‘Well taken. Perhaps I was looking at it in the rather longer term. Have you ever thought of marrying Vivvy? I don’t mean have you any sort of intention to – I’ve no right to ask that and it’s none of my business – but simply and literally if you’ve ever thought of it.’
I had no trouble staying in my chair now. ‘Oh. No. I can’t honestly say I have. But that’s nothing to do with Vivienne, it’s to do with me. I just feel – when I look at the mess so many people—’
‘With respect, Doug, what an extraordinary number of things you don’t think about and haven’t got time for. Science fiction. Religion. Whether the country’s heading for moral anarchy. Marrying Vivvy or evidently anybody else either. I expect you must find a great deal to occupy you in other ways. Your music and all that. Some men have made music the only really important thing in their lives, I suppose. Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn. But then they were all . . . Ah, here we are. Well done, Vivvy.’
Vivienne came in and handed round coffee without any kind of look at me. While we drank it, Mr Copes talked about the doings of his sons, politely seeing to it that I could follow the main drift without being encumbered with detail. He passed over some photographs of the senior son and his family, for me to look at while he himself described to Vivienne his visit to them over at Ealing the previous day. I turned through the series of holiday snaps, amusing myself at first by trying to pick out bits of Vivienne and her father from her brother and two small nephews, but finding nothing recognizable. The maternal strains must have predominated there. Well, why not?
Finally, Mr Copes said he had an archdeacon coming to see him at crack of dawn, and would take the liberty of chucking us out, if he might. This proved within his powers, once I had rejected a return bus-journey in favour of some sort of cab and he had successfully telephoned for one on my behalf. We parted cordially. The sort of cab concerned had no lateral partition, and was also the sort with a driver lacking in geographical knowledge or aptitude, so that what with one thing and another Vivienne and I exchanged no more than a dozen words until we were back in the flat. It was five past eleven. She said she would make some tea. I followed her out into the kitchen.
‘Are you cross with me?’
‘Yes, a bit. Or I was. I’m getting over it.’
‘What about?’
‘You didn’t think much of my father, did you?’
‘Viv, what are you saying? It’s quite true he disconcerted me once or twice, but that was just his way. I thought he was a marvellous old character. Most entertaining.’
‘Character. Entertaining.’ She put the lid back on the electric kettle and slammed the plug into its base. ‘That’s about it, isn’t it?’
‘I really don’t know what you mean.’
‘Where you’re concerned. That’s as far as it goes. You wouldn’t discuss anything with him.’
‘Now that is just not true. We covered a hell of a lot of ground and whatever he wanted to discuss I discussed back at him. Except your brothers, admittedly, but there wasn’t much in the way of a side for me to take in the discussion about them.’
‘You weren’t really talking to him, you were getting him to go on saying more things for you to go on thinking what a wonderful old character and incredible old codger and fabulous old buffer and fantastic old gaffer he was. You do the same with me: that’s how I noticed.’
‘Me think you’re an old gaffer? You must be—’
‘Not a gaffer, but funny. Zany, screwy, dotty, kooky. Not on purpose, but because I can’t help myself, because I was made that way. An oddball, a card, a caution. I’ve seen you watching me as if I was television. Comic.’
I took the lid off the teapot. ‘I do sometimes think you’re funny when perhaps you aren’t really intending to be, yes. But I never think you’re silly or absurd or undignified. And it’s part of being fond of somebody: you must know that, surely. Anyone who was never funny except on purpose would be a freak, and a repulsive sort of freak at that, especially if it was a woman. From my point of view. And what about men, from your point of view? You’re not going to tell me you’ve never thought I was funny not on purpose.’
‘No.’
I was less whole-heartedly relieved to hear this reply than I had expected, but at once thrust aside the temptation to ask in what circumstances, and to what degree, I was funny not on purpose. ‘There you are then.’
‘But I don’t go round thinking it’s the main thing about you.’
