Getting It Right (18 page)

‘All right. And then come back in here.’

As he left her to see what his mother was up to, Gavin reflected that what he had thought of as being nasty to people was often just saying what you meant – even if they didn’t
always like it, it didn’t actually hurt them. Then he just had time to think that it was funny how he always seemed to make these discoveries when he hadn’t really got time for them,
before he was back in the other room.

Mrs Lamb had certainly not wasted
her
time. The table was now fully laid, including a cut-glass vase with three tulips in it. The sundae dishes were also out, filled to the brim with
tinned grapefruit. Mrs Lamb was cooking furiously. She had taken out the rollers and her black hair was a riot of curls. She wore her floral dress in various shades of cyclamen and her
uncomfortable shoes, and her face had an unnatural pallor, due, he saw, to a thick coating of whitish pancake which contrasted strongly with her cyclamen lips and little brown neck below it.

‘I’ve had a job to get your father into his suit, and I haven’t had time to mitre the serviettes. Have you brought the papers in? Although I expect Lady Munday knows all the
news.’

‘Why should she do that, Mum?’

‘Privilege,’ she said sharply. ‘It’s Them who tell us what’s going on.’

Gavin fetched the papers from outside, and also the milk. Mrs Lamb pounced upon the latter and whisked it out of sight.

‘There’s just the marmalade to put in that nice pot Marge gave me for Christmas.’

‘I’ll do that.’

She let him, which was an indication of her state of mind. ‘Not the beehive pot; that’s for honey. The one shaped like a cottage.’ She wore her charm bracelet which kept
slipping down her knobbly wrist threatening to plop into the frying pan. Her desperate excitement about this occasion touched him then about the rest of her life. ‘It’ll be a lovely
breakfast, Mum, I know it will. There’s no need to worry.’

‘It’ll be a perfectly normal breakfast – same as we always have. Worry? I’m not in the least worried. Not worried,’ she repeated, shaking the sausages – like
a terrier – to death in the pan. ‘Don’t hang
over
me – you know I don’t like being hung over.’

So he went to see how Minerva was getting on. She had put on the jeans and a relatively clean but extremely crumpled white shirt, and was tearing at her heavy hair.

‘Sit down and I’ll do it.’

‘Will I do?’

‘You look fine.’ What else could he say, and she did look better.

‘You’ve made me feel quite nervous.’

‘Everything’ll be all right. Just don’t – I mean don’t discuss anything to do with sex.’

‘Don’t be stupid. I never talk about it at meals – specially not at breakfast.’

Although she was clearly sulking, he felt he had to add: ‘And I never tell them much about what happens at parties. I mean, they wouldn’t understand.’

‘All
right
!’

Shortly after that, his mother – in tones that he hardly recognized – called: ‘Gavin! Breakfast is served!’

Half an hour later, Gavin felt that they had been having – or, in the girl’s case,
not
having – breakfast for at least a week, and yet they seemed to have got no
further than the grapefruit. Gavin knew that his mother had no intention of eating; the girl was picking at hers, and every time Mrs Lamb asked her a question, she put down her loaded spoon
untouched in order to answer it. Mr Lamb, usually a most reliable and steady eater, seemed to think it would be rude to chew while the guest was speaking, so whenever Minerva opened her mouth his
jaws became motionless while he stared at her with unwinking attention except when she looked his way, whereupon he coughed and his eyes did a world tour of the room. Mrs Lamb led the conversation,
alternating between boasting about Gavin – ‘Of course, Gavin really sees the world at his work, his salon’s in the West End, you know’ – with questions that, while
they were cunningly phrased to sound as though she knew the answers already, merely wanted confirmation as it were, were actually, Gavin realized, designed to inform her curiosity about glamorous
upper class life: ‘I suppose your family only use their Town House during the Season?’ Minerva rose gallantly to all these sallies: ‘As a matter of fact we’ve rented it to
some people from the American Embassy. Daddy hates London, anyway, he says there’s so much more to
do
in the country.’

‘I expect he has a lot of Estates to see to.’

‘Oh yes: he’s got them all right.’

‘Not to mention the Stately Home?’

‘It’s nothing like as Stately as it was. Falling to pieces – most of it. We had a lot of death in the family, you see. So there were Death Duties.’

