Success (6 page)

I work in an art gallery. Yes, the job
is
rather a grand one, as you’d expect. High salary, undemanding hours, opportunities for travel, lots of future. It’s all very relaxed and genial. Everyone knows what’s going to happen, short-term and long. I never have to do anything I don’t want to do. It’s hardly a ‘job’ at all really, in the sense of trading one’s days for cash: I just turn up here in Mayfair pretty regularly, behave more or less as I wish in fairly acceptable surroundings (chat, read the paper, ring my innumerable friends) — and there is this vast, blush-making cheque on my table, every Friday.

The answer is, of course, that I am the chuckling puppeteer of the two simpletons who run the place. Everything they do is in response to a twitch from my strings. They are called Mr and Mrs Jason Styles — a couple of early-middle-aged roués who jewed their way up from a Camden Passage antique shop and are now trying
so
hard to be decadent. Under their auspices, I need hardly say, the gallery is little more than a rumpus-room of socio-sexual self-betterment: they deal in down-market investment Victoriana, hang the curiosities of the rich, lease out their walls to the doodlings of the famous. They will, in short, do anything to get along. For instance, there is little doubt that I was given the job here on account of my breeding and looks; when I arrived to be interviewed for the assistantship, the Styleses heaved a moan of longing in unison, thanked me for my attendance, and dreamily dismissed the hopefuls queueing without. They are both desperate for me in a playful, candid sort of way and I do try not to be too abrupt with them — though
Mrs
Styles, in particular, grows bolder by the hour. I expect, at any rate, to be in complete control here within the next six months or so; already I am nursing along a school of youngish talent, and I have tentatively scheduled the first of my one-man shows for December.

The glass door wafts shut behind me. I swoop for the mail, refasten the lock from inside, and stride on into the gallery, whose cork walls are at present defaced by the loud ‘moodshapes’ of some celebrated hysteric or other. I flick on the silver spotlights and remove from the paintings any deposits of dust which present themselves to my eye. Silly old Jason once joked that I should spend the first ten minutes of every day here ‘cleaning the canvases’ — going round the gallery with a handbrush and rag! Had a good laugh about
that
. In the Styleses’ small and incredibly smelly office I remove my cape and curl up with the mail on their squat leather sofa. A postcard — she always writes to me at the gallery — from the exquisite
Ursula, my sister, my love; she offers family news, endearments, and a delicious weekend tryst. She is coming down to London to be taught how to become a secretary. Ridiculous. She should come down to London to be taught how
not
to become a secretary. Still, it might amuse her for a while. Along with her note there are the usual eight or nine invitations — openings, launches, at homes; of these, perhaps three or four might get lucky. I glance at the arts pages of the dailies, synchronize my watch with the hideous fluted clock on the Styleses’ filing-cabinet, and wander back through the gallery to my desk, lodged in a gloomy nook a few feet from the door — annoyingly, there ‘isn’t the space’ for an office of my own: yet. Within two or three minutes Jason and Odette Styles — I wonder when it was that they made those names up — are shuffling and grunting in the porch, hugging themselves, stamping their feet. I glide up to let them in.

‘Good morning, Gregory,’ says Jason.

‘Morning, Greg,’ says Odette.

‘Everything all right?’

‘How are you today?’

‘I’m fine. Everything is fine. How are you?’ I say, in genial disbelief.

As a connoisseur of ennui, as satiety’s scholar, I’m always rather taken aback to see them arrive here each day, still together, still arm in arm, still solicitously aware of one another as sexual beings. They are in their middle or late thirties; they have shared an office and a bed for ten years now, possibly even longer; they are both, by any reasonably humane standards, hell to look at. And yet — here they come again, and again, and again. They
leave
together too, which never fails to give me a special jolt. They leave together, they go home together; they drink and eat and drowse together; they turn in together; and they get up together again, and again. Phenomenal! ‘Ooh, it’s so
cold
today,’ says the thick-hipped woman to the disgustingly fit little unit of a man under whose
whippety pummellings she has staked herself out on the rack of bedroom boredom. ‘Not much warmer in here. I’ll check the Thermaco,’ says the pepper-haired man to the faintly moustachioed, pungently menopausal hillock of a woman through whose doomed forestry he has cantered baying for a decade of neuter night-times. I look on appalled as, even now, they reach out to steady each other while rounding the unspeakable 3D abstract by the door. My God, no wonder they’re
swingers
, no wonder they play pimp and whore, no wonder they’re desperate, absolutely desperate, for a taste of me.

