Getting It Right (9 page)

Mr Adrian had looked at the book, and as far as he could see but correct him if he was wrong, Gavin had not got another client until two.

‘Mrs Blake had to be finished off.’ But Gavin knew that Mr Adrian, by putting him on the defensive and ignoring his lunch break, had won some sort of murky point. Gavin was at least
too experienced in Mr Adrian’s little ways to
mention
his lunch. He knew if he did that exactly what he would get. Oh – of course, Gavin’s
lunch
! We
mustn’t forget the all-important point of your
lunch
! Then there’d be a lot more stuff about how, in this modern age, the client was of no importance compared to employees
having
to have a disproportionate amount of time off to eat a sandwich; when he thought of
his
youth . . . no, Gavin’s only victory was not to give him that opening.

‘Right,’ he said with great firmness but apropos of nothing at all. ‘Point taken: I must be off now.’ And, before Mr Adrian could take his feet off the chair on which he
usually kept them, he’d gone.

Now he’d have to go out to lunch – well, go out, anyway. His watch said twenty-five to two. There’d be queues at all the local sandwich shops – his only hope was the
pub.

It was, as usual, crammed – with the sort of people who seemed only to manifest themselves in pubs: large sweating men in tweed suits; middle-aged women wearing diamanté clips and
fur jackets, with most of them shouting and laughing. Jokes about Irishmen, Welshmen and Scotsmen and just any old person who was tight were being bandied about; there was a smell of drink and hot
clothes and the air was filled with smoke. There was nowhere to sit (which he minded because he was on his feet all the time he was working) and the only sandwiches left were cheese. He bought one
and a tomato juice to wash it down. Then, by great luck, he saw a seat in the corner being vacated and managed to seize possession of it. Once in it, he thought things would feel better, but in
fact they got worse, or, rather, getting somewhere to sit and having something to eat freed his attention for how horrible the rest (and most) of life was being. If Mr Adrian had ever spent his
youth working like a galley slave – one of his many ways of putting it – he had certainly made up for that ever since. But it was more, or worse than that. He could stand Mr Adrian
lolling about all day with his racing papers, it was the way he turned everything sour that was unforgivable. The only person in the whole salon whom he never dared to snipe at was Hugo, who was
the oldest of them. It was difficult to put an age to him since he had had silver white hair, a white moustache and brindled eyebrows ever since Gavin had first seen him. For a brief moment, Gavin
considered leaving, getting out, starting somewhere else, but the mere thought of such a cataclysmic change frightened him nearly as much as the thought of being left entirely alone with some
unknown female. He wouldn’t know what was going to happen every day – he might never know what was going to happen again! The unknown couldn’t be good: it would be like
freewheeling on his bike down a steep hill in the dark . . . faint echoes of last night recurred then, but he shut down his memory of it . . . he had only himself to trust and he was always letting
himself down. It was easy to go down. No, he’d have to stick Mr Adrian. He could blow off steam to Harry who was wonderful about it, listened with the utmost attention, clicking his teeth and
twitching his nose. ‘The old
bitch
,’ he’d say; and almost admiringly, ‘I don’t know how you stand it.’ His work wasn’t his whole life, after all;
there were tons of things he was interested in. Five to two – he must get back to Muriel Sutton.

She was waiting for him, of course; she was early, sitting on the reception chaise-longue.

She wore a polyester dress of a green so shrill that, after the first assault, he tried to concentrate upon anything else about her: white shoes, white handbag, white gloves. Her face always
reminded him of a kitten’s peeping out of an uncooked bun, small, playful eyes, a tiny, podgy nose, with the shortest possible upper lip all set in a vast expanse of seemingly boneless white
flesh – whiskers and some fur, even pointed ears would have lent piquancy that was sadly lacking.

‘It’s all right, Gavin, I was early,’ she said with a knowing indulgent smile that was meant to put him at his ease. As he put the cape round her and conducted her to a chair
he reflected that the salon was full of
other
people, including his colleagues, it would be impossible for her to confront him with any really terrifying intimacy: he resolved to be
extremely professional.

‘Now,’ he said, aware of her gazing at him in the mirror. ‘What have you got in mind?’

