Success (21 page)

Listen.

Yesterday a sinister and wonderful thing started to happen to me.
Suddenly
(I got home at six-thirty. Ursula and I had one of our quiet evenings together, me drinking and reading and going bald in my room, her knitting and muttering and going mad in hers, but the door between us ever-open)
I knew what I had to do
. Ursula had used the bathroom and was contentedly sitting up in bed by 9.45. About an hour later, Gregory wandered vaguely through to use the bathroom himself, pausing for a rare chat with his sister before wandering vaguely back upstairs. I went through soon afterwards for my own discreet trickles and swabs. On the way back I stood over Ursula’s bed, as usual, and leaned forward to kiss her chastely good night.

‘Come to my room,’ I then said.

‘Mm?’

‘I said come to my room. Come to my room,’ I said.

I switched off my bedside lamp and lay there in tingling naked incredulity, the colourful darkness thudding against my eyes, my heartbeat filling the room, my nose sniffing at the aromatic vacuum, my eardrums peeled for the answering ruffle of blankets and the creak of the adjoining hinges. Before any sound could impose itself on the silent thunder — there she was beside me, a warm downy presence of skin and light cotton.
Christ
. I made no move but then she furled her arms about me in a confident, childish, deeply unsexual embrace and for a time we lay there like sleepers, hardly daring to breathe, her jawline
snug in my pit, the caps of her knees oddly cold against my thigh. (Is this it, I thought, or is there more?) I made an almost imperceptible gesture, as if to kiss her, turning on my axis hardly a tenth of an inch, and sensed her stiffen — likewise when I brought a hand up and placed it fraternally on her forearm. Momentarily I felt a sticky uncertainty at the centre of my being — like the panic-second of readjustment after frightening dreams, or like a trivial, charmless memory that says hello every day — but then the little secret clicked and suddenly I knew again what I had to do. I let the secret out.

‘Do it,’ I said.

‘Mm?’

‘I said do it,’ I said.

‘Oh.’ At once her thin hand appeared on my chest. Briskly it trailed downwards. With an unthinking grunt she propped up her head on an elbow and slid a few inches down the bed to improve her purchase. I heard her yawn complaisantly, and parted my trembling lids to see the angled, downward-pointing face, the mouth set in featureless concentration.

And she likes me. At first I half-expected a schoolgirl
tsk tsk
from my no-nonsense bedmate, but after a few patient caresses I found that I was able to offer myself up to those small fingers. Although her movements were strictly mechanical (and never more so than in the trills and graces she executed with her knuckles and nails), it didn’t seem at all like distaste — more like affectionate conscientiousness. I lost myself until I felt my muscles tighten and Ursula came closer in response to give me the full action of her arm. Confusedly I made as if to take her hand away (you needn’t, you needn’t) but her hand was resolute and unsqueamish and I voided with a
whoosh
of hilarious remorse.

‘There,’ said Ursula firmly, like a nurse, and whispered, ‘I think I’d better go back to my room now.’

I turned awkwardly to kiss her and her mouth was nowhere to be found.

‘No kisses. Never on the lips.’

‘Oh, love, love.’

‘You’ll never leave me, will you,’ she stated.

‘No, never, never.’

‘You won’t tell Gregory, will you.’

‘No, I won’t, I won’t.’

‘Good night, Ginger. Whoops. I can’t call you that, can I?’

‘Yes, you can, you can.’

Happy birthday, Terry. It doesn’t take much to make you better.

That morning I brought Ursula tea in bed (‘Happy birthday, Terry’), kissed her on her lineless forehead and gave her a note saying that I loved her and would always protect her (one thing about incest — there’s no point in playing it cool. They cannot get away. They cannot hide out. They just cannot hide out), and strolled like a mawkish schoolboy up a freshly discovered mews to the Underground. I paused for two whole minutes to watch a high-flying, string-trailing jet, no more than a glinting crucifix in the deep blue above the thin salty clouds. Even the bang and shudder of the Underground kept saying a new thing to me: purpose (there are reasons why people go to work). As soon as I was in the office I rang her, frantic for assent that my life had changed. How are
you
? Are you all right? I’m fine, fine. How are
you
? Are you sure you’re all right? It wasn’t enough: I rang back ten minutes later. Did you read my note? It’s true what I said. It is. Don’t worry about anything ever again. And it was the same that afternoon: I couldn’t keep away. Me again. Sorry. Can I buy you a nice dinner tonight? I love you. Why? I always have. Don’t ask why. I love you.

