Getting It Right (29 page)

Walking from the train to the salon, he suddenly realized that the reason why he felt so confused – had descended to thoughts about feeling – was that Joan in no way conformed to his
lifelong ideal of a possible love. She was not ethereal, not young, she had none of the enigmatic but total compliance with his requirements that he was familiar with. She was not, in those terms,
a beauty; in no sense did she give him the impression that she had been waiting for him all her life; in many ways she seemed to him to be a remarkably self-contained woman. But, then, he had
always discovered
his
girl in scenes of such shimmering romance, that talking to her had never really come into it, and in the end, whatever you felt about someone, you were reduced to
talking to them: well, he hoped not ‘reduced’ – you
wanted
to talk to them. Otherwise, how could you
go on
with them after the first few magic encounters? There
was, there must be, ordinary life to be lived with whoever it might be somehow. He trudged up the stair to the salon to his own particular brand of regular and repeated doses of that.

‘You got someone?’

Gavin simply looked at Peter: he couldn’t think what he meant.

‘For tonight. You remember I told you we’d got four of everything?’

‘Oh – yes. No, I’m afraid I haven’t.’ He didn’t feel up to telling Peter that it had totally slipped his mind . . .

‘Well, can you ask someone this morning? Hazel’s been getting everything ready for the last two evenings: I wouldn’t like to disappoint her . . .’ and he sped off from
the coffee room to his first client.

It was all very well for Peter to say that, Gavin thought, as he sent Jenny off to wash his first client, but he hadn’t
got
anyone he could ask . . . Gloomily, he reviewed the
possibilities – such as they were. Harry, apart from the state of his eye, and any other state he might be in, would simply refuse to come. Newly married people were not his style, and
although Gavin knew he would refuse as nicely as possible saying he didn’t really feel up to it, or had planned a quiet evening with Winthrop – refuse he would: it was not even worth
asking him. After that, the possibilities became bizarre. Minnie, who would be bound to make some kind of reckless scene; she could be relied upon to shock Peter and Hazel, no amount of briefing
her beforehand could rule that out. He didn’t really know the sort of girl that Peter and Hazel would expect him to know. Muriel Sutton, for example; when he thought of what she would read
into such an invitation, he wanted to laugh aloud, or scream. He didn’t have any girls about who were
friends
. Come to that, he had very few friends of any kind. The person who came
nearest this category, really, was Joan. But taking Joan to such a thing would be a waste of her – anyway, she was miles away. Then he thought of his sister, Marge;
she
might be
persuaded, if she was free. As soon as he’d got his client through the tricky part of timing the solution for her perm, he went and rang Marge. She was going to the pictures with Ken. She
seemed surprised to be asked. ‘I always think of you as such a lone wolf, Gav,’ she said. ‘Well, I hope you find someone. Have a good time, anyway.’ A few minutes later, she
rang him back and asked him why he didn’t take Muriel: ‘She’s almost sure to be free.’ He didn’t want to go into the reasons why he wouldn’t ask Muriel on the
salon phone, so he just said no to that. A few minutes later, Mr Adrian summoned him across to the desk in order to inform him that this
was
the salon phone. Over the years, Gavin had run
his gamut of responses to this kind of remark, from apology, to excuses, to dumb insolence, to breezy dismissal to apology again. The best way to deal with Mr Adrian, he’d discovered, was to
use words that couldn’t be faulted but in the way most calculated to irritate the old bastard; an apology that sounded as though he was answering back. Now he said how tremendously sorry he
was, and how much he hoped that Mr Adrian had not lost too much business in the minute that he had been on the phone and how he mustn’t make matters even worse by keeping his present client
waiting which he was sure Mr Adrian would understand. He could hear Mr Adrian’s false teeth gnashing together, so he knew that he had scored – in a minor way.

Jenny unwound the white towel from Mrs Strathallan’s head, and he ran his fingers through her new little snakey ringlets.

‘Is it all right?’

He smiled at her in the mirror. ‘Taken very nicely. I’ll set it on fairly big rollers so that it won’t come out too tight.’

‘You didn’t get your big rollers back from Mr Peter.’

‘Oh. Well, get them for me, would you?’

Jenny stumped off, and Mrs Strathallan said, ‘What a nice girl that is.’

