Absolute Beginners (16 page)

This
Pinafore
one was always my and Dad’s special favourite, I think chiefly because it has such a really miraculous opening – friendly and sweet and gay and completely crazy – and many’s the time we’ve sung the Captain’s number with his crew together, even since I’ve grown to man’s estate, and even when out, he and I, in some public place. So every year, when Dad’s anniversary comes round, we go off to the matinee to see it, Dad of
course telling nobody, and sit eating chocolates and ices in a state of rapture, surrounded by the other G. & S. cats.

These cats, unless you’ve already seen them, you would really not believe are real. The chief thing about them is that though, presumably, they must live somewhere in the capital, you’ve never seen anything like them anywhere until this G. & S. celebration brings them all out of hiding. The thing is, although they’re by no means all old-timers, there’s not a single one of them that looks as if, in any way, he belonged to the present day. Their clothes aren’t old-fashioned, exactly, but
home
-made
. And though they’re lively enough, to judge by their applause, they seem so completely neuter, I can only call it. They look very good, of course, but only because no one has ever told them that there’s such a thing as bad.

In fact, come to think of it, they’re rather like Dad: he fits in here, among this audience. When I glanced along the row, I saw his face shining and smiling just like theirs, and his hand beating time with his
programme-souvenir
, and his lips forming the words just underneath his breath – and sometimes above it, too, when it came to the ninth encore, or to the rousing choruses. And when the Captain sang that wonderful ditty with his crew, I knew my old Dad’s greatest dream was to be up there beside him on that quarter-deck – yes, here and now my poor old battered parent was really having a tremendous ball.

Come the intermission, I asked my Dad for news of
Mum and Vern. ‘Your mother,’ he said, ‘keeps saying she wants to see you.’

‘She knows my address,’ I said.

‘I think she’s expecting you to call around at home.’

‘I bet she is. Well, you tell Ma the GPO run an excellent service, and a postcard will cost her 3d.’

‘Don’t be too hard on your Mum, son.’

‘You say that!’

‘Yes, son, me. I don’t like your taking a liberty where your mother’s concerned.’

‘Liberties! She’s been taking diabolical liberties with all of us for years!’

This little argument with Dad flared up quite suddenly and unexpectedly, as these often do, particularly among relatives, and I could see, of course, that poor old Dad could never admit to me Mum was a bitch without admitting all the mistakes that he himself had made, and sacrifice his dignity. It was also that Dad’s very conventional, and comes the
father
sometimes, or tries hard to, and you can hardly let him down.

So there was a pause, and we looked round at the G. & S. cats, jabbering delightedly away.

‘And Vern?’ I said fairly soon.

‘He’s got himself a job.’

‘No!’

‘In a bakery: night work.’

‘I give up eating bread from this day forward.’

Dad smiled, and the little film of ice was melted. ‘And the tenants?’ I asked him next.

‘There have been changes,’ Dad said carefully. ‘The
Maltese are out. She’s got some Cypriots instead.’

‘Mum’s certainly loyal to the Commonwealth.’

This just got by, and Dad, said, very decidedly, ‘The Cypriots are gentlemen.’ I asked him why, and he said, ‘They don’t despise you like the Maltese do. You can see, how they behave, they come from a people, not a tribe.’

I wanted to lead up to the question of Dad’s health, but this was tricky, because no one is more secretive than my poppa, and also, how could I do it so that he wouldn’t guess that I had anything to fear about him?’

‘And how you been personally, Dad?’ was all I could find to say.

‘How I been?’

‘Yes. I mean, how you been feeling in yourself?’

Dad stared at me. ‘As usual,’ he said, whatever that meant.

Actually, ever since Mum’s disclosure, I was hatching a bit of a plot concerning Dad. It’s like this. A year ago, when I was still quite a kid, I had food poisoning. That’s what I had – but that’s not what the doctors told me. What they
said
I had was almost everything
except
food poisoning. Believe me, I’m not making this up. When the local expert at the surgery threw in his hand, I went into hospital on the national health, where at least three of them probed me, gave me pills and injections, and discharged me as cured, exactly as before. For days I ran temperatures, and vomited almost hourly. I nearly went home again just then, back to my Mum and Dad, because I was beginning to get really scared.

