – the sort of hair you’d like yourself.’

  Bristow spat into one of the wash bowls, then turned a tap to rinse it away.

  ‘You can shampoo O. K.,’ said Morgan thoughtfully.

  ‘Well, thanks.’

  ‘No, I mean it. You’re
O.K. with that. You want some better shampoos, that’s all. So it’d be like this, see. A fellow comes in for the treatment. So he comes in to me first, and I advise him on a style, and I give him a trim-up or whatever I think he needs. Then he comes out to you for a shampoo. Then he comes back to me and I give him a styling. Presto, he goes away a new man!’

  ‘Pop stars,’ said Bristow. ‘They make me vomit.’

  Morgan swung his chair. ‘ You can think what you like but you’ve got to live with the times. Remember in the dark ages when you started it was the girls who used to cut pictures out of mags and say, I want my hair like – well, whoever it was in those days: Dietrich, Crawford, Garbo. Nowadays it’s the man’s turn. The women do it still but it’s the men who’re the new peacocks. Give ’em your sort of treatment: 25p. for a hair cut, short back and sides, and you will be out of business by Christmas. Give ’em everything women have – the works – charge ’em £2 a time, and Bob’s your uncle!’

  Bristow let out a slow breath. ‘Well, d’you know, just for a minute I was fool enough to get interested. I thought, maybe the lad’s got something. But now I know you’re barmy. Maybe you could get away with that sort of price in one of your fancy seaside towns like Brighton, but they’d drop dead before they paid that in Crowchester! Or anything like it! Try some other sucker, lad.’

  ‘The trouble,’ said the young man, ‘ the trouble is you don’t ever think of the way times has changed. When you began nobody under twenty-five had any money. Now they’re the big spenders. You think they won’t pay £2 for a special hair style? Who buys all the discs of pop music? I ask you. Young chaps think nothing of paying two or three pounds for a long play. They all have their own transistors. Look at the shops now. Maybe you’ve not got a Carnaby Street or a King’s Road in Crowchester, but I’ll bet there’s some shops cashing in. Three pounds, four pounds for a shirt or a pair of slacks. What d’you think these cost? These I’m wearing? You wouldn’t get the whole outfit for twenty-five quid. Think if I wear things like this I’m going to be content with forty pence spent on my head? It doesn’t make sense. Think it over. It doesn’t make sense either way up.’

  Bristow stubbed out the end of his cigarette and dropped it in the waste bucket. The shop was still empty. Outside a traffic warden was moving on a car that had tried to stop.

  ‘There’s a place up the road,’ he said. ‘Dailey’s. Used to be a draper’s. Now they’ve gone all mod. Might be selling stuff for a carnival. How they get rid of it …’

  ‘But they do, I reckon.’

  ‘They do, you reckon. Now you answer me one question, will you? Why’ve you come to me?’

  ‘Why? I didn’t come to you. I was passing through, visiting a lad I know; he’s got a garage, wanted me to go in with him but I said no. Cars aren’t my line. Messy. Why mess up your hands? They’re O.K. to drive. I drive a little Mini. But that’s all. Hairdressing, that’s what I like. And I’d a few hours to kill, so I thought I’d do a bit of prospecting, casing the joint, see what Crowchester’s got in the way of classy establishments. So I dropped in on yours.’

  Their eyes met. Bristow’s showed doubt and a vague suspicion; Morgan’s a cheerful irony.

  ‘No, it don’t make sense,’ said the older man suddenly, shaking his head.

  ‘O.K., O. K. I only asked. It was just a thought, as you might say. Scrub it.’ Morgan rose from his chair and began to comb his hair through again. It was nearly dry now and showed its fine texture.

  ‘What’s your proposition?’ said Bristow.

  ‘I’ve told you. Anyway you’re not interested. Go broke in comfort, and good luck.’

  ‘Oh, I’m interested, if this isn’t a have-on. But you can’t just come in here one morning and make a proposal after being here half an hour, a proposal that’d mean a – a complete change in everything. Sinking more money in the shop when I’m nearly on my uppers anyhow – taking a partner I’ve never seen till this morning.’

  ‘Well, I’m like that, see. Make up my mind quick –’

  ‘And unmake it just as quick?’

  ‘Yeh, I see, that’s a point … You mean you couldn’t do this on your own, and I might run you into the cost of it and then get browned with it all and fade. Yeh. Well, we’d have to get it in writing somehow. Articles of partnership or something. One of these writ-scratchers would know.’

  Bristow was not a quick thinker, and it worried him to have this proposition thrust at him until he had had plenty of time to look at it all round. The young chap was likeable enough so far as it went, and for all his free and easy manner he gave you a feeling that underneath he was business-like and all there. You could see he would be a success with customers because he had all that pleasant small talk that Bristow lacked. But it would lead to – Hell, it might lead to anything: a quick bankruptcy where before you might count on being able to get out in time.

