Fairness

by Ferdinand Mount

‘What other Helen?’

  ‘Helen of Troy. Don’t they teach you anything in college?’

  ‘Helen of Troy wouldn’t have been like that.’

  ‘No? What makes you so sure? Anyway, the point is, it would make you feel extraordinary, marked out by God.’

  ‘Helen doesn’t believe God’s around to mark anyone out,’ I said.

  ‘By destiny then. You would feel chosen.’

  ‘I suppose you would.’

  ‘So you would be particular. You could take your pick, so you wouldn’t give yourself to just anyone.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  ‘But Helen isn’t that way, not at all.’

  Suddenly I was wide-awake.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, she lets you do it, just like that.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘She enjoys it, but as far as I can see, it’s no big deal to her. I don’t mean she doesn’t you know, or she seems to anyway, but she doesn’t make a fuss about it.’

  ‘Oh.’ I couldn’t think what else to say, my whole, what?, body, being, self was suffused with such a suffocating mixture of lust and humiliation.

  ‘That surprises you? Of course it might be that she’s hopelessly in love with me – they say it can be done – but I’m not a complete idiot, I can tell she isn’t. She likes me all right, but that’s about the limit of it. You’ve known her a long time. Have there been others?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask her?’

  He looked at me not without pity.

  ‘That’s not a thing you ask a girl, that’s an accusation.’

  ‘Well, why do you want to know?’

  ‘I want to find out if I’m right.’

  ‘But if you do find out you’re right, it will be upsetting, won’t it?’

  ‘Of course it will. But there are things you have to know even if getting the answer is going to be a grief.’

  ‘Well, as it happens, I don’t know the answer.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Quite sure. I don’t know the name of a single other lover of hers.’

  He nodded, looked pleased but dubious, changed the subject, took me back to the rest of the group.

  ‘What have you lot been nattering about over there? Women, I expect.’ Bobs was flushed and full of himself.

  Tolly d’Amico smiled and said nothing.

  That was not something you could accuse Bobs of. He was a one-man information bureau, endlessly forthcoming on any subject you cared to mention and quite a few you didn’t: masturbation in public schools, the date of the introduction of the overhead camshaft, the low cost of motor insurance in Denmark, his aversion to goat’s cheese, the effect of the Six-Day War on petrol supplies, where he was standing when he heard about Mike Hawthorn being killed which he could remember as opposed to where he was when he heard about J.F.K. which he couldn’t, recordings of ‘Rock Around the Clock’ not made by Bill Haley, the likely date for the introduction of decimal currency and its effect on the prospects of Britain going into the Common Market or the other way round, why Tammy Wynette was a greater singer than who was it now. I cannot recall all the subjects he touched on that evening and on the other evenings that followed.

  Why did any other evenings follow, what weakness of will, what pathetic desire for company made me yield to his cheery call, always coming through at some awkward moment, just as the permanent secretary had come into our office and was asking how we were all getting on (I had joined the Department three months earlier)?

  ‘Hi, who did you screw last night, what’s the buzz on the Rialto, why don’t we meet at the Cri sevenish?’

  The Cri! Nobody had called that decayed pleasure palace by any such abbreviation since before World War One, nobody had even been to the place. But there were no inverted commas about Bobs. He had probably read the brochure about the Criterion in its golden years while munching the nuts and olives there with his manic esurience. Other people’s slang, whether fashionable or hopelessly moth-eaten, stuck to him like burrs. He accepted every invitation that came his way, invitations that nobody else would have dreamed of accepting and that had nothing at all to do with him. From the Aetherius Society, Chelsea Town Hall, 8 p.m. – Why we can prove that Aliens have landed – Speaker Dr R.P. McKechnie, Refreshments; or the old Waltonians Choral Society, G & S night; or Britons Together, Methodist Central Hall; NATO our shield, General Sir Walter Walker, Admission Free; or Ethical Society cheese and wine evening, Conway Hall, all welcome. Happenings, Be-Ins, vintage car rallies, he went to them all. He had two kits, at least only two that I ever saw: (a) the green and brown jacket with the prairie-states pattern, grubby twills, brogues and the red-and-yellow cravat, the total effect like a down-at-heel Rupert Bear, which he wore for work and to go motor-racing; and (b) an oatmeal jersey with some brutal cable stitch and jeans of the bright blue colour that most people tried to wash out, which he wore for more way-out occasions. At an arts event in a deconsecrated Baptist chapel in the Polish bit of Hammersmith, I saw the jersey being ruined by a beakynosed girl with long black hair in a black leotard covered with spray paint entwining herself about him to some incongruously cheerful Beach Boys number while Bobs stood there with that seraphic Moonman look.

