Getting It Right (26 page)

‘It doesn’t really need that bit, though, does it? I mean, the father not wanting them to marry would be enough.’

She lit another cigarette and gave him an absent little smile, but he could not really tell what her expression was, because of the tinted glasses. He wanted to ask her to take them off, but
decided that it would be forward of him to ask that.

‘Do you understand Italian?’ she asked after quite a long pause.

‘Good Lord, no! I’m hopeless at languages. Tried to learn one once, but I didn’t make much headway.’

‘Which one?’

‘Latin, actually . . .’

‘What made you choose Latin?’

‘Well – feeling I stopped my schooling a bit young. And they didn’t teach Latin where I went, anyway. I was reading a lot, and I kept not understanding words, and I know at the
posh places where you really get an education they seemed to go in for Latin so I thought that was the ticket.’

‘Did you want to be thoroughly educated, then? Go to university, and all that?’

‘Me? I never really thought. I mean it didn’t come out like that. I wanted to
know
things, you know, but they mostly seemed to be things they didn’t go in for much in
my school. I just took to reading really, because the teaching was so dull.’

‘You must have had
one
good teacher though.’

‘Funny you should say that. I don’t know if he was much cop at teaching, but he knew a lot. He taught arts and crafts where I was, and he loathed it. And he knew I loathed it. We
used to talk about books and things . . .’ His voice tailed off. Whenever he read anything that really touched him, or made him laugh, he thought of Mr Allsop, who had a bald patch on the top
of his head that went shiny when he got excited . . . Aloud, he said: ‘
He
knew Latin. I think I sort of thought I’d like to be a bit like him, and that’s what started me
on the Latin.’

They finished their drinks, and he said:

‘How did you know to get two glasses of brandy?’

‘I always order two of things to be on the safe side . . .’

‘Do you often meet people here, then?’

‘No.’ She said nothing more, and he felt he’d stumbled, as it were, into being forward. Then, for the millionth time since he’d met her this evening, he remembered the
Secrets game and said: ‘If you don’t like me asking you questions, you’ve only to say.’

‘Would you stop then?’

‘Yes.’ Then he added: ‘I might go on wanting to know, but I’d shut up.’

‘That’s very sweet. Thank you.’

The bell rang. She got to her feet before he did; the black dress was another tube – like the silver one in which he had first seen her and, as he got up, he realized again how very tall
she was, taller than he by about three inches. He also noticed that people were looking at her – with the kind of glancing stares that denoted curiosity more than anything else. This made him
feel angry for her, because
he
would have hated being stared at in that way, and, on impulse, he took her arm and marched back to her box beside her. When they were back, and seated, she
said:

‘It was nice that we didn’t spend the interval having little judgemental comparisons of performances. A look-what-a-lot-I-know-about-opera conversation.’

Gavin agreed, and then, as the house lights went, he remembered that, in a way, that
was
the sort of conversation he often had with Harry. This lent a discomforting dishonesty to his
agreement, and then the beautiful prelude to Act Three began – one of his favourite bits of the whole work and he remembered nothing but that Violetta was to die and that not even love could
save her.

From then until the end – ‘Oh God, to die so young!’ – he was transported past the physical confusions of impending grief – thorn in throat, hammer on heart, icy
fingers, scorching eyes, until he had given himself, soul and body, to the sad magic.

Applause always came too soon for him and he resented it: it was like being shaken awake on the instant of a dream and he sat plummeting helplessly back into himself until the (infinitely)
milder sensations of gratitude and admiration took over . . .

When the last call had been taken, she said:

‘Would you like some dinner?’ And, not needing to think about it, he said that he would.

In the taxi they talked a bit about opera, but not much. He asked her whether she thought that in real life people did actually die for love. She said she thought that people would do anything
for it, and for some that would include dying. ‘Harder to live for it, though,’ she said. ‘It goes on so much longer.’

Later she remarked that beauty was useful stuff.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Well, it enables us to accept so much truth that we would otherwise find unbearable.

