Getting It Right (7 page)

After some juggling, they agreed to slot Dr Blenkinsopp into the following Tuesday afternoon at one forty-five (bang would go another lunch hour, Gavin thought), and Daphne said she would offer
the appointment and come back to them.

His next client, Mrs Blake, was a permanent. Her hair was in poor condition – very dry and with the ends splitting, and, strictly speaking, she shouldn’t be having a perm at all, but
his earlier attempts to dissuade her had met with an almost hysterical resistance, and sensing that she was very unhappy, he did not want to make things worse. He apologized for keeping her
waiting, and as her eyes met his in the mirror he realized that things were much worse than usual. She wore far too much make-up – as though she was only meant to be seen at a distance, and
her eyes, set in the peach and biscuit pottery of her face, had always seemed, like a clown, to provide an uneasy contrast, but today they gave him a shock – she looked as though she was in
hell. He felt for his comb and cleared his throat.

‘I’ve been thinking about your hair since we last talked, and I was wondering how you would feel about a short cut – ’ he ruffled her hair gently with the comb –
‘fairly close all over the head, and then a light permanent? The style would suit you and be better for your type of hair.’

‘Perhaps that would be the best thing.’ He thought she smiled and he responded as though she had.

‘Would you like a cup of coffee? Or would you rather wait until you have your sandwich?’

She shook her head and, as though the movement had upset them, tears filled her eyes. For a moment she sat, blind, holding her breath and resolutely smiling. Gavin wanted to put his arms round
her. Instead, he drew a protective curtain round the cubicle, murmured something about fetching his scissors, and went to find Jenny.

‘Get my client a cup of coffee, would you?’

‘Mrs Silkin’s in.’

‘I know she is. Get
her
to get it. Quickly.’

‘Okay.’

At that moment, Mrs Silkin minced past them carrying exactly what he wanted. ‘Could I possibly lift that off you?’ He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial hiss:
‘Client’s up
set.
’ Mrs Silkin’s expression melted from ‘
Do
you mind?’ to ‘Poor thing!’ and she made as if to follow him. He felt for
the 20p tip Mrs Shack had given him and popped the coins into Mrs Silkin’s overall pocket. ‘Here’s her money.’

When he returned to the cubicle she was smoking.

‘I don’t know why I
offered
you coffee,’ he said: ‘clients who are having a perm get it for free. Seems a pity to waste it.’ He put the cup in front of
her, settled the towel round her neck, and with every appearance of extreme concentration began cutting her hair. After a bit, she asked him what he was going to do for his summer holiday and they
talked a little about Greece: she had once been on a cultural cruise of the kind that provided lecturers to go with the sight-seeing. A bit too much like a school holiday, she said; she had never
liked doing anything in groups. But, by the time he sent for Jenny for her first hair wash, she seemed much calmer.

‘Use a nice lot of conditioner,’ he said to Jenny, ‘I’ll take Mrs Wagstaffe out.’ Mrs Wagstaffe insisted upon sitting under a hairdryer because she disliked being
blown-dry, and with the shortage of juniors this was really a blessing. Sherry made a half-hearted attack on him, but Gavin recognized this as being more a matter of form than of purpose. Mrs
Wagstaffe gave him 25p in a conspiratorial manner – almost as though she was slipping him some heroin – and, when he had helped her to struggle into her thickly-lined Burberry, he was
free to have a quick coffee before dealing with the tricky permanent.

Peter had got in before him. This meant that he occupied the only stool in the tiny annexe off the coffee cupboard. Peter had recently got married after a three-year engagement to a girl who
worked as a secretary to an accountant. For three years they had saved to buy a flat and, each time they thought they had enough to suit their mortgage company, inflation had put the whole thing a
couple of thousand pounds out of reach. Gradually, they had given up everything: holidays, the squash club (they had met playing squash), visits to the cinema – except once a month –
eating out, smoking, and going to the pub. He had gone to carpentry classes and she had learned upholstery. Even their eventual wedding had been conducted with the utmost economy and they had spent
their honeymoon painting and papering, making bookshelves and laying lino.

