Success (15 page)

It is perhaps, then, in the spirit of false humility that illness and isolation produce that I have started allowing Terence up here in the evenings.

It is six o’clock. I am finished with any dozing that the afternoon might have let slip, and now stare moonily out of the penthouse window. At ninety-second intervals, tinselly aeroplanes wobble upwards through the bland air. The room darkens and I make no move for the light. The world curls up and dies. Only sad memories linger. The silence is climbing, climbing — as if at any moment it might burst into harsh laughter.

Terence comes home — with a sigh of the lift, the determined approach of his footsteps, the hello of his key in the door, the arc of light that comes up the stairs as he flicks on the hall lamp and noisily divests himself of duffle-coat, brolly, satchel.

‘Greg, are you awake?’ he’ll call.

‘I think so,’ I reply.

‘Hi. How are you? How are you feeling?’

‘Come up.’

Rather touching, this. My illness seems to make it easier for Terry to express his full concern for me. All the other things that clutter up our dealings, all the envy, awe and hero-worship, have taken a back seat for a while.

‘How was your day?’ he asks, chugging up the stairs so that he enters my vision like a figure being wound on to a film reel. The creased ginger hair, the face (which at least looks quite honest and decent, apart from those disgustingly fizzy eyes), the boxy shoulders and upper torso, the sovereign of pee-stain on the crotch of his jeans, the incredibly short legs (I’m amazed they reach the ground), the ‘shoes’.

‘Dull and long. How was yours?’

‘Dull and long. Except there was this quite funny bit in the afternoon when — ’

And then he’s off — off on some hectic anecdote about one or other of the cretins, louts and pseuds who work in that frightful dump of his. Terence really does catch them all quite well, and often amuses me with scarcely credible tales of the resentment and obstructiveness that characterize his strange little life (the firm is joining Yobs’ United: it all sounds risibly squalid). He drinks his undrinkable wine and gets me my Tio Pepe or Abroja with crushed ice, I make him cook me an omelette — or send him running, as fast as his legs will carry him, to the take-home bistros and kebab-houses in Queensway — we watch television on my powerful Grundig, I take a few pounds off him at backgammon (my game is fast, fluent and aggressive, his paranoid and cramped), he drinks on, we play chess, we talk.

‘Tell me,’ I asked him the other night, ‘have you made any progress with young Joan.’

‘It’s not
Joan
. It’s
June
.’

‘June then,’ I murmured. I was building up a witty attack on Terence’s left flank. He had fianchettoed, and as usual all his pieces were clustered inertly round his king.

‘Well, I haven’t had much of a chance. I was going to ask you about that, actually.’

‘Oh?’ I brought my second rook into play, revealing a delightful combination with the white-square bishop.

‘I wondered if, when you’re well, you might let me have the place to myself one evening.’

‘I expect that could be arranged.’ By this time Terence’s king had been poked out of its nook and was making its usual distracted diagonal dash across the board towards me. ‘I take it she’s willing. She looks a complete pushover to me.’

‘Gregory,’ said Terence seriously, ‘will you promise me one thing?’

‘What’s that?’ I interrupted a series of brutal checks to fork and capture his queen with my knight.

‘You won’t make a pitch at her yourself.’

‘Oh don’t be so wet. And so ridiculous. I don’t fuck the lower classes. Now let’s talk about something else.’

‘All right. Let’s talk about — ’

‘Wrong play,’ I said calmly. ‘Grigoric suggests taking the pawn.’

In my view, of course, the whole idea of Ursula coming down to London like this was an utterly preposterous one, and I think Mama should have sat on Mr Dick in no uncertain manner when he first hatched his frisky little scheme. One way or another, though, a large part of life at Rivers Court has involved remoulding, intercepting or sometimes just ‘going along with’ my father’s banal whims simply in order to get things done. The family needs a holiday and we all decide on Greece: a book or pamphlet on this clime is left by his bed and the next morning he is loudly making reservations into a brandished telephone. He suddenly gets a passion for woodwork and handicraft: instead of allowing the French furniture to be cannibalized, we have him help with the retimbering of our scheduled barn, where he harmlessly makes a fool of himself among the stooped village carpenters. And so when he claimed that he’d need a secretary for this absurd book of his — I think the project has already
been abandoned — it seemed cleverly opportunist at the time to offer Ursula herself as his future clerical auxiliary. At least she would gain some sort of qualification, which as we all know ‘helps’ these days, and at least the plan put paid to the intolerable notion of having some overpaid frump sitting about the place all day with nothing to do. The old boy was as easy to talk round as ever, and in fact Ursula was a good deal less keen on the idea than he was by the time she was dispatched to the Great Wen. That was six months ago …

