Getting It Right (30 page)

‘I’m Jenny’s mother,’ she said. ‘Would you like to come in? She’s nearly ready.’

He followed her along the passage to a room at the back which turned out to be a sitting room with the kitchen at one end of it. There was an ironing board out and a basket full of washing, but
Gavin did not notice very much else, because sitting at the table wearing a pale blue T-shirt and eating a bowl of Puffed Wheat was Jenny’s child. When he saw Gavin, he stopped eating with
spoon in mid-air and favoured him with a stare of the most penetrating impartiality.

Jenny’s mother said: ‘That’s Andrew. Put your spoon down, Andrew, and say hullo.’

Andrew shut his eyes very slowly and then lowered his head.

He was the most beautiful child – well, almost the most beautiful
person
– Gavin had ever seen in his life. His hair was a riot of silvery curls, his eyes, when open (and he
opened them almost at once to continue his appraisal), were the colour of aquamarine, a wonderful greeny blue, and his skin was a faintly flushed, translucent white.

‘He’s inclined to be shy,’ Jenny’s mother said. ‘Eat up your supper, Andrew. I’ll go and tell Jenny!’

Andrew put down his spoon, seized his bowl with both hands and began drinking from it, making a surprising amount of noise and watching Gavin over the rim of the bowl – judging to a nicety
when Gavin’s attention would falter, as, the same second that it did, he blew an astonishing amount of milk and Puffed Wheat back from his mouth into the bowl . . . Then he put his hands over
his face and shrieked with laughter. Then he upset the bowl, and Gavin, who had been infected by the joke, rushed to find a cloth to clear things up. He was in the middle of this when Jenny’s
mother returned.

‘She won’t be a minute – oh, Andrew! Don’t you bother: I’ll do it. You were showing off, weren’t you? Don’t take any notice of him: he’s usually
as good as gold . . .’

‘He’s a marvellous little boy, isn’t he.’ Even as he said this, it sounded a lame way of describing Andrew.

‘He’s marvellous, all right. Quite a handful. It’s very nice that Jenny is getting a chance to get out. She hasn’t been out in the evening for I don’t know how
long: must be before Christmas – oh no, Andrew had a chill then, and at the last minute she didn’t go. Anyway, it’s nice for her.’ By now she had mopped up the table,
Andrew’s face and most of his chair.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting.’ It was Jenny. She wore a bright blue cotton boiler suit and she looked excited. Andrew held out his arms to her and, in a wonderfully husky voice
shouted, ‘Cheese!’

‘You can’t have cheese at this time of night! I mashed him some banana, Mum, would you give him that? I’m off now, Andrew. Sleep well, see you in the morning.’ She bent
down to kiss him which ended in her hugging him. ‘I’m coming back soon,’ she said, almost as though she was reassuring herself. She gave Gavin a look which implied that she wanted
to go at once.

‘Thanks,’ he said to Jenny’s mother. ‘Good-bye, Andrew.’ Andrew, he could see, was working up to intense disapproval of the situation; his face was suffusing, his
mouth becoming square. He rejected the plate of banana offered utterly and it fell to the floor. Jenny’s mother said: ‘Go on, love – I’ll look after him. He knows me.’
And Jenny, with one backward glance, as her son finally expelled his breath in a roar of despair, almost ran out of the room. In the passage she said:

‘It’s just that he’s not used to me going out in the evening. I told him I was when I was bathing him, but I can see now he didn’t believe me.’

She looked so worried, that Gavin said: ‘Do you want to stay with him?’

‘Oh no. I want to go. He’ll be all right.’

By the time they reached his bike propped against the privet hedge, the wails had stopped. Gavin gave her the helmet. ‘You been on a bike before?’

‘Once. A long time ago.’ She took off her specs and put them in her shoulder bag. The helmet made her look like a little Action Man.

‘I won’t go fast.’

‘Is it all right if I put my arms round your waist?’

It seemed to be quite all right. In any case, Gavin reminded himself, if she had only been on a bike once before, there wasn’t much else she could do . . . ‘We may have a bit of a
job finding Peter’s flat,’ he warned, and they set off.

Conversation was so difficult during the ride, that he didn’t try to have any. After he’d asked her once if she was all right (he could feel she was nervous from the way she gripped
him round the waist) and she’d said something that he’d not heard but taken for an assent, they concentrated upon getting to wherever it was Peter and Hazel lived. This proved to be not
far, but after asking two Poles, one American and finally a policewoman, they discovered Greenwood Close, a gaunt block of flats set between a car park for a supermarket and a bus depot.

