Getting It Right (8 page)

‘All right, Jenny. But I shall want you at about two-fifteen, so mind you get your lunch in before that.’

Jenny rolled her eyes and, slightly overdoing it, said, ‘Yes, Mr Gavin,’ but he knew that, with her, it was the tail end of her apology for letting him down earlier. Mrs Blake,
meeting his eye for the first time in the mirror, and clearly finding it difficult, said hastily: ‘I like that girl; she looks about fourteen, though, doesn’t she?’

‘She does look young. She’s twenty, actually.’ He decided that Jenny was a good safe subject. ‘But she came to hairdressing later than they usually do. Her father was a
vet, and when she left school she worked with him for a couple of years, but then two of her brothers were passing the exams and said they were going to take over the business and they wanted her
just to be a sort of receptionist and general assistant so she decided to have a different career.’

‘Goodness! What a lot you know about her!’

‘She’s been here nearly three years.’ While he finished the rollers and put on the net and ear pads he reflected that in a way it was funny that he didn’t know more.

‘Half an hour under the dryer should do you,’ he said: ‘one of the advantages of having shorter hair, you’ll find.’ He settled her in with a clean towel to protect
her neck, told her that Mrs Silkin would bring her her lunch and hurried over to his next client, an anaemic young woman who stammered terribly (the stammer somehow neutralized the fear he might
have felt about her youth). She looked up from her book (she was one of the very few clients who actually brought real books to read). They smiled at each other, and he picked up the book to read
its title – he enjoyed and she liked his curiosity in this respect. ‘
Time Was
,’ he read; ‘Graham Robertson: don’t think I’ve heard of him.’

‘Erse erse uss uss
Sar
gent p – pppppp painted him when he was a young – ermmmmm man,’ she said, and showed him the frontispiece.

‘Oh yes. I know that one. Very fine portrait. Although, I think I’d rather have been painted by Whistler, wouldn’t you?’

‘Only when I was very old. The er er erra erra rest of the time, I’d rather ersa ersa
Sar
gent.’

Her hair was very fine and she wore it in a longish bob with a fringe. She was one of the few people whom he preferred to cut dry, as, wet, it contracted to such tiny wisps that it was difficult
to see its shape. It was a delicate business, getting her hair right, and usually protracted because, in her enthusiasm for what she was reading, and with a touching acceptance of her speech
problems she would leaf through the book and show him some particular remark. Thus he got Mrs Patrick Campbell: ‘My eyes are really nothing in particular, God gave me boot buttons, but I
invented the dreamy eyelid, and that makes all the difference.’ And: Once at a rehearsal Sir James Barrie, impatient at the impossible subtleties demanded of the players by a producer, called
out to an actor, ‘Mr—, I want you to cross from left to right silently conveying to the audience that you have an aunt in Surbiton.’

‘Aren’t they erwer erwer erwer erwer
un
derful?’ It was indeed a bonus to be presented with entertainment of this kind: it also opened up the charming, if organized,
vista of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras which he knew he had not explored enough. But, and perhaps this was because he felt a bit tired by now (although the day was barely half done), he
also felt that somebody like Miss Wilming must be rather lonely if she felt the need to tell him, only her hairdresser, after all, what she was reading. He found himself worrying about her stammer,
and how lonely this might make her; she might even be shy, poor thing . . . the terrifying thought occurred to him that
he
might have been landed with a stammer: God, if he had been,
he
wouldn’t have been able to talk to anybody at
all
! He wouldn’t have dared to do this job, for instance, he would have had to be a lighthouse keeper or something
like that. Of course, people could get cured of stammering – look at George VI and Demosthenes: on the other hand, Somerset Maugham, who loathed his stammer, had never got over it. Perhaps
the need to orate was a spur, in which case he would probably have had his stammer all his life. At this point, just as he was realizing gratefully that not having a stammer was one thing
he’d got going for him, he also realized that he’d taken off too much of Miss Wilming’s hair behind her left ear and would have to do a general trim all round again to redress the
balance. She was reading quietly, and he had to resist the host of other disabilities by which he might have been afflicted that crowded into his mind. Winthrop’s mother, for instance; how on
earth would he have managed with a cork leg? He certainly wouldn’t have thought of being a prostitute: Winthrop’s mother seemed now to him to have lived at the very top of the Ladder of
Fear, and minus one leg to boot. Then there was a host of frightful diseases . . . shutting the door on leprosy and inherited syphilis, he wrenched his mind back on his work, conscious of a passing
but real surge of gratitude for acne and dandruff – the first, after all, did recede from time to time, and the second was something that he had the professional knowledge to keep at bay.

