the bathroom door. ‘There’s one thing I’m really rather expert at.’
‘Well?’
But the old trout is gone —
my
, how tantalizing — to service the stray scaffolding of her stays. Tubes rustle and gasp as I sprint upstairs.
Recuperating at my desk, I sense the compact Jason’s diagonal approach. I look up.
‘Of course, I don’t go in for that much any more,’ he says, looping his right arm in a bowler’s swivel.
‘In for what much?’
‘Played tennis this weekend. Terrible mistake. I feel like I’ve been beaten up. Very rash. Never again.’
He plants his pert derrière on the edge of my desk‘Did you go in for all that, Greg? Games and so on?’
‘I rowed and played squash for the school and was captain of the First Eleven,’ I tell him, averting my gaze from the coarse lustre of his shantung suit.
He leans forward frowning to sample the muscularity of my thigh. ‘Wouldn’t have thought soccer was your game. Stronger than you look, though.’
‘Not “soccer” — cricket. Football was forbidden at Peerforth.’
‘Quite right too.’
His hand is still idling on my kneecap when busybody Odette shoots up the basement stairs.
‘We’ve got work to do!’ they say to each other in startled harmony, veering off like evasive aircraft to the shared shadows of their room.
Where, at about a quarter-past eleven, I am expected to join them as the three of us assemble for a morning drink variously described to me as ‘coffee’, ‘tea’ and ‘chocolate’ (the last one is, I think, rather sweeter than the first two, but that may be pure fancy). Now the mood changes — rivalries are forgotten, jealousies set at naught. We are warm in there, and after a few minutes I can even start breathing through my nose without undue discomfort. I let them gossip for a bit; I let them tell each other wistful lies about the viability of the gallery; I let them discuss important fixtures in their diary. Then, with hardly any direct prompting from me, it starts:
‘In what terms, Greg, in what — how do you see your future here?’
‘The boy we had before, you know, he wasn’t very happy. He had too many interests, really.’
Boy? Boy? The pathos of it — these people wear their needs on their sleeves!
‘In the end he left for a more … a job that appealed to him more.’
‘As you know, Greg, we’re childless, but we’ve always thought of the gallery as a family affair. Silly really.’
‘We’ve grown very fond of you, as you know, and we’dfeel a lot easier if we could feel that you were, well, sort of a permanent fixture here. Wouldn’t we?’
‘Because — let’s face it — we’ve no one else we can leave it to. Have we?’
And so on. And so on.
God, the horror of being ordinary.
When I see them, other people — a woman who looks like a remedial art-therapist releases a soft gurgle of satisfaction as she and her colleague find seats at the wine-bar, a stroke of luck which considerably lightens her day; in the underground carriage a big man in a cheap grey mackintosh, breathing that bit too hard, is wrestling with a newspaper so explosively that he misses his stop, a reverse which causes him to rise and pace, and to stare suddenly at his watch as if it were a syphilitic boil; the porter at my flat stands becalmed on the stairs all day wondering how old he can be, as if the very air were full of strange equations that would somehow make his life add up — I think: you deserve to be what you are if you could bear to get that way. You must have seen it coming. And now there’s nothing for you here. No one will protect you, and people won’t see any reason not to do you harm. Your life will divide up between the fear of madness and the panic of self-preservation. That’s it: feed up for going mad. I’m afraid that’s all we have to offer you.
Well, well (I bet someone is asking), and what would happen to
me
if …
If I weren’t beautiful, talented, rich and well-born? I
‘Well?’
But the old trout is gone —
my
, how tantalizing — to service the stray scaffolding of her stays. Tubes rustle and gasp as I sprint upstairs.
Recuperating at my desk, I sense the compact Jason’s diagonal approach. I look up.
‘Of course, I don’t go in for that much any more,’ he says, looping his right arm in a bowler’s swivel.
‘In for what much?’
‘Played tennis this weekend. Terrible mistake. I feel like I’ve been beaten up. Very rash. Never again.’
He plants his pert derrière on the edge of my desk‘Did you go in for all that, Greg? Games and so on?’
‘I rowed and played squash for the school and was captain of the First Eleven,’ I tell him, averting my gaze from the coarse lustre of his shantung suit.
He leans forward frowning to sample the muscularity of my thigh. ‘Wouldn’t have thought soccer was your game. Stronger than you look, though.’
‘Not “soccer” — cricket. Football was forbidden at Peerforth.’
‘Quite right too.’
His hand is still idling on my kneecap when busybody Odette shoots up the basement stairs.
‘We’ve got work to do!’ they say to each other in startled harmony, veering off like evasive aircraft to the shared shadows of their room.
Where, at about a quarter-past eleven, I am expected to join them as the three of us assemble for a morning drink variously described to me as ‘coffee’, ‘tea’ and ‘chocolate’ (the last one is, I think, rather sweeter than the first two, but that may be pure fancy). Now the mood changes — rivalries are forgotten, jealousies set at naught. We are warm in there, and after a few minutes I can even start breathing through my nose without undue discomfort. I let them gossip for a bit; I let them tell each other wistful lies about the viability of the gallery; I let them discuss important fixtures in their diary. Then, with hardly any direct prompting from me, it starts:
‘In what terms, Greg, in what — how do you see your future here?’
‘The boy we had before, you know, he wasn’t very happy. He had too many interests, really.’
Boy? Boy? The pathos of it — these people wear their needs on their sleeves!
‘In the end he left for a more … a job that appealed to him more.’
‘As you know, Greg, we’re childless, but we’ve always thought of the gallery as a family affair. Silly really.’
‘We’ve grown very fond of you, as you know, and we’dfeel a lot easier if we could feel that you were, well, sort of a permanent fixture here. Wouldn’t we?’
‘Because — let’s face it — we’ve no one else we can leave it to. Have we?’
And so on. And so on.
God, the horror of being ordinary.
When I see them, other people — a woman who looks like a remedial art-therapist releases a soft gurgle of satisfaction as she and her colleague find seats at the wine-bar, a stroke of luck which considerably lightens her day; in the underground carriage a big man in a cheap grey mackintosh, breathing that bit too hard, is wrestling with a newspaper so explosively that he misses his stop, a reverse which causes him to rise and pace, and to stare suddenly at his watch as if it were a syphilitic boil; the porter at my flat stands becalmed on the stairs all day wondering how old he can be, as if the very air were full of strange equations that would somehow make his life add up — I think: you deserve to be what you are if you could bear to get that way. You must have seen it coming. And now there’s nothing for you here. No one will protect you, and people won’t see any reason not to do you harm. Your life will divide up between the fear of madness and the panic of self-preservation. That’s it: feed up for going mad. I’m afraid that’s all we have to offer you.
Well, well (I bet someone is asking), and what would happen to
me
if …
If I weren’t beautiful, talented, rich and well-born? I
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