‘I shall put out the
OPEN
sign,’ I suggest.

The day starts with a vexing personal
fracas
. Corinthia Pope, an absurd girl whom I recently scorned after some vague fling we had — and who’s been pestering me for weeks on the telephone — takes the unprecedented step of bursting in on me here at the gallery! I whisked the fool outside again and smartly sent her on her way with a definitive rebuke. Returning to my desk, I felt quite ill with rage, and had to shrug my helpless apologies at the two sets of eyes watching me from the glass slit of their office.

Talking of rejects, by the way, Terence is now claiming that he
didn’t
enjoy that Miranda after all. Amusing, you think. Well, I thought it was funny myself at first. But now he’s sticking to the story: he tried to, he says, and she wouldn’t let him. Curious business, because little Terry does enjoy a fair degree of success with the bashful shopgirls and aromatic students he used to bring back to my flat; if I returned late at night, and the kitchen tasted of smoke and human sweat, I’d almost bank on seeing some frizzy mat on the pillow next to his as I popped through his room to wash. Perhaps Miranda really wasn’t within his range. Perhaps, like so much else, it’s all a question of class. Has he said anything to you about it?

The incident with the Pope girl is enough to trigger the usual morbid badinage. There’s no one in the gallery
anyway, of course, save for the odd taciturn alien moving from frame to frame like an inspector at an ID parade.

‘I must say, Gregory,’ Mrs Styles is compelled to remark as I emerge from the downstairs lavatory, the hearty ballcock flushing resplendently in my wake, ‘I can see why all the girls are chasing you. You are a very elegant young man.’

‘And I must say too,’ I am obliged to reply, ‘that
you
are a very elegant Older Woman.’ In the nature of things there must be some who would think her handsome — sleek black hair, barmaid face, embarrassingly swelly breasts and behind (I don’t know where to look — they’re everywhere), decent though unacceptably flossy legs, tall.

‘Come on … have you ever known an Older Woman?’ She moves closer — it is impossible for me to duck past. Breasts teem inside her manly shirt.

‘No, I don’t believe I have, funnily enough — not in that special sense.’

‘They have so much to show one,’ she goes ahead and says — the trite horror.

‘Oh? For example?’

She moves closer; so do seven veils of old make-up. A gargoyle jeers behind my slow diamond smile.

‘It would be simplest to show you,’ she says with a brazen nod towards the bathroom door. ‘There’s one thing I’m really rather expert at.’

‘Well?’

But the old trout is gone —
my
, how tantalizing — to service the stray scaffolding of her stays. Tubes rustle and gasp as I sprint upstairs.

Recuperating at my desk, I sense the compact Jason’s diagonal approach. I look up.

‘Of course, I don’t go in for that much any more,’ he says, looping his right arm in a bowler’s swivel.

‘In for what much?’

‘Played tennis this weekend. Terrible mistake. I feel like I’ve been beaten up. Very rash. Never again.’

He plants his pert derrière on the edge of my desk
‘Did you go in for all that, Greg? Games and so on?’

‘I rowed and played squash for the school and was captain of the First Eleven,’ I tell him, averting my gaze from the coarse lustre of his shantung suit.

He leans forward frowning to sample the muscularity of my thigh. ‘Wouldn’t have thought soccer was your game. Stronger than you look, though.’

‘Not “soccer” — cricket. Football was forbidden at Peerforth.’

‘Quite right too.’

His hand is still idling on my kneecap when busybody Odette shoots up the basement stairs.

‘We’ve got work to do!’ they say to each other in startled harmony, veering off like evasive aircraft to the shared shadows of their room.

Where, at about a quarter-past eleven, I am expected to join them as the three of us assemble for a morning drink variously described to me as ‘coffee’, ‘tea’ and ‘chocolate’ (the last one is, I think, rather sweeter than the first two, but that may be pure fancy). Now the mood changes — rivalries are forgotten, jealousies set at naught. We are warm in there, and after a few minutes I can even start breathing through my nose without undue discomfort. I let them gossip for a bit; I let them tell each other wistful lies about the viability of the gallery; I let them discuss important fixtures in their diary. Then, with hardly any direct prompting from me, it starts:

‘In what terms, Greg, in what — how do you see your future here?’

