Lewis Percy (18 page)

Pushed forward to receive her guests, Tissy appeared calm, even uninterested, although Lewis knew that under the pink blouse her heart was beating painfully.

‘Well, Tissy,’ said Pen, kissing her on both cheeks. ‘This is
nice of you. And it’s good to see you again, looking so well, too.’

Lewis poured champagne for them all into the beautiful glass flutes his wife had found in the attic. While Pen engaged Tissy in gentle conversation, guaranteed not to discompose her, Lewis studied Emmy, admiring her long brown hair, her round face, and the rosy stain of her cheeks.

‘I hear you’re looking for a flat,’ he said.

‘Oh, I’ve found one,’ she replied. ‘Near to Pen. Isn’t that lucky? Tissy,’ she called. ‘You must help me furnish my flat. I’m hopeless at that sort of thing. And you’ve done wonders here. I love this room.’ But she was looking at Lewis as she spoke.

‘What is that marvellous scent?’ he asked, inhaling.

‘Mimosa.’ She pulled down the front of her dress and took a deep breath. ‘It’s good, isn’t it? A boyfriend brings it for me from Tahiti.’

A boyfriend, he noted. Not my boyfriend. He filed the information away for future investigation, then went over to his wife and put his arm round her waist. ‘Shall we eat, darling? Bring your champagne,’ he called to Emmy. ‘Will you have some more? There’s only a perfectly ordinary white wine to follow.’

He stood while she rose, admired her long waist and legs. Beside her Tissy looked like a child. Yet at that moment he felt a painful wave of love for his wife, whose weakness he so clearly felt. He would defend her to the death, he thought, not knowing why he felt her to be under threat. He took her hand, willing her to enjoy herself, but merely registered the extent of her nervousness. Her peculiar gift, he reflected, was to turn pleasure into mere absence of pain. Sometimes this worked. On a domestic level it ensured calm and order. But there was a defensiveness that militated against high emotion. Not that high emotion was called for on this occasion. But Lewis wished that something a little more active than her usual manner could be demonstrated. She had refused champagne, saying that it gave her
a headache. He knew that she would refuse the wine as well.

The perfectly risen soufflé awaited them on the dining-room table, as if by magic. Emmy ate enthusiastically; at one point a large Mexican ear-ring fell with a clatter on to her side plate. She looked at it indifferently, and then removed the other one. ‘This always happens,’ she said. ‘I’ve left ear-rings all over London. Put them in your pocket, Pen, I haven’t got a bag. Evening bags are so goody-goody, aren’t they? Don’t lean back, you’ll crush them to fragments. Have I said something funny?’ she said, surprised, catching Lewis’s grin. ‘Yes, I’d adore some more, if there is any. Gosh, Tissy, you must give me lessons. My cooking is nowhere up to this standard.’

At this point the figure of Mrs Harper was to be seen crossing the hall. The peculiar showiness of her gait had not diminished since the first time Lewis had seen her stroll out of the library, her daughter on her arm. Age had, if anything, increased it, made it heavier. She was slower now, more elaborate, more declamatory. At some point in her girlhood she must have expected roomfuls to rise at her entrance. There was still something of the proud beauty about her, but spoilt now, diminished, disappointed.

‘Oh, look,’ exclaimed Emmy. ‘Your cook’s just leaving. Do stop her. We must tell her how good this is.’

‘It’s my mother,’ said Tissy, tonelessly.

‘Thea,’ called Lewis. ‘Come and join us. This food is wonderful. My mother-in-law is a brilliant cook,’ he explained to Emmy.

‘I’ll say she is,’ said Emmy, ‘Oh, do come in, darling, and tell us how to make this heavenly stuff. Pen is getting so tired of beans on toast.’

Pen poured Mrs Harper a glass of champagne, which she drank with her normal lack of pleasure. Lewis sensed that she was tempted to stay, and would have done so were it not for her daughter’s honour. Suddenly he felt entirely relaxed. But,
‘Enjoy your meal,’ said Mrs Harper, as soon as her glass was empty.

