Getting It Right (3 page)

When he had washed, he came downstairs to find that his mother had propped his post against his glass on the table. There was a card from the library saying that the book he had asked for was
now in and also a travel brochure about Greece – the country he was planning to go to on his next holiday: a good post.

Supper was eaten in silence. Mrs Lamb did not realize the heat of the curry because she did not eat it. She hardly ever ate at meal times, and was not given to tasting the food she cooked. This
meant that whenever she strayed from the family recipes learned from her own mother, her food became an anxious business for her consumers. She was particularly fond of trying out new recipes for
‘foreign food’ and various curries were a recurring hazard. But she also had the unshakeable notion that all printed recipes were mean: if it said ‘one teaspoonful of chili powder
and two of plum jam’ she carefully measured these amounts and then chucked in a whole lot more for good measure. The results were extreme; scalding, dizzily sweet, briney beyond belief.
Sometimes the skin was removed from the roofs of their mouths before they were blown off – sometimes not. Mr Lamb and his son dutifully ate as much as they could of whatever was put before
them and kept their criticism to an heroic minimum ever since the dreadful evening some years back when Mrs Lamb, looking more like a nervy little witch than usual, had served them their first
curry, asked what they thought of it, and on being mildly told that it had seemed a bit hot, had burst into wracking sobs and a tirade that beginning with their ingratitude had extended to the
futility of her whole life. It had taken hours to calm her, and even then she had not been really appeased and they had been treated to tinned food served with sardonic sniffs and nasty remarks
made to Providence for nearly a week. Afterwards, Gavin had realized that it had been the anniversary of Caesar being put down. As she refused to have another dog, Gavin and his father made a note
of the anniversary, and were always especially bright and obliging on it, but they had also divined that criticism, however tentative, was not something that Mrs Lamb wished to experience. So, this
evening they chewed their way through shredded strands of beef in coconut syrup and sultanas while Mrs Lamb sat, a little apart, crocheting a playsuit for a teddy bear; her small speedy hands in no
way impairing her watchfulness: the teddy bear, clad in tangerine nylon fur, lolled beside her.

‘Very nice,’ Mr Lamb said at last. He drank the last of the water on the table and met Gavin’s eye without expression.

‘You haven’t finished the coconut,’ she said, without apparently taking her eyes from her crochet.

‘You gave us so much, Mum.’ Gavin got up to move the plates.

‘You could finish it up on your pears,’ she continued inexorably. ‘They’re waiting for you outside.’

They were indeed. Fruit out of a tin did not count as tinned food for some mysterious reason that had never been uncovered. There was a whole lot of nonsense in tins – and then fruit. The
pears were in sundae glasses, lying on what looked like raspberry jam and topped with custard. The kitchen was spotless. Salt evenings could be worse. He had a quick drink of water and switched on
the kettle. In a minute or two, she would come out and make tea for herself and Dad, and coffee for him.

‘Don’t you forget about the Castle puddings,’ he told her as he returned with the pears.

‘I won’t.’ She did not mind being admonished to make things they liked.

‘Pears are good for your complexion,’ she added, an unexpected number of minutes later. ‘There’s strychnine in pears.’

He knew that with peeled, let alone tinned pears this was most unlikely, but the occasional – and surprising – pieces of misinformation were yet another spice in his mother’s
life and he was very fond of her. It was Marge who argued with their mother; they could keep the same argument going for days – for weeks now that Marge was married and they met only at
weekends, when she brought the kids over for Sunday dinner. They did not have rows, exactly, but neither of them gave an inch.

Mr Lamb was hurrying with his pears because he wanted his tea, and then his pipe so that he could get back to television before the programmes got too highbrow. A quiet man, he none the less
enormously enjoyed violence in his viewing: sex, he often said, he had never cared for – his morality entailed knowing a great many things that were not right – but the sight of
somebody being machine-gunned to pieces or battered to death afforded him genuine entertainment. He even enjoyed the news occasionally for this reason.

