The Rachel Papers (9 page)

We have to begin with a tolerably even development, characterized though it is by chance meetings, botched preparations, half-successes. Referring to
Conquests and Techniques: a Synthesis,
I write on the inside cover of the Rachel folder itself:

Initial 2B

Compensatory
A3
tendencies

Emily gambit

Marilyn variation deferred.

I erase 'deferred' and put in 'declined'. This doesn't tell me much.

The first day at school was intensely embarrassing, not for me (I felt) so much as for the directress and her staff, unhelpful as these distinctions generally turn out to be.

On my way there, walking up attractive Addison Avenue, I took out the two letters I had received that morning. It was a clear day, and so, being morbidly early for school, I slipped between the bird-pats on a pavement bench to take a proper look at them.

The fact that my mother had in her life made any written contact whatever with the outside world was in itself a moving tribute to the British GPO. My name mis-spelt, an address which even I could make little of, four ip stamps upside down in the top left-hand corner. I put on my glasses and began worrying a few key phrases: pity missed you Sunday ... clearing up? got sick ... Your father in London two weeks but ... giving rather grand house-party ... the ? of one college is coming ... you come?
...
Love to Jenny ... Norman is behaving ... Mrs Wick found vests you forgot ... My face burned. What was the point? There always was a point. Ah, sinisterly clear ending ... take care. Find out from him how
many
are coming. He can be reached at 01-937 2814.

9-3-7, W-E-S, Western: Kensington area; must be his slag's place. Why didn't she ring him at the office ? Or was this some wily show of uninterest? The whole thing would have depressed me, but I happened to be having tea with Rachel that afternoon -
d deux.
And the telephone number might come in useful.

The second letter was airmail, garishly stamped. It was from Coco.

'Coco' was the
sixteen-year-old
daughter of a Lebanese economics professor (cultivated by my father when he was visiting lecturer at Cambridge the year before last). Towards the end of the summer the family had come out for three weekends. Coco was tanned, minx-like, exotic; she was, furthermore, a girl, and I was just old enough and rude enough to seem quite unimprovable to her. The first weekend I kissed Coco on the landing. The second I smoothed her shy breasts in the greenhouse. The third I persuaded her to come to my room at 12 p.m. - a perfect night, though intercourse did not take place. She was barely fifteen then and I didn't want to come out of jail when she was barely twenty-one. Besides, she wouldn't let me. I kept up our correspondence because it made me feel sexually active and in demand, and because I like showing off (doubtless to myself only) in letters. I read:

Dear Charles,

Thank you for your letter - at last! Shame on you for not writing to me sooner! I am very pleased that you did so well in your exams. My o levels were not so good! ?

I skimmed for the bits about how handsome I was. The final paragraph went:

I always hope I might come to England soon. Mummy says may-be (?) next year. I think often about meeting you again and that you will not like me any more. If I come next year you will be at University and I at Drama-school ! ? But this belongs to Maybe Land. Well! I must go to bed now, I am so tired out! Write to me soon. Love Coco XXX

This required immediate attention. Taking out a memo-pad I began to draft my reply:

My Sweet,

Thank you for your long-awaited letter. I was particularly intrigued to hear of 'Maybe Land'. Could you tell me more about this strange clime? What, for example, is its capital, its geographical situation, its type of government? What, say, are its climatic features, its territorial boundaries, its chief industries? Moreover, you neglected for the second time to tell me whether on your next visit you are going to let me go to bed...

I stood up, stretching like a starfish. It was nearly nine thirty. I gathered my papers and trotted off.

The school looked more like a Victorian police station than I had really bargained for. Flanked by spindly terraced houses, cordoned off with mauve railings, the building crouched inset from the road, its sooty bricks having nothing to do with the available sunshine. I sidled down the path to the rear basement entrance. The door was open.

No one seemed to be about, apart from the directress. Mrs Tauber was in her office drinking cups of coffee and smoking cigarettes, about three of each. She was surprised but on the whole delighted to see me.

