The Rachel Papers (19 page)

Willie signalled his intention of taking issue with me here by saying 'Doe' a lot. After a couple of minutes, Herbert suggested, 'Don't?' Willie nodded.

'Don't you think that total puppappapermissiveness is preferable 2-2-2-2 total repressiveness, including cell-cell-self-repression?'

Sir Herbert, soon himself to be rendered unintelligible by food and drink, cruised back into the argument.

I gave my father a steely glance, and shrugged at Rachel. She was contemplating me with what seemed a mixture of emotions.

The next day, Saturday, was an epoch-maker, I now see.

Invoking the teenage prerogative, Rachel and I opted out after dinner, and went to bed, separately. I felt the hawks coming on, so I claimed tiredness.

It was one of those nights: my bed a roller-coaster, my brain a garbled switchboard of poems speeches essays plans, sheets of scrambled type the contact-lenses of my mind's eye, coughing a kaleidoscope of commas and dots.

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

'Christ. Sebastian ? What's ... I'm falling apart here.'

'Eh?' Sebastian put the hall light on and leaned against the door. 'It's three o'clock,' he said. 'You were shouting.'

'Oh? Really? What?'

'Couldn't hear. Got my cigarettes?'

'On the table. Don't tell mother I got them.'

He disappeared again.

I read till seven, watched the dawn through the window as if it were television, bathed, shaved, and went downstairs. Cat's crap on the strip-lit kitchen floor, musty wine-shop smells from the dining-room, objects tingled to flayed senses.

Then, bath-robed, I took coffee and orange-juice into Rachel's room. She was sleeping in a foetal bundle: white cotton nightie, kneecaps for breasts, her little brown thumb planted tritely in her mouth. Quite sweet really. I parted the curtains and massaged her awake.

'What time is it?' she asked.

'Practically eight thirty.'

When she finished her coffee, Rachel stretched and smiled at me. I said something like 'Alive again,' and moved up the narrow bed towards her.

'Is that the birds singing ?' she asked at one point.

'No, it's the radiator pipes. And while we're on the subject, have you slept with DeForest?'

'Mm?'

She had.

'Only him, or others too ?'

'Only him.'

I said: 'Never mind.'

At mid-morning the adults tooled off in Sir Herbert's tank-like Daimler to have lunch with some small-shots on the other side of Oxford. They were to spend the afternoon admiring the colleges. When they left I asked Rachel if she'd like to take a bus in, go punting perhaps. Rachel said she was happy here.

The house had no real garden: fields began after a stretch of lawn at the back and on either side the grass drifted into shrubby wastelands. But there was a spinney only yards from the front door and we went for a walk in that. I'll never forget it. The wood was unspectacular; fat oaks every couple of hundred yards, a distant rank of chestnuts lining the road to the village. Otherwise it was mostly long whitened grass, frizzled bushes, and hundreds of ropey little trees, fifteen feet high. But at every turn in the path my childhood ganged up on me, and every twig and tuft seemed informative and familiar. Drugged and amazed by exhaustion, my mind fizzed with memories and anticipations (and Wordsworth) as we stumbled along in silence, like guests.

There was a place where a hazel had keeled over between two clapped-out rhododendrons, sheltered from the wind but not from the sun. We sat. I took Rachel's hand and lay back, thinking that there was a lot to be said for going without sleep, letting the rays boil up images on my closed eyelids, toying parenthetically with the idea of telling Rachel I loved her. The setting was good. Girls never minded so long as you pressed for no reply. Enjoy the moment a moment longer.

I opened my eyes and let them swim around, declining to focus them on the curled leaves and blades of grass.

'Come and look here. There's a sort of hollow in the bush where I used to come and smoke fags when I was young.'

I stood up, walked forward, and knelt to part the foliage and branches. Rachel looked over my shoulder. Inside the tent of leaves we saw: beer bottles, a tin can, trodden newspaper, grey tissues, shrivelled condoms like dead baby jellyfish.

Rachel groaned.

