All that Margaret had been concerned about was that Gordon was late for dinner. She had cooked a leg of lamb, to which he was partial, and after four supplementary hours in the oven it was, to say the very least, dried up.
‘You might have rung me,’ she admonished her husband when, although he had absolutely no recollection of driving himself there, he finally arrived home. ‘You know you like it pink.’
‘I have been arrested for soliciting, Margaret,’ Gordon said. ‘You have to know.’
‘The mint is from the garden… What did you say?’
‘Soliciting – prostitutes – according to the police. It will be in the newspapers in the morning.’
‘Gordon. What’s happened? I don’t understand.’
He sat Margaret down in the kitchen and recounted, as if he were addressing a board meeting, exactly what had taken place. He confessed that he had previously been the subject of a caution, and told her, pulling no punches, of his sexual predilection. It was almost the first time he had communicated with her on a personal level since their marriage. The leg of lamb had remained uneaten. When Gordon had finished talking, he had taken the willing Margaret to bed, where he had mentally transposed her pallid flesh into the seductive curves of a street-walker. Imagining that she was a prostitute, he had ‘rogered’ her in a variety of ways of which she was vaguely aware but which she had never allowed herself to contemplate. It outdid Mills & Boon any day of the week. In the morning she had been despatched down the hill for the newspapers. The newsagent, who came from Bangladesh, hadn’t been able to look her in the eye. Assuming an unaccustomed importance in her husband’s life, she took the newspapers – their front pages emblazoned with identical photographs of his surprised face – to Gordon in his study, where he had more or less remained incarcerated ever since.
Twenty-eight
Tristan was nervous about coming home. Firstly because he had no idea what to say to his father – he found the whole subject of Freddie’s dismissal acutely embarrassing – and secondly because he had been suspended from school for two weeks for doing drugs. It was hard enough to communicate with Freddie under normal circumstances. Now that he had to be sorry for the old boy, now that he empathised with his father to the extent of being angry on his behalf, dredging up the words was even more difficult. Talking, to anyone, was not Tristan’s forte. Talking to Freddie was well-nigh impossible. It always had been. When he did manage to overcome the mental block which prevented him from expressing himself adequately in Freddie’s presence, what he did produce in the way of words – if they succeeded in leaving his mouth at all – seemed always inappropriate. He and his father rubbed each other up the wrong way, and the simplest of interchanges, on the most uncontroversial of topics, invariably escalated into paternalistic pyrotechnics on Freddie’s part which were met with sullen silences – beneath which mute responses fermented and seethed – from himself.
Talking to Jane was different. Her relaxed attitude, her effortless chatter to which he did not feel compelled to respond, to come up with some worthwhile nugget of information, some informed opinion, some pearl of intellect, some demonstration of aptitude, made such conversation as he was capable of, simple. His mother made no demands upon him. He felt at ease in her company and she allowed him to be himself. He got on well with Jane. When she came down to school for parents’ weekends in her colourful outfits, her zany hats, charming his friends, intriguing the headmaster, seducing the staff, conversing knowledgeably with the art department and chattering away to the French teacher in French, he was consumed with pride. When Freddie was away on business, Jane came down alone. It was a relief. When Freddie was around, far from enjoying escorting his mother round the school and showing her off, he was metamorphosed by his father’s critical presence into a gibbering idiot, a bag of nerves, and counted the minutes until it was time for his parents to go home.
Freddie was always on his back. Whether he meant to be or not was beside the point. Tristan was aware that, as far as other people were concerned, his father was amiable, generous and well-mannered, that his friendship was valued, that he was highly thought of in business, that he was a considerate employer, a good husband, a good son, and did his utmost to be a good father. He was all of these. Until it came to his relationship with his son when it was an entirely different ball game.
Tristan could not be entirely sure exactly when he had changed from being the legendary apple of his father’s eye to the proverbial thorn in his flesh. One of his earliest memories was of Freddie taking him to the playground where, while he dashed happily from swing to roundabout, his father, who was supposed to be looking after him, stood in the middle of the asphalt with his nose in the Financial Times. After that it had been a succession of homes from which Freddie was largely absent. When he was around, an event marked by the reverberations of opera music which filled the house, he left Rosina to her mother and spirited Tristan away for man-sized treats to the Natural History or the Science Museums, which he breezed through like a dose of salts.
Sometimes he played cricket with him in the garden. Looking back, Tristan thought that it was the cricket – like the San Andreas Fault – which was responsible for rending the two of them irrevocably asunder. He disliked cricket, as he disliked any form of sport, in which he could see absolutely no point. Cricket was its apotheosis. It was on his sixth birthday that Freddie had bought him his first cricket bat. He remembered it as clearly as if it were yesterday. He had been expecting a drum kit – like that of his friend Matthew – or a train set such as he had pointed out to Freddie on one of their rare visits to Hamleys from which he had had forcibly to be removed. When Tristan had unwrapped the cricket bat and looked up with horror into his father’s smiling face as he sat on his bed before leaving for the bank, something in his child’s mind told him that he had met his Armageddon. He regarded the dead and heavy bit of wood, with its rubber handle, and was bitterly disappointed. You could not make a noise with it, and you could not set it up on the floor and watch it circumvent the lino whilst peopling it with imaginary figures. Worst of all, if you had to play with it at all, you could not play with it by yourself.