  ‘Yes, I picked it up on the hall table at Padders, addressed to J. Devlin, not known at this address, so I snaffled it, might be fun, don’t you think?’

  This was an invitation to the Polish Dance Society Waltz Night at the Baltic Military Club, wasn’t fun at all, couldn’t possibly have been for two non-Poles who had no one to dance with and, speaking for myself, couldn’t have waltzed if I had. Yet after an hour or so of some 500 per cent Polish vodka, Bobs picked up a stout Polish lady with hair piled high on her head, and whistled her round with some fluency.

  ‘Only thing I can do better than my brother,’ he said returning her gasping to her tall sombre mate. ‘That, and talking.’

  Sometimes he would make me meet him at Padders, his frowsty second-floor flat in Padstow Mansions. When I rang the bell, even if I had come at just the time he said, he was always having a bath and would have to come down to open the door because the buzzer was broken. If he had a towel, it would fall off and his hairy white buttocks would be exposed as he hurried back up the stairs. Then he would turn round to explain why he was behind schedule and his frothy little genital cluster would bob at me. He had to hurry because the light on the landing only stayed on for a few niggardly seconds before needing to be pressed again, and so if he paused to chat, we would be plunged into dusty dark and the first thing I would see as the light came on again would be his naked bottom scampering on upstairs, white as chalk against the floral encrustations of the wallpaper.

  I wondered why the other tenants hadn’t bumped into him naked like this or if they had why they hadn’t complained, but there was never anybody else on the stairs when I was there and the letters lying on the wooden ledge above the radiator in the hall didn’t seem to change. You felt that the dust rising from the brown stair-carpet was the same dust that had filled your mouth and nostrils a month before as you gasped for breath on the landing. It was easy to press the wrong bell in the poor light – the Moonman inked in the No. 3 slot was almost illegible. But none of the others – Brotherton, da Silva, Mr G. Prem – ever answered. Nor were they the same as the names on the uncollected letters – R.P. Sawyer, Serena Bell and Miss J. Johnson. Perhaps they had all left Padstow Mansions years earlier or never lived there in the first place.

  ‘Fantastic new hotel deal we’ve signed up in Fuengirola, Spanish lawyers gassing all day.’

  These claims to be caught up in high negotiations didn’t often trip from him. In fact he was almost secretive about his work at the travel agency, once coming close to implying that their contract with some governmental body had a hush-hush aspect.

  ‘Oh it’s because he’s only a clerk,’ Helen said. ‘I mean, he’s the person sitting behind the desk who makes you wait for hours and then gets the booking all w
rong.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I walked past and looked through the window and there he was.’

  ‘Didn’t you go in?’

  ‘No, I didn’t quite like to.’

  ‘But you do go out with him?’

  ‘There’s no but about it. I go out with him. Do you think I shouldn’t just because he isn’t the boss?’

  ‘No, no, I wasn’t thinking of that. It’s just that he’s . . .’

  ‘Such a bore,’ she finished for me, ‘yes, but you “go out” with him too, or so he says.’

  ‘Well, he asks me.’

  ‘Same with me,’ Helen said. ‘Asking gets you a long way, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Not the whole way. Or does it?’

  ‘I don’t answer that sort of question.’

  She giggled.

  Bobs became a shared secret between us, a joke which was more than just a joke and was somehow liberating – from what I don’t know. He was our Puck, a half-cock sort of Puck, but none the less an importer of magic. It was better when the three of us did not go out together, because I could not help catching Helen’s eye. In any case, the pleasure came from reporting not from experiencing an evening with Bobs which at the time was exhausting, often edgy. Our enthusiasm for his company was not widely shared. Strangers who ran into him would soon begin to find themselves disconcerted, not quite able to decide whether they were bored or irritated or amused, and on deciding that amused was not what they were would discover that it was too late, Bobs already had their telephone number or had found out where they worked or, worse still, had already lowered the boom, a phrase Helen and I had borrowed from him – ‘one of these days the Stock Exchange is going to lower the boom on these inside deals’ – and applied to his effortless, perhaps unconscious, technique of shepherding his victim into the corner of the room, then leaning across him or her, usually her, with his hand planted firmly on the opposite wall, which made escape impossible, especially because he was so short.