They still seemed to spend the most strenuous evenings stripping paint off doors, sanding and polishing their sitting room floor and tiling bits of the bathroom. Peter had a beard, which added
to his ravaged and rather missionary appearance, and this morning he looked more exhausted than usual. Gavin knew that the most casual question elicited floods of response (this was why he knew so
much about the flat), and as he was feeling the need of a peaceful break, he smiled at Peter and leaned against the draughty window to watch two pigeons on the fire escape, remarking that they
seemed to be getting on very well together. But for Peter, who was capable of relating almost anything to his personal life when he wanted to, this unfortunately provided the perfect opening.

‘
You
can laugh,’ he began bitterly: ‘pigeons are one thing. You’re not married.’

Gavin, who hadn’t been laughing, felt less like that than ever. ‘What do you mean?’ he said – exactly as (he knew) he was meant to say.

‘Spring, and nature and all that jazz. It’s got into Hazel now. What do you think she said to me last night?’

Gavin shrugged, divided between wanting to look as though he didn’t want to know, and feeling he ought to look as though he did.

‘She told me – and we hadn’t even finished getting the cork down in the toilet – she calmly told me that she wanted to leave the bank and start a baby!
Hazel
said that!’ he added, as though it might have been better coming from anybody else.

Gavin, wishing that his coffee wasn’t too hot to drink, murmured something about girls who got married often feeling like that, but this, so far from being oil on troubled waters, was more
like setting a match to the oil.

‘But it would throw everything out! You know we’ve got this five-year plan? We’ve done all the sums, everything worked out: we live on my salary, including rates, heat and
light, etc., and hers pays off the mortgage and the H.P. payments on the fridge,
and
she saves a bit towards a larger flat.
When
we get the larger flat (by which time the H.P.
payments will have been paid and hopefully a washing machine as well),
then
she can start to think about a family, but even then, as I pointed out to her again and again last night,
there’s bound to be some sort of mortgage on the larger flat, and if she’s not earning anything we shall be pretty tight for money for a good five years after that. It’s all in
the book. We spent hours working it all out, and I got a friend of mine who’s an accountant to check the figures so it isn’t as though she can say the figures aren’t
right
. But, if she starts acting up and just doing what she
feels
like, we’re sunk. I knew women were difficult, but I thought she wasn’t like them. She hasn’t
even worked out what it would
cost
to have a baby, quite apart from there being nothing to pay for it
with.
’

Gavin suggested that perhaps the actual baby wouldn’t cost much, but Peter knew all about that. ‘Oh, yes they
do
! They keep needing larger and larger clothes and all those
gadgets to stop them doing anything. Pens and slings and high chairs!’ he exclaimed. ‘I don’t want to spend all my night classes making those!’

Gavin gulped down his coffee and prepared to escape, but he’d left it too late.

‘Tell you what. Come and see us. Have supper. We’ve worked out a rota for food to fit the budget, but I’ll pick you a good night. If you admired the flat,
and
said how
marvellous it would be when we’ve done X, Y and Z to it (I’ll tell you what that amounts to), it might impress her. Coming from a complete outsider.’

The thought of his being able to persuade a newly married total stranger that she couldn’t afford to have a child made Gavin want to scream with terrified laughter: what he actually did
was to mutter something about looking forward to seeing the flat one day and he must get back to his client. Later, as he wrapped the tapered wisps of hair in the paper soaked in the perming
solution and fastened each into its small roller, he wondered fleetingly what it would be like if people actually behaved to one another exactly as they felt, instead of filtering their reactions
until some suitable, thin response trickled through? Judging by his own double life in this respect, he thought it would frighten him, but as there seemed no chance of it happening, he allowed the
little squib of curiosity and exhilaration its brief and secret explosion. He would have shouted at Mr Adrian. He would have smacked that dog. ‘Don’t you be so bloody
patronizing!’ he would have said to Mrs Shack. And he would not only have put his arms round this poor lady, he would have told her that she had all the time in the world to tell him what was
making her feel so awful. If one thing led to another, these very different things would certainly have led to different things. He supposed that people couldn’t stand one another much
because they couldn’t stand one another at all. And then, when people in plays behaved, as they sometimes did, without the filter, it was called artificial and not like life. One of the best
things about art was it
not
being like life: surely most people knew that somehow or other? Take opera for example. But, before he could take opera, he realized that Jenny, who had been
standing on one leg handing him papers, had run out of them and was simply staring into space, and since the timing of a perm was vitally important, he had to send her off at the double for some
more, and however quick she was, this probably meant doing the head in two sections. He smiled reassuringly at the client and began squeezing more solution with a sponge on to the existing rollers.
Yes, given the state of the hair, it would certainly mean that, he realized as he unrolled the test curl. Well, it was his fault: his business to keep the juniors up to the mark: blast it though,
it was going to make the whole thing longer.