‘What I find so awful, Gavin,’ she said, ‘such a dirty trick, is our life span. That was the wicked fairy at the christening all right. We shan’t live long enough to make
the best use of our experience . . .’

‘Really? Do you think that?’ Redoubtable old geniuses like Bach and Einstein were in his mind backing disbelief.

‘But of course!’ she said impatiently. ‘We spend the first quarter of our lives like good, innocent little slates on which any old graffiti get written; we can’t choose
anything much. Then there is the heady time when we
can
make choices, but by then they’re going to be conditioned by the graffiti, you bet. And then, when a little wisdom starts
creeping in, we start breaking up physically, so that we have less and less power to use what we know. And practically the only weapon we have against all that is art. I think that was the late
fairy’s attempt to give us a chance, at least. Let there be condensed experience available.’

‘What about the great people? What about genius?’

‘The point about them is that they’re the exceptions, aren’t they? They’ve slipped through the net: lonely, privileged bastards.’ She laughed then, and added:
‘I can combine being envious of them with not in the least wanting to be one of them. I’m simply full of
human
nature.’

Gavin said nothing: he was thinking – testing himself to find out how much, if at all, he agreed with her. She was talking about too many things at once, he decided, or else he was lacking
in any overall philosophy (most likely, that), and for a moment he wished he was at the Chinese with Harry – a relatively familiar and undemanding situation. Then, as though she knew
something of his mind, she said: ‘Look here. Let’s have a simple, merry time. To hell with it: you’re only whatever you are, once.’

And that was how it turned out, or certainly began to turn out. She took him back to her flat, now seeming even larger without all the party in it. It was completely silent up there, and
although lights were on – in the hall, in the large sitting room with its open doors – it seemed a rich and desolate place. She went away to take off her coat and he stood uncertainly,
beginning to wish that he wasn’t there, with small nagging thoughts about the last train back to Barnet, and wondering how he could mention that without being rude. She was away a long time.
He stared at a Rouault over the hall table (by now he had come to accept that there would be no doubt of its being a Rouault – whom he didn’t care for anyway), confidence ebbing: if
happiness
was
energy, he was fast approaching a limbo of paralysis where he could feel nothing at all.

She returned through an unexpected door in the passage – not the way she had gone, and she had not only taken off her coat, she had removed the sequin tube dress and was now clothed in a
kind of housecoat, or wrap – voluminous, but somehow not shapeless and of a strikingly beautiful colour that was neither grey nor green.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘we’re going to move to another part of the forest. Follow me.’ They went back through the unexpected door, into another, much smaller passage that
seemed to lead nowhere. Her skirts trailed at the back, and he was reminded of Callas in
Norma
. At the end of the passage was a fitted bookcase which swung open at some touch of hers to
reveal a narrow staircase. ‘You go up first, because of my skirts,’ she said.

There was a final door at the top: he opened it and stepped into a place so different from the rest of the flat at first he could hardly believe it. It was a room, a studio, an attic with an
enormous skylight revealing the reddish glow of a London sky faintly peppered with stars. The floor was painted yellow, the walls white, and at the far end of the room was an open fireplace with
long, large logs burning in it, and a large multi-coloured rug of a kind he had never seen before. It was so surprising, so different from the rest of her flat, that he simply stood trying to take
it all in. There was very little furniture, but it seemed furnished; there was a feeling of space, but also of intimacy. It was the most beautiful comfortable room he had ever encountered. He said
so.

‘It’s my one private place,’ she said. ‘I spend a lot of time here. When Dmitri is away. Which is quite often. Go and sit by the fire, while I get our food.’

He went and sat on a small stool on the multi-coloured rug which turned out to be made of rags. The logs that were burning made a fragrant fruity smell. It was wonderfully silent; he could hear
nothing but the sounds of the fire.

When she returned to him with a tray of food and drink which she put on the rug between them, he said: ‘It’s a bit magic, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you mean it to
be?’

‘That’s right. It isn’t meant to be like the rest of life at all. Now, let’s eat and drink.’ She poured some wine, handed him a glass and said: ‘Help yourself
to food.’