He agreed absently; he would have appeared to agree even if he didn’t – one never knocked any of the staff to clients. But Jenny
was
nice: he remembered the walk with her up
St James’s Street from the Park, and how he’d very nearly felt hardly nervous of her. An idea struck him; and when Mrs Strathallan was safely under the dryer, he said:
‘Peter’s asked me to bring someone to supper with him and his wife this evening. I wondered whether you’d like to come?

‘I know it’s very short notice,’ he added, as she didn’t reply.

‘I would like to,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to phone my mother to see if it would be all right . . . I’ll have to wait till my lunch hour, though.’

‘All right.’ He noticed that she had gone a very dark pink.

At two o’clock she told him that it
was
all right, but that she would have to go home first – to see Andrew into bed. He said he would pick her up if she liked, and if she
didn’t mind riding on the back of his bike.

‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘I’d like to.’ He arranged to pick her up at seven. When, however, he told Peter that he was bringing Jenny, Peter did not seem particularly
pleased. ‘She’s a junior!’ he exclaimed. ‘Oh well, if you’re mad keen to have her, I suppose it’s all right,’ he said a moment later.

‘I’m not mad keen to have her, but you said get someone, and she was the only person I could get at such short notice.’

‘It wasn’t short notice when I asked you.’

‘Well, I forgot – I told you.’

‘Okay then. Seven-fifteen to seven-thirty. Here’s the address, and here’s a sort of map I’ve made. It isn’t very easy to find till you know it.

‘Don’t be late,’ he said, as they were changing to go home. ‘Hazel gets terribly worked up if people are late.’

‘All right. I’ll try not to be.’

He looked at Peter’s map in the train going home. It was the kind of map that only included the streets that Peter felt were important and at the bottom of the map he remarked that there
was a very complicated one-way system that he couldn’t really explain. It wasn’t much use, really – and he decided to use his ‘A to Z’ and trust to luck. He’d
got to look up Jenny’s address, anyway – she lived in Kilburn.

It was a beautiful evening: when the train emerged into daylight, the railway banks were full of buttercups and cow parsley, and the sky was blue, with large whitish clouds. He wondered what
Joan was doing. His knowledge of the South of France was scanty; he had only been there once; hadn’t enjoyed it much. It was the year of his acne being particularly virulent; he’d felt
self-conscious in bathing shorts and it had been tremendously hot with mosquitoes who zoomed about biting him from dusk till dawn. It wasn’t a very good place to be alone in; everybody else
seemed to be with someone. He’d headed north after a few days, and spent a much happier time looking at châteaux on the Loire. But it was probably quite a good place to be if you were
rich and had friends and there was nothing wrong with your body. But Joan was rich, and she seemed to know a lot of people – and she wasn’t self-conscious about her body. Or was she,
perhaps? The gear she wore was a fairly self-conscious business, and although she said she wore it because Dmitri liked it, a bit of her must surely
want
to look like that. He remembered
in the Secrets game she had said that she was grotesque: well, he knew now that she wasn’t. Did she
believe
that she was, or had Dmitri somehow got her to believe it?

Trains were not a good place to think about Joan’s body, he discovered; if he thought about her for more than a second or two, he started wanting her. He started thinking resolutely about
the evening ahead, and wondered what it was about him that allowed him to embark on things (like this evening) that he didn’t really in the least want to do? But, come to think about it, he
never
wanted to embark upon any social do. He hadn’t wanted to go to the party with Harry and Co. and, if he hadn’t gone, he would never have met Joan. Or, come to that,
Minnie. But, in a way, he
expected
such situations to yield a heavy crop of Minnies: he had never expected a Joan – or anyone like her. It was getting more and more difficult not to
think about Joan: whatever else he thought about seemed to end up with his thinking about her. Did this mean love? He was really sick of asking himself this question, because he never seemed to get
any nearer answering it.

He walked quickly back from the station to his home; the air felt both warm and fresh on his skin; swifts were wheeling and streaking after the tiny flies that milled about; snatches of the six
o’clock news reached him from the open windows of various houses. The scene was so familiar that he could observe the smallest changes in it; buds on the roses starting to have colour, a
garden gate painted since this morning; a large oak tree thicker with its sun-encrusted unfolding leaves.

