‘Sorry,’ I replied, ‘but I thought you might have been able to tell me. You look like a typical London girl to me. I’m a stranger here as well, because I’m from Nottingham. I’m studying there at the university, doing English Literature. Watch out, or that car will take your arse off. Pardon me, it’s only a colloquial expression. I’ll explain it to you if you come and have a cup of coffee. I’m down here for a few weeks, staying at a hotel, but my mother is coming to see me tomorrow to make sure I’m not getting into mischief. It’s going to be a bore showing her around, but she insists on keeping me under her thumb, so what can I do?’ Just when she was beginning to find my gamut had a bit of a hook to it, she noticed that we were standing outside a strip club with framed photos hung up of bare women whose faces you couldn’t see for their breasts. From the pious distaste on her face she might have thought I’d try to drag her inside, drug her, and rumble her off to a miners’ club in Sheffield. So I put on an honest, half-bewildered expression, folded my map, and took her by the elbow.
A few minutes later we were sitting in the Swiss Centre having cakes and coffee. ‘You a student, then?’ I asked. She wore a nice white blouse with a brooch at the neck, looked icy and demure, the last person it seemed possible to go to bed with, so why the hell had I picked her? She blushed, though I didn’t know why, and said: ‘I’m working in this London, as an au pair girl. But I’m also studying to make my English fluent.’
‘That’s hardly necessary,’ I told her. ‘Your vocabulary dazzles me. It scintillates.’ My only chance of maintaining hold of her was to keep the talkpot boiling with words that she understood but hardly knew the meaning of. If it was English she wanted, English she would get, and since I was born talking the lingo, who could give it to her better than old Jack Spice? I said how perfectly good her English was, while at the same time using words in such a way that she thought she’d never heard them before. ‘My family dwell in a mansion-hall near Nottingham,’ I went on, ‘a place my mother had me in, with its own hallelujah-garden where an old monk chapel once stood, and where we used to see silent films as kids. A private tutor taught me, up to the year of twelve, and then I was sent to a boarding college, though I kicked up the hot dust of hell because I didn’t want to be pitched out like that. But our family is bound by the steelropes of tradition. That’s England all over, and also what’s wrong with it. There was no gainsaying them. Yet it had its advantages, because me and my three brothers, as we came of age at fourteen, were taught to drive in a dual-controlled Rolls-Royce in the private grounds, which was a useful experience. That training Rolls has been in our family for generations.
‘The more you know me the more you’ll hear about my family, because families are like iron in this country, very important, worse luck. I’ve been wanting to kick mine off like a salty boot for as long as I started to dream, but it’s no use. In any case what’s the point? When I’m twenty-one in three months’ time I’m going to get a quarter of a million in sterling cash, and a tax-free income of fifteen thousand pounds a year. So it’s hard to let that slip out of my hands. Not that it would worry me if I never got it, because I’m quite capable of being independent and earning my own living. In fact I’m seriously considering giving my money, when it’s due to me, to the Charitable Organization Inching Towards Unspeakable Suffering — otherwise known by its initials as — well, anyway, it’s such a scorching brain problem with me, my dear, that its intensity sometimes threatens to trouble my studies. However, I imagine people do have worse worries, though I can’t visualize what they are, because this certainly seems real enough to me.’
I spoke such as this, and more, not in a swift, manic, lynx-eyed way, but slowly and mellowly, as if throwing it off in a familiar drift, casually, blowing out nasal cigarette smoke and sipping my coffee. I told her my name was Richard Arbuthnot Thompson, but that I was called Michael by my friends, when they hadn’t cause to use my initials, but within an hour she was tearful and wringing her hands over my dreadful dilemma of whether or not I should accept my share of the family fortune and be imprisoned within it for life, or whether I should be poor, independent, and territorially unsung. I knew which side she’d come down on in the end, if we knew each other that long, but I let her get all deliciously upset over my nonexistent problem because it drew us together like liquid dynamite. In two hours, and a different café, we were gazing into each other’s eyes while our cigarettes burned low and our vile coffee got cold. I said that in case I did repudiate the family coffers I was already practising the holy art of self-abnegation, and though I’d be delighted if she’d eat with me, it had to be in Joe Lyons at no more than five bob a head.
So we had lunch, and I told her how much it meant to me, having found someone who actually had the greatness of mind to understand my problem and not laugh at it. Then we went into the National Gallery (free) so that I could show her what pictures were fakes, because the real ones existed in the northern wing of Nondescript Hall, which was the name of my family and ancestral home. The more I posed at being noble, the more noble I felt, and it occurred to me that you are what you tell yourself you are, not what other people tell you that you are. You’ve only got to insist loud enough, and the clouds open to let in the sort of sunshine you’ve always been looking for.
Later that afternoon my new-found girlfriend, whose name I made out to be Bridgitte Appledore, said she had to go to the house she was working at because a night of baby-sitting had been arranged. Such had been my all-day gabble that she’d told me nothing about herself, but I hoped that would come later when I’d got more of a toe-hold into her confidence.
She worked for a doctor and his wife, who lived in a big place near the BBC. When they’d gone out she came down and let me in, and up I went by lift to the fourth floor.
I’d not been into such a flat before. It was so rich it didn’t even smell rich, but was full of good furniture and paintings, books and carpets. Bridgitte told me to sit in the living-room while she put a few finishing touches to the little boy of six who still crowed from his bed. I poured a cut of the doctor’s whisky and relaxed on the long deep settee, half listening to the inane story being read to the kid, who interrupted every phrase. I spied a box of Romeo and Juliet Havanas, and lit one — a far cry from a common Whiff — with a heavy effective lighter which had a solid base of pure silver. I was tempted to put it in my pocket, but for the time being resisted it, not knowing Bridgitte well enough to betray her. She might give me away if I nicked something so early on. But I was boasting to myself in even entertaining the idea of making off with such a thing, because I wouldn’t know where to sell it without getting caught. In any case I never had been and never would be a thief because I considered that there were better methods of making your way in the world than stooping to that. I just contented myself by taking half a dozen more cigars.
She came in from the kid’s room, hot-fer-dommering in Dutch that little Crispin had jumped out of bed and shat on the floor just to annoy her. He did it almost every night and she’d found no way to stop him. She’d told the doctor and his wife but they’d laughed and said it was only his cute little way and that he’d grow out of it soon. Meanwhile she had to be patient with him. There wasn’t much else she could do because the job was easy, the pay high, and the flat in the middle of London. She came back from the kitchen with a bowl of water and a bundle of cloths, a cigarette in her mouth to stop herself being sick at the mess. ‘Is he still awake?’ I asked.