His round Chinese laundryman’s face at last became animated. ‘Oh yeah, I’m the most powerful left-winger ever to hold office in this country. Michael Foot and Tony Benn never had ministries in which they could really influence people’s lives like I’ve done.’
Scribble, scribble. When I’d covered ten more pages, I called a halt. I’d been outflanked by someone determined not to let me let him be interesting. I felt doomed to write about the received ideas after all. Loony this . . . Newt that . . . I’d have to wear out the inverted-comma key on my typewriter.
As I left and walked back down that dingy corridor with its numbered doors, Ken called after me to point out that the very last thing he’d done as GLC leader – even after the Brent handout – was to twin London with Managua.
‘Thank you,’ I called back.
I left with a smile. I felt that Jen Soc, at least, would have liked that twinning. They’d have voted for it, eight to five with two abstentions. Then a glass of Hirondelle to celebrate.
The Chatfield Old Boys’ Society contains some dogged sleuths. I’m flabbergasted by their persistence. Each year since I left I’ve dropped their pathetic entreaties for information into the bin; every time I changed address, I failed to tell them. Yet in the morning yesterday I found a copy of the Chatfield Year Book on the doormat. How on earth do they do that? It was addressed to me as M. Engleby, though in the Old Boys’ News section, I was appalled to read: ‘M. Engleby (Collingham, 1966–70) is reportedly working as a journalist in London under the nom de plume Michael Watson. Further sightings, please!’
The only thing that cheered me up was an entry in the Valete column. ‘J.T. Baynes (Collingham 1963–68) died from a stroke in Stoke Mandeville hospital. He had suffered gradual paralysis over many years. Our sympathies to his widow Jane and their two children.’
‘Gradual paralysis’. Was that a bona fide medical term? It was good enough for Lt Commander S.R. Sidway, RN, retd, editor of the Year Book. And good enough to have finished old Baynes.
As I climbed out of the underground at Chancery Lane and looked in the clothes shop with the Tudor half-timbering, I puzzled over one thing: how ‘Jane’ allowed that faceful of pus to rub on her skin while he impregnated her. I also felt slightly disappointed that he’d managed to find a wife at all – though Christ knows what sort of swamp-dweller he’d bagged.
For the rest, of course, the news was unalloyed delight, and at lunchtime I took Margaret to Langan’s Brasserie to celebrate. We both had the spinach soufflé with anchovy sauce to start, and a bottle of the house champagne to wash it down. Then another bottle with the main course. Afterwards we walked over to the Ritz, took a room and had it off.
There was a message on my desk last Friday. The handwriting was that of Felicity Maddox, the sarcastic newsroom secretary. ‘James Stellings’s office rang. Would you go to dinner Thursday the 11th. 8.30, 152 Elgin Crescent, W11.’
I found the word ‘dinner’ a bit intimidating. Would it be just me and Stellings and his wife and child or was it a ‘dinner party’? I’d never been to one of those, though I’d seen them in plays and films. (In Accident, by Joseph Losey, for instance.) Christ. I pictured this Clarissa in some sort of ball gown saying to the other guests, ‘James has asked his funny little friend Toilet Engleby. He’s known him since college, apparently. What a scream! Do be kind to him, won’t you?’
Shit. I was actually out of London on the day in question, in Birmingham, and didn’t get back till about seven. I had a bath and put Steely Dan on the record player. I ought to explain that I don’t like new pop music any more. I’d always liked the latest thing, sequentially: rock’n’ roll, pop, soul, psychedelia, hard rock, progressive, glamour, punk, then: whooaaah! I remember the day I suddenly stopped. A deejay played a song that started ‘I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar,/That much is true . . .’ When it finished, he banged on about how brilliant it was, how it was the future and everything. And I thought that pathetic sound, those gutless hairdressers with a toy kazoo – that is the inheritor of Hendrix and Dylan and Stevie Wonder and the Beatles and Cream and . . . Dear God. I lowered the top half of the sash window, took careful aim and hurled the small radio out as hard as I could: over the street and into the grassless ‘garden square’, where it landed noiselessly. I liked to think of them warbling on till the batteries died, face down in the dog mess.
