Getting It Right (28 page)

Mr Lamb made the first attempt and, eyeing his expressionless face as he slowly shifted the food from one side of his face to the other, Gavin knew that the situation was pretty bad, but even
then, he was unprepared for exactly how terrible the stuff was going to taste until his own first cautious forkful. Then he knew that nothing – no amount of concern for his mother’s
feelings, no stringent desire for a quiet life, no strength of aversion to family scenes – was going to coerce him into swallowing this lot.

‘I’m sorry, Mum. I can’t take this.’

‘You can’t –
what
?’

‘This food. It doesn’t taste very nice.’

‘A lot of Mexicans would be ever so grateful for it.’

‘Well, I’m not Mexican. It tastes queer to me.’

‘Chicken’s off?’ suggested Mr Lamb with uncharacteristic brilliance. Mrs Lamb had a horror of things going off. It was also recognized as the one way out. If you ate off food,
you could drop dead, according to Mrs Lamb.

‘Could be,’ Gavin took this up at once. ‘Now you come to mention it, I expect that’s what it is. It does taste distinctly queer. Try it, Mum.’

‘I had my tea over an hour ago, thank you. In any case if it’s off I have no more wish to be poisoned than I have the wish to poison you. Either of you,’ she added. She had put
aside her crochet and was now poking vigorously at the casserole which still contained a frightening quantity of stew. ‘It smells perfectly all right to me. Foreign, of course, but
that’s only to be expected. I’ll give that butcher a piece of my mind tomorrow. You’ll have to make do with beans on toast.’

She had given way with surprising ease, Gavin thought. Then he wondered whether this was because he had said outright what he felt about the food, instead of trying to find ways of getting out
of eating it. As soon as Mrs Lamb was in the kitchen heating the beans and making toast, Mr Lamb rolled his eyes at Gavin and flapped his hand in front of his face, indicating a narrow escape.

‘Although, I expect you’ve been eating all kinds of foreign stuff in your opera dinner place. Upset yourself as likely as not . . . And dear knows when you got to bed?’ This
last turned into a kind of ambushing question. He felt himself going red. ‘Late, Mum. Too late, I know . . .’

‘You’re only young once.’ Mr Lamb was always in danger of pouring oil on to banked-up fires. She turned on him.

‘Gavin’s not all that young. Old enough to know better. Better to be safe than sorry. He knows an ill wind blows nobody any good. If he doesn’t, he ought to,’ she ended
rather breathlessly, dumping the baked beans on the table. ‘All I can say is I hope you’re not going to make a habit of it.’

‘Of what?’ The back of his neck prickled, as it occurred to him that she somehow
knew
what he had been up to.

‘Staying out all night without a word.’ It was general scolding: she didn’t really know – how could she?

‘Don’t you want to go through the holiday brochures?’

‘I’m upset. If I read when I’m upset, I get a migraine.’

‘I’ll read them to you, Mum.’ The moment he said that, he wished that he hadn’t: he wanted time to himself, and offering to discuss her holiday with her was no way to get
it . . . He was really only cravenly levering himself back into her good books. This, he discovered, had to be done the hard way. When the baked beans were finished, and she had made tea for his
father and coffee for himself and they were settled at the otherwise empty table with the brochures in front of him, she started in again.

‘You look tired, Gavin.’

‘I’m not tired.’

‘You look as though you’ve been up all night.’

‘Well, I haven’t.’

‘You don’t look as though you want to do a whole lot of reading.’

‘I feel fine.’

Reassured by this small pack of lies, she sat down, pulling her chair round so that she was close beside him and he could hear her breathing.

‘Start with the top one,’ she said, which meant, he knew, that she expected to go through the whole lot.

‘Every amenity – miles of unspoilt beaches in the Mediterranean sun,’ he began, and as he did so remembered that last year he’d had a terrible cold when he was reading to
her, and that she’d caught it.

Mrs Lamb’s holiday plans were a prolonged and complex affair. Roughly speaking, they entailed her announcing that this year she had it in mind to go abroad for her holiday (the subject
nearly always came up on Sunday lunches with Marge), and every year Mr Lamb telling her she didn’t want to do that (his opinion of abroad was a. that it was a dangerous place to go –
he’d served in Normandy and Belgium at the end of the war – and b. that it wasn’t a respectable place for a family holiday – his pre-marital sex had taken place there and so
far as Gavin could make out still filled him with a kind of gloomy underhand triumph). His views, however, only hardened Mrs Lamb’s resolution and her senses of justice and adventure.
He
had been there, so why shouldn’t she? Also, the magazines that she read were full of stories about foreign holidays; advice to people having them and advertisements telling her
how cheap and easy they were. But she also collected information of a more anxious kind: she had, for instance, ruled out the whole of Spain last year because there had been some incident of food
poisoning in an hotel on the Costa Brava, and France had been knocked out because of a forest fire near Ste Maxime. She did not wish to go to Italy because of the danger of being kidnapped. But
these embargoes did not prevent her wanting Gavin to read about the no-go areas: ‘We might as well hear what they have to say for themselves.’

