The Rachel Papers (16 page)

'I've got mother here. I think she wants to know whether you're bringing' - I waved my head - 'her, up for the weekend.'

He descended to the bathroom landing. 'Yes. You see ...' He began down the stairs towards me, 'Vanessa's sister is —'

'You are? Right. Yes, mother, Pat will be bringing her sister.'

'... oh. Well, I'll... there'll probably—'

'I'm sorry, mother, I can't talk just now ... Yes, I might come. No one will be using my room, will they ? I'll ring if I am. Bye now.'

My father stood half-way down the stairs. 'You will come, Charles, won't you. Old Sir Herbert is coming along and I think you should be there. He can —'

'Next time,' I said, 'next time, let her know, okay? There's enough room to sleep an army in that fucking house. Let her know. So she won't have to go through this pathetic charade to see if she can find a bed for your girl. Okay?'

'Oh, come on, Charles, pull yourself together. Your mother and myself have already discussed the matter. And nothing whatever is going to happen with my "girl" in "that fucking house". Do you understand me. Do you understand me?'

I turned away and then back again. He was managing to look quite elegant and plausible, there on the stairs. I nodded.

'Charles, you're such a ...' he laughed, 'you're such a prude.'

I felt ashamed. All worked up and nowhere to go. I looked down at the telephone, breathing deeply.

'Come back upstairs.'

I went.

'Gordon,' said Vanessa, in an outraged voice, 'Rachel is Eliza Noyes's girl - Harry Seth-Smith's step-daughter.'

I followed my father into the room.

'Really,' he said, steering past Jenny's legs to the tea-tray where, with rock-like hands, he filled his cup. 'Well, in that case you must come this weekend also. Charles, why don't you bring Rachel ? I'm sure there'll be plenty of room.'

Rachel looked at me blankly.

'I saw Harry only the other week. He does regular work for us, very old friend of mine. Do come.'

Rachel shrugged in my direction.

I had had no intention of going. 'Can you?' I asked.

'Well, Mummy might —'

'Nonsense,' said my father. 'I shall ring her myself this evening. Charles, have you started at the Tutors yet?'

'Yes. Beginning of last week.'

'Good man.'

I took Rachel to a French film,
La Rupture,
as an oblique way of indicating to her how good in bed I was going to turn out to be.

I realized that there were plenty of sound, indeed urgent, reasons for hating French films: the impression the directors gave that the shoddier and less co-ordinated their products were, the more like life, and therefore the better, they were; that habit of
lapsing
into statement whenever suggestion got too difficult or ambiguous. And my critical sense told me that the English-American tradition of exploratory narrative had obvious strengths. Yet I preferred the more rickety and personal conventions of French - and, occasionally, Eyetie -cinema: the more radical attitude to experience, the scrutiny of the small detail and the single moment.

I said as much to Rachel, I told Rachel so, as we walked up to Notting Hill Gate. She agreed.

At one point Rachel took my hand. (Relax, I told myself; you don't have to do all this. She just fancies you.) She said, 'What happened when you called your father out of the room ?'

'Nothing much.'

'Do you get on with him ? You seemed, I don't know, frightfully tense.'

Rather flattering. I said: 'It's funny. I hate him all right, but it doesn't feel like hatred. Even at home. If I was sitting in the kitchen reading, and he came through the room, I'd look up and think, Oh, there he goes, I hate
him,
and return quite happily to my book. I'm not sure what it is.'

Rachel said that - hold your hats - she had 'given up' hating
her
father long ago. I didn't explain.

Owing to the mendacity of the girl who answered the telephone there, we arrived at the cinema just in time to catch the last hour and a quarter of the B feature. The B feature was called
Nudist Eden.

