would beg, fight, travel, succeed, die.
Terence
thinks — he doesn’t actually dare say it — that my life is in some sense a gloating parody of the huff-and-puff of his own quotidian dreads, slumped where he is now in his days and days. All my gifts — social, monetary, physiognomic — take on monstrous shape, loom large like muscle-clouds, in his sallow mind. He sees me as somehow the active champion of the privilege which Imerely passively embody. That sad bastard, he didn’t do anything to end up like he is. Only he let what happened to him happen to him, and that’s enough these days. The world is changing; the past has gone, and from now on it is all future tense. The yobs may be winning, but they’ve left no room for him inside.
Do I mind — do I mind the guaranteed dazzle of my days, the way I surge from one proud eminence to another, the way my life has always pounded through the unequal landscape about us on arrow-straight, slick silvery rails? I hold my eye in the glass — funny feeling: it’s always nice; we have a good time together (it’s like catching nature rhyming). I suppose it’s a gift, like any other, and the inordinately gifted have always had a certain dread of their own genius. There’s a pang in it somewhere … lonely are the beautiful, like the brilliant, like the brave.
(Terence Service is my foster-brother, by the way. I know, but there it is. My parents went and adopted him when he was a lad of nine. The first chapter of his life was spent in some hired box in the Scovill Road area of Cambridge, the meandering slum that lies between the railway station and the cattle-market. His mother, a freelance charwoman, died when Terry was six or seven, and for a few years he and his little sister lived under the sole care of their father, a perfectly able carpenter by the name of Ronald. It was conjectured that Service Sr had an intimate say in the death of his wife, and, in due course, the view received pointed corroboration when the brute savagely murdered his own daughter. Terence was, as I say, nine years old, and there at the time, so you should indulge his going on about it. The melodrama won a fair amount of attention in Cambridge — not least because Terence lived on for a week in the deserted hovel before anyone realized he was there — and it was only through the local rag’s shameless mawk-campaign that little Terry’s tragedy came to the benign notice of my family,the Ridings. I remember my father, over the breakfast table, reading out the daily bulletins in that soppy old voice of his, while Mama and I exchanged wary yawns. He was going through one of his gluttonously humane phases — or, more accurately, he had recently read something somewhere about humanity, or had read something somewhere about someone being gluttonously humane — and ‘literally’ could not rest until Terence had been satisfactorily housed. What took my father’s fancy, you see, was not the corny squalor of Terry’s plight so much as certain imagined affinities between his family and our own (too boring to rehearse — get them from Terence). His concern for the waif grew; he longed for him to be taken into care. Mama and I did our best to reason with him — ‘But the boy, the boy,’ he would say, slowly shaking that big crazy head. Father’s considerable influence was brought to bear: the plans were formed, the authorities notified …
As the village princeling and household cosset, the toast of the family, the
mignon
of the minions, the darling of the staff, my feelings about the proposed adoption would not be hard to divine. I stared at the small visage splashed on the paper’s dirty front page (caption:
Terry Service — Friday’s Child
) until the grain of the print seemed to stir with a writhing furtive life: this, just this, was soon to push me to one side of my cloudless childhood days, an alien and frightened boy, a scurrying cur, no more corporeal to me, really, than a smudge
Terence
thinks — he doesn’t actually dare say it — that my life is in some sense a gloating parody of the huff-and-puff of his own quotidian dreads, slumped where he is now in his days and days. All my gifts — social, monetary, physiognomic — take on monstrous shape, loom large like muscle-clouds, in his sallow mind. He sees me as somehow the active champion of the privilege which Imerely passively embody. That sad bastard, he didn’t do anything to end up like he is. Only he let what happened to him happen to him, and that’s enough these days. The world is changing; the past has gone, and from now on it is all future tense. The yobs may be winning, but they’ve left no room for him inside.
Do I mind — do I mind the guaranteed dazzle of my days, the way I surge from one proud eminence to another, the way my life has always pounded through the unequal landscape about us on arrow-straight, slick silvery rails? I hold my eye in the glass — funny feeling: it’s always nice; we have a good time together (it’s like catching nature rhyming). I suppose it’s a gift, like any other, and the inordinately gifted have always had a certain dread of their own genius. There’s a pang in it somewhere … lonely are the beautiful, like the brilliant, like the brave.
(Terence Service is my foster-brother, by the way. I know, but there it is. My parents went and adopted him when he was a lad of nine. The first chapter of his life was spent in some hired box in the Scovill Road area of Cambridge, the meandering slum that lies between the railway station and the cattle-market. His mother, a freelance charwoman, died when Terry was six or seven, and for a few years he and his little sister lived under the sole care of their father, a perfectly able carpenter by the name of Ronald. It was conjectured that Service Sr had an intimate say in the death of his wife, and, in due course, the view received pointed corroboration when the brute savagely murdered his own daughter. Terence was, as I say, nine years old, and there at the time, so you should indulge his going on about it. The melodrama won a fair amount of attention in Cambridge — not least because Terence lived on for a week in the deserted hovel before anyone realized he was there — and it was only through the local rag’s shameless mawk-campaign that little Terry’s tragedy came to the benign notice of my family,the Ridings. I remember my father, over the breakfast table, reading out the daily bulletins in that soppy old voice of his, while Mama and I exchanged wary yawns. He was going through one of his gluttonously humane phases — or, more accurately, he had recently read something somewhere about humanity, or had read something somewhere about someone being gluttonously humane — and ‘literally’ could not rest until Terence had been satisfactorily housed. What took my father’s fancy, you see, was not the corny squalor of Terry’s plight so much as certain imagined affinities between his family and our own (too boring to rehearse — get them from Terence). His concern for the waif grew; he longed for him to be taken into care. Mama and I did our best to reason with him — ‘But the boy, the boy,’ he would say, slowly shaking that big crazy head. Father’s considerable influence was brought to bear: the plans were formed, the authorities notified …
As the village princeling and household cosset, the toast of the family, the
mignon
of the minions, the darling of the staff, my feelings about the proposed adoption would not be hard to divine. I stared at the small visage splashed on the paper’s dirty front page (caption:
Terry Service — Friday’s Child
) until the grain of the print seemed to stir with a writhing furtive life: this, just this, was soon to push me to one side of my cloudless childhood days, an alien and frightened boy, a scurrying cur, no more corporeal to me, really, than a smudge
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