The Rachel Papers (18 page)

'But I can't drive,' I said.

'But you had lessons ?'

'I know.' (Driving-lessons were the statutory seventeenth-birthday present in the mobile Highway family.)

'And you took the test?'

'I know. But I failed it.'

'But you took it again ?'

'I know. And I failed it again.'

'Well, it's too late now. Where did I put the keys?'

I went in mother's Mini, and nearly got old woman all over the bonnet, too.

After going through an affected little toll-bridge - the toll was the twee sum of three and a half pence -I got up to forty miles per hour as the road straightened out. At this kind of speed it was advisable to place the stiletto-heeled shoe, kept in a side-pocket for this purpose, over the gear-stick to prevent it jiggering like a pump-drill. As I did so. I noticed a scrawny figure two hundred yards ahead, motionless in the right-hand half of the road. To break her reverie I parped the horn. Instantly, she flew into a spastic life-or-death dash across my path, abandoning her hat, her shopping and a single brown slipper in a galvanized frog-march to the opposite curb. I changed down, slowed, and drifted to a lazy halt beside her.

'It was all right,' I said, returning her accoutrements, 'you could have just stepped back on to the pavement. Are you okay?'

She stared unseeingly before her, thinking: I'm fucked if I'm going out again.

I parked the car in front of Valentine's school, one of the better Oxford primaries, which nevertheless resembled a cluster of Monopoly hotels greatly enlarged, dirtier red, and with windows. Valentine, or his silly name, had been 'put down' for a second-rate public school but my father had decided not to send him to a prep school also. I searched for damaging significance in this policy as I walked up the lane dividing the school from the playing-field in which Valentine was supposed to be having his game of football. I warmly looked forward to interrupting it. My pace slowed.

Had I got over my obsessions about Valentine ? More or less. Those days were gone. Watching him marshal his hosts of friends, being asked to tick off the Harrods toy catalogue on December ist, dressed up by his mother like a spruce three-foot adult (he and I had switched from short to long trousers the same year: I was thirteen, he was four); on that spring day, eighteen months before - I was there, when Val rode his drop-handle racing bike down a schoolgirl-packed street, no hands, singing 'Hey Jude'. And that mad, wonderful summer: I sabotaged his bicycle, spiked his Lucozade with steaming urine, spat in his stew - I went as far as contemplating one ruse involving, well, a portion of vanilla junket, actually, but felt that I had already made my point. (As a rule, I too would deplore such behaviour. But this was - how shall I put it? -this was family.)

In the right-hand corner of the playing-field, about twenty yards away, four boys, one of them my brother, stood in a semicircle round a fifth. The fifth was a Fatty. He cringed against a shed-like pavilion. I crept up behind the goal-posts, and watched.

The Fatty wore a crochet jersey, odd socks in Clark's sandals, and patched short trousers (everyone else, especially my brother, was in longs). Home-cut hair capped a face well used to - seemingly almost bored with - fear: non-existent bush burned off every day at school, head kneed in every night by his over-glanded father.

Having looked round for encouragement or approval, one of the boys leaned over and slapped the piggy in the middle quite hard on the face. The other three took a step forward and joined in. I watched a bit longer, on the off-chance that Valentine would do something exceptionally odious, then signalled my presence with a yell.

I walked towards them. 'Piss off,' I told the Fatty, hoping that my intervention would be taken as a breaking-up of unruly horse-play rather than a bulliable rescue. The Fatty collected satchel and cap, and wandered off, breaking into a run as he approached the gate.

Tiss off,' I said to the other three. They hesitated and backed away. As an afterthought, I shouted out: 'My brother's too posh to mix with the likes of you.' They might beat him up on Monday.

'Hello, Valentine,' I said, 'had a good day? Enjoy your game of football?' He stood his ground, chewing lemon chewing-gum, hand on tailored hip. 'Why'd you pick on him? What did he do?'

'I didn't hit him a lot,' said my brother. The others did, mostly.'

'Did he do anything? Why were they hitting him?' Hatred was dissipating me.

