Getting It Right (25 page)

‘I’ll come with you.’

Outside, they walked for a few minutes in silence. Then, he said: ‘I warn you, Minnie, I am going home, and you’re not coming with me.’

‘Okay.’ In a muffled voice, she added: ‘Your mother liked me, anyway.’ As they crossed the railway bridge, she said: ‘Don’t you
ever
do anything
without a plan?’

‘Sometimes. Look – if you’re at a loose end, there must be a friend you could ring up?’

‘I’ve got hundreds of friends. The thing is, I don’t like them very much. And, if you ask me, you’re getting a bit like them.’ She wiped her nose with her knuckles
and then said: ‘Tell you what. If you’ll lend me a fiver – I’ll be off . . . I swear I’ll pay you back . . . I get my allowance on Monday. Those bloody paints cost so
much, you see.’

Gavin only had three pounds on him. He gave her that, standing outside the tube. It felt treacherous, giving her the money, rather than kind. She took it expressionlessly, with her eyes on his
face.

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked. He badly wanted to feel better about her.

‘I’ll go to a supermarket.’ She started a little smile, which went suddenly out, leaving her face quite bland. ‘Okay then. Thanks. I’m off.’ She turned on her
heel, and walked, very fast, away – back across the bridge.

In the train, he felt very tired, and dropped off, but just before that he recalled her voice saying: ‘Don’t you
ever
do anything without a plan?’ and remembered that
it had actually made him very angry, and he’d lied to her. He always made plans.

Sometimes, however, plans branched out into other things that hadn’t been planned. Gavin had got seats for Harry and himself to go to Covent Garden the following
Wednesday evening. The opera was
Traviata
, ‘good old
Traviata
’ Harry called it: he shared with Gavin a predilection for Verdi. Gavin loved going with Harry, because
they both wept copiously at all the desperate and sad moments (often, indeed, at any moment at all) and Harry was the only person with whom Gavin felt comfortable at such times. They usually met in
the Circle Bar with time for a drink, and ate in a Chinese restaurant off Shaftesbury Avenue afterwards. They always got good seats, and had Peking Duck with all the trimmings afterwards;
‘You’re only young once,’ Harry would say, and Gavin, while he did not particularly associate youth with pleasure, felt that a treat was not a treat unless they were doing
everything they could to make it one. He looked forward to Wednesday to brighten an uneventful and slogging week at the salon.

On Wednesday morning, Harry rang up to say that Winthrop had hit him so hard with yet another ashtray (not the Pisa one) that he had a huge great black eye and wasn’t at all sure that his
nose wasn’t broken. Anyway, he felt dreadful, and Gavin would see that he couldn’t go out like that. Also, he needed to have a serious chat with Winthrop who was clearly not himself.
‘See if you can sell my seat,’ Harry said, ‘and if you can’t, well, never mind.’ He went on to give Gavin a blow by blow description of Winthrop’s blow by blow
behaviour until his voice broke . . . Gavin said he’d ring on Saturday and come round if wanted, and that was that.

Gavin did actually think for a bit about whether there was anyone at all that he would like to ask instead of Harry, but there wasn’t. Domingo was singing, and he sold the seat quite
easily and then wandered up to the bar to get himself a drink. He had arrived early, because of selling the ticket, but part of the treat was simply being in such a beautiful building –
surely the most beautiful and suitable in the world? Only the people, he thought, as he caught sight of himself in the enormous mirror half-way up the main staircase – only the people let the
place down in their boring clothes. Still,
he
couldn’t talk; he was simply wearing the better of his two suits. It was amazing, really, the way the opera house went on being so
majestically festive in spite of its drab occupants: if he had any choice in the matter, he’d make everybody have to have special clothes just for going to the opera in . . . He, for
instance, would have a velvet suit and an enormous cloak lined with red – no, not red with
his
complexion – with pearl-grey satin. And of course, in this case, he would be
accompanied by the most stunning, fabulous amazing girl the place had ever been graced by – in a long yellow silk dress with a little crown of diamonds: a kind of Violetta, really, only
without anything wrong with her chest . . . Here he remembered Garbo in the famous film and the wonderful way that her eyes had flickered upwards as she died . . . That was another thing that he
and Harry enjoyed together, ‘the golden oldies’ as Harry said . . . Briefly, he wondered whether it was better to die in the full flood of an undying passion – rather than hang on
and get hit by ashtrays – it might depend a bit upon whether you were the one who died and/or the one who got hit. He had a feeling that that was the one he’d be: the usual, no win
situation. Then he thought that, as he certainly didn’t want to go to the Chinese restaurant by himself, he’d better have a sandwich. They were expensive, and very good: he decided
that, if he had one now, he’d want another in the first interval and then, probably, another in the second. He’d put it off and save some money. He’d have another drink,
instead.