‘What a shame!’

‘My great-uncle and then my grandfather one after the other – like ninepins. My great-uncle got kicked to death by a frightful horse that the groom warned him not to ride.’

‘Well I never! It just shows you, doesn’t it?’

‘It was rather awful, because afterwards the groom was told to shoot the horse, so of course he had to, and then he shot himself. A bit like captains going down with the ship.’

There was an awe-struck pause, during which Gavin wondered whether it was better when the ball stopped rolling, or better when it seemed in danger of rolling off the table.

‘What happened to your grandfather then?’ asked Mrs Lamb when she felt respect for the dead had had its due.

‘Oh – he died of port. The doctor warned him, and he tried mixing claret and brandy, like Queen Victoria, but he never got to care for it. So he fell back on port. Then he just fell
back.’ She laughed in a social manner, and then met Gavin’s eye by mistake.

‘Shall I get the sausages now, Mum?’ He had tried shooting Minerva warning glances, but she simply looked at him with wide, blank eyes.

‘If everybody’s had sufficient, you may.’

‘Shall I help?’

‘Gavin can manage.’ She could not bear to miss a moment. ‘It’s all in the plate-warmer, Gavin.’

Sausages were brought. They lay on a huge Pyrex dish surrounded by fried tomatoes and fried bread, fried eggs and fried bacon. He placed this doubtfully on the table and fetched the plates. The
whole thing reminded him of the carpet he had managed to stop his mother buying for the best lounge.

‘Lady Munday would prefer coffee to tea, Gavin. Gavin fancies coffee for his breakfast, don’t you, Gavin.’

Gavin said that he would make some and retired to the kitchen, where he discovered that he was sweating. While he boiled water and spooned Nescaff into cups, he heard her going on and on and on:
the East Wing, the West Wing, the haunted tower and the lady who walked in the deer park . . . Surely, any moment, she would go too far, or rather, since she had done that almost from the moment
she opened her mouth, she would be
seen
to have gone too far, and then what would happen? His mother would be humiliated, and almost certainly very angry as a result. He was honest enough
to admit that he was frightened of her anger, but he also did not want her to be humiliated. The terrible dullness of her life assailed him and, as usual, he suffered from it because he made
himself mysteriously responsible. His father was a kind of eating working machine whose social life – such as it was – was conducted outside the house. His mother – a pool typist,
up from Swansea – had once worked for three months in an office in Barnet, had met Dad and had married him when she was twenty-one, and from that moment all she had ever been allowed to do
was to keep house and have himself and Marge. She had fought for her children to have advantages often with no very clear idea of what they might entail, or even what they were. At one point she
had taken a job in Boots to help pay for Marge’s private schooling, but the rest of her married life had consisted of cleaning this house and feeding them all. Since Caesar had been put down,
she only went out to shop. He took the coffee back to the table, full of resolutions about giving his mother a new dog. The sausages and eggs, tomatoes, bread and bacon had now been arranged upon
four of the ferny plates. Minerva had levered her egg on to her piece of fried bread and was now absently stabbing at its yolk with her fork as she answered Mrs Lamb’s questions.

‘Daddy simply hates the House of Lords,’ she was saying. ‘No wonder they have to pay them to go there. Sitting about in mothy old ermine and coronets all day: Daddy says
it’s no life for a man.’

‘Do you want milk in your coffee?’

‘No thank you, Gavin. I prefer it black. I’d love some sugar though.’

‘Pass Lady Munday the sugar, Fred,’ Mrs Lamb ordered sharply. ‘Well, we have to have a government, don’t we, or else where would we be?’

Minerva said, ‘Goodness knows,’ and put four lumps of sugar into her cup.

‘Over-run by foreigners, that’s what,’ said Mr Lamb unexpectedly. Everybody looked at him and his neck went red.

‘All capital cities have a lot of foreigners, Dad.’

‘Not like us, they don’t.’

Minerva who had drunk her coffee and was now spooning out the sugar said:

‘I must say, some of them have awfully pretty clothes. And it must be such a relief, if you are really plain and spotty, to wear one of those black face masks every time you go out.
Everybody would think you must be ravishing underneath, or your husband wouldn’t bother with it. But they do have awful operations. If you’re at all well born you have your clit sewn up
so that you can’t feel anything.’

