Getting It Right (6 page)

When he took the coffee through to Mrs Shack, the salon was coming to life. The telephone was ringing, two more clients had arrived and Iris, Hugo and Peter were getting out their trolleys of
equipment for the day’s work. Daphne put down the telephone receiver and called, ‘Sharon won’t be in today: her mother says she’s eaten something.’ Then she mouthed:
‘Bet you it was her.’ When his favourite junior, Jenny, arrived, he told her about the cups and asked her if she would mind washing them up before Mr Adrian arrived. Jenny, who with her
short, dark golden hair en brosse and huge steel-rimmed spectacles, looked like a cross between a choirboy and a young owl, rolled her eyes and shrugged her bony shoulders, but clumped off in her
absurd boots without a word to do what she was told. Daphne started arranging some tulips in the vase for the reception desk and Gavin had a quick look at the book to see what was in store for him.
Fridays were always busy – mostly with regulars – but he saw that in his case there was one exception. Miss Muriel Sutton was booked for a cut and a permanent at two. His heart began to
sink as he remembered who she was, and then plummeted. Muriel was his sister’s best friend, older than Marge, worthy and unmarried. Marge, who was married and liked it, seemed to feel that
Gavin should follow suit, and what had begun as her idle but none the less embarrassing family speculation about who he would marry, had, over the years, hardened into an obsession: heart to heart
talks with him, frightful schemes to introduce him to a series of ‘nice girls’ with recriminatory follow-ups, or post-mortems, depending upon how much she had been able to throw whoever
it was and him together. In between what might be called the outsiders introduced to the field, Marge’s undoubted favourite was Muriel. Muriel, she had told her brother, was really a good
sort, was thoroughly domestic and maternal: she was worth her weight in gold, which Gavin had once considered must make her very valuable indeed. There was no nonsense about her: she was not
flighty or preoccupied with her appearance; she thought of others; she was longing to get married. As time went by, Marge’s claims about her friend’s qualities verged upon the
desperate: Muriel – deep down – was quite artistic – had won prizes for flower arrangement and even written some poetry – and, knowing how deeply Marge distrusted anything
at all to do with art, Gavin recognised the lengths his sister was going to about the whole business. Sending Muriel all the way from Potters Bar to have her hair done by him was a new manoeuvre:
it was surprising in a way that she hadn’t thought of it before, since it was clearly the only cast-iron method of forcing him to spend some time alone with Muriel. Still, it was in the
salon: on the Ladder of Fear count he would not ever be
alone
with her.

‘Miss Renishawe’s in. Jenny’s put her in Cubicle Three.’

‘Right. Keep an eye on Mrs Shack for me.’

Miss Renishawe had been lowered into her chair by Jenny. She still wore her navy blue knitted hat – now slightly askew, which went so well with her weather-beaten face and keen blue eyes
and made her look more like an old sea salt than ever.

‘Just want it cut, Gavin – no nonsense.’ Nonsense was rollers. He had just about accustomed her to having a blow dry although each time she asked him what was the matter with
nice old-fashioned towels. Her hair was the colour of silver-birch bark and she liked it cut extremely short, ‘shingled’ as she put it. She was a great gardener and Gavin found her
conversation – when she indulged in any – a pleasant mixture of knowledge, opinion and personal rumination. Today she said nothing at all for about ten minutes and then suddenly as
though she was in the middle of some argument asked:

‘Do
you
go in for this new-fangled notion of having a
herb
garden?’

Gavin shook his head.

‘My mother wouldn’t see the point of that, I’m afraid.’

‘Well, you can tell her from me that she’s quite right. All very well when they were the family medicine chest: that’s become nonsense when everyone’s chock full of
penicillin whatever’s the matter with them. Herbs should be planted with other plants: gives them health and saves them from disease. Take roses, for instance. If you under-plant them
properly with herbs you’ll save gallons of chemical muck. How would
you
like to be deluged in some revolting-smelling concoction the moment you felt poorly?’

‘You mean like those disinfectant baths they give prisoners?’

She chuckled, and for a moment her face, equally composed of wickedness and innocence, had a fascinating beauty. ‘People do stupid things, they must expect stupid things to happen to them.
Plants are never stupid.’ After a pause, she added: ‘Extravagant sometimes, but never stupid. Get it nice and short, Gavin: I don’t like it bothering me. I don’t like to
know that it is
there
.’

