The Rachel Papers (2 page)

'Sorry?'

'I mean it's just an extra.'

'Oh, absolutely. Thanks for the offer, by the way, but I think I'll take the train down. See you at dinner.'

I made myself some coffee in the kitchen and browsed through those Sunday papers that weren't draped over my mother's tent-like bulk on the sitting-room sofa. I wore a tired smirk. What did you expect? I thought. Outside, the sky was already beginning to turn shadowy mackerel. How soon would it get dark? I decided to leave for London straightway, while there was still time.

I suppose I really ought to explain.

The thing is that I am a member of that sad, ever-dwindling minority ... the child of an unbroken home. I have carried this albatross since the age of eleven, when I started at grammar school. Not a day would pass without somebody I knew turning out to be adopted or illegitimate, or to have mothers who were about to hare off with some bloke, or to have dead fathers and shabby stepfathers. What busy lives they led. How I envied their excuses for introspection, their ear-marked receptacles for every just antagonism and noble loyalty.

Once, last year, when we were all sixth-forming round the school coffee-bar (everyone else had to be in class), I was bor-ingly reproached by a friend for 'actually hating' my father, who wasn't villainous or despotic, after all, merely dismiss-ible. My friend quietly pointed out that he 'had no feelings of hatred' for his father, although he (the father) apparently spent most days with one fist down his wife's throat and the other up the au pair's bum. Precisely, I thought. I tipped my chair back against the wall and replied (somewhat high-mind-edly, having that week read a selection of D. H. Lawrence's essays):

'Not at all, Pete, you miss the point. Hatred is the only emotionally educated reaction to a sterile family environment. It's a destructive and ... painful emotion, perhaps, but I think I must not deny it if I am to keep my family alive in my imagination and my viscera, if not in my heart.'

Cor, I thought, and so did they. Pete looked at me now with moody respect, like a sceptic at a successful séance - which, of course, was exactly how I looked; there it was, morally intelligible at last.

Not that there aren't, in my view, plenty of urgent reasons for hating him; it's just that he constitutes such a puny objective correlative, never does anything glamorously unpleasant. And, good Lord, in this day and age a kid has to have something to get worked up about, skimpy though his material may be. So the emotion that walks like a burglar through our house trying all the doors has found mine the only one unlocked, indeed wide open: for there are no valuables inside.

Now I kneel, take from the bed the largest stack of papers, and fan it out on the floor.

It's strange; although my father is probably the most fully documented character in my files, he doesn't merit a note-pad to himself, let alone a folder. Mother, of course, has her own portfolio, and my brothers and sisters each have the usual quarto booklet (excepting the rather inconsequential Saman-tha, who gets only a 3p Smith's Memorandum). Why nothing for my father? Is this a way of getting back at him ?

At the top left-hand corner of every page in which he features, I write 'F'.

My father has in all sired six children. I used to suspect that he had had so many just to show the catholicity of his tastes, to bolster his image as tolerant patriarch, to inform the world that his loins were rich in sons. There are in fact four boys, and he has given us progressively trendy names: Mark (twenty-six), Charles himself (pushing twenty), Sebastian (fifteen) and Valentine (nine). As against two girls. I sometimes wish I had been born female, if only to rectify this bias.

The most unattractive thing about him, or at any rate one of the most unattractive things about him, is that he gets fitter as he gets older. The minute he started to get rich (a mysterious process this, dating back some eight or nine years) he started also to take an increasingly lively interest in his health. He played tennis at weekends and squash three times a week at the Hurlingham. He gave up smoking and abstained from whisky and other harmful liquors. I correctly took this as a vulgar admission on my father's part that now he was richer he had every intention of living longer. A few months ago I caught the old turd doing press-ups in his room.