So for five years or more I’ve just listened to old stuff. I always liked Steely Dan. They must be two of the strangest men ever to imagine they were pop stars. You’d have had them down for maths professors or computer programmers. ‘Dr Donald Fagen at nine on Statistical Analysis; Professor Walter Becker at ten on Boolean Algebra.’ Except they were rockers, and so were the others in the picture: Jeff ‘skunk’ Baxter, responsible, I gathered, for the fret-shattering guitar solo on ‘Bodhisattva’, Jeff Porcaro and the others.
That night, before Stellings’s do, I was listening to the melodious, early Can’t Buy a Thrill. I thought its sweetness of nature would put me in the mood. I must have heard it a thousand times, but there’s always something new there. I was humming along to ‘Brooklyn (Owes the Charmer Under Me)’ when I noticed with a jolt that I must always have misheard the lyrics. For a decade or more I’d had it as ‘A race of angels/Bound with one another,/A dish of dollars/Laid out for all to see,/A tower room at Eden Roc/His golf at noon for three:/Brooklyn owes the charmer under me.’
Now this had always bothered me because in my limited experience of golf, a three-ball is frowned on. Some clubs you even have to get the secretary’s written permission. But here was Donald Fagen, and maybe some girl he’s singing to, or possibly Walter Becker – anyway, that makes two: but who was the third, and how were they going to swing it with the caddymaster? Maybe Don had the secretary’s ear, and with a back catalogue like that, who’s complaining? But it bothered me. Christ knows what Jeff ‘skunk’ Baxter’s short game was like.
Then, as I lay in the steaming water, it struck me that the words in fact were ‘A tower room at Eden Roc/His golf at noon for free’ and it all made sense. I got out of the bath, laughing with relief.
Why was I having these peculiar thoughts and chuckling to myself? My mental processes, I believed, could sometimes include humour, but they weren’t normally facetious. What was going on?
I suppose I was nervous.
I’d bought a suit some time ago for going to Fleet Street, but it wasn’t very new or very fashionable or very clean. I didn’t have much else apart from jeans. It took me only a minute to glance through my ‘wardrobe’. I picked a tan seersucker jacket that Margaret had once said she liked, some fairly new straight-leg trousers and a clean shirt (there was only one: it was a sort of maroon colour. It didn’t quite go with the jacket, perhaps, but there was no time to wash and iron another one). I wasn’t sure about ties. Most of mine were a bit on the kipper side. Then I remembered I still had a cowboy bootlace thing that Julie had given me one Christmas (it was one up on the Donny Osmond tee shirt. Where the hell did that go, by the way?). I put the tie on and I thought it did a job. If they were all wearing ties, well, so was I; if not, mine was a joke. My newest shoes were a pair of rubber-soled caramel-brown lace-ups, so on they went.
At the weekend I’d bought a pricey bottle of Montrachet to amuse Stellings and I got some flowers (dahlias, I think; I’m not good on flowers – orange jobs anyway) at 8.22 from the garage on Westbourne Grove for ‘Clarissa’. I was keeping a tight watch on the time because I didn’t want to be late. I walked on briskly.
When I first came to London, Notting Hill was full of squatters, potters and banjoists; but the tide seems to be turning. Many rooms have gone to flats, the flats back into houses and the houses have been bought by people in American banks who wouldn’t know a Bacon from a xylophone.
At 8.29 I punched the front doorbell in Elgin Crescent. It was opened by a small oriental woman in a white apron. She showed me into a large, empty sitting room with an open fire and a couple
of huge oil paintings. One was of an old bloke in Gainsborough style (a Stellings or Clarissa ancestor, perhaps) and the other a more or less random splosh-and-twirl in grey and tangerine that seemed designed to trigger a sequence of sophomore thoughts about ‘art’.
I was still shuddering at the banality of my own responses when Stellings breezed in.
‘Christ, Groucho, you’re punctual. Or Gaucho, we’ll have to call you with that tie. Have a drink. Champagne? Wine? Scotch?’