‘If you stay I can walk you home,’ Lewis urged, but she was determined to go. ‘Nice to have met you,’ she said to Pen. ‘We’ve heard a lot about you.’ Pen lifted his glass to her. Emmy blew her a kiss. All the while Tissy sat immobile, a faint pink colouring her cheeks.

The four roast poussins nestled in a deep bed of parsley-speckled greenish rice. Their arrival was greeted with a cheer. As Tissy lowered the heavy platter on to the table Lewis reached for Emmy’s plate. Between two silver spoons a poussin slipped inexorably downwards, landing on the tablecloth. The platter was abruptly relinquished, a chair pushed back. ‘Look, darling,’ said Emmy busily, wiping a fleck of rice from her cheek, as Tissy burst into tears. ‘I do this all the time. At least it didn’t land on the floor.’ She appeared to think of this as an extenuating circumstance. Lewis took a deep draught of wine. Emmy ladled the chickens untidily on to their plates, went round to Tissy, and put her arms around her. ‘It’s your tiny wrists you ought to blame. Look at mine! Like a navvy’s! Don’t let it get cold, it looks too delicious. There’s a good girl.’ She wiped Tissy’s cheeks, went back to her chair, and ate, again enthusiastically. ‘Nothing is better than food,’ she pronounced beatifically. ‘Not even sex. Well, not all the time.’ Pen groaned and shook his head. ‘I must ring your mother and ask her how she cooked these. You are lucky, Lewis. When I think what we put up with at home.’

Suddenly Lewis felt reckless. Destiny stared him in the face; he knew it must be resisted, but he thought he might offer himself a few moments of reprieve.

‘Dear old thing,’ said Emmy. ‘You’ve done us proud. I shall have to lose weight before I go on camera.’

‘I’ve seen you on television,’ offered Tissy.

‘You’ll see more of me in the autumn,’ said Emmy. ‘Oh, this tart! Divine!’ Her fork poised in mid-air, she closed her eyes in ecstasy. ‘It’s only a small part but we’re shooting it in France. Near Dijon. More lovely food. Well,
lovely everything.’ Her face took on a look of sly reminiscence: she seemed older, greedier. She was not young, Lewis thought; about his own age, thirtyish, a little more. She was not slim, careful, elegant, virginal. She was the opposite of all those things, very much the opposite. He was surprised to find himself evaluating her in this way, and wondered mildly at the brutality of his thoughts. Even his fantasies, it seemed, must always be censored. Besides, he told himself, he did not appreciate this sort of carelessness in a woman. He was, for better or worse, attuned to something in his wife’s mould, even if not always to his wife. He watched Emmy covertly, as her face loosened, coarsened. Then he looked at Tissy, who, under Pen’s gentle tutelage, was now talking prettily and happily.

‘Coffee, darling?’ he said, feeling once more well-disposed, benevolent, but also guilty.

‘Of course,’ said Tissy. ‘Coffee, everyone? Would you like to go into the other room?’

It was at this point, hearing his wife utter these appropriately wifely sentences, that Lewis realized that the evening had been a complete success.

‘You did very well,’ he said, later in bed, meaning it, but stifling a yawn as he said the words. ‘Did you enjoy it?’

There was no answer. He knew she was not asleep.

‘You like Pen, don’t you?’ A silent nod, in the dark.

‘And Emmy? Did you like Emmy?’

There was a long pause, so long that he wondered if she had gone to sleep. He felt his consciousness drifting. ‘Tissy?’ he said, coming to himself with a jerk. There was another long pause, this time apparently definitive. Suddenly Tissy turned over violently, presenting her back to him. He knew what that meant.

‘I thought she was rather rude,’ she said.

9

‘Peace, Lewis,’ said Goldsborough, raising a pontifical hand.