‘Have you been here before?’ Jenny asked in the lift.

‘No. I’ve no idea what it will be like.’

‘It’s funny, isn’t it? Meeting people you work with away from work. You expect them to be different in ways that they aren’t.’ She stopped at this, and Gavin
noticed – or rather realized that he’d noticed before but not remarked on it – that away from work Jenny seemed to blush quite often. At work, she rolled her eyes and stumped
about, but stayed the same colour. She had put on her specs again, and run her fingers through her hair – en brosse as usual. She had a very small pearl in each ear: at work she wore tiny
little thin gold rings.

‘Is it okay if I call you Gavin? I mean just this evening.’

‘Course it is.’ He felt both embarrassed and touched.

Peter met them at the door. ‘I thought you were going to be late,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘Hazel!’ he called. ‘It’s all right; they’ve
come!’ He was wearing a scarf tucked into his neck – like Gavin, but there was nothing casual about his demeanour. He led the way along a passage that smelled very strongly of paint
into a narrow room with picture windows at each end. Everything in it was various shades of brown: after Gavin had been there for some hours, he could see that this was not entirely true, but the
first, overall, impression was of brownness: biscuit, coffee, caramel, oatmeal, treacle, peat, chocolate, cow dung (and others) were all toning to such an effect that it was a bit like being inside
a very old and heavily varnished picture – even the air felt thick and coloured. At first there was no sign of Hazel, and he wondered whether she was also in brown and therefore temporarily
invisible until the eye could pick her out, but then he saw the top half of her through a hatch: her hair
was
brown and cut in a rather unadventurous fringe and she was putting peanuts
into a brown pottery bowl. Peter said:

‘That’s Hazel. Hazel, this is Gavin. And Jenny.’

Everybody said hullo. Then there was a pause until Hazel left the hatch and came into the room. On a coffee-coloured coffee table stood a jug and four amber-tinted glasses. Peter said:

‘Do you want us to have our drinks yet, Haze?’

‘I think we should. Peter’s made a special brew.’ She indicated that they should all sit, and they did: Jenny and Gavin on the chesterfield upholstered in near-brown leather;
she and Peter on severely architectural pine chairs. There was a short silence. Then Hazel said:

‘What do you think of it? We only finished it last night.’

‘Oh! Drinks!’ Peter started to deal with that.

Jenny said: ‘Did you do everything yourselves?’

‘Oh – we had to. Couldn’t afford anything else. But it does mean that in the end you get exactly what you wanted. It’s the only room we have finished as a matter of fact.
Do you know, that if you have paint mixed by those paint shops, they
charge
you for it? We found that out the hard way with the loo!’

While talking, he had poured out four drinks from the pottery jug, and now handed them round. Gavin sipped his: all he could say about it was that he hadn’t the slightest idea what it was.
He wanted to know, so he asked.

‘Ah!’ said Peter: ‘It’s a speciality of the house. What do you think of it?’

Hazel said: ‘It’s a bit sweeter than last time you made it, Peter.’

‘Don’t you like it then?’

‘I didn’t say that. I said it was a bit sweeter.’

‘Oh well, I didn’t have a measure: I just chucked things in.’

Jenny said: ‘It’s got lemonade in it, hasn’t it? I mean that fizzy kind.’

‘Right. What else?’ He looked challengingly round. Gavin took another sip. As a drink, it wasn’t growing on him. At random, he said, ‘Guinness? Red Cinzano? A dash of
Angostura bitters?’

‘You might have been
there
! When I was mixing it! You’ve left one or two things out, though.’

‘I can’t guess them.’ He put his glass down and took a peanut.

Hazel said: ‘Oh! I forgot the crisps.’

Peter called: ‘What’s the timing on dinner, Haze?’

‘It’ll be about half an hour; I think. The cooker’s been a bit funny.’

‘We got one of those re-conditioned ones. They have some bargains, if you’re prepared to wait and keep going to look every week. The one we got would have cost a hundred and
ninety-four pounds if we’d got it new. Hazel’s parents said why didn’t we get one on the H.P. I had to explain to them that that would have cost even more. Then I saw this place
from the top of a bus. In the end we paid seventy-five, wasn’t it, Haze?’

‘Seventy-six fifty – including delivery and fixing.’

‘That’s right. She’s amazing about figures: it must come from working for an accountant.’

Hazel re-appeared with another pottery bowl full of potato crisps.

