On the other hand, she had managed to convey the impression that it might be rather a good thing to have “celebrated one’s twenty-first”—to have shed the irrelevant preconceptions of the last century and decided to enjoy the world as it was, faults and all.
“Well, I don’t think it would be terribly convenient,” Karen said. “I told you, I have exams hanging over me—”
“Ah, but surely it’s bad, isn’t it, to work at full pressure all the time before exams? You’d benefit from the chance to relax for an evening.” Victor flavoured his voice with all the coaxing he could.
“Fasten it, Brian!” she snapped sideways at the half-seen person in her room. “If you and Tom can’t keep quiet I throw you out, catch? Sorry, Vic,” she added, facing the camera again. “But—no, I don’t think so, thanks all the same.”
There was a frozen instant in which the only sound was from the bathroom overhead: Mary stepping out of her tub.
Eventually Victor said, and knew he sounded both idiotic and peeved, but couldn’t help it, “Why not?”
“Look, Vic, I really am very very sorry. I shouldn’t have done it because I realised afterwards you’d probably make a big scene of it and I can’t. I don’t want to, candidly, but even if I did I couldn’t. I just happened to be on my own in Cheltenham and you really were very sweet to me when I was feeling a bit lonely and it was a very interesting evening hearing you talk about the old days especially what you said about Africa because I was able to come back and tell Tom some things he didn’t know and he comes from there—”
“But if you mean that why wouldn’t you like—?”
“Vic, I’m terribly sorry, honestly I am. I should have told you straight out, I guess, but I didn’t know how you’d react and I didn’t want to upset you because lots of people do get a bit upset.” Her pretty face wore an unhappy look which he couldn’t for the life of him believe was pretence.
“You see, I’m spoken for here. I’m in a triple with Brian and Tom and we’ve got a good thing going for us and I just don’t go outside unless—you know—it’s an accidental thing, like my being away looking up those old parish records. So all I can say is it would be very nice to have you drop in and say hullo when you come to Bristol but don’t hope for any more. Is that horribly blunt?”
The past reached out and closed a dead hand on Victor’s brain. He looked past Karen’s worried face and made sense of two shapes immobilised at her insistence in the background of the small square picture. Like badly unfocused photos, they still conveyed their essential identity: one pale and one dark male figure, both bare to the waist, with some sort of blurred pale bar over the shoulder of the dark one. In exact painful words, Karen’s two boy-friends sitting on something low, probably a divan-bed, one with his arm around the other.
And that “other”—she had just said so—an African.
The bathroom door overhead opened. He switched off the phone and moved away from it, mechanically. He had not formulated another coherent thought apart from fury before Mary appeared in a towelling robe and asked him to fix her a drink from the liquor console.
He complied grumpily, aware that he must not let his anger show through, yet incapable of putting on a cheerful expression. Mary asked him, as was inevitable, “Who were you talking to on the phone?”
“I called Bristol,” Victor said, more or less without lying. “I’ve been thinking about that housing development over there, and wondering if it would be worth our while to sell up and go somewhere a bit more isolated.”
“What did they say?”
“I didn’t get any joy.”
Mary sipped her drink, frowning. She frowned a lot nowadays, and it was turning her once-pretty face into a mask of aging wrinkles. Victor noticed the fact and thought with detachment of how that brief phone-call had altered the reaction it had conjured up in him only an hour ago.
Then, drunk on the memory of Karen, he had been thinking: I could leave her, if there are young girls available, I could have a grand fling before I finally lose the urge …
Such thoughts at his age seemed ridiculous in modern terms, but he had never adjusted to modern terms. He realised now with resignation that he never would. “Celebrating his twenty-first” was a privilege time had stolen away.
“This drink tastes terrible,” Mary said. “Are you sure you set the machine right?”
“What? Oh, damn it! Of course I’m sure! It’s been mucking me about the past few days and nobody can come to fix it before the weekend.”
“Talk about progress!” Mary said with a scowl. “Our head boy in Lagos would have died rather than make a mess of a cocktail like this.”
She gulped the rest of it down anyhow, with a grimace, and set aside the glass. “I’ll go and get dressed, then,” she added. “What time are the Harringhams expecting us—noon, or half past?”
“Noon,” Victor said. “Better hurry.”
When she had gone, he fixed himself a drink too—manually—and stood gazing out the room’s window-wall at the encroaching hordes of interchangeable houses across the valley. Thoughts flickered in his mind like a series of projected slides that had been shuffled out of coherent order.
Over a hundred million people in this damned island and they let these blacks come and go as they want.
She seemed like a decent girl and suddenly it turns out that she …
Bloody machine cost a fortune and doesn’t work properly. Have to send for repairmen and they make you wait. Back home it was done by servants and if one of them didn’t work there was always another to be hired and trained.
Decadent, dirty-minded, obsessed with sex like the black brutes we tried to get some sense and civilisation into!
Try telling that to Karen and make her understand, try explaining the spaciousness and real leisure in the life I had to leave behind. Mary understands; she comes from the same background. We can at least share our grouses if nothing more.
Which, he realised dully, meant that there could never have been any substance in his brief dream of leaving her and going off for a few wild-oat years before he ran out of energy. His marriage to Mary had lasted; his others, to English-born girls, hadn’t. And the same on her side, too: she had been married before to someone who didn’t understand. A row between himself and her didn’t have to be explained away and excused—she felt the same aching disappointment with the world as he did.
Some people had adjusted, come home after having well-paid jobs in Africa or Asia tugged out from under them, accepted inferior posts at home and worked their way back up. He’d tried and tried, but it never suited him—sooner or later there was a crisis, a loss of temper, a complaint, and an interview with the management … He wasn’t poor, they had enough to live on. But they had no purpose, and almost no occupation.
He wanted to turn back time, and could not.
At least, though, he and Mary had not been allowed children—he had used up his permitted maximum of three in his second marriage, and the two boys and the girl were in their middle twenties now, which meant they had probably just escaped the full impact of the decadence claiming Karen.
If they hadn’t …
But that he would rather not know. If he couldn’t get from life the only thing he desired—return to the colonial society he had been brought up in—he preferred that the world turn its back on him and leave him to mope undisturbed.
continuity (21)