Getting It Right (24 page)

The door to the room on the first floor was half-open and, motioning him to stay put, she went in.

‘Good Lord! You’ve had it off at last! I must say it looks considerably better. Who did it for you?’

‘A man called Gavin. He’s marvellous.’

‘I’m sure he is. Just so long as you don’t drag him back here.’

‘I did: that’s exactly what I did.’

‘Oh no! You are the limit: you know I’ve got a dinner party.’

In a slightly, but not much, lower tone she asked: ‘Where is he?’

‘Here. On the landing. He can hear every single word you’re saying.’

There was the shortest possible silence and then Sheila stood in the doorway before him, saying: ‘Sorry about that. My little sister up to her tricks again. I’m afraid we shall just
have to pretend it never happened.’ She was a tall, blonde woman, and while she spoke her eyes ran over him in an appraising and somehow offensively indifferent manner. Gavin felt that she
did not think much of him and he began to feel responsible for not being someone she could think more of. She wore a navy silk dress with a frilly white collar and pearls and her gold hair was
pleated neatly up the back of her head. She was not in the least like Minnie.

‘I told her to be out tonight, you see. My husband asked some rather important people’ – she turned to Minerva – ‘the kind of people who would bore you anyway
– as you well know.’

‘Gavin and I are going out to dinner, thanks. We just dropped in for a drink.’

‘Oh well.’ Sheila seemed relieved. She looked at her watch. ‘Well, you’d better go down and get some ice and some glasses. If you want a drink, that is.’

‘Yup.’ Minnie ran off.

‘Come in, Mr . . .’

‘Lamb.’

‘Lamb.’

The sitting room was all done up in biscuit and white with hessian walls and bowls of white lilac.

‘Do sit down, Mr Lamb.’ She said it as though it was the most she could say. Gavin decided to stand, and then thought he couldn’t stand all through a drink, so he sat down.
Sheila walked over to a shelf where there seemed to be a lot of bottles.

‘I’m sure you realize that my sister is a bit mad. My half-sister. Don’t believe a single word she says. I only put up with her because my father has asked me to. She’s
in London to see a psychiatrist. So, for goodness’ sake, don’t get involved with her. Nobody will help you if you do. Right?’

Gavin thought: I don’t
like
her. I wonder what she means by mad? Poor Minnie – she probably can’t help whatever it is: I don’t want to be involved with her. Then
he thought that probably Minnie was the kind of person whom nobody wanted to be involved with and that perhaps this meant that he ought to be the exception. Then he thought: Responsibility again!
And then she said:

‘You’re very silent. Where do you come in? By the way, don’t think for one moment that she’s an heiress, or anything like that: she hasn’t got a bean except the
allowance her father gives her.’

Gavin said: ‘I met her at a party. She came into the place today where I work and asked me to cut her hair. That’s all.’ He was acutely aware of his voice as he said this;
knowing that she would think he was common, and feeling he wasn’t, and
minding
her thinking that, and then hating himself for minding what someone whom he didn’t like
thought.

Sheila returned from the bottle shelf with a bowl of peanuts which she now offered him. Gavin, who didn’t want them, but would ordinarily have taken one out of weakness/courtesy, refused
– the largest gesture of disaffection that seemed to him available. There wasn’t a single decent picture in the room.

‘Well – I’m sure you understand that, as her family, we get a bit steamed up about her. No offence and all that, but she does get involved with some pretty queer types.’
She looked quickly at Gavin again – to see whether he was
queer
, he realized, but was unable to determine her conclusions on that front. She was one of the most insensitive people
he’d ever met, he thought, with a small flush of experience.

‘She asked me to come back here to show me something.’ The moment he’d said that, he felt disloyal – to Minnie.

‘Have you the remotest idea what?’

He shook his head; really it had been a stupid thing to say.

‘Her room’s always in a ghastly state. I’ve given up trying to have it cleaned. Patrick my husband’s read the Riot Act several times now, but that only lasts about two
days. She’s
adolescent
.’ She made it sound like a nasty disease. ‘However, we’ve put her in the basement this time. Nobody goes down there, so it doesn’t
matter so much.’ Gavin suddenly thought of Mrs Elton’s offer of a piano to play on to Jane Fairfax – vulgarity went arm in arm with insensitivity, ha ha. In a way, he was almost
enjoying how much he disliked her.

