Getting It Right (22 page)

‘Hullo,’ she said.

‘Hullo,’ he said. He couldn’t not speak to his junior, just because they met off duty: she might be hurt, anyway he liked her, but it
would
turn out to be her.

‘That’s the lot.’ She turned the bag upside down, and a few crumbs fell out of it.

‘Do you often feed them?’

‘When the weather’s okay and we get enough of a lunch hour. Not very often in fact.’ She began a smile but, meeting his eye, it faded, and she turned back rather hurriedly to
the ducks, most of whom seemed not to have realized that the source of provender had ceased, and were swimming about in a greedy and expectant manner.

Gavin remembered that he hadn’t eaten his sandwiches and got one out of his bag. ‘They can have half my bread,’ he said, ‘there’s always too much of it.’

‘A lot of different kinds,’ he remarked a few moments later as he embarked upon round two. ‘Which do you like best?’

‘The Carolinas.’

‘Which are they? That one?’

‘That’s a Mandarin. They used to be my favourites, but now I’ve gone on to them. Over there.’ She pointed out a wonderfully-marked bird in green and reddish brown with
black and white delineations. ‘But I like the diving ducks too. That cheeky little tuft on their heads that stays upright however much they dive. You can read what they are from boards on
another bit of the lake. That’s how I know.’ She took an apple out of her mac pocket and started to eat it.

‘Do the pelicans ever come?’

‘No. They eat fish. It wouldn’t be worth their while. They get specially fed.’

They stood there in silence for a bit while Gavin finished his second sandwich – there was nothing in them, really – and threw the last bit of crust into the water. The silence,
which had been easy at first, became heavier with length, and Gavin started to feel uncomfortably responsible for it. Jenny finished her apple and chucked the core into the water. Most of the ducks
seemed to know at once that they wouldn’t want it and almost swam out of their way to make the point.

Jenny turned away from them and started to walk away just as he thought of something.

‘Where are you going for your holidays this year?’ he asked, walking with her.

‘I don’t know. I can’t really go far because of the boy.’ And, before he could wonder what on earth she meant, she added: ‘My son . . . He’s only three and a
half. I took him to the seaside last year and he hated it. Although that may have been because they said there’d be sand and there wasn’t. Not so’s you’d notice . . . And we
had shocking weather.’

‘I didn’t know you’d been married, Jenny.’

‘Haven’t bin.’

‘Sorry.’

‘You couldn’t know. I met this bloke when I was on a camping holiday in France. You know – you can go diving and you live in a kind of club. It was the most exciting thing
I’d ever done in my life . . . He was Norwegian – a student . . . He was much older than me. Afterwards, I wrote to him to tell him I was having a baby, but he never answered. I
wondered for a bit whether I hadn’t got his address right. Anyway, I never heard. So there it was.’

‘You just went ahead and had the baby.’

‘I had him all right. Everyone kept telling me I ought to get him adopted, but I couldn’t see the sense in that. He might have had
any
sort of life if I’d done that.
At least if he’s with me I know . . .’

‘And he’s fine, is he?’

‘He’s a
terror
,’ she said in a very warm voice.

They were standing, waiting to cross the road outside the Park: he glanced at her, and saw that she was smiling. She really didn’t look at all old.

‘How
old
were you?’ he found he couldn’t help saying.

‘Seventeen. Well – nearly.’ Then she added quickly: ‘I haven’t told any of the others, because I didn’t want it to get to Mr Adrian. I had a job getting taken
on as it was, and if he’d known
that
you wouldn’t have seen me for dust.’

‘I won’t tell anyone. Thanks for telling
me
.’

‘It just came up,’ she said, ‘because of the holidays.’

They walked in silence until they reached the bottom of St James’s Street while he made timid generalizations about other people’s courage, and how amazing people were when you got
to know anything at all about them, and until he felt the pricking in his eyes subside.

‘Who looks after him?’

‘You sound a bit croaky! You haven’t got that bug that’s going round, have you?’ She sounded genuinely concerned.

‘I’m fine, thanks.’

‘My mum. She’s been lovely to us. I could never even have started my training if it hadn’t been for her. That’s why I always take Andrew out at weekends and away for my
holiday – to give her a rest . . .’

