The Rotters' Club (26 page)

Sometimes, when he was alone like this, Benjamin would wait for God to speak to him. He was reminded of the silence in the locker room, and then the door of the nearby locker swinging open and shut, and then his own footfalls as he went to retrieve the gift that had been left for him that momentous day. But God had not spoken to him since then. He would, of course; some time, some time soon, He would speak to him again. But there was nothing Benjamin could do, for now, except wait. Patience was everything.

He heard footsteps in the corridor. A light, feminine tread, heading past his own half-closed doorway, in the direction of the editorial meeting room. He took no notice.

Benjamin wondered if he should begin work on the apology. But the effort suddenly seemed tremendous, the physical effort of lifting his finger and striking one of the typewriter keys, striking it firmly enough for a letter to be imprinted on the page, to say nothing of the mental effort, deciding which key he should strike, and therefore, by extension, which word should bear the awful responsibility of coming first. He would write it at home, tomorrow or on Sunday. There was plenty of time. Far preferable now just to savour this aloofness, to close himself off, settle further still into a luscious insensibility that no sound, no image would ever be able to pierce.

And indeed, it wasn’t a sound or an image that roused Benjamin from his inertia at all. It was a smell. The smell of a cigarette.

This was very odd. Smoking in school was forbidden, so strictly forbidden that even Doug had never been known to try it. As soon as the unmistakable stagnant odour reached his nose, Benjamin was intrigued. He rose immediately from the chair in which he had come to assume an almost supine position, and walked carefully – even stealthily – along the corridor towards the meeting room. On reaching the doorway he paused, and then for some moments feasted his startled eyes on the seated figure of Cicely Boyd.

She was sitting, or rather crouching, at the editorial table, with her back to the door, and with one bare foot (the shoe seemed to have come off) tucked beneath her bottom. Her posture radiated tension and nervous expectancy. She was wearing fawn trousers and a loose, chunky, navy blue Argyll sweater, with the famous golden hair swept into a long ponytail which reached almost to the small of her back. Ash from her unfiltered cigarette fluttered down on to the table, unnoticed, as she stared intently towards the window, favouring Benjamin with a view of her left profile. Her nose was thin and aquiline, her eyes were the palest blue imaginable, there was a galaxy of tiny freckles above her cheekbones, and one even tinier mole on her left cheek. All of these details were new to Benjamin, who realized now that he had never really seen Cicely before, except at a distance, or in snatched glimpses. Here, close up, in the flesh, she was fifty, a hundred, a million times more beautiful than he could have thought possible. For many seconds, it seemed, his heart stopped beating completely.

Then she turned; and he knew at once, before their eyes had even had a chance to meet, that she had come here for no other purpose than to see him.

He took a faltering, involuntary step forward.

‘You’re Benjamin,’ she stated, baldly.

‘Yes.’ And for some reason, the next thing he said was: ‘You’re not allowed to smoke in here, you know.’

‘Ah.’ She let her cigarette fall, picked up her shoe and carefully ground the glowing stub into the floor. ‘We must stick to the rules, mustn’t we?’

She looked at him for a while, until he felt compelled to say something else:

‘Everybody’s gone home.’

‘Not quite everybody,’ she answered. ‘It was you I wanted to meet.’ She took a breath. ‘You wrote –’

‘– a review of your play, yes, I know. I’m…’ (and suddenly the word seemed useless, although it was the only one he had) ‘… sorry.’

She took stock of this comment; absorbed and pondered it.

‘Why did you write it?’ she asked, after what seemed like a long pause.

Benjamin had been dreading this question. It was the same question he had been pointedly refusing to ask himself, and now that it confronted him, there was no plausible answer that he could see. Quite simply, some sort of madness must have seized him when he sat down at the typewriter that evening. Here, after all, was the opportunity he had been dreaming of for years: the chance to compose, not just a love letter to Cicely, but something infinitely more potent – a public statement of his admiration for her, a panegyric to her beauty and her talent which couldn’t fail to put her endlessly in his debt. And yet for some crazy, unfathomable reason he had done nothing of the kind. He had sacrificed this glorious opening on the altar of some half-baked notion of critical objectivity. Yes, her performance had been bad; of course he had realized that, of course he had believed it; but to have said so, in such uncompromising terms, when every motion of his heart was telling him to do the opposite – well, this was idiotic. This was perverseness of the first order. The whole episode, in fact, raised a much larger question, just as unanswerable, and one which was pressing itself upon him a good deal these days: what was the
matter
with him, exactly?