Mr Lamb, who from long practice had found it wiser to dissociate himself from his wife’s early ruminations, said he was going to pop over to Friern Barnet to see a lady about a job. His
departure caused a halt in the reading, and after it Mrs Lamb reverted to personal matters that very quickly boiled down to her intense curiosity about Minnie. ‘Lady Minerva likes the opera
then, does she?’ was her opening shot. Gavin said he didn’t know. As he said this, he realized that Minnie simply hadn’t even crossed his mind since he’d parted from her in
Chalk Farm. This made him feel guilty, and his mother misinterpreted the guilt.

‘No need for you to be shy about her with me. You know what I thought about her. I thought she was a thoroughly nice girl. Just like anybody else.’ This last Gavin privately thought
was one of the things that she wasn’t.

‘I didn’t go to the opera with her.’

‘I’ve no wish to pry,’ she answered stiffly. ‘How can I know anything about your friends? You never tell me.’

‘I’ve told you about the people at work.’

‘That’s not what I mean at all. Work!’ she said witheringly. ‘They sound a funny lot to me. You could have been a teacher!’

‘Oh, Mum – don’t let’s go into that.’ He could see that she was working herself up, and a fresh wave of tiredness assailed him. He yawned – covertly –
and then decided to make a performance of it and yawned again – this time with sound effects. She pretended not to notice, but it deflected her. ‘Marge said that Portugal was nice. Read
me something about there.’

So he read about the Algarve with its miles of beaches (they always went on about beaches), its magnificent seafood, its superb hotels with swimming pools and buffet luncheons, its quaint old
villages, its friendly simple peasants, its night life, wines, pottery and proximity to an airport . . .

After a bit, she said: ‘They sound much the same to me. What’s so special about Portugal? It’s just that Ken likes to go to a different country every year. “You’ll
run out soon,” I told Marge. Course, I suppose the languages are different. There’s bound to be a difference somewhere. I should really like to go to the Caribbean on one of those
islands with palm trees.
They
look different, but of course they’re much dearer – I’m not sure Fred would stand for one of
them
. But at least on an island
you’d know where you
were
.’

Gavin said that he hadn’t got any brochures on the West Indies and how about Norway? But he must have said it in the wrong tone of voice, because she retorted:

‘Gavin, you look tired to death. Whatever you may say, I know when you’ve been overdoing it and we all know what happens then.’

He was able to escape. Before he went upstairs, and when they were both standing by the table, he gave her a hug, stooping a little – she only came up to his shoulder. A flush, starting at
the bottom of her neck, spread upwards rapidly. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.

But, alone at last, he did not know what to do with the privacy: wandered round his room – pulled out a record with the last duet of
Traviata
on it, remembered her sitting in the
box, absorbed, with her face resting on one hand, and felt no need to play the music, and then heard her laugh and her husky voice when she said: ‘Oh, Gavin! What do you mean
“anyhow”?’ and then – slowly – relived her stripping herself down to her own self until he was hard with lust, painfully imprisoned by his clothes. Which he had no
sooner got rid of when there was a knock on the door.

‘Gavin?’

‘Yes, Mum – what is it?’

‘Are you asleep?’

He seized his dressing gown. ‘No, Mum.’

She came into the room. ‘I didn’t want to wake you up.’ She was carrying the painted cat tray upon which was a steaming mug of Horlicks and a plate with custard creams.

‘This is to settle your stomach,’ she said.

Feeling guilty, irritated, and slightly ridiculous, he walked away from her towards the window. ‘You needn’t have bothered.’

‘I know that. I also know what happens if I
don’t
bother. You remember that time when you were doing your A-levels? When Marge couldn’t go for that job in London
because she got glandular fever? That time that Fred had all that trouble with the dry rot up on Hadley Common? When there was that nasty murder, too, on the Green?’

He said he did remember – it was true about the A-levels anyway, and he hadn’t got his mother’s multi-storey memory.