‘It’s a terrible smell, isn’t it?’

‘Not too good, I’m afraid.’ It
was
awful: something like roasted rotten nuts: he never got used to it.

‘I suppose you get used to it,’ but she said it anxiously and he hastened to reassure her.

‘It’s all in the day’s work. Jenny!’

Jenny scuttled back with the papers. ‘Someone had put them back wrong. I couldn’t find them.’

‘You should have collected enough in the first place,’ he said, but so mildly that she grinned as she apologized.

One way and another, Mrs Blake’s perm took longer than it should, with the result that he began to get behind with his appointments. His twelve o’clock didn’t turn up: she was
a tiresome woman who was given to breaking appointments on the ground that she didn’t feel up to it. She usually claimed that she was unable to let them know that she wasn’t coming in
because the telephone was always engaged, although, mysteriously, she was able to use it to make appointments. When Gavin had remarked on this to Iris, to whom Mrs Bletchley-Smythe also went, Iris
had made a minute little drinking gesture with one hand and unexpectedly winked. ‘How do you know?’ Gavin had asked. Iris had looked at him in a kindly, almost pitying way. ‘There
are signs,’ she said. Anyway, Mrs Bletchley-Smythe didn’t turn up, but Mrs Courcel did, with three hair pieces: two of them to be cleaned and reset, and one which she wanted used to
dress her hair after a wash and set, and he knew from experience that dressing Mrs Courcel’s hair in a new way was a time-taking affair. He managed to get her hair into rollers before he set
Mrs Blake, whose newly permed hair emerged from the wash basin in tiny corkscrews – he hoped not
too
tight, but it had taken very fast . . .

‘I look like a rather expensive doll! My hair, I mean – not the rest of me.’ Well, at least she was noticing – it had taken her out of herself a bit.

‘I’ll set it on rather large rollers to give it a soft effect,’ he said. ‘Mind you, a perm’s always a little bit tight to begin with. Or, if it isn’t, it
doesn’t last five minutes. Would you like to order a sandwich now to have under the dryer? Egg and prawn’s very nice, with brown bread. Mrs Silkin makes them with a little cress –
’ but he realized that he was entering Mrs Blake’s Danger Zone; she didn’t seem able to stand anyone offering her things. This time she nodded, and started to frown, so he sent
Jenny off to Mrs Silkin with the order, and bent over his trolley pretending to sort out the rollers to give her time to recover. But she didn’t recover; tears were making two tracks down her
face, she was holding her breath again, and, what both moved and frightened him, she began a small uneven rocking motion. This time, he took one of her hands in both of his, held it very firmly and
remained quite still, not looking at her face. It was meant to be a kind of repressive comfort; not the kind he wanted to give, but the only kind that circumstances would allow. Eventually, she let
go of her breath in a long muttering sigh and then said, almost briskly: ‘I shall have to blow my nose.’

He released her hand and stooped for her bag which was on the floor.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘if you stayed on one of the islands near Turkey – the Dodecanese I think they are called – you can get across to Turkey. You can get a boat
from Cos, for instance, they tell me.’

‘I don’t think I’m going to be there long enough, you see. I mean, I’ve never been to Greece, and two weeks isn’t very long to get the feeling of a new
country.’

‘Perhaps Turkey next year then.’

‘Can you manage without me, Mr Gavin, because Mr Hugo wants me to wash his client?’