Metroland (2 page)

The gallery was fairly empty that afternoon, and the woman was quite at ease with the portrait. I had time to impart a few speculative biographical details.

‘Dorking? Bagshot? Forty-five, fifty. Shoppers’ return. Married, two children, doesn’t let him fug her any more. Surface happiness, deep discontent.’

That seemed to cover it. She was gazing up at the picture now like an icon-worshipper. Her eyes hosed it swiftly up and down, then settled, and began to move slowly over its surface. At times, her head would cock sideways and her neck thrust forward; her nostrils appeared to widen, as if she scented new correspondences in the painting; her hands moved on her thighs in little flutters. Gradually, her movements quietened down.

‘Sort of religious peace,’ I muttered to Toni. ‘Well, quasi-religious, anyway; put that.’

I focussed on her hands again; they were now clasped together like an altar-boy’s. Then I tilted the binoculars back up to her face. She had closed her eyes. I mentioned this.

‘Seems to be recreating the beauty of what’s in front of her; or savouring the after-image; can’t tell.’

I kept the glasses on her for a full two minutes, while Toni, his biro raised, waited for my next comment.

There were two ways of reading it: either she was beyond the point of observable pleasure; or else she was asleep.

1 • Orange Plus Red

Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen; but this is a rare, lingering exception. At that age, everything seemed more open to analogy, to metaphor, than it does now. There were more meanings, more interpretations, a greater variety of available truths. There was more symbolism. Things contained more.

Take my mother’s coat, for example. She had made it herself, on a dressmaker’s dummy which lived under the stairs and told you everything and nothing about the female body (see what I mean?). The coat was reversible, pillar-box red on one side, an expansive black and white check on the other; the lapels, being made of the inner material, provided what the pattern called ‘a dash of contrast at the neck’ and chimed with the large square patch pockets. It was, I now see, a highly skilful piece of needlework; then, it proved to me that my mother was a turncoat.

This evidence of duplicity was corroborated one year when the family went to the Channel Islands for a holiday. The size of the coat’s pockets, it transpired, was exactly that of a flat-pack of 200 cigarettes; and my mother walked back through the customs with 800 contraband Senior Service. I felt, by association, guilt and excitement; but also, further down, a private sense of being right.

Yet there was even more to be extracted from this simple coat. Its colour, like its structure, had secrets. One evening, walking home from the station with my mother, I looked at
her coat, which was turned to show its red side, and noticed that it had gone brown. I looked at my mother’s lips and they were brown. If she had withdrawn her hands from her (now murkily) white gloves, her fingernails, I knew, would also be brown. A trite occurrence nowadays; but in the first months of orange sodium lighting it was wonderfully disturbing. Orange on red gives dark brown. Only in suburbia, I thought, could it happen.

At school the next morning I pulled Toni out of a pre-assembly kickaround and told him about it. He was the confidant with whom I shared all my hates and most of my enthusiasms.

‘They even fug up the spectrum,’ I told him, almost weary at yet another outrage.

‘What the fug do you mean?’

There was no ambiguity about the ‘they’. When I used it, it meant the unidentified legislators, moralists, social luminaries and parents of outer suburbia. When Toni used it, it meant their inner London equivalents. They were, we had no doubt, exactly the same sort of people.

‘The colours. The street lamps. They fug up the colours after dark. Everything comes out brown, or orange. Makes you look like moonmen.’

We were very sensitive about colours at that time. It had all started one summer holiday, when I’d taken Baudelaire with me to read on the beach. If you look at the sky through a straw, he said, it looks a much richer shade of blue than if you look at a large patch of it. I communicated the discovery to Toni on a postcard. After that, we started worrying about colours; they were – you couldn’t deny it – ultimates, purities of extra value to the godless. We didn’t want bureaucrats fugging around with them. They’d already got at

‘… the language …’

‘… the ethics …’

‘… the sense of priorities …’

but these you could, in the last analysis, ignore. You could go your own swaggering way. But if they got at the colours? We
couldn’t even count on being ourselves any more. Toni’s swarthy, thick-lipped Middle-European features would be completely negrified by sodium. My own snub-nosed, indeterminately English face (still excitedly waiting for its great leap into adulthood) was more immediately secure; but doubtless ‘they’ would think up some satirical ploy for it.

