The White Father (7 page)

Why, Edward Gilchrist, do you think only in terms of money? Surely you don’t believe that money can buy
happiness
? No, indeed. Of course not, no, no. Oh no. No? It’s all pointless, isn’t it, that’s the point, the whole business of going to work in the morning and coming home in the evening and then going off to work again next morning, with two weeks off every other August bank holiday, and why should I? Why? You get caught in that and you’re caught for life. You start inventing loyalties, moralities, to keep yourself going. You’ve got to stay clear as long as you possibly can. Money’s nothing to do with it. It’s a way of seeming to stay clear, that’s all.

And what about love, Edward—or may I call you Teddy?—don’t you plan to marry and raise a family? How are you proposing to fit love into your scheme of non-involvement? I take it you have the normal physical desires, you’re not a castrato? No, not that, not that exactly, more a—well, love, that’s a personal question, isn’t it, fans? I mean—But Teddy, your fans, they want to know everything about your sex life. I don’t believe in love, then, do I? Where’s my manager, he’ll answer that question, where is he? Now come on, Teddy, let’s have a straight answer, shall we? People have been whispering about you, you know. Whispering?
Whispering
about me? But there’s nothing to—Precisely—and why not? Look, you’re not my analyst, are you? Do you have an analyst? No, of course not. Well then, let’s say I am. Your
public, Teddy, your fans, they analyse your every move. Tell them to get stuffed, then. No, no, Teddy, you don’t mean that, you know you don’t, you love your fans: but whom do you
really
love, Teddy? I told you, I don’t believe in all that, I—I’ve felt different about all that since, oh, a couple of years ago, there was—but that’s nothing to do with—and there’s Jackie, Jackie Harmer, I date her, she’s sort of my girl. That’s all we wanted to know, Edward, just who was your girl. You gotta have a girl, you see, for the fans, right? Yes, yes, I see——

His hands slithered along the rim of the steering-wheel as he turned into the drive that led to Mendleton, and he nearly hit a gatepost. Christ, I’m sweating. That’s what talking to yourself can do. So shut up, shut up.

The gravel spluttered beneath his wheels as he forced
himself
to think about nothing, about nothing at all.

He parked the car in the old stable to which it was allotted, and walked up to the house. Mendleton was built of stone, yellowed and softened by four hundred years of wind and rain and sun, and it glowed in the bright late afternoon, windows glistening, one chimney lazily smoking. Beneath the ancient walk of yews, older than the existing house, there was a deep green stillness, like the stillness of a well. The house itself basked in calm, only the distant chink of glasses indicating human presence as someone prepared a trolley for drinks.

The evening’s visitors were to be an old woman called Grace Shrieve and her nephew, a district officer or something from somewhere in the middle of Africa. The soirée was not likely to prove entertaining, but it would make a change. And it had already proved a useful excuse for leaving the excavation before his back collapsed from the strain of squatting. He looked forward to a leisurely bath, and then an appearance in the drawing-room for half an hour before the visitors left. His mother would excuse him vaguely, saying that he was so enthralled in his digging that he seemed to have lost all sense of time, and his father would announce that it was an excellent thing to study the past. The more we understand about our origins, he was fond of pontificating, the more we understand
ourselves : the past, he would conclude grandly, illuminates the present, and we live in the present. Many guests had been struck dumb by this undoubted truth. Mr Gilchrist was not really an alarming man, but his unblushing air of superior knowledge and experience often deceived others as much as himself.

