The Outcast (16 page)

ritual and the shame became normal, too.

He hadn’t been able to get up to London until the next holidays and the fear of his father almost stopped him, but Lewis had

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been holding the memory of Jeanie close to him all through the long spring term. He had been at school and a child again, but he knew he had held Jeanie and kissed her and not felt like a child then. He pinned all his desire and all his hope onto her, and even his father couldn’t keep him from that.

He slipped out of the house on the last Saturday of the holidays. He got to the club long before it opened and went to a pub to wait. He got a drink and sat in the corner with it. The pub smelled of beer and the windows were dirty.There were stains on the red seats and two old men near him talking about dogs. He had got drunk in the pub, but not felt quieter like he normally did, just agitated and frightened about seeing Jeanie and angry with himself for getting that way. He had drunk some more and then gone back to the club and knocked again, but there was nobody there and he was angry, and when he hit the

door he couldn’t feel it.

‘Hey, man. Hey, Lewis, isn’t it? Remember me?’

Lewis turned around. It was the barman, Jack. He was standing just near him and Lewis hadn’t seen him and it took him a while to look at him properly now.

‘. . . Jack.’

‘Right. Jack. Come with me, man.’

Jack took him to a café and bought him a pie and some tea, and smoked roll-ups and chatted to the waitress about the police and licensing and raids on places they’d both heard about.The pie had thick brown gravy that shone, and the tea was brown too, and very strong. Lewis put sugar in it and drank it while it was hot enough to burn. When he’d finished, Jack pushed his tobacco tin over the table and Lewis shook his head.

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‘You came for Jeanie?’

Lewis nodded. Jack picked up his hat and examined the sweat band inside it minutely.

‘Where’s home, Lewis?’

Lewis had a feeling there was going to be a lecture. Jack had a look teachers sometimes got. Lewis was grateful to him, but he didn’t want to talk about anything.

‘Where’s home for you?’ he asked.

Jack nodded, accepting.‘I have a flat I share with another fella just up the road,’ he said, and then,‘Jamaica.’

Lewis had a vague picture of his school atlas and little islands in paper blue sea.

‘Lewis . . . you look to me like a boy in trouble.’

There was no arguing with that, but nothing to say about it, either.

‘What time will she come?’

Jack smiled at him.‘Jeanie pleases herself. Come back with me, I have to take a delivery.You can help me.’

Jack stayed up on the pavement and handed boxes to Lewis down in the cellar, who took them and stacked them. He got hot and took his shirt off to work because he didn’t have another one for the evening. Jack peered down at him. It had started to rain and he was wet from taking the boxes off the lorry. He laughed.

‘Forty-proof sweat, man!’

Afterwards Jack showed him where he could wash and Lewis put his shirt back on and they sat in the office for a while ‘resting’, and later on Jack counted out the float in the bar while an old man swept the floor.

The club opened and filled up, slowly, and Lewis sat at the bar and waited for Jeanie. He kept his eyes on the stairs and

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waited for her. Jack told him about the trumpet player who was going to play and how they’d booked him, and Lewis was inter- ested and happy to hear about it, but he felt he’d been waiting for a long time. It was very busy that night and the people and the dark and the smoke seemed to press against him. Jeanie would never come and the whole pitiful day had been leading to this – then he saw her coming down the stairs. First he saw her shoes, and then her legs. She wasn’t in green this time, she was wearing black. He saw black shoes, fishnets, and the bottom of her fur coat, wrapped around her with nothing showing underneath it, and then her gloved hand on the rail. She had a big beaded bracelet over her gloves that was pearl coloured and shone. She paused and her eyes scanned the room and she saw him and wasn’t surprised. She walked past the people standing at the bar and came over. Lewis wanted to get up, but didn’t move.

‘Hey, Jack,’ she said, keeping her eyes on Lewis. ‘Miss Jeanie,’ said Jack, not turning.

‘Waifs and strays.’

‘I couldn’t leave him in the street.’ Jeanie smiled at Lewis.

‘Don’t you look sweet,’ she said, and kissed him on the cheek.

Lewis couldn’t think of anything to say that didn’t sound stupid, so he kept quiet.