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to stop reading for a minute or two while I cut your fringe,’ he said. She put down the book and smiled trustfully at him: really, in a way, she
was rather an attractive person – not his type, of course, but looking at her quite objectively he could see that quite a number of people might regard her as reasonably attractive.

When he had finished, she gave him a 50p piece in an anxious, almost supplicatory manner – as though she was afraid he might not accept it.

He thanked her warmly and then he had to rush over to Mrs Courcel, who had taken herself out of the dryer and was surveying herself with the unswerving interest that he had noticed she seemed
always to have for her own face. Quicker to take her rollers out himself than wait to get Mandy or Jenny.

Mrs Courcel’s hair was black and glossy and the gloss shone blue – like the flame from methylated spirit. It was really the kind of hair that looked best when it was dressed very
simply, but when he had once suggested this, she had said to hell with simplicity, it bored her husband. Her hair piece lay on the shelf in front of the mirror like a dead raven. He brushed out her
hair from the roller curls and then asked her what she wanted him to do.

‘I want it all drawn back, but on top as well, and then the piece
right
at the back, with curls falling down each side. I’ve a dress with just one shoulder, so I want it
sort of Grecian.’ His heart sank. Getting the piece to stay on the back of her head (she hadn’t really
got
a back to her head – it sloped alarmingly from the top) would
be murder – however: never say no to a client. He parted her hair in the middle, fastened each side with clips and picked up the hair piece. Fifteen minutes later, he had achieved what she
had asked. He was sweating but thank God it was over. He handed her the mirror and she began a minute survey of her head from every angle.

‘It’s no good,’ she said at last. ‘I thought it couldn’t be: it didn’t feel right and you can see – three quarters from the back – that I
look
as though I’m wearing a hair piece. It doesn’t look like
me
.’

There was a brief silence: Mrs Courcel did not look in the mirror at him to see what he thought of what she thought: she continued calmly to gaze at herself, picking at pieces of her hair with
her coral-painted nails, but Gavin looked fleetingly at his own face as a tidal wave of rage and hatred surged up his body and swirled about his throat, and was astonished to see that it was
suffused with a weak (and silly) smile. He had been afraid that his fury would show – might even upset the client – but his idiotic expression filled him instead with self-loathing.
‘Why don’t you ever stand
up
for yourself?’ Marge used always to say whenever awful things had happened to him as a child which they so often had. When they’d
emptied his silkworms down the school toilets, when he’d won a pig at Barnet Fair and his mother had made him give it away, when his father had said there was no sense in paying for violin
lessons, when he’d run a (sub-normal) temperature the night before he was going to the seaside with Auntie Sylvia and his mother had cancelled the trip ‘to be on the safe side’,
when Tony Williams had pinched his brand new bike and crashed it . . . He realized that he was taking down Mrs Courcel’s hair, and glancing up from his hands to the mirror again he saw with
relief that the smile had vanished – indeed, he had no expression at all.