'Everyone does.'

I stared at him. I could think of nothing to say, so I caught hold of his shoulder and boxed him on the side of the head. But without much conviction.

Rachel and I lay still on my bed. It was nearly dinner-time. (The pre-twenties aren't required to socialize; apart from meals they can come and go as they please.) My room, one of the three long, low attic rooms, was okay, allowing for the fact that I hadn't had a chance to do anything to it. Faddy ephemera covered its walls: posters of Jimi Hendrix, Auden and Isherwood, Rasputin, reproductions of works by Lautrec and Cézanne. The bookcase retold my adolescence: Carry
On, Jeeves, Black Mischief, The Heart of the Matter, Afternoon Men, Women in Love, Gormenghast, Cat's Cradle, L'Etranger.
A chess set, a drawing by my little sister, postcards on the mantelpiece. It was straightforward enough - nothing much you
could
do to it. However, the one vital adjustment had been made before we arrived. That morning, before school, before I had run out to pay my graft to the legless buskers: a panicky telephone call. I got Sebastian, and bribed him with the promise of ten cigarettes to fucking go up and change the light. There had been a pink-tinted bulb in the bedside lamp, so that any village girls I lured up there would know at once how sexy I was. Seb, as instructed, had put in a normal one. A bit outré for an urbanite like Rachel.

Most of the guests were there by the time I got back with Valentine. I joined Rachel and the au pair in the kitchen, gave beefy assistance gathering chairs and shifting the dining-room table. I led Rachel to her room on the first floor, then to mine on the second. Some low-pressure necking took place, soon modulated by me to include drowsy conversation. We talked as it got dark. We talked about our fathers, pretty well agreeing that women had it harder than men :

'Women have to cope with babies and periods and things, they carry the real responsibility.' I sighed. 'If a girl sleeps around she's a slag, if a boy sleeps around he's quite a guy. Society
and
Nature seem to be loaded against —'

'Do you think so? I don't think I do,' mumbled Rachel to my armpit. 'You'll probably say this is rather ... pissy, but babies are the only things women can have that men can't. And they should be proud of that. It evens things out, too.'

I considered attacking this view as doctrinaire, brainwashed, sexist, etc., but I said, 'I don't think that's at all pissy. How do you mean, it evens things out?'

'Well, let's face it, women usually look pretty terrible by the time they're thirty-five.
Scaly
faces. Figures go, hair gets matty and dry. Men often get better. At least their faces don't get all...' she yawned and cuddled nearer, 'scaly, like women's. So it's good that they can have families. Like your mother.'

Rachel was wearing a short red dress - no stockings. I placed the palm of my hand on the back of her thigh, where it became her bum, where the rim of her silky panties was.

'Maybe,' I said, moving my crotch back to make way for the erection. To give them something to do, you mean. But my mother's really in the shit. What'll she have when Valentine's grown up?'

'Mm. Suppose so.'

'Anyway, I'm glad you could come.'

She grunted. 'Mm,' she said.

I excused myself and slipped downstairs for a hawk and a pee. For some reason, I felt neurotically high-cheek-boned as I closed the door.

My father was in the passage to the bathroom. He was wearing a fashionable black polo-neck jersey (fashionable, that is, among the weasly middle-aged) whose sleeves he was rolling down. He not only looked quite good, he looked quite
nice.

'Ah,
Charles,' he said, in the voice he used for ballockings. 'Now I hear from your mother that you hit Valentine earlier on. On the head. Is that correct? Well you mustn't. It's extremely dangerous. Not on the head. Is that clear? All right, ticking-off over. See you at dinner.' He smiled and began to move past me.

'I wouldn't have hit him anywhere, but he and his friends were beating up another boy.'