‘I don’t think it’s the main thing about you, for God’s sake. You know what I think the main thing about you is. Not the only thing, but the main thing.’
‘What is it?’ She sounded considerably mollified.
I was in the middle of telling her when the kettle boiled. She turned it off with an absent-minded gesture and said conversationally,
‘You know, Doug, I sometimes find a cup of tea this time of night keeps me awake. Do you ever find that?’
‘Yes, I do sometimes.’
Without looking at me, she started to walk out of the kitchen. ‘After all, tea’s supposed to perk you up, not sort of slow you down.’
‘Yes, quite,’ I said, intrigued at this variation on our established cup-of-tea ritual. ‘It’s the caffeine, you know.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, apparently there’s more caffeine in a cup of tea than in a cup of coffee. Isn’t that interesting?’
‘Oh, darling . . .’
Afterwards I went and made some tea, and we both managed to fall asleep before the caffeine had had time to hit us.
Eight: Pigs Out
It was the next evening, that of Elevations 9. I had arranged to meet Roy for a drink in Craggs’s at half past eight and escort him to the concert hall, or rather to the converted tramway depot south of the river which, over the past couple of years, had served as the venue for many an exciting transmedial breakthrough, anti-Establishment manifestation and punch-up. His pre-performance routine, always strict, normally led off with a light early dinner attended by Kitty, two or three of the orchestra with their wives, husbands, etc., and a close friend or so. For more than one reason, this custom was not going to be observed tonight. Nor, as I saw when I arrived and went to join him in his corner, were other familiar prescriptions: a caramel-coloured helping of what I took to be whisky stood at his elbow, replacing, probably as one of a group rather than solo, the single glass of wine to which the routine restricted him. I was relieved (taking one possible view of the matter) to see his violin case within his reach. Here, at any rate, tradition had held: no cloakroom attendant, waiter or functionary of any kind would be allowed to take the thing out of his sight for a moment. At my approach, he got up and pressed a bell-button.
‘Hi, Duggers. I suggest champagne. For you, that is. You do like it, don’t you. In so far as you like anything one could properly call a drink. What was that about a bite to eat you said you were going to have eaten? Have a sandwich or something.’
‘No thanks, I had a sort of high tea at the flat.’
‘High tea, Christ. Ham and Russian salad and sweep pickle and tim peaches and plung cake and lots of cups of char. Each to his taste is what I always say.’
He seemed to me fairly drunk already. While he spoke to the waiter, I dallied with the thought of plying him with his own drink to the point at which he would be unable to leave the club, or at least mount the concert platform, then put it aside. We must take off in half an hour or less, and ten times that time of continuous soaking would hardly have been enough to put him under any table I had ever seen in his vicinity.
‘How’s life?’ I asked him when the waiter had gone.
‘That’s the silliest bloody question I’ve heard for longer than I care to remember. Life gets lived. That’s how life is.’
‘How’s Sylvia?’
‘That’s more like it. A bit more like it. She’s fine as far as I know, which is virtually no distance at all. I haven’t seen her or been in touch with her for . . . But d
on’t exult prematurely, old lad. Temporary arrangement. While we, or more accurately while I go to work on devising some counter-measure to your friend Harold Meers’s little stratagem.’
‘Any progress?’
‘No. None whatever. Very nearly none whatever. To anticipate your next question, everybody else is in very much the condition you might expect them to be. Oh, I’ve been to work on young Christopher. Offered him anything he cared to name to refuse to let the interview be published. Can you do that, by the way? Stop a chap printing something you’ve already given him? Buggered if I know. Anyway, we didn’t get to that stage. He and I aren’t on very good terms these days, to tell you the truth. The others are all okay. Well . . . except Gilbert. Rock of stability normally. He’s taken to going off for hours at a time, wandering round those woods that lead off from the common apparently. Nothing there apart from trees and sexual maniacs. You know, I sometimes wonder whether I might not end up as one of those, when Girl, 20 and going down and all the rest of it are as if they’d never been. You could easily find yourself stuck with flashing what was left of your hampton at Girl, 8. Or I suppose by that stage it might even be Boy, 8. No sign of it at the moment, I can assure you, but you never know. I expect it’s quite an agreeable sort of life when you get used to it: plenty of fresh air and exercise, and Mother Nature on every hand, and a spot of spying on courting couples thrown in to rekindle memories of long ago. Quite romantic. Not much fun in January, though, I grant you.’
