Getting It Right (37 page)

Harry’s narrow nose was quivering slightly. Gavin said: ‘Shall we have a beer?’

‘Yes, let’s.’

Gavin got his Wilhelm IIs out of his pocket. ‘Like one of these?’

‘No thanks – yes, I will.’

Gavin said: ‘We could go and get an Indian take-away and play records?’

‘Yes. Right. We’ll do that.’

After a minute, he said: ‘We could play something now. Something heartening.’

So they played Mozart’s clarinet quintet, and that did the trick, as always, Gavin thought afterwards.

‘It’s very marvellous, isn’t it?’ Harry said, and Gavin felt a surge of comfort about them feeling the same.

They went together to the Indian, and got dhal, and chicken biriani and okra in a dry sauce and some plain parathas. When they got back, Harry put it all in the oven while they sliced an onion,
and put the smallest new pot of chutney on the tray with two more cans of beer.

‘We were talking about you setting up on your own.’

‘We’d begun to talk about it. The thing is, I know in some ways it would be a good thing, but I feel rather daunted about how to start.’ (I might as well
talk
about
it, he thought; just to feel what it feels like to take it seriously.)

Harry fetched the food and set it on the table. They were both hungry, and concentrated for a while on eating. Then Harry said:

‘I have the feeling that you’ve only told me the tip of the iceberg. Your week, I mean.’

Gavin had a moment’s panic. Did Harry know, or guess about Joan? What nonsense, how could he? To gain time, and because he felt he should have said it before, he said:
‘Chutney’s marvellous.’ Then he thought, Harry’s my friend: he won’t let me down. So he told Harry about meeting Joan at the opera, and said that he had had dinner
with her, and added, rather lamely, that he had liked her very much.

‘Yes: she’s an unusual type of person. Winthrop says she would be very powerful if she wasn’t so hooked on that layabout.’

‘Does Winthrop know her well, then?’

‘He
knows
her.’ He finished his beer. ‘Winthrop has instinct about people. He’s hardly ever wrong. Of course it makes him rather dashing. And, of course,
he’s quite different when you’re alone with him.’

Why ‘of course’? Gavin wondered. But then he thought that, in some senses, most people
were
. Before he could reply, Harry said:

‘People confide in him. She told him that her father was homo – but he never came out with it.’

‘Joan did?’

‘We were talking about her,’ Harry pointed out. ‘Have you met Dmitri?’

‘No. Have you?’

‘Briefly.’

‘What’s he like?’

Harry thought for a bit. ‘Stunning to look at,’ he said at last. ‘And full of charm. You know, the kind you like to think you’re impervious to until you actually meet it
face to face – and then you find you’re just like everyone else. He’s perfectly conscious of it, of course – uses it all the time to get what he wants. He’s like a
very
experienced
ruthless child.’

‘Does he love Joan?’

‘You must be joking. He loves Dmitri; that’s who he loves.’

‘But she loves him?’

‘She’s mad about him,’ Harry said absently. ‘Like some coffee?’

‘I would.’

While they were clearing things up and Harry was making coffee, he said: ‘I have a feeling that a certain party has rather cleverly
sidestepped
the main issue. We were talking
about you – remember?’

‘I thought we’d finished that.’

‘Just as you like. But I wouldn’t have thought that your little excursion to darkest Weybridge was entirely responsible for how you were feeling when you arrived.’

He thought back to how he had been feeling when he arrived. Guilty about the present, and hopeless about the future; or something like that. He’d got over the salient feature of the Joan
bit without telling Harry about it, but in any case that hadn’t been what had been making him feel awful. It was much more to do with seeing people in traps – Minnie’s awful
mother and Minnie herself, and Peter and Hazel in a different sort of trap, and even Jenny, he supposed, and then realizing that he felt trapped himself – by Mr Adrian and Mum. He tried to
explain some of this to Harry.

‘Well, you have remedies there, haven’t you?’ Harry remarked. ‘I mean you could leave the salon and work for someone else, and you could leave home and set up on your
own.’

‘But how do I know that the someone else wouldn’t turn out to be just like Mr Adrian?’

‘You don’t, but you could take some steps to avoid it. I mean, you are, or you ought to be, an expert on Mr Adrian, so you ought to recognize any likeness to him in anyone else who
interviewed you. You could give that a try. After all, you’ve got a lot of experience, and anybody would take notice of you if you’d been in the same place so long.’ Then he added
rather irritatingly: ‘That’s what Winthrop’s so good at. Spotting bastards.’