‘Well – don’t get any ideas about me,’ he said. ‘I’m just a casual friend – acquaintance more.’

Then Minnie returned with a tray on which there were glasses and a bowl of ice.

‘Couldn’t get the ice out,’ she said. She had taken off the golf jacket and tripped across the room to the bottle shelf on little spidery, shining legs. The stretch pants were
bottle green.

‘Shall I pour?’

Sheila, who had been standing by one of the long windows, moved swiftly to the drinks. ‘I’ll do it.’

‘Gin and tonic suit you?’ she demanded a moment later.

‘Thanks.’ Minnie had joined him on the white sofa, but Sheila wasn’t having that, either. ‘Here’s your friend’s drink.’ So she had to get up and fetch
it. As she handed the glass to Gavin, she made her funny hideous face and used the two fingers of her left hand to screw her sister: he noticed again her bitten nails. He also wondered what on
earth they would talk about when they’d all got their drinks. He need not have worried about that, however, because the telephone rang, and Sheila, motioning to her sister not to answer it,
settled herself in a large white leather swivel chair before she picked up the receiver. There ensued one of those one-sided conversations as interminable as they are mysterious; it was impossible
not to listen and impossible to discover what was actually being talked about . . . ‘Did you?’ Sheila was saying. ‘That must have made the whole situation much trickier . . . Oh
no, my dear, I don’t think anyone in their senses would think that!’ And so on.

After a bit, Gavin suggested – he thought, very quietly – to Minnie that she might get on with showing him whatever it was she wanted to show him, but Sheila made large negative
gestures with her left hand. ‘Do you mind? I really can’t hear – ’ and then to the receiver, ‘Sorry, darling: some people were talking and I didn’t hear all of
that. You got there half an hour late and
what
?’ She waited a moment and then said, ‘But he must have realized! I mean, even Lionel isn’t actually as tactless as
that!’

Minnie picked the ice out of her glass and put it in her mouth. Gavin heard her crunching it up. Then she reached for the bowl of peanuts, perched it between her silken knees and started eating
them one at a time very fast. Sheila, who did a lot of the talking considering she wasn’t the person telling the story, said: ‘Of course you couldn’t. Nobody could after that!
What on earth did they
think
you were made of, for Pete’s sake?’

Gavin suddenly decided he’d had enough. He put down his half-finished drink and got to his feet. Minnie looked up at him, crammed the rest of the peanuts into her mouth with both hands,
and followed him out of the room.

Half-way downstairs, he said: ‘Look – I’ve got to get back now.’

‘You haven’t seen them! You promised!’

Afraid that she would start wailing, he said: ‘Well, just five minutes then. What are they, anyway?’

She led the way to the door leading down to the basement and said: ‘Something very important. Something I want your advice about.’

The basement seemed very dark. ‘The passage light bulbs have gone,’ she said; she was ahead of him – opening a door.

Her room was quite large and looked out on to an area. The windows were barred; there was an unmade bed in one corner and clothes nearly all over the floor. Her parrot sat on a bar in his cage
by the window. He started making surreptitious movements as soon as they came in.

‘Isn’t she
foul
?’

‘I didn’t take to her.’

‘And my father thinks she’s marvellous . . . Sit down, Gavin, I want you to sit here.’ And she pulled what might have been a kimono or some sort of Japanese curtain off a
chair, which turned out to be a kitchen one with a wobbly leg. As he sat, he noticed a glass case on the wall with bells inside and black and gold lettering saying dining room, morning room –
the kind of thing you saw in TV plays about Victorian life. The walls themselves were painted yellowish green and looked dirty.

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘she took the light bulbs out in the passage, because she said I left them on.’ She was kneeling on the floor in a particularly dark corner of the
room burrowing in some kind of trunk . . . From this she dragged out an immensely large portfolio: She’s going to show me pictures of herself modelling, he thought, then she’ll ask me
if I think she’s attractive. He thought of the casual offer of a friendly little screw and began to feel uncomfortable. This feeling was not soothed by Minnie suddenly dropping the portfolio
and darting across the room to turn the key in the lock.

