Blame It on the Bossa Nova (11 page)

“Heard the news?” I said.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

I had no idea how she wanted the business to run out anyway, perhaps she wanted a limited nuclear Armageddon, so I didn’t pursue the matter. Instead I said “I wanted to say sorry about the other day.”

“Forget it.”

I was erasing it from my memory when she added “... look, today I’m out to enjoy myself, OK?”

“Great,” I said, and we set off for Chris’s flat.

Christopher was pottering about in a silk dressing gown. He was suitably impressed. “I approve Alex.” On a coffee table was a bowl of ice, bottles of gin, martini, whisky, tumblers. We helped ourselves.

He carried on a conversation with Pascale through the open door of his bedroom as he was changing, questioning her closely on her connections in French society and letting drop the name of a Comte or two who certainly wouldn’t have remembered him with the same clarity. After Chris had changed we sat around drinking while he made some ‘essential’ phone calls. Most of them sounded far from that, and after a brief exchange of salutations degenerated swiftly into bitchy gossip about an absent third party. I was jarred into brief attention by one call when he actually made an appointment to see someone at his surgery. He had succeeded so thoroughly in suppressing all talk of his business life since I had known him that I was shocked, as once before, to be reminded that he had a livelihood. When he finally put the phone down we sat and drank and talked and drank some more.

When we at last climbed into his battered old Daimler it was well past midday. I had been told Christopher never cleaned his cars. Never is a long time, but on the external and internal evidence confronting us I could believe it. I made sure I got in the back first and that Pascale took the front passenger seat. I didn’t figure our relationship had a lot of mileage in front of it so I lounged back out of the restricted beam of a two-way conversation and played the diligent professional, my role completed. Her personality was a radio that she could turn on like a switch. With Christopher it was set for harmony and he couldn’t get enough of it. She brought out wit from him, which she then applauded, and he in turn found the company as relaxing and conducive as a sandalwood bubble bath. They quite forgot about me in the back so I picked up a copy of the new satirical magazine, Private Eye, lying on the back shelf.

Some time later I was jolted out of my reading by Christopher swinging the car off the road into the gravelled forecourt of a gigantic Neo-Tudor Thirties pub, one of a number that encircle the outskirts of London like strategically placed fortresses.

“Where are we?”

“I don’t know, Alex, somewhere on the Portsmouth Road, the suburban hamlets of London are mysteries to me.”

“We’ve just come off the Kingston by-pass,” said Pascale, revealing an unexpected knowledge of local geography.

As we entered the pub we encountered a small group of football fans, bedecked in their team’s colours, they were just leaving.

“Where are you off to lads?” asked Christopher with a bonhomie born in the depths of cynicism.

“Bournemouth,” they replied.

“And who’s your team?”

“Crystal Palace,” their gruff voices rising slightly with the pride of association.

“Great. Good luck to you, I hope they win.” As the last of the group passed him Chris gave him a comradely pat on the back. We took our drinks back to one of the darkened alcoves that encircled the bar, gloomy even in the midday sun. Between us and the bar was an expanse of carpet big enough to be used as a training pitch by a formation dance team. Perhaps at night it was crowded - now it was deserted. Each alcove contained two tables, about six green leather padded chairs and four Victorian hunting prints. The principal source of illumination was the reflection from the copper cooking utensils fixed to the timber beam above our heads. At the next table a girl who wasn’t half bad looking was sitting in silence with a bloke of about thirty. He had a pint mug in front of him and she had a tomato juice. I saw Chris look at them quickly and noticed his face tense up for a second, so I gathered he was interested. I wondered if he was going to make a move. He was forced to remain within the sphere of our conversation for quite a while however by the drive and verve of Pascale who to me seemed almost hysterically determined to make it a weekend to remember. But my perceptions of Pascale’s behaviour were scarcely objective and Chris seemed happy enough to develop the intimate understanding that had begun at Pavilion Road. As I’ve said before she was very good at making people like her a lot, and she’d quickly judged the sort of pseudo-sophisticated glibness that would attract Christopher. One of its essential elements was to trivialise and ridicule any subject which was in danger of being taken seriously - Thalidomide babies, the OAS attempt to assassinate De Gaulle, the Berlin Wall - All were treated to the same immaculate bad taste in a self-congratulatory duet that seemed to flow as effortlessly as the drinks. We kept them coming, doubles and trebles to save time re-ordering. I think we were all determined to be well oiled by the time we arrived at Drone Acres.