We said good morning, and, after an eery silence, I asked whether I might perhaps be 'a bit early', a real misgiving since the place was empty and it was possible I had got the times wrong.

'Certainly not,' she said, gesturing to the electric clock behind her. It was nine thirty-five. 'Can't you see the time ?' She seemed genuinely to want an answer.

This dislocated me. The one strictly logical reply was: 'I'm awfully sorry - I do beg your pardon - but ... this is the Tauber Lunatic Asylum, isn't it ?' Instead I asked where everyone else was.

She said, exasperatedly,
'They're
late.'

I slapped my thigh and shook my head.

'Ah.
Um, is there anywhere I can go until "things get started"?'

At this point her previous geniality returned, and I was led with paraded bustle to the 'library', a dirty boxroom furnished by three chairs, a split blackboard, and at least a dozen raddled textbooks forming a knee-high stack in the far corner. It was into this arena of liberal scholarship that my colleagues wandered over the next hour and a half; there were four of them, two girls, one not bad, though twice my height.

By the middle of the week Tauber Tutors held no surprises for me. The school turned out to have a second floor, the upper one consisting of a large hall/gym/cafeteria/classroom plus two small offices. The school turned out also to be a nursery school, or mostly that. There were just the five of us in the O-Level-and-after age group, and getting on for ten times that many in the Eleven-Plus-and-Common-Entrance-and-before age group. Not that age was a helpful grouping criterion, the elder lot ranging as they did from fifteen (a delinquent ghoul studying for RSAs) to nineteen (myself), and the younger lot ranging from sphincter-free toddlers to the occasional pillow-faced, taller-than-me mongol, who could have been anything from eight to thirty-eight. A high proportion of the children were obviously insane.

My time was (theoretically) to be split up between brief morning sessions in the offices with the two on-campus teachers (Maths and Latin), evening sessions with an English master in St John's Wood, and 'general study' in the spacious hall.

In practice ?

Arrive ten to ten thirty. Twenty-minute Maths lesson with Mr Greenchurch. Vacuum-chamber office redolent of dead man's feet; hairless, cysty-eared octogenarian sucking noisily and ceaselessly on his greying false teeth (I thought at first he had a mouthful of boiled sweets; on the Wednesday he allows the coltish dentures to spew out half-way down his chin before drinking them back into place); mind like a broken cuckoo-clock, often forgets you're there. Ten minutes in the hall, talking to Sarah, the less ugly girl. Eleven thirty to noon with Mrs Marigold Tregear, the enormous though well-proportioned Latin widow, up whose stockingless adamantine legs it was my constant endeavour to peer; expedients included: rolling pencils off the end of the table at which we sit side by side and going round to pick them up; crouching opposite her on entry to the room and double-bowing my shoelaces; loitering beneath the iron staircase, on the off-chance: Mrs Tregear was over thirty, and I suppose very unattractive, yet she wore quite short skirts.

Another five minutes with Sarah. Brisk walk home. Light lunch and an attempted chat with whoever was there - Jenny, or Norman, sometimes neither, never both. Perhaps half an hour in the hall, cooling my three contemporaries (Sarah was mornings only). Here I attempted a few minutes' work, not easy because the fifty bawling sprogs had classes there in the afternoon, normally acting classes, or singing classes, or self-expression classes.

This, then, was the humdrum background to the fecundities of my nocturnal reading. For I had begun to explore the literary grotesque, in particular the writings of Charles Dickens and Franz Kafka, to find a world full of the bizarre surfaces and sneaky tensions with which I was always trying to invest my own life. I did my real study at home, of course, mostly on Rachel, and on English Literature and Language, which, or so it seemed to me, I was really fucking good at.

Since the night of the punch-up things were quieter between Jenny and Norman. But on the rare occasions they were together the room was muggy. It wasn't day-to-day aggro, nor the drooped, guilty, somehow sexless disgruntlement I had seen overtake many relationships, where the tension never tries to become articulate. No, there was definitely something at stake, some
issue,
and I felt I ought to be able to see what it was.