During the semi-delirious phase of my illness I dreamed of her almost constantly, hurtful and saddening dreams that left me with a sense of irretrievable loss, as if something had gone wrong with the world while I slept which could never be put right again. Occasionally I would wake during her actual visits to my flat (she has her own key, the darling), and I would be unable to tell if she was really there and talk nonsensically — the words all in the letter A of dreams — until she hurried to my side. One morning last week, the sight of my suffering distressed her so much that she melted into tears; I held her painful, shuddering body in my great arms as her bones contracted into exhaustion and as I watched the clever new dreams marshal themselves once more on the white ceiling.

I can’t bear to dream of her small and unprotected evenings over there by the river, that lonely district of tall, set-back houses and the treacly nocturnal glaze under which the Thames seeps, that beetling drainpipe-splinted hostel, past whose yellowish windows flit the wraiths of pale factotums, dust-whorled typists and submarine stenographers. She is too small for any of that, the labelled refrigerator trays, the rooms containing three asymmetrical beds (it always looks wrong, like a ward), the scattered underthings and rubbled make-up, the pungent, towny bickering of it all.

When she used to come to me, at night (I dream this daily), in the lost world of our childhood at Rivers Court, it was with a slow tweak of the doorknob, the thin wake
of the landing light playing on the alert, skeletal silhouette within her nightdress, the watchful glance over her shoulder which showed me her hair, like a Guppy-doll, the quick tiptoe through the darkness to my bed, the soft kittenish spring landing her knees first by my pillow, and the nervous burrowing slither that in one movement exchanged her nightdress for my sheets and left her warm breath and cold skin gradually osmoting with my cold breath and warm skin. ‘Success,’ she would whisper. ‘You’re a very clever girl,’ I would whisper back. Before, during, and — if less regularly — after my pubescence, and then, ultimately, through hers, did brother and sister indulge these childish pleasures, until time stood back and made way for that sudden afternoon.

Puberty for me, of course, came like some brisk and thrilling benediction. One week my voice was a piping treble, the next it had descended without incident to its present mellifluous bass; one week my genitals comprised the pouch and knobble of any young boy’s, the next my enflossed virilia were craning wantonly in bathtub and bedroom; one week my physical movements had all the natural grace of a healthy child, the next they had taken on the full authority and calm of an athletic adult. (In easy contrast, Terence’s clamber-up into manhood was the usual sprawling three-year nightmare of stubbed toes, pimples volcanic, leaping octaves and cat-flux.)

Well, I’ve never been really sure how long it took Ursula to notice the difference. Our fledgling nights together had naturally often featured startling tumescences on my part, and I enjoyed many delicious preadolescent orgasms under Ursula’s inquisitive little auspices; but there had until then been nothing in the slightest bit carnal about it all.
You
know: we would exhaustively caress each other, inspect each other’s private parts with a kind of giggly revulsion; a lot of hair-stroking, I seem to remember, took place. We never kissed, funnily enough. In all my life I have never kissed my sister — not on the lips, not on those lips.

Gregory, she said one night, you’re getting all awful and hairy down there. You don’t like it? I asked. Well, she said, amused, I preferred it small and smooth. What other things will happen to you now you’re old? Why, I jolly well showed her, the minx. Look at all this
stuff
, she said: how clever. A month later her thin moist face poked up from beneath the sheets; she rested her chin on my chest and frowned. I believe it’s very nutritious, I whispered with a smile. She crinkled her nose — a gesture which in her indicated uncertainty rather than distaste. I’ll probably get used to it, she said, and added: What will you do when I go like Mama? — But I had sent my sweetheart packing down the bed again, and I lay back with my hands stitched behind my head, as the Cinderella birds encouraged the dawn to peep in past the frayed edges of the window, and as my sister salted my stomach with her sacramental tears.