‘Yeah, Scotch.’ I thought it would sit better on the three Johnnie Walkers and the blue pill I’d already had in my flat.
‘Clarissa’s just saying goodnight to Alexander. How’s things? Any good scoops lately?’
I told Stellings a bit about the work I’d done. He was wearing jeans with an open-necked white shirt, espadrilles and no socks. He hadn’t made much of an effort, I thought.
My drink was brought to me by the Thai or Filipina in the white apron.
A woman appeared in the doorway: tall, fair-haired, dressed all in black, so I wondered if she’d been to a funeral, down to the thin black tights on her long legs. She had rather more mascara than you’d expect for a wake, though, and reddish-pink lipstick. Also, she didn’t look tear-stained or sad. I felt her eyes flicker over me, pausing for a moment at my feet.
‘Darling, this is Mike Engleby. Mike, this is Clarissa – the old trouble and strife.’
Clarissa’s soft hand entered mine and withdrew almost before it had made contact; it was more of a stroke than a shake. ‘James has told me so much about you. Come and sit down. James, you’re not looking after Mike properly. Have an olive.’
‘Is it all right if I smoke?’
‘Of course it is. Letitia, would you mind getting an ashtray?’
Clarissa’s large blue eyes fixed on my face as she perched next to me on the sofa, shifting away only a few inches when some of my smoke seemed go up her nose. I felt swaddled by the intensity of her interest.
‘And tell me more about your family,’ she was saying. ‘Are they still in . . . Reading? I had a friend who lived not far from there once. In Stratfield Saye. Do you know it?’
Her expression had the life-and-death curiosity of someone needing only one more score-draw for the pools jackpot.
‘No. My mother’s in the hotel business.’
‘How interesting. I believe it’s awfully hard work.’
‘Yes. Yes. And . . . Er, my sister’s in brewing.’
‘Which side of it?’
‘Accounts.’
‘It’s such a volatile market, isn’t it, wines and spirits? There are so many conglomerates, aren’t there, but I believe many of the independent breweries have done well recently.’
‘Yeah, well I think the real ale thing’s helped a bit. And you know—’
‘Of course. How clever of your sister. And is she married, did you say?’
‘Not yet. She—’
‘Sensible girl. Career first. And are you a Berkshire family on both sides?’
I did my best to make Mum and Julie’s life worthy of this apocalyptic degree of interest. After a while, I half began to believe it myself, as the Englebys, in my account, emerged as yeomen of Mercia, devoted to their victualling heritage. Still, I was relieved when at about nine-fifteen some more people arrived.
I didn’t catch many names, but there were I think four more couples, making eleven people in all, with only Engleby unpartnered. The men all had the same haircuts: shorter than mine, with straight edges, dark gloss and burnish. They had suntans and made candid eye contact with one another. Most wore suits and apologised for having come straight from work; they loosened their ties and showily threw the first drink down their necks – presumably to prove they were at home chez Stellings and no longer in the office. They talked mostly about sport and cars. The women were without exception good-looking. All were thin; most were in dazzling colours – puce and amber and lilac – as though they were stating some primal confidence. Their hair, too, smelled of salons and looked brittle and dry, though gleaming. They all had slim legs covered with some fabric I’d never seen before: like nylon, but finer. I orbited round with a B&H on the go, and occasionally got a word in.
For dinner, we went downstairs to a long table with a floor-length white cloth, candles and bowls of tall hellebores at intervals. I know they were hellebores because I heard Clarissa say so when one of the women asked.
I was put between someone called Laura and someone called Cecilia. The layout of the table meant that I couldn’t really see through the flowers to anyone opposite and in any event they would have had to shout. So I talked to Laura for about twenty minutes, then to Cecilia for about twenty. Then when I swivelled back to give Laura her ration, she’d turned to her left. I switched back to Cecilia, but she too had turned the other way. So I stared straight ahead while the first course and the main course came and went and the maid filled and refilled my glass with white burgundy, then claret.
Then I had another right-and-left stint.
What did they say?