‘He was wrong about Spiro,’ Gavin pointed out.

‘I grant you he got a bit carried away by Spiro . . . Sex does rather go to his head from time to time.’

It seemed to Gavin to go to everywhere where Winthrop was concerned, but he didn’t want to hurt Harry’s feelings, so he picked up the coffee tray and carried it back to the living
room.

Then he said: ‘It’s all very well to talk about me getting out, but where to? I’ve managed to save five thousand, but that’s the lot. That’s not going to get me
very far with a flat.’

‘It would. You could get a mortgage with that much to put down.’

‘Then I’d have to be in a good job and not leave Adrian and wander about unemployed.’

‘Who said you’d be unemployed? You’re just the right age with the right experience to get another job. Probably pick and choose one.’

‘In my work, you have to be able to say roughly how many clients you’ll bring to the new place. I mean how many from the old one who’ll follow you.’

‘Well?’

‘
I
don’t know. I haven’t thought about it. There’s nothing very special about me.’

‘Well, you’d start by counting up how many clients always ask for you – won’t have anyone else – wouldn’t you? It’s probably a percentage of
them.’

It all seemed to make sense, and Gavin began to feel quite frightened.

‘I’ll have to think about it.’

‘You do that. I agree you’d be better off tackling one problem at a time. But nothing venture, nothing win as the saying goes.’

Gavin recognized that the cliché – or maddeningly right old saying – was one of Harry’s ways of closing conversations. After it, they played a Lipatti record of Bach and
Scarlatti, and then Gavin said that, as he hadn’t got his bike, he’d better be getting home.

On the train back to Barnet he started worrying about whether Minnie would have called, and what his mother would be like about all that, or as much of all that as she knew. This relieved him
from worrying about his conversation with Harry, but he knew that that, too, was lying in wait for him. He told himself he was extremely tired, and by the time he got out at Barnet and started to
walk down Meadway he had the beginnings of a headache and was longing to take his lenses out.

The moment that he was in the house he knew that something was wrong. There were sounds of tremendous activity coming from the kitchen and the television was switched off.

‘Is that you, Gavin?’

‘Yes, Mum.’

He went into the kitchen, where she was mashing an enormous quantity of potato.

‘I’ve had some very bad news,’ she said; she stopped mashing and looked straight at him. ‘It’s your Aunty Sylvia. She’s been in a terrible accident!
Terrible,’ she repeated, her voice shaking. Gavin went and put his arm round her. In spite of seldom seeing her, she was devoted to this sister.

‘Oh, Gavin!’ she cried and began to weep. ‘She might never have taken that bus! She usually caught the earlier one. It was Timmie’s music lesson!’

‘Timmie was with her?’

‘Oh, Gavin – he’s dead! He didn’t live a minute. They found him with his little arms round his violin. She’s in hospital. She hasn’t come round – in a
coma – of course she doesn’t know. I’m going down first thing in the morning. To see to the other children – and sit with Sylve a bit. Phil wants me to tell her. If she does
come round.’

He hugged her – she was rocking herself against him in his arms.

‘Come and sit down, Mum: it’s all right, I’ll come with you.’

He led her to the battered chair in which his father watched telly and felt for and found his handkerchief. He sat on the arm of the chair while she wiped her eyes and furiously blew her
nose.

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘He’s off to see Lennie to tell him to look after the business. He’s coming with me. That poor little boy! What did he ever do to deserve that!’

‘Is she hurt very badly?’

‘She’s got concussion and her leg’s broken, but there’s something wrong with her back – that’s the worst of it – she’s in intensive care, Phil
says they don’t say – oh, Gavin – he was her only son!’ She clutched him. ‘I know what I would feel like if – ’

‘It’s all right, Mum, I’m here. Would you like me to make you a nice cup of tea?’

‘I would, dear. I must get on with my pies.’

‘You’re not taking pies with you?’

‘Of course not! They’re for you. I don’t know when I’ll be back, but it won’t be for at least a week, I shouldn’t wonder, so I’m making you six pies for
the freezer; three fish and three shepherds.’

‘You really needn’t bother. It’ll do me good to fend for myself.’

