Success (12 page)

Listen, if he fucks Jan I shall just have to arrange for him to be dead. I’ll kill him, and her (I’ll leave the country and start over). Oh Christ, perhaps the safest thing is for me to pay him not to, make him an offer (he’d take it — he’s very broke). Or threaten him (I know I can beat him up. He’s bigger than I am, but I don’t care what damage is done to me. He does). Or agree to move out if he doesn’t. Or promise to kill myself if he does. Hear this: if he fucks Jan — a casual athleticism, one on his list, might as well — my hatred will find some way to injure his life, to do his body harm, or to make him mad.

I really must say a few words about this rather marvellously tarty girl that Terence has taken to bringing home with him from the office. Joan? Janice? Janet? — something ridiculous like that. A secretary, of course, or the discharger of untaxing clerical duties at his blacking-factory, dreadful ragdoll manner and wilfully barmaidenly voice, just the sort of slouching nobody one half-registers among you all in the clamorous streetscapes but hardly expects actually to meet. Interesting, I suppose, to see these city-ciphers in the flesh, and some minor refund for having a nonentity as a flatmate.

She’s got one of those corkscrew haircuts … Now it’s normally axiomatic that the
slightest hint
of ‘frizz’ is enough to have me reaching for my thickest dark glasses. But I playfully admit that with young Janice here the effect really is quite fun in a hackneyed, sentimental way, combining with her small stupid features and clogged goldfish mouth to provide that look of orb-like vacuity striven for by portraitists of the Woolworth school — you know, unbearably cute mites, all gaze and pout, whose likenesses are hung, mostly, by representatives of the
criminal classes on taffeta walls. (They’re enjoying a camp revival at the moment, sponsored by such slow-witted phonies as Du Pré at the Merton Gallery. Three weeks? Four weeks?) Yet Janet’s face has withal several symptoms of an interesting hardness — the tough creasing round the eyes, the occasional mean tightening of those lips — which, in my vast experience, argues for great daring and know-how in bed.

And then I expect Terence has told you about her absurd figure? Now normally, again, I like girls to have
small
breasts: the breasts I like are mild round concavities which unobtrusively swell to gossamer petallic teats. I can’t bear women who push out all over the shop, like one-man bands. Great plates of blancmange the size of knapsacks, topped by curlicued sausage stubs — oh, wonderful; thanks awfully. I will at once concede, however, that Joan’s breasts are frankly colossal (so big that she wears a brassière) and would be utterly sick-making on any other girl (Susannah, Mrs Styles, Miranda, etc., etc.). But there is an air of sweet disproportion about Joan’s body, as indeed there is about everything to do with her. Such breasts shouldn’t be where they are really, gawkily perched on a frail lattice of ribcage over that poor waist (thumbs up from the waist down, incidentally: long lean thighs, boyishly dinky derrière). She carries it all off with a certain style and, no, I admit it, I’m rather amused by her.

Take the first time Terence brought her back to my flat. It was a glorious mid-April evening and a burgundy dusk was slowly decanting itself through the high windows. I lay musingly on my bed, a goblet of Tio Pepe balanced on the muscular tabletop of my stomach, freshly showered, midway between taking off my day clothes and putting on my evening ones — i.e., naked, except for some fairly daring and extremely eventful white scants — and generally readying myself to whizz off to Torka’s in my aggressive green car, which had that day been returned from the Garage of Thieves with a
staggering bill. I sensed the usual drunken scuffling at the front door and was about to put down my glass and feign handsomely profiled sleep — until I heard voices, and a light female cockney mingling with Terence’s didactic baritone. I sat up in wry anticipation as they climbed the stairs to my room: Terence, carrying a shiny bag full of cheap drink, and the Joan, a frizzy presence in his wake.

‘Oh, sorry, Greg,’ he said, tugging his eyes away from my barely clad form. ‘Thought you’d be out. Just wanted some ice.’

‘Come in, come in,’ I indulgently drawled.

‘Oh … thanks.’

‘Introduce, introduce.’

‘Oh — uh, this is Joan, Joan, this is Gregory.’ He turned to me helplessly. ‘She works at work,’ he said.

‘Yur, what a dump. Never temped anywhere so
dead
.’ And in she strode, past my bed right up to the penthouse window, on whose sill she coolly leaned, running her screwed-up eyes over my torso in candid appreciation. I in turn, meanwhile, allowed my stare to praise the contents of her billowing T-shirt, the stripe of brownishly exposed midriff between it and her bejeaned, sharp-boned pelvis (noted also, with distaste, the abnormally plump pubic hillock).