One had three children and told me about the schools they attended and the schools they hoped to send them to after that. She asked if I had any children and I said no. Then she told me which of her children were good at which subjects and which were having extra tuition. One of her daughters was also good at the violin, whereas her son was mad about football. Then she talked of the reputations of various schools that her children were not going to but which friends of hers had children at. She also talked of a new school that had just been started – somewhat too late for her elder children, and her youngest couldn’t be moved because he was happy where he was – and how she thought it might be a great success because there would always be a need for good schools.
I agreed with her emphatically – as though she’d been only halfhearted in her own belief – that there would always be a need for good schools.
Something odd was happening in my head. Although I was receiving a large amount of random information, I didn’t feel I knew any more about anything. On the contrary, I felt that, as far as data in the brain were concerned, I had suffered a net loss.
‘And where did you go to school yourself?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Where did you go to school?’
‘Eton.’
‘Really? My brother was there. What years were you?’
‘Sixty-six to seventy.’
‘Which house?’
‘Collingham.’
‘I mean, who was your housemaster?’
‘You wouldn’t have heard of him. Which house was your brother in?’
‘H.R.T.’s.’
‘Right. I didn’t know anyone in that one.’
‘No one! Gosh, I thought only the scholars didn’t mix.’
‘Well, I was a scholar, you see.’
‘So why weren’t you in College?’
‘I . . .’ I took a long pull of white burgundy.
‘I know. You were an OS, weren’t you?’
‘Yeah, that’s right. An OS.’ I had a brainwave. ‘And I met Stellings – James, I mean, at university. We were in the same college.’
I thought I’d got away with it. I don’t know why I told a lie. Maybe I couldn’t face talking about Chatfield. Or perhaps my brain had just been scrambled by the occasion. As soon as I could, I turned to the other side.
This neighbour, she told me, had only one child, but had had six au pairs. She herself had returned to work at a bank – which was where she’d first met Clarissa, as it happened, when she was working in the mergers and acquisitions department – and so it was very important that the au pair should be a good one, since neither she nor her husband (who was sitting next to Clarissa and talking far too loudly as usual, she was sorry to say) was at home very often. He (the husband) had taken a bath, by all accounts, over some long term financial guesswork that hadn’t come off, but had turned it all around in the last six months to the extent that he’d been headhunte
d and was now on ‘gardening leave’. In his new job, he was going to be remunerated on an ‘eat what you kill’ basis.
So, I ventured to suggest, the au pair crisis must have eased off a bit.
Far from it. Things had gone from bad to worse. The Latvian was lazy, the Czech was greedy and the Pole took money from Laura’s (possibly Cecilia’s) purse. We tried a bit of a Czech/cheque/check thing here, but it didn’t really catch fire, possibly because it was the Pole who’d been the tea leaf. So we quickly got back to the child, who was now at a nursery school, which was a blessing.
Was it the new place, I wondered, the one that had just started?
It turned out that it was indeed the new one, and it was every bit as good as they’d hoped. They took such a lot of interest in the children. And it gave them a head start at big school. Talking of which, there were any number of possibilities for the little fellow – possibilities which we went on at some length to review.
My head cranked from side to side, ten minutes here, ten minutes there, like watching Wimbledon in slow motion. I began to feel that I was no longer making sense. The more I heard, the less I knew. Someone had put their fingers in my brain and uncoupled the trucks.
When the au pair one came back for a fourth knock I could see the dumb pain in her eyes.
I had imagined that at a ‘dinner party’ you talked to your friend, the one who’d invited you, and maybe his wife, and who knows, a couple of others and the whole thing became a sort of convivial, pooled chat. Like a pub or a café.
I hadn’t thought it through.
It had never crossed my mind that I’d spend three hours talking to the wives of people I’d never met. It was like being stuck in a stalled Tube train, trying to make common cause with the strangers in the next seat, but without the Evening Standard for respite.
Coffee arrived at one o’clock. By then, I was no longer capable of thought. All that once I’d known, I had forgotten.
At one-thirty, I stumbled upstairs. I must have drunk at least a bottle of Stellings’s Meursault and a bottle and a half of La Dominique (I noticed he was still keen on the ‘poor man’s Pétrus’, or whatever he’d christened it). I was well into a second packet of B&H.
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