Mrs Lamb would sit with him whatever he watched, but she would not watch herself. This was not because she did not like television; she watched it in the afternoon when Fred was out building or
repairing people’s houses. It was simply that she disapproved of women doing anything
with
men: women – particularly wives – were meant simply to
be
there while
their husbands spent their leisure hours as they pleased. Now, observing that they had finished their pears, she laid the playsuit carefully beside the bear, seized their sundae glasses and nipped
into the kitchen. Gavin met his father’s eye again: they had little in common, but in particular they shared a benign conspiracy geared solely to not upsetting Mrs Lamb.

‘Yes, well – a nice cup of tea won’t do any harm,’ Mr Lamb said in a voice designed for his wife to hear.

Outside, an ice cream van jingled its Greensleeves way down the road and Gavin wondered fleetingly whether this was tremendously unfair to Vaughan Williams, or whether he would have regarded it
– ruefully – as some kind of accolade – vox populi to the chime. This made him feel lonely: a spring evening with some hours in it that he could spend as he pleased. If he stayed
downstairs, he would get
The Streets of San Francisco
: if he went up, he could be alone with Brahms and he did not quite want either of these alternatives. But, when he started to think of
what he might want, he felt merely spasms of fear and a kind of despair – an almost irritable anxiety: there must be more to life, and could he stand it if there was?

The telephone rang and he leapt to answer it. ‘I’ll go, Dad.’ It might be his friend.

It wasn’t: it was a customer of Dad’s, having trouble with a skylight. Mum had brought in their drinks and was now quivering with anxiety to see them drink them. To make up for the
exasperating possibility that Dad’s tea would be cold before he came off the telephone, Gavin scalded his already fiery tongue on his Nescaff. Appeased, Mrs Lamb handed him the
Daily
Mirror
.

‘No thanks, Mum.’ He’d read the
Telegraph
on his way to work.

‘You ought to
look
at the paper.’

‘I’ve read one already. Anyway –
you
never do.’

She seized the playsuit. ‘I’ve got better things to do with my time.’ She never read any papers on the twofold grounds that she didn’t believe a word they said and that
they never had anything in them.

Mr Lamb returned from the telephone. ‘There’s no money in skylights,’ he said.

‘They make a nice light, though,’ Gavin said.

‘If they can’t make do with windows, they can fall back on electricity,’ said Mrs Lamb. She was watching to see whether her husband wasn’t enjoying his tea because he had
let it get cold. Mr Lamb was up to this, however; he signalled his enjoyment by wincing appreciatively at the first sip, drinking the rest in fairly noisy gulps and mopping his moustache with an
old Army handkerchief – faded khaki – out of which fell a little clutch of washers.

‘I wondered where they’d got to.’

‘You’ll wear your handkerchiefs out keeping things like that in them.’

‘I said to Sid last night, “You got them washers?” “No,” he said, “I ’aven’t got ’em,
you
had ’em.” “I
’aven’t got ’em,” I said and ’ere they were all the time!’

‘Wearing everything to a thread like that, nasty sharp things’ – she was cramming the bear’s indifferently hinged limbs into the playsuit, twisting him this way and that:
it looked quite painful, but Gavin noticed that his expression of wilful unreliability remained unchanged.

‘Nothing sharp about a washer, dear, unless it’s worn. Nothing sharp about a
new
washer.’ He had finished filling his pipe and leaned back to pat for his matchbox in
his jacket. ‘These are new washers,’ he explained reassuringly.

She darted to her feet to seize his tea cup. ‘Tobacco all over the table!’

She was always one jump ahead, Gavin thought; no sooner had they laid one anxiety at rest than she pounced upon another and they lumbered after her shovelling sand into all the ground she cut
beneath their feet: she called it ‘Where would you be without me?’ and he called it ‘Understanding women’. It gave them both a sense of domestic strategy, Gavin thought, but
it hadn’t, exactly, anything to do with
him
. He decided to ring his friend, Harry King.

‘Harry – ’

‘Oh, hullo!’ There was a faint, but unmistakable crash of breaking china. ‘Shut
up
, you silly quean, it’s Gavin. We were just finishing dinner. Why don’t
you pop round for a cup of coffee?’

‘Thanks: I’d like to.’

‘I warn you, there’s a certain amount of tension in the air.’

Another crash – it sounded like glass this time.

‘Are you sure you’d like me to come?’

‘
I’d
like you to come, dear boy.’

‘Hadn’t you better ask Winthrop?’

‘No.’

‘All right.’

