Getting It Right (10 page)

Gavin spent a good deal of Saturday trying to think of legitimate ways of getting out of Harry’s party. In his private Court of Law (where petty cases against Gavin Lamb
were tried from morning till night practically every day of the week) there was really no case at all. He had committed himself to going to the party because he had told Muriel that he was going
out, and his brand of honesty precluded his staying at home after that. Unless he was ill; but he wasn’t ill. On the other hand, he hadn’t actually
said
where he was going, so
wouldn’t simply going out somewhere – anywhere – do? But that didn’t feel right: if he didn’t go to Harry’s party, he
could
have had supper with Muriel.
Never mind whether he
wanted
to or not – the court didn’t care in the least about want, it was only concerned with the rights and wrongs of the matter. And, as usual, there was
evidence of the accused evading an issue to the point of dishonesty. Sentence passed was that he go to Harry’s party
unless
he cared to ring Muriel and tell her that he could make it
after all. Options presented by the court were usually of the kind that made him feel mild guilt for choosing the lesser evil.

Otherwise, Saturday was much as usual. He got up later, had a boiled egg for breakfast, got through his mother doing his room – ‘Books are very
dirty
things, you know
– they collect the dirt, I don’t know why you want so many of them’; went to the cleaners to collect his best brown trousers and spring jacket; collected the new records
he’d ordered; and bought a bunch of tulips for his mother. For lunch, there was boiled beef and carrots and dumplings – followed by Castle puddings which, since he’d mentioned
them only the night before, he had to eat in quantity.

The meal was demolished fast because Mr Lamb wanted to watch an old war film and Mrs Lamb wanted to get the washing-up done. There was nearly a disaster about one Castle pudding being left;
before either Mr Lamb or Gavin could conceal or dispose of it, Mrs Lamb flitted in from the kitchen where she had been washing their beef plates.

‘Which of you is going to eat that?’ she commanded. Mr Lamb shrugged, but he met Gavin’s eye uneasily. ‘Three’s my lot,’ he said; ‘and very nice they
were too.’

‘Well, I’ve had four. Wouldn’t it warm up, Mum?’

‘Warm up? Warm
up
? Since when have you known me serve warmed up food? In this house,’ she added, as though she might do it anywhere else. ‘Cold food’s one thing
– warmed up is quite another. A lot of elderly people drop dead from warmed up food: they may think it’s easier but they soon find out their mistake.’

The wildness of this lie warned Gavin and his father that, if they didn’t want things to go too far, they’d better recognize that they’d gone quite far enough.

‘We’ll share it,’ Mr Lamb said. Taking the initiative meant that he could divide it and take the smaller piece.

‘All that fuss about one Castle pudding,’ Mrs Lamb scolded as she poured all the rest of the golden syrup on to their plates. ‘I’ll bring your tea into the front room if
you want to watch the match.’ She popped back into the kitchen.

‘“People have been known to drop dead!” Where does she get it all from?’

‘I don’t know, Dad.’

‘If you ask me, it’s the women’s magazines – all those books she reads every week. They’re always putting people into
classes
and full of all that
do-it-yourself nonsense. The trouble
we
get with that! And fancy meals. And there’s another thing about them. Don’t tell your mother, ’cos I don’t think she’s
noticed, but they’re full of
sex
. What good is that? They may call it romance but it’s nothing of the kind. It’s dressed up sex . . .’

‘Dad, if you want to watch the match – ’

‘It says, “You may be presented with a difficult choice and if you continue to be in doubt you should do nothing – let events speak for themselves.” Here’s your
tea.’

‘All right, Mother.’ He took the tea, winked at Gavin and went into the front room. ‘It’ was their horoscopes in the
Mirror
; Mrs Lamb read them every day and
seemed always to know them by heart. They were allowed to wink or smile about them – to tease her very gently in return for seeming to believe them.

‘What about mine then, Mum?’

‘“You will have a quiet, socially rewarding day, but beware of rash impulses that could result in embarrassment.” Going to take your tea up for a nice read, are you?’

‘I thought I’d mow the lawn first.’

