Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard
‘Mr Gavin! Mrs Whittington’s ready to come out.’
He glanced across the salon to the table at which a large middle-aged woman sat, under a hairdryer, her face suffused to the matt apoplectic bloom of unpeeled beetroot.
‘Take her out then, Mandy, and get her ready for me. Tell her I’ll be over in two ticks.’
He was combing out Lady Blackwater, who had remarkably little hair the colour, but not the consistency, of steel wool. A blue rinse idealized this effect, and having brushed the sparse, curly
tufts he was now engaged upon a good deal of ingenious backcombing to give the illusion of body. Lady Blackwater’s eyes – round, pink-rimmed, and the shade of well-used washing-up
water, watched him trustfully. Gavin was most reliable. Now he was folding the surface hair over the puffed sub-strata – merging the tufts into three, main diagonal sweeps; Lady Blackwater
evolved from looking like a very old negro child, to someone amusingly surprised in bed in an eighteenth-century print, and then – and this was what Lady Blackwater paid for – to some
distinguished old dyke – a Fellow of the Royal Society – famous for some esoteric service to the Arts or Sciences.
He stepped back from his work, and handed her a looking glass.
She looked at herself carefully. The sculptured effect emphasized the fleshy folds and cracks between what had always been the anonymous features of her face.
‘Very nice, Gavin.’
‘A little spray?’
She shook her head, nearly blushing. Spray seemed wickedly theatrical to her.
A receptionist came into the salon.
‘Gavin, would you be able to see Mrs Buckmaster about her daughter?’
He put his comb back in his pocket and glanced again at Mrs Whittington. She was not reading her magazine, and was patently awaiting him. He observed that Mandy had simply removed the dryer, but
had done nothing about the rollers.
‘Mandy!’
Mandy trailed over to him. She walked as though her feet hurt.
‘I told you to get Mrs Whittington ready. Take the curlers out and put everything back on the tray.’
‘She’s outside at reception now. Shall I tell her you can spare a moment?’
‘Right. Perhaps you would take Lady Blackwater through for me.’
As he turned to say good-bye to her, Lady Blackwater clutched his jacket and made a futile attempt to slip some coins into the lower pocket. A 5 and a 2p coin rolled across the black and white
checkered linoleum. The mean old bitch exposed for once, he thought, as he retrieved the money, thanked her, and popped over to Mrs Whittington to tell her how soon he would be with her. Mrs
Whittington was not pleased. ‘I haven’t got all the afternoon, Gavin,’ she untruthfully announced. Mandy was listlessly removing rollers, and the client’s hair was emerging
as sausages the colour of custard.
‘Back in two ticks, Mrs Whittington,’ he said and hurried through to reception. On his way there, he nearly ran into Mrs Courcel, an immaculately turned out young woman for whom
hairdressing was an obsession.
‘Here I am for my usual,’ she said as though presenting him with an especial treat.
‘May have to wait a few moments,’ he replied. Mrs Courcel came in nearly every day, and apart from tints, cutting, washing and setting and the purchase of innumerable pieces; a
comb-out, her most frequent requirement, meant a long discussion on how her hair could be restyled. She was childless and bored, but his sympathy for her had long ago evaporated; she had nothing to
do all day, and he could not help envying her those hours during which she did not have to earn her living and which he could so easily and interestingly have filled.
Mrs Buckmaster, a tweedy and commanding lady, rose from the white leather chesterfield.
‘Ah – Gavin. I thought, before I made an appointment for her, that you might give us a teeny bit of advice. Cynthia!’
By the time he got back to Mrs Whittington, he found her testily examining
Vogue
.
‘I ask you, Gavin! Can you seriously imagine anybody going out like that?’ She held out the magazine, so that he could see the picture of a young girl wearing what seemed to be lilac
sequinned culottes with wide sequinned braces that miraculously covered her nipples. The girl’s strawberry blonde hair was blowing, and she stood poised by a Palladian bridge in some great
park.
‘Incredible, isn’t it? What gal could ever go about seriously looking like that?’
He smiled pleasantly as he began brushing the custard sausages.
‘I really don’t know, Mrs Whittington.’ He was wondering whether the bridge was from Stowe, or Stourhead, or Wilton or Blenheim.
‘I mean, if one faces up to it, it’s disgusting. It simply isn’t on. If I had ever suggested to my daughter that she should go about in that state she’d have laughed her
head off.’
Gavin had seen Mrs Whittington’s daughter. Her appearance had struck him forcibly as that of a heavyweight policeman in County drag. He had felt quite frightened at tackling her hair,
which was dark, and painfully springy, like heather.