‘That’s his name, then?’ he said trying to sound jollier than he felt.

‘I wouldn’t have called him Andrew if his name wasn’t Andrew,’ she said with recognizable forbearance. (God – he sounded just like his father! Something he liked to
think he never did!) He turned to her, blushing. ‘That was silly of me.’

‘Okay. Actually, it’s nice to have been able to tell you. I feel a bit of a Charlie when the other juniors are talking about their boyfriends and getting engaged and all that.
Course, I’m older than them, but that makes them think it’s even funnier. It’s funny, isn’t it, how everybody expects you to be just like them.’

‘Feelings,’ he agreed, ‘they do expect you to feel the same.’

‘Yes, but you couldn’t feel the same if the same things hadn’t happened to you, could you?’

‘I don’t know. You might imagine whatever it was a bit.’ After a pause, he added: ‘There’s art, too, of course. You can’t leave that out.’ He felt shy
about saying that, but he couldn’t leave it out.

‘What’s that for?’

‘Recognizing things, I think. I think it’s for showing people that there is a lot more to them than usually meets their eye.’

‘Oh.
That’s
what it’s for!’

‘Well – only a bit.
I
don’t know all of what it’s for. Every time I think about that I think something else. Don’t take what I say about it for
gospel.’ He was backing off; the whole subject was something he only discussed – and he didn’t say all he thought to
him
– with Harry.

‘When you say art, you don’t just mean pictures and that, do you?’

‘No – I mean the whole lot.’

‘Music and reading and acting?’ she persisted: she sounded childishly dogged, almost as though she was trying to catch him out.

‘All that. And architecture, and opera and poetry. And gardens, sculpture. Films,’ he added after a pause.

‘Gardens!’ she scoffed. ‘I can’t see that! I can’t see the art in gardens!’

‘I don’t mean that every garden is a work of art: of course not. Not anything’s that. I only meant it could be.’

They had nearly reached the top of the street, she nudged his arm and said: ‘There’s always old men reading newspapers in those windows.’

‘It’s a club. Called White’s.’

‘What do they do?’

‘I don’t know. They have drinks and food and things and just be there.’ Winthrop had worked as a waiter in the R.A.C. very temporarily indeed, and what Gavin knew about clubs
was gleaned from his invective-studded account. ‘Fuck all,’ he had added absently.

‘Perhaps they just want to get away from their wives.’

‘Could be. They’re the sort of men who went to schools without girls, so probably they aren’t very used to them.’

‘They have waitresses, though,’ she said. ‘I know that because a friend of mine did it for a summer.’

‘They wouldn’t have to talk to them.’ Briefly, he wondered whether that, in fact, was what clubs were for: an escape; to provide an escape from the Ladder of Fear. In which
case, he could absolutely see the point of them.

The afternoon would have been quiet had it not been for a telephone call from Minerva.

‘Hullo,’ she said. She sounded rather breathless.

‘Hullo.’ It was the most cautious thing he could think of to say.

‘I’m somewhere terrifically boring, so I thought I’d ring you up.’

‘I’m at work, really.’

‘I know. I wondered what time you finished. Or – tell you what – I could come round and have my hair done . . .’

This stymied him. He only had two clients between now (three o’clock) and closing time.

‘What do you want done to your hair?’

‘That’s up to you, isn’t it? Okay, I’ll come round.’ She rang off before he could say anything. Then she rang back again to say what was the address, so of course
he had to tell her.

She turned up about an hour later wearing green stretch pants, boots and what looked like a man’s golfing jacket; it was about eight sizes too big for her. He happened to be combing out
his client and it was Jenny who divested her of the jacket and put the nylon jacket round her. That looked too big for her as well: she seemed to have shrunk since Gavin had last seen her. Jenny
gave her a magazine to read and she settled down quietly to wait. So perhaps she was going to behave herself, he thought, and not be a nuisance. He finished off Mrs Atkinson who slipped him his
usual 50p, and then walked over to Minerva who had been watching him.

‘How much did she give you?’ she asked audibly.

‘I don’t know.’ Mrs Atkinson had not yet left the desk where she was paying her bill.