I’d heard all this sick stuff better done on Lenny Bruce LPs so to pass the time I half closed my eyes and tried to see what colours were retained: violets and yellows, and then opening them suddenly: reds, and then slamming them closed: deep indigo. I was experimenting on whether this varied greatly with constant repetition when Pascale got up to go to the lavatory. Christopher turned to me smiling.

“Alex, what other friends have you been hiding from me, she’s terrific?”

“I’m glad you get on together.” I was convinced at that moment that he was totally captivated by her and oblivious to everything else but he had a surprise in store for me, for he suddenly leaned back away from me and addressed the couple sitting next to us.

“Have you any idea how far it is from here to Chichester?”

The bloke replied that it was about fifty miles.

“Same road all the way.”

The bloke gave him some advice on the best road to take and the girl looked up lethargically to observe the intruder into her boredom. Christopher twinkled his eyes at her and drew a slight response. Seconds later he was introducing himself, seconds later he was signalling to the bar for drinks for our new friends and I was returning to the world of reds, yellows and deep indigos.

“This is Alex,” I heard him say.” I opened my eyes to a blaze of cinnamon and vermilion and acknowledged them. By the time Pascale came back everything was very matey, particularly between Chris and the girl, whose name we found out was Pauline. I could see Pascale was a bit put-out by this intrusion - it served no useful purpose in her scheme of things - and in truth it amused me slightly. The finely honed wit she had been purveying earlier sat ill at ease in a conversation that under Christopher’s guidance had broadened considerably to accommodate the new participants. She was forced temporarily to sit, like me, in silence. Pauline and Chris were hitting it off famously, he was doing his famous impersonation of himself and she was lapping up every last drop. I looked across to her boyfriend, Roger, and saw he was getting very pissed off.

“Look you two,” said Christopher suddenly, addressing both of them but fixing Roger with a look that tried to convey he was Chris’s best mate in the whole wide world, “... we’re off to a party, down in Hampshire. Why don’t you both come, it’s going to be a whole lot of fun.” He was talking to Roger because he knew Pauline was already in the bag. But Roger looked doubtful.

“Come on Rog, let’s go,” said Pauline. “... Your mum won’t mind if we don’t go round and see her tonight.”

“What d’you say Rog?” said Christopher, perfectly capturing the required mood of cajolement. But Roger was not to be budged, and as his intransigence manifested itself more and more clearly, so too did Pauline begin to lose patience with him.

“Come on Rog,” she pleaded. “... We never do anything exciting. This sounds really great.”

“It will be,” promised Chris dutifully. But still he remained obdurate and soon she lost all patience.

“Well I’m going anyway. You can do what you want.”

At this Roger showed signs of panic, repeating her name in imploring tones, but the more pathetic he became the more resolute grew her determination to come with us. So close to victory, Chris could now afford a moment’s satirical parody: “Come on Rog,” he echoed, “... it’ll be fab.” But shortly afterwards with clinical timing he briskly stood up and said that we really must be on our way, in fact that we were already behind time.

“Rog – Pauline - What’s it to be?”

“I’m coming anyway,” she declared and marched out with us, leaving the dejected Rog alone amid a sea of empty shorts glasses, a sadder and a wiser man.