‘You couldn’t keep anything down then. You got overtired overworking and then you couldn’t digest your food properly. You were living on Horlicks then . . . I’m not
having that again. I’ll put it by your bed and you can have it nice and cosy.

‘That was a terrible summer,’ she added, as she prepared to go. ‘I shan’t forget
that
in a hurry.’

‘Thanks, Mum,’ he tried not to sound surly, but that was how it came out. When she had shut the door, and after he had listened to her going down the stairs, he kicked his trousers
round the room as viciously as he could, but as they neither whimpered, nor fell into a thousand pieces, they were hardly a worthy target. ‘She thinks she can come into my room
any
time she likes –
any
time – she doesn’t even let me be private in my own room! For God’s sake!’ He went on in this vein for quite a bit, until he suddenly
stopped wanting to, and collapsed on his red sofa, just as he had begun telling himself that, after all, he
chose
to live at home, had, in fact, begun to tell himself all the things other
people might say . . . If he wanted freedom and privacy, he had only to go out and get them. The thought terrified him. Finding somewhere, getting all his stuff moved, getting kitchen stuff, and
then just
being
there every evening after work; even Harry didn’t have to do that – he had Winthrop. The particular and irremediable disadvantages of living with Winthrop only
made him feel that this meant that everybody else would probably turn out to possess a different set. Like always being there when he wanted to be by himself; or
never
being there when he
wanted them. He got into bed and decided that he might as well drink the Horlicks.

In bed, he wondered what Joan would actually be doing now. At a party probably, on some floodlit yacht that Dmitri had been decorating, dressed up in her wig and her spectacles so that nobody
would know who she really was . . . This started him wondering about Dmitri, and he decided immediately that, whatever Dmitri was like, he wouldn’t like him. How on earth could he be married
to someone like Joan and keep on going away and leaving her alone? How dared he, in fact, collect and accept her love without returning it? He could not answer this question – nor did he very
much want to. He had eaten the custard creams without realizing it, just because they were there, and all he wanted now was to put out the light, lie in the dark and go through all the amazing
things that had happened to him with Joan. He put out the light and lay down, but he had hardly reached the first moments when she had stood in the kitchen saying, ‘Oh, Gavin! What do you
mean . . . ?’ when he fell suddenly and deeply asleep . . .

In the morning, he woke, wanting her, feeling, he thought, as though perhaps he was in love with her. How did one know that sort of thing? He thought that it was unlikely to be
a state that the recipient was in doubt about: unless, of course, there were degrees of love as there seemed to be degrees of everything else. Degrees of fear, for instance – he was an
authority, he felt, about
them
. But one of the things that she had done for him was to remove herself entirely off the Ladder of Fear. He couldn’t think of any other woman who had
done that; so perhaps this meant love? But you couldn’t surely love somebody simply because they didn’t frighten you. In the train going to work he counted up the other things he
thought about her. She was intelligent: well, Harry was that, and he certainly wasn’t in love with Harry. The idea made him smile, and he caught the eye of the girl sitting opposite and felt
himself flushing. He hadn’t
meant
to catch her eye. If he wasn’t careful, she would think he was wanting to get off with her which of course he didn’t. Joan enjoyed opera
– Harry again. He’d really got to think of some things about her that couldn’t possibly apply to Harry. She was marvellous to go to bed with, but this was a real sticking point.
Since he hadn’t been to bed with anyone else, how did he know that she was particularly marvellous in that respect? Well, she just was, that’s all: if you lined up all the girls in this
train, he betted she’d come out near the top. There was no way of proving this, thank God: he could hardly go up to each girl or woman and say, ‘Would you mind going to bed with me so
that I can see whether the person I have been to bed with is better than you?’ She was easy, and interesting, and he just
liked
her very much; the charms and pleasures of her body
had simply been a totally unexpected, almost a miraculous, bonus. In any case, he was beginning to see that love was not measurable stuff; approval might be, but he was considering much more than
approval . . . He tried a few more tests: would he be excited if he was going to see her this evening, instead of going to dinner with Peter and Hazel? The answer to that was yes, but he
wasn’t at all sure how much not wanting to go to dinner with Peter and Hazel conditioned it. Did he wish that she was not married to Dmitri? Well, yes, in a way, since it made her unhappy,
but on the other hand she
wanted
to be married to Dmitri. He recognized, then, that in an awful way he was quite glad that she was so tied – it left him free – he wasn’t
quite sure for what: but it gave him time to think, if thinking was the thing to do.