‘Where’ve you been then?’ ‘Nowhere,’ he said.

‘I know what you mean,’ she said.‘Jack looking after you?’

Lewis didn’t know what to say. He needed her and he didn’t know her and he was helpless. She moved up close to him and he put his head down into her neck, forgetting the people

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around them, and held her wrist, very carefully between his thumb and forefinger, looking at it.

‘Hey,’ she said, but she said it gently. ‘I’ve been waiting.’

‘And you wait so well,’ she said and laughed. ‘Come with me.’

Whatever he’d imagined – and his imagination had been vague – it wasn’t this. She had taken him into the office at the back, where he’d slept before. There were no windows and a bright bulb hanging from the ceiling. He hadn’t imagined, in his blurry schoolboy plan, that she would be so businesslike, or that he would have had her on a sofa, or that when he did have her it would feel like it did.

At first there was the need for her, needing to touch her and get to her and not knowing how, and then, when he was inside her, it was exquisite, and overwhelming. He shut his eyes and going into her was like going into the blackness inside his own head, and he had cried when he came and wanted to keep on crying like a child and had to stop himself.

When it was over she had laughed. The sound of it was shocking to him. He didn’t know how he felt, but he couldn’t have laughed. Then she stopped laughing and clambered out from under him. She became very practical, fixing her face and her clothes and wiping herself, and Lewis watched her and felt lonely, but it was nice to watch her.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said,‘I can’t have children.’

He looked at the back of her; he couldn’t see her face, except for her mouth in the mirror as she painted it.

‘Why not?’

‘None of your business.’

‘Do you mind if I use the telephone?’ he said.

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‘No, I don’t mind if you use the telephone.’

She was laughing at him. He stood up and went to it. She seemed to realise he didn’t want to be overheard, or else she didn’t want to know.

‘You’ve got lipstick on your face. I’ll see you out there,’ she said and unlocked the door, and left him.

He went over to the mirror and got the lipstick off. He looked around the room. The bottom half of the wall was painted dark green with white above.The sofa had a rip in it. He picked up the phone.

‘Guildford 645,’ he said to the operator and after a while he heard Alice’s voice and got through.

‘It’s Lewis.’

‘Lewis! Where are you?’

‘I’ll go to Euston for the school train.Will you be there, with my trunk?’ His heart was beating very hard.

‘What? Are you all right?’

‘Will you be there? I need my trunk for school.’ ‘Yes. Of course.Your father—’

He put the phone down. Jeanie took him home with her that time.

Lewis had nearly missed the train in the morning and when he got to school he was put into detention for not being in proper uniform. It made him smile to have a child’s punishment for sleeping with a woman and not being a child any more. He had to translate some passages from
The Odyssey
, and he wrote about Odysseus trying to sail home to Ithaca and remembered he had used to write stories about heroes. He sat in the detention room with his writing drying on the lines and tried to remember what his stories had been about and what the heroes had fought for,

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but he couldn’t remember, and the light faded from the room as he sat there.After a while the master waiting with him stood up and collected his pages and put them in the rubbish bin in the corner and let him go up to his room.

When he was a little boy Lewis had seen his life in sections; before and after his father had come home and then, later, with and without his mother.The section of life he felt himself to be in now had a more common, universally recognised watershed. It was before and after Jeanie.The before had the sweetness he felt kissing her, and her being close to him that first time, and the after had the familiar coldness he felt when he had slept with her and ever since.

It was an odd affair, even to Lewis. He saw Jeanie just a few times each holidays – when he could get away from home, and bear the prospect of the consequences – and she hardly asked him where he’d been. He didn’t even know if she knew he’d been at school until one day she’d said, ‘It’s been ages’, and Lewis, feeling a small delight that she’d noticed, confessed,‘I’ve been at school.’ Jeanie had laughed again, opening her mouth wide, while he waited, nervous, and then she said, ‘I suppose posh boys don’t leave so young, do they?’

