The Rachel Papers (8 page)

'All aboard?' said Deforest, pulling away
down
the hill and round, going way too many places way too fast to do a three-point turn and go up it like everyone else.

How had I let myself get into this situation? Rachel sat erectly in front of me, her hair bright and aromatic to my peeled senses.

'No, I just love these English cars,' Deforest was telling Rachel, who nodded. She clearly loved them too.

Had Rachel planned the whole thing ? Perhaps I should have given her more time on the telephone. Was DeForest in on it? Christ. 'DeForest, darling, there's this tiresome little shit who
keeps
on ringing me up and has finally bullied me into having tea with him; I thought the only half-way civilized thing to do was to jolly well
take
the hopeless little bugger—'

The Tea Centre was a sort of genteel workman's caff, done up in 'thirties, U.S. coffee-shop style; there were several circular tables surrounded by knee-high mushroom chairs and some booths at the back. With me in the rear we headed for the far corner. The girls got in first, followed by their beaux. The booth sat four. I looked round: the queer pixie's poofs were tacked to the ground; there were no movable chairs.

And there wasn't any room for me. Rachel and DeForest were talking scones, the other couple were writhing about still, now seemingly poised for a session of fully robed soixante-neuf. My head was like an electric blanket. I couldn't see Rachel because fucking DeForest's spiky insect head was between us. In a voice that didn't carry I said, 'Going out now, to make a call.'

No one reacted. They had the wide world spinning round within their heads. They hadn't heard.

Outside, I walked reflexively across the road to the line of telephone boxes opposite the tube entrance. I stopped to look in a shop window. Why hadn't I just flashed in, told them to move up? It was my hesitation that had done it. They had all wanted me to stay. No, there wasn't any room, nothing I could have done but get out. Get out. I started home.

'Charles.
Hang on.'

I turned. Rachel had come to a halt on the island half-way across the road. She waited, still looking at me, while a stream of traffic passed between us.

How hackneyed of her, I thought emptily.

The lights changed. She paused; she walked towards me, hands in pockets, head tilted slightly. She reached the pavement and stopped a few feet away.

'Charles, come back.'

'I'm not coming back.'

She came forward two steps and stood with her feet together.

'I'm sorry. Are you all right?'

Tm fine.'

'I've got to go back.'

'Suppose so.'

'Are you cold?' she asked.

I was. I had been feeling far too vain to wear an overcoat. I was shivering.

'A little.'

She bit her lip. She came closer and held my hand for a few seconds.

'Will you ring me?'

'You bet.'

'Goodbye then.'

'Goodbye.'

At Campden Hill Square another tea-party was in progress. It consisted of Geoffrey, two strangely dressed girls - a small one, swathed in a floral curtain, and a big one, got up as a cowboy, complete with holsters - and Jenny. No Norm. A scene of almost pastoral spontaneity followed. I felt rather light-headed and, steamy though the kitchen was, I didn't appear to be getting any warmer. Furthermore, I was still vibrant from an intense Consciousness-of-Being attack, having had a highly soulful walk from the Gate.

When the tea was made I popped upstairs for a hawk. On the way back Geoffrey intercepted me; we stole into the sitting-room.

'Which one d'you fancy?' he breathed.

'I hardly know. Haven't taken them in yet.'

'Do you like Anastasia?'

'Anastasia?'
This could not be. 'What's her real name?' I implored.

'Jean.'

'Oh. The short-arse? Yeah, she's all right. Boring dress.'

'Mm. Good body, though.'

'Have you fucked her?'

'Sort of. She's not as good as Sue.'

'Have you fucked Sue?'

'Sort of. She's got better tits.'

'What do you mean, "sort of'?'

'We had this vague Troy.'

'No.
Christ
how sexy. What was it like?'

'Yeah, they're dikes, too. It was okay, except I couldn't get a proper rise. Too Mandied.'

'Why doesn't that sort of thing ever happen to me?'