It was grisly. The film presented itself as a documentary, just taking a look round a real nudist camp. The narrator gave facts and figures, interviewed satisfied customers. The camera patrolled the grounds, examined the facilities. Grubby colour, low-budget incompetence; it had
a
nightmare quality: you can't tell whether you're going mad or whether everyone else is going mad; you stare round the cinema to check your bearings; you expect the audience to make some gesture of spontaneous protest. What was more, the producers could afford only middle-aged actors and actresses.

I shifted in my seat as the camera inexpertly focused on a parade of oldster genitals. The men had pricks like hand-rolled cigarettes, balls like prunes. The women did not differ significantly in this area, as far as I could see. Caved-in bums, deflated breasts - these were to be seen everywhere: by the pool, round the camp-fire (a scene scored by an ill-synchronized Deep River Boys number to which the nudists attempted helplessly to mime), in the chalets, at the canteen, and so on.

I began to feel distinct alarm, what with Rachel being so posh, when the camera lingered for a full half-minute on the naked body of a seven-year-old girl. High-spiritedly she was arching herself backwards, to reveal (i) that little girls in nudist camps are healthy and can do the crab, and (ii) her cunt, in order to sate the more recondite predilections of certain cineastes - one of whom, a mackintoshed compost-heap, was sitting immobile, like a toadstool, not even wanking, in a wide circle of unoccupied seats.

The time came to say something. After a most cunning scene, in which, for three minutes, a dangerously overweight couple were to be viewed jumping up and down on a trampoline, I turned to Rachel and said - unanxious, empirical, resigned - 'That's motion pictures.'

Rachel started laughing, quite loudly, shoulders hunched, right hand cupped over her nose. 'I love this sort of thing,' she whispered. 'How much of it will there be? Have we missed much?'

'Not much,' I said. I grabbed a kiss. 'There'll be plenty more.'

I gazed at Rachel's profile. Goodness me, I really did like her. A novel turn in our relationship. What had it been up until then ? It didn't seem like affection, far less desire: rather a kind of gruelling, nine-to-five inevitability.

As it turned out, the nude film was a delight and
La Rupture
left us cold.

Later; at the bus-stop, I quizzed Rachel about the weekend. She was evasive, pointing out that even if my father did ring it might still be difficult.

'Mummy's really neurotic about things like this. Maybe because of Daddy. She was so young then, and I think she thinks the same will, you know, happen to me.'

I sighed.

Rachel's hand writhed in mine. 'But if you came up and met them to sort of reassure her
... ?'
She pinched the loose skin on my knuckles.

'Okay,' I said. 'Yeah, I'll do that. Tomorrow? What, just come up for dinner, or a drink or something. Yes, I'll do that. I'm quite good at all that.'

' ... although Eden, then, is the "goal" of all human life, it remains strictly an imaginative goal, not a social construct, even as a possibility. The argument applies also to the literary Utopias, which are not the dreary fascist states popularizers try to extrapolate from them, but, rather, analogies of the well-tempered mind: rigidly disciplined, highly selective as regards art, and so on. Thus, Blake, like Milton, [hesitate] saw the hidden world, the animal world in which we are condemned to live, as the inevitable complement to man's imagination. Man was never meant to escape death, jealousy, pain, libido -what Wordsworth calls 'the human heart by which we live', [perplexed three-second silence] Perhaps this is why Blake paints the created Adam with a serpent already coiled round his thigh.'

So ended my short, derivative,
Roget
-roughaged essay, complete with stage-directions.

'Ye-es,' said Mr Bellamy. 'Which Utopias did you have in mind?'

'Mm. Plato. More. Butler.'

He thought about this. 'And Bacon, of course. Sherry? ... or
gin.'

'Gin, please.'

'Pink one?'

'Probably,' seemed a safe answer.

The church clock across the road struck six. Mr Bellamy chuckled as he made the drinks. 'Beng on time,' he said. 'Yes, "utopia" in feet means "nowhere", and
Erewhon
is an ene-grem of the same word. Yes, I liked thet. One of the more stylish essays I've heard for some time. Better, I should say, than most undergraduate essays.'

I found this unsurprising.