  ‘What’ll you do,’ he said, ‘ if I say no?’

  ‘Get my car off of the car park and push on as far as Norwich. I’ve a cousin there, and he said to look him up if I was ever in these parts.’

  ‘And if I say yes?’

  ‘Oh … stay the night at some pub so that we can talk it over after this place is shut. Even if we don’t go so far as a lawyer, we’d have to have things fairly cut and dried.’

  Bristow chewed his bottom lip. ‘Well, it … You could do that anyhow, couldn’t you. See if it came to anything.’

  ‘Yeh, I could. If you’re interested. A day won’t matter either way.’

  ‘I tell you what. This is a lock-up, I told you. I got a bungalow down Parkers Lane, by the river. I’d like you to meet the wife, see what she thinks about it. Come to supper tonight. Seven o’clock we usually eat. Come at half six.’

  Morgan patted the back of a swivel chair as if inviting a child to sit down. ‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘I’ll do that. See you then.’

  TWO

  Bristow’s wife was fifteen years younger than her husband. He had married late, a shop girl who worked in the dress department of Fortescue’s, and she still worked there ten years after. Peggy was a good-looking blonde, a bit colourless, with not much more than a tendency to overweight. This she watched carefully, and she never corrected the natural pallor of her face because she thought this made her look slimmer and more delicate. She and Walter did not have much in common, and even had different groups of friends, but it was a marriage that worked as well as most. He claimed his rights twice a month, and with this she appeared to be content. Only sometimes when she went into the lounge bar of one of the local roadhouses with a couple of her girl-friends did she become shrill and bawdy.

  When Ken Morgan arrived for supper Bristow had told her of his coming but not why, and when she heard the proposition she was cautiously in favour of it. Eighteen years in business had given her a good sense of the practical, and for her it was not whether the idea was good – she could see it was good – but what it would cost.

  She behaved correctly and in a lady-like fashion to young Morgan, putting on the manner that she used when dealing with one of her better-class customers. He was cool, casual, alternately persuasive and indifferent. After supper they got down to detail.

  Six weeks later, after the shop had been closed for alterations for a month, the new men’s hair-styling salon, called The Wig-Wam, opened its doors to Crowchester’s inquisitive male youth. Very much as Morgan had first outlined it, the shop front had been changed, though without big structural alteration, so that against a black, silver-starred back-drop, a number of studio portraits of the more handsome and couth of the pop stars was arranged, and between them a half-dozen wigs on stands with names under them: Page Boy, Cavalier, Roundhead, Plantagenet, Brummel, and Aztec. Below the name was another card which read: Styled by Morgan.

  Inside, the shop had been divided into two parts and reequipped so that everything was of the most modem: basins, chairs, hair-dryers, waiting seats, mirrors. The bank, after some reluctance, had agreed to an increase i
n Bristow’s overdraft. Peggy Bristow, caught up by sudden enthusiasm, had advanced £500 out of her own savings.

  Crowchester’s young males came in, most out of plain curiosity, many of them, after being charged £2 for less than an hour’s treatment, never to return. Even those who did not begrudge the cost returned at long intervals. But In Crowchester and its surrounding villages and countryside there was a surprisingly large number of young men, and word of the salon got about. It grew to be rather the thing to try it once: young men joked with each other about it and compared heads.

  It was a hard first six months. Most of the old clients, such as they were, took themselves off grumpily up the hill to Cowland’s. A few customers, considering themselves overcharged, refused to pay, and over these Morgan took a soft line – very different from what Bristow wanted to do. ‘Let ’em go,’ said Morgan. ‘It’s all advertisement.’

  The style that first caught on was Page Boy. This was a bit of a surprise to Morgan himself because he’d thought it a bad name. But it happened that Lennie Heath was in a TV show in Norwich and chanced to come over and stopped in the shop and had a styling. After that seventy per cent of the young men who came in wanted a Page Boy. The salon became known farther afield: some said there wasn’t another like it in East Anglia.

  Bristow on the whole adapted himself well. He couldn’t work up a really good manner, and this was a drawback; but he could shampoo really well and he learned to do a modified trim for clients who didn’t want the whole treatment, Morgan was nice to everyone but he was never servile, and he never gave the impression of being effeminate. This was important. You went there for modem treatment for a man and you received it from a man – no nonsense about that.

  Morgan took a little flat in the High Street. It was down a narrow alley and had a back door looking on to the river. This was ill-lit and was convenient for getting out of and into unobserved. Twice a week Peggy Bristow visited him there.