‘It takes all sorts,’ he suggested dutifully. Mrs Whittington did not care for unpredictable conversation.
‘It must do.’ He had brushed all her curls together, so that her hair looked like Instant Whip. ‘Oh, well.’ She gave a huge liberal sigh, discarded the magazine and told
him a good deal about what she thought of the law on abortion.
After Mrs Whittington, there was just time to settle Mrs Courcel’s discontent with her appearance for the day before he started a big restyling job upon a retired opera singer who wanted
her long hair cut off and permed. Mrs Courcel had lost him his lunch.
Although it was in the middle of London, the establishment that Gavin worked for was not fashionable. It was no scene for the young: there was no music: glamorous personalities – such as
models, pop stars or other people whose pictures regularly appeared in the press and on the screen – did not frequent it; its clientele were middle-aged to old. It combined experienced and
highly professional service with more individual attention than was commonly to be found in the newer places, and therefore its patrons tended to stay; its staff to remain. The chief problem was
getting juniors, as fewer and fewer girls (or men) were prepared to face the gruelling three years’ apprenticeship – with one day off for the college every week – where they were
expected to do only what they were told from nine to six; sweeping up, washing hair, handing rollers and pins for setting until their feet killed them for wages that were less than they could earn
almost anywhere else. Already, Gavin and the other three hairdressers he worked with were having to do some of the shampooing and clearing up, and as the appointments they were responsible for did
not diminish, they were all a good deal more tired at the end of the day.
Gavin, far the youngest, did not mind any of this; he had always been a hard worker and it suited him to work with and for people older than himself. The thought of a salon filled with the young
and beautiful would have terrified him. He was thirty-one – had been in hairdressing for fourteen years now, and experience and expertise had slowly alleviated some of his agonizing shyness
– in the salon, at least. Outside it, he reverted to square two – that is to say he had learned to conceal most of his terror – although he still knew nothing about how to get rid
of it.
He had worked out a kind of Ladder of Fear that began with meeting people he already knew, and thence, step by step, having to talk to them, having to talk to
one
of them, meeting
someone he
did not
know, and having to talk to
them
– until it ascended the astral plane of meeting a beautiful girl
alone
and having to talk to
her
. . .
The Ladder of Fear only catalogued the problems and arranged them in order of strength from a mild breath of discomfort to the gale force of panic; it did not help in the least with their
dissolution.
None the less, the years in the salon (where he had stayed on after his apprenticeship) had certainly improved his public persona: he did not any longer find it in the least difficult to talk to
and advise women about their hair, or to listen to them about almost anything else. He found, indeed, that his middle-aged or aged clients made an interesting change from his parents, who, father
and mother respectively, were dedicated to making money and keeping things nice.
In the train by six-twenty, he reviewed his evening. Home by five past seven, go and tell Mum he was back – of course she heard the gate and the front door but didn’t count that as
being told – up to wash and back down for the meal, a cup of coffee and a Wilhelm II and then . . . He might watch the programme on China, or play his new Strauss recording, or finish the
latest Anthony Powell. And then – to bed.
When he got a seat on the train, he found he was opposite a young girl who was laughing and talking a lot to an older, plainer friend. She had short, curly, auburn hair, a creamy skin –
freckles, though – and pale, gentian-coloured eyes. She was making her friend laugh a lot, and he wished he could hear what she was saying, or enough of it to find out whether she was really
funny, or whether it was just girls being silly. Quite soon he noticed that other people in the train were looking at her too; in fact, all the men coming in and getting out of the carriage looked
at her, and some of them stared. She was really – well, he would call her arresting to look at; not beautiful, but then he had very high standards of beauty: he was not a person who was
easily pleased; in fact, where that was concerned, he knew what was what. She had small, wide-apart breasts well defined in her white orlon sweater. As she was sitting down, he was unable to pass a
serious judgement upon the rest of her until he got to her ankles, and they were far from perfect. Her friend was pathetic. He felt a twinge of pity for her, but there it was. Beauty, the faintest
shade of it, had utterly passed her by.