As you can see, we worried about large things in those days. And why not? When else can you get to worry about them? You wouldn’t have caught us fretting about our future careers, because we knew that by the time we were grown up, the state would be paying people like us simply to exist, simply to walk about like sandwich-men advertising the good life. But stuff like the purity of the language, the perfectibility of self, the function of art, plus a clutch of capitalised intangibles like Love, Truth, Authenticity … well, that was different.

Our coruscating idealism expressed itself naturally in a public pose of raucous cynicism. Only a strongly purifying motive could explain how hard and how readily Toni and I pissed on other people. The mottoes we deemed appropriate to our cause were
écraser l’infâme
and
épater la bourgeoisie
. We admired Gautier’s
gilet rouge
, Nerval’s lobster; our Spanish Civil War was the
bataille d’Hemani
. We chanted in concert:

Le Belge est très civilisé
Il est voleur, il est rusé
Il est parfois syphilisé
Il est donc très civilisé
.

The final rhyme delighted us, and we used to work the blurred homophone into our stilted French conversation classes at every opportunity. First, you would set up some worthy fumbler with a gallingly contemptuous remark delivered in simple language; the fumbler would lurch into

‘Je ne suis pas
, er,
d’accord avec ce qui, ce que?’
(a frowning look at the master) ‘Barbarowski
a,
um,
juste dit
…’

then one of our sniggering cabal would jump in, before the master could rouse himself from his depression at how thick
the fumbler was, with a

‘Carrément, M’sieur, je crois pas que Phillips soit assez syphilisé pour bien comprendre ce que Barbarowski vient de proposer
…’

– and every time they let it go.

We were, you may have guessed, mostly doing French. We cared for its language because its sounds were plosive and precise; and we cared for its literature largely for its combativeness. French writers were always fighting one another – defending and purifying the language, ousting slang words, writing prescriptive dictionaries, getting arrested, being prosecuted for obscenity, being aggressively Parnassian, scrabbling for seats in the Académie, intriguing for literary prizes, getting exiled. The idea of the sophisticated tough attracted us greatly. Montherlant and Camus were both goalkeepers; a
Paris-Match
photo of Henri de going up for a high ball, which I had sellotaped inside my locker, was as venerated as Geoff Glass’s signed portrait of June Ritchie in
A Kind of Loving
.

There didn’t seem to be any sophisticated toughs in our English course. There certainly weren’t any goalkeepers. Johnson was tough, but hardly swish enough for us: after all, he hadn’t even got across the Channel until he was nearly dead. Blokes like Yeats, though, were the other way round: swish, but always fugging around with fairies and stuff. How would they both react if all the reds in the world turned to brown? One would hardly notice it had happened; the other would be blinded by the shock.

2 • Two Small Boys

Toni and I were strolling along Oxford Street, trying to look like
flâneurs
. This wasn’t as easy as it might sound. For a start, you usually needed a
quai
or, at the very least, a
boulevard
; and, however much we might be able to imitate the aimlessness of the
flânerie
itself, we always felt that we hadn’t quite mastered what happened at each end of the stroll. In Paris, you would be leaving behind some rumpled couch in a
chambre particulière
; over here, we had just left behind Tottenham Court Road Underground station and were heading for Bond Street.

‘How about écrasing someone?’ I suggested, twirling my umbrella.

‘Not really up to it. I did Dewhurst yesterday.’ Dewhurst was a prefect destined for the priesthood, whom Toni had, we agreed, totally crushed in the course of a vicious metaphysical discussion. ‘But I might be up to an épat.’

‘Sixpence?’

‘Okay.’