  ‘Look, the boom’s down.’

  ‘You’ll soon see the look of panic spreading across her face.’

  ‘It always takes them a bit of time because they think Bobs is going to take his arm away and let them out.’

  ‘Like any normal person would.’

  ‘They don’t realise he can stay in that position for hours.’

  Tolly didn’t care for Bobs’s company – he had made that plain enough – but he cared even less for our skittish conversation about him.

  ‘I suppose you’d rather we talked about you instead,’ Helen said.

  ‘No, no, I just don’t like that kind of talk.’ Tolly’s voice, normally soft as fur, sharpened to a bark. He looked almost hurt. We had offended against an obscure sense of decency – at least it was obscure to us and he was in no mood to spell it out. His own brand of banter left his fundamental seriousness unaffected. But serious – was that the word for someone in his line of business? Perhaps seriousness was a trickier quality to pin down than it looked, Tolly d’Amico being more serious, by his own lights, perhaps by mine too, than the Rev. James Moonman, to name but one.

  That was the last time I was to see Giovanni Tolomeo d’Amico for several years and it was not our happiest meeting. His presence was leaden, even mournful. Bobs was not the only topic he cut off in what seemed to us its prime, and I could not blame Helen for getting up abruptly and saying she thought she would get Bobs to drive her home. She had to make an early presentation to the ice-cream people in the morning. She didn’t usually talk much about her work. We had teased her too much. There was something about the idea of it which sparked our fantasy. We imagined Helen bombarding vats of ketchup or cream cheese with a spray gun loaded with chemicals and the mixture then rising to an evil green froth, out of which strange misshapen creatures would clamber, probably flesh-eating and capable of devastating an entire postal district. At the back of the little pavilion didn’t they keep hutches full of defenceless rabbits or beagles who would foam at the mouth and fall into contortions when she fed them her experimental compounds? No, she said, it wasn’t like that at all. It was more a question of measuring qualities such as acidity, analysing chemical change over time, painstaking compilation of statistical data. There was scarcely any tasting involved at all, even by humans. That was done back at the various factories by panels of volunteers. In any case, working with chemicals your taste-buds soon became unreliable.

  But even her serious answers only provoked more fantasies of her dulled taste-buds confusing things like caviar and tapioca, and so she soon learnt to say nothing at all. Referring to the ice-cream presentation must have been the only excuse she could think of to make a quick exit. Tolly jumped to his feet. ‘I’ll take you. You don’t want to risk your life in that draughty old heap. He’s a lousy driver anyway.’

  ‘He’s going my way and you’re so grumpy tonight.’

  ‘I can’t help it if you two insist on talking such a load of cock.’

  ‘I don’t want a row, Tolly, I’m just going. Good-night. End of story.’

  She was gone in a moment, with that unobtrusive quickness she had when her mind was made up.

  Tolly kept me back for another drink. He sat with his head bowed like a mourner in a pew. His face looked heavier when downcast, the crevice in his forehead merging into his frown.

  ‘You take these things pretty lightly, don’t you, you people?’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Love, relationships, life – they’re just words to you lot.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘What makes you think so? Just because Helen and I were having a crack about Bobs –’

  ‘All right then,’ he said, ‘I don’t know about you, I don’t give a shit about you, but her – that’s how she thinks.’

  ‘Is it? How do you know?’

  ‘Would you go off with him, if you really minded about me?’

  ‘Go off with Bobs? She’s only asked him to run her home because you’re a bit ratty.’

  ‘That’s what you think, is it? Shows how much you notice.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Really, are you sure? Bobs.’

  ‘Yes, Bawbs,’ he said, mimicking my drawl.

  ‘Well it’s crazy,’ I said, ‘but even if it’s true it doesn’t prove she isn’t serious, I mean a serious person, not necessarily serious about him. She may be sorry for him.’

  ‘You think that’s all right, do you? Going with someone because you’re sorry for them?’

  ‘Well it might be, I don’t know.’

  ‘No, you don’t know. You don’t know the half of it. You don’t know anything about it at all.’

  ‘No, I don’t, I never pretended to. You brought the whole subject up.’