Geoffrey swayed on his pegs. 'Because you're a country bumpkin and I'm a city slicker.'

We talked drugs. Geoffrey had dropped two Mandrax; there was also some hash, but this was of only minor interest to the bronchitic narrator. I got a Mandrax off him to take later. My chest was telling me not to get any ideas about sleeping tonight.

That evening Mr and Mrs Entwistle laid on their very first row. It opened modestly enough. Geoffrey and I were back in the kitchen, helping to clear up. Door slams full force, missing-link footsteps, Norman's head bulges hugely into the room; seeing no one else, its albino eyes fix on Jenny. We froze, as in a television advertisement. Then he was gone, and Jenny, scooping up cigarettes and lighter, had gone after him.

'Heavy,' murmured Geoffrey.

My stage designs for Rachel were not entirely wasted. In my room, Anastasia made for the
Blake,
saying 'wow' in a reverent whisper, and Sue adjusted her six-guns, knelt on the floor and opened
The Poetry of Meditation.
I looked over her shoulder; she was reading an essay on Herbert, rather a good one despite the fact that it was called The Plateau of Assurance'; 'Herbert Who?' she must have wanted to ask. Geoffrey, licking at cigarette papers, instructed me to put on a record. The girls being hippies, I selected the most violent and tuneless of all my American LPs,
Heroin
by the Velvet Underground. The immediate results ? Anastasia swayed in her chair and tapped a sandalled foot; Sue went glazed, craning her neck in figure-eight patterns. There you go.

Geoffrey lit up. 'Are we going to have some amazing orgy, or what?' No one reacted. He shrugged, gave the joint to Sue and tottered backwards on to the bed.

A peaceful quiescence followed.

The joint came my way; I drew on it, swallowing rather than inhaling the smoke, and in the high hippie manner, as if it were a normal cigarette. (Ostentatious and/or noisy intake is considered vulgar.) I repeated this several times, and waited. Golden Rain cinders showering my knuckles, yes, and I felt I could have puked my ribcage on to the carpet: apart from that, nothing. And it could not be said that I didn't respond to drugs; early last summer Geoffrey gave me my first purple heart: I got the screaming hab-jabs for two days, sweated liquid frying-pans throughout the third, awoke from a gentle coma on the fourth. Indeed, my metabolism is in many ways as much of a gullible weathercock as my mind. Geoffrey's hash didn't work; he must have been sold a wad of gumboot mud, or, if it was supposed to be grass, a matchboxful of crumbled tobacco, rosemary and aspirins.

I offered it to Geoffrey but he held up his hand with a hollow smile, all of a sudden not having a good time. I couldn't resist taking a certain fascinated pleasure in his remorse-stricken face; the usual triumvirate: pearly complexion, ruby lips, emerald tongue. His cheeks ballooned as if to contain a mouthful of prancing vomit.

'Is there anything I can get you?'

'Water.'

They dehydrate you,' Anastasia explained.

As I left the room Susan quickened my stride by saying, in an indignant monotone, 'It bugs me when these guys start trying to hang on The Temple' this kind of
structuralized
didactic trip when it's all the hang-ups and anxieties that make it so ... integrated.'

*

Phase two of Jenny and Norman's row. It came through the walls with high fidelity.

In the kitchen I became gradually aware of screams and shouts from above. I tiptoed up to the intermediate landing outside the bathroom. The sitting-room door was open and the light off. It was from the bedroom, then, that I could hear Jenny shriek:

'You're a
murderer.
Do you hear what I'm saying to you? You-are-a-
MURDERER
!'

A very very loud scream came next.

This didn't alarm me. It was clear from the tone that Jenny's accusation was an emotional, not a circumstantial, one, probably the crest of an imprecatory tidal wave. And that sort of scream wasn't the result of fear or anger but of drawing one's breath deep into one's lungs and thinking: I'm going to scream as loud as I can now and see what effect that has on the situation.