Then I had an inspiration. Everybody knows that Harley Street and thereabouts is where the best doctors ply their trade, and so I thought – why shouldn’t they ply it now on me? I went up there one day, and decided that I’d choose the same street number as the day of the month it happened to be, and ring on the bell, and see what happened. The trouble was there turned out to be six bells – so I rang them all. If you don’t believe this fable, please recall that I was drunk with fever, and just didn’t care what happened: all I wanted was to reach somebody who
knew
. Well, the six bells were all answered by the same person: i.e. a sort of nurse-secretary (I’d say nurse as far up as the bosom, and secretary above that), and I didn’t have to choose which of the six medicos, because I collapsed in the marble hallway, and Dr A.R. Franklyn chose me.

This was the medical cat who cured me. When I came round, vomiting again, and got him into focus, I saw a tall, serious young-looking man who asked me to tell him all about it, which I did. He gave me an hour’s examination, and then said, ‘Well, I don’t know what’s the matter with you, but we must find out.’ I can’t tell you how much these words of Dr F.’s impressed me. Because all the other Emergency-Ward-10 numbers had assured me they knew
exactly
what the matter was (though they were very vague about the details of it), but Dr A.R. Franklyn of Harley Street said he didn’t know – and got an ambulance and whipped me inside one of those eighty-guinea-a-week clinics where they pierce your
earlobes
, or change your sex for you, for three-figure fees
– all without any mention of who was eventually going to pay what.

To cut a long whatsit short, with two days of poking things into every gap I owned, he found there was an abscess, and pierced it, and down went the temperature, and that was that, except that I had to stay on another week inside the hospital, which I didn’t really enjoy exactly, on account of the nurses. I know nurses are wonderful and everything, and the whole damn community would collapse without them, but they’re bossy. They know every man remembers that, way back in time, when he was an infant, he was bossed about by women, and when they get you on that rubber mattress, between those sheets starched like cardboard, and never enough blankets, they work on those babyhood memories, and try to make you feel you’re back again in that cosy little cot where females used to rock you, and push bottles at you, and take every kind of liberty. But I got by. And every day Dr A.R. Franklyn would call in to say, ‘Hi!’, and he always treated me, in front of those stacks of nurses, as if I was a cabinet minister or someone – I mean, he was so wonderfully
polite
. Considering who he was, and me, I really think he had the nicest manners I have ever seen in anyone, and I shan’t forget it.

But the day they turned me loose, he didn’t show up at all, and so I didn’t have a chance to thank him, or to raise the tricky question of how all this medical luxury was going to be paid for. I wrote him, of course, but though he answered very nicely, he didn’t refer at all to the financial aspect. So I did this. While I was in
the place, I’d whiled away many a weary moment with my Rolleiflex, and some of the snaps I took of everyone were really rather intimate and funny, so I picked out the best, and made enlargements, and put them in an album, and dropped it in at Harley Street, and he wrote back and said, if ever I fell into his clutches again, which he sincerely hoped I wouldn’t, he’d make sure my Rolleiflex was confiscated first.

You must see by now what was in my mind: it was somehow to get Dr F. to see my Dad without Dad exactly knowing why.

By this time, of course, we were back in the auditorium, but in the second half of
H.M.S. Pinafore
the marvellous magic of the first half gets lost somehow … I dare say old G. & S. were in a bit of a hurry, or felt the whole thing was becoming something of a drag – anyway, the plot of the musical doesn’t thicken, but evaporates. We both knew, of course, that there’d be this bit of an anticlimax, but it was a disappointment all the same, and we came out into the night air together feeling a little bit lost and cheated.

‘Well, there you go,’ I said.

‘Have a wet with me?’ said Dad.

‘Excuse me, no, Dad, I have to pound around a bit tonight …’

‘Oh. See me to my bus, then?’

‘Sure.’

I took his arm, and he said, ‘How’s your work? You’ve not been using your darkroom much of late, I’ve noticed …’

I expect even Dad was beginning to guess what must have been obvious to anyone, namely, that having a darkroom at Ma’s Rowton House was only an excuse to keep in touch with him … well, yes, and I suppose in a way her, too … because up in my shack at Napoli, there were dozens of places I could develop in, and as for darkrooms, the electric fused or packed in at the meters with such monotonous regularity there’d be no lack of rooms dark enough to operate in for hours.