Then there was the road, the crazy road, the A3 taking us westward, and Chris at the wheel hugging the cats’ eyes, playing the trash music on the radio, and sitting next to him Pascale, still brooding but beauteous in her sulkiness. Once Chris turned to flip the dial of the radio and we all caught the sound of an announcer saying something about Cuba, but Pascale flipped it back saying that was for the birds and we were out to have a good time... and in the back me and Pauline... Pauline soft and big-titted and snuggling up to me and letting me play with her gently so that she giggled softly and told me to stop it but let me continue.

The Kemps were an old English family, but no one had paid them much attention until the Henrician Reformation, they’d done rather well out of that. As one of Henry’s new class of civil servants Thomas Kemp had acquired landed property and power. Later generations had become titled - something to do with the way they accepted the Hanoverian Succession - and, as is often the case with Whig aristocracy, things had just kept on getting better and better. The peak of overt political power came to the family in the nineteenth century when for a very short period a Kemp was foreign secretary. But in the twentieth century a subtler role was ordained. The rise of the media was superintended in certain key sectors by Kemps, and sometimes the current Lord appeared on ‘Any Questions’.

Their home, Cathcart House, had been built at a low ebb in the fortunes of English architecture; a century spent trying to grasp the nettle of classicism had produced a number of blistered hands but very few memorable buildings. By the time things had begun to settle down after the battle of Waterloo the patient was in a critical condition. Any imposed rational discipline tends to give the British a headache after a time and while everyone hung around counting off the decades to the Gothic revival the final emasculated examples of the old style revealed a carelessly concealed death-wish. Cathcart House was a case in point.

Christopher had parked the Daimler casually askew on the gravelled drive in front of the house and we all crawled out and those of us new to the place leaned on the bonnet and looked at it. It’s size made it impressive. In the centre of the facade was a portico with a flight of steps a storey high leading to it, seven giant order Corinthian columns were capped by a crude pediment - it was too dark to examine the reliefs inside it. On either side of the portico were six bays with ground floor rusticated but apart from that hardly any articulation, terminated by a balustrade. The effect was uninspired, unpleasing, but as I say impressive. It impressed Pauline.

“Is this your place Chris?” she gasped. He smiled with proprietorial pride. In his mind to have introduced us to it made it his place. Pascale too was impressed, I could see, her silence was eloquent, and also the fact that for a few seconds the almost permanent expression of fathomless introspection was replaced on her face by one of surprise.

The whole elevation was ablaze with light coming from almost every window and we could see people moving about inside. In my mind I made the clichéd comparison with a stage set. The light was thrown out onto the forecourt and I looked at the watch on my wrist and then across at the faces of the others in naive fascination of the effect.

“Are we going in, or shall we stay here?” said Chris. We dutifully fell in behind him and climbed the steps. The exterior had balanced mediocrity with grandeur but inside bad taste took over completely. The everyday objects of life in the second half of the twentieth century sat ill at ease next to suits of armour, themselves uncomfortable in quasi-classical surroundings.

I must have lost concentration for a second or two while transmitting the sense-data to my memory bank, for I suddenly noticed that Chris had disappeared and that Pascale also was no longer with us. Pauline hung nervously on my arm like a non-swimmer in a public swimming pool full of noisy louts.

“Let’s find out where they keep the drinks,” I said and went through a door to our left. She followed closely behind. A few people were standing around talking. One guy seemed familiar and after a second or two I recognised him as a television journalist on a nightly news magazine type programme. His television style was quirky, moralising, egocentric, posturing and I had never managed to develop an affection for his persona. He was without the tools of his trade that night, outrageous check jackets and matching hats, and he was chatting up a sexy looking blonde girl whom I recognised, again after a few seconds, as the one with whom I had nearly made it on the sofa at the Earls Court party. I looked round the room and sure enough, leaning on the mantelpiece was the fat slob. Pauline and I approached the chatting couple. I was surprised to find that the blonde remembered me. She didn’t actually say hello, but looked at me in a way that implied previous knowledge of my existence.