'Popular spot,' I said. I let go of her hand when I straightened up. She followed me as we started back to the house.

Early evening. On the sitting-room sofa, we lay snogging, as teenagers will. Very mild stuff, on the whole. Occasionally, of course, I would go all sinewy and urgent in her arms, or halt her in mid-sentence with a (probably absurd) demonic glare. I, for one, was beginning to find it a bit unreal - but what could a poor boy do ?

So. Let me describe the way DeForest looked when he came in.

There was the noise of a car. The oldsters' return? We separated, not far. The front knocker sounded and we heard someone go to answer it. A tap on the sitting-room door preceded DeForest's entry. He gave a smile of furtive recognition and came over towards the sofa, all the time staring straight at the mantelpiece, as if tolerantly giving us time to get dressed. I remember I almost let out a shriek of terrified laughter when I noticed he was wearing plus-fours.

No one spoke.

Still staring at the mantelpiece, DeForest lowered himself on to the edge of an armchair, little feet together, hands on lap. I glanced at Rachel, as if to say, Is it all right if I hide under the sofa until he goes ? Then, DeForest put his head in his hands for perhaps five seconds, took it out again, and looked up at Rachel: mischievous but ashamed, like a schoolboy caught stealing.

'What
is
it?' Rachel asked in a frightened voice.

'Are you okay?' I joined in. 'Can I get you anything?'

A brave child can bear anything but commiseration, and DeForest's tiny square head jerked backwards suddenly and his chest trembled, searching for air. He started to cry.

Rachel moved forwards and knelt in front of him, her breasts on his thighs, her arm round his knees, her free hand stroking his face and hair.

'DeForest, DeForest, shsh, shshsh, DeForest, shshsh,' she whispered.

Incredulously I suggested out loud to myself: 'I'll go into the kitchen.'

Ten minutes later Rachel followed me. I asked how DeForest was and Rachel said he was all right now. She said she thought she had better go back to London with him. I said I wished she wouldn't do that. She said she had to.

As a juke-box turntable moves along the row of upright records before picking one out, so I prowled my mind's filing cabinets. But all I said in the end was, staring into space:

'Oh no. I know what's going to happen. You're going to walk out of here in a minute and I'll never see you again.'

Who can say how I got through the weekend? My heart really goes out to me there.

Charles listened to the car drive away and walked up the stairs like a senile heavyweight. 'Seven o'clock,' his watch told him. In the master bedroom he rifled through drawers, examining bottles of pills. Back in the sitting-room, he washed down a fistful of hypnotics with a quarter of lukewarm vodka. He complained to the mirror that this only made him feel worse.

Charles went upstairs to Rachel's room. It looked exactly as it had when he showed her into it twenty-five hours before. He searched methodically but without success for the note that would read: 'How I love you - R'. Next, he kicked one of the bed's iron legs, not quite as hard as he could, but hard enough to make him squawk with pain and surprise.

In his own room he took off the shoe. The big toenail of his right foot came away cleanly in his hand. Charles thought about this for a few seconds before resourcefully sticking it back on again with a piece of festive Sellotape.

He found his Rachel note-pad (not to be confused with the Rachel folder) and wrote some things in it. He sank down on the bed, but a minute later his head reappeared; on it was a vertiginous scowl. Now sitting, now lying, he got rid of most of his clothes. He swore every few moments, or gasped in breathless grief.

Let us leave him, then, as the scene fades: upright in the armchair, comatose; naked except for watchstrap, a single sock, and a scarlet cushion nestling on his thighs.

First thing the next morning I ran round the house telling lies about Rachel. Domestic tragedy, financial ruin, multiple bereavement, jumbo blaze horror, and so on, were responsible for her disappearance. I didn't worry about the lies being exposed. I needed self-respect only for the weekend, and after that no one would be insensitive enough (or concerned enough) to raise the subject again.

My chief preoccupation was how to get sufficiently drunk to ring Rachel. Due to a whim of my father's, the Sunday papers weren't allowed in the kitchen until the afternoon -probably he thought it more amusing and civilized to loll around the sitting-room with them. But the sitting-room was where all the drink was kept, and Willie French, because of professional interest, and Sir Herbert, because of his great age, would assuredly be in there till two.

