Success (17 page)

‘God, I’m incredibly sorry,’ I said. ‘It just happened.’

‘It could happen to anybody,’ said John Hain. ‘Go and apologize to Wark. He’s been taking your calls. And get on with it.’

I apologized to Wark, who looked up with abstracted scorn, as if my presence would only multiply his remaining tasks. Then I got on with it.
Two
sales-sheets lay by my telephone. Wark had self-righteously failed to indicate which calls had already been made. I didn’t dare re-approach him. I started at the top and worked down. Was I buying or selling or neither or both? It seemed I was playing simultaneous chess blindfolded in a space-capsule. I felt like an animal, I felt like a god, I felt like the ghost of summer thunder.

Not until 12.15 did I make my first serious mistake. I ran out of the office and entered the pub in the side-street beneath my window, where for some reason I demanded a boilermaker (whisky and beer), having been told that this was especially good for hangovers. Fifteen seconds later I was vomiting convulsively in the alley, my forehead pressed on a length of rusted scaffolding. People were peering down the side-street at me, to check on how fucked up I was. Being sick did not have the effect it is often reputed to have: it did not make me feel better. It made me feel worse. I lit a cigarette, whose first inhalation caused me to cough up items so entirely revolting in their own right that I was sick again — independently, disinterestedly, in sober tribute to the goings-on inside
my body. I bought an apple (noting, after the first bite, a squirt of blood on the pulp, from my lungs perhaps, or from some gum-bogey, for which many thanks), and regained my office, where I found (a) another sales-sheet, (b) a message confirming an order I hadn’t ordered, and (c) a message cancelling a sale I hadn’t sold. I dialled until two. I hiked to Holborn (couldn’t face Dino’s) and bought a takeaway pie and tomato soup, both of which were inedibly tepid by the time I got back to my desk. I dialled until four. I took my empty coffee carton to the nasty lavatories and filled it with warm soapy water; one of the cubicles was free, though sultry and aromatic; next door someone very ill (who no doubt set aside his tea-break for just this dreadful task) was parting company with substances that sounded like a sack of melons being poured down a well; I washed bits of myself as best I could; I looked terrible, and felt it; I cried some and ran back to my desk. I dialled until five. I spoke to Veale, who still wants me to do things for him. I dialled until six. I yelled for Damon (the boys from downstairs have started beating him up: he
asks
for it) and offered him the three completed sales-sheets. I leaned back, giving gangway to a neurotically smelly blast of vintage, hoofy wind.

‘Well
hi
,’ said Jan, who was standing at the door.

Ah but from that highpoint, let me tell you, from that proud peak, things definitely took a turn for the worse, things ceased to gel in the way they had been doing, things started to go wrong.

Not that I was actually jeered away from the Bar Royale’s commissionaired portals (for being fucked up — ‘Sorry, sir, I can’t let you in.’ ‘Why?’ ‘You’re too fucked up’ — an eventuality I had anticipated and, in part, made alternative arrangements against): on the contrary, there was nobody there to stop us. We went to the Maverick Lounge, where we quaffed many Sidecars and Old Fashioneds, supped several Banana Daquiris and Harvey Wallbangers, drank deep of Whiskey Sours, Bullshots and
Screwdrivers, of Tequila Sunrises, of Vodka Gibsons and of Mint Juleps. I was totally delirious by this time, naturally, but still talking and so on, still acting in the manner of one who had hopes that he might indeed be going to go to bed with somebody or other that evening. Jan was cheerful and young-seeming, and of course blindingly beautiful. We then had dinner, I appear to recall, in an Italian restaurant in Greek Street (what was that doing there?). I tried hard to eat a lot, to shore up against the mutinous gang-warfare taking place within my body, but could manage only a slice of melon and a couple of burpfuls of risotto. I noticed with climbing awe, however, that Jan was inflexibly present when I paid the bill, obstinately by my side when I hit the street and looked for a cab, still in intransigent attendance when I poked the key into the front door, rode the lift and entered our flat.

‘I know,’ I said, leading the way upstairs, ‘let’s have a drink.’

‘Up here?’ said Jan. ‘Where’s your gorgeous mate?’

‘My foster-brother,’ I said.

‘He’s not in, is he?’ said Jan.

‘Oh no, he’s out,’ I said.

‘Oh no he’s not,’ said Gregory. ‘He’s in.’

