Success (20 page)

Friday the 24th
. Getting bored, too, in a way, you know, with how things seem to be turning out in my flat, now that Ursula is here, and what with Terence still slightly fizzy (i.e., in a state of helpless, purple-gummed paranoia) about that absurd tart of his, June. My flat is an eldest son’s flat: it is designed for one person: it is designed for me. The spacious drawing-room, with its high knobbly cornice, serried bookcases, and white blaze of window, was, in days of yore, an ample stage upon which the young Mr Ridings could muse and wander, wander and muse … These days my civilized eyrie appears to have gone the way of the rest of the neighbourhood — a teeming subcontinent of alien voices, alien clothes, alien needs. Ursula
will
leave everything all over the place, and Terence, who is virtually a tramp these days anyhow, clearly feels that if a Riding can be untidy, you just watch a Service. Scenes of Rabelaisian squalor are commonplace now on the ground floor, and it takes a clear head and a strong stomach to forge one’s way
through that jangling rag-and-bone shop to the blighted bathroom. Ursula, mind you, is herself quite prettily installed in the little dressing-room: normally I shouldn’t mind in the least her powdery pandemonium of discarded dresses and unrecycled laundry, her rockpools of jewels and bombsite necropoli of make-up. There’s just something promiscuous and infra dig. about my sister’s girlish, patrician (i.e., essentially maid-less) disarray mingling with Terence’s apathetic slobbery: her used stockings are sandwiched in the wastepaper-basket by Terence’s beer-bottles and pin-ups; his splayed, pyorrhoeac toothbrush and ginge-fleeced comb flank her lipstick tubes and hair clips. They have, moreover, got a definite little community going on down there, often pooling resources for take-home snacks from Queensway and brewing up hot drinks on that electric kettle I forced Terence to buy. I sometimes feel — coming in late to deposit my coat in the large cupboard I still use in Ursula’s room — that
I
am the interloper; they’ll be sitting on the bed chatting, or listening to Terence’s absurd gramophone, or just pottering about, content in one another’s proximity, and
I
seem out of place, too glamorous, too in-demand, too far ahead of them. (Extra disorientating, this, when you reflect that from puberty onwards the young Ridings’ life had been a constant quest to evade their foster-brother, the weepy new-boy whose wrinkled socks never would stay up.) Why doesn’t she go out more? How does she fill her days? Where is her life? I’ve completed the circuit, have myself adorned the endless soirées, outings and cocktail parties of her near-coevals. She should be off to Ascot and Wimbledon and Henley, or just having those teas with her friends (where
are
everyone’s friends? A pity that no one’s daughters ‘come out’ any more, or rather that only yids’ daughters ‘come out’ any more). I don’t think it’s really on — is it? — that my sister should be permitted to slum in Terence’s world of cheap eateries and drab bedsitterdom, that world of contingency and failure. Shall (a) make an effort to take her out more
myself, (b) get her to sneak up here sometimes at night — fun for me and symbolic rescue from below-stairs, (c) forbid Terence to have her in his room. (T. is, by the way, pretty well his docile, winded old self again. I think he has now accepted the status that was always so clearly his true one. Don’t you?)

Thursday the 30th
. Staying bored, staying it, staying it. Last night attended an unavoidable — and virtually inedible — dinner with the Styleses at their repellent home. I don’t know, perhaps I’ll chuck up my job for something else, walk out on the gallery, ignore their promises and their pleas (they’ve already offered me more money. But I don’t need money). Fresh careers fan out at me like a conjuror’s playing-cards … Diplomacy: rather fun, house abroad, a troupe of servants (absolute walkover for someone with my connections, social talent and flair for languages). Publishing? Quite amusing despite the derisory pay, and you might get halfway tolerable colleagues (also relish the prospect of, say, knocking an arts list into shape — would need a free hand, of course). Politics … the charisma —
and
some — is already mine, salary good, secretaries, perks (but then all the fools, the fools). The City! No — not the City, definitely
not
the City. Writing holds some appeal; a few dashed-off prose-poems of mine have already won a small but resonant
succès
 … I don’t know, perhaps I’ll travel. The patchwork quilt of Europe, the rusty triangle of India, the green baize of Russia and the Urals, the lacquered prawn of Japan. See the world while the world is still there. Today I got home at twenty-to-seven drenched with the filth of the city and the filth of my boredom, and as I came out of the jaws of the underground and walked down the yapping hell of Queensway, the beercans, the youths eating muck in the street, I thought of my sister and my bath and my tea and my book and the congenial evening ahead (with maybe a little extra something after lights-out, courtesy of Ursula).
I took off my gloves and walked straight into Terence’s room. No one there. The flat silent and dead. I moved into the smoky light of the dressing-room. Through the mist of my disappointment I saw the signs of a hasty and excited exit. The day’s dress, left in a puddle on the floor, made me gulp. It hurt my heart to see the rejected shoes, placed together, saying twenty-past-six with their heels.