‘Cor,’ said Joan in that mock-common voice of hers, ‘what a flash flat. How much’s it cost you?’

I waved a hand in the air. ‘
Rien
. An heirloom. I merely pay the rates.’

‘What do you pay then, Tel?’ she asked her colleague. Tel?
Tel
?

‘Half the rates,’ he mumbled. Terence really was looking something like his very worst that night. His unpleasant face, with its long upper lip and crushed nose-bridge, seemed drained of all colour and life, further highlighting the remains of his hair, which fell in fishy red tails down his brow. His clothes were the usual bellowing
mardi gras
. He appeared to be quite pleased with himself, however; he was smiling furtively, and a
dirty glint played in one of his revoltingly bright eyes.

‘Well well well,’ said Janice, turning to me, ‘
isn’t
this posh.’

I held her gaze — and, as Terence lurched away into the kitchen, and as a defiant half-smile offcentred Janice’s round mouth, I felt a familiar tremor riding down the paths between our eyes: suddenly the room was full of burgundy light, and suddenly it would have seemed the most natural and decorous thing in the world if Joan, slipping her T-shirt over her head, had knelt unsmilingly on the bed to delve with her hard lips in the busy curvatures of my scants. Had it not been for Terence, slopping explosively about in the neighbour room, she would have done so without the slightest hesitation. Of that I entertained no serious doubt. And neither did she, the slut.

‘I’m so glad you like it,’ I murmured, whisking her pussy to the boil. ‘I do think it’s rather beautiful.’

‘Oh I do too. Beautiful,’ she said slowly (and we all know where her eyes were now), ‘beautiful, beautiful.’

‘What a charming friend you have found!’ I cried when Terence appeared in the doorway, holding the two glasses aloft like a waiter. ‘Do bring her back here as often as she is prepared to come.’

‘Sorry, Greg, can I get you a — ’

But at that I sprang to my full height and, with smooth indifference, started to dress. Terence squired poor Janet down the stairs in alarm — he won’t make it, I thought: no chance — and I shot off to Torka’s, found the great man asleep and his flat almost deserted, teased Adrian until he went off to his room for a sulk, and then imaginatively ground myself empty (compliments of young Janice) to the bland flicks of Susannah’s boring, amphetamine-verdured and in my view rather sandpapery tongue.

April is the coolest month for people like myself. Down comes the roof of my ritzy green car. Out burgeons my spring wardrobe. I have a £20 haircut. Champagne is more often than not to be found in my refrigerator.
Flowers garland my room. I walk in the park. Dreams of legendary summers hang about me in the air.

I leave the gallery early when it’s fine — enfeebled protests notwithstanding — so that I can enjoy to the full these lengthening days before the burnt months take the town in their clammy hug. I motor out with Kane and Skimmer to country hostelries. We get rich girls to bring picnics along, or if it’s warm we all eat late on the pavements of Charlotte Street. At weekends there’s houseparty after houseparty — croquet, tennis, Pimms on aromatic lawns. Ursula and I keep meaning to drive up to Rivers Court for a few days while the weather holds (she loves the open car), but my diary is far too full, as hers must be by now: April is when the debs are making friends. Henry Brine wanted to take me to Paris for his opening and I couldn’t make room even for that. It’s right, I think, to crowd one’s youth like this. I hardly sleep at all once the season is underway, but everyone says I look as fresh as always. How do you do it? they say. There’s no answer.

I only wish I could entertain more here in my flat. You’ve guessed why I can’t, naturally … I’ve
considered
making a virtue of him, featuring him as a kind of court dwarf, a mascot, a curiosity; I wouldn’t need to dress him up, after all. Too embarrassing, though, and people would be sure to ask questions. Quite often, of course, I simply instruct him to get the hell out for the evening. But the ghastly thing is that he has absolutely nowhere to go, and I can’t bear to think of him in some coffee-bar all night staring at his watch. It’s far too depressing for me. God, what am I supposed to do with him? (I’d like to evict him. That’s what I’d like to do. Now how would I manage that?) Perhaps, at my next thrash, he could come with that nice Janice of his, as a sort of double-act; Skimmer would be wild for her, I know — he adores tarts. She’s even made the odd appearance in my own thoughts too, as a retrospective visual aid, during dull sessions at Torka’s …

Watch out, Terry, or I may have to have her!