‘Come on,’ he had said. ‘Please. Stay and chat with me for a while.’

‘All right. Yes, let’s all have a drink together,’ I said, with some pride.

‘Most frightful day. Had to steal back from the gallery and seek my crib. I tried to ring you, Terry, but you weren’t there. It’s this flu again.’

‘What is it with that flu of yours?’

‘I know. Well I think it’s bloody unfair.’

‘Ezza poor baby,’ said Jan.

‘Well I do. Bloody unfair.’

‘So do I,’ I said.

‘I won’t be in your way, don’t worry. You can just
leave me up here at death’s door, and go off and play bodies together.’

Pretty sexy stuff, I thought, coming from his delicately curled lips. If
he
thinks I can, maybe I
can
.

‘Tell me,’ he then asked us, ‘what devilment have you been up to tonight?’

‘Well,’ said Jan, ‘we had some flash drinks. Lots of flash drinks. And then we had a flash dinner. And then we came back here.’

‘To do what, pray?’ said the twinkly Gregory as my blood congealed.

Jan turned to me and said, in a brilliantly hurtful imitation of Gregory’s voice, an imitation that did full justice to how pompous and prissy and coarse and queer he sounded: ‘… To play
bod
ies.’

I laughed — I laughed hugely, with vicious abandon. I laughed in pure triumph, delivered at last of all envy and fear.

‘… Really, Terence,’ said Gregory, ‘isn’t it about time you coped with your teeth? They’ve gone green now, and you
can
get them done on the National Health. You can get toupées too, you know. In fact, Terry — ’

Jan frowned. Then the telephone rang.

I stood outside on the street. It was raining now. I held up an arm. I wondered how much the taxi would cost, realizing I could never ask anyone for the money back. I hated myself for thinking that, of course, but there were so many new things I hated more: the gorgeous Gregory, up there in bed, dry and clean; the beautiful Jan up there with him, drunk and free; the ruined Ursula, abruptly half-alive in an ambulance somewhere, being driven with a
swish
through the glossy streets, kind uniformed hands trying to make her feel all right, her brother on his way.

Oh
dear.

It seems that I have misbehaved. It seems that I am in disgrace. I have ‘misbehaved’. I am
in disgrace
.

Oh
dear.

I must say, however, that Terence is behaving in the most killingly stuffy way about it all. He’s in a massive sulk. Stupid boy. It’s hardly as if I’ve run off with his wife, and — as I told him quite frankly — it was far more her idea than it was mine. Yet he is livid: I have never seen those gingery features so intense and concerted, so resolute and yoblike … Nasty business.

In a way, you know, I suppose I could argue that the whole thing was simply a matter of habit. Insomuch as our previous sexual dealings with women ever coincided, there was never the slightest question of Terry having any
say
in the issue of who got whom, who wanted whom, who preferred whom. In fact his status then — and a status unthinkingly embraced by T. himself — was one of courier, of scampering pander, rather than of an autonomous sexual unit, with its own needs, hurts and dignity. ‘Terence, go and get those two girls over there … There are two girls over there, Terry — go and get them … Go and get them — those two girls over there, Terry …’ That sort ofthing. Naturally enough, he would get the ugly one (if that), or on those rare occasions when the girls were equally desirable — and it is rare: beauties hunt with beasts (why, look at Terence and me then) — he
might
, he just
might
set his cap at the moody and disgruntled reject. He accepted this. Now and then, inevitably, I would sense the dull, adenoidal longing usher from him like a great slow pulse — as, say, his grumpy dog looks on in resigned wonder when my bronzed Viking staggers replete from the bedroom — but really his demeanour was on the
whole one of extreme diffidence. Sex, anyway, equalled transgression to Terence, and he saw transgression at the heart of all life.

I even hatched complicated schemes to make Terry feel better about it. For instance: two rich, neglected girls appear in the village one spring. No sooner am I back on holiday from Peerforth than I am established as the elder’s cosset, taking my tea there in the long, parentless afternoons. I bring little Terence along — partly for his own amusement, and partly also to deflect the bothersome younger sister, who has not taken my preference for her rival well (and who has too, I note, dark hairs on her legs crushed flat by her stockings, like a preparation ready for the microscope). Nevertheless she gives Terry no change, until I step in, promising secretly to service the trollop if she will look more kindly on my friend.
V
exhausting and almost gets me into trouble.

