The White Father (10 page)

“Really?” said Edward. He felt annoyed that he, who was going to assist them, knew less about them than Belinda. “Time to start work again.”

It would be nice, he thought, as he went back to his trench, to stay in London for a few weeks. Mr Gilchrist was given to saying: “I don’t know why I bother to keep this enormous place up for you children when you’re never here,” and the idea of London was surrounded by moral and economic disapproval. What do you want to go to London
for
,
dear? A concert, Mummy. A concert: I see: and what sort of concert? Duke Ellington at the Astoria, Finsbury Park: Stockhausen at the Festival Hall: could you honestly tell the difference? You’ve got very rude, Edward, since you went to Oxford. Oh, it’s my friends—all jazz people are very, very rude, you know, it’s almost a matter of faith with us. Sometimes, Edward, I think you’re very young for your age. I’m going to London to get some experience of real life. You might get your hair cut while you’re at it.

The trouble was, money seemed to last only half the usual time in London. Record shops were very tempting: Julian “Cannonball” Adderly, Webern, Charlie Parker, Berg. But it wasn’t the records so much as just London. He didn’t go to night clubs, as he hoped his parents imagined, he didn’t smoke
marijuana in seedy cellars in Notting Hill, he wasn’t
extravagant
: but London was insatiable. Now, though, he had every reason to be there, to be swallowed up himself, if necessary. The Ngulu needed him. A man called Fred Martin in a
recording
company wanted to hear him sing. Politics and jazz, old cynics, young enthusiasts. He mustn’t get them confused.

The thin red line of his corridor unwound its slow length along. It was as boring as the floor of a school lavatory, but he was coming to love it. It had persistence, an obstinate tenacity, an arrogant determination to survive in all its
boringness
. And no doubt school lavatories outlasted their schools, their permanent damp chill preserved down the ages for
someone
like himself to uncover years hence with delicate scraping fingers, not disturbing a tessera, bringing the unyielding ugliness once more to the light of a grey English day. Perhaps this wasn’t a villa at all, perhaps it was a Roman
boarding-school
. Perhaps the corridor had shrilled to Romano-British adolescent voices, had been stamped by generations of sandalled feet. Did the Romano-British wear sandals?

When he left to get home in time for dinner, it was beginning to rain, a warm, rather soupy rain which made him want to bathe rather than bath. There was just time. He drove quickly to the gravel-pits favoured by the youth of Cartersfield: it was here that there had been such trouble two summers ago.
Someone
had set fire to an island in the middle of one of the lakes, there had been hooliganism. Unthinkingly, Edward avoided the gravel pit where he and others had once swum with David Mander, the vicar’s nephew. He chose a small lake, changed in the car, then picked his way across the painful gravel to the water and plunged in. It smelt of reeds and riverbeds, and it was scattered with a million tiny pinpoints of rain. He lay on his back and allowed the rain to peck lightly at his face, then swam briskly out to a small island and back. He dried, shivering, and pulled on his clothes. He would just have time to change before dinner.

*

“Ah,” said Mr Gilchrist, “the horny-handed son of toil. And I bet he hasn’t washed his horny hands, either.”

“Let me see,” said Edward’s mother.

“Certainly not. As a matter of fact, the reason I was nearly late is that I went and swam for a few minutes in the gravel pits. I may smell a bit of weed, but the sweat of the day is now poisoning the pike.”

“How disgusting,” said Jane. She spent a lot of time playing tennis and her muscles were a little too beefy for an off-
the-shoulder
dress, but Edward thought she was really quite pretty. She didn’t swim, saying it put her eye out.

Mr Gilchrist, who occasionally floundered about for a few minutes, puffing and blowing and shouting, said, “Ah, swimming in the rain. It’s one of the greatest pleasures of youth.”

“Perhaps you’re thinking of singing in the rain?” said Edward.

“No, swimming.” Mr Gilchrist had missed the reference. “Do you remember, darling, how we used to go swimming after parties when we were first married?”

“All too well. There was that awful occasion when your cousin Toby pushed the host into the pool, do you remember?”