'You're a
bastard,'
Jenny resumed, 'and you don't care, because you're a
murderer.'

Then Norman: 'Jennifer. You're getting yourself into a state, now bloody get out of it. You know you've got to do it, don't you? Get it through your fucking head—'

I switched off my ears.

In the bathroom I tweaked the light string and sat on the closed lavatory seat. How exciting. What a splendidly emotional day this was for everyone. 'You're a murderer' ... Perhaps, in the course of his work, Norman was called on to do the odd homicide. Perhaps he really did pull capers in his lunch-hour. Had he mown down a file of schoolboys in his Cortina, lured a blinkie into the Bayswater Road, stolen the heirlooms of a dying Jew? Had he poked a switchblade into an enlightened student (for Norman was passionately right-wing) ? Had he jumped up and down on a squealing Pakistani (for Norman was passionately xenophobic: wogs began, not at Calais, but at Barnet or Wandsworth Common, depending on what direction you took from Marble Arch)? Perhaps —

yawn - she just meant that he was ""murdering"" her love for him.

The sound of what could have been a forearm slam came from above, then a muffled crash, as of a body making speedy contact with the floor.

I blew my nose on some lavatory paper and thought hard about Rachel. I wished Geoffrey would get a move on and puke in my bed; then Sue and Anastasia could carry him off, and I would be alone. Nip up to the sitting-room for a glass of Norman's cherry brandy ? No: he might revive Jenny in order to beat her unconscious again. Instead, I hawked confidently into the basin, and returned with Geoffrey's water. Upstairs, all was quiet now.

Geoffrey had indeed been sick, not in my bed, but, rather, over the floor, walls, sink, towel-rail and lavatory of the next-door bathroom. Anastasia was there, an arm round his waist. Geoffrey turned to me diffidently when I joined big Sue in the doorway.

'Sorry glug,' he said, throwing his head back to accommodate a fresh mouthful which he then channelled into the bathtub.

That's all right. But, Geoffrey?'

'Yeah?'

'Remember: I'm a country slicker, you're a city bumpkin. Okay?'

'Right.'

Between the three of us we cleaned Geoffrey up and gave him, in succession, an apple, some water and a cigarette. When asked, he said he felt cool. I mentioned something about a taxi but it turned out - amazingly, I thought, for one of her youth - that Sue had a car. We put Geoffrey in it and they drove off, with me asking for the telephone number of and trying to kiss neither of the two girls.

I watched them go, shaking my head a couple of times in the normal way, and walked back to the house. In the darkening kitchen, with a few glasses of water I worked the shirt-button-sized Mandrax down my throat. It was already brightly moonlit and for a while I gazed out at the navy-blue sky. Unasked, I could feel, gradually playing on my features, a look of queasy hope. And why not? I had someone to think about, no matter how fretfully; I had a face looking over my shoulder, no matter how snottily equivocal its expression. At least it wasn't my face.

There was little to admire outside, apart from the sky: just a smooth high wall, on which glittered a thousand chips of broken glass, placed there to deter the burglars over twelve foot tall who couldn't be bothered to use the back-garden door. They looked neutral enough now, though.

As I turned I saw Jenny on the chesterfield in the adjoining room, curled up on her knees, haggardly smoking a cigarette. I stepped towards her, but as I did so she made a movement, hardly perceptible, a shrug or a wave of the hand, which told me that she was content to be alone. I closed the door behind me, and went to bed.

Thirty-five minutes past eight: The Rachel Papers, volume one

Over by the window now, I effortfully uncork the second bottle of Chateau Dysentery. Red spots fly over my twentieth-birthday present from Rachel, the new Longman's Blake. It's very dark outside, so it seems appropriate to ask out loud:

Can delight Chained in night The virgins of youth and morning bear?

On my desk, a sea of pads, folders, envelopes, napkins, notes, the complete Rachel Papers stand displayed. Four-eyed, I indent subject-headings, co-ordinate footnotes, mark cross-references in red and blue biros.