There was some kind of fish pâté and dark bread, and, the moment he started, Gavin realized that he was very hungry. There was also a dish of cold meats and a salad full of
delicious and unexpected things, followed by cherries in a very beautiful white bowl . . . She sat opposite him, on the rug, with her back resting against an enormous cushion, and with her feet
tucked up under her – he had noticed earlier that they were bare. They talked: indeed, Gavin realized, by the time they got to the cherries, that he had been doing most of the talking.
‘I’m curious about you,’ she had said, as they spread the pâté on their bread, ‘start by telling me three things about yourself that you know I don’t
know. Unless you absolutely don’t want to, of course.’ He had been momentarily confounded: she already knew some things about him that nobody else knew; what could she want to know?
What
was
there about him that could possibly interest her? He began to feel frightened – both of her, and of boring her. ‘I’m not playing any games,’ she said,
‘just being personal.’ So he told her that he lived with his parents in a house that his father had built, and that he, too, had one room that was really his own. And that he cut
people’s hair. ‘I knew that,’ she said. ‘Somebody at the party told me that.’ There was a short silence while he tried to think of something else. Then she said:
‘Tell me about your room.’

‘It’s not as good as yours, not by a long chalk. But it’s got something about it that I like.’

‘Describe it to me.’

So he told her about the faded red sofa, and his mirror with gilded birds and roses on it, and the second-hand flowered carpet, and his old Persian silk rug with its faintly musty smell and the
white walls and his books and records and plants by the dormer windows . . . ‘It’s far too crowded, really,’ he said, ‘but I have to keep everything I want in
there.’

‘Does anybody else ever go into it?’

‘My mother – to clean once a week. But you can’t count her.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because she doesn’t really
see
it. She’s not aware of it at all, except as rather a difficult place to clean. I’d rather she didn’t, but it would hurt her
feelings if I asked her not to.’

‘Nobody else?’

‘Only Harry sometimes. He’s the friend I was meant to be going to the opera with tonight.

‘Why?’ he said, a moment later. ‘Don’t people come up here?’

She shook her head. ‘You are the second person who has ever been here.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh.’ He felt a bit shy of her when she said that; it seemed like a great compliment, but he wasn’t sure that it was and anyway, if it was, he
didn’t know what she expected him to say back. Instead he asked: ‘Why is the rest of your flat so very different? I mean if this is what you like, you could have it everywhere,
couldn’t you?’

‘The rest of the flat has been entirely designed by Dmitri. He did it for me, so I wouldn’t want to change any of it.’ There was a pause, then she added: ‘He’s a
designer, you see.’

This made Gavin remember the conversation in the car going to the party, when people called Joan and Dmitri had been mentioned; it seemed a hundred years ago; what was it Noel, the Australian,
had said, that Joan had started Dmitri on interior design in an effort to keep him at home, but it hadn’t worked because he kept going away and designing the interiors of yachts. Something
about her marrying him with her eyes open, and the other one saying that she’d had to keep them shut ever since . . . That made him think of something else, but he didn’t know how to
ask her that . . .

‘Is Dmitri away designing something now, then?’ he asked.

‘That’s what he says he’s doing . . .’ She said it without emphasis. ‘I’ll make some coffee.’

He got to his feet. ‘Let me help.’

‘You can bring the tray. But first, if you’re going to walk about, I’d rather you took your shoes off. My yellow floor doesn’t respond well to shoes.’

He took off his shoes, and then, on second thoughts, his jacket, since the room was very warm.

She had a sort of kitchenette in a cupboard, and there was a hatch into which she told him to put the tray. ‘It goes down in a lift.’ They were standing side by side, and without her
high heels she was only an inch or so taller than he. She was pouring water from a kettle into a coffee machine: the wide sleeve fell back as she poured and he saw her strong, white, rather
muscular arm that ended in an unexpectedly delicate wrist and narrow hand. She reached with her left arm for a bottle on the shelf before her, and without thinking and before he could stop himself
he said: ‘Why do you wear those stupid glasses? They really don’t suit you at all!’