His home was a good twenty minutes’ walk from the station: on wet days he waited for the bus, but he walked whenever possible because one doctor had told him that fresh air was just as
important as diet if one was prone to skin problems. He nearly always had a spot – no pun intended – of trouble in the spring; lots of people had, though; it was something to do with
getting rid of the impurities of winter. It was a lovely evening; for some reason this particular kind of late spring light always made him think of the Suffolk coast: mysterious and bland; a
painter’s light – Mary Potter came to mind. He wondered whether the Dutch coast was the same: whether it was simply the North Sea – a great deal of it – that informed those
skies but the only time he had been to Holland he had been to the museums at Amsterdam and The Hague, except when he had walked about parts of them later to look at tarts sitting in the windows
waiting for customers. A thoroughly civilized arrangement he had thought at the time, but, inevitably, the girls had turned out to be disappointing. Still – a good idea, and he had enjoyed
looking at them, even if they hadn’t come up to scratch.
At home, the gate was sticking again, a lovely waft of the white lilac, and then, the moment he had the key in the door and before it was properly open he smelled (oh dear) curry. One of the
things Mum hadn’t got the hang of was curry. When he bent to kiss her he noticed that his dandruff was on the march again. He had never met – he had never even
heard
of anyone
who was subject to such virulent and persistent attacks of this tiresome complaint, and if anyone ought to be able to deal with the problem it should be he. Nothing seemed to avail for long, and he
had stopped wearing dark suits years ago. A good thing he was the sort of person who noticed this kind of thing about himself, because if
he
didn’t, who would ever tell him? He
patted Mum’s shoulder, thereby dismissing as much of the dandruff as was tactful. His father was watching some violent, deafening film on telly.
The house was square, double-fronted and built by Gavin’s uncle in 1937. Uncle Keith had been considerably older than Dad, had worked for a local builder all his life until he won three
thousand pounds on the Grand National, whereupon he had started his own business – with Dad and a couple of men, bought himself a third-of-an-acre plot in a lane off the main road in New
Barnet and constructed his own home upon it. He had had a profound and informed contempt for architects and, as he was not much of a draughtsman, the house was a simple rectangle – in shape
much what might have been drawn by a child. But he had had, had
always
had, an eye for detail, and on this, his own home, he spared no detail that sprang to his mind. The surface textures
of the house embodied every technique he could employ: three kinds of brick; tiles, pebbledash, roughcast and timber beams; the front door had a porch with both rustic wood and stained glass of
wine-gum hues; there were casement and sash windows and even a pair with diamond leaded panes; the chimney stack had Tudor associations and, too tall for the size of the house, looked as though he
had found it somewhere and not wanted to waste it.
Gavin’s room was unlike any of the others in the house. This was partly because it was the two attics in the roof turned into one; partly because he had – naturally – been able
to do what he liked with it. The roof sloped so that he could not stand upright at the sides of the room, but this no longer troubled him. He had painted the walls and woodwork white, and bought a
second-hand carpet with flowers on it that entirely covered the floor. Books and gramophone records covered both end walls. He had built out wide window shelves for each of the four dormer windows
on which he kept his cacti and ferns and one miniature Japanese elm. A screen concealed the wash basin: he had pasted it with postcard reproductions of pictures he had particularly liked, and
sometimes buildings cut out of old
Country Life
s from the salon. His bed was covered with a rather tattered old Persian silk rug that he had come upon years ago in a junk shop. His –
so far small – collection of Baxter prints, his shells (juvenilia, this, he sometimes thought, but, when it came to the point, he couldn’t bear to part with them) were arranged on two
shelves over the bed. There was a small kitchen table for answering his correspondence. He had put hardboard over the fudge-coloured tiles round the fireplace and his antique mirror – gold,
with two doves and a wreath of roses roving round them – over it. He had bought an old chaise-longue at the same shop as the one where he had first seen the mirror – from the top of a
bus. It had been very well upholstered in red velvet that had faded with age and the sun: only the bits behind the faded buttons showed you the original, royal colour. But he had not wanted to
change it, which had driven his mother into a frenzy about germs and worse. She sprayed it angrily with fly-killer and had been known to dab at it with almost neat Jeyes Fluid till he’d
stopped her. She thought second-hand things equated with being poor and there was no shifting her, so he had simply said that he was funny that way, and that had turned out to be immediately
acceptable. The room was certainly Gavin’s rather than his parents’. Mum kept the rest of the house so nice that it was in a perpetual state of suspended animation – there was no
sign that anyone ever read, sewed, talked, left things about, or even dropped or broke them – whatever they did, she cleared it up almost before they had finished doing it. Even meals were
cleared off the table the moment their mouths – or possibly only plates – were empty. The garden was rather like that as well. It was so tidy and symmetrical that putting even one deck
chair in it made it look lop-sided. Largely on the strength of these things, Mrs Lamb had the reputation for being a wonderful wife and mother.