‘Don’t you want to look?
I
would.’

‘No. What do you want me to do with your hair?’

‘Bet it wasn’t any more than 50p.’

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mrs Atkinson registering this . . . ‘Would you mind just shutting up about that?’ he said as quietly and as forcibly – a very nice
adjustment that – as possible.

‘Sorry.’ She hunched down in the chair, and looking at her in the mirror he noticed that she had grey purple smudges under her eyes. She looked, in fact, rather ill. Her hair was in
rotten condition too as though she was eating the wrong food or, come to think of it, not enough food.

‘We’ll give it a shampoo and a good conditioner, and then I’ll cut it. If you want it cut.’

‘Yes please, Gavin.’

He got Jenny over and sent them off together. Then he went out to the back to get himself a coffee. Peter was there.

‘Is she your bird?’

‘No.’ He had to think what Peter meant for a second: he never thought of himself as a person who had them.

‘Well – she seems to know
you
.’ He swilled his coffee in the cup for a moment and then said: ‘I mean – if you want to ask her on Friday –
you’re welcome. We’re broadminded, you know.’ Then he went, before Gavin could work out what he could possibly have meant by
that
. Gavin, who felt often that his mind was
like a small and partially disused branch railway line, had a natural and, he felt, well-founded terror of those who claimed the broader highways: it was either a way of telling you that they could
put up with however silly you were, or it was a way of warning you that they couldn’t put up with anything. Perhaps, he thought, it was Peter’s way of telling him that he, Peter, could
put up with Minnie because he, Peter, liked Gavin. That was all very well, but could
he
put up with her? He didn’t have to; he advised himself to wait, not to hurry things, or rush
into anything. Then he started wondering morosely when he had last ever rushed – you couldn’t count being propelled – into anything, and decided that it was when he’d bought
William, his white rat, from Mr Dean in New Barnet when he’d been thirteen.

‘Mr Gavin. Client’s ready.’ It was Jenny, behaving as though they hadn’t met in the Park, and had not, ever, talked about anything other than their clients. Following
Jenny into the salon, he wondered how on earth somebody so slight could ever have produced a three-and-a-half-year-old son. She must have looked extraordinary when pregnant – like a very
young tree with one enormous pear . . . with this he suddenly realized that he found pregnant women sexually attractive. By the time he reached Minerva, whose peaky face was surmounted by a white
towel twisted like a turban round her head, he was blushing – thank goodness his mother couldn’t read his mind – she would be even more shocked than he was . . . she called a
pregnancy a condition – implying that it was not a very nice one at that.

Jenny unwound the turban and gave a final expert drying little rub. ‘Shall I comb out, Mr Gavin, or will you?’

‘I’ll do it. You nip off for a coffee. Next client’s not due till a quarter-to.’

He combed out in silence, aware of Minnie watching him intently. He
was
intent; the first time he cut any client’s hair he had to get the feel of it: look at their face, see how
to make the most of any good feature, how to soften any shortcoming. She had a high and wide forehead – a double crown set rather far back. The hair itself was medium coarse, very much split
at the ends. Her ears stuck out a little too much for beauty, but she had a long neck. It would be best cut just to the bottom of the ear lobe – a little longer at the back: he’d
feather it to three inches all over the head. That would give the hair a better chance to recover. He began feeling for her natural parting – no, in view of the double crown, better perhaps
without one. He’d cut the hair short across the forehead on a slant. He felt in his pocket for his scissors, which weren’t there.

‘I’ll have to fetch my scissors.’ He’d left them in an overall pocket – extremely careless of him.

‘There are some.’ She pointed to the glass-topped table in front of them.

‘I use my own.’

When he came back with them, she said: ‘What’s so special about your scissors?’

‘They’re Japanese. They’re mine. Nobody else uses them.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’d know if anybody else
had
used them. We all have our own scissors.’

‘Does the man who owns the shop dole them out to you?’

‘Oh, no. We buy our own.’ The idea of Mr Adrian forking out sixty-five quid for a pair of scissors amused him mildly.

He told Minnie what he was going to do; she said, ‘Okay – go ahead,’ and sat remarkably still for a while. Then, suddenly, she said: ‘Lucky you!’