August is the month when we both have our birthdays, his on the 18th, mine on the 19th. (This was one of the things that so appealed to my foster-father’s quirky, musing nature; he loves all coincidences, flukes, windfalls, anything arbitrary.) Everyone seemed to think that the contiguity would cause me much abject distress, but in fact it was among the very few things that didn’t bother me, at least not in itself; I didn’t mind him having a better time than me (then. How would I dare?). They used to try and try and fuss and fuss, though, and of course I hated that. More than likely I would’ve preferred not to have birthdays at all; boys like the boy I was, I think, hate attention more than they hate anything. I enjoyed Gregory’s celebrations, for instance, infinitely more than I enjoyed mine. No effort was needed to render it good — there was little of the sense of strain which marked the gatherings gathered round me. And my foster-brother made tremendous viewing, of course. It is hard to transmit the sheer lustre of the growing
Gregory, when you can see the uncertain and compromised figure he has since become.

Especially recently. Especially since Ursula has come here. She diminishes him in some important way that I cannot yet detect. Do you know what it is? Or does he still tell you lies?

Why doesn’t he take her out more, give her more of his time, claim her as his own, which is what she is? At first, through craven habit, I inferred that he left Ursula and me together in an unthinking, disdainful way, as if to suggest that we were compatibly small-time and fucked up, the below-stairs losers who should not be allowed to impinge on the sparkling citadel of his own life. But that can’t be right, somehow. He doesn’t seem to be having a good time any more.

Did he actually fuck her ever, is what I want to establish. This must be important. I know she used to go to his room a lot at night (I thought she did it simply because she was better friends with him than she was with me, but I once surprised her in the bathroom afterwards, and she looked startled and ashamed for a second, and her nightdress was bunched and creased, and there was a salty odour about her that I had never smelled before), I know they had sexy jaunts together (there was one incident, for which they both had their ears soundly boxed, when they got marooned in the nude on a tiny island in the D-Pond), and I know they embraced every opportunity to touch each other up (I myself once wandered into the barn on a bright-shadowed spring afternoon and heard the cornily filmic noises of love among the hayricks, and crept towards the sounds of playful struggle and giggling reproach, and saw Ursula stretched backwards over an enormous saddle on the floor, her dress pulled up, the lower half of her body concealed by Gregory’s busy shoulders and back, and he certainly did seem to be caressing her very thoroughly, I thought, as I ran silently away), but did he actually
fuck
her, is what I want to
establish. Because then things would be clearer, wouldn’t they, not just for them but for me.

‘Hey, Ursula,’ I asked her the other evening, ‘that time out on the D-Pond, when you and Greg got stranded without any clothes on — what actually happened?’

‘Oh,’ said Ursula, not looking up from some knit-by-numbers pattern she was working on, her thin, sensitive hair almost intermeshing on her lap with the cotton and her own nervous fingers, ‘it was silly really.’

‘I dare say it was silly, but what actually happened?’

‘Oh, well, we went out on this raft Gregory had made and we didn’t notice it slipping away from the island and grumpy old Mr Firble had to row us back.’

‘But tell me a bit about the bit about having no clothes on.’

‘Yes, we took them off.’

‘Clearly. What for though?’

Her hands paused, and she glanced sideways towards her room. ‘We just took them
off
.’

‘Yes, I’m with you so far. I’ve mastered that bit of it. But sort of
why
did you take them off?’

‘Because it was so
hot
. I’m no good at knitting and I’m going to stop it and never do it again.’

‘
Tonto
, Ursula. Ursula —
tonto
,’ I whispered warningly, and she looked up at last. She made what’s known as a funny face, compressing her lips and bulging her eyes.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘I bet,’ I said, as she looked down again, ‘I bet it was quite embarrassing, being rowed back by that old turd Firble with no clothes on.’