At first he had tried to hide his cut up arm from her, but she had seen it, and never said anything. Mostly she was sweet to him, but he never knew quite what she would be like. Some- times he’d have to wait in the club all evening before she noticed him and he got used to waiting and would talk to Jack and the waitresses, and the evenings without Jeanie were often easier and lighter than the evenings with, except for the need for her tugging at him. It made Lewis feel free to be a different person when he was in London and when he was with Jeanie, but it

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made him feel like nothing too, just invisible and that he deserved to be. A part of him was still a child, with a child’s need to be watched over and comforted, and Jeanie didn’t see him; even when he was in her bed with his arms around her, he felt entirely alone.

Before and after Jeanie, before and after the club, before and after jazz, and Soho, and knowing somebody who was black, and gin out of glasses, and learning to drive and smoking . . . Jeanie had taught him both of those last, and he would have loved her just for that. When he started smoking he couldn’t believe it – he hadn’t had any idea they made you feel like that; grown-ups smoked and didn’t give any indication that the tops of their heads were coming off, or that they couldn’t think straight. He supposed you must get used to it. He didn’t know how anyone could smoke a pipe; his father did and it was horrible and he couldn’t imagine how you’d start. Cigarettes were bad enough to begin with – although the hit of them was almost as good as drinking when you did – but a pipe, a pipe was just ugly and complicated and for old people. He’d never do that.

At home he was careful to hide himself; he never uncovered his arms, he barely looked Alice in the eye. Even when she tried to be kind he turned away from her, but all the time he hoped, shamefully, in his child’s heart, that she would notice him, and hold him, and help. The bad things he did had been useful at first, but now they were stronger than he was. He knew he needed her help, or somebody’s. He scared himself.

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hapter
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Alice had her new dress laid out on the bed and the different shoes she might put it with arranged nearby. She could hear Gilbert dressing next door and the familiar sounds of the wardrobe door opening and his footsteps.

‘Gilbert?’ ‘Alice.’

She put on her stockings and sat at her dressing table and looked into her own eyes and tried to see deep into herself.

‘What is it?’ He was in the doorway. ‘Aren’t you dressed?

They’ll be here in less than an hour.’ ‘Gilbert?’

‘What?’

‘My period is late.’ There was a pause. ‘How late?’

‘A week.’

‘It’s been late before . . .Well.We’ll see.’ ‘Gilbert . . .’

‘Don’t get your hopes up.’

‘I’m not. A whole week, though.’ He sat on the bed. She shouldn’t have told him.‘Wouldn’t you be happy?’ she said.

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‘You know I would be. It’s been a very long time for you.

Waiting. I know that.’

‘Then we’d be a proper family.’ ‘I know.’

She got up and went over and knelt in front of him. ‘I shouldn’t be excited.’

He stroked her face.

‘You’re looking very pretty,’ he said.‘Let’s just wait and see.

Try not to think about it.’ ‘No. I’m not.’

‘It never helps.’ ‘I know!’

‘Get ready now.They’ll be here soon.’ ‘I’m getting ready.’

Dicky Carmichael stood in the hall and tapped his watch and waited. The big house was all around him and he knew where each of the servants were and his wife and his younger daughter and the state of each room; how tidy or how warm and whether empty or being used for something; and he felt his control and he was satisfied with it. Except that he missedTamsin so much. The house without her felt wrong; almost under his hand and yet not quite under his hand.When she went to London it was practically intolerable not knowing where she was. He pictured her at parties, he imagined her being flirted with and he knew all of her dresses and wondered which one she was in and if she was warm enough and how late she was staying up and who with. Sometimes he pictured faceless boys taking her out onto terraces, or into strange bedrooms, and what they might do to her – what he had done to girls at that age – and he pictured their hands on her and had to control himself, and try to forget.

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‘Claire! Katherine! Will you come down now!’

Kit was sitting on her window seat, reading. She didn’t want to go down one minute before she had to. She’d spent the morning in the woods trying to light campfires with damp sticks and getting scorched and watery-eyed from smoke, and Claire had shouted at her and made her change. She chewed the end of her plait and turned the page.

‘Katherine! NOW!’

That was the tone that said, if you don’t come now I’ll save it up for later and if you displease me I’ll belt you. Kit wasn’t going to be bullied. She read another paragraph, just to show him, and then got up slowly.