A bit later, she said: ‘That little fair, bird girl. I like her to wash me. She doesn’t scrubble me up like the others.’

‘Right.’ He called Jenny, and was just in time to comb out Mrs Shack, who, rollers removed, was showing that she was perfectly prepared to wait, like everyone else, even if she
did
have rather important things to do with her time.

By now, Mr Adrian had arrived. He was a very large man – even flabby: he wore heavy, horn-rimmed glasses and an extremely skilful toupee; his huge pale chins meandered down into his bow
tie, and his suede shoes had thick rubber soles. He moved about the establishment with ponderous silence, but nothing escaped him; he had found out about the dirty tea cups by feeling the drying-up
cloth which was far damper than it would have been if the cups had been washed up the night before. Mrs Silkin, who came to do the sandwich lunches and coffee for clients, had complained about the
cloth; she always left everything nice, Daphne told Gavin that Mr Adrian had said Mrs Silkin had
several
times said. Instead of providing another cloth – which was urgently needed
– Mr Adrian had gone straight for the juniors. Gavin could tell this by simply looking at them: Mandy was sulking which meant that she had to be asked to do every single thing, and then did
it twice as slowly, and Jenny looked as though she was going to burst into tears at any moment. Mr Adrian beckoned Gavin over to the back of the salon where, in a small cubicle, he had a
comfortable chair and read the racing papers.

‘I understand that it was you who discovered the cups this morning.’ He raised a huge white hand to prevent Gavin from speaking. ‘I’m not blaming
you.
I’ve
said the same to Hugo and Peter
and
Iris. But, if nobody tells me anything, how am I to know? I ask you, that’s all.’ He waited while Gavin didn’t say that it
didn’t seem to make much difference whether people told him things or not since he had found out anyway.

‘I don’t think it was anything to do with Jenny. Or Mandy,’ he added fairly.

‘You needn’t tell me that. I
know
the young lady responsible. And I tell you, quite frankly, that I have a suspicion that this incident will prove to be the Last
Straw.’

Mr Adrian specialized in last straws, could even be said to be addicted to them, so Gavin remained silent.

‘
If
that young lady condescends to put in an appearance tomorrow, I shall ask her for an explanation, but I’m afraid, even now, that I know what her answer will be.
“I’m sorry, Mr Adrian, I forgot.”’ His mimicry was offensively careless. He passed a hand over his toupee with practised caution and concluded, ‘No. It will have to be
O-U-T for Miss Sharon.’

‘We’re short of juniors now – ’ Gavin began, when Daphne interrupted to say that she was sorry she was interrupting, but his client was in.

‘Don’t tell
me
that. I
know
we’re short of juniors. Nobody knows we’re short of juniors better than I do. I shall have to strain every nerve to find a
replacement, and meanwhile we’ll just have to take the rough with the smooth. But, Gavin,’ he went on and on: ‘keep them up to the mark. If you all keep them up to the mark, we
might not have these little unpleasantnesses.’ He smiled with vulpine insincerity and said he must not keep Gavin.

As Gavin walked back to the reception he realized that his heart was pounding, and that this, for once, had nothing to do with fear. He actually hated Mr Adrian. All he ever seemed to do was to
make nasty situations. He blew up petty little mishaps to the size where they upset even people who had nothing to do with them. ‘Take the rough with the smooth’ indeed! As he and the
other hairdressers were the people who had to do this, they might at least have some choice about the rough. Almost
any
junior was better than no junior. If Sharon went they would be two
short, and this simply meant that he and the others had to do a lot of extra unpaid work which entailed staying late and/or arriving early, which impaired their own work and which made Mandy and
Jenny feel put upon. And another thing that he hated about Mr Adrian was the way that, while he was quite prepared to be very tough and unpleasant to juniors, he had been trying to blame Gavin for
the incident without actually having the courage to say that that was what he was doing. And he was mean. (Gavin had worked for him longest and he had always been forced into asking for any rise
during that time, never once been offered one, and he found it agonizing having to ask. Often he only managed to do this after he had been goaded by the others who were thicker-skinned –
‘braver’.) But, before he could start to consider the extent and degree of Mr Adrian’s meanness, he was confronted by Mrs Wagstaffe and her irritable dachshund Sherry. Mrs
Wagstaffe wanted a cut, but Sherry disliked anybody doing anything at all to her. He was a dog of few words, but he had a lightning snap, designed to harass and unnerve his target, rather than
actually to draw blood. Gavin liked dogs – he had always wanted his mother to replace Caesar, but Sherry, after years and years spent with Mrs Wagstaffe who anthropomorphized him, had become
much more like a nasty person than a dog. Now he sat, poised on Mrs Wagstaffe’s tweed lap, rumbling softly – like the beginning of the storm in the last act of
Rigoletto
, Gavin
thought.