‘Yes,’ said Ursula, ‘it jolly well was.’

Mad bitch … Perhaps, then, the whole thing is altogether simpler. Perhaps it is
really
simple. If I’m right, the way to my revenge is now clear.

Has she fucked anyone since, I wonder idly, if indeed she ever fucked him in the first place? Has she fucked anyone ever? I haven’t fucked anyone since I last fucked anyone.
I haven’t fucked anyone ever either, or at least it feels that way by now. It just disappears from your life. I don’t even go on about it as much as I used to, do I (though I still say
fuck
a lot)? That’s in character too. You’d think it would get worse, wouldn’t you? It doesn’t, thank God. The loss just looms lunar and abstract, like a dog on a distant moon baying at the Earth.

I’m earning so much money these days that I hardly know what to do with it all. I’m earning so much money that I’m thinking of going to a whore, and a good one too. Good ones, they say, cost a lot of money but are good at giving you hard-ons. The more money you give them, the better at giving you hard-ons they get. She’d have to be a very good one, my one. Perhaps there aren’t any that good. Perhaps, no matter how much money I earned, I’d never be able to afford one good enough to give me hard-ons. Who
could
give me hard-ons? Someone who liked me — I think that’s all it would take. Perhaps there’s a whore somewhere who is so good at giving you hard-ons that she likes you if you give her enough money. I’d better save up for her.

I’m earning so much money these days because Veale gimmicked it (why is Veale giving me all this money? Perhaps he likes me. Perhaps he could give me hard-ons too, if he wanted). Veale has already gimmicked it that I get tax relief and supplementary benefits for doing things about being Clerk (i.e., for doing things for him. I did them when he told me to. They only took a minute, and now I get all this money. I’ve got to do even more things for him later, but then I get even more money).

The rationalization proper hasn’t taken place yet. Everyone at the office is in a state of inordinate apprehension — quite rightly. They all think they are going to get aimed. Most of them will get aimed. Whereas, six months ago, it seemed that only one or two of us would be, it now seems that only one or two of us won’t be. I listen all day to Wark’s mushy-mouthed forebodings, watch Herbert
sit in quiet desperation at his desk, notice that Burns has got too paranoid to eat his fish in the office (Lloyd-Jackson has already resigned — there’s true bottle for you). Only the Controller is calm, though Veale says he oughtn’t to be. I am nervous, though Veale says I oughtn’t to be. I am as nervous as anyone here.

All this money I get. I feel most nervous when, every Friday morning at half-past ten, I go to get it. I feel nervous when I take my place in the slouching queue at the pay-bay downstairs, among all the stooped clerks, foul-mouthed van-drivers, and prismatic secretaries, when I announce my horrible name (Service, T. — ‘Here’s old tea service again’, ‘Two lumps with milk, please’, ‘Don’t like his pot, do you?’, etc. etc.) and the fat woman or the thin man flick through the ranked packets, when, to my weekly consternation, my envelope is not only there but actually gets handed over to me, and when I walk back along the line of alternately exuberant and catatonic employees, holding in my fist a heavy brown wallet containing seventy-three quid! Even before all these bonuses started pouring in, I had calculated that I would always be able to afford my daily three packets of fags and my daily litre-and-a-half of Spanish wine — which was all I seemed to need to live and not go mad on. Now there’s all this extra stuff: I have a drawer at home, my tramp drawer, silting up with fivers I can’t spend; I keep coming across forgotten notes in odd pockets; I weed out the coppers from my change and stack them contemptuously on the window-sill; I took a taxi somewhere the other day, just for the hell of it; la, sir, I might even buy some new clothes. (It would be hard to go broke now, though broke still scares me. Broke always will, I think.)

I’ve fallen into the habit of leaving my pay-slips in prominent places round my room. The hieroglyphed ribbons are to be found on desk and bed, on bookcase and table. I think he must have seen one by now, because the other Saturday he asked me, in rather appalled tones,
whether I could lend him £15; I did so, with negligent panache, and left him staring at the notes as if they’d just materialized in his hand. And naturally I take Ursula out a lot now, in the most ostentatious manner possible, similarly arraying the many restaurant book-matches and expensive cinema-ticket stubs. I like taking Ursula out because it fools the world that I have a girlfriend. It’s beginning to fool him. It’s beginning to fool me. It’s beginning to fool her.