Or again: under my direction, Terence lures over two rather fine young shopgirls in the Cambridge bus-station. Within minutes both are stroking my shiny hair, and Terry is edging down the bench with a vacuous, qualmish smile on his ill-bred face. While he’s off getting us Coca Colas, I playfully promise the tarts that the first one to be nice to my foster-brother shall also be the first to have an hour alone with me. (Promises, promises — besides, I was devoted to a school-friend at the time.)

That was the way it had always worked, the sort of odd-job arrangement we’d always had. By the same convention that he got my expensive clothes when I soared out of them, so he got the rejects, the table-droppings, the leave-offs, which he guiltily exhumed as if from a forbidden attic drawer.

Well what would
you
have done?

There I am. It’s the end of an exhausting week, and after all I’ve been bloody ill, and I haven’t been to my friend Torka’s for yonks, and there’s this perfectly acceptable girl absolutely hurling herself at me, and —

Listen. Terence had just made some fatuous joke or other when the telephone rang. It was past midnight and the three of us turned to the telephone — T.’s panting giggles subsiding — and stared in minor surprise. I held Joan’s gaze, violet in the quarterlight, as Terence lurched drunkenly across the room and picked up the receiver, his back to our busy eyes (‘Hullo? Pardon?’), eyes which were already seeking each other out along slick cool parallels (‘Yes. Who?’), parallels which already seemed full of secret liquids (‘She
what
? When?’), liquids which were already glistening like dew on duck feathers in the cusps of our bodies (‘Where? Yes, yes. Well Christ of
course
’), bodies which already —

Terence reeled wildly round. He babbled something about Ursula and hospitals. ‘I’ll
have
to go,’ he said incredulously, and stumbled towards the stairs. But were June and I really listening?

The door slammed.

I lifted a forefinger and slowly beckoned her to my bed. She obeyed, raptly swaying across the room, hypnotized, dazed, battered. She hovered above me, as on that first night, a sleepy voluptuous sneer on her half-open lips. Very well then.

‘Sit.’

Now first — placing my hand among the sharp curls at the nape of her neck — I began to lower her face swooningly towards mine. Ah, but then, with a quick and contemptuous jerk on her head, I adroitly diverted her lips to the — what have we here? — superbly twanging erection which had long craned free from the folds of my kaftan (my kaftan is maroon, by the way, and it’s got buttons all the way down the front and a curiously effective white ruffled pageboy collar). I don’t know who was the more mesmerized as, with abstract stealth, her puckered mouth neared my palatinate dome: the face hovered, irreducibly close, kept in check by my rod-like hand, while, using natural heft only — I didn’t even need to tense my buttocks — I scoured the perimeter of her
lips. Poor Joan’s goldfish mouth was flaccid with yearning by the time I let it have its slurpy, syrupy little way (strictly controlled throughout, of course, by this warm scribe my hand), and I let it sup full before I wrenched her face back, pointed it at mine, and told it,

‘I want you naked. Now.’

I do believe the girl had some trouble finding her feet. Meanwhile, I propped my head on an elbow to enjoy the view. She was wearing a downy patterned T-shirt and spray-on dungarees. She kicked off her golden shoes. I straightened a finger at her.

‘The breasts last,’ I specified.

Off, first, came Joan’s jeans — taking the pink and quite hygienic panties along with them in rather inelegant fashion (I always like a good peer at the pristine puff before confrontation with the jungly reality). But she still looked very fine standing there, legs defiantly apart, her fingers curling under the T-shirt’s hem, inches above the disappointingly sparse quiff of glistening henna. Now the breasts. They did not, I’m afraid, produce in me that tender, existential ache that occasionally comes with the slow unbuttoning of a shirt, the sudden unloosening of a gown strap, the sighing exhalation of a recalcitrant ‘bra’, that sense of glazed despair of the world’s staying alive long enough to touch the skin naked. What June did was to take hold of the hem with both hands and immediately cat’s cradle her arms, so that the material catapulted up into the complex of her neck and elbows, hiding the face and revealing with bizarre abruptness the two great swinging eminences, which lapped confidently on the summit of her ribcage. (We ought to remember that she was drunk.) Once she had got the bally thing off, though, and was peeling its sleeves from her arms, she shut her eyes and laughed, and for a moment she looked touching, pretty and extremely capable.