He fiddled with his sleeves, in order not to meet my eye. 'I dare say they were, but your mother and myself—'

'Fine. Next time I catch him at it I'll just break his arm. And what do you
mean,
"your mother and myself" ? When was the last —'

'Oh, for Christ's
sake.'
He allowed a few seconds to pass. He looked puzzled, amused, like the time at Norman's. 'Charles, are you seriously going to claim that you didn't behave badly when you were his age?' He took a chain-mail watch from his trouser pocket. 'Perhaps, when you're older, you'll see that the - that the wrong that's committed to make a right, the second wrong, is invariably shabbier than the first.' He finished putting on his watch. 'Perhaps when you're older you'll see that.'

'Great copy,' I said. 'And that's quite meaningless coming from you. You may be
old,
but my mother hasn't —'

'What do you care?'

My father paused, and continued in a softer voice. 'I can see there's little point in discussing this.' He put his hands in his pockets and waggled a bunch of keys. 'We only say things we regret. Charles...'

'Nothing, sorry.' I weaved past, erasing with my hand any further reply or question. 'Don't worry, won't say a thing. Mum's the word.'

In the bathroom I peed, hawked, steadied myself by chanting 'don't get full of yourself, don't get full of yourself,' and tried not to cry.

The room was dark when I returned; Rachel was asleep. I went over to the window and watched the woods. Gradually my chest stopped heaving. There was nothing to tell Rachel anyway. I lay down beside her, chest-first to dull my lungs, and waited until someone called upstairs for dinner, which wasn't long.

I kept an eye on the old goat all through the meal, but with little to show for it. He was too busy being worldly socialite Gordon, lavish house-party-thrower Gordon, to have much time for erring husband or wily philanderer Gordon. Nevertheless, he sat between his tart and her (twin) sister, while at the other end my mother coped with Sir Herbert and the journalist, who honestly was called Willie French. Rachel and I sat opposite each other half-way down the table. She was being self-possessed enough; all the same I found I had to intercept and remould pretty well everything she said.

However, a brilliant argument was taking place between Sir Herbert and Willie, all about youth. I couldn't for the life of me make up my mind which one I disliked more. Dismissive cameos. Sir Herbert resembled nothing so much as a pools-winning dustman. Snouty open-pored face (itself topped by a sprig of sinister golden hair) clashed with his Savile Row suit and stiff collar. Shaving-cream bubbled inside the nearer of his question-mark ears. In stockinged feet. Sir Herbert stood four foot eight inches tall. To look at Willie, on the other hand, you'd place money on the fact that he had just dismounted from a motorbike on which he had spent his entire life at high speed. His ginger hair was driven back to form a curving mane from brow to nape of neck; he had inside-out lips, as if most of them took place within his mouth; speckly red eyes. For all this, he appeared to be losing the exchange, which served him right for having - in order to show how
simpatico
he was - a machine-gun stutter. Sir Herbert only ever let him get as far as saying 'I' or 'Wha' a few times.

Herbie now propounded the toiling paradox that the ostentatious 'unconventionality' of youth was, in point of fact, nothing other than a different sort of
conventionality.
After all, was not the non-conformity of yesterday the conformity of today ? Were not these young people as orthodox, in their very different way, as the orthodoxy they purported to be subverting?

How refreshingly different, how refreshingly different.

Sir Herbert's liquid eyes roamed the table with such twinkling conceit that even my father fell silent and frowned interestedly. Herb then consulted me, praising my eccentrically restrained dress, my weirdo good manners, my daring cleanliness. The reply I gave was far too nasty not to be quoted in full. (It reads well because I plagiarized a key paragraph from the Speech to My Father.) By way of apology I squeezed Rachel's ankle between mine, before saying :

'I couldn't agree more. Sir Herbert, though I confess I've never looked at it from quite that angle. It occurs to me that the analogy can be taken further - moral issues, for example. The so-called new philosophy, "permissiveness" if you like, seen from the right perspective, is only a new puritanism, whereby you're accused of being repressed or unenlightened if you happen to object to infidelity, promiscuity, and so on. You're not
allowed
to mind anything any more, and so you end up denying your instincts again - moderate possessiveness, say, or moral scrupulousness - just as the puritans would have you deny the opposite instincts. Both codes are reductive, and therefore equally unrelated to how people feel: so fucking give me a scholarship,' or words to that effect.