After Brock (16 page)

The next morning, December 28, they met again at 11 am at the coffee bar. Ever since saying goodbye to him the day before Pete had been unable to think about much else than seeing Sam again. His gleaming tea-brown eyes were like hooks to draw him into the world of his desiring. Was this a good thing? Should he try to resist it? He also learned today that Sam's A Levels were not in standard Arts subjects like his own (History, English and Art) but in Biology, Maths and Economics. This suggested sides of his personality he had not yet manifested. Also these were disciplines in which Pete was weak, unlike the Brats, Julian and Robin Kempsey, with their flare for mental arithmetic. ‘Well, you'd better come round to tea at our house tomorrow,' Sam said, as they parted company in the High Street, Sam once again about to go off to his father's shop, ‘last Saturday of the year, and all that, the Old Man will be shutting early, taking life easy before the rush of the January sales begins properly. I'm glad to be leaving 1973 behind – though our PM can't be, 'cause he knows next year he's going to be well and truly crucified, and next year starts Tuesday!! But the old year's brought a lot of suffering my own way, Pete, and I'm fucked if I want any more of it… Know where we live?' He was rightly assuming Pete would accept the invite. ‘The Tall House, Bargates.' Pete heard pride in his enunciation.

   

The name Tall House was apt enough for this late Victorian villa. A flight of a dozen stone steps (slippery that afternoon with skeins of frost that had neither melted nor been scraped away) led you up from the pavement, past a steep little front garden dark with laurels, to the front door. Pete felt self-consciousness invade him as he rang the bell and heard its jangling chimes resound within. It was one thing speaking in a studio to a hundred thousand Britons or more, another turning up at a house which apparently looked down on your own.

Mrs Price answered the door bell. She switched a small smile onto her heavily made-up face, and tonelessly asked him in. The hall had rugs on the parquet floor and little tables bearing objects which Pete (whose vastness of general knowledge didn't extend to such things) immediately marked down as collectors' pieces; more of the same were visible through the panelled double doors to the left. Neither of his own parents came from backgrounds which passed on heirlooms, and Dad was unabashedly tight with his respectable salary, even though it was supplemented by Mum's more modest one. Had he not got three sons to bring up, and had he not to bear in mind the possibilities of a rainy day, possibly soon?

The Tall House, it was at once clear, was a household governed by very different values from Jim Kempsey's. Sam's parents had after all kept him until last term at a swank school where he'd been

‘miserable', in deliberate contrast to a local one where he might perhaps have been a deal happier. Mrs Price looked Pete up and down with her somewhat bloodshot and bulbous eyes, as if to ascertain the cost of his clothes, not an item of which had been bought at her husband's store (used by Pete only for school gear). Then in a flat, guarded, but recognisably Black Country voice she said: ‘Sam gave us notice only this morning that he had someone – you – coming round here.' She appeared to be as innocent of Pete's identity as he of hers. ‘We didn't imagine you'd want to be having much to do with Mr Price and myself when you turned up. So we thought it'd be best if Sam took you into his snug. Conchita can bring your tea in there, in due course.' Her manner couldn't remotely be described as welcoming. Pete thought her words amounted to: ‘Mr Price and myself don't want to have much to do with you, so we thought you'd best… etc.'

Her son looked even less like her than than he did her husband, though her blue-rinsed bouffant hair was a greater barrier to spotting similarities than Trevor's baldness. Her complexion was unnaturally pale, not improved by savage application of powder, while her eye shadow gave her round face a disquieting, bruised look, as if she were recuperating from a fight. As Pete was seeking gauchely to assure her that these arrangements were fine by him, Sam himself appeared from the far back of the hall. His drawl sounded more languid than ever as he stated, with one of his most irregular smiles: ‘My mother's afraid, you see Pete, the two of us will bore her and the Old Man with our demands for intelligent conversation when they're settling to their usual Saturday afternoon telly. So she's requested our latest skivvy to serve us tea in my little snug.'