‘That trip!’ I said to Dad, to take his thoughts away. ‘That ship trip up the river. Don’t forget, you promised we’d do it this year for my birthday – all the way up to … where did you say it was?’

‘Reading.’

‘There you go! Well, that’s a date, then? You’ll book the tickets?’

Dad said yes, he would, of course, and I hoisted him on his number something bus, and waved him out of sight, and stepping back on to the pavement, was nearly crunched by a Lagonda.

‘Careful, teenager,’ cried the driver, and he pulled up sharply at a red.

I get so tired of characters in motor vehicles behaving like duchesses, when usually the car’s not even their own, but part-paid on the never-never, or borrowed from the firm without the board of management’s permission, and all they really are is human animals travelling much too fast with their arses suspended six inches above the asphalt – that I stepped round smartly to give this Stirling Moss a bawling out, and saw it
was the advertising monarch, Vendice Partners.

‘Oh, hullo, trade wind,’ I said to him. ‘Where did you blow in from?’

‘Come and have a drink?’ the Partners person asked me, opening his noiseless, squeakless door.

I held my hand on it. ‘You haven’t apologised,’ I said, ‘for trying to take my life.’

‘Jump in. We’re very sorry.’

‘Come along, the lights are changing,’ said the cat sitting by his side.

I thought quick, oh well, my Vespa will look after itself, and perhaps this V. Partners will be of use to me over my photographic exhibition, so I climbed in the rear seat, with a fine view of their stiff white collars and Turkish-bathed necks and un-hip Jermyn street hairdos, and Vendice half turned and said. ‘This is Amberley Drove.’

‘Don’t
turn
like that, Vendice!’ I cried. ‘How do you do, Mr Drove.’

‘You’re nervous?’ the Partners number said.

‘Always, when I’m not driving.’

‘Then you must be nervous very often,’ said my fellow passenger, in a great big booming ‘friendly’ voice, and treating me to a doglike grin. ‘The London track,’ he continued, ‘is becoming a real menace.’

‘Some day, it’ll just seize up,’ I told him. ‘It’ll just get stuck, and everyone will have to walk home.’

‘I can see you’re an optimist,’ he said.

‘You bet,’ I told him.

As you can see, I wasn’t hitting it off with this
Amberley Drove creation. I could see he was marked down by fate as one of those English products such as you’d make a circuit of five miles to keep away from, not because he’s dangerous at all, really, but because these hefty rugger-bugger types are so damn
boyish
, and beneath their thick heads and thin skins, such bullies, longing, I expect, for the happy days in the past when they could bash the heads of juniors at their academy, or the future ones when they hope to bash someone else’s in some colony, provided they’re too small and powerless to hit back.

‘Amberley,’ said Mr P., ‘is much concerned with questions of the moment. He’s a leader-writer.’

‘Is that so,’ I said. ‘I’ve always wondered what they looked like. It doesn’t trouble you,’ I asked the Drove one, ‘that no one ever reads that stuff of yours?’

‘Ah, but they do.’

‘Who do?’

‘Members of parliament … foreign newspapers … City people.’

‘But anybody
real
?’

Vendice laughed. ‘You know, Amberley,’ he said, ‘I believe the young man’s got something.’

The Drove let out a laugh that would chill your bones, and said, ‘The leader columns are angled at the more intelligent portions of the population – few though they may be.’

‘You mean I’m a dope,’ I said.

‘I mean you talk like one.’

We’d pulled up outside one of those buildings down
by Pall Mall that looked like abandoned Salvation Army hostels, and Amberley Drove got out, and carried on quite a long conversation through the car door with Vendice that was evidently way up above my head, then said to me, ‘I tremble to think, young man, that our country’s future’s in hands like yours,’ didn’t wait for an answer (there wasn’t going to be one, anyway), and leapt up the steps, three or more at a time, and disappeared into his clubman’s emporium.

I climbed over the back seat beside Vendice. ‘He’s too young to act like that,’ I said. ‘He should wait till he’s a bit more senile.’

Vendice smiled, did some fancy stuff among the traffic, and said to me, ‘I thought you’d like him.’