Predictably, Norman's behaviour was more illustrative than that of his wife. Now, in the early evenings, he would moon over the kitchen table, toying with his car keys or staring, glaucous-eyed, at the wall. At some point he'd slope off headlong towards the door - but he was going out just to get out; he had lost that air of breezy purpose.

After my first morning at school, I was in the kitchen, enjoying - rather sweetly, I thought - a sandwich and a glass of milk for lunch. I hardly noticed Norman's entrance. He came in - again, not to the traditional manic flurry of crashes and shouts, but with hesitation, uncertainty, as if only on reaching the kitchen would he be sure he was in the right house. 'Oh, hello,' he said. 'Jennifer around?' ('Jennifer', in Norman's parlance, tended to mean 'that bitch Jenny'.) I said I supposed she was out. We both shrugged. Nodding to himself, as if in thought, he opened the door of the fridge. 'Any food?" he asked, his eyes quartering the room. Norman's eyes saw: a sinkful of crockery, a soiled cat-tray, a basket of fetid sheets, knitting kit splayed on the table, a cooker like a tinker's stall.

The odd thing about what followed was that I had never seen Norman take any interest whatever in domestic affairs, behaving usually as if he were living in a tent or semi-permanent pre-fab - chucking newspapers on the floor, undressing on the stairs, pasting his beetle-crushers over clean upholstery.

He took a step forward and booted the rubbish bin beneath the sink; he sent a pot slithering up the draining-board with the flat of his hand.

These fucking slags,' he yelled, head thrown back. 'All they can bloody do is gorge down great fucking fry-ups and squirt ponce all over themselves.' He flicked on a tap and rolled up his sleeves, tone getting jerky with righteous sarcasm.
'You
work all bloody day and they're wiggling their bums in fucking dress-shops and spending pounds in Sleazy fucking Wheezy's or whatever the fucker's name is. You're up the shop while they're on their arses doing their eyes.' His voice rose half an octave. 'Juskers they wear the tits doesn't mean -' He cut out on a long, shuddering growl of rage and frustration.

Norman finished the washing-up (with Boy-Scout meticul-ousness), put on his jacket and left the house.

But that wasn't it. If it had been it, then nothing on earth would have made him do what he had done.

My next encounter with Rachel was on the Friday, three days after the Tea Centre Incident.

It couldn't have been more spontaneous if I had planned it. All the more startling, because I had resigned myself to dumping the entire Rachel opus. Shaving on Wednesday morning I cringed and winced as I recalled the mawkishness of my thoughts the night before. At best she had felt merely sorry for me; at worst it was phase two of her and DeForest's plan. I was too scared and ashamed to ring her that evening. Perhaps tomorrow. Nothing ventured, nothing lost.

But, as I say, when I did see her it couldn't have been more spontaneous. I was quite unprepared, caught completely on the hop. Semi-shaven, dishcloth hair, duffle-coat, baggy brown Farmer-Giles corduroys. Didn't have a single note-pad on me. So I ad-libbed.

I was in the Notting Hill Gate Smith's at the time, standing with my back to the front entrance and scratching my scalp -not in puzzlement, but because it itched. Badly shaken by my fell-off-a-lorry slip the other day, I had just put down a book on Cockney slang ('Cheers, Norm, where's the trouble and strife? Up the apples and pears having a pony and trap?'), and was just picking one up on 'Criticism and Linguistics'.

She came on me from behind and poked me too hard in the ribs.

'Hello then. Wotcher reading?'

'Oh, hello,' I said, surprise borne out by the falsetto croak in my voice. But then I was off. 'Oh, you know, some tired old hack reproducing boiled-up earlier articles and pretending they form a unity.' I paused and made (three) impatient gestures with my hand. 'He says they're all about "the problem of words".' I pointed to the subtitle on the cover, rich in adrenalin as a phrase from a novel took shape at the back of my mind. 'But what they're really about is him - his taste, his poise, and how much he likes money. Just look at the price.' Rachel just looked at the price, and then back up at my face, which smiled brilliantly.