  ‘Yes I did, and now I’m going to tell you.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Listen, my grandfather came from Palermo in 1890, sweatshop in Saffron Hill, made straw hats, Henley Regatta and all that, his wife started a little deli over the other side of the Clerkenwell Road, both of them worked eighteen hours a day for sod all, straw-hat business went belly-up in 1914, no boaters in the trenches, deli staggered on, my dad took it over, chased the girls, so that went phut too. It wasn’t fine then, before or since, and it isn’t fine now.’

  ‘I don’t quite see how –’

  ‘– this connects up? It connects up because when you have to fight each step of the way it teaches you to appreciate life and the facts of life are hard and it’s the hardness gives you pride because you’ve earned it, however little it may be.’

  ‘So your pride’s hurt because –’

  ‘Don’t sound so amazed. Of course my pride’s bloody hurt.’

  ‘But if she happens to prefer Bobs, I know it’s obscene, but –’

  ‘Prefer? Who said anything about prefer?’

  ‘I naturally assumed –’

  His forehead was glistening and the tiny alien was making the crevice throb.

  ‘She doesn’t prefer Bobs, she include
s him, she adds him to the list. Is that clear enough for you?’

  ‘Oh I see.’

  ‘And she doesn’t mind telling me about him.’

  ‘That’s a bit much. You mean, all the details?’

  ‘No, no, she’s not like that. But if you ask her a question, she’ll give you an answer.’

  ‘Well, if the answer shocks you, you shouldn’t have asked the question.’

  ‘Of course it bloody shocks me. I mean a wimp like that especially when –’

  ‘When what?’

  I wasn’t sure whether his hesitation was a theatrical pause or whether some scruple was detaining him.

  ‘He can’t get it up. I hadn’t meant to say but she makes me so fucking miserable.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, taken aback and also annoyed to find Bobs a fellow member of my fraternity. ‘Isn’t that a bit of a consolation to you?’ I added, somewhat lamely.

  ‘No it is not. She should get rid of him if he can’t, can’t be a proper man.’ (Even Tolly found this sentiment a little too Sicilian to spit it out without hesitating.)

  ‘Why? What’s wrong with being kind to him? Perhaps she sees him as a challenge.’

  ‘He’s not a challenge. He’s a disaster area and he shouldn’t hang around if he can’t cut the mustard. And she should have more pride than to let him.’

  ‘Not to mention your pride.’

  ‘You don’t understand any of this, do you? You don’t think pride matters.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s the most important thing in life. In fact, I don’t think it ought to be that important.’

  ‘You’re talking balls, you know that? Because underneath you’re just as proud as I am, you’re just too fucking proud to show it.’

  Tolly stopped talking and laughed, not in a particularly friendly way, but rather to signify that he had run out of anger for the time being and was ready to let me go home.

  He was right of course about my own pride, even I had enough self-knowledge to acknowledge that, but he could, I thought, have pushed his analysis one step further and turned it on to Helen. It wasn’t because she lacked pride that she let Bobs hang around or had taken him on in the first place. And it surely wasn’t that she wanted to clock up a record list of lovers either. That wasn’t the kind of pride she had. But there was a variety of pride she did have, although it was hard to describe, and letting Bobs hang around was not unconnected with it. The fact of his being a non-performer and this not putting her off him had something to do with it too. Suppose, though, Bobs had been someone quite different, someone brutal and oppressively virile who insisted on doing something unpleasant and painful to her, she would be just as long-suffering, just as accommodating. Most people would describe that pattern of behaviour as promiscuous, and you would have expected Tolly d’Amico to take that line. Certainly if he had thought like this, he wouldn’t have hesitated to use the word, or a ruder one. But he hadn’t. Rather, part of his anger seemed to be inflamed by puzzlement as to how to describe what she was up to. He wasn’t just angry to discover Bobs as a rival, though that was enough to enrage anyone, he was angry because she was so serene about it. Her openness reduced Tolly and Bobs to the same level. They were like so many volunteers for a research project, into the common cold, say, having chosen to contract this non-life-threatening complaint and then being nursed through all their coughs and snuffles and thanked at the end of it, but none of them could hope to be given special treatment. Her patients would be grateful to have found a refuge from the chaos and unkindness of the world, but they had no right to resent that the patient in the next bed had found the same refuge, though of course they did resent it like hell. How had I got tangled up with these awkward characters with their peculiar secrets and desires? Did other people feel so ill at ease with what the outside world would have assumed to be their friends? When I watched other people in the street or in a bar, they seemed to fit together, even when they were quarrelling. I could imagine their unspoken sense of intimacy, of being right for each other.