‘I think if you tried the piece on top of my head with the curls below it it may work better,’ Mrs Courcel said. He set about trying that: it was what he had been going to do in the
first place. As Mrs Courcel relentlessly followed every move he made – and he was now working against time because Mrs Blake was due out of the dryer any minute with no Jenny to hand him pins
or hold pieces of hair – he felt his stomach contracting with nerves, and knew that even if he managed to get time for lunch, he wouldn’t feel like eating. ‘God!’ he told
himself; ‘you’ve been doing this job for nearly sixteen years and you
still
let a little thing like this get you down!’ She was just a difficult client; selfish,
self-absorbed and narcissistic. He thought of a few more things that she was, and then his dogged sense of fairness – misplaced, in this case, for all he knew or did not know – rushed
to the attack. For all he knew, everything she cared about might have been taken from her: her obsession with her appearance might be nothing more than a gallant attempt to keep going; she might
have
had
a child who had died; her husband might be off with another woman and she was trying desperately to hold his attention; she might be so frightened and lonely that she was in
danger of going mad. The thought of a life that could entail a pointless visit to the hairdresser every day opened up vistas of boredom and isolation that any ordinary person like himself would
find appalling. Look how fortunate
he
was, with a good job, Mum and Dad to go home to, a nice foreign holiday every year and tons of interests, and it wasn’t as though he felt
marvellous all the time in spite of all that. He stopped there, because he found himself not wanting to contemplate his opposite of feeling marvellous – not in the salon and especially not
when he was dressing Mrs Courcel’s hair. He hoped that Mrs Blake would not start crying again (a distinct possibility if he was too nice to her when he combed her out) and, beyond Mrs Blake,
Muriel Sutton loomed. As he handed Mrs Courcel the hand mirror for the second time, he said: ‘I think that’s about the best I can do for you today.’ (Bloody well like it, or leave
it.)

After prolonged scrutiny, she agreed that it was better, and before she could qualify her cautious approval he begged to be excused and wheeled his trolley smartly over to the patient Mrs Blake
who was still baking under the dryer. As he did this, he noticed that Mr Adrian had emerged from his lair, had seen Mrs Courcel being abandoned and was now padding over to her. This was going to
mean trouble of some kind or another, but he decided to concentrate upon Mrs Blake.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ he said: ‘but at least it will be thoroughly dry.’

‘I don’t suppose I shall know myself,’ she said as though this would be an inviting prospect. He smiled but did not reply: he felt that the best technique with Mrs Blake was to
look as though dressing her hair occupied the whole of his attention. The large rollers out, he brushed the curls thoroughly while – from the corner of his eye – he saw Mrs Courcel
escorted to the reception desk by an obsequious Mr Adrian (she was an account customer and of course she spent a lot): she did not come over to tip him, and he knew that that was a bad sign. No
parting, he thought, and he would back comb the sides a little to give extra width. The perm had taken very well: wasn’t too tight considering.

‘When you’ve finished, I’d like a word with you, if I may.’

‘Right,’ he said. Mr Adrian hovered a moment more and asked if Madam was pleased with her perm.

‘I’m sure I shall be. Gavin’s been wonderful: I’ve got such difficult hair and he’s made it look positively luxuriant.’

Mr Adrian smiled, showing a large number of small, unnervingly white, false teeth and glided away. Gavin felt a surge of gratitude to Mrs Blake.

When he had finished with her, she really looked much better: the slightly windswept look made her look more hopeful and alive.

‘There we are,’ he said briskly as he handed her the mirror. ‘Of course, it’ll take a week or two to settle down.’

‘Thank you so much.’

Fearing that she might be reaching danger point, he took her quickly to the desk, handed her over to Daphne. When she thanked him again he gave her a cheery wink – as a kind of telegram to
keep her pecker up. Pity there was nobody to wink at him, he thought as he walked to Mr Adrian’s lair, or, pity he couldn’t wink at himself.

He knew exactly what Mr Adrian’s ‘word’ would be. Mrs Courcel was a very good customer: he – Mr Adrian – did not keep the kind of establishment where clients were
abandoned the moment their hair was dressed: no – in his establishment (and perhaps he ought to remind Gavin whose establishment it was) clients were conducted back to the reception desk,
where, if there was not a junior available, they were helped into their coats. It might sound funny to Gavin, but good, old-fashioned courtesy made a world of difference. Some clients were more
fussy than others, but that, as Gavin must know, was the way the cookie crumbled – his teeth put in an appearance here . . .

‘Perhaps you could suggest to Mrs Courcel that she make appointments instead of dropping in – ’

Now now, Gavin knew that she usually did make appointments –

‘She doesn’t! She makes about one a week, and comes in at least three other days. She upsets my bookings, and then, when she wants her hair dressed
twice
, I get short of
time.’