For a moment Jimmie sat on without any movement, as if turned to stone. Then he shook slightly with laughter. ‘Darling, my advice to you is to reconcile yourself to having married a very impressive man whose impressiveness has not been diminished by the passage of time, in fact if anything enhanced. I just am impressive, I have no need to try. But you still haven’t answered the question I asked you just now, which was and is, who else is coming to … wait for it … luncheon,’ he concluded, facetiously mouthing the word.
‘I truly think I mentioned everyone,’ she said without change of expression. ‘As I said, it’s only a small party.’
‘You mentioned somebody I fancied I’d never heard of, some Scotch name would it have been?’
‘Not Scott-Thompson?’
‘Was it? Who is that, anyway?’
‘I’m sure I said. Gordon Scott-Thompson is a literary journalist, freelance I think. He writes mostly for the Sunday –’
‘Oh, a literary journalist. Should one have heard of him? I’m so terribly cut off these days.’
‘I really don’t know. Quite well thought of, I gather. He was at a party a couple of weeks ago. He said he’d got a proposition he wanted to put to you so I said he’d better come to lunch. He must be about forty-one or -two. Not bad looking if it weren’t for his moustache.’
‘Have you told me all this before?’
Joanna hesitated. ‘No,’ she said.
‘What’s this proposition of his, do you know?’
‘He wouldn’t tell me, at least he didn’t tell me.’
‘He’s not queer, I hope, the enterprising Mr Thompson? Just clearing the ground.’
‘No. At least I shouldn’t think so.’
‘So many of them seem to be these days, especially the ones with moustaches. There must be some reason for it, I suppose. These days all that side of life is quite beyond me. These days I’m told the creatures have the impertinence to call themselves gay, thereby rendering unusable, thereby destroying a fine old English word with its roots deep in the language. You must have heard as much.’
‘Yes, I had noticed. I don’t think this chap’s one of them, he had a rather pretty girl with him, Louise something, a few years younger. He asked if he could bring her along and I said he could.’
‘Really.’ What his wife had just revealed apparently alleviated any gloom that Jimmie had fallen into over the perhaps unrelated matters of Gordon Scott-Thompson and homosexuality. ‘Good. What a good idea.’
‘There’s somebody now,’ said Joanna as the doorbell sounded from downstairs. ‘Have you seen to the wine?’
‘Oh yes. And there’s no actual need to respond to a possible arrival as if it might be that of your Uncle Arthur from Penge. Is my tie all right?’
‘Oh, as usual it’s all … Here.’ She efficiently reduced the dark-purple knot from something the size and rough shape of a baby’s fist to a smaller polyhedron. ‘That’s better but it’s still not right. You’re hopeless when it comes to tying ties.’
Jimmie said with pretended humility, ‘I’m afraid I’ve never managed to learn,’ and might have gone on to say something about the truly neat tying of ties being a body-servant’s skill if Joanna had not been hurrying from the room. Instead he called after her, ‘But then I’ve got you to look after me,’ which was better anyway.’
‘I shouldn’t have thought he was your idea of fun at all,’ said Louise. ‘All those lords and ladies and butlers and what-not.’
‘It was my impression I’m not meant to like fun anyway,’ said Gordon Scott-Thompson seriously. ‘As for lords and ladies and what-not, I can take them or leave them alone. It’s up to him what he writes about anyway, within reason. There isn’t any point getting hot under the collar about Hardy’s peasants as such, before he does anything with them.’
‘You do stick to the point, don’t you, Gordon? It’s a bit off-putting, you know. People don’t necessarily like thinking what they’re saying.’
‘Blame it on my far-off education. Bad timing – another couple of years and the school I went to was comprehensivized out of existence. As it was they taught me how to read and write.’
‘There you go again.’
Gordon had not been far off the mark about his being meant not to like fun. From time to time Louise certainly took that view and would often go on to say he would be well advised to keep that kind of attitude to himself; as he knew, she meant in his dealings with females. He thought she might have had a point there. He would never have said he knew a great deal about women, but he had noticed that one of the many ways in which they could be divided into two classes was along the lines of whether they did or did not show signs of wanting to remake their men to suit them better. According to him, Louise was one of those who did. As if in pursuit of some kind of symmetry, she had once told him he was obviously the sort of man who refused to compromise his standards when dealing with a woman. Though he had had enough sense (for once) not to say so, he interpreted this to mean he refused to palter with the truth or what he saw as the truth no matter what the company, what might be gained by answering any old rubbish a woman might talk with rubbish of his own, etc. He was intermittently aware of the repellent tendency of such an attitude.
Nevertheless, Gordon had had some success with women. He must have been, he felt, reasonably personable, otherwise people like Louise would not have considered being seen with him in public. Women interested him, too, though admittedly more as a series of individuals than, in the manner of his randier contemporaries, as one huge undifferentiated objective to be assaulted wherever it might show itself; after all, perhaps a man did that much better in this field for having a touch of the prig in his character. Even so, Gordon now and then felt dimly that he was missing or had missed something in life by not being permanently on full sexual alert.
There remained the question of his moustache. It was on his face now for a mixture of reasons, starting chronologically with dissatisfaction or boredom with his own unadorned looks as seen reflected in mirrors and such. His grandfather, his father’s father, universally said to have been a striking-looking man, had worn a similar moustache all his adult life. Then he, Gordon, had remembered being secretly rather taken by how he had looked with just such a pencilled-in facial addition in a newspaper photograph. And he had since found it a useful talking point. Anyhow, there it was, establishing itself more firmly every day.
That morning Louise had come to his flat because it was a good point from which to set out for the Fanes’ place near the river. She knew that the lodging across the landing from his own was occupied by a West Indian sound engineer called Emmet Berry, and mentioned him conversationally to Gordon as the two were leaving.
‘What’s he like to have in the same house?’ she asked.
‘I hardly see him. He and I keep ourselves pretty much to ourselves.’
‘Doesn’t he make a lot of noise?’
‘Nothing out of the way.’
‘For a boogie, don’t you mean? For a jig?’
‘If you’re telling me I believe in my heart or somewhere that black people make more than their fair share of noise, I’d have to say some of them probably do. But then some white people probably –’
‘Yes, yes, yes. Christ, Gordon, why have you got to be so bloody balanced about everything under the sun? In your world it’s always on the one hand this, but on the other hand that.