The place was filling up, and he had to wait. He waited while someone who looked startlingly like Professor Moriarty collected three glasses of white wine and turned to donate two of them to
– this was really too much – two people who could easily have been Dr and Mrs Watson . . . What on earth would Holmes have thought of that? Impossible to accuse Watson of treachery; he
probably thought that, by having a straight talk with Moriarty, he was calming everything down between them, and getting everything above board. He was probably the only person in the world who
could believe for an instant that Moriarty would connive at anything above board . . . But then he realized that, of course, Moriarty was simply Holmes in disguise; any minute now, he’d pull
off his wig, grow about two feet in stature and have Watson laughing heartily at having been so taken in.

He paid for his drink and wandered off with it. He was beginning to wish that he had someone to talk to: it would be all right once the opera started . . . he certainly didn’t want anyone
new
to talk to . . . he had collided with a girl who smiled at him almost as though she
liked
people running into her and spilling her drink . . . good God, she might have thought
he’d done it on purpose! As he apologized, backing off and feeling the sweat prickling his skin, he wondered with angry terror whether she simply came to the opera by herself for the sole
purpose of making it seem as though people bumped into her with a view to getting off with them. It was quite possible; anything was possible. But she wouldn’t catch
him
like that
– he knew a thing or two. It was exactly the sort of way that Minnie would behave. Thank goodness
she
wasn’t here. He went and bought a programme (he collected them) and thence
to his seat (in the Amphitheatre), well chosen in the middle of the front row. The occupant of Harry’s seat was a very small, old man with gold-rimmed glasses and a ragged white moustache,
who turned out – they spoke because Gavin tripped over his feet – to have heard every Violetta Gavin had ever heard of and some that he hadn’t, and the ones he had heard of he
only knew through his seventy-eights – like Rosa Ponselle – he had a recording of her with Martinelli doing two arias from
Aida
. . . But he didn’t need to do much
talking; the old man produced an uneven flow of happy reminiscences, with great names periodically exploding like rockets in the hazy dark of his memory. By the time he got to Caniglia whom Gavin
knew only through the Rome Opera Company recording of Verdi’s Requiem, the house lights were dimming, the conductor had arrived, and they were off.

In the interval, rather to his relief, the old man elected to stay put, drawing magically from some pocket a jar of Brand’s Essence which he proceeded to eat with a plastic spoon. Gavin,
who did not want to hear the present performances unfavourably compared with the past, decided to go in search of his sandwich. Then, in view of the crowds round the refreshment bars, he decided to
give that up in favour of the Gents, and it was coming out of there that he met Joan; almost, in fact, ran into her, since she was emerging from a box.

‘Well, Gavin, how
are you
?’ she immediately said.

‘Fine.’

‘Well, come and have a drink with me. I’m on my own – like you.’

She strode purposefully ahead. She was wearing a dress with a lot of black sequins on it, and two black sequin butterflies in her orange hair. How did she know he was alone, he wondered, but he
felt quite simply glad to see her; glad, and a bit excited.

She had reserved a little table on which stood a bottle of wine in a bucket and two glasses.

‘I have it out here, because I like to smoke,’ she said. ‘You pour the wine.’

The wine was white, cold, and with a delicate flinty taste.

‘How did you know I was alone?’ he asked after a short, easy silence.

‘I saw you come in . . . I watched that old man talking to you. I have some very powerful opera glasses. Also, it didn’t surprise me.’ Her spectacles were black diamanté
this time and the plate-glass lenses seemed to be tinted.