‘Good morning,’ Lewis replied.

This new airy yet solemn version of Goldsborough made him feel staid, impossibly old hat. What was his excuse for not joining in what Goldsborough referred to as the ‘effervescence’? The trouble was that it had reached the library rather late, too late for any sustaining ideology, and Goldsborough, now wearing a flat black leather cap, was forced to preside over empty desks and only rare disruptions. These, however, were enough to rejuvenate him. The new criticism had been cast aside, and the hapless artists and their letters temporarily discarded. It was the sociology of television that now claimed his attention, his devotion, even. He saw a brilliant future for himself at very little capital outlay: when not watching television he could be on it. He had jettisoned dignity as being of little use to him in these exciting times; voluptuously he threw in his lot with the lowest common denominator. And who better to deal with the culture of the masses than the universal man he knew himself to be? Life, to Goldsborough, was infinitely more genial once he had abandoned his hard-won academic solitude. Like a man who has been on a stringent diet for too long he surrendered himself to popular entertainment, popular music, popular food, popular beer. He had found a new use for deconstruction. Best of all, he had rediscovered
the simple pleasures of his adolescence, of that time before he had learned to strive and to discriminate. ‘Identifying’ was how he thought of this process, as if he were on an eminence which permitted him to view the world with enormous yet enlightened sympathy. Tucking into a manly meat pie and chips in the canteen, he was assured not only of solidarity, not only of pioneering a new study, but of the satisfaction of appetites he had discarded with his naïve and hopeful boyhood. He characterized this feeling as ‘relevance’. Sometimes, to distinguish himself from his material, he would smoke an articulated futurist chromium pipe. This he confined to his leisure hours, in the pub. Inside the library he felt he was taking on a new intellectual lustre. At lunchtime he could address himself to the further delights of jam roll and custard with a clear conscience.

Lewis was aware of the effervescence only in the form of odd-smelling cigarette smoke in the corridors, and on one occasion in the open doorway of the library itself. His own anger, once he had traced the stale vanillic odour to its source, astonished him, as did the vigour with which he seized the offender’s arm in one suddenly giant hand. Manhandling him out into the corridor, he listened grimly to the man’s whining protest.

‘Jesus, man, this is 1970.’

‘Too late,’ said Lewis, tight-lipped. ‘You missed the bus in 1968. And probably before that too.
Nobody
smokes near the books. Is that clear? Only barbarians smoke in libraries. The last person to misbehave in a library was Attila the Hun.’

The power of his feeling was both surprising and puzzling to him, since of recent weeks he had been aware only of a vast and almost terminal calm. He was inclined to shrug mentally at the damping down of his hopes, thinking this to be consonant with maturity, or if not with maturity then with growing older. Yet his dreams told him of his disappointment, and even of his displacement into an alien environment. Lying there in the dark, beside a wife who was no more distant in sleep than she was when she was
awake, helpless with the need to protect her and to instruct her, he longed for freedom. On one occasion he dreamed that he had risen up in the bed and flown, hands clasped, out of the window, like a soul escaping from the body, leaving his inert physical envelope next to an undisturbed Tissy. He thought of this on the following day and found it exaggerated. He could not have said that he was unhappy, but equally he could not have said that he was happy. He supposed, mildly, that he would go on as he was, living in the same house, with the same wife, writing his book (which he could not abandon, although he knew it to be finished), but once he had registered this sameness he felt almost faint. He dismissed his reaction as excessive, for his life was comfortable, safe, even pleasant. He arrived at a state of indifference: no harsh words, no protest, no criticism. With this armour he was able to confront and to endure the daily routines of his existence. He sometimes felt in relation to his wife as if he were some honourable but sexless connection – an uncle, a father-in-law – rather than a husband. They made love willingly, but she remained polite, formal. He said nothing, for this was the attitude she preferred. What he preferred he hardly knew any more, so dulled and hazed was he with his self-imposed withdrawal from himself.