The Rachel Papers (24 page)

My one unfallen week.

'I could get my father to ring.'

'Would he?'

'Of course. He'd dive over backwards to do anything like that. He may not worship me but he worships youth. Make him feel sexy and young.'

'Mm. But still.'

'Mm, I suppose your mother would reason that he wouldn't be there to prise us apart. And Norman's hardly ... I suppose they think you want to go because of your father.'

'Eh?'

'Paris. Your father.'

'Yes, I suppose they do.'

'I've got it. Say you don't want to go for just that reason. Painful memories, such a shit, only upset you. All that.'

But Rachel was taking on that look of modest distress customary whenever her father was under discussion.

'Or wouldn't that work? Look, come on, I'll just tell them that you'd rather stay with me. We're living in the 1970s, for Christ's sake. Don't they realize that parents aren't allowed to mind about all that any more?'

Although my tone was rousing enough, I was fairly relieved when Rachel shook her head. You never know, I might have been able to handle it. During my second dinner there I had acquitted myself well, merely by seeming as dull and ugly as possible. Because if there's one thing girls' parents don't want to see in you it's whatever it is their daughters see in you. All my demeanour had had to say, in effect, was: Look folks - no cock! They didn't like me, true, but Harry was far too keen on seeing his name in print on my father's law page, and anyway, for Christ's sake, what did they think when they looked at Archie, who went from catatonia to manic garrulity just as the mood took him, and why -

'There's always Nanny.'

'How do you mean, there's always Nanny,' I asked cautiously. She might have been setting up another visit. I had got out of it twice already.

'I could pretend I was staying with her. She'd back me up.'

'In that one room ?'

'I used to stay with her when she had a flat in Bloomsbury. And Mummy's never been to Fulham.'

I wondered how Mummy made it to Putney and Roehamp-ton to see her trendy friends, if not via Fulham.

'Really?
Then it might just work.'

We planned it all out. Afterwards, I said :

Think what a lovely time we'll have.'

But, even then, as Memo-pad 3A quite clearly states, part of me wasn't thinking that. Part of me was thinking how well I'd do in my exams with Rachel in France (automatic Fellowship? telegram from the PM?) and what florid letters I could write to her there.

Must have spent too much time alone. For I needed my secret bathroom hours, and I certainly didn't want Rachel to view me pinned and wriggling on its soiled lino. How could I explain my 200-minute baths, my marathon craps? Why, some of my most peaceful afternoons had been spent slumped on the lavatory, fat tears flopping occasionally on to my thighs. (Only there was I possessed by a truly radical vision of life; only there did I really
feel,
in my heart, that, somehow, we were all guilty.) With Rachel there I would no longer be able to go to sleep on a pillow of tissues, or bark into the special coffee-cup beneath my bed, or ever cough the night away, my throat applauding the silent dawn. Ah, those fourteen-hour reads, the vegetable delirium, the drug of exhaustion, the repose of loneliness. And exams in two weeks.

After briefly wanking myself off on top of her (a layer of lav paper tucked down my strides) and after a neat coke with her parents, I left Rachel's early that evening. She said that I had better stay out of sight for a while if she was going to work the Nanny ploy. I was to ask Jenny and Norman if it was all right by them.

And I would have done, too, only they were having a row when I got back.

I was drinking tea in the kitchen. My sister, a swirl of red-checked nightie, flew through the doorway.

'Hi,' I said.

Knocking back tears, splendid with indignation and rectitude, she went to the chest-of-drawers in the breakfast-room and hauled out the folder in which all her documents and certificates were kept. Jenny found what she was looking for. As she turned, Norman entered, a sceptical businessman come to see an appliance he knew wouldn't work and didn't want anyway.

'Hi,' I said.

She ran over to him, seeming very small, and waggled the bit of paper in front of Norman's nose.

'Look.
Look.
It's true. Can't you
see?
You great... huge
yob
, it's
true.'

As if on a cinema screen, I watched Norman lean forward, remove the piece of paper, curl it up in his fist, and drop it to the floor. Jenny stared at the crumpled ball for a few seconds in what looked like incredulous grief. Then, in a sudden movement, her palm had come to a deafening halt on Norman's cheek. Oh no, I thought; now he's really going to knock her block off. Jenny froze, hand resting flat on Norman's whitened face. He waited for her to take it away.

'Go to bed, Jennifer.'

After her rapid footfalls came the fading cry, 'You're a
murd
ere-e-e-er.'

Norman picked up the ball of paper with a sigh, put his hands in his pockets, and sank back against the wall.

I wondered if he knew I was there.

'Have a game of brag,' he said.

I was, of course, much too scared to refuse.

Two down, one up,' he continued monotonously, 'table stakes, black twos wild.'

Your guess would have been as good as mine. However, the teenager's ignorance about such oldster issues encourages an insensitivity to them - and I was resolved, despite my ambivalence, to ask about Rachel that night, to get things fixed up, before some anxiety could put its foot down.

After an hour of brag, I said: 'Hang on. Just going to have a quick crap. Be a sec. Don't fix the cards.'

Upstairs, I knocked on the bedroom door. 'Jenny?'

'I'm here.'

In the sitting-room, aglow as usual with moody street-light, Jenny had turned one of the armchairs round to face the window. I went and crouched by her side. In a soft voice I told my sister about the possibility of Rachel coming to stay for a while. She looked straight ahead, down the square.

'That's okay,' she said.

'I don't think it'll be much extra trouble. She'd help with things.'

'No, that's fine.'

'And you do get on quite well.'

'Mm.'

