Getting It Right (35 page)

The enormity of this suggestion left Gavin momentarily speechless. Then he thought, of course, it was all quite simple – all he had to do was to say that he wanted no part of it, backing
up this general statement with the salient point of not wanting to marry Minnie: that would do it. But it didn’t. To his horror, Sir Gordon simply raised the price of the bribe: he’d
buy them a house. Gavin explained all over again how much he didn’t want any of it. Sir Gordon congratulated him on his shrewdness. ‘We’ll make a business man of you yet,’
and added more financial inducements. At the end of what seemed to Gavin like about half an hour, but was probably only a few minutes, his future – married to Minnie – contained two
houses, a three months honeymoon in the West Indies, a directorship of one of Sir Gordon’s subsidiary companies and an account of up to £500 a month at Harrods. ‘My word,
you’re a sharp operator.’ As the price went up, so did Sir Gordon’s estimation of him: he seemed to admire greed almost as much as he admired dishonesty.

At his wits’ end, Gavin said he would have to think it all over: he felt craven saying it, but it seemed to be, and in fact was, a possible way out.

‘Take your time, my boy!’ he cried. (He had completely stopped repeating Gavin’s words after him: Gavin thought that that must be because he had – most unfortunately
– stopped disapproving of him.) It also became clear to Gavin that his saying that he wanted to think it over was regarded as merely a form: he felt the tentacles of bonhomie closing in when
Sir Gordon clapped him painfully on the back. ‘One little point,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘I shouldn’t pass on any of this to the girl: not now, anyway. Savvy?’
Gavin, who’d thought people only said that in books, said he wouldn’t dream of it and he must be going.

‘Enjoy your swim. We can have another talk before dinner.’ Just then, the telephone rang, he walked with ponderous speed back to his desk, and his attention was deflected. He picked
up the receiver and then made elaborate mime to Gavin about having to talk on it. Gavin escaped.

Into the hall. The front door was before him at the other end. He wasn’t going swimming; not he – not on your life. He opened the door, shut it as softly as he could behind him and
ran lightly down the drive. Reaching the road, he turned left and continued running. He had the fear – possibly irrational – that Minnie would discover he was no longer with her father
and that then she would give chase in her car, and he simply did not feel equal to her tenacity. Twice he hid behind hedges when he heard a car but neither of them was hers. His luck held when he
got to the station too; there was a train drawing in as he arrived and in spite of the crabbed and slow-motion efforts of the man in the ticket office he managed to catch it. He flung himself in an
empty second-class compartment just as the train moved off. His heart was pounding from running. He was pouring with sweat and he was almost sobbing with the effort to get his breath back –
and from relief.

At Waterloo station, he went to a call box and rang Harry. The one thing he didn’t want to do was to go home, in case she started ringing him, since he neither felt equal
to dealing with her, nor with his mother
about
her. Harry was in. No, he wasn’t doing anything that night, because he’d got a case of mangoes from a street market and was in
the middle of making chutney. ‘And Winthrop, of
course
, is going to Heaven, but I’ve told him I’m damned if I’m going with him. I can’t stand the noise. You
come round when you like, dear boy.’

The moment that he had settled this, he felt safer, and the situation he had escaped from seemed even more unreal than it had begun to feel in the train. On his way to Harry, he even started to
try to imagine what life as Sir Gordon’s son-in-law could possibly be like. A mixture of being bullied and being bored. In a way it would add up to an endless life round tables; tables with
food on them, and tables with papers on them. There would also, of course, be Minnie, who presumably was well on her way to becoming as hellishly bored as her mother had said she was. But, when he
thought of Minnie, he knew that there was something much wronger with her than that . . . It was easy to say that she was off her head; but that, too, seemed now to be a rather callous way of
simply writing her off. It was in the train on his way to Harry that he began to feel bad about her, which irritated and unnerved him. What on earth could
he
do about it, after all? He
hoped that there was absolutely nothing, but his uncertainty about this nagged at him. It opened up the whole question of how responsible was he meant to be for other people? And, if at all, to
whom, and how much? He hadn’t
invited
Minnie into his life; she had occurred and then clung like a little limpet. But then he hadn’t invited Joan, either: it was she who had
done the inviting, he had simply – thank God – gone along with her. He suddenly wondered whether he was one of those craven, passive people who hung about all their lives waiting for
things to happen to them – merely reserving the right to complain if they weren’t the right things.