Mrs Lamb was hovering about the hall, obviously waiting his return.

‘Ah, there you are,’ she said after he had kissed her hot and downy face. ‘Somebody’s been phoning you with a very nice invitation. “So far as I know,” I said
to her, “my son is free this weekend, but mark you, I’m only his mother, so I don’t know anything for certain.” She sounded ever so nice on the phone . . .’

Gavin, who for one glorious moment had envisaged Joan calling from the South of France and inviting him to join her, was brought up short by the sounding ever so nice on the phone bit. Before
she said it, he knew who it was.

‘Her Ladyship herself. Asking you for the weekend in the country. To meet her parents. I got that egg off your nice tie, and I’ve cleaned your dark shoes. “Expect him back by
six at the latest, Lady Munday,” I said, “because I happen to know he has an evening engagement. Would you like him to phone you as soon as he comes in,” I said, but she said no,
don’t bother, she’ll be giving you a call in the morning.’

‘Thanks, Mum.’ He started to move past her to get upstairs.

‘Is that all you’ve got to say? There’s no need to give yourself airs with me, young man. I don’t know what’s come over you in the last few days! Suddenly
you’re out and about and everywhere and go on acting as though nothing is happening!’

‘There’s no need to get excited, Mum. I’m not going anywhere for the weekend.’

But he could hardly have said anything worse, and they embarked upon one of those altercations made more painfully indeterminate by the fact that she could not possibly admit to him that she was
dying to know how Minnie’s parents lived – let alone the more permanent ambition that she nursed about Minnie in what she thought was deadly secrecy. Gavin, who was dimly aware of both
factors, refused to face her with them, and took refuge in sulking or seeming to be airily unconcerned. In the end, he shut her up by having a bath.

The prospect – even of the faintest kind – of spending the weekend with Minnie (and her parents) lowered the price of the forthcoming evening. Which was something: after all,
he’d known Peter for years: he was not (presumably) going to have any kind of
tête-à-tête
with Hazel, and the presence of Jenny would preclude – he hoped
– any embarrassing discussions about whether Hazel should embark upon motherhood or no. And one person he wasn’t frightened of was Jenny; she was a quiet, nice, amiable girl – the
antithesis of Minnie – or even of Joan – who, whatever else she was, could not be described as quiet. It was no good starting to think about Joan: he couldn’t even afford a long
bath – had to get changed and be off as soon as possible.

In his room, he put on some Wagner at maximum volume to discourage his mother from coming up and going on about the weekend. Then he had a good look at his ‘A to Z’, first for
collecting Jenny, and then for finding Peter’s flat.

He escaped his mother by literally running out of the house, shouting that he was late; then caught himself having to pretend he
was
late in order to circumnavigate dishonesty . . . All
the time he was fixing his pillion and strapping another helmet to it for Jenny, he ruminated about honesty – how everyone made aggrieved or bland assumptions about it and went to tortuous
lengths to preserve their own image of themselves – why was he saying ‘everyone’? He meant himself. He liked to think of himself as honest, but let there be any kind of
confrontation with anyone, and he fell back upon twisting with the best of them. He wanted people – even those he didn’t like, in fact often
especially
those he didn’t
like – to approve of him. On top of that, he would go to almost any lengths to give the impression that he was honest as well as likeable, when everything that he was now thinking showed only
too clearly that he was neither . . . As he sped through the back streets up to the main road he wondered what would happen if he had a go at being honest for the evening. Nobody would notice
probably. But
he
would notice, and he was the person he was going to go home with at the end of the evening. For some reason, he felt suddenly light-hearted about the prospect ahead; it
was as if he’d decided to go with somebody whom he both liked and felt was something of a challenge: there were uncertainties attached to such an idea, but they were of a kind that he felt he
might take charge of.

He found Jenny’s street quite easily: she lived in a semi-detached Victorian house. The door was answered by Jenny’s mother who looked rather young for the part – largely, he
quickly realized, because she didn’t look in the least like his own mother. She wore jeans and an Indian smock, but he knew that she
was
Jenny’s mother because she had the
same, rather round eyes and specs, but horn-rimmed, not gold like Jenny’s specs.