'You do seem to have read a great deal, I must say.'

'One of the advantages of being a delicate child.'

His brow puckered in genial inquiry.

'No.' I shrugged. 'I spent a lot of time in bed with illness. I read a lot then. Even dictionaries.'

Mr Bellamy rocked on his heels before the marble chimney-piece. He had so many hairs sticking out of his nose that I was unconvinced, after nearly an hour in his company, that they weren't a moustache. He sounded about fifty - he went on as if he were fifty - but he couldn't have been more than thirty-five. I assumed he had a private income. How else could he sit about drinking gin, girdled by bound books, in a Hamilton Terrace drawing-room, pretending to teach English and wishing he were an Oxford don with real live queer undergraduates to bore?

'Most imprissive. I think they'll snep you up. More gin.'

He was a short-arsed little bastard - about five-five. Hirsute brown jacket, knobbled face, rusty Brillo-pad hair. Being posh and rich and unhurried, he managed to get away with it, though what he did with it then was open to doubt. He had virtually no sexual presence, didn't look as if he could be bothered even to masturbate.

Bellamy returned with my glass. He reached out to his left and put a book in my hand.

'Perry-dice Lost,
second edish'n. It's ... viny lovely, isn't it/ he said tremulously. 'Yes, I believe
a
distant encestor of mine wrote a Utopia novel.
Looking Beckwards,
it was called. I've never rid it.'

'Really. It's a lovely edition,' I said, handing back the Milton.

'No. I should like you to hev it.'

I began shaking my head and saying things.

'Uh-uh-uh.' He held up his hand. 'I insist.

'Read it,' he said, 'It's rather good.'

It was light enough to risk the walk to Kilburn. Thirty-ones were capricious buses; even so, I wasn't due at Rachel's until seven forty-five. There might be some time to kill. Underneath a still bright sky, Maida Vale was reassuringly well-lit against the incipient dusk.

I had been to Kilburn once before, when Geoffrey made me come with him to investigate a second-hand guitar shop. Again, it looked like a small town in wartime: beleaguered, shuttered-up, people on the streets, camaraderie after a blackout. I went into a ramshackle Victorian pub, and came out of it, very quickly. Chock-a-block with teds, micks, skinnies, and other violent minority groups. Any other day, to consolidate Bellamy's gins, I would have chanced it. But I was wearing a three-piece charcoal suit - from school, admittedly, yet quite flash all the same. A lemonade, instead, then, with the students and au pair girls in a shadowy coffee-bar next to the cinema. There, and on the bus twenty minutes later, I leafed through my present from Bellamy, and thought about the weekend.

What, for a start, was my father's game ? When I got back from the cinema on Wednesday, Jenny and Norman were watching television in the breakfast-room. Simultaneously, Jenny asked me if I'd like some coffee and Norman asked me if I'd like some whisky, so I had had to say that I didn't want anything.

'Why', I wondered, 'did old shitface come round? What was he after?'

'Old shitface's tart', said Norman, 'has got a ten-year-old daughter with nowhere to go this weekend because her mother's going off with old shitface.'

'And he wants you to baby-sit?'

Norman nodded.

'Are you going to?'

'Of course,' said Jenny.

'What for?'

'The poor little thing's got nowhere else to stay.'

'So?'

The television crackled. Jenny let out a short, sharp scream.

'What's the matter with you?' asked Norman.

'Oh, nothing. I was just wondering what the dickens was going on.'

'Thass funny. I was wondering what the fuck was going on, myself.'

I sat at my desk for an hour, shaking my head, working on the Letter to My Father. At midnight I crossed out 'Letter' and put in, above, 'Speech'.

I alighted at Swiss Cottage and turned left up the hill into Arch Hampstead itself. In a nearby side-turning, two streets from Rachel's, I tried to lose in advance the evening's phlegm, expectorating two puddles of assorted greenery. I rested against a brick wall and watched a man clean his car.