Well, he never shall — so much is clear. Good Lord, has the boy any conception of what is happening to him these days? Has he no idea of the kind of impression he has started to make? And I don’t just mean the more effusively horrible aspects of his appearance, the aspects he can’t do much about. It’s not hard to read certain people’s lives in the way they look, and something dreadful and lasting and deep is going wrong with Terence Service. I didn’t mind him last year, for some reason — he was like a big friendly dog to come home to. Now he’s like a reptile, a quiescent, loathsome thing. He’s drunk. He’s drunk all the time, and he thinks you can’t tell. He returns from the office at eight — he can hardly walk. His smile is sick and smug; his face is numb and slightly luminous — it seems dead (you can tell life is getting to him). You feel he must be hating something very much nearly all the time. Something is sizzling behind his eyes.

How has he made me hate him like this? Do you know? How has he landed me with this concerted, headache hate which makes me frown as if in pain when I pass him on the stairs or hear the fat-thighed
swish
of his cheap denim trousers, when we jockey head-on within the bathroom doorway and I go on into the land of his smells, when we sit up here together and the room slowly fills with the sound of his breath. Why do I let him roost on my life? Why don’t I swat him from my brain like the flea he is? Why do I care?

You know why.

There was a time when I felt very differently about Terence. Yes, I loved him — and who wouldn’t have? Trite though the sufferings of his early life seemed, they had reality enough; when he first came to our house they still clung to him like sad heavy clothes, and he never quite shook them off. Poor Terence, poor Terence, my dear old friend. I see you running from the school bus in tears, clutching your satchel to your side as if it were some
worthless extension of your body to which you had by now grown miserably used. I see you being led back to your room by servants at midnight, your face exhausted by the staying-power of your dreams. I see you kneeling on the curved lawn, your body bent over with the strain of the past and your own colossal efforts to expunge it, the grass rippling scarily all about you, the trees wringing their hands behind your back, the clouds scudding away above your head, scudding away from you and all the terrors of childhood and hell. Here is my pity, duly wettened with your brother’s tears — take it, take it.

I naturally expected to be teaming up with a compact, urban, taut-nerved little tike: not a bit of it (one reaches for one’s Penguin Freud). Although he later turned out to be a frightful thief and sneak, Terry was from the start an abject, pant-wetting supplicant of the most token forms of authority. All the spirit, all the
licence
of childhood, seemed to have been confiscated from his imagination before he knew what childhood was, before he saw it couldn’t last. There I would be — up on a glass-spiked wall stealing apples, out on the Green baiting the village yobs, off on my ten-gear racing-bike pursued by scandalized schoolgirls — and there would be Terence, uncertain, retreating, distressed that sudden possibilities had opened up in the world of harm about him. While I tossed hissing cherry-bombs in the air, flicked them through the letterboxes of the disadvantaged and distraught, or buried them in soft dog-messes beside scrubbed and splendid cars, Terence would be off behind some wall or tree, his wrinkled eyes clenched shut, his hands held flat over his ears as if to keep his whole head from flying apart. While I, standing tall on private property, rained splintery death on neighbouring greenhouses and conservatories, he would look on in the posture of one cocked for flight; and while I laughingly lingered in the lane to relish the fury of gardener or housewife, away Terence would scramble to the fields, and one would then have the tedious job of coaxing him out of some ditch where he cowered and blinked.
Curious, inconsequential things spooked him: parkies, too-tall buildings, dressing up, boarded shopfronts, any sudden noise or movement. Curious, inconsequential things steadied him and made him feel at peace: small rooms, buses, very old people, policemen …

Whereas I stole with care, precision and superbly classy daring — from shops, from institutions, from enemies — the young Terence’s thefts were grubby, doomed and exclusively domestic. With him, plainly, it was all part of some bungling anal compulsion, quite at odds with the expressive chutzpah of my own romantic capers (in several ways I think I’m still a victim of Terry’s potty-training). I remember one particularly uproarious bit of banditry involving a rather fine Cellini salt-cellar which Terence the Menace scooped into his hot pocket soon after I had returned from Repworth, my expensive prep school, for the Christmas holidays. Instantly the disappearance of the piece was established, the culprit wearily agreed upon to be Terence, and a servant sent to get the boy and bring him forthwith to the Ridings, sternly arrayed in the library, wondering about some vague form of punishment — and all trying like mad to keep straight faces. But wait: the larval Moriarty had gone into hiding! We undertook a search of the house and quickly cornered Public Enemy Number One in the north attics, where he had crawled beneath the chassis of a warped bed. I was the first to discover him and raise the cry. His explosive confession and bawled apologies soon had us all in stitches.