Stephen was different, Ralph supposed, in that it never seemed to occur to him not to be Ralph’s friend. Their alliance was what Ralph imagined to be brotherly, an unquestioned linkage which demanded no particular profit or return and which didn’t seem to have arisen out of personal choice. It irritated Ralph that he sometimes wondered why Stephen stuck with him; partly because he knew it never occurred to Stephen to wonder the same thing about Ralph, but largely because his criticisms of Stephen were deep and should not have manufactured a sense of good fortune at Stephen’s friendship as their irrational by-product. He supposed it was an unreformed conviction of their schooldays, when Stephen had been a princely character whose patronage was an asset. If Ralph was honest it had been his only asset, the thing that had got him through it all.
Stephen had never asked about Ralph’s parents, although when his father died at the end of Ralph’s first year at the school and he had had to go to Stephen’s house for the summer holidays, Stephen had been kind to him in a clumsy way and patted him on the back once or twice. When they went back for the new term, they had gone on a school trip. As the bus wound its way through the outskirts of the town, Ralph had suddenly recognized the road in which he had lived with his mother and father when he was younger. He had gazed out of the window and as they approached his old house he had turned to Stephen to point it out.
‘Plebsville,’ Stephen had said before he could speak, following Ralph’s eyes through the window. He made the hilarious vomiting noise which they had lately been using to signal disgust or contempt. For a moment Ralph had a strange feeling in his stomach, but then he had made the noise too and had sat back in his seat, glad that he hadn’t said anything.
It made him sad to think about that now, although he scarcely remembered his mother any more and the confused, itinerant portion of his life with his father had long since supplanted the old house with a set of diffuse, unrelated memories. He remembered running into their bedroom, though, early in the morning, and climbing up on the bed beside his mother in her nightdress. Her bare arms used to seem colossal to him, riven with a delta of frightening veins, but he had loved the way she smelled in the mornings. Later in the day she would be perfumed and distant, but in the morning she had a human smell, a smell of herself, which made him burrow against her like an animal. She was called Angela, although remembering her name made her recede even further in Ralph’s mind. His father had always called her ‘Mother’, which now struck Ralph as strange, but at the time had seemed a natural extension of his partnership with his father against her hygienic and dissatisfied leadership.
‘Better shape up,’ he would whisper to Ralph, as his mother swept in some nameless fury through the small rooms of their house. ‘Else Mother’ll have us.’
The bus had heaved itself past the traffic lights and was now thundering down the Holloway Road towards Ralph’s stop. Returning from his recollections he felt all at once rather lost and he reminded himself of the suddenly distant necessity for getting off the bus and going to work. He stood up, clinging to the metal poles as he staggered along the swaying platform. His body felt large and heavy, as if he had just woken from a dream and found it newly so. The bus stopped and he disembarked. Hurrying along the pavement towards his office building, he saw himself calling for his mother through the quiet house when he came home from school one day, worrying that she wasn’t there. He had used to call her ‘Mummy’, and he remembered now that she hadn’t liked it.
‘You sound like a little pansy,’ she had said, emerging wearily from the bedroom as he stood calling her in the hall. Her face was full of secrets. ‘What’s wrong with “Mum”?’
He opened the door and walked quickly across the foyer to the stairs. He hadn’t thought of that in years.
*
‘Good weekend?’ said Roz, who sat opposite him.
Their desks were pushed together at the front to form a square, a contact Ralph found obscurely intimate. Roz was in charge of the office computer and had discovered how to play games on the screen. She would sit for hours at solitaire, or a faster game involving spinning meteors which made explosive noises, and Ralph would grow infuriated at the incessant clicking and the blank rapture of Roz’s face, sighing and clearing his throat to no avail.
‘It was all right,’ he said.
‘What did you do, then?’ said Roz after a pause, her hand still clicking on the desk as she spoke.
‘Not much,’ said Ralph. He bent over his work and began writing something.
He occasionally felt guilty about his unkindness to Roz, for she was always interested in him in her slow, impervious way. She would ask him questions with apparently no memory of repetition or rebuff, retaining nevertheless the few blunt details he was obliged to divulge about his activities outside the office and stringing together a little narrative from them of which it pained Ralph to be the subject. He was ashamed of his feelings of physical repulsion for Roz’s pale, doughy form, her big moon of a face with its round eyes and slack, wet mouth. He would find himself watching her occasionally in wonder at her almost impossible plainness and sometimes she would catch him doing it and would reveal her teeth in a mirthless, fleshy smile.
He didn’t know much about her, for her fascination with Ralph’s life seemed to carry within it an almost dutiful apology for the monotony of her own. She lived with her mother in Hendon and she didn’t have a boyfriend. He had asked her about boyfriends when he first started the job, trying to be friendly, but something had lit up in her eyes which told him it had been a stupid thing to ask. The result of his enquiry was the flailing rapport which now plagued him daily, and it was with dumb misery that he realized Roz liked him — and, worse, that she was now irreversibly possessed of the conviction that he liked her — and that no amount of curtness would ever erase his early blunder. He had encountered girls like this before, big, silent girls who required only the acknowledgements his politeness obliged him to offer for their sad, obedient devotion to be forever nourished. At university there were several of them, and they would stop and greet him in the street, standing before him with the mute expectation that he would talk to them, until he had to excuse himself quite rudely and would go on his way with his heart thudding angrily in his chest. He perceived in their attentions some notion of affiliation, a disquieting recognition of his hopelessness which hurt him more than the disdain of loud, confident girls who had made the same discovery.