Life in the West (14 page)

‘So much for business,’ Rotheray said, looking at his watch. ‘Now for something more social — more my line, I’m afraid. Anything else we can help you with while you’re here?’

‘No, thanks, James. It’s just a fairly ordinary quasi-academic congress, crawling with Lefties, as you’d expect. There’s an interesting American woman who arrived via West Germany, very cool and elegant but underneath very mixed-up, I suspect. Perhaps a real sympathy with the oppressed but it’s been channelled into Marxist lines and has withered under a stream of orthodox phraseology. She feels herself in some way trapped and cheated.’

‘What age?’

‘Oh, she’d be about — early forties. Well-preserved. Has a very cleansed, bare, even barren, appearance. Thinks that just to see a human brain lying in its shell is enough to banish thoughts of God and the human soul. I suspect a deep puritanism as regards sex and the flesh — a feeling she projects onto me. Americans nearly always reflexively suspect the English of puritanism. A strabismus in their history education. She hid it by talking nonchalantly about brothels.’

‘There are no good brothels in Ermalpa,’ said Rotheray. ‘So I’m told. All the attractive whores go to Palermo or Naples or Rome. They return here only when they’re old and desperately in need of a re-bore. Anyhow, how’s Teresa?’

‘Hasn’t your secret service been keeping you informed? We broke up last summer, during the heat wave. Haven’t quite managed to get things together again since.’

‘I am sorry, Tommy. You and Teresa were always such a jolly pair. Why, you knew each other when we were up at King’s and she was at Newnham. She’s got a slight squint, hasn’t she?’

‘No.’

‘My mistake. Sorry. To be honest, I did hear a whisper, but I hoped it was all over. Difficult creatures, women, I’ve always found. Is this Marxist American woman nice?’

‘Oh, she’s nothing to do with me.’

‘I thought you sounded interested. Well, let’s go and see about dinner. I hope that’ll cheer you up a bit.’

Rotheray led the way to what proved to be a pleasant meal, considering that it was a semi-formal British Consulate dinner.

5

She’s Only a Sex Symbol

Pippet Hall, Norfolk, June 1977

All the girls cared for was the beautiful weather. They were off early for what they called their ‘secret beach’, hurrying away on bicycles, with Nellie running effortlessly beside them. Teresa’s mother had gone back to her flat in Grantham for the weekend. It was Saturday morning. Teresa and Tom Squire faced one another alone across the breakfast table.

For the past three nights, he had slept in the chief guest room. Teresa was moody and inaccessible.

‘I’m going to drive into Norwich to see Uncle Willie,’ Squire said, as he folded his napkin. ‘Come with me and we’ll have lunch in Cutteslow’s.’

She looked down at her plate. ‘I’d prefer to stay here.’

‘I’ve some business to discuss with him, but I won’t be long.’

Teresa had no answer. She prodded a triangular piece of toast in the rack with one finger, rattling it against the silver sides of its pen. The slight mouselike noise conveyed a powerful sense of futility.

‘All over the world, poor buggers are being shut up in dungeons or hung up by their thumbs. We’ve got peace and plenty. Cheer up and come to Norwich with me.’

He studied the silver coffee service, concentrating in particular on the cream jug with its complex reflections of white cloth and blue room which were, in their turn, reflected in the swelling side of the sugar bowl, minutely, distortedly, but with gallant precision. The arrangement reminded him of a canvas by William Nicholson, which his father had once told him was his favourite painting in the Tate, except for the Cotmans.

He sighed. ‘I really am sorry about the lady-friend, Tess. Sorry the thought of her hurts you, I mean. It will be only temporary...as all things are... Don’t let it mess up our relationship.’

Her anger burned suddenly like a gorse fire, leaping up into her cheek and eyes. She grasped her knife, as if about to strike him with it. ‘ “Don’t let it mess up our relationship!” What do I have to do with that? You’ve already messed it up. That’s your role in life. You can’t be relied on. You’re always chasing other women — you don’t want me at all.’