‘Come on your scooter, or you’ll be all night.’

Harry lived in an extremely small block of flats in Whetstone. It was built of concrete which looked as though it had been severely pecked by giant birds; whether this was in preparation for
some more indulgent facing or whether the concrete being some three years old had failed to stand up to the exigencies of the British climate, Gavin did not know: he
did
care, since he
thought Harry – and even Winthrop – merited a lovelier home, but he had not liked to ask. There were only six flats in the block: each containing a living room, a bedroom, bathroom and
kitchen. The living rooms sported balconies, large enough, as Harry had once said, to accommodate one deck chair or a medium-sized dog, or, alternatively, a dog in or on the deck chair – the
space involved was described by him as fanciful. The building was rather surprisingly called Havergal Heights (years ago they had wondered whether it could possibly have been named after Havergal
Brian: Gavin, who had just at that time finished reading
Ordeal by Music
, had said he hoped not, or if it was so, he hoped the poor old composer didn’t know, and Harry said he
thought it was perfectly in keeping with the rest of H. Brian’s life). Winthrop had said who the fucking hell was Havergal Brown and then, when Harry started to tell him, said that Harry was
patronizing. This evening sounded like another of those, Gavin thought as he immobilized his scooter on the concrete crazy paving and rang the bell marked F. King – highly unsuitable, as
Harry always pointed out to newcomers.

‘That you?’

‘Yes.’

The buzzer went: Gavin leaned on the door but it remained shut.

‘I don’t think it’s working.’

Nothing happened for a bit. Gavin thought what a good thing he knew Harry so well: it meant that, if nothing went on happening, he could ring the bell again without feeling bad about it, and
also he could wait to see if something
would
happen without his mouth getting dry. But this thought, like so many of the few he indulged in that were of even a faintly consoling nature,
only went to show him how many other people he would find it impossible to visit because of hazards of this kind. Listening, he could hear a quarrel, a spin dryer, Radio Four and a gun-fight on
telly: the soundproofing in the flats was poor, to put it mildly.

The door opened suddenly and there was Harry. He was wearing his tartan sleeveless pullover and his shirt sleeves were rolled up.

‘The bloody thing’s always going wrong. When they mend it, it only lasts five minutes. How are you, dear boy?’

‘Fine.’

As he followed Harry up the concrete stairs Harry said:

‘Winthrop’s having a bit of a moody. If I’ve told him once, I’ve told him a hundred times he must not use the wok without oiling it. Pay no attention to him –
he’s just a child.’

The flat was one of the top ones. The sitting room – not large – was furnished rather as Gavin imagined a small V.I.P. lounge at an airport would be. A large black leather
chesterfield, black glass-topped table, a huge – almost menacingly healthy – houseplant; two walls of black coffee; two of coffee with milk in it. The floor was covered by a
surprisingly white, rather furry carpet (people were encouraged to take their shoes off before they came through the door). The only things that one couldn’t expect to find in a bona fide
V.I.P. lounge were the hi-fi equipment and the books. There was a hatch through to the kitchen.

‘I was just finishing the washing-up to save any more disasters. Like some coffee?’

‘I would.’

‘French or Turkish?’

‘Turkish – if it’s not too much trouble.’

‘No trouble at all. It’s a bit late to be drinking it, but we all have our little vices.’

Gavin watched as Harry measured coffee beans and poured them smoothly into the electric grinder.

‘Has Winthrop gone out?’

‘No. He may have
passed
out. But he hasn’t gone anywhere so far as I know. Unless he’s jumped clean off the balcony, which, so far as I’m concerned, he’s
very welcome to do.’

Harry had a trick, with which Gavin was familiar, of lowering the volume of his voice with dramatic suddenness towards the end of a sentence, while using his mouth to enunciate the final
syllables with the sort of care that he might have employed if he was teaching someone to lipread. This was something that Gavin had
noticed
many times, but now he realized that it was
connected in some way to what Harry was feeling: his eyes were uneasily bright. He switched on the grinder and, in the few seconds that it took to chew and roar its way through the beans, little
shreds of Harry played back relentlessly in Gavin’s mind: like clips from a film: Harry describing the end of
The Ring
: Harry talking about his first evening in Venice: Harry telling
him about picking up Winthrop . . .