Golden Boy

by Rosemary Friedman

  ‘Cheers, Dad.’

  Tristan raised his glass. He tried frantically to think of something intelligent to say but drew a complete blank. A young couple in black leather, carrying motorcycle helmets, walked up to the bar. As they waited to be served the guy slipped his hand into the waistband of the girl’s jeans.

  ‘How are you getting on at school?’

  Tristan groaned inwardly. It was going to be a rerun of the car scenario. The guy’s hand had disappeared up to the wrist. He was caressing a chubby buttock. The girl was wriggling with pleasure. He had a girl at school – well, not had. Miranda Harding. Half-French like his mother. She had a white face and punk hair and a terrific figure. He hadn’t actually spoken to her yet.

  ‘Reading any decent books for A levels?’

  The couple had turned to each other now, mouth to mouth, pelvis to pelvis. He wouldn’t half mind doing it with a girl like that. He crossed his legs to hide his discomfiture. He wouldn’t half mind doing it with a girl.

  ‘Tristan?’

  ‘George Orwell. Down and Out in Paris and London.’ Christ! Every time he opened his mouth he put his foot in it. ‘I didn’t mean…’

  ‘Of course you didn’t.’

  The embarrassed silence was broken by Freddie with a reverberating sneeze which distracted Tristan from his preoccupation and made several people glance round to see who was responsible for the explosion. Unable to locate his handkerchief quickly enough, Freddie found a tissue in his jacket pocket.

  ‘Do you know a sneeze travels at 40 miles an hour,’ Tristan said. ‘Gale force eight on the Beaufort scale.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘The globules dry out from the friction as they go through the air. If you had a cold –’

  ‘Which I haven’t,’ Freddie said.

  ‘The viruses would take thirty minutes to reach…’ Tristan nodded his head in the direction of the inverted bottles ‘…the back of that bar.’

  Freddie put the tissue back in his pocket. ‘That’s if I hadn’t stopped the buggers in mid-flight.’

  ‘The globules were through that paper and out 15 inches in front of your nose one second after you sneezed, in a sort of massed bomber attack’, Tristan demonstrated with his hands, ‘that put the entire room in danger. Remember the conquistadores who landed in South America in the early 1550s?’

  Freddie wondered what the conquistadores had to do with his sneeze.

  ‘They destroyed civilisations that had been around for centuries. You know how?’

  Freddie couldn’t remember the last time he had heard the boy string so many words together. He shook his head.

  ‘Not because they had superior weapons, but because each time they sneezed they released millions of contaminated micro-darts against which the Aztecs and Mayans, who had never been exposed to them, had absolutely no defences. That’s why microbiologists avoid public places. I wouldn’t mind being a microbiologist.’

  It was the first time Tristan had spoken to Freddie about his future.

  ‘Do you realise that in this room’, Tristan went on, ‘we could be inhaling oxygen that was in Paris a few days ago? Atoms that were breathed out by people smoking…’ He looked at Freddie. He hadn’t meant to bring up the subject of smoking. ‘Gauloises,’ he ended lamely.

  ‘About the pot…’ Freddie said.

  Tristan cursed himself.

  ‘It’s not such a big deal. Just don’t do anything worse.’

  Tristan finished his shandy. ‘I’m not that stupid.’

  Freddie nodded.

  ‘I could always leave school before A levels,’ he said hopefully.

  Freddie knew this was an oblique reference to his current financial situation which Jane must have discussed with him.

  ‘I’d quite like to join a jazz band and do gigs.’

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ Freddie said firmly. ‘Your godfather is taking care of the fees.’

  ‘Uncle James?’ Tristan said. ‘That’s decent of him. You must be pissed off, Dad.’

  Freddie took the glasses over to the bar for refills.

  ‘I am pissed off,’ he said when he sat down again. He pushed Tristan’s shandy across the table. ‘If you really want to know, Tristan, I have never been so pissed off in my life. I’ve been lucky really. I’ve always worked hard, but things seemed to have fallen into my lap. The fates are no longer smiling.’

  ‘I’d like to help.’