Why? Because she gave me my cock back, is why. I felt so changed, so brazenly transformed, that I kept expecting mad Wark, or whoever, to come up and say, ‘Hey, what’s happened to you? Did somebody give you your
cock back or something?’ Yes, somebody sure did. In several respects, I grant you, it’s far from ideal. Ursula is more or less my sister, for instance, and she often seems to be unclear about what exactly is going on. This introduces an arbitrary element — I feel like the Jacobean trickster who impersonates an absent husband in the dark bedroom, or like the lucky sailor who gets to go first in the gang-bang queue: if they knew what I knew (I feel), they wouldn’t be
quite
so keen. But, Christ, Gregory did it too (didn’t he?), and he really
is
her brother. And it’s a start. And who am I to be critical?

I wanted to sprint home that night, but even in the routine delays and prevarications of the afternoon there was something cool and erotic. I loved the man who sold me my evening paper, and I returned the hello of the tobacconist with courtly particularity. The yellow lights of the tube-entrance machines, with their embossed patterns of fares and destinations, made a dusk of the indoors, and as I rode the descending staircase into the grey vault I felt as if a large and watchful creature were welcoming me to its deep preserve. My train raced beneath the city, bursting out of tunnels, creeping back in and bursting out again.

All kinds of surprises awaited me. When I came bounding and barking into the flat, holding two presents for Ursula in my mouth, my tail thumping on the carpet, who should I encounter but fucking
Gregory
(who the fuck is
he
?), sitting with Ursula in her room. But — down, boy, down, and it was such a piquant joke on the past to have
her
making covert, placating gestures at
me
. I offered, greatheartedly and at once, to take them both out to the expensive French place in Dawn Street (I got a birthday bonus from work, too. £25. Happy birthday, Terry). After we had dispersed to change I fawningly offered Ursula her presents — a cashmere jersey and some scent — which she accepted with grave delight, placing a quick kiss on my forehead. Dinner made me feel secure, even pampered, a prince for a day — Greg silently gluttonous
(much inspired, no doubt, by the shimmering prospect of not paying for what he ate and drank), Ursula calm and attentive, as I guided the meal along.

‘I suppose this is our joint birthday party,’ I said at one point.

‘Yes,’ Gregory agreed, ‘I suppose it is.’

We walked home three-abreast, Ursula between her brothers. To my grateful relief, Greg gloomily proposed going to bed straightaway, so Ursula and I walked in single file down the passage (Good night, Good night, Good night) and wordlessly, unsmilingly, we set about our motions of storage and ablution, like people who had lived together all their lives. I walked out of the bathroom, dressing-gowned, and moved past her bed with hardly a backward glance. I lay there, waiting, a last cigarette my taper. She came (with a quick tiptoe through the darkness, the soft kittenish spring landing her knees-first by my pillow, the nervous burrowing slither). And so did I.

August is the month when we both have our birthdays — the shattering, Nostradaman coincidence that so excited my father. Do you know, by the way, what the twinkly old twerp is up to now? According to Mama, he is landscaping a useless field in some corner of our estate, at colossal expense, with ha-has, mirages, the lot. Mama and I are formulating long-overdue plans to have him
put away
, yes
put away
, before he pauperizes us all.