He looks sweaty, too. Due no doubt to delayed shock, his hair began pouring out soon after the money began pouring in. For a while he tried things like combing the seaweed curls forward, practically from the nape of his neck, to form a Brylcreemed cap which any sudden movement would gash with etiolated scalp. But eventually he realized it wasn't on and let his hair go its own way, which it did, teasing itself into two grey-coloured wiry wings on either side of his else hair-free head. It was a great improvement, I'm sorry to say, combining with his large, pointed face and short-shanked body to give him a certain ferrety sexual presence.

For some time now, his ferrety favours have been the preserve of his mistress, as I was assured at the age of thirteen by my elder brother. Mark was raffishly mature about it and had no patience with my falsetto disgust. Gordon Highway, he explained, was still a healthy and vigorous man; his wife, on the other hand, was - well, look for yourself.

And I looked. What a heap. The skin had shrunken over her skull, to accentuate her jaw and to provide commodious cellarage for the gloomy pools that were her eyes; her breasts had long forsaken their native home and now flanked her navel; and her buttocks, when she wore stretch-slacks, would dance behind her knees like punch-balls. The gnomic literature she was reading empowered her to give up on her appearance. Off came her hair, on came the butch jeans and fisherman's jerseys. In her gardening clothes she resembled a
slightly
effeminate, though perfectly lusty, farm labourer.

Anyhow I rampaged enthusiastically about all this, largely I think as a reaction against my brother's greasy permissiveness. Also, I had never thought of my father as being particularly vigorous nor of mother as being particularly unattractive or of either of them as being anything but quietly, and asexually, content with each other. And I didn't want to see them this way, in sexual terms. I was too young.

Even this, though, you see, even this failed to put any bite, any real
spunk,
into family life.

The Highway kitchen, nine o'clock, any Monday morning:

'Are you off now, dear?'

My father pushes his grapefruit aside, swipes his mouth with a napkin. 'In a minute.'

'Shall I be able to reach you at the flat, or at the Kensington number?'

'Uh, the flat tonight and,' narrowing his eyes, 'I
think
on Wednesday. So the Kensington number Tuesday and probably' - flexing his forehead -
'probably
Thursday. If in doubt, ring the office.'

I always tried to avoid these exchanges and felt like peeing in my trousers whenever I accidentally witnessed one. But in fairness it wasn't the sort of thing you could actually get yourself into a state about. If only mother minded more. Surely, I felt, she must spend
some
time wondering when he would start arriving on Saturday morning instead of Friday night, start leaving on Sunday night instead of Monday morning, when his weekend with the family would suddenly and irreversibly become his day with the children.

I packed - crucial juvenilia, plenty of paperbacks, and some clothes - then looked round the house for people to say goodbye to.

Mother was still asleep, and Samantha had gone to stay with a friend of hers. The study was empty so I wandered through the dusky passages calling out to my father, but there was no reply. Sebastian, being fifteen, was probably making eyes at his bedroom ceiling. There remained one brother.

Valentine was in the attic playroom, knee-deep in a metropolis of Scalextric, dicing model sports-cars. I said I was going and told him to give my love to everyone, but he couldn't hear me. I left a note on the hall table, and crept off.

Seven twenty: London

Now I look round my room and it seems a companionable place to be - what with the two wine bottles, the subdued lighting, the listless but reassuring presence of paper and books.
Highway's London,
one of my note-pads, has it that I found the room 'oppressive, sulky with the past, crouching in wan defiance as I turned to look at it' on that September Sunday. My word. I suppose I was just moodier then, or more respectful of my moods, more inclined to think they were worth anything.

Of course, if Philip Larkin is anyone to go by, we all hate home and having to be there.

It was certainly nice to get out of the house and, come to think of it, 1 did feel quite braced and manly walking the nut-strewn lane to the village. The Oxford bus wasn't due to leave for another quarter of an hour, so I had a well-earned-half at the pub and chatted with the landlord and his wrecky wife, Mr and Mrs Bladderby. (Interestingly, Mrs Bladderby had an even wreckier mother, who was eighty and had, moreover, during a recent outing, got her left leg slurped into a dreadful piece of agricultural machinery; she was far too ga-ga to die of shock, had indeed never mentioned the fateful picnic since. Now Mrs Lockhart resided in the room above the saloon, clubbing the floor with a warped bar-billiards cue whenever she needed attention.) As Mrs Bladderby disappeared to answer just such a summons, Mr Bladderby wagged his head at my suitcases and asked whether I was off on holiday again.