‘The boy we had before, you know, he wasn’t very happy. He had too many interests, really.’

Boy? Boy? The pathos of it — these people wear their needs on their sleeves!

‘In the end he left for a more … a job that appealed to him more.’

‘As you know, Greg, we’re childless, but we’ve always thought of the gallery as a family affair. Silly really.’

‘We’ve grown very fond of you, as you know, and we’d
feel a lot easier if we could feel that you were, well, sort of a permanent fixture here. Wouldn’t we?’

‘Because — let’s face it — we’ve no one else we can leave it to. Have we?’

And so on. And so on.

God, the horror of being ordinary.

When I see them, other people — a woman who looks like a remedial art-therapist releases a soft gurgle of satisfaction as she and her colleague find seats at the wine-bar, a stroke of luck which considerably lightens her day; in the underground carriage a big man in a cheap grey mackintosh, breathing that bit too hard, is wrestling with a newspaper so explosively that he misses his stop, a reverse which causes him to rise and pace, and to stare suddenly at his watch as if it were a syphilitic boil; the porter at my flat stands becalmed on the stairs all day wondering how old he can be, as if the very air were full of strange equations that would somehow make his life add up — I think: you deserve to be what you are if you could bear to get that way. You must have seen it coming. And now there’s nothing for you here. No one will protect you, and people won’t see any reason not to do you harm. Your life will divide up between the fear of madness and the panic of self-preservation. That’s it: feed up for going mad. I’m afraid that’s all we have to offer you.

Well, well (I bet someone is asking), and what would happen to
me
if …

If I weren’t beautiful, talented, rich and well-born? I would beg, fight, travel, succeed, die.

Terence
thinks — he doesn’t actually dare say it — that my life is in some sense a gloating parody of the huff-and-puff of his own quotidian dreads, slumped where he is now in his days and days. All my gifts — social, monetary, physiognomic — take on monstrous shape, loom large like muscle-clouds, in his sallow mind. He sees me as somehow the active champion of the privilege which I
merely passively embody. That sad bastard, he didn’t do anything to end up like he is. Only he let what happened to him happen to him, and that’s enough these days. The world is changing; the past has gone, and from now on it is all future tense. The yobs may be winning, but they’ve left no room for him inside.

Do I mind — do I mind the guaranteed dazzle of my days, the way I surge from one proud eminence to another, the way my life has always pounded through the unequal landscape about us on arrow-straight, slick silvery rails? I hold my eye in the glass — funny feeling: it’s always nice; we have a good time together (it’s like catching nature rhyming). I suppose it’s a gift, like any other, and the inordinately gifted have always had a certain dread of their own genius. There’s a pang in it somewhere … lonely are the beautiful, like the brilliant, like the brave.

(Terence Service is my foster-brother, by the way. I know, but there it is. My parents went and adopted him when he was a lad of nine. The first chapter of his life was spent in some hired box in the Scovill Road area of Cambridge, the meandering slum that lies between the railway station and the cattle-market. His mother, a freelance charwoman, died when Terry was six or seven, and for a few years he and his little sister lived under the sole care of their father, a perfectly able carpenter by the name of Ronald. It was conjectured that Service Sr had an intimate say in the death of his wife, and, in due course, the view received pointed corroboration when the brute savagely murdered his own daughter. Terence was, as I say, nine years old, and there at the time, so you should indulge his going on about it. The melodrama won a fair amount of attention in Cambridge — not least because Terence lived on for a week in the deserted hovel before anyone realized he was there — and it was only through the local rag’s shameless mawk-campaign that little Terry’s tragedy came to the benign notice of my family,
the Ridings. I remember my father, over the breakfast table, reading out the daily bulletins in that soppy old voice of his, while Mama and I exchanged wary yawns. He was going through one of his gluttonously humane phases — or, more accurately, he had recently read something somewhere about humanity, or had read something somewhere about someone being gluttonously humane — and ‘literally’ could not rest until Terence had been satisfactorily housed. What took my father’s fancy, you see, was not the corny squalor of Terry’s plight so much as certain imagined affinities between his family and our own (too boring to rehearse — get them from Terence). His concern for the waif grew; he longed for him to be taken into care. Mama and I did our best to reason with him — ‘But the boy, the boy,’ he would say, slowly shaking that big crazy head. Father’s considerable influence was brought to bear: the plans were formed, the authorities notified …