This proximity of our birthdays was always, naturally, the cause of much gruelling pain for Terence and even of some rather poignant embarrassment for me. Thirty or forty friends usually seemed about right for my parties, and since most of my friends were delivered to Rivers Court by their parents, and since most of my friends’
parents were my parents’ friends, why, the house was more or less thrown open and a carnival, holiday air blessed the entire estate — the tap-tap of marquees being erected on the lawns, every passageway junction zigzagging with precipitate, grim-faced servants, the good cottagers (folding their caps in their hands like newspapers) getting their low-octane punch at the side door, the vast driveway rimmed by fat silent cars like rhinoceros at a river-bed, the cacophonous clatter of the hired steel band, the fruity
zoot
of kazoos, whistles and streamers, that flowery throng of high summer. Poor old Terence! I believe it was at my suggestion that we once put through the disastrous scheme of combining the two celebrations. Picture, if you will, the contrasting piles of presents in the drawing-room — T.’s humble rubble of half-a-dozen family tokens next to my fabulous, piratical haul. Imagine, if you can, the wincing introductions — ‘And this is little Terence (the boy we’ve adopted), whose birthday it also is today, well, not today exactly — it’s just that …’ And contemplate, if you must, the split-screen spectacle of the chosen son, metaphorically aloft on the shoulders of the crowd, in a blizzard of confetti and love, and the nauseous, cowering, hot-faced interloper who was always hiding, always hiding. Thereafter we reverted to the standard arrangement, my mythic
mardi gras
being preceded by a small, domestic tea-and-crackers affair in which the servants were bribed to play a prominent part. (Terence attended the village school, and had no doubt formed some sort of preference for a selection of his colleagues there. But we couldn’t have the spore of, say, the local street-cleaners, rat-killers, shit-shovellers, and so on, up to the Manor Hall. Now could we?) Ursula and I suffered the mandatory low spirits which such an inequality would tend to enforce, yet frankly we were far too absorbed in one another for Terence’s miseries to be truly ours. You see, those years entirely belonged to Ursula and me — Ursula, whose growing body I knew as well as I knew the shape of my own teeth — and the
huff-and-puff of Terence’s doomed and squalid life, with all its humiliation and hate, seemed an infinitely postponable thing, merely an image of the frenzied greed, stupidity and filth which suddenly beleaguers us now.

I wonder what will happen this year (last birthday I went to the Court, but I’m far too tied up these days) … I expect I shall take a couple of dozen friends out for a slap-up dinner at Privates’, that new place in Chelsea. Then, too, Torka will no doubt throw some extravagant party round one. There’ll be the usual salvo of presents and telegrams, and that large cheque from Mama. Wonder what Terence will do for his … Nothing, is the most appealing possibility, though perhaps he’s hoping not to become a tramp until the day
after
! (I don’t imagine you realize that Terence pees in the washbasin? Well, he does. On several occasions recently I have found the porcelain stained — at loin height — by a slug’s trail of yellow. It’s only a hypothesis at the moment, but one that will shortly, I am confident, turn out to be susceptible of proof.)

Now
— say quickly: What do you think of me? What do you think of me, Gregory, Gregory Riding, the being I am? Let’s hear it — haughty, vain, florid, contemptuous, lordly, superficial, corrupt, conceited, queer — and insensitive, above all insensitive (look how he gives himself away). Actually I’m extremely self-aware. You fool, do you think I don’t know all that, all
that
? You fool, I know it, I know it all, you
fool
.

Listen.

Yesterday a sad and irretrievable thing started to happen to me.

I rose at nine. It was sunny. I had a cup of tea and a square of toast. I walked to the underground station in Queensway. The lift was taking one of its frequent days off; I descended the endless steel staircase, my hair scattered by dirty winds from the earth’s core. At once
the metal train rushed from its hole, an ugly beast sprung from a trap. I entered the half-full carriage and stood, as usual, in one of the door-bays. Everything was as it always is, the suspended hand-holds wiggling at the car’s every lurch, the sodium lights fading and strengthening again with a blink, the powerful whine of the undercurrent, the muck on the floors, the heat, the passengers sitting stupidly face to face. Then it started to happen. As the train surged with a
whoosh
out of Lancaster Gate, as the tunnel walls went black and the lights fluttered, then (like the thud of air from a nearby explosion, like the
excuse me
of a sick memory, like the sizzle of mixing chemicals) I felt it, felt it in an instant, felt as if I’d been mad for years, as mad as a mad old sheep in a drizzling field under sodden skies. No, don’t do this to me, don’t do this to me, no. I got out at the next stop. I climbed to the colourful surface and stood scratching my hair in the mad motion sculpture of Marble Arch, the traffic going on and on, the clouds scudding away above my head.

What happened to me down there? Something did. Physically it was real enough all right — cold sweat, shortness of breath as if my heart were fighting to get out, a bodily tremor too deep to reveal itself in shaking or in shouting either. I saw at once that, like a prentice bicyclist or a first-time-flung equestrian, I would have to go straight back, back into the underground, the nethers, the underside, and I turned, repurchased a ticket, and stood like a doll on the descending staircase as the hammers pounded louder and the dark air swirled and my body (the sweat, the tremor, the heart) again picked up its rhythms. It took every neutrino of my resolve not to turn and race back up the moving steel treadmill like a crazed hamster. And to go on, deeper into all that? — no, no, not a chance. I walked swiftly from the
down
to the
up
staircase and with huge strides raced out into the light.