‘Saturday,’ Freddie said. ‘We’ll have a game in the garden. Rosina can field.’
And on Saturday Freddie, helped by the 5-year-old Rosina who trotted dutifully after him, had marked out the pitch, set up the stumps and the bails, and polished up the specially light-weight ball on the seams of his trousers. It was all lost on Tristan who would rather have been indoors with a book. In an effort to please his father, he had stood in front of the wicket, taking up his position as instructed, to face Freddie’s gentle and accurate bowling. Try as he would, he failed to make contact with the ball. Freddie was patient. Standing behind Tristan he manoeuvred the boy’s hands until they were in the correct position, demonstrated the benefits of a straight bar, and while Rosina bowled – not at all badly – showed him how to reach out for the ball. It was no use. Tristan had no eye. Freddie thought he was swiping at the summer air deliberately. His mouth had set into a horizontal line of disappointment (an expression with which Tristan had since become familiar), and he had sent Rosina in to bat.
Tristan had been a disappointment to Freddie ever since. Freddie’s buzz words were duty, responsibility, application, and persistence. His morality, as Tristan saw it, was unimpeachable, and work was his ethic. Tristan, lazy, vague, artistic, inspired by nothing so much as a pronounced sense of laissez faire, failed his father on all counts. Despite this obvious dichotomy, Freddie had persisted in trying to make over his son in his own image. He took him to the swimming pool and, his powerful shoulders glistening, demonstrated his water polo skills while Tristan, unable to see without his glasses, skinny and pale, not a fine specimen at all, stood shivering on the side of the pool. He ran with him, whenever there was an opportunity, and shouted at Tristan for not keeping up with him. He took the boy out on the golf course, when there was not a competition on, and could not understa
nd why Tristan could not summon up the slightest interest in the whereabouts of the ball. Finally he gave up. He played cricket with Rosina, took her rowing in the park, taught her how to fence, and swam side by side with her on holiday while Tristan mooched off on his own. There was no point of communication between the two of them and when they did come into contact with each other sparks were likely to fly.
One of Freddie’s major grievances was that Tristan did not get on with Lilli. Probably because he saw through her. Tristan recognised in Lilli her need to control, her skilful manipulation of those around her – in particular Freddie – and hated going to see her. Whilst others fetched and carried – her glasses, her pills, her rug, her book – while they willingly looked up telephone numbers and found her slippers and made her cups of tea, Tristan remained, as Lilli told Freddie, as often as she could, ‘thoroughly disobliging’. It was not that Tristan was insensitive to the needs of his grandmother, but his awareness of the fact that she was perfectly capable of doing all these chores for herself – as she often did when there was no one around – made him dig in his heels and stick doggedly and silently to his seat when Lilli’s demands were made or when she practised her wheedling number on him. He was not her servant and refused to be her slave. It was bad enough that she tyrannised his father, a thraldom which appeared quite out of character in Freddie who became putty in her hands, and which Tristan was quite unable to understand. Sometimes he felt like shaking Lilli, and he was quite convinced that she was not as off the wall as she liked to make out. He felt sorry for her carers, who came and went like migrant birds – there was never the same one in attendance when Tristan came home from school – and was inclined to side with them in their catalogue of complaints. Tristan knew that it was this disaffection which pained his father most of all.
Tristan did not want to upset Freddie, for the simple reason that he adored him. He did not merely love him, as he did Jane, he worshipped the very ground on which his father walked. His deepest desire was to emulate Freddie’s quick wit, his easy camaraderie, his business acumen, his sporting prowess, his facile charm, but he was lumbered with an inarticulate tongue, a slow mind, a disregard for physical exertion of any sort, and a sullen demeanour. It was little wonder that he did his best to avoid his father as much as he could and preferred to keep his own company.
The move to Regent’s Park had made this easy. He had been allotted a large room on the top floor, next to Jane’s sewing-room and well away from his father, over which he was autonomous. This haven which he had created was the next best thing to the geographical distance from Freddie provided by the sixty-odd miles which separated Chester Terrace from school. Paradoxically it was Freddie – albeit indirectly – who had been responsible for his introduction to the jazz music of which Tristan was an aficionado and which now drove them even further apart.
Tristan had had piano lessons with Lilli until the age of 8, when his general intransigence, his refusal to practise, and his dislike of classical music had led her to wash her hands of his musical education. He was 11 years old when, on a visit to the attic in the house in Bedford Park, he had stumbled upon Freddie’s collection of 78s, and the wind-up gramophone, inherited by his father from his grandfather Hugh, which was the medium for the discovery that he had jazz in his soul.
While Freddie filled the house with triumphal choruses and bel canto arias, Tristan lay on his bed and lost himself in the gut-wrenching sounds that derived from the tin-roofed lean-tos of the American Negroes, from their desperate bread lines, from their failed cotton crops, from the bleeding hearts of an oppressed people for whom music – dredged from their downtrodden spirits and released from the nets of their suffering – transcended poverty and bypassed politics and touched some abused chord in himself.