Why does she cry so much
now
? What else can she be crying for but the lost world of our childhood, when it didn’t seem to matter what we did?

Uproarious scenes on my return to the gallery. How these good plain people do without me for a millisecond is a complete and enduring marvel.

Eventually, I suppose, it was sheer boredom rather than any dramatic recuperation that lifted me from my sick-bed. Also the impertinent Styles woman had been agitating in the most unforgivable fashion — braying telephone calls, facetious get-well-soon cards of a predictably vulgar stamp, and I believe there has even been some suggestion of docking my handsome salary if I don’t return forthwith! In addition, Terence — dour, attentive, heavy-breathing Terence — has been tenderly nagging me to get well on account of his wonderfully comic bid to seduce that tarty June of his, in accordance with which I have provisionally agreed to stay on late at Torka’s one night towards the end of next week. Fair’s fair, I do see the boy’s point — from the sublime to the ridiculous and so forth.

I elected to return to work on the Friday, in order to give myself the weekend to recover. Putting on all my clothes so early felt strange, exemplary, like getting dressed up for some mythic ball or hunt, or like preparing, at an impossibly tiny hour, to begin a holiday. For the moment I found it pleasurable, and was excited by the touch of my expensive and unfamiliar clothes. It looked hot outside. I stood up, amazed, alive again.

‘Good morning, sir, good morning!’ fluted the toadies in lift and hallway. ‘It’s good to see you on your feet again, sir,’ said the porter, deferentially holding the doors open for me as I cruised past.

 … My, but the world changes quickly these days. How long can I have been away? Where am I — Munich, Florence, Calcutta? Among the snorting buses and the thronged porches of the sudden hotels, whole races, entire cultures, seem to gather and disperse. As I walk, like a foreigner, like Rip Van Winkle, down the diasporadic Moscow Road, I weave through boisterous peninsulae of Pakistanis, step aside for vast cohorts of panting, flaxen Scandinavians, negotiate Jumbo-loads of torpid, Italianate trudgers, forge through great continents of Middle-Eastern immigrant workers. Up-ended dustbins and capsized vegetable barrows are being sick all over the pavement; rubbish bags slump like tramps against shop windows; rabid pigeons, too fat to fly, squawk among the filth. I turn into Queensway and it could be anywhere. A shock-haired nig-nog is selling fresh orange-juice from a colourful, two-wheeled refrigerator. Across the road, the stickered visage of a new building announces
CAMBIO —
WECHSEL — CHANGE —
24
HOURS
(I look around for a sign saying
ENGLISH SPOKEN HERE
). Everyone in the street but me is clutching a map.

After this the underground is almost a haven: I complete the shunting, frangible journey pressed flat in the crushed carriage, wondering with amused detachment whether these people can really be my kind (there are so
many
of you all. What will become of you? How will
you cope?). The better-kept precincts of Mayfair, with their tub-like Americans, costly women and velvety window displays, are the theme of some reassurance as I purchase my tulip and saunter up Albemarle Street to Berkeley Square. There is the gallery, the Odette and Jason Styles Gallery, the place where I work.

‘Gregory! How do you spell “Metamorphosis”?’

The poor dears wonder how they kept going without me. As I sit at my desk, trying to suppress an uncontrollable fit of giggles, I wonder how they got
started
without me.

‘M, e, t, a …’ I manage to blurt.

Do you know what they’ve gone and done while I’ve been away with my flu? Only commissioned, set up and hung the most ghastly, hideous —

‘Gregory! How do you spell “Euthanasia”?’

‘E, u, t …’ I gasp.

— one-man show from
an interior decorator in Bond Street
. I walked in here to find the walls vandalized by abstracts of what I call the Perforce School (‘I paint in abstracts, perforce, so that no one, not even me, can tell I can’t paint’), dreadful kaleidoscopic slap-ups in brown and ochre, with a kind of —

‘Gregory! How do you spell “Extraterrestrial”?’

‘E, x, t …’ I moan.

— simple-minded oriental motif, inducing in the fit viewer a tendency to think he needs his eyes fixed or his stomach seen to, a gust of existential nausea, a deranged insult to all one’s —

‘Gregory! How do you spell “Embryonic”?’