Edward went upstairs. His room was large and airy, with two tall windows which looked across the lawn and towards the woods in which he had been digging. It had been his room for as long as he could remember, and it still bore many traces of his growing up. There was a large cupboard in one corner which had once housed his impressive collection of toys. Now it was simply a wardrobe, but on top of it lingered a few broken legs and the chewed ears of long-lost woolly animals, and occasionally he would find at the backs of drawers the button eyes he had spent hours removing as a child, to the fury of his nanny. In the bottom drawer of the chest on the other side of the room, next to the dressing-table, was a rubbish heap of childhood memories—old school magazines, stamp albums, aborted collections of cigarette cards, marbles, gnarled and invincible conkers, programmes of plays and concerts. There were letters he had preserved from his teenage romances and group photographs of people he could no longer name. A souvenir of the Coronation supported a pile of exercise-books, and bicycle-clips tangled with the straps of roller-skates. He never looked in this drawer, using it merely from time to time as a slot in which to post documents of no further current interest but which might, he never knew, one day be useful. His General Certificates of Education, “O” and “A” levels, were there, his Certificate of Matriculation, Certificate “A” from the school Corps, school-lists for five years and many diaries full of scrawled appointments and notes. He could scarcely read his juvenile writing, and few of the notes would have meant anything to him now even if he had bothered to read them, but the diaries remained with all the other detritus of childhood and adolescence in the bottom drawer.

He stripped off his shirt and sank on to the bed, rubbing his
face with his hands. He bent down to untie his laces, then kicked off his shoes and swung his legs up on the covers. Lying at full stretch, with the sun pouring through the window still, he began to unbutton his jeans with his eyes shut. He lay for a minute, his hand soothing where his belt had chafed, then scratching luxuriously in his body hair. He felt weak, but the blood pumped loudly round and he could feel his whole body shaking gently with each pulse. He jumped up suddenly, kicked off the jeans, stripped himself of socks and pants and pulled on his dressing-gown. It was a buff schoolboy’s dressing-gown, with a shredded tassel cord, and he had meant to buy himself a new one for years. All his spare money seemed to go on records.

From the bathroom window he gazed across the
water-meadows
and fields towards Cartersfield, whose church spire pointed unobtrusively towards the sky. Pigeons were cooing from the stable lofts, and in the nearest meadow a cow was lowing plaintively after its calf, which scampered shakily among the buttercups. A horse stood with pricked ears watching these antics from a neighbouring gate, then tired of them and lowered its head to graze. The scene was lush, civilised, English. All it required for Edward was a mournful vibraphone singing from a distant room, cool as kingcups. West coast music, that was what he really liked, that was the new, the true jazz. As he sank back into the brimming bath, his back seemed to groan with pleasure and the tensions and tiredness of his limbs to float away on the green surface of the water.

He was in the middle of a fantasy about the opening night of the jazz club Pete Harrisson was talking of starting, when someone tried the door.

“Can I come in, please?” said his sister Jane.

“I’m in the bath.”

“Oh. Well, will you
please
hurry up, I can’t possibly meet this man before I’ve had a bath.”

“Use Mummy’s bathroom. And he’s quite an old man, I think, you needn’t make a pass at him.”

“Don’t be disgusting. And Mummy’s still
in
her bath.”

“I’ll only be another five minutes.”

“You’d better mean that. I shall time you. You’re always complaining about how long I take, but you’re just as long yourself.”

“I’m washing off the toil and sweat and tears of the day. My back has to be left to soak.”

“Don’t be mean, Teddy,” said Jane. He heard her footsteps receding towards her bedroom.

Ten minutes later he was drying himself leisurely while Jane raged outside.

“Oh shut up,” he said. “As though five minutes is going to make any difference.”

“But they’re here already, they came
exactly
on time, and you know what Mummy says, Mrs Shrieve is a great do-gooder and we have to be nice to her to stop her doing good to us. And anyway, there’s this African she’s brought.”

“He’s white, surely? I mean, he’s her nephew, isn’t he? He can’t be black.”

“Oh.” Jane sounded disappointed. “Are you sure?”

“Nothing is sure.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. And please
hurry
, Teddy.” She rattled the door-knob.

He let her in and said, “Can’t get a moment’s peace in this house.” She slammed the door after him.

A white shirt should do it, with my white jacket, then no suit, thank God. Comfortable jacket. I don’t know how you can bear to go around in these dirty old things, Edward, and they’re made of such cheap stuff, they won’t last, you know. But Mummy, I’ve told you, you’re concerned with keeping
up
appearances all the time, and I don’t care about appearances, if anything I want to keep them
down
, to concentrate on
comfort
, and I find these clothes both attractive to look at and comfortable to wear. I know I find them very
un
attractive, they’re workman’s clothes, jeans, perfectly all right for the garden, but
not
for the house: and why don’t you ever wear a tie, you look so sloppy. You should see me in the band uniform
—lapel-less suede jackets and narrow black trousers, stunning, you’d love it. I doubt it very much, and where did you get the money to pay for such preposterous garments? We earned it playing. Well, you can spend the rest of your earnings on having all these things cleaned, they’re filthy, and I’m not going to ask Mrs Clark to wash them. Thanks a lot, I’m sure. There’s no need to be rude to your mother, Edward. Oh for Christ’s sake.