Cicely, in any case, did not wait for his response. She had her own, ready to hand.

‘I’ll tell you why you wrote it,’ she said, and then her voice cracked and broke. ‘Because it was true. Every word.’

As soon as she said this, Benjamin had, for the first time in his life, what might be called an out-of-body experience. He could see himself, quite clearly, rushing towards her, kneeling down beside her chair and putting a comforting arm around her shoulder. He could hear himself, quite distinctly, saying, ‘No, Cicely, no. It wasn’t true. None of it was true. I was stupid to write it.’ He could see at once that this was the right and natural thing to do. But he didn’t do it. He said nothing, and remained by the doorway.

‘The last few weeks have been dreadful. Unimaginable.’ She took another cigarette out of the packet and began to twirl it between agitated fingers. ‘First of all that interview. That… thing Claire wrote.’ She screwed up her eyes at the recollection. ‘So hurtful.’

‘I think Claire has a problem,’ Benjamin volunteered, tentatively. ‘Where you’re concerned. I think she may be a bit jealous.’

‘She used to be my friend,’ said Cicely. She was speaking to herself, and gave no indication of having heard his remark. ‘I must have done something awful to her.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Benjamin, but again she ignored him.

‘I hate myself. I really do.’ She looked at Benjamin directly now. ‘Do you know what that’s like? Do
you
hate yourself?’

‘Perhaps I should, after what I did to you,’ said Benjamin; or would have done, if he wasn’t having another out-of-body experience. Instead he mumbled: ‘I don’t know, really.’

‘But in a way,’ Cicely continued, ‘what she wrote… What she wrote is easier to cope with. Because she didn’t mean any of it. She was just being a bitch. And none of it was true. Whereas
you
did mean it, didn’t you? You hated my performance. Everything about it.’

‘No, I… I was being very harsh. I don’t know why.’

‘Did I really get all those stresses wrong?’

‘So did everybody else, actually,’ Benjamin said, in a vain attempt to make things better. ‘If anything it was Tim’s fault. He was directing you, after all.’

Cicely stood up, and drifted towards the window. She was taller than he had thought, and so slender, and lovely, and so full of grace. Benjamin cowered at the thought that he might have vandalized such beauty, done violence to it in any way.

‘What about… Harding’s letter?’ he found himself compelled to ask, rather to his amazement. ‘That wasn’t true either, was it?’

Cicely turned sharply. ‘About me and Steve?’

He nodded.

‘It was wicked of them to print that. Steve’s girlfriend saw it. She dumped him.’ And now her whole body shook, with a visible sob. ‘It happens so easily. You’re working with someone, things get very intense. It was only a little fling, I never meant it to do any harm. Oh, I’m a terrible, terrible person.’

Benjamin had run out of reassuring words, and besides, the knowledge that Richards had indeed enjoyed this good fortune, however briefly, filled him with an irrational and paralyzing jealousy. Once again some better-natured but inaccessible part of him suggested that he should be offering physical comfort to Cicely. Once again, he remained frozen to the spot.

Even without his assistance, she managed to compose herself after a moment or two. She stood by the window with her back towards him, and wiped her cheeks with a scrap of tissue. Then she turned. Her eyes, though still red-rimmed, now carried within them the hint of a different, steelier light.

‘You could be good for me,’ she said, unexpectedly.

‘Pardon?’

‘I think you have an interesting mind.’

‘Thank you,’ said Benjamin, after a stunned pause.

‘Sometimes I can be vain but that doesn’t mean I take no notice of criticism. Because most of my friends are a bit scared of me, they only say what they think I want to hear. Whereas you…’ (and the smile she suddenly turned on him was at once combative and bewitching) ‘… you’d give it to me straight, wouldn’t you? Every time.’

‘Well… I’m not sure I know what you mean, but – yes, I’d try to.’

‘When I said that I hate myself,’ Cicely continued, sitting on the table, now, so that she was almost at Benjamin’s level and there were only three or four feet between them, ‘I wasn’t being flippant. Everything about me is going to change. It has to.’

‘I don’t think…’ Benjamin began.