‘You’ll have to eat all these, and the nuts,’ she said, ‘because we need the bowls for the sweet.’ Everybody had some of both. There was a brief silence, during
which Gavin could see Hazel sizing up Jenny, and, he thought, deciding to like her. Then Peter said: ‘Tell you what. We’ll do our tour of the flat now, Haze, while you’re popping
the first course under the grill.’

They toured the flat. It consisted of a bedroom in which Hazel and Peter slept, which was going to be done in shades of lilac, Peter explained, although at the moment it had bare plaster, what
looked like a concrete floor and no curtains – in fact contained a double bed with bright brass rails each end, and a lilac candlewick coverlet and a fitted cupboard covered with primer that
Peter said he’d made. When he had showed them everything about the cupboard and said that it had taken him four weekends and three weeks’ worth of evenings to make, he told them that
they had plumped for lilac because an aunt of Hazel’s had given them the bedcover. ‘It meant changing duvet covers and pillowcases, but we thought it was worth it.’ Then they saw
the bathroom, that had a cork-tiled floor – a very recent piece of work – but not the tiles round the bath yet because they’d put them on with the wrong stuff and had to take the
whole lot off, and in taking them off they’d broken some; ‘and then when we went back to the place where we’d got them, they’d run out, so
then
we swopped what
we’d got left (and I had an awful job getting the wrong glue off the backs), and what we got – well, I’ll show you when we get to the spare room.’

In the passage, Jenny suddenly winked at him, and Gavin stopped minding about being shown everything so much, and winked back.

They stood in the doorway of the lavatory about which even Peter could not say very much since its size precluded it being anything more than strictly, not to say uncomfortably, functional.

‘You mustn’t mind the state of our spare room. We aren’t planning to have anyone to stay until the end of the year. We keep all our decorating gear in it.’ He opened the
door and they saw what could only be described as a very single room indeed filled with plastic buckets, and rollers and pots of paint. Peter edged his way round most of these and opened a
cardboard box out of which he proceeded to take a succession of perfectly white tiles. ‘The point is they’re not all like this – ah, here we are!’ And he held up a less
white tile with the picture of a courgette on it. ‘And each one is different, you see. It was Hazel’s idea – she does have the odd brainwave – ’

‘Dinner’s ready!’

A moment later, Hazel appeared at the spare room door; ‘Dinner’s ready,’ she said more quietly but with greater urgency.

Peter bundled the tiles back into the box saying: ‘Right; we’re coming; we’ll be right with you.’

At the car park end of the sitting room, a small, round table covered with brown Formica was laid. There were brown paper napkins, brown candles in amber glass holders, brown pottery plates
amorphously decorated in a paler brown, and cutlery with wooden handles. On the plates were four steaming grapefruit.

Everybody sat down, and Hazel explained that the grapefruit was hot.

‘I put brown sugar on it,’ she said, ‘but there’s more if anyone wants it.’

Peter, who had fetched their unfinished drinks from the coffee table, lifted his glass. ‘This is our first sit-down meal here,’ he said, ‘quite an occasion, really.’ And
he smiled at his wife. He had an engaging smile which relieved his face of the stern anxiety that was his usual expression, Gavin thought, whether he was cutting someone’s hair, or worrying
about his home.

Jenny said: ‘Goodness! You have done a lot. I don’t think I’d have the patience.’

‘You will when you get married. Hazel used to go out every night, before we got engaged, but now I only let her out for her lampshade classes. This is jolly good!’ he prompted, and
Gavin, honesty deserting him, murmured assent.

For the rest of the dinner, aubergines stuffed with something or other, Peter talked to Gavin about how terrible Mr Adrian was, and would he be likely to give them a rise in the autumn –
not
he
, mean old ponce – and Hazel asked Jenny where she lived, and whether she liked working in the salon, and whether she worked for Peter much and what was
that
like? But
after Jenny said that no, she worked nearly all the time for Gavin, Hazel said – confidentially, but Gavin, who only needed half an ear to listen to Peter, heard her quite clearly: ‘Are
you walking out with him then?’ And, even if he’d been in any doubt, the colour of Jenny’s face – a very pale scarlet – would have left none. The colour of
Jenny’s face seemed a confirmation to Hazel too, but of a different sort. She said: ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry. I think he’s lovely,’ and went to fetch their sweet
– over which there was some delay as the crisp and nut bowls (not emptied) had to be cleaned out to make way for the crème caramel.