She pursed her little, bright pink lips.

‘Well, you know how it is: I just felt like a change.’

He combed through her hair experimentally – to get the feel of it. It was dark, fine and rather greasy; had been cut square to shoulder length and permed rather badly about six months ago,
he guessed. She wore it scraped back from her face by a tortoiseshell band. He tried a side parting, rather high up – no, that would create problems about what to do on the parting side. The
thing was to get her hair to conceal the featureless areas of her face – to give the built-up bits more of a look in.

‘Supposing I cut you a fringe – from fairly far back, and then I layer the back and perm it to curl upwards?’

‘Whatever you say, Gavin. Marge told me to put myself completely in your hands.’

‘Right. Well, we start with a shampoo, and then I’ll cut you wet. Jenny!’

But there was no sign of Jenny. He made signs to Daphne to get Jenny, and Muriel, with the same smile, said, ‘I’ve got all the time in the world. Don’t
worry
!’

Daphne said: ‘She’s not upstairs: I don’t know where she is.’

He went to the back of the salon – partly to get away from Muriel – before he retorted that he wasn’t worrying, but
he
hadn’t got all the time in the world thank
you – and found Jenny cleaning one of Mrs Courcel’s hair pieces. ‘Mr Adrian told me to,’ she said.

‘Well, you’ll have to shampoo my client first,’ he said. Jenny grinned.

‘Glad to.’ He knew she hated Mr Adrian although nothing, of course, would ever be said.

While Jenny was shampooing, he slipped out to the back to get a cup of coffee from Mrs Silkin. The mere thought of being properly alone with Muriel was intimately nerve-wracking, but he now
realized that when he was with her when there were other people present she simply maddened him with her ‘you and I know that I know all about you’ demeanour. When, however, he
thought
about her, unthreatened by the prospect of actually seeing her, he just felt extremely sorry for her. Just! Feeling sorry for other people was one of the most overwhelming
sensations he had about them that he knew – a time when he felt powerlessly sad, when injustice seemed to have a casual, but all-embracing whip hand: why should Muriel weigh fourteen stone
and
be seemingly unaware of her actual effect upon people whom she most wanted to move or impress? It was different for him; what he wanted was probably unattainable – out of the
question – but she just wanted to capture the devotion of a perfectly ordinary chap like him (well, due to Marge’s formidable influence, he suspected that she’d narrowed her
sights to it being actually
him
) and settle down – subside into some sort of innocuous routine of providing for the creature needs of a family. She didn’t even want a Prince
Charming; Fred Charming would do her perfectly well. Well, he must be kind to her, but the drag of that dictum included the feeling that, apart from being hard work, being kind to her wasn’t
even good enough: being direct to her was a sort of long-term kindness that he had not got the energy to employ . . .

‘She’s washed and combed out.’ He felt for his comb and followed Jenny back into the salon.

‘Now,’ he said, with as much breezy good-will as he could muster: ‘let’s see what we can do.’