‘That is not so. Perhaps you want it to be so, but it is not. Our relationship is a long and enduring one, I hope.’

She lowered her head, hiding her eyes; the prelude to weeping. He saw with tenderness how the dark roots of her hair were showing through the fake gold.

‘Come with me to Norwich and be sensible. We’ll stroll round the Tombland antique shops.’

‘Another demand!’ she said without heat, looking up. ‘Don’t mess things up. Come to Norwich. Be sensible. I’m sick of being sensible and not messing things up, if you want to know. I’m staying here, as I told you — I have a business associate to see. Go to Norwich on your own. And give up that actress bitch. She’s half your age, it’s filthy! Give her up at once or I won’t be responsible for what happens.’

‘I’ve told you, we’re still filming. It will be over soon. Don’t try to make me angry.’

‘Get her the sack, find someone else for the part, damn her!’

He rose from the table, standing irresolutely with his hand on the back of his chair, aware of the sun outside the windows, chilled by her anger.

‘Tess!’

‘One of these days, you’ll find you’ve cried my name too late. How much more have I got to stand? John going off as he has — that was your fault — Daddy dying while you were screwing that bitch in Singapore — ’

He laughed. ‘Since I was out of the country at the time, you can hardly blame me for your father’s death.’

‘How much more have I got to stand? That girl’s only a sex symbol. You’re always chasing symbols. I hope she gets cancer like me and dies before your very eyes, blast her!’

‘I’m going, Teresa.’

‘Go, then, go! She’s waiting for you in Norwich, is she, the slut?’

‘Excuse me.’

He left the room, moving slowly, hoping she would call him back, would recant, would throw her arms round him and say how sorry she was to hurt him, thus releasing him to do the same. Instead, he heard a plate smash. As he went towards the stairs to collect his wallet and keys from his bedroom, he turned the corner of the corridor and almost bumped into a young man in a denim suit hurrying through the hall.

The young man had long but not very long hair. He wore his sideboards long and cut sharp across the cheeks, so that they appeared to be executing a pincer movement against his nose. It was a harmless-looking nose, but the teeth were large and many, seeming to multiply as he smiled, as now he did, in a rather anxious way. ‘Oh, jeez, Mr Squire, you frightened me, lovely morning, isn’t it?’

‘Who are you and who let you in here?’

‘Oh, don’t you remember me? Vern? Vernon Jarvis, how are you?’

‘What are you doing in here?’

The young man fell back a step. He put a cautionary hand out.

‘We met at your party before you flew off to Singapore. I just bumped into that Miss Rowlinson outside, and she said to come in. I heard voices, so I thought — ’

He was carrying a smart mock-leather executive’s attaché case, incongruous against his green denim-styled suit and fancy shoes with wedge heels. Despite the heat wave, he wore a fawn turtle-neck sweater under the suit, and a gold-plated ingot stamped with a zodiacal sign on a chain round his neck.

‘You’re the fellow with the brother who runs.’

‘Athlete, yes. Hoping to run in Moscow in the Olympic Games. We talked about that, remember?’

‘You claimed that sport had nothing to do with politics.’

‘You see, Mr Squire, I’m a great admirer of Teresa’s — of Mrs Squire’s wall trinketry. It’s real rinky-dink gear.’

‘Wall-trinketry, what’s that?’

Jarvis lowered the attaché case, hitherto held in a defensive position, and said with a touch of condescension, ‘
The
wall-trinketry. Those bugs and creepy-crawlies. Those bugs and creepy-crawlies she
makes.
I aim to invest in them. I’m a director of an exporting firm, and by my calculations — ’

‘All right, all right, My wife’s in the breakfast room. I doubt if she’ll want to see you at this hour of the morning.’

Jarvis smirked. ‘Oh, she’ll want to see me all right.’

‘In future, ring the bell before you come barging in, understand?’

‘Yes, that’s quite clear.’ Jarvis smiled at him.