All this talk about skivvies and snugs was making Pete feel well and truly awkward. And once inside the little sitting room that was Sam's snug – on the ground floor, to the back of the hall, and lit today by a couple of paraffin lamps – its owner was far less forthcoming than on their three previous meetings. Then Pete realised that his host was quite determinedly and watchfully leaving conversation-making to him, testing his powers while he himself reclined indolently on a BIBA sofa piled with cushions. There was plenty in his present surroundings to prompt remarks: an expensive-looking record deck (a Garrod?) and quadraphonic speakers (wow!), a backgammon table (well, that was a game Pete enjoyed and played well, and would condescend, when he was in a good mood, to play even with Julian) and a dartboard, plus a bookcase full of the classier Penguin and Picador titles, novels by Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, John Cowper Powys and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Also on the walls were expertly mounted posters: of Genesis, and their albums
Nursery
Cryme
and
Foxtrot
, showing Peter Gabriel in extravagant attire highlighting their anti-Tory number ‘Selling England by the Pound', of the Dead (naturally!) and Jefferson Airplane – in the last case, a blown-up picture of the cover for 1973's own
Thirty
Seconds Over Winterland
with its celebrated eye-catching squadron of flying toasters. (Flying toasters led Pete to think of flying saucers – for surely what Sam had seen in Darnton really did belong to this category?)

Also on the snug's walls hung four pictures in gilded frames, identical in overall design but strikingly different in colouring (poster-paints). Pete had never seen anything similar and was at a loss to place them in any context. In each an octagon of three-dimensional appearance was set within a diamond, which itself stood at the centre of eight triangles, but blocking their apexes. So often were Pete's eyes compelled back to this quartet of vari-ants that eventually Sam, smiling, informed him, breaking the virtual silence: ‘Jungian mandalas, to answer the question you're too shy to ask. They help me, you see.' Pete could find nothing to say back to this extraordinary statement. ‘I did these pictures, after Jung's own model, when I was still at Darnton. There was one guy there, Andrew Smithers, who was far less of a bastard than the others, and it was he who introduced me to the whole world of the mandala. It's the inner world of all of us, of all humanity. But I expect you know no more about mandalas than my revered parents, who thought these paintings on the walls exercises from a geometry book which I'd decided, like a kid, to colour in.' He gave one of his snorts of mirth-that-wasn't-mirth with which Pete was becoming familiar. 

At that moment there was a tap on the door, and after a word-less, affirmative grunt from Sam, in came a dark-haired, leathery-skinned, saggy-bodied woman in her mid thirties, dressed entirely in black and wheeling a trolley. Elegantly laid it might be but Pete, with a Home Economics teacher as a mother, saw at a glance it was all shop stuff (just as Mrs Price could assess the worth of his clothes): Warburton's sliced-bread for toast, a cheap make of strawberry jam, one Mum always avoided, a Lyons Victoria sponge cake. Only the most minimal communications were made between the son and this – servant (?), who slunk from the room without even the shadow of a smile on her face. ‘That was Conchita,' Sam informed him, ‘my parents always get a foreign woman of a certain age and practically no English to do their bidding, though they never stay long in The Tall House, and who can blame them? From time to time I wonder if Conchita is expecting me to fuck her, and whether I should oblige so she doesn't feel unwanted, but I haven't got round to it yet.'

Pete felt instant distaste at this remark; it struck a false note. Then his eyes met Sam's and he realised he was being tested again. This made him blush, and even if he hadn't then, he would have done when Sam said with a change of key, almost of register: ‘I don't think we know each other well enough to talk about passion, do we? I have this damned feeling that passion's going to be my undoing, one of these days. Not so far ahead.'

As Pete felt disinclined, indeed unable to make any reply, Sam got up from the sofa. He went over to the trolley, from which he picked up the teapot. ‘Perhaps you don't want tea?' he said, with one of his most twisted grins, ‘perhaps you'd like some apple juice? Maybe, on a cold wintry afternoon like this, some
hot
apple juice?'

‘Why ever should…?' began Pete, but Sam interrupted him:

‘Because of your great feeling for apples, natch. Because of your gargantuan encyclopaedic knowledge of 'em. How did it go now? I'm afraid my memory isn't quite of the Wellerman-Kreutz kind – The Foxwhelp, once Herefordshire's favourite but now replaced by – yeah, got it! The Redstreak.'