  Looking at Tristan’s face on which the pain was evident, Freddie thought that he did not really know this boy. Since his infancy, when Freddie had kissed him goodbye before leaving for the bank in the mornings, and stood over his son’s sleeping form in his cot when he came home late, they had been ships that passed in the night.

  ‘I’m a victim of the times,’ Freddie said. ‘A statistic. Nobody can really help. I’ve got a few things on the table. A big number in Manchester which should keep the wolf from the door for the time being.’

  ‘Mum’s really worried about you. She was crying.’

  ‘She was?’ Freddie was surprised.

  ‘She said you don’t talk to her about it.’

  ‘I find it extremely hard to talk to anyone about it, Tristan.’

  ‘It’s because you blame yourself. You think it’s your fault.’

  Freddie nodded. ‘You’re right. I couldn’t feel worse if I’d heisted the bloody bank.’

  ‘But you haven’t, Dad.’

  Tristan’s heart went out to Freddie as he went to the bar and came back with another drink.

  ‘Do you have to go back into banking?’

  ‘What’s your objection to banking?’

  ‘Dedication to profit is a crass preoccupation,’ Tristan said with the lofty sentiment of youth.

  ‘The idea that no good can come from wealth is the most perverse moral judgement in human discourse,’ Freddie said. ‘Don’t forget that the moneybags of today are the charitable foundations of tomorrow. Who do you think builds the concert halls, supports museums, endows universities, funds the arts?’

  ‘Never thought about it.’

  ‘People who flog cars or sell shoes. If it wasn’t for the beer barons or the sugar kings, where would the Ford Foundation, the Whitbread Prize, the Tate Gallery, half the Oxbridge colleges, be? The Western world has always thrived on the injection of new blood and new ideas by the rich, whether they be recently ennobled Tudor grandees, the Medicis – sixteenth-century yuppies – or your Clores and Sainsburys. Art follows money. It always has done.’

  ‘I’m not talking about money, Dad. I’m talking about grubbing for it.’

  ‘I agree with you that money is not always come by entirely honestly. It’s almost impossible to get rich without stepping on somebody’s toes. But today’s nouveaux riches, today’s newly created titles, will be seen by your grandchildren, Tristan – just as they were during the Renaissance when the vulgar money came from trade with the New World – not as ‘money grubbers’ but as philanthropists, the protectors of the nation’s heritage, the saviours of its artistic treasures. “L’argent n’a pas l’odeur.”’

  ‘I’m doing Spanish,’ Tristan said.

  ‘Money has no smell.’

  ‘I’m not saying that money can’t be put to good use,’ Tristan said. ‘But you must admit that there are other currencies in life.’

  ‘There are indeed,’ Freddie said. ‘Unfortunately they neither feed nor educate your children. Come back in twenty-five years’ time and tell me about them. Meanwhile, get me a refill, there’s a good lad.’

  ‘Do you think that’s entirely wise?’

  The impact of the question, with its implicit role reversal, took Freddie by surprise. Tristan, standingly awkwardly with the empty glass in his hand, was the father and he the child.

  ‘Probably not.’ Freddie nodded towards the bar. ‘But “at this moment in time”, as they say, it happens to be what I need.’

  And he had come to need it more and more. The whisky, taken in incr
easingly large measures, anaesthetised him against the anxieties of his daily life, not least of which was his impotence. In the medical department at Dillons he had surreptitiously flicked through a book on the subject, to discover to his horror that 60 per cent of erectile problems were due to organic causes such as neurological or vascular disease. A personality profile of impotent men revealed that they were anxious (for which he gave himself a tick), depressed (another tick), neurotic (certainly not), suffered from identity problems (Freddie was not sure what was meant), or borderline, which accurately described his mood. Individuals with unresolved Oedipal conflicts, or those with ‘repetition compulsion’ or ‘ambivalent sexual orientation’ were also afflicted with what appeared to be a well-researched complaint, the cures for which included intracavernosal injections, which sounded extraordinarily unpleasant, penile implants, which sounded even worse, and a cocktail of drugs such as ceritine, yohimbine, prostaglandin E, papaverine, and phentolamine, which he could not pronounce and had certainly never heard of. When it came to the section on the complications of these drugs as well as reports of fatalities – in men with concurrent coronary artery disease – he decided that he had had enough. As he replaced the book on the shelf, the name on the spine caught his eye. Richard Scott. A glance at the photograph on the back flap above the biographical details confirmed the fact that together with Charles Holdsworth he had played golf with the author. It was not difficult to track him down to Harley Street where he saw his private patients.