We wandered along while Toni looked for subjects. Ice-cream vendors? Small fry, and hardly bourgeois enough. That policeman? Too dangerous. They came into the same category as pregnant women and nuns. Suddenly, Toni hoiked his head at me and started pulling off his school tie. I did the same, rolled it round four fingers, and pocketed it. Now we were just two unidentifiable boys in white shirts, grey trousers, and black jackets lightly specked with dandruff. I followed him across the road towards a new boutique (how we disapproved
of these linguistic imports); in large yellow capitals it announced
MAN SHOP
. It was, we suspected, one of those new and dangerous places where they’re into the changing-room after you, with rape in mind, before you can pull up your trousers. Toni looked round the assistants and picked out the most respectable-looking: ageing, greying, separate collar, a thick margin of cuff, even a tie-pin. Clearly a left-over from the previous ownership.

‘Yes, sir, can I help you?’

Toni gazed past him at the open-fronted wooden drawers of Banlon socks.

‘I’d like one man and two small boys, please.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ said tie-pin.

‘One man and two small boys, please,’ repeated Toni in a dogged-customer voice. The rules of the épat declared that you should neither giggle nor give ground. ‘It doesn’t matter about the size.’

‘I don’t understand, sir.’ That
sir
was pretty cool in the circs, I thought. I mean, the guy must be about to crack, mustn’t he?

‘For God’s sake,’ said Toni quite brusquely, ‘call yourself a Man Shop? I can see I shall have to go elsewhere.’

‘I suggest you do, sir. And which school are you at?’

We beat it.

‘Cool fugger,’ I complained to Toni as we flâned on at top speed.

‘Yeah. Think I épated him much?’

‘Must have done, must have done.’ I’d been really impressed, especially by the way Toni had picked the right assistant, not just the one nearest the door. ‘Anyway, you get your tanner.’

‘I’m not worried about
that
. I just want to know if I épated him.’

‘ ’Course you did. ’Course you did. Wouldn’t have asked for our school otherwise. Anyway, did you notice that
sir
?’

Toni gave a squint-grin, his mouth sliding across as if loyal to his eyes.

‘Yeah.’

It was that time of life when being sirred is of inestimable importance; a token coveted out of all proportion to its value. It was better than being allowed to use the front steps at school; better than not having to wear a cap; better than sitting on the sixth-form balcony during break; better, even, than carrying an umbrella. And that was saying something. I once carried my umbrella to school and back every day of a three-month summer term during which it never rained. The status, not the function, counted. Inside the school, you displayed it – fencing with your peers, pinning the shoes of smaller boys to the floor with a sharpened ferrule; but outside, it made a man of you. Even if you were scarcely five feet, your face a battlefield of acne shaded by vigorous adolescent fuzz; even if you walked lopsidedly, weighed down by a festering cricket-bag full of rotting rugger shirts and gangrenous boots; as long as you had your umbrella, there was always an outside chance you might collect a
sir
from someone, an outside chance of a bout of surging pleasure.

On Monday mornings Toni and I would ask each other the same questions.

‘écras anyone?’

‘ ’Fraid not.’

‘épat?’

‘Well, not exactly …’

‘Sirred?’

A teasing smile of assent would rescue the whole weekend.

We counted the number of times we were sirred; we remembered the best occasions and retailed them to each other in the tones of old roués recalling conquests; and, of course, we never forgot the first time.

My own first time, on which I still dwelt happily, occurred when I was measured for my first pair of longs. It was in a thin, corridor-like shop in Harrow, which was wall-papered with boxes of clothes; racks of camouflage windcheaters and corduroy trousers as stiff as cardboard turned it into an obstacle course. Whatever colour you wore when you went into the
shop, you always came out in grey or bottle-green. They did sell brown as well – but nobody, my mother assured me, wore brown until they were retired. On this occasion, I was booked to come out in grey.

My mother, though timid in her family and social life, was always precise and authoritarian in shops. Some deep instinct told her that here was one hierarchy which would never be disturbed.