Pete, not unimpressed, cut into this with a young man's version of that cool voice his mother had used to put Sam back in his place after the show: ‘Tea will do me fine, thanks!'

‘Pity we can't share some shit,' continued Sam unabashed, ‘and I scarcely need to tell you that I have quite a bit in this very room. But there'd be a hell of a shindig if we were found out. And I don't want to go through that just at the moment. Ironic with Jefferson Airplane looking down so lovingly from the walls. That's the origin of their name, you know – Jefferson Airplane means a scrap of used paper split so it can hold a joint when it's been smoked too short, like ours was the other night. Stops your fingers getting burned.'

‘Yes, I know,' said Pete, ‘I guess I've read exactly the same articles as you.' Why was it better to be here with Sam than in some tea shop with Melanie, so unceasingly kind, so sensitive to his many moods? Why was he preferable even to the Brats, to be nicer to whom (after what Julian had so feelingly said) would be his 1974 New Year Resolution? Did he even
like
Sam? He was far from sure that he did. But that wasn't the point. This afternoon he felt more intensely held by him (and with no dope for excuse) than ever before: by the constant if shade-shifting dark brilliance of his eyes, by the asymmetry of his grins which appeared and disappeared like the Cheshire Cat's, by the powerful aroma of his patchouli, by the whole aura emanating from his fashionably clad, supple body.

‘Well, it can't be
apples
again, your special subject on Jan 31, can it?'

‘Obviously not!'

‘So what are you going to choose? Got round to giving it any proper thought?'

The fucking cheek of him, thought Pete; whatever does he think I've been doing? But, truth to tell, (not that he
would
tell it to Sam Price in his present haughty mood), nothing he had come up with so far – breeds of dogs; giants from Goliath onwards; earthquakes (further localism this, for one of Britain's major geological fault lines runs through the Welsh Marches); currencies of the world; kites (surely the most original and pleasure-giving of the topics so far) – had seemed satisfactory.

‘I'm still working on it.'

‘You're not chickening out of our little scheme, I hope?' asked Sam, now back on the BIBA sofa and sinking himself deep into its cushions while balancing his tea cup deftly, ‘let me remind you that you yourself said my idea was “watertight”.'

‘I'm sure it is,' said Pete. Didn't Sam realise that he was worried about other things than its efficacy, not least its eventual discovery? ‘I've sent the letter to Bob Thurlow as we agreed – so let's wait till the letter arrives. Here at The Tall House,' he added.

‘No, I don't agree,' said Sam in his drawl, ‘I've got to have – let's call it a return on my investment, haven't I? It was me who came up with the scheme?' And he waited for Pete's agreement, which, after a second's pause for surprise at Sam's attitude, he made, with a nod and a low, soft, slightly reluctant grunt. ‘Well, then, I expect you to do your bit. You've got to be Highest Flyer by leaps and bounds, or else I shall feel cheated.'

‘Cheated?' He had not once thought that his acceptance of Sam's proposal – made after they'd barely passed their shared joint three times one to another – had bound him to Sam, psychologically, morally if you liked.

‘Cheated because I need stimulus if I'm to survive at all. The world around me – whether it's stuffy old Darnton or this snug,' and he waved a hand disparagingly round his comfortable, expensively fitted quarters, ‘just isn't enough. I'm a superior soul. I know it; I guess I've always known it. And superior souls can't be expected to find much to interest them in inter-house cricket matches at school or small-town chitchat. That's why the idea of you as High (or Highest) Flyer was such a draw for me, and why I was so pleased when Fate – so to speak – brought us together.'

Pete didn't like hearing any of this much (if at all); on the other hand he was fascinated by Sam's frankness, and also (not without a prickle of guilt) recognised his own sentiments.

‘You don't know many other guys, I'll warrant, who have seen a Visitant like I have. Like I told you about outside your house. Always remember that, Pete, it means I'm in touch with things in a way Mr Average simply isn't. There's only one person I can think of who may have the same affinities as me…'

‘That bloke who works for your dad?'

Sam didn't look pleased at this interjection.
He
did the interjecting in any conversation.