  ‘Lomax?’ Richard Scott said, shaking Freddie by the hand and indicating a chair in front of his desk. ‘Haven’t we met?’

  Freddie had only to mention golf for Richard Scott to remember the fourball with Charles Holdsworth.

  ‘Having trouble with your swing?’ Sitting down at his desk he took out a clean sheet of paper.

  ‘I suppose you could say that.’

  After taking a careful history and carrying out a physical examination – Freddie was unable to decide which of these procedures he found more distasteful – Scott made his diagnosis and was able to reassure Freddie that his inability to make love to his wife was psychogenic, rather than organic, in origin.

  ‘You mean it’s all in the mind?’

  Scott nodded. ‘Which is not to say that it is under your direct control. The impotence is a physical manifestation of your loss of self-esteem, which is a direct result of losing your position at Sitwell Hunt.’

  ‘I’m not pretending that it wasn’t a blow.’ Freddie took out his worry beads, a move registered by the doctor. ‘The past few weeks have been decidedly the worst in my life.’

  ‘The psychological effects of redundancy are a problem we unfortunately have to deal with quite often these days,’ the psychiatrist said, glancing discreetly at his watch. Freddie assumed that it was time for the next patient.

  ‘I do love my wife.’

  ‘I’m sure you do.’ The voice was understanding. ‘The problem – as I see it – is that you are having difficulty in loving yourself. Look, Freddie, why don’t you make another appointment? Then we can have a talk about how you feel. Perhaps I can help you…’

  ‘I do not need help.’ Freddie stood up. ‘Yours or anybody else’s. As long as it’s nothing serious. That’s all I wanted to know.’

  ‘I’d go easy on the whisky if I were you,’ Richard Scott said on the way to the door. ‘It has a direct suppressant effect on the gonads. It may not be helping.’

  Ignoring the comment, Freddie held out his hand.

  ‘You know where I am,’ the psychiatrist said.

  But Freddie was halfway down the stairs.

  He had not taken the psychiatrist’s advice on cutting down on the alcohol, and he certainly didn’t want any interference in that direction from Tristan. Alcohol in no way affected his mental performance. If anything, he functioned better after a few drinks.

  By the time he and Tristan got back to Chester Terrace, Freddie, assisted by the whisky, was in a decidedly more optimistic mood. They decided to surprise Jane, who was still out, by getting the dinner ready.

  Tristan, who washed with as little water as possible, used a non-animal-tested soap, and dressed in unbleached T-shirts in the interests of the environment, suggested making a vegetable ‘cobbler’ or failing that a tian, while Freddie, who was contemplating the open fridge and wondering why the contents blurred one into the other, opted for the chuck steak in its supermarket packet. Unable to agree, they decided to ditch dinner and make a chocolate cake, which took Freddie back to his childhood experiments in the kitchen while Lilli was giving her piano lessons. While he looked through Jane’s books for a suitable recipe, Tristan opened cupboards and drawers in search of eggs, sugar, and cocoa, as well as the batterie de cuisine. Having entered into a serious dialogue over the definition of a peak (as in ‘beat to stiff peaks’), and the meaning of ‘fold’ (as in ‘fold in the flour’), they put the mixture in to bake while Freddie listened to Simon Boccanegra on Radio 3, and Tristan suffered in silence. After the prescribed hour, when they assumed that the raw ingredients would have been transformed, as per the glossy illustration, into a mouth-watering gâteau, they opened the oven expectantly, to find their state unaltered. Losing interest in the whole thing, they slung the mixture down the waste-disposal.