‘Did you get my card?’

‘I did. Meeting
you
was the best part for me, too. Although, when you come to think about it, it’s a pretty guarded compliment. It was a pretty terrible party.’

‘Why did you have it?’

‘I had it for Dmitri. He said he’d be home by then. And he gets into a frenzy of boredom if I don’t arrange things like that for him.’

‘Would he have enjoyed it?’

‘Would he? I don’t know. Because, you see, if he’d been
there
it would have been a different kind of party.’

‘Is he – has he got a very strong personality, then?’

‘He’s certainly a personality. He’s got a wonderful side to him,’ she added, which to Gavin opened up vistas of terrifying other sides, but he nodded.

‘What’s with you? What happened to you after the party? If you feel like telling me, that is.’

‘That thin girl – in a red dress – she offered me a lift to get my bike, and then it turned out that she had nowhere to sleep, and she sort of chased me back to my
parents’ house and in the end she slept there. On the settee,’ he added defensively . . . Her large, orange, painted-on mouth smiled, and he wondered what her real mouth inside it was
like. She asked him to pour more wine.

‘Do you often come alone to the opera?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Often. Most of the people I know either don’t care for it, or they regard it as a luxury. That’s the last thing that it is. For me it’s like
being a fish put back into water.’

‘You mean – because it’s larger than life?’

‘It’s exactly the
size
of life. There are just a lot of undersized people about.’

‘I don’t suppose Alfredo’s father would mind anything like as much today about who his son went about with, though.’

‘He wouldn’t mind for the same reasons. Anyway, that’s just plot. Themes don’t change: they’re elemental.’

‘Morality changes, though.’

‘Not as much as you might think. Most fathers would worry about their only son marrying a renowned prostitute; they’d find different reasons for it, but they’d mind.’

‘You mean if Graham Greene, for instance, was writing about Violetta, she’d only have to be a married Catholic and Bob’s your uncle.’

‘Alfredo would be the married Catholic: she’d have leukaemia.’

‘But if it wasn’t a Catholic writer – ’

‘Oh, then Alfredo’s wife would have to be brought into it. After God, you get Freud and guilt. I bet you Freud’s inhibited far more people than he’s liberated.’

This was a new idea to Gavin and he digested it in silence. Then he said: ‘You mean, hell has simply changed into being other people – like Sartre said?’

‘Yes. I don’t care for it much, do you? It still smacks of us all being victims. Smarter, and more knowing, but still victims. I really prefer the happiness is energy
notion.’

‘Who said that?’

‘I think,’ she said, after a pause, ‘I think it was Balzac.’

‘I haven’t read much of him.’

The first bell went, and she said: ‘Make with the wine . . . Listen: would you like to sit with me? I’ve got a box – all to myself . . . It’s the kind of box for four
where two people can see properly.’

‘Thanks very much. I would.’ He had never been in a box. He poured the rest of the wine, feeling exhilarated.

Following her back into the auditorium, he wondered how much playing that curious game with her had to do with this absence of any discomfort that he felt in her company. Something, surely
– there was a feeling of intimacy, and dishonest intimacy was not, he thought, possible. But he wasn’t much of an authority upon intimacy really.

The box was just what he hoped it would be: glamorous, cosy, and dark red. It also gave him a kind of Lautrec view of the audience which somehow made being there doubly exciting. Then the
curtain rose on the second Act idyll, and he became lost in Alfredo’s rapture.

Once or twice during the Act, he glanced at his companion, who sat motionless, turned away from him, her face resting upon one hand. Silhouetted thus, she had at once a vulnerable and a
mysterious air: her absorption enhanced his own; each time he looked back to the stage with another dimension to his pleasure.

In the second interval she proposed that they go out ‘for our drinks’ and which this time proved to be two large brandies waiting on the same table.

‘I suppose one thing that would have to be different,
morally
speaking, would be Alfredo’s sister’s future in-laws. They’d have to be real Washington bourgeoisie
to refuse to let her marry their son because of what her brother was up to. So you may be right about morality changing.’