“Certainly I do. Poor old Toby.” He chuckled, then sighed. “It’s a bloody shame, having to come home, losing all that money. And after all the work he’s put into the farm, too.”

“Oh, really,” said Edward. “You know perfectly well that he only went to Kenya to avoid taxes. Serves him right.”

“Nonsense,” said Mr Gilchrist. “He was fed up with the awful austerity of the Labour government. I’d’ve gone myself if it hadn’t been too complicated, what with you children to educate and everything. That was a grim time, you know.”

“Well, I hope there’s another Labour government to greet him on his return,” said Edward. “But I suppose there won’t be.”

“I don’t think you really understand politics, dear,” said Mrs Gilchrist, “or you wouldn’t say such silly things.”

“I am completely apolitical,” said Edward, “as you know.”

“What’s apolitical?” said Jane.

“It means he hasn’t a sensible idea in his head,” said her father. “Apolitical, indeed. You’re just against everything.”

Edward smiled. It was important within the confines of family warfare that the first major untruth should be uttered against, rather than by, oneself.

The meal continued with equable bickering. Afterwards they sat in the drawing-room and watched television, a routine story of crime and its consequences which Edward found
inexpressibly
tedious. His father fell asleep, his mother knitted, Jane went upstairs. The flickering box in the corner continued to shed its fatuous blue light though no one was watching or listening.

Edward got up quietly and said to his mother, “I think I’ll go and practise.”

She nodded, putting a finger to her lips, warning him not to wake his father. Mr Gilchrist slept with his head lolling to the right, his hands folded neatly across his paunch. Mrs Gilchrist counted the rows of her knitting. The dim blue light from the corner watched over them like a household god.

The piano, an old upright with an incurable bass, was kept in what had once been called the schoolroom. Now it was used as an all-purpose store by the daily helps. Brushes and
carpet-sweepers
leaned against the wall, flower vases huddled together on a table, and a pile of mending waited on a chair. On the walls were the pictures that had hung in the nursery: some idiot pixies, the gift of a tasteless aunt, were munching a huge
toadstool
, Brueghel’s blind men led each other into the ditch, and The Laughing Cavalier, that eternal club bore, guffawed beside a sub-Dufy scene of brightly coloured yachts.

Edward played a few scales to warm himself up. He felt tired after his digging, and he hadn’t practised recently as much as he should have done. He tried the tune he had been fiddling with for the last few days, but it came out dull, with too many echoes from other songs, and no distinguishing mark of its own. The possibilities within the form of the pop song were strictly limited and almost exhausted, that was the trouble. And though
he wanted very badly to write a hit so that he could make some money, when it came to the point he couldn’t find the necessary enthusiasm. He changed to what he really liked, a long jazz solo with much use of sevenths which he had developed from an idea on a record of an avant-garde American pianist. He repeated various passages, changing chords and rhythms, working towards a piece that could eventually be played in public. He tended to be a sour-sweet soloist, he knew, and he tried to make his playing less emotional, but somehow it never was. He wasn’t really satisfied with his playing, and he often wondered whether music was, in fact, his medium: even what seemed at the time to be moments of originality and inspiration turned out to be no more than clever impersonations of the great. Yet he got immense pleasure from playing, from feeling the piano respond like a cat to his fingers, the notes purring, each key like a sensitive hair.

After a while he took down a book of Chopin waltzes. He wasn’t a skilled sight-reader, but he could get through most pieces more or less accurately, and he enjoyed a challenge, something which kept him on his finger-tips, as it were. But tonight he was too tired to play Chopin even well enough for himself, and he put the book back on top of the piano. As he was wondering whether to go back to the drawing-room, Jane came in.

“What were you playing?” she said.

“Chopin. Making a mess of it, too.”

“Oh, Chopin,” she said vaguely. She wandered round the room touching the chairs and tables, picking up the mending and putting it down again. “Have you written any good songs lately?”

“Nothing. I thought I’d had a good idea, but it turned out to be someone else’s, like all my ideas.”

“Sing something, Teddy.”

“One of my own compositions?” He played three
deliberately
harsh discords.