She liked the lawn mown within an inch of its life, so this suggestion found favour. While he marched up and down, he wondered anxiously about the rash impulses. Whatever they were, he
determined to beware of them since he could certainly count on the embarrassment. Ordinarily he would, metaphorically speaking, have winked (one did not wink
at
Mrs Lamb), would have
risked a little nudging pat on her shoulder, but the threat of rash impulses froze him. Perhaps it was rash to go to Harry’s party, but if it was, the impulse had been yesterday’s.

The rectangular garden had wallflowers, pink tulips, and forget-me-nots planted in the two beds which contained standard roses of peculiarly fluorescent colours – not in flower yet, but
once they started they went on and on. They were the pride of both his parents: Mr Lamb pruned and fed them with ferocious care; Mrs Lamb sprayed them repeatedly against every known pest. The
wallflowers and forget-me-nots were a concession to him: they really preferred bare, weedless beds symmetrically planted with staked and regimented dahlias and chrysanths. At the far end there was
a small greenhouse where Mr Lamb grew tomatoes and cucumbers, and, outside it, two rows of runner beans behind which was the compost heap. Gavin only had to go there twice with the mowings. When he
had finished, he wondered whether to get a chair and his book to read out of doors, but the rather fitful morning sun had given up, the sky was a pale, dense uniform grey and the neighbour who had
recently embarked upon learning the electric guitar was well away with his explosive and irregular tonic dominant chords. Mowing the lawn had helped to get his lunch down anyway.

He watered his plants, and after wandering round his room picking at books to see what he felt like, took one of his favourite catalogues – of an exhibition he had seen years before in
Paris – on to his bed. It was beautifully produced and he was easily plunged into the lyric composition of early summers, of sunlit waters and orchard greens, and pieces of domestic behaviour
caught with brilliant intimacy. It was the girls he loved: girls brushing out their hair, cutting their toenails, putting on their stockings; cast in languor upon grass, upon chaises-longues, upon
orientally coverletted beds; sitting self-consciously erect upon small severe chairs in a café, one girl sewing the collar on to a flowered dress, one washing cherries at a wooden table, one
reclining in a white basket chair nursing a baby whose head, round and brown like a hazelnut, pushed against her breast. If those girls existed now he would be in love: there was something both
festive and gentle about them whereas he felt that most girls today were as joyless and difficult as Everest – to be conquered by anyone who did not mind discomfort and recognized that they
were there. He let the catalogue lie and closed his eyes . . .

He was walking up a very short, straight drive edged with young poplars towards a white house with green shutters whose door was open. The sun was hot and the house marvellously cool and still,
except for the sound of a large walnut clock ticking. A straw hat trimmed with daisies and narrow green velvet ribbon lay on the chest below it and he knew this meant that he could go up. Her door
was also open, but the shutters were closed, making bars of aqueous light across the white bed. She wore a muslin wrapper of pale green and white so that the bed was a marvellous confusion of
stripes and her white skin was blossomed with green and gold reflections. She lay half on her side with her face resting in the palm of one hand: at affectionate ease with herself, she was asleep.
On the bed beside her lay a painted paper fan open as it had fallen from her hand. (He remained quite still to watch and enjoy her – to store and print the detail of her in his mind so that
it would be easier to return to her in the future.) Her heavy dark hair, cut short on her forehead, was long and undressed – tied back with a piece of white braid; a thin gold chain with a
cross on it lay slanted on her neck. Her ankles were negligently crossed, her feet were bare. How should he wake her, and what might happen when he did? She would speak French, he realized with
sudden panic: he would not understand her. No – she would speak just enough English; or perhaps they need not speak. He put out his hand to touch her forehead . . .

There was a banging on his door.

‘You never drank your tea after dinner.’ Before he could sit up, she was in the room with a tray, and stood over the bed waiting for him to clear the bedside table of books so that
she could deposit it. She wore her spectacles and three rollers at strategic points in her hair and he could see her darting professional glances round the room to see whether he had managed to
untidy anything since this morning.

‘You shouldn’t have bothered.’