'And I thought you might actually like having her around, to talk to. Another girl - you know how I'm always going on about girls needing other girls to talk about perms and babies and things. Because you seem a bit low.'

'Have you told him yet?'

'Norman? No.'

'Don't, please, not yet. Tell him before she comes, but not yet.'

'Okay. Why, though?'

'Oh I don't know, but please don't tell him yet.'

I laid my hand on her wrist. I laid my hand on her wrist as a collector might touch a piece of marble to see that it was the required number of degrees below room temperature.

'All right,' I said.

'Fine. She can stay as long as she wants.'

'937 2814? ... Oh God.' I hung up and redialled. 'Hello ? Now look here, this has —' I hung up and redialled.

Engaged.

I hung up.

The Letter to My Father, onetime the Speech to My Father, was now some thirty foolscap pages. It lay on my desk downstairs, in a manilla envelope, stamped and addressed. Last-minute corrections and revisions kept me from posting it.

I saw Rachel only twice in the six days before she was due to come and stay. Just as well, really: there were still some texts I had to read for the exams, and a good deal of clerking was necessary to keep The Rachel Papers up to date, what with all these new emotions to be catalogued and filed away. First Love, you understand.

I have very little new to say on this subject. And yet, if I may quote from The Rachel Papers? 'As though normal life (Jen + Norm, school) taking place on a parallel dimension in which I can participate or not participate as the whim takes me. Want R. to witness and experience everything I do, looking over my shoulder, want to be permanently in her presence (not the same as with her); but there she always is.'

And I partly realized this by acting as though she were. If she really had been watching me those two weeks I would have had nothing to hide. I felt myself alone only when I closed the bathroom door behind me. I was still at the stage when you feel you are carrying round a barrel of poignancy in your diaphragm; when you feel you could cry at the drop of a hat; when any bugger could show you fear in a handful of dust. But all this is well documented elsewhere.

Lots of whisky and brag on Tuesday night, the eve of Rachel's stay. And I still hadn't told Norman she was coming.

About eight o'clock, accompanied for some reason by his younger brother Tom, Geoffrey floated in. They were hailed with drunken bonhomie by Norman, who immediately convened a seminar on three-card brag.

I was delighted to see Geoffrey, sure that he had long got tired of my disquieting presence and shifty ways. But I was less pleased to see Tom, Geoffrey's analogue of my own Sebastian : sixteen, wealthy in pustules, randy-dog smells, sebum-moist hairline, and other adolescentiana. I looked at him, yawning cluelessly as Norman explained about priles and ack-a-boos.

'How're you, Tom?' I asked.

'I'm cool.'

'Sure, kid.'

Tom (apprentice hippie, second class) fidgeted with the ludicrous bundle of scarves, bandanas and lockets swathed about his boily neck to indicate the sympathetic nature of his views on sex, drugs, Cuba, the fact that he was a hippie, despite the contrary evidence of his as yet short hair and unfaded jeans, his conventional though tolerably sweat-stained shirt.

But Tom wasn't paying attention.
'Look,'
said Norman, 'if you get a black two it's ...
Far
kin hell.'

Tom looked at his elder brother. 'I can't make this,' he complained.

Norman was drunk enough to be manageable, yet he was also old enough to be wary of and hostile to undiluted youth, inclined to think that there was something inherently scurrilous about it and to feel wet and queer in its company. I became diplomatic, flashing partisan looks at each of them: these-fucking-beatniks for Norman, these-fucking-greymen for Tom, and something rather more natural for Geoffrey. I went up and leaned on Norman's shoulder and helped him clarify the rules, winking at the other two. I shoved round the whisky bottle. Within minutes, Geoffrey started to make an effort, Tom was saying 'yeah' and 'I dig', and Norman was interspersing the lesson with dirty jokes. Then I slipped away.

'Of course, it's your birthday tomorrow. Quite appropriate. How does it feel, about to be twenty?'

'No different to being eighteen or nineteen.'

'But you won't be a teenager any more.'

'So? That doesn't matter.'

'Don't you think ? I'm sure it'll make a tremendous difference to me.'

'Why?'

'Beginning of the end. No. Beginning of responsibility. Have to start taking yourself seriously.'

'Well, I don't mind.'

'Christ. I haven't got you anything yet. D'you mind?'

'Of course I don't mind.'

'Is everything okay with your mother?'

'Think so.'

'Well then, I'll see you tomorrow. About six?'

'Okay. I love you.'

'And I love you.'

Norman was sitting alone when I returned to the breakfast-room. I asked where the others were. Tom was being sick in the upstairs bathroom. Geoffrey, in bold contrast, was being sick in the downstairs bathroom.

'What for?' I asked.

The whisky,' said Norman with a judicious air. That little sod was bolting it down.'

'Couldn't be only that. Must be sleeping-pills, too.'

Norman shrugged. 'You haven't half got poncy mates. You going to see if they're all right?'

'No. Fuck them. Can't be bothered. They'll be okay, won't they?'

'Yur. Your deal.'

We played in silence. I let Norman win three hands running, then said: 'Rachel's probably coming to stay tomorrow. Her parents are going to ... Cornwall for a couple of weeks.'

'Yeah ? Why's she not going ?'

'She doesn't want to. I don't want her to.'

'Bloody mad.' Norman poured out more whisky. 'Who was that tart you had round here before?'

'Gloria?'

'Yeah. Tell you what, she's got a right pair on her.'

'Yeah, but she's just a bunk-up. Feel different about Rachel. First love and all that.'

Norman raised his non-existent eyebrows. 'Oh, fuck off,' he said.

Then there was the sound of light footsteps. Jenny's head appeared through the sliding doors.