‘Yes?’

But he had already forgotten what he was going to say.

‘You know, they told me you didn’t talk much,’ she said, once he had tailed off, ‘but I didn’t expect you to be
quite
so silent. You’re practically a Trappist.’

‘Who’s they?’ Benjamin asked. ‘Who told you that I didn’t say much?’

‘Everybody,’ said Cicely. ‘I’ve been asking around about you, of course. Who wouldn’t, after reading that piece?’

‘So what…’ (Benjamin swallowed hard) ‘… what did they say, exactly?’

Cicely looked at him gravely. ‘You know, Benjamin, it’s not always a blessing to know what other people think of you.’ She let this advice hang in the air, could see that it was wasted, and went on: ‘Anyway, you’ve got nothing to worry about. Most people just said that they couldn’t make you out. “Inscrutable” was the word that seemed to keep coming up. People seem to think you’re probably some kind of genius, but not necessarily someone they’d want to be stuck on a train with.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Benjamin, laughing uneasily. ‘The genius bit, I mean.’

Cicely assured him, with quiet emphasis: ‘The world expects great things of you, Benjamin.’

He stared mutely at the floor, then looked up and met her gaze for the first time: ‘I don’t think you should change, you know.’

‘That’s sweet of you,’ said Cicely. ‘But you’re wrong. What do you think of my hair?’

Benjamin’s little moment of forthrightness had already passed, and instead of saying, as he would have liked to, ‘It’s amazing’ or ‘You’ve got the most beautiful hair I’ve ever seen’, he mumbled: ‘I like it. It’s very nice.’

Cicely laughed acidly, and shook her head. Then, noticing a pair of paper-scissors at the other end of the table, she reached across, picked them up, and passed them over to Benjamin. ‘I want you to cut it off,’ she said.

‘What?’

She sat on the chair again, turned her back on Benjamin, and repeated: ‘I want you to cut it off. All of it.’

‘All of it?’

‘All –’ she tugged the bottom of her ponytail, as if it were a bell-rope ‘– all of this stuff.’

‘I can’t do that,’ said Benjamin, shocked.

‘Why not?’

‘I’ve never cut anyone’s hair off. I’ll make a mess of it.’

‘For God’s sake, I’m not asking for a perm. One big snip ought to be enough.’

Benjamin stepped forward and reached out a terrified hand. It would be the first time he had touched her. It would be the first time he had touched any girl, apart from his sister, since reaching puberty.

He drew back and said: ‘Are you sure about this?’

Cicely sighed. ‘Of course I am. Just do it.’

Benjamin took the ribbon of hair into his shaking hand. The fineness and softness of it were hardly to be believed. It glimmered between his fingers. The act that he was about to perform seemed frightful in its wanton finality.

Gathering together Cicely’s hair to put it between the jaws of the scissors, he could not help brushing against her skin. At once he felt her whole body stiffen, either anticipating the cut, or in response to the careless touch of his fingers against the fine down at the back of her neck.

‘Sorry,’ he murmured. And then: ‘Here we go, then.’

Cicely tautened again.

‘Ready… Steady…

‘GO.’

The action of the scissors was sudden and entirely effective. The hair came away in his hand, and he clutched it tightly, not letting a single strand fall to the floor. Cicely stood up.

‘Here.’

She handed him the Cyclops Records bag he had thrown earlier on to a side-table, and with loving deliberation he folded the hair three times over, so that it fitted neatly inside. Meanwhile Cicely had whipped a compact out of her pocket and was inspecting her new bob with an appalled, curious gaze.

‘Makes you look a bit like Joanna Lumley,’ Benjamin suggested. ‘In
The New Avengers.’

This was not true at all. It made her look like one of the inmates of a Nazi concentration camp he had seen recently on a TV documentary. But anyway, she didn’t seem to hear him; turning the mirror this way and that she merely whispered to herself, ‘Oh my God…’

‘What, erm…’ Benjamin gestured with the bag of hair. ‘… What shall I do with this, then?’

‘Do whatever you want with it,’ said Cicely, still preoccupied.

‘OK.’ He put it down on the table for now. ‘Right.’

After a few more seconds’ contemplation, Cicely snapped the compact shut and put it away. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’s a start.’ She found a sheet of paper on the table, scribbled some figures on it and handed it to Benjamin.