‘Since when have you done any cooking? I don’t want to come back and find you laid low with food poisoning. They’ll all be in the freezer and all you’ll have to do is
take them out and put them in the oven and warm them up . . . I must do something,’ she added, and he saw the point of that.

So he made the tea and she topped her pies, and quite soon his father came in.

‘Terrible business,’ he said to Gavin.

‘How did it happen, do you know?’

He shook his head. ‘It was a lorry jack-knifed at a roundabout –
I
don’t know. First Phil knew about it was when they rang him to go to the hospital. The little boy
died at once. Terrible thing. Tell your mother you want biscuits: she hasn’t eaten anything for her tea.’

They had the tea – and biscuits – although she only started one, put it down, forgot about it, telling Gavin to be sure to take the milk in in the mornings and to lock up properly
before he went to work, and to ring Marge from his work in the morning to tell her what had happened – ‘I daresay she’d give you a nice meal one evening, only mind you put the
lights on before you go out’ – and that she’d put clean sheets on his bed that ought to last him, but if they didn’t, he was to take the bottom left hand pair from the pile
in the linen cupboard. She would ring him tomorrow evening to tell him how poor Sylvia was. After a good deal of this, she ran out of injunctions and things to say generally, and began to look very
unhappy again.

Gavin said: ‘Perhaps you ought to go to bed, Mum. Get a good night’s rest before the journey.’

‘I shan’t be able to sleep for thinking of that poor little boy – and my own sister!’ Her tears began again, but she took out Gavin’s handkerchief and blew her nose
with repressive violence. ‘You’re quite right, dear. I shan’t be any use to them if I keep breaking down. I’ll just lay up for breakfast, and then I’ll be
off.’

‘I’ll do that, Mum. I’d like to,’ he added.

For once, she let him. He gave her a good-night hug and a kiss, and she didn’t tell him not to be silly. Mr Lamb gave Gavin a lugubrious wink before departing: he had a remarkable range of
winks.

When he had finished downstairs and was in his room, the shock of what had happened impinged. Timmie was his youngest cousin: he had hardly known him – in fact had only met him twice when
Sylvia had brought her children up to London. Sylvia was very much younger than his mother, and she, unlike her sister, had married late; his cousins had not been contemporaries, and the last time
he had seen Timmie had been two years ago, when he had been nine. Now he was eleven – and dead. No life at all; a young child. The fearful impartiality of life appalled him. He remembered
that, egged on by his mother, Timmie had said that he wanted to be a violinist when he grew up, if he was good enough, he had added. Then his mother’s phrase about little arms round the
violin recurred, and he remembered that when he was a boy – not so very much older than Timmie – he had heard of the French violinist, Ginette Neveu, dying in an air crash. It had
struck him at the time, because he had just bought a record of hers. She, too, had died cradling her instrument, in a vain effort to protect it. This made him cry – for both of them.

Afterwards, when he lay in bed with hot eyes and a much lighter feeling in his chest, he thought of Timmie’s sisters, Molly and Barbara, having lost their brother, and wondering whether
their mother was going to recover: or not. He felt he ought to send up some sort of prayer that she should, but he hadn’t much hope of God (if He was there) taking much notice of somebody who
didn’t pray the rest of the time. ‘I just hope she gets better,’ he said – whispered – in the dark. As he was falling asleep he remembered that tomorrow he was going
to be on his own here; funny – after that talk with Harry about leaving and setting up somewhere. Well, he could look on the next week as a sort of practice. No dreams: he couldn’t take
anything more in, but as though his subconscious was some kind of salesman, it produced a flickering catalogue of what was in stock: lunch with the Mundays but he was the only one without clothes;
himself running –
from
something
to
Joan; riding his bike and trying to explain how wonderful Mozart was to an owl who could not fly fast enough to keep up; standing on the
edge of a cliff and having to jump because there was someone lying hurt on the roundabout below; standing in a pool of water, unable to move because all the people round him couldn’t decide
what he was, ‘Hello, Froggy; we’re not glad to see you’re back’; swimming with his feet horribly tangled in all the red hair, and it was raining, each drop slamming on the
water making such a noise he couldn’t hear himself speak until he was on a small, round island where he couldn’t hear Harry warning him – he couldn’t hear anyone if he
didn’t want to . . .