“Anything.” She opened the window and leaned out. “Look at the moon. Isn’t it pretty?”

Edward wrinkled his nose in disgust and began to sing ‘St James’s Infirmary’.

“I don’t like Blues,” said Jane. “Can’t you play something cheerful for a change?”

He played his new solo for her, and she seemed to like it, for she came and leaned on the piano, watching him. He hummed to himself as he played, as though he was in a private dream to which the music was only an accompaniment.

“What are you thinking about, Jane?” he said, stopping.

“About you. Why do you deliberately annoy Daddy?”

“A son has to annoy his father. It wouldn’t be natural not to. It’s a sort of essential ritual.”

“Well, I think it’s time you stopped,” said Jane. “It’s such a bore for everyone else. Why don’t you get yourself a nice girl, then you wouldn’t feel the need to quarrel.”

Edward shrugged. “Too busy.”

“Oh, pooh. You’re always complaining that there isn’t anything to do. You just tinkle away at the piano all day long.”

“I don’t
tinkle
.”

“Well—— You just sit there having fantasies.”

“I do not. I concentrate when I’m playing.”

“Concentrate on what?”

“On the music.”

“Oh, really,” she said. “Don’t you ever think about anyone when you’re playing things?”

“Never.”

“Don’t you
care
about anyone?”

“No.”

“About any
thing
,
then?”

“No.”

“Don’t you think there must be something wrong with you?”

“Probably. No one’s perfect.”

“You’re absolutely infuriating,” said Jane. “Honestly, you make me want to hit you.”

“Sorry, dear.”

“What on earth made you decide to offer your services to that boring Mr Shrieve?”

“He’s not boring, he’s extremely interesting.”

“I thought he was boring. But why did you decide to get mixed up with him?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been drifting about, I’m tired of drifting. It’ll be amusing, perhaps. Anyway, nothing’s arranged, you know, it’s all very indefinite.”

“Are you happy, Teddy?”

He looked up at her sharply. “Happy? I never think about it. I should say, on the whole, no. But why do you ask?”

“I knew you weren’t. You ought to have a girl friend.”

He played a brief jazzy version of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, ending it with a rude noise. Then he said, “I like the idea of helping those primitive types in Africa. They’re so helpless. I think people only really enjoy helping the totally helpless, because the totally helpless can’t help back at all. It’s a one-way arrangement. Giving is so much easier than
receiving
.”

“You do talk such utter rubbish, Teddy. You’re too dreamy to be true. Why don’t you want to receive?”

“I don’t particularly want to give, either.”

“You’re lazy, that’s all.”

“No. Idleness doesn’t suit me.”

“You’ve certainly given it a chance to.”

“Oh, you say that. But I really worked quite hard at Oxford, you know, and then there was the band—I didn’t have much time over.”

“But that’s not
working
,”
said Jane. “That’s like being at school—it’s just a way of filling up time while you’re waiting to grow up and get away.”

“And what sort of work do you do?”

“I’m a girl.”

“So I’ve noticed. But surely you believe in sexual equality. Or are you waiting to start work with marriage?”

He began to play the Wedding March from Lohengrin.

“I’d like to be married,” she said. “I want to have a white
wedding, and for Mummy to cry, and for everyone to throw confetti. And I want there to be lots of those awful speeches.”

“Do you?” he said. “Hmm. I’ll write you a pop song for your wedding.”

“Teddy, do you honestly
like
pop songs?”

“Certainly. Musically, I’m apolitical.”

“I do wish you wouldn’t use words like that,” said Jane. “You know I don’t understand them.”

“Ethmoid,” said Edward.

“Oh, shut up,” said Jane.

J
AMES WEATHERBY’S
tiny bachelor flat was just off the Brompton Road. Weatherby lived in Sussex, but as often as twice a month he would telephone his wife and say that he was terribly busy and couldn’t face the extra fatigue of the double journey. The flat was furnished from the days when he had been, indeed, a bachelor. There were two arm-chairs, a double divan on which guests were supposed to lounge, a desk, a
ratty-looking
carpet and some cheap bright prints. The curtains were a chintzy green, and the windows gave a splendid view over central London. Weatherby claimed that on a clear day one could see from Clapham to Hampstead.