If Harry hadn’t made him go to that party, he wouldn’t have met either Minnie or Joan. He certainly wouldn’t have gone to it without being pushed. And, if he hadn’t gone,
he would have been at the opera the same night as Joan, but he wouldn’t have known her so nothing would have happened. But if he was a different sort of person not knowing her would have made
no difference. He made the resolution that, when Joan returned to London, it would be
he
who did the inviting and felt his body give a little lurch of assent. Certainly that party had
changed his life; so how many parties had he
not
gone to that might have done the same thing? It had altered the Ladder of Fear: once he
knew
people, they were off it, whereas
before, everybody had some sort of position on it. Excepting Harry. He was really looking forward to seeing Harry, to having a good long talk with him about – things.

He could smell the chutney on the stairs, and when Harry opened the door he released a great blast of it – so strong it brought tears to the eyes.

‘You’ll have to
bear
with me because we are nearing the potting stage and it keeps sticking.’

The glass coffee table was covered with the remains of lunch for two. Harry had darted straight back into the kitchen, so Gavin followed him.

‘Winthrop’s taken some Black Magic to his mother. He’s lost interest in the culinary arts.’ He was vigorously stirring a huge cauldron from which steam was rising; the
odour of boiling vinegar and spices was overpowering.

‘I know – if it was alcohol I should definitely be unable to walk straight,’ Harry said cheerfully.

Gavin went to look at the blackish-brown mixture that bubbled and periodically spat at them.

‘Put a kettle on, dear child. As soon as I’ve potted it, we can have some tea.’

Gavin put on the kettle and then went to the lavatory which was in the bathroom. The towel rail was hung with T-shirts inscribed with cheery/belligerent messages – Winthrop’s, no
doubt. This reminded him that he hadn’t seen Winthrop since the night of the party, and that Winthrop had shown unmistakable signs of not liking him then. He remembered the powerful ease with
which he handled people he didn’t care for – like Spiro, for instance – and began to worry about what he would be like if he came back from visiting his mother in a bad
temper.

‘How
is
Winthrop?’ he asked when he returned to the kitchen.

‘Well, he’s all right in him
self
, but he’s restless. He’s working for a mini-cab company now, because he wants to save enough to go to America when I get my
holiday . . . I’m glad he’s dropped the modelling because I don’t think it brought out the best in him. We’re going to San Francisco in the autumn. It’s given him some
kind of goal, but on the other hand he spends a fortune on these discos, and of course he meets all kinds of people there. You have to be very patient, but I expect one day he’ll grow up and
settle down. But if you’re . . . fond of someone, you have to take the rough with the smooth.’ He lifted a small amount of chutney out of the pan and put it on a saucer. ‘Just
want to see if it looks done when it’s cooler. It’s not as critical as jam, but on the other hand you don’t want it slopping about in the jars.’

His eye, Gavin noticed, had faded to a livid yellow with tinges of green. ‘You’d better not buy any ashtrays when you’re in San Francisco.’

‘We always buy ashtrays, dear boy; for our collection.’ Then he got the point and, feeling the wounded side of his face, he said: ‘But, even if we didn’t,
he’d
find something else. Winthrop’s very resourceful when he’s angry.’

‘I got the impression he was angry with me last time I saw him.’

‘When was that?’

‘At the party. The famous party.’

‘Oh – that! It was that wretched little quean Spiro he was angry with. He likes Joan, and he can’t stand dishonesty.’ He inspected his saucer. ‘Right: I think we
can go ahead.’ He turned off the gas under the chutney and opened the oven door. A batch of Kilner jars filled the small oven.

‘Why do you keep them in there?’