She took this as a compliment. ‘It will be a fine time when I can’t bring my own son some tea. There’s those shop cakes you like. You can bring the tray down when you’re
done with it. Don’t let it get cold.’ And she went.

The tray was a round tin one with a cat crouching in some buttercups printed on it. The teapot was encased in a knitted cosy the alternating colours of a ripe banana. There were three cupcakes
arranged on a paper doily on a plate. The milk jug was shaped like a yellow chick from whose beak the milk was supposed to pour (Marge had given it to his mother at Easter), the cup was one of her
best square ones whose handle was too modern to have a hole in it. Even before he lifted the shrouded teapot he knew it would be the one with feet – amusing china boots upon it. The whole
tray was crowded with her affection – never expressed in words but in countless domestic deeds of this nature. He got up from the bed and fetched his secret cup and saucer from a cupboard. It
was a piece of early Copeland with painted violas and butterflies, the rims richly gilded. He drank his tea out of it and wondered whether he could ever get his mother to believe that he liked
China tea. She would give it to him if he asked for it, but she refused utterly to
count
it as tea, so if he had it, it simply meant that he had to drink twice as much. He still felt so
stuffed with food that the cupcakes were a problem. In the end he wrapped them in a handkerchief to take to work. He started to feel nervous about the party as he was washing his cup in the
bathroom, and decided to have a bath and listen to some music while he catalogued his newest batch of records to take his mind off the evening.

He had a long bath, washed his hair – did some Bates work on his eyes and had a thorough inspection of his face and neck. His face wasn’t too bad, but there was a corker coming up on
his neck – too high to be concealed even with a scarf round it. He scowled at himself in the glass so that he could see how much better he looked when he stopped. Not much better, really. The
bathroom now smelled of bad eggs from his dandruff treatment and he was glad to leave it. He opened the window, tucked the curtain out of the way to air the room, and padded upstairs back to his
room.

The catalogue lay on the bed where he had left it – open at a luminous Vuillard interior of a girl in a rocking chair looking out of a window. He shut the catalogue and put it away. She
was always interrupting him: the only long privacy he could count on was at night.

He decided that Chopin would be good music to play while he did his catalogue, and opted for the mazurkas. It had to be music that he knew extremely well, but not of a kind that required
intellectual attention: Chopin he could now – from love and familiarity – absorb through his skin. His cataloguing was a simple but ingenious affair. A loose-leaf book indexed under
composers with each record numbered as he collected them and then entered in the book with its number and details about performance. Thus he could turn to ’S’ to find Schubert, or
Strauss or Scarlatti – look for songs or operas or sonatas – find the number of, say,
Ariadne auf Naxos
and then seek it from the records on the shelves as they would be
arranged purely in numerical order. He had taught Harry this system and Harry took every opportunity of praising it to friends in front of Gavin until he felt quite embarrassed. He had got to
record three hundred and thirty-two, and with the new song cycle he had bought of Somervell’s ‘Maud’, and the reissue of Rachmaninov playing an assortment of piano pieces, and
Tuckwell doing the Mozart horn concertos, he was going to get nearly to the forties. The problem was soon going to be one of space: he would have to shift things round a good deal in order to build
a new record shelf. If only he wasn’t going out! He was longing to play the new records. Well, this time tomorrow he’d be safely back from lunch with Marge and have time to himself.

At half-past six he was dressed: cream shirt, brown trousers, brown and coffee-coloured Indian scarf failing to conceal newest eruption, brown windcheater unzipped (it was quite warm) and the
faint feeling of malaise he associated strictly with going to parties. His parents were both in the front room. Dad was asleep in front of an earnest programme about New Towns; Mum was making a
jockey cap for the bear out of scarlet felt.

‘I’m off now.’

‘Got your key?’

‘Yes.’

‘I hope you have a good time.’ But she said it as though this would be very unlikely.

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’ Dad had opened his eyes.

‘Of
course
he won’t. Anyway, why shouldn’t he? You enjoy yourself,’ she advised.

‘Going to Town, are you?’

‘I don’t know. I’m going to a party with Harry.’