Pat’s life was one in which there were no such significant saliences. She was about to begin her course at university, and 186 Domenica Meets Pat
was looking forward to the student life. It would have been marginally better, she thought, if she were sharing a flat with other students, rather than with Bruce, but Scotland Street was convenient and she had become fond of it. And now, of course, she had met Peter, the part-time waiter from Glass and Thompson, who was also a student of English literature and given, she had surreptitiously learned, to skinny-dipping.
She was not sure what to make of Peter, and wanted to discuss him with Domenica, whom she had not seen for some time, but whom she now encountered while turning the corner from Drummond Place into Scotland Street. There was the custard-coloured Mercedes-Benz being manoeuvred laboriously into a parking place which was almost, but not quite, too small for it.
Pat waited while her neighbour extracted herself from her impressive vehicle.
“Everything,” began Domenica, as she locked the door behind her, “is getting smaller and smaller. Have you tried to sit in an aeroplane seat recently? Legs, it would appear, are to be left behind, or carried, separately, in the hold. Houses are getting smaller, ceilings are being lowered. Offices too. Everything. Not just parking spaces.”
Pat smiled. Domenica had an endearing way of launching straight into controversy. There was never any warming up with remarks about the weather or inquiries after health. “I suppose you’re right,” she said.
“Thank you,” said Domenica. “Not that I wish to complain.
There is nothing worse, in my view, than people of my age –
which is not unduly advanced, I hasten to point out – nothing worse than such people complaining all the time. O tempora, O
mores! That sort of thing. That comes from seeing the world changing and not liking it simply because it’s different. We must embrace change, we’re told. And I suppose that’s a sensible thing to do if the change is worthwhile and for the better. But why should we embrace change for its own sake? I see absolutely no reason to do that. Do you?”
Pat did not, and said as much as she accompanied Domenica down the street.
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“The problem,” said Domenica, “is that the cost-cutters are in control. They are the ones who are setting the tone of our age. They are the ones who are insisting that everything be cheap and built to the barest specifications. Nobody can do anything which is large and generous-spirited any more, because a cost-cutter will come along and say: Stop. Make everything smaller.”
Pat said nothing. She had been thinking about Peter. Perhaps it would be an idea to discuss him with Domenica. “I’m thinking about a boy,” she said suddenly.
“How interesting,” said Domenica. “Interesting, but often a terrible waste of time. Still, come up with me, my dear, and we shall talk about boys in the comfort of my study. How delicious!”
57. The Natural Approach
“Well,” said Domenica, perching on the edge of her chair. “Tell me, then. You went to see him? That rather handsome young man whom we jointly encountered? You went to see him?”
Pat thought the question rather pointed. She had forgiven Domenica her tactless attempt to introduce the two of them, through the transparent device of offering to lend Peter a book of Rupert Brooke’s verse. She had even laughed, in retrospect, over the obviousness of the ploy. But in view of her neighbour’s somewhat heavy-handed, not to say socially clumsy, behaviour, she did not think that she was in a position to criticise her going to Peter’s flat. “He did ask me,” she said, defensively, and went on to explain to Domenica about the meeting at the Film Theatre and the invitation which Peter had extended to her. He had meant it, she said, even if by the time she went to see him he had forgotten that he had invited her.
“And did it go as planned?” asked Domenica.
“I had no plan,” said Pat. She frowned. What did Domenica imagine she had intended to do once she got to Peter’s flat?
Sometimes people of Domenica’s generation, in an attempt to 188 The Natural Approach
be modern, missed the point. Young people no longer bothered about engineering seduction. It happened if they wanted it. And if they did not, it did not. People were less coy about all that now.
Domenica provided the answer. “But you must have gone hoping to find something out – to learn a bit more about him?
Did you?”
Pat nodded. “I learned a bit,” she said. “But I’m not sure about him. I’m just not . . .”
Domenica waved a hand. “The most important thing these days is whether he . . . whether he’s interested. There are so many young men who just aren’t interested these days. It never ceases to surprise me.”
Pat studied her neighbour. It embarrassed her slightly to have this conversation with a woman so many years her elder
– even if circumlocution was employed. Interested was such an old-fashioned way of putting it; laughably so, she thought.
And yet Domenica was a woman of the world; she had lived abroad, lost a husband, done anthropological fieldwork in South America. She was no innocent. Why did she need circumlocutions?
“Of course, the terminology has changed,” Domenica went on, waving a hand airily. “In my day we used to refer to men as being musical. That was a code word. The other words came in, and now, of course, everybody spells it out. Is he, do you think?”
“Is he what?”
“You know. Cheerful?”
“You mean gay?”
Domenica blushed. “Yes.”
“I don’t know,” said Pat. “I really don’t.”
Domenica laughed. “But you must. Any woman can tell. We can just tell.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Pat. “Do you think men can tell when a woman isn’t interested in men?”
Domenica did not hesitate. “Of course they can’t,” she said.
“But that’s because men aren’t as perceptive as women. Men The Natural Approach
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don’t pick these things up. They just don’t notice the obvious.”
“And the obvious is?”
Domenica picked her glass up off the table beside her chair.
“Trousers,” she said. “Big, baggy trousers, and boots. Certain tattoos. Subtle clues like that.” She paused. “But tell me – is he available, so to speak?”
“I think so,” said Pat. “I get the impression that he is, but . . .”
Domenica’s eyes widened. “There was something?”
Pat looked down at the floor. She would not emerge very well from this story, but she wanted to tell it to Domenica, and so she continued. “There was a photograph,” she said. “It had something written on the back – skinny-dipping in Greece with T.
And I had a quick look at it when he was out of the room. I couldn’t help myself.”
“Entirely understandable,” said Domenica. “Anybody would have done the same. Anybody.”
“Well, I did. And it was a picture of him, of Peter, standing in the sea. It looked as if it had been taken on a Greek island somewhere. He was a little bit off the shore and so the water came up almost to his chest. It was a perfectly respectable photograph.”
Domenica sighed. “How disappointing.”
Pat was not sure what to make of that. There was something racy about Domenica, something liberated. And yet at the same time, she was in no sense coarse. There was no scatological language of the sort that is so casually pumped out by the foul-mouthed, for whom the obscene, predictable expletive is an obsessive utterance. And yet there was a complete lack of prudery. It was contradictory – and puzzling.