I stalled until the lady returned and then settled down to making it clear that, chinless elitist and bratty whey-faced lordling that I most unquestionably was, my move to London had nothing to do with any antipathy towards themselves, nor towards the village - far less did it symptomize a disillusionment with the rustic pieties, etc., etc. I gave two reasons. The first was 'to study', earning a look of grim approval from Mr Bladderby; the second was 'to see my sister', earning a glare of congeniality from his wife. When I finished my drink and glanced at my wristwatch they appeared to be really sorry to see me go, and two of the unemployable old locals looked up and said goodbye. Carefully closing the door after me, I was in no doubt whatever that one of them would now be saying: 'That Charles, you know - he's a fucking nice boy'; and then: 'Yes, I agree - a
fucking
nice boy.'

And quite right too. Thinking back, actually, 'self-infatuation' strikes me as a rather ill-chosen word. It isn't so much that I like or love myself. Rather, I'm sentimental about myself. (I say, is this normal for someone my age?) What do I think of Charles Highway? I think: 'Charles Highway? Oh, I like him. Yes, I've got a soft spot for old Charles. He's all right is Charlie. Chuck's ...
okay.'

The bus was good, too. I sat up the front, to admire the chubby, unsmiling driver, whose combination of snake-eyed intentness and natural flair made quite good viewing. Elation was gathering on me like a drug - I smiled at my fellow-passengers, gazed interestedly out of the window, and was polite and deferential to the transport operative, producing the correct money and enunciating my destination clearly.

Nor was it as if this was an obviously epoch-making journey. Perhaps it was simply that I had rung this girl Gloria before I left.

At any rate, Oxford station, recently modernized so as to resemble a complex of Wimpy Bars, was sobering enough. The newsagents was closed so I looked out a paperback from my suitcase. Seated appropriately far from the window,
A Room with a View
lay unopened beside me all the way there.

London is where people go in order to come back from it sadder and wiser. But I had already been there - returned from it only three weeks before, in fact.

When my A-Level results came through my father beefily gave me seventy-five pounds with which to 'get the hell out of England and have a good time'. It was suggested that I go to a warm healthy country, and stay there some while; otherwise I was given a free hand. A boy I knew was going to Spain the next week so I gave him a newsy letter addressed to my parents for him to post when he got there. Then, with Geoffrey (a like-minded friend), I headed for Fat City.

We holed up for a month in the Belsize Park flat of a Miss Lizzie Lewis, Geoffrey's actress sister, who was away doing a summer season of panto at a holiday camp in Port Talbot. It was a month I always think of with a certain pimply lyricism. It was a month of plonk and coffee-bars, pinball arcades and party-hunts, of looking for girls and wet daydreams, white smell of sweat and dusty afternoons, of getting burnt by ghoulish hippies, of such mind-expanding drug experiences as pork-chop vomiting and consommé diarrhoea. It ended one mid-August morning when I happened to glance down at the undulating area between my stomach and the stomach of a girl I just so happened to be poking at the time (in a sweaty, hungover state, I might add). What I saw there were worms of dirt — as when a working man, his day done, strides home rubbing his toil-hardened hands together, causing the excess grit to wriggle up into tiny black strings, which he soon brushes impatiently from his palms. Only these were on our stomachs and therefore much bigger: like baby eels.

I was back in Oxford for lunch that same day, with feverish stories about its having been Spain's worst summer since the war - hence the pallor. My parents informed me, however, that I had 'been seen' on the Portobello Road in the last week of July. I denied this and silenced them by pretending to be far iller than I was, not that they need much silencing. (There was also the question of a little going-away present from the young lady - my partner in grime - which is another story.)