He chose a narrow tie with horizontal stripes of white, pale blue, brown and green, the very latest thing from the shops he patronised in Soho and along Shaftesbury Avenue. When he was a pop-singer, he was going to have ties with clean vertical stripes. There weren’t such things in the shops yet, but once you were a pop-singer you could start any fashion you liked.

As he knotted the tie he sang quietly to himself. His voice was a light but flexible baritone, casual in manner and lacking in real strength. But that didn’t matter, pop-singers always had microphones.

“There’s room for two,” he hummed,

“For me and you,

We’ve both been alone so long.”

He meditated on the words. They were terrible, but then they had to be. The song ought to end with lines like:

That wouldn’t be quite pop material, though. There was a nice lilting melody coming along, and a splendidly obvious change to the subdominant in the second verse. Something could be made of it. The tune sounded enough like several other tunes to be a certain hit.

As he went downstairs he heard voices in the drawing-room, and as he entered he saw his mother talking to Mrs Shrieve in what he called her Women’s Institute voice.

“How simply enchanting,” she was saying. “Oh, Edward, here you are at last. You must excuse him, Mrs Shrieve—you
have met Edward?—of course—he’s been working at the excavation over in the woods, you know.”

“Good evening, Mrs Shrieve,” he said.

“Good evening, Edward,” she said. She was tall and seemed to have a lot of hair, somewhat haphazardly pinned beneath a small black hat. She smiled at him, the smile of one accustomed to approaching the most difficult problems with the same air of general joviality.

“How interesting it must be,” she said. “Have you found anything exciting? I did see something about it in the local paper, but I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had time to go and have a look.”

“I’m afraid I’m not nearly expert enough to tell you how valuable our finds have been so far,” said Edward politely. “But I should be delighted to show you round if you’d like it.”

“I shouldn’t want to be in the way at all,” said Mrs Shrieve. He thought he detected a hopeful note in her voice.

“Not at all, not at all. Of course, we have to keep visitors out of the main area unless they’re accompanied, or they may fall into a trench or tread on pottery or something. But if you ask for me, I’m always grateful for a break. My back aches terribly after a day’s work.”

“It’s the first hard work he’s ever done,” said Mrs Gilchrist. “Do you think I can get him to dig in the garden?”

“You must tell my nephew,” said Mrs Shrieve, smiling. “I’m sure he’d be fascinated. Where has he gone?”

“I think my husband must be showing him the garden,” said Mrs Gilchrist. “He never works in it, either, but he feels responsible, personally, for all the flowers.”

“Men are like that,” sighed Mrs Shrieve.

“What are you drinking, Mrs Shrieve?” said Edward. “Can I get you another?”

“Perhaps a little, yes, thank you. The dry sherry, please. I’m afraid I’m so old-fashioned, I’ve never got over what my father used to say. Whisky for men, gin for the servants, and sherry for women over thirty.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” said Edward. “Every don at Oxford gives it to his pupils. It’s usually South African, of course, and nasty.”

“Yes. I only like the dry.”

“I’m going to have some of the servants’ drink myself,” said Edward, “with ice and tonic and lemon. Servants are everywhere these days. How’s yours, Mummy?”

“I’m all right, thank you, dear.”

He handed Mrs Shrieve her sherry, and she said, “Oh, thanks so much. Delicious.”

The two women looked at him blankly. The gossip of Cartersfield, which had sustained them so far, would hardly do now. He wondered if he ought to go out to the garden and leave them to their talk about fêtes, whist-drives and flower shows. But his mother might be desperately hoping he’d stay. Everyone agreed that Mrs Shrieve was a good woman, but none went so far as to call her good company.