In fact, there wasn't much problem. After a heist on the pantry, I spent the later part of the morning with half a bottle of (exquisite, it seemed to me) South African sherry. I made diagrammatic plans of the Telephone Conversation. They were fairly cocky diagrammatic plans. My behaviour of the night before now struck me as overdone. Even Rachel could not have been genuinely affected by DeForest's grotesque theatrics. She had acted out of fatigued loyalty.

Sure, kid,
I wrote, it must
have been tough for you too.

But you never knew. And I had been sure last night that I would never see her again.

I went down to the sitting-room, slunk unnoticed past the dyspeptic Sir Herbert (who was grappling with the
Sunday Telegraph
as if it were a giant sting-ray), and scooped a bottle of port off the drinks shelf. There was an old television set in the attic 'nursery', where Sebastian had been billeted, and I thought it might steady me if I watched some. Sebastian had gone into Oxford to see an X film ('any X film', he said) and to moon round looking for girls with his spotty mates. Valentine was playing football in the garden - refereeing, and captaining both sides if his querulous whines were anything to go by. I locked myself in all the same, forced down the alcoholic syrup, and worked desultorily on the Reunion Speech.

Sunday television is a mixed bag in the provinces. University Challenge: the contestants seemed to be alarmingly well-informed but, on the other hand, reassuringly hideous. A panel-game in which a cross-section of dotards and queer celebrities tasted wines and, with diminishing coherence, talked about them. A comedy show that recounted the attempts of three beautiful girls and one ugly one to pay the electricity bill and not sleep with their boyfriends.

A sports programme followed - not the Saturday afternoon kind, where alert-looking old men lean on desks keeping you up to date, but a canned, filmic report on a tennis championship currently being disputed somewhere in the southern hemisphere. I was about to turn over when a pea-headed American gravely announced that what we were about to see was the women's semi-finals.

Now I greatly revered women tennis players. When they came on to the court, smiling in trim uniforms, they seemed plain, remote persons: yet, after an hour of sweat and malice ... A couple of years back, there had been a particularly simian little number: squat torso, arms like legs, and a face as contorted and spiteful as you could possibly wish. She had obsessed me all through the Wimbledon fortnight. Not an afternoon passed without me thinking how much I'd like to corner her after an eighty-game, four-hour final (which she had lost), wrench off - or aside - her porky shorts, bear down on her in the steamed-up dressing-room or, better, much better, in some nicotine-mantled puddle, and grind myself empty to her screams.

Neither of the present sportswomen was up to that standard. In my excitement I missed the initial roll-call, and had to sit through twenty minutes of elegant variation - 'the 28-year-old Australian', 'the young Wiltshire housewife' - before I caught the ladies' names, so intent were the unctuous commentators on concealing the fact that they had bugger-all to say. However, of the two I vastly preferred the enormous Aussie. The British Wightman Cup player made the mistake of trying to appear recognizably feminine, doubtless in order to show the older woman that you don't necessarily have to look like an orang-utan to play a damn good game of tennis. The wife of the Great Bedwin dentist skipped up to the net to volley and pirouetted when she served. The Darwin-born PT instructress, on the other hand, her glossy shoulder-muscles rippling in the ninety-degree heat, threw her bulk round the court in frank virility - as she bulleted passing-shots, as she leapt four feet to punch the shit out of last year's quarter-finalist's weedy lobs. That mother of two wailed like a tragic heroine whenever she lost a point; the ex-junior champene showed emotion only when she double-faulted (with strident bellows that brought the commentary to nervous ten-second silences) before pounding back into the match. - At last I got their names: Mrs Joyce Parky and Miss Lurleen Bone. Miss Bone took Joyce apart in the second set. Joyce, quaking at the net on match-point, love-six, got a mouthful of tennis ball from Miss Bone's top-spin drive. She limped off the court in tears, without shaking hands.