‘Now then, Sherry, good morning, Mrs Wagstaffe,’ he said in that order.

‘Isn’t he amazing? He never forgets.’

Since Mrs Wagstaffe came in regularly every three weeks to have her iron-grey bob and fringe trimmed, there seemed no earthly reason why Sherry
should
forget, but as a master of petty
grievance he would probably remember if she didn’t come in more than once a year.

‘Let him smell you,’ invited Mrs Wagstaffe, but Gavin had been had that way. The best method, he had found, was to vest Mrs Wagstaffe in one of the larger overalls so that the folds
enveloped Sherry, on the general principle that what the eye could not see, the jaw would not snap at. The rumbling reluctantly subsided, and he snipped away while Mrs Wagstaffe earnestly discussed
the differences between mange – something Sherry definitely did not have – and alopecia, a condition she suspected Sherry might be suffering from. Tinned food certainly aggravated his
condition but, then again, hot weather, or other animals, or anxiety of any sort – he was very highly strung – or people he did not like (and, really, he only actually
liked
her) had much the same effect. Gavin switched his mind into what he called neutral as he worked. That is to say, he neither thought about the juniors, or Mr Adrian, or Muriel Sutton looming, or
Harry’s problems with Winthrop, or where, in fact, he would go for his holidays, or last night in bed, nor did he give his mind to the difficulties attached to Mrs Wagstaffe’s
relationship with her dog. He half-listened and agreed with her; years ago, he had learned that he could work better in this way: that the core of his attention was upon the way in which his
client’s hair grew: her double crown – like two opposing tides meeting – the patch, just north of her left temple, where her hair was noticeably thin, the suggestion of side burns
that, with a woman, were better concealed if not eliminated. In fact cutting was what he liked doing best; it combined skill bred of much varied practice with flair born, he supposed, of some
alliance between his eye and his hands. In this respect, if no other, he could do what he could see to do – always with interesting provisions that no two heads were alike, and there was
always the tantalizing possibility of doing better. It was perfectly possible to string along with Mrs Wagstaffe’s monologue and do his best for her hair. When he had finished with her, Iris
asked him to confer with her about a client who had rung to say that she wanted her hair cut off and the colour changed as soon as they could both fit it in.

‘She wants a permanent as well, but I explained to her that she would do better to wait a fortnight after the tint for that.’

‘How long
is
her hair?’

‘Well, it doesn’t reach her waist, but there’s a fair amount of it. I know you like to do two cuts when it’s from length.’

‘It’s usually more satisfactory – gives the hair time to settle.’ Together, they pored over the engagement book. Iris, who was expert at her job – something of an
artist, Gavin thought – was always heavily booked, and finding a time that fitted with his schedule was not easy and his next client had already arrived. Gavin, apart from respecting her
skill, was fond of Iris: she was a gentle, middle-aged woman, devoted to her work, who unobtrusively lent a considerable air to the establishment. Her judgement and her taste were excellent; she
never allowed her clients to indulge in the sillier caprices that would show their lack in these directions; they all emerged from her hands with hair that matched both their complexions and their
ages. Although they had worked in the same salon for eight years, Gavin knew very little about her, and what little he did know made him almost afraid of knowing more. Her only child had died in a
car accident; her husband, who was blind, had appalling arthritis and had undergone operations on both of his hips – one successful, the other not. They lived in a bungalow on the river, and
Alfred, whose guide dog had recently died, was having a lot of trouble with the new one. The last time that Gavin had asked her anything about herself had been about her holiday on which he knew
she had set great store. She had been saving for years to go to the Caribbean, but had had to cancel it because Alfred had got a bed for his second operation.