‘They have to be hot when the chutney goes in, or they’d crack. Winthrop’s fond of you. He’s just a bit nervous of people who’ve been educated. Well, we all are,
aren’t we really? I mean, if education is relative, I suppose there’s always one lot somewhere that we’re afraid of. Winthrop really slipped through the net as far as formal
education was concerned. His mother’s working hours meant she was always asleep during the hours of education, and no one else seems to have bothered about seeing what he got up to during
them. It has left him at something of a disadvantage . . .’ He was pouring the chutney into the jars from a steaming jug; and standing too close to him (there wasn’t much room) Gavin
jolted his arm so that some of it spilled – down the side of a jar and on to the tray.

‘Sorry!’

‘Look – you go next door; I shan’t be long. Put on a record if you like.’

He went, but he didn’t put on a record. He didn’t want to: he didn’t
want
to do anything, he felt suddenly and completely fed up. He’d had a really awful day so
far, and he’d come all this way to see what amounted to his only friend and all
he
did was make chutney and talk about his boyfriend. It was no use his going home, because his mother
would go on and
on
at him, and even if he escaped to his own room she would bring him angry trays. He had no privacy; he didn’t even have his own place – like Harry –
where he could do what he liked. And what did the rest of his life amount to? He worked for a man he loathed, but who would one day retire or die, and then where would he be? Come to that, his
parents
would die eventually, and
then
where would he be? Supposing Harry stayed in San Francisco, what would he do then? By now, having deprived himself of home, job and friends,
he felt considerably more than fed up – he felt frightened. This was
his
life, but was anybody else faring much better? Could he, if it came to it, think of
anybody
who
would claim to be, if not happy, at least content? Obviously the Munday family weren’t; Joan, for all the marvellous things about her, could not be described as
happy
; his attitude
to his mother, made up as it was of so much side-stepping, evasion and conciliatory gestures, was really based upon his certain, unspoken knowledge of how disappointing she had found her life;
Harry was nearly always on the rack about Winthrop whose compensating features seemed to Gavin to be sketchy and unreliable – to say the least. Even his clients in the salon – God,
think of them! – poor little Miss Wilming with her appalling stutter and her blatant loneliness; Mrs Blake, the one who’d been nearly, or quite, in tears all through her perm; even Mrs
Courcel (what kind of life could be hers if she had nothing better to do than to come in nearly every day to have her hair fiddled about with?). And Muriel Sutton;
there
was somebody who
wasn’t getting anything they wanted out of life! And of his colleagues Iris had her terribly ill husband to worry about; she must spend all her spare time warding off his inevitable death
which would leave her with nothing to worry about but being alone. Even Peter and Hazel, he reflected morosely, were probably heading for the rocks of strife and unhappiness: either Hazel
wouldn’t have a baby to please Peter and would secretly blame him for it, or she
would
have one, and Peter would drive her mad by replanning their economics. And so on. And what was
he supposed to do with his life? Here he was, at thirty-one, tooling on in a job with no prospects, consoling himself with daydreams that he could now see had no bearing at all upon reality,
stuffing himself up with reading and record-playing (and he hadn’t done much of either lately). In any case, the Arts were probably mere palliatives: a series of tricks that enabled people to
get through their dreary lives. Without reason, he suddenly thought of the succession of his annual holidays; times when he had gone to places to look at them; the endless meals in small pensions
or big package-tour hotels – reading, a book propped up against his carafe of wine; spending God knew how much energy on not meeting people; trying, even abroad, to evade the unknown; to
remain intact – and lonely – waiting for that wonderful girl who never turned up. People
had
made advances to him of course, but he had become expert at choking them off. Once,
though, he now remembered, he had had to go to the lengths of pretending to be ill for a whole three days – until her package tour came to an end and she was safely gone. A very ordinary girl
with sunburned shoulders – nowhere near the kind of girl he had in mind . . . But then Joan was nowhere near her either. Before that party, he
had
been content, in a way. He’d
even been smug, congratulating himself upon all his interests, his nice home, his steady job. That had been when he was getting ready to go to the party, he remembered. And that was – good
Lord! – only a week ago! In one week he had changed from being somebody to whom hardly anything happened, into someone to whom things never seemed to
stop
happening.