She asked him whether he had seen Marge lately. He nearly fell into the trap of saying that he went on Sundays – was, in fact, going to lunch this Sunday. He knew that would mean that she
would get herself asked along if he did. So he said, not since last week. She said she often wondered what he did with himself at weekends. Not much: caught up on his reading, got some exercise,
saw a few friends. She always thought that weekends was the best time to see friends. She didn’t know about Gavin, but most weekday evenings by the time she’d coped with the rush hour
back from the office, all she felt up to was cooking supper and watching a little television possibly – of course she didn’t watch just
anything
– she was pretty choosy
when it came to television, but documentaries often opened up new vistas and she had to confess that she was a bit of a romantic and loved a good old Hollywood film with a proper, old-fashioned
story – nothing violent. Of course it wasn’t the same as going to the cinema, didn’t he feel there was nothing like having an evening out and going to a film? Barnet Odeon had
three screens and there was quite often a worthwhile film showing on one of them. Marge had told her how interested he was in films. He belonged to some society, didn’t he, that showed the
real oldies on the South Bank somewhere? Yes, but he hardly ever went these days. It
was
difficult to keep up with all one’s interests wasn’t it? She had her flower arrangement
class and she visited one Old Person in Barnet General every week, and last year she had made every single one of her Christmas cards, verses, decoration, the lot, and then she was very keen on
making her own pickles and jams – time flew without one realizing it. It must be three months since she’d seen Gavin – no,
more
! – it had been on Boxing Day,
hadn’t it; they’d had such fun – all those games with Stephen and Judy, such lovely kids – not that Marge didn’t deserve it, she and Ken made a lovely couple, did
Gavin remember the wedding? When all the sausage rolls had been off because of the weather and they’d had to rush off and get some ham? But Marge had made a beautiful bride and she had felt
quite embarrassed being the only bridesmaid and did Gavin remember Lionel – the best man? Well, it was all water under the bridge now but she didn’t mind telling him that after the
reception Lionel had been – well, you know – he’d made ever such a pass at her (here she mercifully lowered her voice), he’d got her at the end of the passage coming out of
the bathroom and she simply
had not
been able to get by . . . She hadn’t set eyes on him from that day to this. Just as well, really, because she did like things nice between people
– quite frankly, she found all that grabbing and pawing distasteful – there were things of the mind, after all, and personally she didn’t hold with love at first sight, she felt
it was something that ought to come slowly – often two people might not be aware of how they felt for years, or one of them might feel too shy to say anything. Here, her dark little eyes
flickered at his for an instant in the mirror and her mouth, as moist and pink as an uncooked chipolata, curled into its miniature smile. But her hair was cut, ready to be dried before he permed
it. He had got by with a kind of absent-minded acquiescence and by an over-attention to the job. The back of his neck felt burning, and his face ached with the passive half-smile he had adopted,
but that was a small price to pay. The worst was over, in a way; he could insist upon the presence of Jenny for the perming process – and make her hand him the rollers for the set after it.
He hadn’t got trapped into
seeing
her; her monologue had been too much of a landslide for any particular notion to get lodged long enough to confront him with the need to reply. He
knew that Hugo, working on his right, must have heard a good deal of Muriel, but tact about such matters was unwritten law. Without being told, Hugo would have known that Muriel was some kind of
private connection and this always meant that you pretended not to have heard anything and never passed any remarks afterwards. Hugo had a terrifyingly old relative – aunt, Gavin supposed she
must be – who treated him as though he was a small unreliable boy all the time he cut and set her iron-grey waves. And Peter had a sister who acted as though she owned the place because her
brother worked there. He wouldn’t get ribbed about Muriel.

While Muriel was being dried, he cut the hair of a four-year-old child – the daughter of an old client who alternated between an almost regal immobility and sudden convulsive movements
when it seemed as though it was going to throw itself out of the chair. Every time it did this and was reproved by its mother, its fine, ash-blonde hair had to be combed out again to provide a line
to cut from. He became afraid of nicking one of its ears; felt oppressed by its silence and depressed by his inability to capture its attention. When it came to trimming its fringe he was sweating
with nerves. ‘You really
have
got to sit still for this bit,’ he enjoined. At this, the child lowered its eyelashes over its amazing brown velvet eyes and put its head in its
lap. ‘Susannah! Gavin can’t cut your hair like that.’ And so it went. As he pocketed his 20p tip, Gavin resolved for the hundredth time never to cut a child’s hair
again.

By then, Muriel was ready and waiting for him with her conspiratorially indulgent smile. So, when Daphne came and said that there was a telephone call for him, he didn’t even ask who it
was, but went to answer it as a kind of respite.

It was Harry. ‘Know you don’t like being rung up at work, but there’s a little party on Saturday night that Winthrop and I think you might really enjoy. Okay?’ And,
without waiting for an answer, he went on: ‘Come to our place at seven, and we’ll all go on from there. We’re getting a lift: it’s all arranged. Bye,’ and he rang
off.

So when, what seemed like hours later, Muriel really came out into the open with an invitation to supper with her on Saturday, Gavin, who had not had the slightest intention of accepting
Harry’s invitation (who had, in fact, felt cross at not being given time on the telephone to refuse it), found himself saying that he was already going somewhere that evening – he was
afraid.