“It’s just a converted attic,” he had said to Shrieve, “nothing more than a maid’s room, really. Are you sure it’ll do for you?”

“It’ll be very useful,” Shrieve had said. “I only want a pied-à-terre.”

“It’s more of a pied-en-air, actually.” Weatherby had given his dry laugh. “But it serves its purpose. When the children are older, they’ll want somewhere they can spend an odd night, and it’s really quite cheap.”

Shrieve hadn’t been in the flat twenty-four hours before he had begun to wonder what Weatherby meant by it serving its purpose. The telephone had rung twice and a woman’s voice had said, “Is that you, James?” When Weatherby came in to see whether his friend had settled in all right, Shrieve said, “There’s been a woman trying to get you. I said you were at your office, but she didn’t seem to believe me.”

“A woman? Now who can that have been?”

Weatherby was a lanky man with very long fingers that gave him the air of being more precise than he actually was: to watch him picking up crumbs was to imagine him an old maid. In fact he was an industrious and able civil servant, near the
peak of his career, and he had a toughness of mind that could alarm Shrieve. He had a neat ginger moustache, and his thick hair was fading gracefully to silver. He wore rimless glasses and occasionally sported a bow-tie. His umbrella was always immaculately furled, and his shoes, as Shrieve remembered from their undergraduate days, always shone with great lustre: Shrieve could not imagine him without burnished feet.

“A woman, you say,” he said. “It can hardly have been my secretary. I wonder who it was. I hardly ever use this number, of course. Perhaps it was one of those wretched people who phone one up to advertise something.”

“She asked if I was James.”

“Did she now?” A glint of resolution showed in Weatherby’s eye. “Hmm.”

Shrieve didn’t wish to hear about his friend’s peccadilloes, supposing them to be nothing worse. “Did you manage to arrange a meeting with Filmer for me?” he said. Filmer was one of the senior civil servants concerned with the colony.

“Yes. He said he’d be glad to see you, but confidentially I was to let you know there was little he could do. The Minister takes a personal interest in these conferences, you know, and he doesn’t leave much to us. But Filmer will be only too pleased to pass on what you’ve got to say.”

“That’s very kind. Have the delegates made up their minds when they’re going to arrive yet?”

“Next week. The conference starts on Thursday week. That gives you a chance to work on them, if you want to. I would, too, if I were you.”

“Yes, I suppose so.” Shrieve looked tired. “I’m beginning to feel rather hopeless, I’m afraid, James. Everyone has been very kind and sympathetic and attentive, and then said there’s nothing much he can do, he’s sorry to say. London’s so far from the Ngulu, the whole problem sounds unreal here. I’m beginning to feel pretty detached myself.”

“I wouldn’t say that, Hugh. Your interest is fairly obviously attached, I’d say. But you’re right about the distance—your place is scarcely on the maps of Whitehall at all. We’re all so
involved with the political structure and so forth. And so will the black boys be, too, when they arrive.”

“Exactly. Everyone’s so interested in the big stuff about freedom and who’s going to be Prime Minister and whether or not they’re going to stay in the Commonwealth that my wretched little people will simply be overlooked.”

“I don’t think you need be quite so gloomy,” said
Weather-by
, picking up his bowler hat. “Look, I must go. Have you got everything you need?”

“Yes thanks. It’s really very kind of you.”

“Not at all, not at all. I must catch the 6.30 or I’ll be late for dinner and there’ll be hell to pay. But there’s no need to be desperate, Hugh. I’d say things have been pretty encouraging for you so far. People are getting to know about the Ngulu, and that’s what counts. You may have nothing to show on paper yet, but it’s what’s going on in people’s heads that matters.”

Shrieve saw him to the door. As Weatherby started down the stairs he stopped and said, without turning back, “Oh, and Hugh. If that woman rings again, tell her I’ll ring her
tomorrow
, would you?”