Driving away a few minutes later, Squire saw Jarvis and Teresa by the window of the morning room, deep in discussion. She was leaning against her desk, and did not even look up at the sound of the car. Poor dear, he thought. As if she hadn’t trouble enough without having that young oik to deal with.

The sudden death of her father, Ernest Davies, had shaken her. Ernest had been walking home from a friend’s house in Grantham one evening, when a car bore down on him as he crossed the road, and knocked him over. He had died in hospital a few days later. The car had been driven by his doctor, heavily under the influence of drink. Astrology had closed over Teresa’s head almost immediately.

He switched on the car radio.

He recognized the music at once. The Tom Robinson Band playing ‘Long Hot Summer’. He smiled.

Saturday morning traffic into town was heavy. It took him an hour to reach Norwich, but he was in no hurry.

The conversation had come back to him. Jarvis’s brother hoped to run for Britain in the four-hundred metres of the Moscow Olympics. Squire, as a member of the board of anti-Moscow campaigners, tried to explain to Jarvis that the occasion would inevitably be used for propaganda purposes, like the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

‘No, no, Mr Squire, honest, you don’t see, neither my brother nor me are at all political. This is purely and simply a sporting event.’

‘Things aren’t so simple. It’s not what you are, Mr Jarvis, but what you lend yourself to.’

‘No, you’ve got it all wrong, Mr Squire. I know you like politics, but, see, I’m just a businessman, pure and simple, out to make an honest penny, and I hate politics. So does my brother.’

After a drive round, Squire found a parking place in Mancroft Street. Locking the Jag, he walked slowly through Tombland, enjoying the sunshine, stopping occasionally to glance in a shop window. At the bookshop, he walked in and gazed at the books, but saw nothing he wished to buy.

The offices of Challenor, Squire, and Challenor, of which William Squire was senior partner, were built of mellow Georgian red bricks, very similar to the bricks of Pippet Hall. The facade of the building was covered by a venerable
Virginia
creeper, the leaves and suckers of which lapped at William Squire’s office window. William had officially retired the previous year, but still worked every morning, looking after old clients of many years’ standing, who refused to transfer their business to the brisk young partners who occupied the lower floors.

Uncle Willie’s office was at the top of the building. The floors below had been modernized, their small rooms broken down into an open-plan scheme which let in more air and custom, rather in the same way that the fields beyond Norwich — the title deeds to which reposed, in many cases, in the archives of Challenor, Squire, and Challenor — had been stripped of their hedges to let in more air and agricultural machinery. Squire made his way past empty desks and silent computer screens to the third floor.

Uncle Willie’s office was a small room on the side of the building, with a window from which the cathedral could almost be seen. Uncle Willie was pottering round smoking his pipe, with the rather sulky-looking Nicholas Dobson in attendance. Dobson was a nephew who had high hopes in the firm. He lived nearby. His expression suggested that he would rather be elsewhere on a hot summer Saturday morning, but he greeted Squire cheerfully enough.

Coughing, Uncle Willie rested his pipe in a marble ashtray and came round the desk to shake hands formally with his nephew.

‘You’re looking fit, Tom. Gallivanting round the world has been good for you. We’re heading for a drought, could be worse than last year, and that won’t please most of my clients.’ Willie bore a strong resemblance to his dead brother John, Tom Squire’s father. He too had a high-bridged nose and a pugnacious set to his jaw. The deep-set lines of the family face had visited him too. So had the clear skin. Although his hair was white, it remained thick.

Thomas thanked his uncle for seeing him on Saturday, although he knew that the old man, a widower for many years, often visited his office on Saturday mornings in order to keep the lethargy of old age staunchly at bay.

The years had hunched his shoulders. He regarded his nephew with a vaguely aggressive air, and then transferred his gaze to the open window.

‘How’s Teresa?’

‘She’s fine, Uncle. How are the cats?’

‘I’ve had Nickie spayed. She was turning into a regular kitten-factory. Madge, is she all right? Still staying with you? Terrible about Ernest. Madge makes a pretty widow, poor lady. How’s she taking it?’ As he spoke of Mrs Davies, he walked over to the window and looked out.