  When Jane came home, Freddie and Tristan, their feet up on the table, were debating the vexed question of saving the planet – a subject which, to her knowledge, Freddie had not previously addressed – and the kitchen looked as if it had been stirred with a giant spoon. While Tristan exhorted his father to swap his car (which he no longer had) for public transport, to take positive action against destroying wildlife, exploiting Antarctica, and dumping at sea, a creaking board disclosed Jane’s presence and summarily silenced them.

  Trying not to laugh, as they related the chocolate cake débâcle, she explained that the oven temperatures were measured in degrees centigrade, rather than Fahrenheit, dismissed them both and proceeded to clear up the mess.

  As they went up the stairs she heard Tristan say: ‘Thanks for the drink.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Freddie’s words coasted one into the other. ‘We’ve never had much to say to each other. I don’t know why.’

  Tristan’s voice reverted to its customary mumble. ‘You never tried, Dad. You never had time.’

  Thirty

  Freddie was back on his old form. The Bowker & Page contract and his £75,000 was in the bag, Lilli had come to terms with Mrs Williams who no longer threatened him with her notice each time he set foot in the flat, and the dialogue which he had opened up with Tristan had miraculously been maintained. He had even volunteered to join his father in his morning ritual.

  Over dinner, he had glanced up at Freddie and mumbled into his veggie burger: ‘You jogging tomorrow?’

  Freddie nodded.

  ‘Mind if I come?’

  ‘He’s having you on,’ Rosina said.

  But next morning, Tristan, in his running gear, was waiting in the hall when his father came down the stairs. Freddie had had to shorten his circuit – in deference to Tristan he took the Inner Circle route – and slow his pace considerably, but he was both surprised and impressed by the boy’s determination. Tristan tired quickly, was patently out of breath, but struggled doggedly on, wiping the sweat from his forehead and brushing the long hair from his eyes. To Freddie’s relief, on this occasion, his son made no attempt to talk, but the thump-thump of their matched stride gladdened his heart. He liked having Tristan beside him. It gave him a sense of continuity and filled him with pride.

  In the past two weeks he had got to know the boy. He had even been allowed into his room. When Jane was out, and the two of them were alone in the house, they had listened to jazz which had taken Freddie back to his own youth. He had tried to interest Tristan in opera, but faced with Cosi fan tutte, or even La Bohème it was as if he had suddenly become tone-deaf like his mother, which he certainly was not.

  Music was not the only sub
ject on which they agreed to differ. Tristan confessed to Freddie the secret fears which led to the hunched shoulders, the shuffling gait, the diffident manner which Freddie had never understood. Tristan, Freddie learned, was afraid. The only time he felt confident, the only time he felt safe, was when he was playing the saxophone. When Freddie, who was afraid of nothing, who did not know what it was to be afraid, tried to extract from him what he was talking about, what there was to be afraid of, Tristan admitted, his pale cheeks turning scarlet, that he was afraid of everything. He was afraid of people, with whom he might be required to communicate; he was afraid of his peer group, in the midst of which he might be called upon to prove himself; he was afraid of social situations in which he might be expected to perform; he was afraid of authority, in the personae of his teachers at school; he was afraid of making a fool of himself, afraid of being laughed at, and above all, afraid of failure. The only person with whom he felt entirely at ease was Jane, and to a lesser extent, Rosina.

  ‘You’re not afraid of me?’ Freddie said.

  Tristan did not reply. He could not tell Freddie, for the simple reason that he did not know himself, that in his idolisation of his father – who seemed to him to encompass the sum of all things good, wise, clever, accomplished – lay the root of all his fear.

  When his two weeks’ suspension was up and it was time for him to go back to school, Freddie, who had nothing better to do, took him to the station. As the train pulled away, Tristan put his head out of the window.

  ‘Talk to Mum.’

  The phrase reverberated in Freddie’s head all the way home. Talk to Mum. It was not easy. He had got on better with Jane when he had been so busy working that he had hardly seen her. The fact that he was around all day seemed to create friction. He tried to make it easy for her, he even tried to help her round the house.

  When Lavender had called to say that she wasn’t ‘feeling too well’ (which meant that Tony had been roughing her up again) and that she wouldn’t be coming in, Jane was in the bedroom engaged in a tidying blitz. There was a pile of clothes on the floor.