“All right,” said Shrieve. He watched Weatherby whistle his way out of sight.

Back in the flat, sunk in one of the chairs, he gazed at the sky and wondered whether his friend was right. In the weeks since his arrival, Shrieve had tactfully urged his case on as many people as he could. Filmer was the most important in a series of reasonably highly placed people whose influence could prove valuable. It was true that it would be more effective to go straight to the Minister, but that, unfortunately, was out of the question. The long memorandum he had written would no doubt have made its way to the Minister’s desk by now, in any case. What was needed was an assurance that the Minister would not only read it, but act on it. The Minister enjoyed a reputation for ruthlessness as well as for hard work, and the memorandum might have been tossed to a subordinate after a hurried glance or even chucked into the waste-paper basket.
You could never tell what a politician was going to consider important.

The flat was ugly and Shrieve felt depressed. The walls badly needed distempering, the chairs needed recovering. He felt very lonely, and wished very much that Amy was there.

*

“I don’t see why we
should
get married,” said Judy Jones. “Do you, Edward?”

“No. Not if you don’t want to.”

“We’re perfectly all right as we are. We’d break up at once if we got married—we wouldn’t know how to cope with
anything
official, we’d just collapse. The way things are we both have perfect freedom and never feel the need to exercise it. Why spoil it?”

“It sounds ideal,” said Edward.

“It
is
ideal,” said Judy.

Pete Harrisson shrugged. He was the trumpeter with whom Edward had started a cool band at Oxford, and he had a fringe of red beard. He always wore open-necked shirts with thick dark stripes. He and Judy had lived together since their second spring term, when he had taken a houseboat on the Cherwell as digs.

“You don’t know my parents,” he said. “Any day now they’re going to ask me what my intentions are.”

“Surely the girl’s family asks that?”

“Like I said, you don’t know my parents.”

They were sitting in the bedroom of Pete’s flat, two rooms, a kitchen and bathroom on the ground floor of a large old house near Ladbroke Grove. So far only the bedroom and kitchen had been furnished, and Edward was to sleep on a mattress in the sitting-room, surrounded by unopened crates and piles of old newspapers. Pete and Judy were do-it-yourself people, but only one wall of the bedroom had been painted as yet, and there was thick dust on half a dozen tins of distemper. The gramophone, however, was fully installed, with extension speakers in the kitchen and sitting-room. At the moment it was on the last track of a long-playing record of Charlie Mingus.

Judy had just started work on a newspaper. Pete was
unemployed
except for odd nights of trumpet-playing with small bands. He was trying to raise the capital for a club, with food served upstairs and a band led by himself downstairs. It was to be called The Incha’ Allah—the God-willing. The Arabic name would give the club a certain cachet: several admired American jazzmen had adopted Mohammedanism and Moslem names in the last few years. It was to be the first and only centre of cool jazz in London, and the plans were sufficiently advanced to include the lighting and the arrangement of tables. The idea was to have unfussy music in an unfussy atmosphere. Edward, it had been made clear, was expected to be the unfussy pianist in the band.

“What are your plans, Edward?” said Judy.

“I’m not sure. What have you fixed up for me, Pete?”

“A few gigs here and there. Maybe something for tonight, it’s not definite yet.”

“Good,” said Edward. “Then I’ll be playing a few gigs for Pete, Judy, and I’ll be working for this test recording, and perhaps I’ll be helping this man Shrieve during the days. I must ring him up and find out.”

“Listen,” said Pete, “I want you to take these gigs seriously. We’ve got to get a band together, and you’ve got to keep your ears open. There aren’t that many people around who play our kind of style. They’re going to be sort of auditions, these gigs.”

“Oh, sure. And you’ve got to take my recording session seriously, too. When I’m top of the pops there’ll be money for all of us.”

“O.K., O.K.,” said Pete. “Look, we’ve got to go to this party. Will you be all right here? There’s probably some food somewhere, isn’t there, Judy?”

“Don’t worry about me,” said Edward. “I’ll contribute to the household budget.”

“Tomorrow,” said Judy. “We must go
now,
Pete, or your mother’ll think we’ve been wallowing in unsanctified sex.”