‘She never comes down. But I suppose, since she knows you’re here, she might.’ Then she went back to her task of undoing the black tapes.

‘Shut your eyes while I put one on the floor to show you.’

He shut his eyes. She keeps
making
me do things, he thought. I’ve got to put a stop to it.

‘You can look now.’

He opened his eyes and looked. It was not a photograph at all – it was a very large oil painting which, in turn, was divided up into twelve small paintings, four across and three deep.
They were divided from one another by thick black lines and were largely painted in crude primary colours. It was hard to say what they were about. At first, he had simply an impression of chaos;
then he saw that an attempt had been made to depict things – a wood, a field with a birthday cake in it; some birds flying into a sunset or bonfire, the head of a girl with huge, dark Coptic
eyes (he guessed that was a self-portrait), the sea (or a lake?) with an island and a tiny little pin figure upon it; then he began to see the pin figure everywhere, even on the ones that she had
messed up so much that they just seemed to be a tangle of paint – someone, for instance, seemed to be stamping upon the birthday cake. She could not draw at all, and she had no idea of what
could be done with paint – she had used white a bit to soften some of the primaries but she had not tried at all to make any other colours. The whole thing was like an older child’s
picture, but on a much larger and more intricate scale than most children had the patience to do. He looked at it for what seemed to him quite a long time – trying to make it out –
trying to think what to say about it. Eventually, he turned to her. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor staring at the paintings with an expression of rapt complacency. When she caught him
looking at her she said: ‘Isn’t it amazing? All done by me.’

‘What else have you done?’

‘What else? Why should I have done anything else? I just did this! I wanted you to see it, to tell me if it’s worth my doing more.’

He thought for a moment, and then said, ‘Do you
want
to do any more?’

‘If it’s worth my while.’

‘You’re the only person who can tell that.’

‘No – no.
You
can! I mean – would you go to an exhibition to see it? Would you buy it – if you had enough money of course – I don’t suppose you have.
But I mean, if you had, would you? It would be framed, of course,’ she added.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t. If that’s what you want to know.’

‘Why not?’

‘It just isn’t my kind of picture.’

‘Is it anyone’s kind of picture?’

‘That’s what I meant,’ he said. ‘Is it your kind of picture? The kind you like, I mean?’

‘I’m not interested in pictures.’

‘Well, there you have it.’

‘I didn’t paint it for me. I painted it for other people. To show them. I told you, I don’t want to do anything unless I’m terrifically good at it.’

‘I don’t think painting is a thing that you start terrifically good at. It’s pretty hard work . . .’

‘Well – you know – does it show promise? If I went on at it, that is.’

‘I’m not the person to ask.’

‘You mean, it doesn’t. Why can’t you say what you mean?’

‘One of the ways to find out whether you are any good, is to go on doing it, I suppose.’ Then he thought of all the painters who’d gone on doing it all their lives without ever
finding that out. Still, they must have wanted to. If a thing was worth doing, it was worth doing badly, as he’d read somewhere. He really must be going.

‘Well – it’s quite clear that you don’t think I’m going to be a famous painter.’ She was trying to be sarcastic, but just sounded sulky.

‘I shouldn’t think so. But why don’t you go and get some lessons? Probably the people who teach you could tell you more about it than I could.’

‘I’m never going to any sort of school in my life again. Ever.’

‘That’s that, then. Look, I really have to go now.’

‘Aren’t we having dinner together? You said— ’

‘No –
you
said that. To your sister.’

‘She’s turning me out. She doesn’t want me at her beastly dinner party.’

‘Well – you don’t want to go, do you?’

‘It’s pretty awful not being allowed even to do things you don’t want to do.’

‘It can’t be as bad as not being allowed to do things you
do
want to do.’

‘What I
do
want to do, is have dinner with you.’ She got up off the floor and came towards him giving the picture a vicious little kick as she passed it . . .

‘We could go to Marine Ices. Not even have dinner. Just coffee and masses of ice cream.’

‘Look, I can’t do any of that, because I’ve got other arrangements.’ He reached the door and unlocked it before she could stop him.