Gavin felt himself going scarlet. In spite of not immediately and precisely knowing what she meant, he knew enough of what she meant to feel acute anxiety about what on earth would happen next,
but both of his parents’ faces were bland: his father had stopped chewing, but that was all, and his mother was listening and nodding in the way that she always did when she didn’t
understand what was going on and didn’t want people to know. (She did this quite a lot with Ken Goshawk, Marge’s husband, about politics, so it was easy for Gavin to recognize.)
‘People have their little ways,’ she now said. ‘It wouldn’t do if we were all the same. We have to remember that they don’t have a National Health Service,’ she
finished, polishing off a subject clearly unwelcome to her only because it was unknown.

Gavin shot Minerva a repressive look and she put her hand over her face and then actually scooped up a bit of tomato with her knife and put it in her mouth. This, Gavin saw,
did
shock
his mother whose expression became almost wilfully broadminded.

‘Eat up,’ said Gavin. ‘Remember you’ve got to be on your way in about half an hour, or you’ll be late. And you promised me not to let you be that.’

‘Okay.’ She knew that she had gone too far and now cut the white off her oozing egg and ate it with the rest of the tomatoes quite quickly.

The rest of breakfast consisted of Mrs Lamb extolling the comforts of her spare room, and lamenting Gavin’s masculine incompetence in putting her in the lounge.

‘Oh, I was perfectly comfortable,’ Minerva said – several times. ‘It was such a lovely change from home,’ she added, nearly spoiling it. ‘Damp sheets and all
those indoor draughts,’ she hurriedly explained. ‘One only has to put a hot water bottle in one’s bed to see the steam simply rising.’

Gavin got to his feet. ‘Come on: I’ll help you pack the car.’

‘Why have I got to go
now
?’ she wailed when they were back in the best lounge.

‘You promised you would last night. It’s not safe to have you about. Look at what you said at breakfast.’

‘It just slipped out,’ she said sulkily. ‘Anyway, they didn’t seem to mind. And wasn’t I marvellous about everything else? I do think you might thank me.’ She
was rolling the red cheesecloth dress into a ball before stuffing it into one of the carrier bags that, Gavin noticed, seemed to be overflowing however much she took out of them.

‘I tell you what! Why don’t we go for a picnic? That’s quite a good Sunday thing to do, isn’t it?’

‘I can’t. I’m driving my parents to lunch with my sister.’

‘Oh.’

‘Can’t you find some nice friends to spend the day with?’

‘Haven’t got any
nice
friends.’

‘Well then, you’ll have to go home to Daddy and the deer park.’ He picked up the parrot’s cage, took her by the arm and started to propel her out of the room.

‘You needn’t pull me about like that: I’ll go, only I do think I should say good-bye to your parents and thank them and all that.’

‘All right. After we’ve packed the car . . .’

When the parrot and the carrier bags had been crammed into their respective positions she turned to him and said: ‘I must say, you are somebody who makes the least of everything that
happens to you. Look at me! You’ve simply wasted me, really, haven’t you. But I suppose if you’re contented with your boring old lot, there’s no more to be said.’

This turned Gavin’s self-reproach from nasty remarks passed inside himself about his brutal and callous attitude to a young girl, into loud jeers about how chicken he was about Life in
general . . . He followed her silently up the crazy paving to the front door. She
had
done her best at breakfast – according to her lights (which meaningless phrase simply exempted
her from behaving as
he
would have done in the circumstances).

Mrs Lamb met them in the hall. ‘Very pleased to have
met
you,’ she said warmly and several times. ‘
Any
friend of Gavin’s,’ she had added rather
wildly. ‘Fred!’ But after an uneasy pause, with more calling followed by a small search, she was forced to say: ‘I’m afraid he’s – engaged – at the moment.
I shouldn’t bother to wait if I was you.’ Gavin knew that she was terrified of his father flushing the toilet and emerging, which would make indelicately clear the nature of his
engagement.

‘It was awfully kind of you to have me for the night, and breakfast – and everything. Thank you so much.’ After a moment’s hesitation, she leaned down and kissed Mrs
Lamb’s white pancake make-up with the result that it became suffused with a tide of lavender as she blushed with pleasure.