“Haven’t you been?”

“Not this evening, no. I’ve only been back from work an
hour. Pete, do take that record off. He never takes records off,” she added to Edward. “It makes me furious, that hissing noise.”

Pete switched off the machine. “See you at the Brachs Restaurant in Coventry Street at half past ten, right? And don’t be late, there may be work.”

“Right. Enjoy yourselves.”

“Some hope,” said Judy. “I just hope it’s not true that children grow to be like their parents. If Pete starts acting like his father, I’m leaving.”

“What’s so awful about your father, Pete?”

“Nothing. It’s that that’s so awful, really.”

After they’d gone, Edward washed as best he could (the hot water system wasn’t yet working), then glanced at an evening paper. A news items on an inside page informed him that a Mr James Pocock, of Brisbane, claimed to have over five thousand Free bottle-tops. Asked why he was collecting them, he said, “In the war there was a great demand for scrap of all kinds. I think my collection may prove valuable next time.” There were collectors all over the world, he said. “It’s our hobby. We exchange letters and so on, you know.”

Could it be true, Edward wondered: or was it just a silly season story? He read the item again. It came from a reliable agency, it must be true. He threw the paper down and decided to call Shrieve.

The phone was answered almost immediately.

“Hello, this is Edward Gilchrist. I’m in London.”

“Oh, hello,” said Shrieve.

“Have you got anything for me to do? I’m ready and eager.”

“Not really,” said Shrieve. He had forgotten that Edward was going to ring.

“Oh.” The boy, as Shrieve thought of him, sounded
disappointed
.

“Look, what are you doing this evening? I mean now?”

“Nothing till quite late.”

“Would you like to come and have a drink? I live very close to South Kensington tube station. We can talk things over a bit, if you like.”

“That would be very nice,” said Edward. “As long as I’m not disturbing you at all.”

“Not in the least. Come whenever you like. Are you far away?”

“Notting Hill. It won’t take me long.”

“You have the address?”

“Oh yes.” He was clutching the piece of paper on which Shrieve had written it in his hand. “I’ll be with you in about twenty minutes.”

“Excellent,” said Shrieve. “Goodbye.” He smiled at Edward’s eagerness as he replaced the receiver.

It was a warm rather sultry evening, and London seemed dirty and sweaty. Large purple clouds floated low, threatening but not giving rain. The trees looked tired, though it was still only July; the fumes of traffic seemed to have wilted them. The streets were busy with late shoppers, and hard to cross for the stream of homeward-bound cars. The tube was suffocating.

Yet Edward felt excited. The start of something new was always exhilarating, and if Shrieve had anything to offer him at all, it would be completely new, a strange and impressive world where men thought seriously about power. And besides, it was a lark, it would surprise his friends, it had already
surprised
Pete and Judy. Edward like surprising his friends, and he liked, too, to take on more than one thing at a time, to juggle with his days. At Oxford he had worked quite hard and played in the band, and at the same time had gone to lectures
completely
outside his subject—on Greek vases, for instance. He liked not having quite enough time, it spurred him on. It had been like going on a cruise, attending the lectures in the Ashmolean, with strange people and a new landscape, and at the back of his enjoyment the knowledge that he ought to have been doing something else. So, now, to be involved with jazz and the fringes of politics pleased him immensely. He dreaded becoming limited, narrow-minded, a specialist. Between the Ngulu and the world of Pete and Judy, of jazz and pop songs, there stretched light years, and he hugged to himself the idea of straddling infinite space.

He soon found Shrieve’s block of flats and took the flights of stairs at a run. Shrieve answered the door in a sweater.

“You
still
feel cold?”

“A little. It takes time to adapt, you know. England is so inconsistent, too. Where I come from you know it’s going to rain at certain seasons and that it’ll be terribly hot at others. You know where you are. Here you look out of the window and the sun’s shining, and by the time you’re at the bottom of the stairs it’s beginning to rain.”

“I suppose so,” said Edward. “I don’t honestly notice much. I like it when the sun shines, of course.”