He went on like this until, indeed until after, some champagne, a plate of smoked-salmon sandwiches and another brunette whisky had been delivered to us. I refrained as studiously as I could from studiously refraining from any flicker of reaction when Roy poured the new whisky into the substantial remains of the old, but I must have over- or underdone it, because he stared coldly at me and said,
‘Liberation from the tyranny of the bar-line! If I’m not good and pissed when I stand up in front of that lot I’ll never get through it.’
‘Fair enough. After all, it isn’t as if this were a musical occasion.’
‘Oh, random noise considered as art!’ he half roared, incidentally providing me with further evidence that he was much more hostile to recent offshoots from music when he was off guard or stirred, as now, than when he was soberly lecturing me and others on our duty to keep abreast of new developments. ‘I do wish you’d try to . . . Well, it’s a totally different sort of audience. Not one of those little . . . Their ears aren’t attuned to the kind of nuances in performance you’re in the habit of looking for. Or I’m in the habit of looking for. Under other conditions. What does this bugger want, do you suppose?’
This bugger was the glaring hall porter, who came up and told Roy that a Mr Harold Meers wished to speak with him on the telephone. Roy asked me to watch his violin, I said I would, and he hurried out. When he came back, five or six minutes later, I was measurably better informed about who had been who in 1935 than on arrival. He looked puzzled, also drunk.
‘What did he want?’
‘I never got to him. Somebody took a lot of trouble, when he wasn’t coughing his head off, to establish that I really was Sir Roy Vandervane and not his grandmother, and then took a lot more trouble to explain that he was speaking from Mr Meers’s private house. He really let that sink in. Then whoever it was said Mr Meers had been called away but would be back in a moment.’ Still on his feet, Roy began eating sandwiches at top speed, with gulps of whisky to eke out salivation, and continued to talk. ‘Then I got a detailed account of how they’d found out where I was. What did Mr Meers want? He didn’t know, but Mr Meers would be along directly to expound in person. I hung on a bit longer and then got fed up and rang off. I suppose it was his way of cheering me up for the concert. Though I can’t understand why the bastard didn’t speak to me himself. Very odd.’
‘Call him back in a few minutes. I’ve got his private number on me somewhere.’
‘Bugger that. I’ve got a little job to do that nobody else can do for me, and then we ought to be moving. I just hope Sylvia’s all right.’
‘If it were anything serious there wouldn’t have been this mucking about. He was just trying to worry you. Don’t let him.’
‘I’ll try not to.’
The tramway depot might, to all appearance, have seen the back of its last tram no earlier than noon on the day in question, in time for the rails to be ripped up and two inspection pits filled (to all appearance) with tins and broken bottles, but not for even a token assault on the layer of grime that clung to every visible square inch of the roof, its network of supporting girders and the otherwise bare brick walls. These last were partly hidden by broad strips of hessian or sacking hung so as to form a series of curtains along all four sides of the building, whether to mitigate draughts or for acoustic reasons or in the interests of decoration I could not tell, nor did I at any time inquire. The stage, a low wooden platform looking at once unfinished and not far from collapse, was occupied by jerking anthropoid figures with musical instruments or microphones in their grasp, and surrounded in depth by enough electronic equipment to mount a limited thermonuclear strike. Nobody who still retains his sense of hearing, I suppose, can properly claim to have experienced a deafening noise, but that was how I immediately felt like describing what was coming out of the loudspeakers, and was to continue feeling, too, with remarkable persistence, every time it started up again after an interval and now and then while it was simply going on. The element I was trying to breathe seemed not so much gaseous as fluid, or even some rarefied form of gelatin that shuddered constantly under the swipes of immense invisible ping-pong bats. It smelt of tennis shoes, hair and melting insulation, and was fearfully hot.