It was not Tristan’s penchant for jazz to which Freddie objected. How could it be, when his own adolescent passion had been the inspiration for his son’s obsession? It was Tristan’s total disregard of anything which could not be blown, or twanged to produce a noise, which was not only loud but extremely intrusive, which somehow annoyed Freddie. He saw the bops and stomps, the riffs and raffs which competed with the celestial voices and intricate harmonies of his own compact discs, as a metaphoric call to battle, a deliberate affront.
When Tristan was at home he rarely left his bedroom, other than to sidle out of the house (with a barely audible ‘See you’ to whoever happened to be around), to slouch, hands in pockets, head bent, not across the road to Regent’s Park, but to Parkway, with its pubs and its drop-in centre, in search of vegetable samosas or onion bahjis to be eaten among the layabouts and the winos in the polluted purlieus of Camden Town.
His bedroom was not a tip like Rosina’s. Although filled with his music-making paraphernalia, guitars, two synthesisers, and his tenor saxophone, various wooden sculptures – mainly of the male form – which he had brought home from school, books on music and meditation, abandoned weights (relics of a desperate attempt to develop muscles like Freddie), Jason Rebello posters, records, headphones, a dozen pairs of sunglasses (behind which he liked to hide), potted plants, plastic carriers and a portable TV, it had an innate order. It was Tristan’s asylum and in it, dressed in tracksuit trousers, floppy knitted jacket and decrepit Oxfam slippers (clothes, to Freddie’s regret, did not interest his son in the slightest) which he would not allow Jane to dispose of, he felt both happy and safe.
He knew that Freddie worried about him. He worried because Tristan was happy. Because he had absolutely no plans for the future, was not the least bothered about his forthcoming A levels, was concerned only with the moment, and had no interest in girls.
Although he had not mentioned it to Jane, it was this latter which bothered Freddie more than anything. He was worried that Tristan might have gay tendencies. Short of confronting him with it, there was no way that he could find out. Although his anxiety about Tristan had recently been displaced by his own problems, Freddie had it on his agenda to tackle him on the subject.
Jane usually met Tristan at the station. When he leaned out of the window of the carriage and caught sight of Freddie, like Nemesis on the platform, Tristan groaned inwardly.
All the way from Waterloo, Tristan searched the nethermost reaches of his brain for something to say to his father. By the time they had reached the Euston Road, he had come up with nothing. The more he tried, the more tongue-tied he became. Polite observations to do with the influx of tourists, which was in no way remarkable, or with the weather, equally unspectacular, refused to be formulated. Sentences formed themselves brightly inside his head, then shrivelled away into a black hole. It was not that he did not want to talk to his father, who seemed diminished, he thought, by the fact that he was driving Jane’s car with its spare pair of tights protruding from the map pocket, but that he could not. Freddie did his best, but the dialogue turned out inevitably to be more interrogation than conversation.
‘Glad to be home?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Robert forgotten about his trainer?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How’s school?’
‘Good.’
‘Anything new happening?’
‘No.’
‘How’s the work going?’
‘Okay.’
‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’
‘It’s okay. It’s going okay.’
Regent’s Park was not all that far from Waterloo. Tristan was thankful for small mercies.
After lunch, when Freddie had disappeared into the dining-room to work on his papers, Tristan confessed to Jane about the cannabis. They had been smoking it in the field when they were caught by the Classics master. He left it to his mother to tell Freddie that he had been suspended for two weeks.
Later, he was listening to ‘Hill Street Blues’ and reading Playboy, when Freddie burst into his bedroom. Tristan assumed that the news about the drugs had been passed on, and that his number was up. He had no time to hide the picture of the full-fr
ontal blonde, whose labia were about to be penetrated by her own searching fingers, and whose breasts swung towards the camera like a couple of overstuffed bolsters. As Freddie looked over his shoulder, he felt the blood rush to his freckled cheeks, his limbs lock in paralysis, and he became totally immobilised. He waited for Freddie to speak, to shout, to read him the riot act about having plenty of time for rubbish but apparently none to spare for his A levels, about wanking – which was what Tristan was about to engage in – or his refusal to have such trash in the house.
In the calm, before what he had every reason to presume would be the storm, Tristan braced himself. The Count Basie stopped. The room was quiet. Into the silence Freddie laughed. It was the first time his laughter had been heard in the house in weeks. The sound of it was infectious. Although he had not the slightest idea what the mirth was about, Tristan was so relieved at Freddie’s unexpected reaction that he joined in.
Freddie sat down on the bed. Far from being angry, he flicked through the pages of Playboy with what Tristan thought was considerable interest. When he had finished with it, to Tristan’s utter amazement, his father put his arms round him and held him close in a strong embrace.
‘Mummy told me about the pot.’
Tristan waited for the heavens to fall.
‘What the fuck,’ Freddie said. ‘Get your shoes on, Tristan. Let’s go for a drink.’
Twenty-nine
Tristan was surprised to hear his father order a double whisky. Freddie had always been an abstemious drinker. He brought his Black Label over to the table with Tristan’s lemonade shandy.
‘Cheers,’ Freddie said.
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