If the place itself had the look of the hastiest possible adaptation to human occupancy, the audience – five hundred strong? a thousand? – might have been making it their home for weeks. They were not exactly all lying about, standing, strolling, chatting, making mild love, beginning to dance, buying and selling, preparing food, but neither were they all sitting in the rows of unfolded folding seats attending to what they, or some number of them, must have paid money in order to witness. Every few feet were plastic carrier bags, radios, footwear and clothing discarded momentarily or for good, coloured newspapers of strange format, textiles that might have been blankets or stoles or things intermediate, and the already substantial foundations of piles of general litter. Here and there I could make out an ordinary human being: journalist, performer’s parent or ill-instructed queer.
A degenerate descendant of Charles II came and took Roy away. My own guide, a girl (so I provisionally decided), escorted me to the end of a row, or lateral straggle, in which I recognized Terry Bolsover, a tremendous visual achievement amid the prevailing hairiness. Near him was a vacant chair.
The person with me articulated quite clearly, and yet without seeming to shout much, ‘You can go closer if you like.’
‘No thanks,’ I bawled, ‘I think I can get everything I want from here.’
‘Sorry?’
‘This’ll do.’
Those sitting, sprawling, lying between the aisle and Bolsover made no attempt to move themselves or their belongings out of my path, but showed no vexation when I kicked, trod on, fell over booted foot or bulging string-bag. Bolsover looked up at my approach and made quite a show of checking what would have been an inaudible roar of laughter. I pulled my chair up to his and began wiping steam off my glasses.
‘You here for the paper or just giving your pal moral support?’ he asked in the same style of utterance as that I had heard a moment earlier: an occupational skill, no doubt, such as foundry workers and warship deck-hands must have to develop. I tried to imitate it when I answered,
‘Moral support, yes. I don’t know about the paper yet.’
‘Eh? Look, hold it until this lot’s over. There can’t be much more.’
I mimed a question.
‘Because he’s already pretended to be going to
stop and been carried away into going on twice. Three times is the usual limit for that one. Here, it’s just coming up now.’
I looked at the stage. Sure enough, the young man who had been making most of the vocal noise, and whose body had so far merely been making stylized copulatory movements, plainly began to suffer the effects of some convulsant poison, perhaps conveyed into his bloodstream by blow-pipe dart: in its way an impressive sight.
‘Yeah, this’ll be it,’ said Bolsover.
It was. What followed it surprised me mildly: hardly a scream, not a single whistle that I could hear, a small amount of ordinary yelling, nothing to compare with the pervading loud but fairly steady hubbub, like that of a cocktail-party on its second drink, that might well have been going on at much the same level underneath the din from the stage. I reasoned that no one turns enthusiastic about the maintenance of his natural environment; as well cheer when water comes out of a turned tap, give the milkman a standing ovation. When I tried it, I found I could converse with Bolsover as easily as if we had been in a record-breaking train.
‘Are there any more acts before Roy comes on?’
‘Acts? Oh, I get you. No, this bunch do one more, then it’s Pigs Out with their . . . like their latest hit number, you see, Doug. Then your bloke comes on and does his stuff with them. Did you say you were writing it up for the paper?’
‘Harold wants me to. He says people would think it was interesting to have two different points of view on the same event. I don’t think I shall want to.’
‘There can’t be more than about eleven people in England who read you and read me.’
‘There can, I’m afraid. Anyway, I told him something of the sort, and he said that didn’t matter: people would still think it was interesting.’
‘I sort of get it. Could I pick your brains a bit on the classical side later? I won’t go into it, that’s your style, but just so’s I don’t say pizzicato when I mean 7/4 time. I’ll do the same for you.’
Girl, 20 Page 22
